FaceOff (9 page)

With extreme caution, Pendergast exited the dark space and moved down the long hall. Each room he peered into was similar: a sleeping patient with a shaved head, frequently gaunt and wasted-looking.

This was getting him nowhere.

He paused to consider the possibilities. Either his version of reality was correct, or theirs was correct. Either way, unfortunately, seemed to indicate that he was crazy. He needed more information to choose which of the two insanities was real.

Stepping out of the last patient’s room, he stuck his hands in his pockets and—not sure, exactly, what he was doing, and yet strangely certain of his actions—strolled back down the hall toward the nurse’s station. The two orderlies—big strapping blond men, six-feet-four inches, a matched set—watched him approach,
first with incomprehension on their faces and then with alarm. He saw that both men were armed.

“Hey . . . hey!” one of them cried, flummoxed at his appearance. “Who the hell are you?”

He strolled up to them. “Pendergast, at your service. The patient from room 113.”

In a practiced move, they parted and took up positions on either side of him. “Okay,” the first said, speaking calmly, “we’re going to take you back to your room, nice and easy. Understood?”

Pendergast did not move. “I’m afraid that’s not acceptable.”

They both moved a little closer. “Nobody wants any trouble.”

“Incorrect. I do want trouble. In fact, I positively welcome it.”

The first orderly reached out and gently grasped his arm. “Enough with the tough talk, friend, and let’s go back to bed.”

“I do hate being touched.”

The second orderly had now moved in, crowding him.

The orderly’s grip tightened. “Let’s go, Mr. Pendergast.”

There was a flicker of movement; the sound of a fist hitting a gut; the sudden wheeze of expelled air—and then the orderly buckled over and collapsed to the floor, grasping his diaphragm. The second orderly swung to grab Pendergast and a moment later was doubled up on the floor as well.

The nurse at the station turned toward an alarm, pulled it, and a siren began to wail. Red lights went on and Pendergast could hear automatic bolts shooting in various door locks. Almost instantly, half a dozen monster orderlies appeared out of nowhere and converged on the nurse’s station, where Pendergast stood calmly with crossed arms. They surrounded him, weapons drawn. The two orderlies on the floor continued to lie in a fetal position, gasping and sucking in air, unable to speak.

“Gentlemen, I am ready to go back to my room,” said
Pendergast. “But please don’t touch me. I have a ‘thing’ about it, you might say.”

“Just get the hell going,” said one of the orderlies, apparently the leader. “Move.”

Pendergast strolled down the hallway, orderlies before and after. They entered the room and one turned on the light, the last one shutting and locking the door. The lead orderly gestured toward the open metal cabinet, at the foot of which lay Pendergast’s hospital gown.

“Strip off your clothes and get back in your gown,” he said.

Meanwhile, another orderly was speaking on a walkie-talkie, and Pendergast could hear him assuring someone that all was under control. The siren stopped and silence descended once again.

“I said, strip.”

Pendergast turned his back on the orderly, facing the locker, but made no move to take off his clothes. A moment passed and then the lead orderly stepped forward and grabbed him by the shoulder, pulling him around.

“I said—”

He fell silent as the barrel of a Smith & Wesson .38—removed from one of the disabled orderlies—was pressed against his head.

“All the radios on the floor,” Pendergast said in a calm, firm voice. “Then the weapons. And all your keys.”

Unnerved at the sight of a gun in a patient’s hand, the orderlies quickly complied, the radios and pistols piling up on the Persian carpet. Pendergast, still covering the head orderly, sorted through the pile, pulling out one of the radios. He removed the batteries from the others and ejected the rounds from the revolvers, stuffing batteries and bullets into the pocket of his jacket. Sorting through the keys, he found a master, stuck it into the keyhole of his room door, and snapped it off. He turned the working radio over in his
hands, found the panic button, and pressed it. The alarm shrieked back to life.

“Elopement!” he cried into the radio. “Room 113! He’s got a gun! He went out the window. He’s running toward the woods!” Then he turned off the radio, plucked out its batteries in turn, and tossed it on the floor.

“Good evening, gentlemen.” He nodded at them gravely, then unlatched the window again, and leaped out into the night.

