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  A gust struck, and the top of the smokestack swayed, more bricks crumbling and popping off the edge. At this rate, the whole damn stack could collapse at any minute.

  Suddenly he had an idea. Working a brick loose, he peered down, waiting for the next bolt of lightning.

  It arrived with a boom of thunder, illuminating Nodding Crane, clinging to the ladder about fifty feet below. Gideon hustled around and threw the brick into the void.

  A fusillade of shots followed, punching holes through the metal platform, and Gideon almost fell off in his effort to get back. More laughter echoed up.

  Dropping bricks on Nodding Crane was a waste — he was easily able to dodge them with his night-vision goggles, while Gideon had to wait for a flash of lightning. He would only get himself shot.

  The wind cut around the open dampers, making a singing noise. He peered down the interior of the smokestack, but it was so dark he could see nothing. It muttered and groaned restlessly. The wind blasted across the top, the iron platform shaking, and the stack swayed. The damn thing really was about to fall.

  About to fall…

  For some reason, an image of Orchid formed in his mind. You’re in some kind of trouble, aren’t you? Why don’t you let me help you? Why do you keep pushing me away?

  He looked at the damper system. It was all brass and still in good condition, a long lever operating a set of gears that raised and lowered the semicircular dampers. Grasping the lever, Gideon pulled on it. The heavy dampers creaked and shuddered but appeared frozen in place. He gave the lever a hard yank: still nothing. Grasping the platform with both hands, he raised his foot and gave the lever a kick.

  The lever flipped up and the dampers fell shut with a massive boom, sending a shock wave vibrating down the entire length of the smokestack. A dozen bricks peeled off the top, dropping into blackness, and the stack rocked violently.

  “What are you doing?” Nodding Crane cried from below, his disembodied voice filled with horror.

  A grim smile briefly crossed Gideon’s features.

  Grasping the handle, crouching on the trembling platform, he leaned in with all his might and forced the dampers open again, the bass wheels turning, flaking verdigris. The two dampers rose back up like a drawbridge.

  He pulled the lever and dropped them again.

  This crash sent an even more violent shudder down the smokestack. A flurry of crackling, grinding noises came up the flue as the entire stack shook.

  “You’re insane!” cried Nodding Crane. A flash of lightning revealed that he was now just below the lip of the platform and Gideon could hear his heavy gasps, the iron stairway groaning with his steps. He was amazed the man had the courage to get so far. Bizarrely, he could see fingerpicks gleaming on the fingers of Nodding Crane’s right hand.

  Gideon forced the dampers open again. “Say good night!” he yelled, letting the lever drop again with a thunderous boom.

  “No!”

  He forced the dampers open once more, dropped them again — and this time the entire stack seemed to shift on its rotten base. A grinding noise came from far below.

  “You fool!” In a flash of lightning Gideon got a glimpse of Nodding Crane gripping the stairway twenty feet below — clearly terrified — and now descending.

  A maniacal laugh erupted from Gideon. “Who’s the fool?” he shouted. “I’m the one who’s not afraid to die! You should have stayed down there, waited me out!”

  He let the dampers crash shut again. The platform shuddered, tilted abruptly with the crack of snapping steel, and Gideon began to slide. He seized the damper lever and held on. With a great popping of iron stays, the platform leaned sideways, the wind catching it like a sail and jamming it over; with a final screech it broke loose and plunged down into the darkness, leaving Gideon clinging to the brass lever at the ruined mouth of the chimney, his legs dangling in space.

  Another flash of lightning. Nodding Crane was descending the ladder as fast as he could. If he reached the bottom, Gideon would lose his chance at revenge. And he would still die.

  With a strength he didn’t know he had, he hoisted himself up and swung his leg over the lever. From there he was able to climb onto the rim of the smokestack, clinging to the ash grating. He could feel it shifting and moving beneath him, the grinding noise rising in volume up the flue. Something was happening and it sounded like a runaway process of failure. He brought down the dampers again with another mighty crash, sending one more shock wave down the stack.

