Страница 106 из 111
Pendergast’s gun lay on the ground nearby, and he reached for it, grimacing a little. “Help me up, please. I need to get back to the operating room, to check on Smithback and stop my own bleeding.”
She helped the agent to his feet. Pendergast stumbled a little, leaning heavily on her arm. “Shine your light on our friend a moment, if you please,” he said.
The Fairhaven-thing was shuffling along one wall of the room. He ran into a large wooden cabinet, stopped, backed up, came forward again, as if unable to negotiate the obstacle. Pendergast gazed at the thing for a moment, then turned away.
“He’s no longer a threat,” he murmured. “Let’s get back upstairs, as quickly as possible.”
They retraced their steps back through the chambers of the subbasement, Pendergast stopping periodically to rest. Slowly, painfully, they mounted the stairs.
In the operating room, Smithback lay on the table, still unconscious. Nora sca
“He’ll survive,” he said simply.
Nora felt a huge sense of relief.
“Now I’m going to need some help. Help me get my jacket and shirt off.”
Nora untied the jacket around Pendergast’s midsection, then helped him remove his shirt, exposing a ragged hole in his abdomen, thickly encrusted in blood. More blood was dripping from his shattered elbow.
“Roll that tray of surgical instruments this way,” he said, gesturing with his good hand.
Nora rolled the tray over. She could not help but notice that his torso, although slender, was powerfully muscled.
“Grab those clamps over there, too, please.” Pendergast swabbed the blood away from the abdominal wound, then irrigated it with Betadine.
“Don’t you want something for the pain? I know there’s some—”
“No time.” Pendergast dropped the bloody gauze to the floor and angled the overhead light toward the wound in his abdomen. “I have to tie off these bleeders before I grow any weaker.”
Nora watched him inspect the wound.
“Shine that light a little lower, would you? There, that’s good. Now, if you’d hand me that clamp?”
Although Nora had a strong stomach, watching Pendergast probe his own abdomen made her feel distinctly queasy. After a moment he laid down the clamp, took up a scalpel, and made a short cut perpendicular to the wound.
“You’re not going to operate on yourself, are you?”
Pendergast shook his head. “Just a quick-and-dirty effort to stop the bleeding. But I’ve got to reach this colic vein, which, with all my exertion, has unfortunately retracted.” He made another little cut, and then probed into the wound with a large, tweezer-like instrument.
Nora winced, tried to think of something else. “How are we going to get out of here?” she asked again.
“Through the basement tu
“No,” Nora replied, swallowing. “Can’t say I did.”
“That’s understandable, considering the North River Water Pollution Control Plant now blocks much of the view,” Pendergast said as he fished a large vein out of the wound with the clamp. “But a hundred and fifty years ago, this house would have had a sweeping view of the lower Hudson. River pirates were fairly common in the early nineteenth century. They would slip out onto the river after dark to hijack moored ships or capture passengers for ransom.” He paused while he examined the end of the vein. “Leng must have known this. A large subbasement was the first thing he wanted in a house. I believe we will find a way down to the river, via the subbasement. Hand me that absorbable suture, if you please? No, the larger one, the 4-0. Thank you.”
Nora looked on, wincing inwardly, as Pendergast ligated the vein.
“Good,” he said a few moments later, as he released the clamp and put the suture aside. “That vein was causing most of the bleeding. I can do nothing about my spleen, which has obviously been perforated, so I’ll merely cauterize the smaller bleeders and close the wound. Would you hand me the electrocauterer, please? Yes, that’s it.”
Nora handed the device—a narrow blue pencil at the end of a wire, two buttons marked cut and cauterize on its side—to the FBI agent. Once again, he bent over his wound. There was a sharp crackling sound as he cauterized a vein. This was followed by another crackling noise—much longer this time—and a thin wisp of smoke rose into the air. Nora averted her eyes.
“What was Leng’s ultimate project?” she asked.
Pendergast did not respond immediately. “Enoch Leng wanted to heal the human race,” he said at last, still bent over the wound. “He wanted to save it.”
For a moment, Nora wasn’t sure she had heard correctly. “Save the human race? But he was killing people. Scores of people.”
“So he was.” Another crackling noise.
“Save it how?”
“By eliminating it.”
Nora looked back at him.
“That was Leng’s grand project: to rid the earth of humanity, to save mankind from itself, from its own unfitness. He was searching for the ultimate poison—hence those rooms full of chemicals, plants, poisonous insects and reptiles. Of course, I had plenty of tangential evidence before: the poisonous materials on the glass fragments you unearthed from Leng’s old laboratory, for example. Or the Greek inscription on the escutcheon outside the house. Did you notice it?”
Nora nodded her head numbly.
“It’s the final words of Socrates, spoken as he took the fatal poison.
‘Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?’ Yet another thing I should have realized sooner.” He cauterized another vein. “But it wasn’t until I saw the room full of weapons that I made the co
“My God,” Nora said. “What a crazy scheme.”
“It was an ambitious scheme, certainly. One he realized would take several lifetimes to complete. That was why he developed his, ah, method of life extension.”
Pendergast put the electrocauterer carefully to one side. “I’ve seen no evidence here of any supplies for closing incisions,” he said. “Clearly, Fairhaven had no need of them. If you’ll hand me that gauze and the medical tape, I’ll butterfly the wound until it can be properly attended to. Again, I’ll need your assistance.”
Nora handed him the requested items, then helped him close. “Did he succeed in finding the ultimate poison?” she asked.
“No. Based on the state of his laboratory, I would say he gave up around 1950.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Pendergast said as he taped gauze over the exit wound. The troubled look she’d noticed earlier returned. “It’s very curious. It’s a great mystery to me.”
Dressing completed, Pendergast straightened up. Following his instructions, Nora helped him make a sling for his injured arm using torn surgical sheets, then helped him into his shirt.
Pendergast turned once again to Smithback, examining his unconscious form, studying the monitors at the head of the table. He felt Smithback’s pulse, examined the dressing Nora had made. After rummaging through the cabinet he brought out a syringe, and injected it into the saline tube.