Douglas Preston - The Obsidian Chamber

Constance strolled along the sandy path through the mangroves, which fell away, opening up to a meadow on the southern end of the island. She had long since passed by the “gardener’s cottage,” Mr. Gurumarra’s bungalow, tucked away in a grove of sand pines. It was a beautiful meadow, fringed by low dunes and palm trees, terminating in a sweep of white beach that ended in a curving spit at the key’s southern tip. She could see some structures set amid the waving grass, clustered around a thick-limbed, half-dead gumbo-limbo tree.

They were old Victorian outbuildings, constructed of red brick, weathered and crumbling. One had a smokestack that went up perhaps twenty feet, choked in vines. Curious, she followed the path toward them. The first and largest building, the one with the smokestack, had an old sign set in the brick façade, much faded, in which she could make out the word DYNAMO. She approached a shattered window frame to look inside, and a group of swallows flew out the broken door with much noise. Peering in, she could see the remains of machinery, draped in vines. This, she realized, must have been the old power plant for the island, now long abandoned. Beyond that stood three rows of sparkling new solar panels, and next to that a new windowless building with a metal door.

Curious, she went to the building and tried the knob, found it unlocked, and opened it. Inside was a single room full of racks of batteries with thick bundles of wires — the island’s new source of power.

Backing out, she closed the door. There was another small brick building nearby, very old, with a green copper-sheathed door. A slanting roof led into the ground — this door led to some subterranean chamber. She went over to it. Painted on the door was the word CISTERN. She tried it and found it locked.

Putting her ear to the keyhole, she listened and heard the faint hum of machinery and the distant sound of running water.

Walking past, she went to the point of the island. Here, two gorgeous beaches met in a long sandy spit that extended into the turquoise water. She felt tired from her walk, and curiously listless. A refreshing dip in the water might help revive her. She looked around. There was nobody about, of course, and the house was at the other end of the key, hidden behind mangroves, with only the tower poking above. There were no boats.

It was as if the water before her, all the way to the horizon, was her private bath.

Feeling a surge of independence, she took off her shoes, unhooked her dress, slipped it off, and in a moment was standing naked, her toes in the water. Again glancing around furtively, she waded into the water, going out quite a way before it became deep enough to immerse herself. She lay on her back, staring up at the blue sky, and trying to calm her mind and simply exist, with no thoughts, no misgivings, no fears, no yammering inner voice.

In the tower of the main house, his eye to the lens of a telescope, Diogenes stared at her white figure floating in the green-blue water. His breath came fast and he could feel his heart hammering in his chest, and with a great effort he tore himself away from the scope.

The Special Operations Center took up almost half a floor of Federal Plaza. It was a rambling labyrinth of glass and chrome, illuminated a cool fluorescent blue, with countless workstations, monitoring devices, satellite tracking screens, flat-panel displays of all sizes, terminals for controlling Predator and Reaper drones, and breakout rooms used by field agents planning operations; spooks listening in on satellite communications or sifting terabytes of email data; and federal nerds disassembling cell phones or employing decryption algorithms on confiscated laptops. Everywhere was a low hum of noise: the beep of electronics, the whisper of servers, the murmur of a dozen conversations. Much of the present activity was focused on one thing: crunching massive amounts of data in an attempt to discover the whereabouts of Diogenes Pendergast.

In a glass-walled room in one corner of the center, behind a closed glass door, Pendergast and Howard Longstreet sat at a conference table. A white-noise machine masked their conversation from any passersby. Although this room served as one of Longstreet’s numerous satellite offices within Federal Plaza, it was bare save for two laptops, a phone on the table, and a monitor on one wall.

“Your trip to Exmouth was instructive,” Longstreet was telling Pendergast. “Thanks to the landlord, we have identities for both Diogenes and his female companion.”

“I wouldn’t put much stock in Diogenes’s identity,” Pendergast said. “I believe he has two types — long-term ‘avatars’ such as Hugo Menzies that he carefully cultivates and that will stand up to official scrutiny, and throwaway names like the one he registered in the Exmouth cottage under, and the one he used to charter the plane that — I’m assuming — my associate Proctor was chasing. Those aren’t worth investigating. The long-term identities are what we need to concern ourselves with. I’m not sure how many he still uses, but after he lost the Menzies identity, and what happened at Stromboli, I would doubt he has many left. At this point, having to sustain double, triple, or quadruple lives might be a burden to him.”

“Well,” said Longstreet, “his accomplice is no question mark at all. Flavia Greyling is in fact her real name. She’s got a long and disturbing history. There are a couple of law enforcement agencies that would like to chat with her. Interesting that she used her real first name during her time in Exmouth.”

“It seems to speak to a certain disdain for the authorities.”

“Agreed.” Longstreet tapped some keys and an image appeared on the monitor: a young woman with blond hair, ice-blue eyes, and high, prominent cheekbones. The photo was evidently a mug shot and, judging by the height scale being measured in meters, had been taken in some foreign country.

“There she is,” Longstreet said, waving at the image. “On one of the few occasions when someone actually managed to get her in custody.” He consulted the computer in front of him. “She was born twenty-four years ago in Cape Town, South Africa. When she was eight, both of her parents were found beaten to death with what the coroner believed was a cricket bat. The weapon was never found, and the deaths were ascribed to a home invasion. Unsolved. After their deaths, she passed through a series of foster homes — never staying for more than a few months. Kicked out, one after the other, the families often citing fear of physical violence. Finally, she ended up a ward of the state — put in an orphanage. Reports from social workers who interviewed her there said she’d been the victim of sexual abuse by her father from an early age. They described her as maladapted, aggressive, manipulative, withdrawn, fascinated by martial arts and weapons — particularly knives, real or improvised, which were always being confiscated from her person — and prone to violence.”

Longstreet used a mouse to scroll through the data on his screen. “It was not long before she was moved from an orphanage to a reformatory. Several instances of assault were noted during her residency there; in one case, she beat a fellow inmate almost to death. Ultimately, when she was fifteen, a request was made that she be transferred to a high-security prison, despite her age. The reformatory staff was simply unable to control her. But before the red tape could be completed, she escaped — stabbing a psychologist through the eye with a pen and killing him in the process.”

He perused the screen a moment. “They tried to run her down, but she was a wily one. She left in her wake a trail of crime and violence. She evinced a hatred of men: one of her favorite tactics was to loiter around in seedy neighborhoods until someone either solicited her or tried to molest her, at which point she would castrate him and stuff his genitals into his mouth.”