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  Moving swiftly to the center, he flattened himself behind a cracked cement pillar where he had a clear field of fire in all directions. There he paused, breathing in the moldy, sour air of the interior. He took a moment to reconnoiter. If Ozmian entered the room through the same archway he had, he would have a clear shot and this time would not miss; but Ozmian was not likely to take that risk. The man was no longer in hot pursuit; he was now in tracking mode.

  There was enough moonlight coming in through the shattered window frames for Pendergast to see the general outlines of the room. It was a cafeteria, with tables arrayed among a disorder of chairs, the linoleum coming up in curls. Some of the tables were still set, as if awaiting a seating of the dead. The floor was strewn with cheap flatware, plastic cups and dishes. A row of shattered windows allowed in not only bars of pallid light, but also vines that had crept within and grown up the walls. The air smelled of rat urine, damp concrete, and decaying fungus.

  As he continued to take in the dim surroundings, he saw that the many layers of paint that once covered the ceilings and walls had cracked and peeled off, flaking away and raining down like confetti all over the floors. The chips and curls of paint mingled with dust, debris, and trash to form a thick layer, creating an ideal tracking environment. It was like snow: one could not walk through it without leaving footprints, and there wasn’t a way to brush out or hide one’s tracks, either. On the other hand, as he scanned the floor he noted there were already tracks everywhere, crisscrossing this way and that, laid down by urban archaeologists and those people called “creepers” who made a hobby of exploring dangerous, abandoned buildings.

  Pendergast made a snap decision: to gain the commanding heights by heading upstairs. Ozmian would no doubt anticipate this; he had already been outguessed once. But the key nevertheless was gaining a physical advantage—and that meant up. He had to move fast, put additional distance between him and his pursuer. At some point he could then double back, circle around, and with luck come up behind his pursuer, becoming the pursuer himself.

  All these thoughts flashed through his mind in the space of no more than ten seconds.

  A building like this would have multiple staircases, in the center and at the wings. Pendergast slid away from the pillar, crossed the dining hall, and, making sure it was clear, headed down a corridor deeper into the eastern section of the hospital. As he ran down the darkened hall, he could hear the paint chips crunching underfoot. At the end of the hall, a set of double doors, one detached and leaning, revealed the staircase he’d hoped to find. Pendergast ducked into the space beyond—the stairwell had no windows and was as black as a cave—and paused again to listen. He half expected to hear the footfalls of his pursuer, but even his keen ears could hear nothing. Feeling sure nevertheless that he was being tracked, and by a master, he grasped the iron rail of the staircase and ascended, two steps at a time, into the foul, cold, pitch dark.

  56

  OZMIAN WAITED IN the blackness at the bottom of the stairwell and listened to the faintly receding steps of his quarry as he ascended, counting each one. The man was evidently taking two steps at a time, given the slight delay between footfalls, and was no doubt heading for “high ground,” a wise if predictable decision.

  For Ozmian, entering Building 93 after all these years had triggered a surprisingly deep emotional reaction. Even though the memory of those times had dimmed almost to the vanishing point, when he first entered the old cafeteria, the underlying smell of the place was still there, and it had released an unexpected rush of memories from that awful period of his life. So intense was the flood of remembrance—the sadistic aides, the raving fellow patients, the lying, smiling psychiatrists—that he staggered, the past intruding horribly into the present. But only for a moment. With a brutal application of will he shoved those recollections back into the bunker of memory and returned his focus to the stalk. The experience had given him a sudden insight. He had chosen this place as a kind of exorcism, a way to drive out the ghosts of that period once and for all.

  In the dark, still listening and counting the receding steps, he ordered his thoughts. So far, he was mildly disappointed in the progress of the hunt and the lack of cleverness of his quarry. On the other hand, the way Pendergast had dropped out of the tree just as he’d fired was an impressively athletic move, even if it was unsatisfactory to find him in such a predictable place to begin with.

  Ozmian sensed that the man had resources yet to be tapped, and the thought excited him. He had confidence that his quarry was good enough to give him a decent, perhaps even epic, stalk; one that would repay his effort and trouble.

  The extremely faint footfalls finally vanished: the quarry had exited on a floor. Ozmian would not know which floor precisely until he had counted the steps between floors one and two and done a quick mental division.

  Now he, too, began to mount the stairs, moving swiftly and silently but not too fast. Upon reaching the second floor he was able to calculate that his quarry, taking two steps at a time, had exited on the ninth floor. The top floor would have been the most obvious, but the ninth made more sense, as it still allowed his prey additional avenues of escape. As he continued climbing the stairs, he realized that he had never felt so alive to the thrill of the chase as he did now. It was an atavistic pleasure that only the true hunter could appreciate, something built into the human genome: this love of the stalk, the pursuit, and the kill.

  The kill. He felt a quiver of anticipation. He recalled his first big-game kill. It was a lion, a big black-maned male that he had winged with a bad shot. It had fled, and because he had wounded it he had a responsibility to track and kill it. They followed it into elephant grass, his gun bearer becoming more and more nervous, expecting a charge at any moment. But the lion didn’t charge, and the spoor led them into even worse country, deep heavy brush. Here the bearer refused to continue and so Ozmian had taken the gun himself, advancing into a dense stand of mopane. He got that unmistakable tingling sensation and knelt, gun pointed; the lion leapt out, coming at him like an express train; he fired a single slug that went into the lion’s left eye and tore off the back of his head as he came down on top of him, all 550 pounds of muscle. He recalled that feeling of ecstasy at the kill even as he lay pinned, with a broken arm, the lion hot with stink and crawling with bugs and flies, his blood flowing over Ozmian’s own body.

