Blue Labyrinth

At length, Barbeaux arrived at a small, tasteful family plot, consisting of two memorials surrounded by a low iron fence. He stepped inside and approached the larger: a statue of an angel, hands clenched to her breast, tearful eyes glancing heavenward. A name was carved into the base of the monument: FELICITY BARBEAUX. There was no date.

Barbeaux was carrying two cut flowers in his right hand: a long-stemmed red rose and a purple hyacinth. He knelt and laid the rose before the memorial. Then he stood again and contemplated the statue in silence.

His wife had been killed by a drunk driver, not quite ten years ago. The police investigation had been botched — the man, a telemarketing executive, had not been read his rights, and the chain of custody had been imperfectly established. A shrewd lawyer was able to get the man a one-year suspended sentence.

John Barbeaux was a man who prized family above all else. He was also a man who believed in justice. This was not justice as he understood it.

Although Red Mountain had been a far smaller and less powerful company a decade ago, Barbeaux nevertheless exerted significant influence, and he had many contacts in various obscure walks of life. First, he arranged to have the man arrested again when over one hundred grams of crack cocaine was found in his glove compartment. Although a first offense, this precipitated a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. Six months later, once the telemarketer had begun serving his term at Otisville Federal Correctional Institution, Barbeaux saw to it that — for a onetime payment of ten thousand dollars — the man was shivved with a filed-down screwdriver in the prison shower and left to bleed his life down the drain.

Justice served.

Barbeaux took a last, lingering look at the statue. Then, with a deep breath, he moved toward the second monument. This one was much smaller: a simple cross bearing the name JOHN BARBEAUX JR.

In the years following Felicity’s death, Barbeaux had showered affection and attention on his young son. After a childhood beset with health problems, John Jr. had emerged into adolescence as a promising artist. More than promising, in fact: a truly gifted pianist, a prodigy as both a performer and composer. His father lavished everything on him: the best tutors, the best schools. In John Jr., Barbeaux saw great hope for the future of his line.

And then things began to go horribly wrong. It started out i

That had been less than two years ago. And Barbeaux had retreated into a fog of grief. He had been too unma

But then, almost a year to the day after John Jr.’s death, an event happened that Barbeaux could never have predicted. He had a visitor one evening — a young man that could not have been more than a few years older than Barbeaux’s son, but of such a different build, energy, and magnetism as if to have come from another planet. He had a foreign accent, but spoke excellent English. This young man knew a great deal about Barbeaux. In fact, he knew more about Barbeaux’s family than Barbeaux did himself. He told Barbeaux the tale of his great-grandparents, Stephen and Ethel, who had lived on Dauphine Street in New Orleans. He told the story of a neighbor of the couple, Hezekiah Pendergast, who had created the nostrum known as Hezekiah’s Compound Elixir and Glandular Restorative — a quack patent medicine that was responsible for the suffering, madness, and death of thousands. Among the victims, this young man told the astounded Barbeaux, were Stephen and Ethel Barbeaux, barely in their thirties, who both died of its effects in 1895.

But that wasn’t all, the young man said. There was another victim in the family, far closer to Barbeaux. His own son, John Jr.

The young man explained how the elixir had caused epigenetic changes in the Barbeaux family’s bloodline — heritable changes to genetic makeup that had, in this case, jumped the generations to kill his son, more than a hundred years later.

Then the young man came to the real point of the meeting. The Pendergast family was still alive, in the form of one Aloysius Pendergast, a special agent with the FBI — and not only alive, but prospering, thanks to the wealth accumulated by Hezekiah and his deadly elixir.

And now the young man revealed just why he had come. He was, he said, named Alban… and he was the son of Special Agent Pendergast. Alban told him a most harrowing tale — and then proposed a complex, curious, but exceedingly satisfying plan.

One last thing, Alban said. The words echoed in Barbeaux’s mind. You might be tempted to hunt me down, as well — and thus eliminate another Pendergast. I warn you against any such attempt. I have remarkable powers beyond your comprehension. Satisfy yourself with my father. He’s the one living like a parasite off of Hezekiah’s fortune. And then he left behind an extensive packet of documents backing up his story, and outlining his plan… and vanished into the night.

Barbeaux had dismissed this talk of “powers” as the braggadocio of youth. He sent two men to follow Alban, excellent men, experienced men. One returned with his eye hanging out, and the other was found with his throat cut. All this Alban had done, quite deliberately, in full view of Barbeaux’s security cameras.

I have remarkable powers beyond your comprehension. Indeed, he did have remarkable powers. But they were not beyond Barbeaux’s comprehension. And that had been Alban’s fatal mistake.

The tale Alban had told seemed too strange to be true. But as Barbeaux looked through the packet he’d been given; as he examined his family history and the symptoms of his own son; and especially once he’d had certain blood tests performed — he realized that the story was, in fact, true. This was a revelation; a revelation that turned his grief into hatred and hatred into obsession.

A cell phone rang in the breast pocket of his suit. Gazing off in the direction of Mount Marcy, Barbeaux plucked it from his pocket.

“Yes?” he said.

He listened for a minute. As he did, his knuckles went white grasping the phone. A shocked look came over his face.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he interrupted, “that he not only knows what has happened, but is taking steps to stop it?”

He listened again, longer this time, to the voice on the far end of the line.

“All right,” he said at last. “You know what to do. And you’ll have to move fast — very fast.”

He hung up, then dialed another number. “Richard? Is the Ops Crew standing by? Good. We have a new objective. I want you to prep them for an emergency deployment to New York City. Yes, immediately. They have to be in the air inside of half an hour.”