Douglas Preston - The Obsidian Chamber

But even before he could begin the second phase of his plan, the door opened — bloody hell that they couldn’t be locked — and who should come striding in but a doctor, not a nurse. The man halted, taking in the scene — the dead woman on her side, the bloody incision — then gave a shout, rushing at Leyland with instinctual horror. “Doctor, what in God’s name—?”

The doctor’s cry was cut short by a long scalpel jabbed upward into his neck. Leyland leapt back and simultaneously skipped to one side, slicing open the throat as he did so, successfully avoiding the spray of blood. The doctor, gargling into silence, fell to the floor. Not wasting a moment, Leyland took a brief look at the doctor’s name tag, went to the open door, and looked out. A nurse was hurrying down the hall, responding to the code.

“Dr. Graben and I are handling it, nurse — if you don’t mind,” he told her. “It’s a DNR, it’s almost over. Please — let us give her her dignity.”

He eased shut the door.

Now here was an unexpected opportunity that he must not overlook. He rolled the doctor onto his stomach. Grasping the back of his white coat, he tucked the scalpel into the material and sliced it up, then did the same to his shirt, exposing the man’s back. There was something about the lumpy whiteness of it, knowing he was going to cut into the flesh, that excited him. He palpated the spinal cord, found where he needed to begin the incision, pushed the scalpel in and drew it downward just to one side of the cord — as needed to access the cauda equina at an angle.

Blood flowed out of the incision, but not much. That made things easier. Opening up the very bottom of the cord, he teased out the cauda equina, the “horse’s tail,” so named because the massive bundle of nerve fibers looked like thousands of gray hairs.

This unexpected second sample would more than help. He hadn’t meant to kill a young, healthy human being, but it couldn’t have been avoided. Now he would have an excess of material to work with, and it would not only make the formulation foolproof, but also allow it to be accomplished in far less time.

Tucking the bundle of tissue into the test tube with the first, he now went to work on a tableau of murder. Using his scalpels, he first slashed the doctor across his throat a few more times, mutilated his face, then sliced his back to ribbons, disguising the incision. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him… He proceeded to slash the torsos of both victims with his scalpels, scoring them this way and that, being careful not to get blood on himself, but making the incisions look as much like the product of a madman as he could. The feeling of the scalpel in the flesh, the tug of it, the smooth resistance and then the sudden feeling of giving way, the sprays of blood that were already quickly ebbing — all this made him frustrated that he could not linger; that he had no time to enjoy it; that he was under such enormous time pressure.

All too soon he was done. Glancing at his watch, he saw he had accomplished all he needed in less than ninety seconds.

He scattered the scalpels about, then rose, examining the tableau with a critical eye. It was gloriously shocking, vile, and disgusting: blood everywhere, all over the snowy sheets, on the linoleum floor, splattered on the walls. Clearly the work of pure insanity. And not a drop of blood on himself. Remarkable.

Tidying himself, he went to the door, opened it, slipped out, shut it behind him. There was the nurse in the hall, uncertain and concerned.

“Nurse?” said Leyland. “Remain there and await Dr. Graben’s summons. He’s still with the patient and is not to be disturbed. He won’t be long.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

He strolled through the doors, out of the ICU. The alarm would come at any second — not nearly enough time for Dr. Walter Leyland to get out of the hospital. But even if he could, he had been recorded already on a dozen video monitors.

A spring in his step, Leyland turned one corner, then another, and was just slipping into the storage room where Petru Lupei’s clothes were awaiting him as the general alarm went off.

Pendergast stood in one corner of the two-bedroom apartment, still as a marble statue, watching the FBI’s extensive crime scene team at work. They were wrapping up: photographic equipment was being put away; fingerprint kits were being closed and samples of lifting tape carefully archived; laptops were being shut down; evidence lockers, practically empty, were being stowed for removal.

As he stood there, his cell phone rang. He slipped it out, examined the number. It was blocked, of course.

“Yes?” he said into the phone.

“Secret Agent Man!” came the voice of Mime. “I’m calling with the promised update.”

“Go ahead.”

“Sorry it took so long, but your man Proctor has grown increasingly difficult to track. Especially once he reached Africa.”

“Africa?”

“That’s right. And off the beaten track, too. It took my entire gang, so to speak, to compile what he did. Okay, here’s the skinny. I’ll keep it short because I imagine you’re busy, and I never like to spend more time on the phone — even this phone — than necessary. We managed to track him from Gander, to Mauritania, to Hosea Kutako Airport in Namibia. Whew, and what a job it was. But from there, the trail went cold.”

“You have no idea where he went from the airport?”

“My best guess, based on local police chatter, is that he, um, visited a car dealership across the street from the airport and then headed east, maybe into Botswana. But that’s it. Everything I’ve tried, every dirty trick and secret back door, has come up empty. We’re not exactly dealing with the digital future in places like these.”

“I understand. But there’s no sign that he’s dead?”

“No. A body would be something that would rise to the surface — digitally, that is. He’s alive — but way the hell and gone somewhere.”

“Thank you, Mime.”

“Anything I can do to help my favorite fed. Now, how about the matter of my fee? That disguising cellular duplexer would really, really come in handy.”

“I’m getting one appropriated for you. Naturally, you would only use it in a manner to assist law enforcement.”

“Naturally!” There was a wheeze of laughter.

“Thank you, Mime.” And Pendergast slipped the phone back into his suit pocket.

He watched the crime scene team finish up for a few more minutes. Then he walked across the living room — as clean and bare as the other rooms — to the nearest window. The Hamilton Heights apartment was in one of the neighborhood’s newest buildings, a twenty-story structure on Broadway and 139th that dwarfed the brownstones and row houses that made up most of the surrounding streets.

The window looked west, toward Riverside Drive and the Hudson. A barge loaded with cargo slowly made its way upriver, bound for Albany.

There was a sound behind him and he turned to see Arensky, the FBI agent in charge of the forensic team. The man was standing there deferentially, waiting to speak with him.

“Yes?” Pendergast asked.

“Sir, we’ve completed work. If it’s all right with you, we’ll go back downtown and begin logging the data.”

“Is there much?”

Arensky shook his head. “Just the occasional print.”

Pendergast nodded.

As Arensky turned and began gathering the teams together, the front door opened and Longstreet appeared, his tall figure filling the door frame. Seeing him, Arensky walked over quickly and they began conversing in low tones, Arensky gesturing this way and that, calling over various team members in turn, evidently to give Longstreet their reports.