Douglas Preston - The Obsidian Chamber

Constance had not seen her child — the child of herself and Diogenes Pendergast — in a year. The Tibetans had declared him a rinpoche, the nineteenth reincarnation of a revered Tibetan monk. He was hidden away in a monastery outside Dharamsala, India, safe from any interference by the Chinese. In this painting, the child was older than he had been when she last saw him. It could not have been done more than a few months before, at most…

Standing utterly still, she drank in the painted features. Despite the father, Constance could not help but feel a fierce maternal love — exacerbated by the fact that she could only visit him rarely. So this is what he looks like now , she thought, staring almost rapturously.

Whoever left this , she thought, knows my innermost secrets. The existence of my child — and my child’s identity. The hint that had begun with the location of the newly discovered orchid, Cattleya constanciana , was now made plain.

Something else was becoming clear. This person was, without doubt, courting her. But who could it be? Who could possibly know so much about her? Did he know her other secrets, as well — her true age? Her relationship to Enoch Leng?

She felt certain that he did.

For a moment, she considered engaging in another fierce and thorough search of the sub-basement. But she dropped the idea; no doubt a fresh search would be as fruitless as the last.

She knelt, picked up her note to Mrs. Trask, tore it in two, then slipped it into the pocket of her robe. There was no longer any point in sending it — because she knew now that it was not the housekeeper who had been providing her with these exquisite meals and precious wines.

But who?

Diogenes.

She quickly dismissed this as the most ridiculous speculation imaginable. True, such a fey, whimsical, teasing courtship would have been typical of Diogenes Pendergast. But he was dead.

Wasn’t he?

Constance shook her head. Of course he was dead. He had fallen into the terrible Sciara del Fuoco of the Stromboli volcano. She knew this, because she had struggled with him on the very lip of the abyss. She had pushed him herself, she had watched him fall — and had peered over the edge into the roaring winds to the smoking lava below. She was certain her revenge had been complete.

Besides, in life Aloysius’s brother had had nothing but contempt for her — he’d made that abundantly clear. You were a toy , he had written: a mystery easily solved; a dull box forced and found empty.

Her hands clenched at the mere memory.

It wasn’t Diogenes; that was impossible. It was someone else — someone who also knew her deepest secrets.

It came to her like a bolt of lightning. He’s alive , she thought. He didn’t drown, after all. And he has returned to me.

She was overwhelmed with a tidal wave of emotion. She felt almost crazy with hope, frantic with anticipation, her heart suddenly battering in her chest as if it would break free.

“Aloysius?” she cried into the darkness, her voice breaking, whether with laughter or weeping she didn’t know. “Aloysius, come out and show yourself! I don’t know why you’re being so coy, but for God’s sake please, please let me see you!”

But the only reply was her own voice, echoing faintly through the subterranean chambers of stone.

Rocky Filipov, captain of the F/V Moneyball , a sixty-five-foot converted trawler, turned his head and ejected a stream of brown tobacco juice onto the deck, where it joined a sticky layer of grease, diesel fuel, and rotten fish juice.

“It’s simple,” the crewman, Martin DeJesus, was saying. “It’s taking too long. Just fucking shoot him, put him in a fish sack, weigh it down, and throw him overboard.”

A cold wind blew across the deck of the Moneyball . It was a deep overcast night with no stars, and they were snugly berthed in Bailey’s Hole, not far from the Canadian-U.S. border. The small group stood on the deck of the dark boat, and all Filipov could see of the others were the glowing tips of their cigarettes. There were no other lights; the Moneyball had extinguished its anchor and running lights, and even the red illumination of the pilothouse had been doused.

“I’m with Martin,” came the heavy voice of Carl Miller, followed by a brightening of his cigarette; a loud exhale. “I don’t want to keep him on board any longer — they’re just stringing us along. Screw the swap. It’s too risky.”

“It’s not risky,” said the cook. “We can be in international waters inside of an hour. The next shipment is weeks away. Arsenault’s a mate of ours; he’s worth the trade.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Then why aren’t the feds playing ball?”

Captain Filipov listened to the back-and-forth. The crew needed to talk it out. Tensions had been rising in recent days. The crew that was still on board, minus the watch on deck, had gradually assembled in the lee of the pilothouse to hash it out once and for all. He hunched in the cold wind, leaned against the steel pilothouse wall, arms crossed.

“I think they’re setting us up,” said Juan Abreu, the ship’s engineer.

“Doesn’t matter,” said the cook. “If we get even the least whiff of the thing going south, then we’ll take off and dump the guy overboard. We’d still have that watch of his to sell.”

The argument went on and on, until they all began repeating themselves. Filipov finally pushed himself from the wall, spat another stream, and spoke. “We’ve had the bastard on board almost three weeks. We’ve been trying to work this exchange for days now. It’s a good plan — let’s stick to the plan. Three more days — that’s what we agreed. If the swap isn’t completed by then, we do the DeJesus thing and dump him overboard.”

He stopped and waited for the reactions. In the drug smuggling business, contrary to all the bullshit television shows, you needed to build a consensus. You couldn’t just bust balls and think it was going to work.

“Fair enough,” said the cook.

“Carl?” Filipov asked.

“Okay. Three more days.”

“Martin?”

“Well, fuck, I’m willing to hang in another couple of days. But that’s it.”

A grudging agreement was reached and the group began to break up.

Captain Filipov caught the cook as he was heading back down into the galley. “I’d better try to keep the motherfucker alive. You got any more beef stew from dinner?”

“Sure.”

Filipov collected a bowl of stew and a bottle of water and carried them down to the aft lazarette hold. The hatch had been left open, replaced with a grate for air. He shone a flashlight through the grate and saw the man in the same position as the last time, with one wrist handcuffed to an open-base horn cleat. He was wearing the same torn and filthy black suit they had found him in, covering a skeletal frame, hollow cheekbones, and bruised face. White-blond hair was plastered to the skull.

He opened the grate and descended into the hold, setting the bottle of water before the gaunt figure. He squatted and stared. The man’s eyes were closed, but as Filipov looked at him they opened: silvery eyes that seemed to glitter with internal light.

“Brought you some food,” Filipov said, gesturing to the bowl in his hand.

The man did not answer.

“What’s taking your friends?” Filipov asked for the hundredth time. “They keep on stalling.”

To his surprise, the man’s eyes finally met his. It made him uneasy.

“You complain of the silence of my friends?”

“Right, exactly.”

“In that case, I apologize on their behalf. But let me assure you that, when the time comes, they will be delighted to meet you. Although I fear that, on the off chance you survive the encounter, you’ll wish you hadn’t met them .”