  With a strange grinding, moaning noise, the immense stack listed one way, then the other, pausing, stopping — and then, in extremely slow motion, it began to lean more and more away from the direction of the wind.

  This time it didn’t move back to vertical. It continued to lean, the wind pushing it over. The top shook violently, once, twice.

  “Nooo!” came a scream from below.

  There was a rumble of bricks splitting and grinding under the shifting weight of the smokestack. It was going over, no question about it. Both of them would die. Gideon only hoped his end would be quick.

  A crack of livid lightning exposed Nodding Crane. He wasn’t quite halfway down.

  “This is for Orchid, you bastard!” Gideon screamed down into the darkness.

  The stack leaned out, falling faster, gathering speed. Another arc of lightning cut the sky, illuminating the turbulent sea below.

  And that was when Gideon realized all was not lost. The stack was falling toward the water.

  Faster and faster it fell, the wind roaring in his ears, as he clung to the lever, riding the crumbling smokestack down. His senses were assaulted by the deafening thunder of the collapsing structure; the air that rushed in his ears; the howling wind; the approaching roar of the sea. Through the flickers of lightning he could see the lower sections of the smokestack exploding against the ground in a running cloud of bricks, drawing a line of ruin in the direction of the water. As the sea came rushing up, Gideon braced himself. Just before the mouth of the stack crashed into the sea he leapt up and out, shedding some of his downward momentum while stiffening his body and clenching his stomach muscles and hands, seeking to hit the water in a rigid, vertical position.

  He struck with tremendous force and was instantly plunged deep. He quickly spread out his legs and arms, slowing, then stopping, his descent into the depths. Then he swam upward, struggling in the chill water. Up and up he went, but the surface seemed too far to reach.

  Just when he thought his lungs would burst, he broke through, gasping and heaving, sucking in air, treading water in the teeth of the storm. All was blackness. But then, as he rose on a swell, he could just make out the lights of City Island, and that oriented him.

  Treading water, he tried to recover his breath, his strength. Then he struck out for the cobbled beach and his boat, swimming through the violent, heaving seas, the water breaking over his head and forcing him under every few seconds. His broken ribs were like veins of fire in his chest. But he kept on, the darkness complete, the boom and roar of the storm all around him like a violent womb. What little strength remained was rapidly ebbing. It would be ironic, he thought, if he survived all this only to drown.

  But he was going to drown. He could hardly move his arms and legs anymore. He couldn’t keep his head above water. A big wave shoved him under and he realized he just didn’t have the strength to struggle back up.

  That was when his feet struck the underwater cobbles of the beach and he was able to stand.

  He didn’t know how long he lay on the beach or even how he found the strength to crawl above the booming surf. But he came back into consciousness on the high part of the strand. Next to him he could see the shattered mass of the great smokestack lying across the beach and going down to the water. Pulverized bricks lay everywhere, amid pieces of twisted metal.

  Metal. He clasped at his pocket in sudden fear. The wire was still there.

  Dragging himself to his hands and knees, he crawled over the rubble, using t
he lightning as his guide. There, after a brief search, he found the body of Nodding Crane nestled among the broken bricks, not five feet from the sea. In his fear, he had tried to descend. And that was what had killed him: he struck the ground instead of the water.

  The body was a hideous, pulped mess.

  Gideon crawled away and — finally — managed to rise to his feet. With a sense of emptiness, of utter physical and spiritual exhaustion, he stumbled away from the crushed remains of the smokestack to the salt marsh where he had hidden his boat.

  He still had one very important thing left to do.

  Epilogue

  Gideon Crew followed Garza into the confines of the EES building on Little West 12th Street. Garza had said nothing, but Gideon could feel anger emanating from the man as if from a heat lamp.

  The interior of EES looked unchanged: the same rows of tables covered with exotic models and scientific equipment; the same technicians and lab workers shuttling busily from here to there. Once again, Gideon wondered whom he was really working for. His phone call to DHS had confirmed, beyond doubt, that Glinn and his outfit were legit. But it nevertheless seemed surpassing strange.

