Lincoln Child - Dance Of Death

"That's right in the center of the room." Smitty walked over to the bank of video monitors, peered at one closely "Looks fine to me. We're dealing with some kind of software glitch here."

He glanced back toward Enderby. "Roll back zone 2."

Enderby typed a few more commands into his primary terminal. Immediately, a second red dot glowed into view on the LED screen. "That's giving me a code red, too."

Smitty walked over, a worried look coming onto his face.

Enderby stared at the screen. His mouth was dry, and the alcohol haze was dissipating fast.

"Do a global rollback," Smitty said. "All zones in the hall."

Enderby took a deep breath, then typed a short sequence on his keyboard. Immediately, he was flooded with dismay.

"Oh, no," he breathed. "No."

The little LED screen on Enderby's desk had just blossomed into a Christmas tree of red.

For a moment, there was a shocked silence. Then Smitty waved his hand dismissively.

"Let's not have a cow here. What we've got is a software glitch. Incompatibility between the new system and the old probably crashed the legacy system. Must've happened when we pulled it off-line. Nothing to get excited about. Larry, shut down the old system, one module at a time. Then reboot from the backup master."

"Shouldn't we report to Central?"

"What, and make ourselves look like idiots? We'll report after we've solved the problem."

"Okay. You're the boss." And Enderby began to type.

Smitty mustered a weak grin and gestured at the video screens of the empty hall, the diamonds glittering within their cases. "I mean, hey-take a look. Does the hall look robbed to you?"

Enderby had to chuckle. Maybe Smitty was acquiring a sense of humor, after all.

D'Agosta moved through the channels on the portable police-band radio he'd pulled from the Rolls, searching for more official chatter about him and Pendergast. Their appearance at Kennedy had set off an APB across the entire length of Long Island, from Queens to Bridgehampton. The Rolls had been impounded at the rental lot, and in time the authorities had identified the Toyota Camry they'd stolen, and put out an advisory on that, as well. They'd managed to evade several roadblocks established on the Long Island Expressway by keeping to back roads and taking their cues from the radio advisories.

They were in a net, and the net was drawing tighter.

Still, Pendergast searched, stopping at one all-night service area after another, refusing to give up-and yet to D'Agosta it seemed a hopeless task, the kind of last-resort, brute-force police work that soaked up man-hours and rarely yielded results. It was a numbers game in which the numbers were just too damn big.

Pendergast screeched into an all-night service area at Yaphank, which looked just like the two dozen others they had already visited: glassed-in front, sickly green fluorescent lights beating back the bitter darkness. At some point, D'Agosta mused, they were going to get an attendant who had heard about the APB. And that would be it.

Yet again, Pendergast leaped out of the Camry like a cat. The man seemed to burn with a fierce, inextinguishable flame. They'd been at it more than twelve hours straight, and during all that time spent alternately searching and evading, he'd said few words not directly related to the game at hand. D'Agosta wondered how long the agent could keep it up.

Pendergast was into the little store and in the sleepy attendant's face before the man could even rouse himself from his cozy chair behind the counter, where he'd apparently been watching a martial arts movie.

"Special Agent Pendergast, FBI," he said in his usual cool voice, which somehow managed to convey menace without being offensive, as he passed his shield across the man's field of view. At the same time, D'Agosta reached over and snapped off the television, creating a sudden, unnerving silence.

The man's chair legs clunked down on the floor as he hastily righted himself. "FBI? Sure, yeah, right. What can I do for you?"

"When do you go on shift?" Pendergast asked.

"At midnight."

"I want you to look at these." He removed the prints he had collected at Kennedy, held one in front of the attendant. "Have you seen this man? He would have come in last night, sometime between one and three."

The attendant took the photo, screwing up his face. D'Agosta watched carefully, relaxing slightly. Clearly, the guy knew nothing of the APB. He glanced out toward the dark highway. It was almost four in the morning. It was only a matter of time. They weren't ever going to get a lead, this was needle-and-haystack stuff. The police would find them, and…

"Yeah," the guy said. "I saw him."

The air in the tiny store went electric.

"Look at this photo as well, please." Pendergast passed the man a second image. "I want you to be sure." He spoke quietly, but his body was tense as a coiled spring.

"That's him again," the man murmured. "I remember those funny eyes, kind of freaked me out."

"Did you see this car?" Pendergast murmured, showing him a third image.

"Well, I can't say I remember that. He did the self-serve, you know?"

Pendergast took back the photographs. "And your name is-?"

"Art Malek."

"Mr. Malek, can you tell us if anyone was with him?"

"He came into the store alone. And like I said, I didn't go out, so I really can't say if there was anybody in the car. Sorry."

"That's all right." Pendergast returned the photos to his jacket and drew still closer. "Now, tell me exactly what you remember from the time this man arrived to the time he left."

"Well… it was last night, like you said, must have been close to three in the morning. There wasn't anything unusual about it-he pulled up, filled the car himself, came in to pay."

"Cash."

"Right."

"Did you notice anything else about him?"

"Not really. Had a funny accent, kind of like yours. No offense," Malek added hastily. "In fact, he looked kind of like you."

"What was he wearing?"

A labored effort to remember. "All I can remember is a dark overcoat. Long."

"Did he do anything else but pay?"

"Seems to me he wandered about the aisles a bit. Didn't buy anything, though."

At this, Pendergast stiffened. "I assume you have security cameras in the back aisles?"

"Sure do."

"I'd like to see the tapes from last night."

The man hesitated. "The system recycles them on a thirty-hour loop, and it gets erased as-"

"Then please stop the security system now. I must see the tape."

The man almost jumped to comply, hastening into a back office.

"Looks like we've finally got a lead," said D'Agosta.

The pair of eyes Pendergast turned on him seemed almost dead. "On the contrary. Diogenes hoped we would find this place."

"How do you know?"

Pendergast didn't answer.

The man came huffing out of the back room with a videotape. Pendergast ejected the movie from the VCR and shoved in the security tape. A ceiling-level shot of the tiny store came into view, a time and date stamp in the bottom left corner. Pendergast punched the rewind button, stopped, rewound again. Within a minute, he'd located the 3 a.m. time stamp for January 28. Next, he cued it back another half hour to allow for a margin of error. Then they began watching the tape at accelerated speed.

The black-and-white picture quality was poor. The aisles of the convenience store glowed and flickered on the screen. Now and then a huddled shape raced through on fast-forward, like a pinball, bounced around grabbing things off shelves, then disappeared again.

Suddenly, Pendergast jabbed the play button, slowing it to a normal pace as yet another dark figure entered the screen. The figure strolled down the aisle, its eyes-differing shades of gray-seeking out and fixing on the security camera.