Blue Labyrinth (21 page)

Of course, Pendergast could not be seen. His corporeal form was not there, but rather in the ruined nursery, and all this was a creation inside his own mind. And yet the piercing, strangely knowing gaze of Alban disconcerted him, threatened to dissolve the already-fragile memory crossing…

… Then Alban looked away. He crouched, checking his weapons: twin TEC-9s, each equipped with silencers and thirty-two-round magazines.

One of the guards outside the fence had turned away and was lighting a cigar. Alban crept swiftly forward and waited for the other guard to come to his location. In a peculiar way he seemed to anticipate the man’s movement. As the guard strolled along, Alban
removed a knife from his belt, waited for the guard to pause and ignite his lighter, and then slit his throat just as the man was concentrating on touching the flame to the tip of the cigarette. A wet sigh of air was the only sound as he let the man’s body down gently and the second guard, his cigarillo now lit, turned back. The guard reached for his weapon but Alban—again with his preternatural gift of foresight—anticipated his movements by seizing the barrel and twisting the weapon from the guard’s hands even as he buried the knife in his heart.

Satisfying himself that both guards were dead, Alban retreated once more to his initial vantage point. Removing the bulky pack and placing it on the ground, he pulled out something long and villainous looking. As he fitted the pieces together, Pendergast recognized an RPG-7 grenade launcher.

Alban paused, preparing himself. Then, reslinging the pack over his shoulder and tucking the TEC-9s into his waistband, he approached the compound again. As Pendergast watched out of the darkness of memory, Alban positioned himself some distance from the gate, balanced the grenade launcher on his shoulder, sighted it in, and fired.

There was a huge explosion, followed by a tremendous boiling cloud of orange flame and smoke. In the distance, Pendergast could hear shouts, barking, and a clattering rain of metal as pieces of the fence began falling all around. Dogs and their human handlers came running out of the smoke. Slinging the RPG over his other shoulder and plucking the TEC-9s from his waistband, Alban dispatched one team after another with bursts of automatic fire, even before they emerged from the cloaking smoke.

When no more guards came, Alban reached into the pack, pulled out another rocket-propelled grenade, and fitted it to the RPG-7. He moved cautiously through the ruins of the fence, smoke still drifting here and there in thick pockets, weapons at the ready. Pendergast followed.

The courtyard was empty. There was much activity and consternation in the central building. Seconds later a stream of machine-gun
fire came from an upper window. But Alban had positioned himself in cover, outside the field of fire. Aiming his RPG again, he fired a grenade at the windows of the upper floor. They flew apart in a storm of glass, cinder block, and wood. As the thunder echoed away, screams of pain could be heard within. Alban fitted another grenade into the launcher; fired again.

Now armed men began boiling out of the buildings to the left and right. Dropping the RPG, Alban began firing at them in controlled bursts from the TEC-9s, moving from one pool of darkness to another, one cover to another, avoiding their volleys even before they started.

Within minutes, the deadly ballet was over. A dozen more men lay dead, their bodies draped in doorways or splayed over the cobbles of the courtyard.

And now Alban approached the central building, automatic handguns at the ready. He entered the front door. Pendergast followed. Alban glanced around briefly, hesitating, before stealthily moving up the staircase.

At the top of the stair, a man burst out of a darkened room, handgun raised, but with that strange sixth sense of his Alban had anticipated the move and his own weapon was already raised; he fired even before the man had fully appeared, the fatal rounds ripping through the door frame to kill the man as he emerged. Alban paused to eject the magazines of the TEC-9s, slap two more home. And then he crept up the stairway to the third floor.

The office—the office Pendergast had visited himself, just an hour before, but at the same time half a year later—lay in ruins. Furniture was burning; two grenade entry holes punctured the walls. Alban moved to the center of the office, weapons at the ready, and slowly looked around. At least four bloody figures lay motionless: some sprawled across overturned chairs, one actually pinned to the wall by a massive splinter of blown-apart wooden furniture.

A heavyset man lay across the desk, rivulets of blood running from his mouth and nose. O Punho. He twitched slightly. Alban turned toward him and let a stream of at least a dozen bullets stitch
their way through the gang lord’s body. There was a dreadful convulsing; a gargling sound; and then nothing. Blood ran across the floor and streamed out the hole in the side of the building.

Alban paused, listening. But all was silent. O Punho’s lieutenants and personal guards—all of them—were dead.

For a moment Alban remained standing amid the blood and the devastation. And then—very slowly—he crumpled onto the floor, sinking into the running sheets of blood.

Watching him, Pendergast recalled the words of Fábio.
You do not understand at all. Something in him changed when his wife and child were killed
.

From the doorway, in his mind’s eye, Pendergast watched his son: sunken to the floor, silent and motionless, the blood wicking into his clothes, surrounded by ruination of his own causing. Had Fábio been telling the truth? Was this more than mere violent retribution that Pendergast was now witnessing? Was it possible this was remorse? Or a kind of justice? Had Alban learned what evil—
true
evil—really was? Was he changing?