As he pressed himself against the dark side of the mansion, the lawn and grounds suddenly blazed with floodlights. He could hear shouts over the sound of the alarms. Moving alongside the edge of the building, keeping behind the shrubbery, he worked his way along the bulk of the great mansion turned insane asylum. As he had hoped, security officers and orderlies were running across the lawn, flashlight beams dancing about, all operating on the assumption he had fled into the woods.

Instead, Pendergast remained against the building, an almost invisible shadow, moving slowly and carefully. In a few minutes he had worked his way around to the front. Here, he stopped to reconnoiter. A sweeping driveway curved through a vast lawn to a porte cochere at the building’s entrance, tastefully planted with arborvitae. Flitting across the graveled drive, Pendergast secreted himself in the dense shrubbery beside the porte cochere.

It took just under five minutes for a late-model Lexus to come tearing down the driveway, scattering gravel, and slow to a stop under the porte cochere.

Excellent. Most excellent.

As the door was flung open, Pendergast dashed forward and rammed the driver—it was, as he’d expected, Dr. Augustine—back into the automobile, forcing him into his seat. Keeping the doctor covered with the gun, he quickly slipped into the passenger’s seat.

“Do keep driving,” he said as he closed the door.

The car continued down the driveway and back out toward what was evidently a manned guardhouse and gate. Pendergast slid off the seat and crouched under the dashboard.

“Tell them you forgot something and will be right back. Deviate from the script and you will be shot.”

The doctor complied. The gate opened. Pendergast rose back onto the seat as the vehicle accelerated.

“Turn right.”

The car turned right onto a lonely country road.

Pendergast turned on the vehicle’s GPS and studied it briefly. “Ah. I see we’re nowhere near Saranac Lake, but quite a lot closer to the Canadian border.” He looked over at Dr. Augustine and removed the cell phone from his coat pocket. Keeping his eye on the GPS, he gave the doctor a series of directions. Half an hour later, the car was proceeding down a dirt track, which dead-ended at a lonely pond.

“Stop here.”

The doctor stopped. His lips were set in a thin line, and he was white-faced.

“Dr. Augustine, do you realize the consequences of kidnapping a federal agent? I could kill you right now and get a medal for it. Unless, of course, I’m as crazy as you claim, in which case I’ll be locked up. But either way, my dear doctor, you will be dead.”

No answer.

“And I will kill you. I want to kill you. The only thing that will stop me is a full, immediate, and complete explanation of this setup.”

“What makes you think this is a setup?” came the doctor’s quavering voice. “That’s your delusion talking.”

“Because I knew how to pick a lock. I took this revolver away from an orderly as easily as taking candy from a baby.”

“Of course you did. That’s your standard Special Forces training.”

“I’m too strong to have been locked in a mental hospital for six months. I bent the bars in my window.”

“For God’s sake, you spent half your time working out in our gym! Don’t you remember?”

A silence. Then Pendergast said: “It was a masterful job. You almost had me believing you. But I grew suspicious again when Helen did not rise to my comment about the moon—sharing the full moonrise was always our private signal. That put me on my guard. And then I knew for certain it was a setup when Helen took my hands in hers.”

“And how in God’s name did you know that?”

“Because she still had her left hand. There’s one memory in my life that’s so powerful that I know it can’t be a delusion. It occurred during the African hunting expedition in which Helen was attacked by a lion. My memory of the moment when I found her severed hand, still bearing its wedding ring, is seared too deep in my memory to be anything but real.”

The doctor was silent. The moon shone off the small lake. A loon called from some distant shore.

Pendergast cocked the Smith & Wesson. “I’ve endured enough prevarication. Tell me the truth. One more lie and you’re dead.”

“How will you know it’s a lie?” asked the doctor quietly.

“It becomes a lie when I don’t believe it.”

“I see. And what’s in it for me if I cooperate?”

“You’ll be permitted to live.”

The doctor took a deep, shuddering breath. “Let’s start
with my name. It’s not Augustine. It’s Grundman. Dr. William Grundman.”

“Keep going.”

“For the past decade, I’ve been experimenting with memory neurons. I discovered a gene known as Npas4.”

