Two Graves

For agonizing minutes Alban stood there, the two with their weapons pointed at each other, bathed in the hellish glow and thunder of the eruption on the island, the sound of sporadic gunfire in the town.

“Well?” Fischer said at last. “What are you waiting for? It’s as I suspected—you don’t have the guts to shoot.”

“You think not?” Alban asked. Suddenly—quick as a striking snake—he swung his weapon around at Fischer and pulled the trigger. The round struck the man in the gut. He gasped, clutched his belly, and fell to his knees, dropping the gun.

“You’re the failure,” Alban said. “Your master plan was flawed—flawed fundamentally. You should never have allowed the defectives to live. I see that now. Having recourse to an organ bank was too high a price to pay for the filial bond you were never able to completely breed out. You failed, mein Oberstgruppenführer—and long ago, you taught me what the price of failure must be.”

He aimed the gun again and shot Fischer a second time, square in the forehead. The back of Fischer’s head detached from his body, dissolving in a mist of blood, bone, and brain matter; soundlessly, he fell backward, his body slipping off the rock and disappearing below the surface of the lake.

Pendergast saw that the slide of the P38 had locked back—his son’s magazine was empty.

Alban, too, noticed this. “It would appear I’m out of ammunition,” he said, snugging the weapon into his waistband. “It seems I won’t be killing you, after all.” Although it must have cost him dreadful pain, he nevertheless smiled crookedly. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be going.”

Pendergast stared, only now managing to wrap his mind around what had just happened. He wondered how his son—despite the terrible burns, the wounds, the loss of everything—maintained his arrogant composure, his cocksure attitude.

“No words of farewell, Father, to your son?”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Pendergast said slowly, maintaining his weapon on Alban. “You’re a murderer. Of the worst kind.”

Alban nodded. “True. And I’ve killed more people than even you could imagine.”

Pendergast aimed his weapon. “And now it is you who must die for your crimes.”

“Is that so?” Alban issued a small laugh. “We shall see. I know you’ve figured out my unique temporal sense. Isn’t that right?”

“The Copenhagen Window,” Pendergast replied.

“Precisely. It’s derived from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which you are no doubt aware?”

Pendergast nodded almost imperceptibly.

“The interpretation is the notion that the future is nothing more than an expanding set of probabilities, time lines of possibility, that continuously collapse into one reality as observations or measurements are made. It’s the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics taught in universities.”

“It would appear,” Pendergast said, “that your mind has somehow become able to leverage this—to reach into the near future and see those branching possibilities.”

Alban smiled. “Brilliant! You see, most humans have only a fleeting sense of the immediate future, perhaps a few seconds at most. You can see a car ahead slow at a stop sign, and you intuitively sense the probability that it will stop—or else continue on. Or you might know what someone is going to say moments before they say it. Our scientists recognized the usefulness of this trait over half a century ago, and set out to enhance it through breeding and genetic manipulation. I am the final product.” There was evident pride in Alban’s tone. “My sense of the branching probabilistic time lines is much more developed than in others. I can sense up to fifteen seconds into the future, and my mind can see the dozens of branching possibilities—as if through a window—and pick out the most likely one. It may not seem like much—but what a difference it makes! In a way, my brain can tune in to the wave function ψ itself. But it is not the same as predicting the future. Because, of course, according to the Copenhagen interpretation, there is no fixed future. And as you have so astutely realized, my ability can be stymied by sudden, illogical, or unpredictable behavior.”

His smile, made gruesome by the dreadful burns, widened. “But even without making use of my special future sense, Father, I know one thing beyond any shadow of a doubt: you can’t kill me. I’m going to walk away now. Into the forest. To stop me, you will have to shoot me dead—and that you won’t do. And so, auf Wiedersehen.”

“Don’t be a fool, Alban. I will kill you.”

The youth spread his hands. “I am waiting.”

A long silence ensued, and then Alban went on, almost jauntily. “With Der Bund gone, I’m free. I’m only fifteen—I have a long and productive life ahead of me. The world, as they say, is now my oyster—and I promise you it’ll be a more interesting place with me loose in it.”

And with that he leapt nimbly from the rock into the shallow water.

Pendergast followed him with his gun, blood dripping slowly from the fingers of his left hand, as Alban waded onto the beach and strolled up it. Pendergast remained unmoving, gun still aimed at his son, as Alban continued, in no apparent hurry, to the grassy verge of the shore, climbed the shallow embankment, and strolled into a field of grass, finally melting into the black and unbroken wall of trees at the forest’s edge. Only then did Pendergast—ever so slowly—lower his weapon with a trembling hand.

85

IT WAS CHRISTMAS EVE AT MOUNT MERCY HOSPITAL. A small Douglas fir, freshly cut, stood in the waiting area near the guards’ station, plastic trimmings attached to its branches by discreet rubber bands. Deep within the hospital, a recording of carols was faintly audible. Otherwise, the vast and rambling mansion was cloaked in a nostalgic silence, its resident murderers, poisoners, rapists, arsonists, vivisectors, and social deviants caught up in reveries of Christmases past: of presents received, and—rather more commonly—of presents inflicted.

Dr. John Felder walked down one of the interior corridors of Mount Mercy, Dr. Ostrom at his side. Over the last several weeks his broken ribs had mostly healed, and the concussion he’d sustained had receded. The only scar—the only external scar—that remained from his ordeal in the Wintour mansion was from the cut on his temple, now a scarlet, jagged line.

Ostrom shook his head. “What a strange case. I still feel we’ve hardly scratched the surface.”

Felder did not respond to that.

Ostrom stopped before a pair of double doors that—like most at Mount Mercy—were unlabeled. A single guard stood outside.

“This is it?” Felder asked.

“Yes. If you need anything, call for the guards.”

Felder extended his hand. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“My pleasure.” Ostrom turned and made his way back down the corridor.

Felder nodded to the guard, took a breath. Then he pushed open the doors and stepped inside.

Beyond lay the Mount Mercy chapel. It was an artifact from the days when the hospital had been a sanatorium for the very rich, and Felder, who had never seen it before, was amazed. It remained unchanged from its late-nineteenth-century zenith, when the numerous bequests of fearful, ailing patients had given the chapel’s designers working capital a Medici would envy. It was a masterpiece in miniature, jewel-like and utterly perfect, the nave only six rows deep, with a single central aisle; and yet the builders had cleverly re-created the ribbed vaults of a gothic cathedral, and in so doing filled both the side walls and the curved ambulatory with delicate, vividly colored stained glass. In the late-afternoon light, the chapel’s interior seemed almost drowned in color; the pews, the slender pillars, the other architectural features, were so dappled and painted with light as to be almost indistinguishable from each other. Felder took a hesitant step forward, and then another. It was like being inside an ecclesiastical kaleidoscope.