City of Endless Night (Pendergast #17)(89)

“Now close your eyes, my brave little man, it is about to begin…”





64

THE LIGHT ON the detonator strapped to Vincent D’Agosta had gone from red to green just three minutes before the timer reached the two-hour mark. It had been damn close, and he felt his enormous relief mingle with annoyance that it had taken Pendergast so long to kill that bastard Ozmian. Over the past two hours of waiting, listening intently, he had heard several exchanges of gunfire from the huge hospital building to the south, as well as the spectacular and frightening sound of what must have been a partial collapse of that building. His worries had mounted when Pendergast hadn’t dispatched Ozmian in the first ten minutes, and the collapse of the building shocked and concerned him, suggesting a fight of epic proportions. He’d had the scare of his life as he watched the time tick down.

But in the end it had gone green, and the timer had stopped, which meant Pendergast had finally killed the son of a bitch, taken the remote, and switched it off.

Five minutes later, he heard the door to Building 44 open and in walked Pendergast. D’Agosta was alarmed by his appearance: covered with dust, clothing ripped and shredded, with two deep scratches on his face on which the blood had mingled with dirt, leaving a crust. He was limping.

The agent came up to him and removed the cue-ball gag. D’Agosta took a few gasps of air. “You cut that one pretty damn close!” he said. “God, you look like you just emerged from the trenches.”

“My dear Vincent, so sorry to have given you a turn.” He began unbuckling the other restraints. “I’m afraid our friend put up an admirable struggle. I must tell you, frankly, I’ve never come up against a more capable adversary.”

“I knew you’d smoke his ass in the end.”

Pendergast unstrapped his arms and D’Agosta raised them, rubbing the flow of blood back into them. Gingerly, Pendergast unstrapped the vest with the packets of explosives and eased it off, laying it with infinite care on a nearby table.

“Tell me how you exterminated the scumbag.”

“I’m afraid I’ve developed an unfortunate reputation at the Bureau as an agent whose perps end up dead,” Pendergast said, now unstrapping D’Agosta’s ankles. “So this time I performed a live capture.”

“He’s alive? Jesus, how’d you pull that off?”

“It was a matter of choosing what game to play. We started with chess, in which he nearly checkmated me; switched to craps, but I had a bad roll of the dice. And so we ended up playing a mind game, one that my opponent lost rather dramatically.”

“A mind game?”

“You see, Vincent, he actually caught me and put a gun to my head. And then released me, like a cat releases a mouse.”

“Really? Wow. That’s crazy.”

“That was the insight I needed. He had already admitted this ‘hunt’ was more than just that: it was an exorcism of his experience here. When he spared my life, I knew that Ozmian was exorcising a far bigger demon than even he himself was aware of. Something terrible had happened to him here, far worse than sessions with a psychiatrist, drugs, and restraints.”

D’Agosta, as usual, was uncertain as to where Pendergast was going, or even what he was talking about.

“So how’d you get him?”

“If I may be allowed self-congratulation, I’m rather proud of my final stratagem, which was to expend all the rounds in my weapon, thus fostering a false sense of security in my opponent, encouraging him to rush headlong into my final setup.”

“So where is he?”

“In the basement of Building Ninety-Three, in a room he once knew very well. A room where the doctors made him into the man he is today.”

D’Agosta’s feet were finally freed and he stood up. He was freezing. Ozmian had tossed his clothes on a chair, and now he went to retrieve them. “Made him into the man he is today? What does that mean?”

“When he was twelve, our man was the guinea pig in a course of brutal and experimental electroconvulsive shock treatments here. The treatments wiped out his short-term memory, as is usual with those treatments. But memories, even the most deeply buried, are never quite extinguished, and I managed to nudge his back—to spectacular effect.”

“Shock treatments?” D’Agosta pulled on his coat.

“Yes. As you may recall, he claimed not to have received them at King’s Park. When he released me, I knew differently. I knew he’d gotten them but didn’t remember. I found in the basement archives an investigator’s file outlining the experimental treatments—and in it was the actual script, every word written out, of how the doctors would calm the poor boy down and persuade him to sit in a forbidding-looking shock chair. It turns out Ozmian got a particularly robust course of treatment. The normal dosage is four hundred fifty volts at zero point nine amp for half a second. Our fellow got the same voltage, but at triple the amperage for no less than ten seconds. In addition, the electrodes fired in sequence from front to back and side to side of the cranium. He was immediately sent into extreme convulsions during the process and for many minutes after it ceased. I would speculate the treatments did considerable damage to the right supramarginal gyrus.”

“What’s that?”

“The part of the brain that is responsible for empathy and compassion. That brain damage might perhaps explain how a man could murder and decapitate his own daughter, as well as take pleasure in the hunting and killing of human beings. And now, Vincent, there is your radio: please call for backup from your people, and I will do the same with the Bureau. We have the brutal murder of a decorated federal agent to report, as well as the perpetrator under restraint, who has, unfortunately, now descended fully into madness and will need to be handled with great care.”