  But that feeling had grown harder and harder to come by—until it returned when, at last, he began hunting human beings. He only hoped the kill of this one would not come too soon.

  At the eighth floor he switched on his light briefly and examined the stair treads, noting with satisfaction the spoor of his quarry’s passage. And at the ninth floor, another brief examination confirmed what he’d already determined—his quarry had exited the stairwell and headed down the long hall of the east wing.

  He paused at the landing, catching his breath and listening. Up here, a cold wind blew, moaning around the building, adding a layer of sound that covered the fainter noises of movement. He crept to the edge of the shattered opening leading into the hallway, where a steel door hung sideways on rusted hinges, and peered through the gap between the door and the frame, which provided a view down the corridor. The main ELOPEMENT RISK door that blocked off the wing, imprisoning its patients at night, had been battered down long ago by urban explorers, and it lay broken on the floor. Faint moonlight filtered into the corridor, providing just enough light to see. The hall stretched the length of the eastern wing, ending in a distant window that framed, grotesquely, the withered claw of a potted plant. A rotten rag of curtain flapped back and forth, like a white waving hand. Doors opened on either side leading into tiny lockdown bedrooms, which he remembered so clearly, really nothing more than prison cells, each with its own closet and bathroom. He remembered that his own cell, like these, had been padded, the pads stained with the dirt, snot, and tears of previous occupants.

  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 façade 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.

  Now was the moment of truth.

  After a long, agonizing silence, Pendergast heard a sigh.

  “Eighteen minutes?” came Ozmian’s voice. “Is that all you could manage?” He released the wrist and took two steps back. “Turn around. Slowly.”

  Pendergast complied.

  “Those misleading footprints into the bathroom. Not bad. I almost wasted a couple of rounds firing through the door. But then I realized that was too easy; of course you’d left by another route—the window. You were waiting on the ledge. That much was clear. But then it occurred to me that you wouldn’t be waiting on the ledge one might expect, to the left or right of the window. No—you’d add an additional layer of deception by climbing up a story! So while you were inching up the façade, I took the stairs at my leisure, figured what room you would end up in, and set up my trap. Recall, this is a psychiatric hospital, and the patients were locked into their rooms—not the other way around. How convenient for me that you seem to have overlooked that small point.”

  Pendergast said nothing. Ozmian couldn’t resist gloating, toying with him. It led Pendergast to believe that his risky guess was correct: if Ozmian caught him this early in the game, he would give him a second chance. Too much of Ozmian’s sense of self-worth was riding on this hunt for Ozmian to end it so quickly. But it was more than that; not killing him right now would say something important to Pendergast about the power this place held over Ozmian, and it would give him a deep and revealing glimpse into Ozmian’s psyche.

  “I expected better from you, Pendergast. What a disappointment.” Ozmian aimed the gun at his head, and as Pendergast saw the man’s finger tighten on the trigger, he suddenly realized he was wrong: Ozmian wasn’t going to give him a second chance. As he closed his eyes, bracing himself for the roar and ensuing oblivion, an image jumped into his mind, utterly unexpectedly—the face of Constance—just before the hot explosion of the shot.

  58

  MARSDEN SWOPE LOOKED on with a kind of passionate, benevolent grace, feeling an almost paternal love for the murmuring, chanting, singing throng that surrounded him.

  Although he could not help feel a little disappointment in the actual number of believers that had shown up on the Great Lawn—in the dark it was hard to say how many, but it certainly wasn’t the countless thousands he had anticipated. Perhaps that was to be expected. Many had fallen by the wayside, like the rich man who wanted to follow Jesus and went away saddened when Jesus told him to give away all he owned first.

  But there was another problem. The pile had grown so quickly, and with so many non-burnable it
ems, that it had overwhelmed the fire that was meant to consume it. Swope had exhausted his supply of jerrycans and now the massive heap was simply smoldering, sending up coils of foul-smelling black smoke. Swope had sent one of his disciples—no, that was wrong, one of his brethren—out to get more fuel, and he hoped he would return soon.

  The crowd around him was now swaying gently back and forth, singing “Peace in the Valley” in low, earnest voices. Swope joined in with a glad heart.

  The one thing that really surprised him was the lack of police presence. Granted, the initial blaze had died down, but even so a crowd of this size, massing on the Great Lawn late at night with no permit, would surely have attracted the quick attention of law enforcement. But there had been no sign of them. Oddly, this was a disappointment to Swope, because it was his intention to confront the powers of the state and prevent—with his very life, if necessary—any interruption of the bonfire. A part of him yearned for martyrdom, like his hero Savonarola.

  There was a jostling to one side, and then a woman approached through the crowd. She was in her late thirties, attractive, dressed in a simple down jacket and jeans, and in one hand she clutched something that had the gleam of gold. The woman held up the item, as if to toss it on the pile, then turned to Swope.

  “Are you the Passionate Pilgrim?”

  For the last ninety minutes, people had been coming up to shake his hand, embrace him, thank him tearfully for his vision. It had proven a most humbling experience.

  He nodded gravely. “Yes, I am the Pilgrim.”

  The woman looked at him a moment, awestruck, holding out her hand to shake his. When she did so, she opened her hand to reveal, not the piece of gold jewelry or watch that Swope expected, but the gold of a police badge. In that moment, she grasped his hand with her other and he felt the cold of steel latch around it.