City of Endless Night (Pendergast #17)(81)

He quickly suppressed this new jolt of memory.

Moving with infinite silence and care—in case his quarry had set up another ambush—Ozmian slipped into the shadows, creeping along the dark side of the corridor, his back against the wall. He ventured a split-second flash of light across the floor, where he once again identified his quarry’s fresh tracks among the others, heading toward the far end of the wing. Pendergast had gotten rid of his shoes, as had Ozmian, the better to move in silence.

Gun in hand, sliding along the wall, he continued his stalk. Toward the end of the hall he saw that Pendergast’s footprints veered into one of the rooms. And the door had been shut. Remarkable he had managed to do it without making a sound.

Interesting. The man had made no move to try to cover his tracks, even though he knew Ozmian was after him. All this meant Pendergast had a plan, most likely another ambush, which the tracks would lead Ozmian into. But what kind of ambush? Probably one that, even if it failed, would flip the tables on Ozmian, turning the pursued into the pursuer.

He paused at the closed door, then took a step back. Made of metal, it had been designed to be strong enough to withstand even the most lunatic assault, though now the hinges were corroded and broken, the screws pulling out of the metal covering. But he knew that you could not lock these doors from the inside; only from the outside.

Grasping the handle, staying well to one side out of the line of fire, he turned it, half expecting a fusillade of shots to come tearing through.

Nothing. He pushed the door open, still keeping to one side, and then, in a single furious movement, handgun at the ready, spun into the room and swept it while moving diagonally across the small space. It was empty, except for a bed with a mattress, a closet, and a ragged teddy bear lying on the floor. The window was gone, leaving an open frame, moonlight pouring in along with an icy wind, the bleak landscape outside rolling away to the distant water of Long Island Sound.

Examining the floor, he saw that Pendergast’s tracks headed into the bathroom—with the bathroom door shut but, of course, again not locked.

His own cell-like room had been identical to this. The attached bathroom had a window, but it was too small for a person to fit through. So if Pendergast had gone in there, he was now trapped. Once again he examined the floor. The tracks plainly went in, but didn’t come out.

Ozmian smiled and raised his gun.





57

A CHILL WIND moaned and whistled around the corner of the building as Pendergast crouched on the outside ledge, ten stories of empty space below him. The projecting brick coping and the four-inch stone lintels offered a precarious foothold. With his Les Baer in his right hand, he aimed down, bracing himself against the fa?ade for the recoil, waiting for the moment when Ozmian stuck his head out the window to check whether Pendergast had escaped that way, after establishing he was not hiding in the bathroom.

Pendergast had taken the deception as far as he could. He had indeed exited the room by the window, leaping first from the bathroom interior to the bed frame—closing the door with one hand as he did so—and from there to the outer sill, so as not to leave tracks. He’d edged out on the sill, as he hoped Ozmian would ultimately assume. But then he had scaled the decorative brickwork to the tenth floor, taking up an unexpected vantage point. Ozmian would expect him either right or left on the ledge outside the ninth-floor window—not one story above. Or so he hoped. The man would be anticipating an ambush…but from the wrong direction. Still, in mulling over the plan, Pendergast had to admit that so far Ozmian had outplayed him in the game of reverse, double-reverse, and double-double-reverse psychology.

He waited. And waited. But Ozmian did not appear.

Perched on the ledge, in the freezing gusts of wind, Pendergast now understood he had made another error in judgment. Again the man had not responded as expected. Either he had been outmaneuvered again, or Ozmian was engaged in some other strategy of his own. For perhaps the first time in his life, Pendergast felt stymied and anxious. Nothing he had done so far had worked. It was like a nightmare in which, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get his legs to move fast enough. And now, he had made himself a perfect target, crouching on the ledge. He had to get back inside the building as soon as possible.

Even as he crept along the ledge, he was thinking. As every hunter knew, the key to a successful stalk was to first understand the behaviors and thought patterns of your prey. You had to “learn” your quarry, as his mentor had once told him. In this case he was now “learning” Ozmian; how he thought, what he wanted, what motivated him. And he had a surprising revelation, one that might allow him ultimately to prevail—if Ozmian acted as he hoped.

He moved along the ledge to a broken window on the tenth floor, paused, and gave a swift glance inside. It was another padded, cell-like room, bathed in a streak of moonlight and empty save for the skeleton bed and chair. Lightly as a cat, he leapt from the sill onto the floor and crouched again, sweeping the room with his gun. Empty. He went to the door, turned the handle.

Locked—from the outside.

This was precisely the situation he had anticipated, spinning around to cover the bathroom door, but he was too late. Ozmian had emerged from it with amazing speed and stealth, and Pendergast felt the icy barrel of Ozmian’s 1911 pressed into his ear as the man’s other hand seized him by the wrist, giving it a sharp wrench calibrated to jerk the Les Baer free of his grip. It clattered to the floor.