Suddenly the walls of the ruined office flickered; went black briefly; came back into view in his mind’s eye; flickered again. Desperately, Pendergast tried to keep the memory crossing alive in his head: to observe his son, to learn the answer to his questions. But then the pain burst through again, all the worse for having been suppressed, and the entire tableau—the burning compound, the bloody bodies, and Alban—vanished from Pendergast’s mind.

For a moment, Pendergast simply lay where he was in the burnt nursery, motionless. Then he opened his eyes and—with difficulty—raised himself to his feet. He dusted himself off, looked around with wavering eyes. As if in a dream, he left the nursery, made his way down the staircase, and stepped out of dimness into the bright sunlight of the grimy street.

M
argo Green took a seat at a large conference table in a forensic suite on the tenth floor of One Police Plaza. The suite was an odd combination of computer lab and medical examination room: terminals and workstations stood cheek by jowl with gurneys, light boxes, and sharps disposal cases.

Across the table sat D’Agosta. He had summoned her from the Museum, where she’d been spending her off afternoon analyzing the anomalous compound found in the bones of Mrs. Padgett and dodging Dr. Frisby. Beside him sat a tall, thin Asian man. Next to him was Terry Bonomo, the department’s Identi-CAD expert, with his ubiquitous laptop. He was swiveling back and forth in his seat and grinning at nothing in particular.

“Margo,” D’Agosta said. “Thanks for coming. You already know Terry Bonomo.” He gestured at the other man. “This is Dr. Lu of Columbia Medical School. His expertise is plastic surgery. Dr. Lu, this is Dr. Green, an ethnopharmacologist and anthropologist currently working at the Pearson Institute.”

Margo nodded at Lu, who smiled in return. His teeth were dazzlingly white.

“Now that you’re both here, I can put the call through.” D’Agosta reached for a phone at the center of the table, pressed its
SPEAKER
button, and made a long-distance call. It was answered on the third ring.

“Hello?”

D’Agosta leaned toward the speaker. “Is this Dr. Samuels?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Samuels, this is Lieutenant D’Agosta, NYPD. I have you on speakerphone with a plastic surgeon from Columbia Medical and an anthropologist connected with the New York Museum of Natural History. Could you please share with them what you told me yesterday?”

“Certainly.” The man cleared his throat. “As I told the lieutenant, I’m a pathologist with the Indio Department of Corrections here in California. I was undertaking the autopsy on the John Doe suicide—the man suspected in the murder of the employee at your Museum—when I noticed something.” He paused. “I first established the mode of death, which, as you know, was rather unusual. As I was completing a gross examination of the corpse, I noticed some unusual healed scars. They were inside the mouth, along both the upper and lower gingival sulcus. At first I thought they might be the result of an old beating or car accident. But as I examined them, I could see the scars were too precise for that. I found a similar, symmetrical set of scars on the other side of the mouth. At this point, I realized they were the result of surgery: specifically, reconstructive facial surgery.”

“Cheek and chin implants?” Dr. Lu said.

“Yes. X-rays and CAT scans bore this out. In addition, the imaging showed plates—titanium, as it turned out—fixed to the jawbone.”

Dr. Lu nodded thoughtfully. “Were there any other scars? On the skull or the hip, or inside the nose?”

“When we shaved the head, we found no scars. But yes, there were intranasal incisions, and a scar on the hip, just above the iliac crest. The images I forwarded to Lieutenant D’Agosta document everything.”

“Did the autopsy turn up any anomalous findings, chemical or otherwise?” D’Agosta asked. “The man was in obvious pain before he killed himself. And he was acting more than a little crazy. He might have been poisoned.”

There was a pause. “I wish we could say with certainty. There
were some very unusual compounds present in the blood that we’re still trying to analyze. The man was on the verge of renal failure; it’s possible those compounds could have caused that.”

“If you come up with anything definitive, please relay it to me via the lieutenant,” Margo said. “Also, I’d appreciate it if you could analyze the skeleton for the presence of unusual compounds as well.”

“Will do. Oh, and one other thing—the man dyed his hair. It wasn’t black, but dirty blond.”

“Thank you, Dr. Samuels. If there’s anything else, we’ll be in touch.” D’Agosta ended the conference call with the press of a button.

There was a large manila envelope on the table, and now D’Agosta slid it in Lu’s direction. “Doctor? I wonder if you could give us the benefit of your expertise.”

The plastic surgeon opened the envelope, pulled out the contents, and quickly arranged them in two piles. Margo saw that one pile contained a mug shot and morgue photographs; the other, colored X-rays and CAT scans.

Lu sorted through the photos of the man Margo recognized as the phony Professor Waldron. He held up one close-up and displayed it to the group: Margo made out the inside of a mouth, the upper gums, soft palate, and uvula clearly visible. “Dr. Samuels was correct,” Lu said, tracing his finger against a faint line just above the gum. “Notice this intraoral incision—technically named, as Dr. Samuels told you, the upper gingival sulcus.”

“And its significance?” D’Agosta asked.