  They entered the spare conference room on the fourth floor. Glinn sat again at the head of the table, his one good eye as gray as a London sky.

  Nobody said anything. Gideon took a seat without being asked, and Garza did the same.

  “Well,” said Glinn, his one eye making a slow blink that seemed to give Garza permission to speak.

  “Eli,” said Garza, his voice quiet but tense, “before we start I wish to protest in the most vigorous terms the way Crew here conducted himself on this assignment. Almost from the beginning he ignored our instructions. In every meeting he lied to me, repeatedly, and in the end he went rogue. He lied about where the confrontation was taking place, took an enormous risk, and created a huge potential problem for us on Hart Island.”

  Another slow blink. “Tell me about the Hart Island problem.”

  “Fortunately,” said Garza, “we were able to pinch it off.” He slapped that morning’s copy of the Post on the table. The headline screamed VANDALS STRIKE POTTER’S FIELD, TWO DEAD.

  “Summarize.”

  “The article says that Hart Island was struck by vandals last night. They stole a boat from City Island, tore up a bunch of graves, desecrated human remains, and vandalized some equipment. And then one of the vandals took it upon himself to climb the smokestack, which fell in the storm, killing him. He hasn’t yet been identified. Another one, a woman, was shot and killed by persons unknown. The others escaped and are being sought by police.”

  “Excellent,” said Glinn. “Mr. Garza, once again you have proven your usefulness to this organization.”

  “No thanks to Crew over there. It’s a damn miracle he pulled it off.”

  “A miracle, Mr. Garza?”

  “What would you call it? From my perspective, it was a cluster-fuck from beginning to end.”

  Gideon saw a smile play briefly over Glinn’s colorless lips. “I would beg to differ.”

  “Yeah?”

  “As you know, here at EES we have many proprietary software algorithms that quantify human behavior and analyze elaborate game-theory simulations.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that.”

  “Apparently I do. Haven’t you asked yourself why we didn’t send a kill-team after Wu? Why we didn’t assemble formal, six-on-six surveillance teams to monitor Dr. Crew, here? Why we didn’t furnish him with additional information or weaponry? Why we didn’t engage police or FBI backup for him? We have ample resources to do all those things, and more.” He sat forward slowly. “Did you ever wonder why we didn’t attempt to kill Nodding Crane ourselves?”

  Garza was silent.

  “Mr. Garza, you know the computing power we have here. I ran all those scenarios — and many more. The reason we didn’t go those routes was because they all ended in failure. If Nodding Crane had been killed, the Chinese would have reacted — on a colossal scale. That prematurity was the event we had to avoid. The arc of the lone operator offered the highest probability of success. The arc in which Dr. Crew operated on his own, with no support; in which Nodding Crane remained alive to the very end, reporting back positive, reassuring news to his handlers.”

  “You know that I think some of your programs are a lot of horsefeathers,” said Garza.

  Glinn smiled. “I do. You’re a straight engineer — the best I’ve got. I’d be concerned if you weren’t suspicious of my psychoengineering methods.”

  He turned toward Gideon. “Dr. Crew, here, has unique talents. And he labors under the most liberating psychological environment a human being can have: he knows when and how he’ll die. The Native Americans understood the power of this knowledge. The greatest vision a warrior could receive was to see his own death.”

  Gideon shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He wondered if Glinn would be so smug and self-satisfied when he learned the final outcome of the op.

  The gray eye turned on him, examining him with unblinking intensity. A crippled hand rose from the wheelchair, cupped, ready to receive. “The wire, Dr. Crew?”

  Here it came. “I don’t have it.”

  The room settled into a strange, listening stasis. All was silent.

  “And why not?”

  “I gave it to Falun Gong. Along with the numbers. I completed Wu’s mission. Soon the technology will be available to the entire world — free.”

