The minutes crawled by. He felt the icy drizzle trickling down his neck and back. The fence grew closer only by excruciating degrees of slowness. But he had to keep going, and as fast as he dared: the longer he lingered, the higher the probability that one of the guards would spot him.
At last he reached the groomed part of the lawn. He removed the device from his pocket, pushed one hand out through the tall weeds, sank the magnetometer down to the level of the grass, then began an awkward retreat.
Crawling back was much more difficult. Now he was facing the wrong direction and unable to monitor the guard towers. He kept on, slowly but steadily, with frequent long pauses. Forty-five minutes after setting out, he once again crossed the stream and reentered the dripping woods, pushing up through the laurel bushes toward their spy nest on top of the hill, feeling half frozen, his back aching from lugging the knapsack of wet trash.
“Mission accomplished?” Proctor asked as he returned.
“Yeah, assuming I don’t lose my frigging toes to frostbite.”
Proctor adjusted a small unit. “Signal’s coming in nicely. It appears you got within fifty feet of the fence. Nice work, Lieutenant.”
D’Agosta turned wearily toward him. “Call me Vinnie,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’d call you by your first name, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Proctor is fine.”
D’Agosta nodded. Pendergast had surrounded himself with people almost as enigmatic as himself. Proctor, Wren… and in the case of Constance Greene, maybe even more enigmatic. He checked his watch again: almost two.
Fourteen hours to go.
13
Rain hammered against the crumbling brick-and-marble facade of the Beaux Arts mansion at 891 Riverside Drive. Far above the mansard roof and its widow’s walk, lightning tore at the night sky. The first-floor windows had been boarded up and covered with tin, and the windows of the upper three stories were securely shuttered—no light pierced through to betray life within. The fenced front yard was overgrown with sumac and ailanthus bushes, and stray bits of wind-whipped trash lay in the carriage drive and beneath the porte cochere. In every way, the mansion appeared abandoned and deserted, like many others along that bleak stretch of Riverside Drive.
For a great many years—a truly remarkable number of years, in fact—this house had been the shelter, redoubt, laboratory, library, museum, and repository for a certain Dr. Enoch Leng. But after Leng’s death, the house had passed through obscure and secret channels—along with the charge of Leng’s ward, Constance Greene—to his descendant, Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast.
But now, Agent Pendergast was in solitary confinement in the maximum security wing of Herkmoor Correctional Facility, awaiting trial for murder. Proctor and Lieutenant D’Agosta were away on a reconnaissance of the prison. The queer excitable man known as Wren, who was Constance Greene’s nominal guardian while Pendergast was gone, was at his night job at the New York Public Library.
Constance Greene was alone.
She sat before a dying fire in the library, where neither the sounds of rain nor those of traffic penetrated. She had before her My Life by Giacomo Casavecchio, and she was intently studying the Renaissance spy’s account of his celebrated escape from the Leads, the dreaded prison in the Venetian Ducal Palace from which no one had ever escaped before—or would escape again. A stack of similar volumes covered a nearby table: accounts of prison escapes from all over the world, but especially focusing on the federal correctional system in the United States. She read in silence, every so often pausing to make a notation in a leather-bound notebook.
As she finished one of these notations, the fire settled in the grate with a loud crack. Constance looked up abruptly, eyes widening at the sudden noise. Her eyes were large and violet, and strangely wise for a face that appeared to be no older than twenty-one. Slowly, she relaxed again.
It was not that she felt nervous, exactly. After all, the mansion was hardened against intruders; she knew its secret ways better than anyone; and she could vanish into one of a dozen hidden passages at a moment’s notice. No—it was that she had lived here so long, knew the old dark house so well, that she could almost sense its moods. And she had the distinct impression something was not right; that the house was trying to tell her something, warn her about something.
A pot of chamomile tea sat on a side table beside the chair. She put the documents aside, poured herself a fresh cup, then rose. Smoothing down the front of her bone-colored pinafore, she turned and walked to the bookshelves set into the far wall of the library. The stone floor was covered in rich Persian rugs, and as she moved, Constance made no noise.