Douglas Preston - The Obsidian Chamber

He went through all this with the group, putting one agent in charge of each aspect of the investigation. He reserved the actual negotiations for himself.

“And in the end,” he said, “we have a fallback: if this strategy doesn’t work, we give in to their demands. We release Arsenault. And we get Pendergast back.”

He paused and looked around, waiting for comments.

“Of course you know they’re going to kill Pendergast regardless,” said Longstreet in a low voice.

“Killing a federal agent would bring the death penalty down on them,” Spann said. “Once their man is released, why take such an extreme step?”

“Because Pendergast would be the witness who would put them away for life.”

A silence. Spann wondered how to respond. “Mr. Longstreet, these men are clearly not stupid.”

At this, Longstreet unfolded himself from his chair in a sort of easygoing way, then strolled to the front of the room. “I’m sorry to be blunt, Agent Spann, but I believe this plan of yours will pretty much guarantee Pendergast’s death.”

Spann stared at Longstreet. “I respectfully disagree. This is classic, exhaustively researched and tested SOP.”

“Which is exactly why it will fail.” Longstreet turned easily toward the group. “Pendergast is on a boat. Drug smugglers, almost certainly. He got pulled from the water; they eventually realized who he was; and they cooked up this scheme. It is a very stupid scheme and these are very stupid people — although they clearly believe they are being very clever. That is why Pendergast is in such extreme danger. If they were smart, as you believe, your plan might work. But they are not. Whatever we do, they are going to dump the body and run.”

“Drug smugglers?” Spann asked. How the hell did he know this?

“Arsenault is a drug smuggler. It stands to reason these are his colleagues. They’re desperate to free him before he sings.”

Longstreet was now strolling along, back and forth. “So what do we do?” He held up a spidery finger. “A: We stage a panic. We give in to all their demands immediately. We appear to do anything necessary to save our precious agent. We keep them engaged — as long as we’re talking to them, Pendergast won’t die.” He held up a second finger. “B: We lean on Arsenault, hammer and tongs —but very quietly. Maybe he’ll ID them. C: They’re hiding in a boat somewhere, so we scour the Atlantic seaboard. D, and this is most important: We smoke them out. How? By bringing Arsenault down from Sing Sing to New York. I might add that this entire operation needs to be kept absolutely secret: not only from the press, but also from the NYPD and even compartmentalized within the FBI, limited to this team and a few of the top brass.”

SAC Spann stood there, looking first at Longstreet and then at his strike force. They had focused their entire attention on Longstreet. Without anyone realizing it, just like that, Longstreet had taken over. Spann felt the slow burn of humiliation and anger.

In the subterranean vastness beneath 891 Riverside Drive, Constance Greene sat before a worktable in her small library, brow furrowed, violet eyes focused. All her attention was directed at what sat upon the worktable: an ancient Japanese vase with a simple ideogram baked into its glaze. Three sprigs from a miniature quince tree were tucked within, the flower buds shivering ever so slightly as she worked.

Over the last forty-eight hours — concerned about her own mental state — Constance had retreated into the spiritual and cerebral exercises that, she knew, would help maintain her emotional equanimity: that, and cultivating a perfect indifference to the outside world, a capacity that was at once both her pride and her defense. She had begun rising at four to meditate, contemplating the transcendental knot in a cord of gray silk that had been a gift from Tsering, an English-speaking monk of the Gsalrig Chongg monastery, where she had been taught the subtle intricacies of the Tibetan spiritual practice known as Chongg Ran. Through much training, she was able to attain stong pa nyid —the State of Pure Emptiness — within minutes, and she had maintained this trance-like meditative state for an hour each morning. This, she’d been relieved to find, had helped calm her restlessness. She no longer felt drowsy in the afternoon, nor had she woken, abruptly, in the middle of the night.

It had helped in other ways as well.

Her unseen companion, suitor, whatever — she did not know precisely what to call him — had not made his presence known in these last forty-eight hours. If it weren’t for the reality of the gifts he had left, he might have been a figment of her morbid imagination. Her meals, too, had grown simpler. While still more exotic and elegantly plated than the practical dishes normally favored by Mrs. Trask — the last had been wild chanterelle and hen of the woods raviolini — they were no longer luxurious. And neither of the last two dinners had been accompanied by wine.

She tried to give her mysterious companion as little thought as possible.

Now, more adjusted to her peculiar situation and aware of a growing reconciliation to the death of her guardian, she had turned back to one of her favorite activities: ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. It appealed to her not only for its antiquity, but also for its beauty and subtlety. The year before, in one of the alcoves in Enoch Leng’s cabinet of curiosities, she had installed a four-hundred-watt phosphor grow light and, beneath it, had been cultivating a wooden rack of miniature trees: orange, apricot, and persimmon. She preferred the shōka style, employing as it did only three branches of a plant in each arrangement, symbolizing sky, earth, and being: a Buddhist philosophy that, she felt, dovetailed with the discipline of Chongg Ran.

She preferred to work with the branches of fruit trees, not only because of their beauty and impermanence, but also because their delicacy and unusual forms made them more difficult to master. She worked patiently, with exquisite care, keeping in mind the fragile nature of the blossoms. If she was happy with the final design, she would place it in the woodcut room, perhaps in an empty niche that sat opposite the t’angka of her son…

Suddenly she paused. Somewhere, echoing from the labyrinth of stone chambers outside her private set of rooms, came the evanescent sound of harpsichord music.

She sat up in her chair. This was no dream-music she was waking from: this music was playing in the here and now — within the sub-basement, very likely coming from the old music room.

She sat listening, her fragile equanimity suddenly in turmoil, beset by a surge of emotion. The music was lyrical, heartbreaking, played with ethereal sensitivity. Constance found it astonishingly beautiful.

Leaving her arrangement unfinished, Constance pulled off her white silk gloves and rose, stiletto in one hand, flashlight in the other. She kicked off her shoes to maintain silence in the stone corridors. Swiftly making her way to the central passage, she paused at the door, listening intently. There was no sense of another presence in the sub-basement, no scent or movement of air that was unfamiliar: only the distant, echoing music. It was not Aloysius — he could not play the harpsichord. And in any case her brief hope that he was still alive, she realized, had been only a foolish dream.

She felt no real fear. This unknown person, she now felt certain, was indeed wooing her — in his own eccentric way.

She turned to the right, toward the music room, again moving as swiftly as she dared to maintain silence. As she swept on, allowing the torch to lick only briefly over the brickwork ahead of her, the music grew in volume. She passed beneath half a dozen arches and through as many large rooms, each containing a specific collection of Enoch Leng’s, until she made an abrupt left and stopped before two medieval tapestries depending from a stone lintel. The music room was just beyond.