Lu put down the photograph. “There are basically two kinds of plastic surgery. The first is skin work. Face-lifts, eye bag removal—procedures that make you look younger. The second kind is bony work. This is much more invasive, and is used in cases of trauma. Say you were in a car accident and had your face crushed. Bony work would attempt to correct the damage.” He waved a hand at the photographs. “Most of the procedures done to this man involved bony work.”

“And this bony work—could it be used to alter a person’s appearance?”

“Definitely. In fact, since there’s no evidence of prior trauma, I
would guess that all the procedures done to this man were to alter his facial appearance.”

“Just how many operations would it take to accomplish that?”

“If the operation was sufficient to change the bony orientation—a midface advancement, for example—just one. The patient would look completely different, especially with dyed hair.”

“But it sounds as if this man had several procedures.”

Lu nodded, then picked up and showed them another picture. Margo recognized it, with some disgust, as a close-up of the inside of a hairy nose. “See the intranasal incision? It’s well hidden, but visible if you know what to look for. The doctor used that incision to introduce silicone into the nose, no doubt to make it look taller.” He flipped through the other pictures. “The upper intraoral incisions, where the gum meets the sulcus, would be used to alter the cheeks—you make a cut on either side, make a pocket in the bone, slip in the implants. The lower intraoral incision, on the other hand, would have been used to add silicone to the chin, make it protrude.”

Terry Bonomo had his laptop open and was furiously typing notes as the surgeon spoke.

Margo watched D’Agosta shift in his chair. “So our friend here had his cheeks altered, his chin altered, and the height of his nose changed.” He glanced significantly in Bonomo’s direction. “Anything else?”

“Samuels mentioned titanium plates.” Lu reached for the X-rays, stood up, and walked over to a series of X-ray light boxes fixed to one wall. He snapped them on, fastened the X-rays to the glass, and examined them.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “The face was restructured by advancing the jaw.”

“Can you explain that, please?” Bonomo asked.

“It’s called a LeFort osteotomy. You essentially break and realign the face. Using the same incision in the upper gingival sulcus, you go right down to the bone, make a complete cut so it becomes mobile, and then push out the jaw. Pieces of bone from other areas of the body are added to fill up the space—usually from the patient’s skull or hip. In the case of this person, there is a scar above the iliac crest, so clearly
the extra bone was taken from the hip. Once this is completed, titanium plates are used to fix the maxilla in position. You can see one of them, here.” He pointed to an X-ray.

“Jesus H. Christopher,” said Bonomo. “Sounds painful.”

“Any idea how long ago these procedures might have been done?” Margo asked.

Lu turned back to the X-rays. “It’s hard to tell. “The maxilla is fully healed—you can see the callus, here. The titanium plates haven’t been removed, but then again, that’s common. I would say at least a few years ago, maybe more.”

“I count four procedures,” D’Agosta said. “And you say these would have been enough to change the man’s looks completely?”

“Just the LeFort osteotomy would have done the job.”

“And based on the photographic, CAT scan, and X-ray evidence here, can you reverse-engineer these changes? Show us what the guy looked like before all this work?”

Lu nodded. “I can try. The fractures in the medulla, and the size of the incisions in the mucosa, are clear enough. We can work backward from there.”

“Great. Please work with Terry Bonomo here and see if we can’t get an image of this guy’s original face.” D’Agosta turned to the ID expert. “Think you can do this?”

“Hell, yeah,” Bonomo said. “If the doc here can give me specifics, it’s a cinch to modify the facial biometrics. I’ve already got wireframe and three-D composites of the perp’s head loaded into the software; now I just need to take my standard operating procedure and run it backward, so to speak.”

While Margo looked on, Dr. Lu took a seat beside Bonomo and together—hunched over the laptop—they began refiguring the face of the killer, essentially undoing the work some anonymous plastic surgeon had done years ago. Now and then Lu returned to the autopsy photographs, or the X-ray and CAT scan images, as they painstakingly adjusted various parameters in the cheeks, chin, nose, and jaw.

“Don’t forget the dirty-blond hair,” D’Agosta said.

Twenty minutes later, Bonomo hit a key on the laptop with a dramatic flourish. “Let’s give it a moment to render the image.”

Margo heard the laptop give a chirrup about thirty seconds later.

Bonomo swiveled the laptop toward Dr. Lu, who examined it a moment, then nodded. And then Bonomo turned the laptop all the way around so Margo and D’Agosta could see it.

“My God,” D’Agosta murmured.

Margo was shocked. The plastic surgeon was right—the image looked like a completely different man.

“I want you to model that from several angles,” D’Agosta told Bonomo. “Then download the rendered images into the departmental database. We’ll run the facial-recognition software against it, see if the face is anywhere out there.” He turned to Lu. “Doctor, thanks so much for your time.”

“My pleasure.”

“Margo, I’ll be back.” And without another word, he stood up and walked out of the forensic suite.

In less than twenty minutes, D’Agosta was back. His face was slightly flushed, and he was out of breath.

“Goddamn,” he told her. “We’ve got a hit. Just like that.”