Brimstone (Pendergast #5)(105)

They moved away from the window, and Pendergast sat against the wall. He seemed to be thinking. Several minutes passed before he roused himself and motioned D’Agosta to follow. Keeping low, they moved the length of the far wall and exited a side door. Thick brush and gooseberry bushes grew up to within about ten yards of the double fence, where the closely clipped lawn began.

They wormed their way into the brush and began crawling forward. Then D’Agosta felt Pendergast freeze. The sound of voices was rapidly approaching, along with the probing of a bright spotlight. D’Agosta flattened himself in the bushes, hoping to God his black outfit and face paint would keep him invisible. But the voices were getting close, too close; and they were loud; and the light was drawing ever nearer.





{ 53 }


D’Agosta lay motionless, hardly daring to breathe, while the beam of the spotlight lanced through the leaves and vines. The voices were even closer now, and he could make out what the men were saying. They were American. There were two of them, it seemed, and they were walking slowly along the inner perimeter of the fence. He felt a sudden, almost irresistible desire to look up. But then the brilliant beam landed square on his back, and he went still as death. The beam lingered, unmoving. The men had stopped. There was a scratching sound, the flaring of a match, followed by the faint smell of cigarette smoke.

“. . . real bastard,” came one of the voices. “If it weren’t for the money, I’d go back to Brooklyn.”

“The way things are going, we might all be heading back,” replied the other.

“The f*cker’s gone crazy.”

A grunt of assent.

“They say he lives in a villa once owned by Machiavelli.”

“Who?”

“Machiavelli.”

“He’s that new tight end for the Rams, right?”

“Forget it.” The light abruptly swiveled away, leaving sudden darkness in its wake. It was a handheld torch, D’Agosta realized, carried by one of the men.

The cigarette arced through the darkness, landing near D’Agosta’s left thigh, and the men continued on.

Several minutes passed. Then, abruptly, Pendergast was at his side.

“Vincent,” he whispered, “the security here is considerably more sophisticated than I had hoped. This is a system designed not just to thwart corporate espionage, but to keep out the CIA itself. We can’t hope to get inside with the tools at hand. We must retreat and plan another avenue of attack.”

“Such as?”

“I have developed a sudden interest in Machiavelli.”

“I hear you.”

They crept back the way they had come, through the groaning, ruined building. The trip seemed longer than before. When they were halfway through, Pendergast paused. “Nasty odor,” he murmured.

D’Agosta smelled it, too. The wind had shifted, and the scent of decay reached them from a far room. Pendergast opened a shutter on the flashlight, allowing a faint illumination. The greenish light disclosed what had once been a small laboratory, its roof caved in. Below, several heavy beams lay crisscrossed on the ground, and—protruding from them—a rotting, partly skeletonized head of a boar, its tusks broken off into stubs.

“Booby trap?” whispered D’Agosta.

Pendergast nodded. “Designed as an unstable, rotting building.” He let the shaft of green light fall here and there, finally pausing on a doorsill. “There’s the trigger. Step on that and you bring down the works.”

D’Agosta shivered, thinking how he’d blithely crossed this very threshold not ten minutes before.

They passed carefully through the rest of the building, warning creaks of wood sounding occasionally over their heads. Beyond lay the broad field. It looked to D’Agosta like a lake of blackness. Pendergast lit another cigarette, then knelt and moved forward cautiously, blowing smoke before him once again, until the first laser beam became visible, pencil-thin and glowing dully. Pendergast nodded over his shoulder, and they returned to the laborious work of crawling through the field, keeping under the beams.

This time the process seemed interminable. When D’Agosta finally allowed himself a glance ahead, he was shocked to find they had only reached the middle of the field.

Just then there was a sudden commotion in the grass ahead of them. A family of hares burst into view, startled, leaping in several directions at once and bounding off into the blackness.

Pendergast paused, took in another lungful of smoke, and blew it at the spot where the rabbits had been. A crisscrossing of laser beams became visible.

“Nasty bit of luck,” he said.

“Triggered the beam?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“What do we do now?”

“We run.”

Pendergast leaped up and flew like a bat across the field. D’Agosta rose and began to follow, doing his best to keep up with the agent.

Instead of heading back the way they had come, Pendergast was making for the woods to their left. As they approached the trees, D’Agosta heard distant shouts and the starting of car engines. A moment later, several pairs of headlights came sawing across the meadow, trailed by the much more brilliant beam of a mounted spotlight, as a pair of military-style jeeps came tearing around the ruined buildings.

Pendergast and D’Agosta crashed into the dense undergrowth of the woods, clawing through brambles and heavy brush. After a hundred yards, Pendergast took a sharp turn and continued at a right angle to their previous course, the haversack bouncing wildly on his shoulder. D’Agosta followed, heart hammering in his ears.