“Which is?”

“It controls the neurons of your memory. Memory, you see, is physical. It’s stored through a combination of neurochemicals and trapped electrical potentials. By controlling Npas4, I learned how to locate the neural networks that store specific memories. I learned how to manipulate those neurons. I learned how to erase them. Not delete—that would cause brain damage. But erase. A far more delicate operation.”

He paused. “Do you believe me so far?”

“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

“I discovered that this technique could be very lucrative. I started a clinic—under the cover of the Stony Mountain Sanatorium. While the sanatorium is visible, naturally, what goes on there is quite underground.”

“Continue.”

“People come to my underground clinic to be rid of memories they no longer want. I’m sure you can imagine all sorts of situations in which that would be desirable. I make those memories go away for a price. And for a time, that was satisfactory. But then my research led me to a discovery that was even more extraordinary. I theorized that I could do more than erase memories. I could also create them. I could program new memories. Imagine the potential market for that: for the right price, you could be given the memory of having spent a weekend at Cap d’Antibes with the Hollywood starlet of your choice, or of scaling Everest with Mallory, or of conducting the New York Philharmonic in Mahler’s Ninth.”

As he spoke, the doctor’s eyes shone with a kind of inner light. But then the eyes glanced at the gun again, and they became veiled and anxious once more. “Can’t you lower that gun?”

Pendergast shook his head. “Just keep talking.”

“Okay. Okay. I needed guinea pigs in order to perfect the memory insertion procedure. You can imagine the results of programming the wrong memories. So I arranged to have indigent people, drug addicts, the homeless, secretly transferred up to my clinic from New York City hospitals.”

“Those are the gaunt patients I saw around me.”

“Yes.”

“People nobody would miss.”

“That is correct.”

“And how did I get there?”

“Ah. What a lot of trouble you were. It seems that, as part of some case you were working on, you became suspicious of Stony Mountain. You managed to check yourself into Bellevue, posing as a homeless tubercular, and you were duly transferred up here. But there was an accident, a miscommunication, and your clothes ended up being transferred with you. Those were not the clothes of a homeless drifter. I became suspicious, made inquiries, and ultimately learned who you really were. I couldn’t just kill you—as you pointed out, killing a federal agent is never the best solution. Much better would be to reprogram you with new memories. To gaslight you, as it were: erase from your memory the real reasons for your coming here, and to add new memories that would, in the end, convince your superiors and loved ones that you had become mentally ill. After that, no one listens to a crazy person. No matter what you said, it would be chalked up to your illness.”

“Diogenes and Helen were not real.”

“No. They were phantoms, reconstructed out of your memory
by manipulating Npas4.” Grundman paused. “It appears my research into Helen could have been a little more thorough.”

“And the dummy?” Pendergast asked.

“Ah. The dummy. I call him Dr. Augustine. He’s a crucial part of the treatment. He doesn’t exist, either. The dummy isn’t real. He’s the conduit, the vehicle—the Trojan Horse, as it were—which I first insinuate into the patient’s mind. If I can plant Dr. Augustine in your mind, I can use him to leverage any other memory I wish to insert.”

There was a long silence, interrupted by the calling of the loons. The full moon cast a buttery light over the water. Pendergast said nothing.

The doctor stirred nervously in his seat. “I assume that, since you haven’t killed me, you accept my story?”

Pendergast did not answer directly. Instead, he said: “Step out of the car.”

“You’re going to leave me here?”

“It’s a lovely summer evening for a walk. The main road is about ten miles back. The local police will probably pick you up before you have to trek the whole distance.” He waved the doctor’s cell phone meaningfully. “You’ll miss the SWAT team raid on your clinic, of course . . . lucky you.”

Grundman opened the door and stepped out into the night. Pendergast slid over to the driver’s seat, turned the car around, and headed slowly back down the dirt road. Behind him he could see Grundman, standing at the verge of the lake, silhouetted in the moonlit water.

With Grundman’s phone in his hand, he began to dial the number of the New York field office of the FBI—the first step toward raiding and shutting down Stony Mountain. But he didn’t complete the call. Slowly, he let the phone drop into his lap.