  For a moment, the self-assured mask left Eli Glinn’s face and something unreadable — some strong emotion — passed across it. “I am afraid our client will be most dissatisfied to hear that.”

  “I did it because—”

  As soon as it had come, the mysterious expression vanished and the faint smile returned. “Say no more, please. I know perfectly well why you did it.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Highest probability of success!” Garza exploded. “Was this part of your computer simulation? I told you from the very beginning not to trust this guy. What are we going to tell our client?”

  Glinn looked from one to the other, not speaking. There was something not entirely dissatisfied in his expression.

  The silence stretched on until, finally, Gideon rose. “If we’re finished here,” he said, “I’m going back to New Mexico to sleep for a week. Then I’m going fishing.”

  Glinn shifted in his wheelchair and sighed. The withered hand reappeared from under the blanket shrouding his knees. It contained a brown-paper package. “Your payment.”

  Gideon hesitated. “I figured you weren’t going to pay me. After what I did.”

  “The fact is, based on what you’ve told me, our payment structure has changed.” Glinn opened the package envelope, counted out several banded bricks of hundreds. “Here is half of the hundred thousand.”

  Gideon took it. Better than nothing, he thought.

  Then, to his surprise, Glinn handed him the other half. “And here’s the rest. Not as payment for services rendered, however. More in the way of, shall we say, an advance.”

  Gideon stuffed the money into his jacket pockets. “I don’t understand.”

  “Before you go,” Glinn said, “I thought you might like to drop in on an old friend of yours who’s in town.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got a date with a cutthroat trout in Chihuahueños Creek.”

  “Ah, but I was so hoping you’d have time to see your friend.”

  “I don’t have any friends,” Gideon replied drily. “And if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t be interested in ‘dropping in’ on them right now. As you pointed out, I’m living on borrowed time.”

  “Reed Chalker is his name. I believe you worked with him?”

  “We worked in the same Tech Area — that’s not the same as working with him. I haven’t seen the guy around Los Alamos in months.”

  “Well, you’re about to see him now. The authorities are hoping you could have a little chat with him.”
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  “The authorities? A chat? What the hell’s this about?”

  “At this moment Chalker’s got a hostage. Four of them, actually. A family in Queens. Held at gunpoint.”

  Gideon felt this sink in. “Jesus. You sure it’s Chalker? The guy I knew was a typical Los Alamos geek, straight as an arrow, wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “He’s raving. Paranoid. Out of his mind. You’re the only person nearby who knows him. The police are hoping you can calm him down, get him to release those hostages.”

  Gideon didn’t reply.

  “So I’m sorry to tell you, Dr. Crew, but that cutthroat trout is going to be enjoying life just a little bit longer. And now we really do need to go. That family can’t wait.”

  About the Authors

  Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are coauthors of the bestselling novels Relic, Mount Dragon, Reliquary, Riptide, Thunderhead, The Ice Limit, The Cabinet of Curiosities, Still Life with Crows, Brimstone, Dance of Death, The Book of the Dead, The Wheel of Darkness, Cemetery Dance, and Fever Dream. Preston’s bestselling nonfiction book, The Monster of Florence, is being made into a major motion picture. His interests include horses, scuba diving, and skiing. He is the co-president of International Thriller Writers. Lincoln Child is a former book editor who has published four bestselling novels of his own, most recently Terminal Freeze. He is passionate about motorcycles, exotic parrots, and nineteenth-century English literature. The authors welcome e-mail from their readers; you can visit their website at www.prestonchild.com.

  A Conversation with Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

  What is your process when writing as a team? Do you find writing together easier or harder than writing your solo books?

  Lincoln: These days, we tend to divide the work, not by chapter or scene, but rather by a series of chapters from one character’s point of view, a plot sequence, or even an act. Then the other writing partner goes over that work and does a careful revision. The first one will take it back and revise further. And that’s why the books appear as seamless as they are. Of course, this is not always a fun process; sometimes I have to firmly object to Doug’s wholesale slashing of my deathless prose.