Douglas Preston - Reliquary

She removed a dish. “This is B. meresgerii, a single-celled animal that lives in the ocean, growing in shallow water on the surface of kelp and seaweed. It usually feeds on plankton. I like to use them because they’re relatively docile, and they’re exceptionally sensitive to chemicals.”

She carefully dragged a wire loup through the colony of single-celled animals. Smearing the loup on a glass slide, she seated the slide on the microscope tray, adjusted the focus, then stepped away so D’Agosta could take a look.

Peering into the eyepiece, D’Agosta couldn’t see anything at first. Then he made out a number of round, clear blobs, waving their cilia frantically against a gridded background.

“I thought you said they were docile,” he said, still staring.

“They usually are.”

Suddenly, D’Agosta realized that the frenzied maneuvering was not random at all: The creatures were attacking each other, ripping at each other’s external membranes and thrusting themselves into the breaches they created.

“And I thought you said they ate plankton.”

“Again, they normally do,” Margo replied. She looked at him. “Creepy, isn’t it?”

“You got that right.” D’Agosta backed away, inwardly surprised at how the ferocity of these tiny creatures somehow made him feel squeamish.

“I thought you’d want to see this.” Margo stepped up to the microscope and took another look herself. “Because if they plan on—”

She paused, stiffening, as if glued to the eyepiece.

“What is it?” D’Agosta asked.

For a long minute, Margo didn’t respond. “That’s odd,” she murmured at last. She turned to her lab assistant. “Jen, will you stain some of these with eosinophil? And I want a radioactive tracer done to find out which are the original members of the colony.”

Motioning D’Agosta to wait, Margo helped the lab assistant prepare the tracer, finally placing the entire treated colony under the Stereozoom. She peered into the microscope for what seemed to D’Agosta like an eternity. At last she straightened up, scratched some equations into her notebook, then peered into the Stereozoom once again. D’Agosta could hear her counting something to herself.

“These protozoa,” she said at last, “have a normal life span of about sixteen hours. They’ve been in here thirty-six. B. meresgerii, when incubated at thirty-seven degrees Celsius, divides once every eight hours. So”—she pointed to a differential equation in her notebook—“after thirty-six hours, you should see a ratio of about seven to nine dead to live protozoa.”

“And—?” D’Agosta asked.

“I just did a rough count and found the ratio is only half that.”

“Which means?”

“Which means the B. meresgerii are either dividing at a lower rate, or…”

She put her eye back to the microscope and D’Agosta could hear the whispered counting again. She straightened up again, this time more slowly.

“The dividing rate is normal,” she said, in a low voice.

D’Agosta fingered the cigar in his breast pocket. “Which means?”

“They’re living fifty percent longer,” she said flatly.

D’Agosta looked at her a moment. “There’s Kawakita’s motive,” he said quietly.

There was a soft knock at the door. Before Margo could answer, Pendergast glided in, nodding to them both. He was once again attired in a crisp black suit, and his face, though a little drawn and tired, betrayed no sign of his recent journeys beyond a small scrape above the left eyebrow.

“Pendergast!” D’Agosta said. “About time.”

“Indeed,” said the FBI agent. “I had a feeling you’d be here, too, Vincent. Sorry to have been out of touch so long. It was a somewhat more arduous journey than I had imagined. I would have been here to report my encounter half an hour earlier, but I felt a shower and change of clothes to be rather essential.”

“Encounter?” Margo asked incredulously. “You saw them?”

Pendergast nodded. “I did, and much else besides. But first, please bring me up to date on events aboveground. I heard about the subway tragedy, of course, and I saw the troops in blue, massing as if for Runnymede. But there’s obviously much that I’ve missed.”

He listened intently as Margo and D’Agosta explained about the true nature of glaze, about Whittlesey and Kawakita, and about the plan to flush out the Astor Tunnels. He did not interrupt except to ask a few questions while Margo was sketching out the results of her experiments.

“This is fascinating,” he said at last. “Fascinating, and extremely unsettling.” He took a seat at a nearby lab table, crossing one thin leg over the other. “There are disturbing parallels here to my own investigations. You see, there is a gathering point, deep in the Astor Tunnels. It’s located in the remains of what was once the Crystal Pavilion, the private train station beneath the defunct Knickerbocker Hotel. In the center of the Pavilion I found a curious hut, built entirely of human skulls. Countless footprints converged on this hut. Nearby was what appeared to be an offering table, along with a variety of artifacts. While I was examining it, one of the creatures approached out of the darkness.”

“What did it look like?” Margo asked almost reluctantly.

Pendergast frowned. “Difficult to tell. I never came that close, and the NVD I was wearing does not resolve well at distance. It looked human, or close to it. But its gait was… well, it was off somehow.” The FBI agent seemed uncharacteristically at a loss for words. “It squatted forward in an unnatural way as it ran, cradling something that I believe was meant as another addition to the hut. I blinded it with a flash and fired, but the sudden brilliance overloaded the goggles, and by the time I could see again the thing was gone.”

“Was it hit?” D’Agosta asked.

“I believe so. Some blood spoor was evident. But by that point, I was somewhat anxious to return to the surface.” He looked at Margo, one eyebrow raised. “I would imagine that some of the creatures are more deformed than others. In any case, there are three things we can be sure of. They are fast. They can see in the dark. And they are completely malevolent.”

“And they live in the Astor Tunnels.” Margo shivered. “All under the influence of glaze. With Kawakita dead and the plants gone, they’re probably mad with need.”

“It would seem so,” Pendergast said.

“And this hut you describe was probably the site where Kawakita dispensed the drug,” Margo continued. “At least toward the end, when things were getting out of hand. But it all sounds almost ceremonial.”

Pendergast nodded. “Precisely. Over the entrance to the hut I noticed Japanese ideographs translating roughly to ‘Abode of the Unsymmetrical.’ That is one of the names used to describe a Japanese tea room.”

D’Agosta frowned. “Tea room? I don’t understand.”

“Neither did I, at first. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what Kawakita must have done. The roji, or series of steps placed at irregular intervals in front of the hut. The lack of ornamentation. The simple, unfinished sanctuary. These are all elements of the Tea Ceremony.”

“He must have distributed the plant by steeping it in water, like tea,” Margo said. “But why go to all that trouble, unless…” She paused. “Unless the ritual itself—”

“My own thought exactly,” Pendergast said. “As time went on, Kawakita must have had increasing difficulty controlling the creatures. At some point, he abandoned selling the drug and realized he simply had to provide it. Kawakita was also trained as an anthropologist, correct? He must have understood the settling, the taming, influence of ritual and ceremony.”