The Obsidian Chamber

45

The Special Operations Center took up almost half a floor of Federal Plaza. It was a rambling labyrinth of glass and chrome, illuminated a cool fluorescent blue, with countless workstations, monitoring devices, satellite tracking screens, flat-panel displays of all sizes, terminals for controlling Predator and Reaper drones, and breakout rooms used by field agents planning operations; spooks listening in on satellite communications or sifting terabytes of email data; and federal nerds disassembling cell phones or employing decryption algorithms on confiscated laptops. Everywhere was a low hum of noise: the beep of electronics, the whisper of servers, the murmur of a dozen conversations. Much of the present activity was focused on one thing: crunching massive amounts of data in an attempt to discover the whereabouts of Diogenes Pendergast.

In a glass-walled room in one corner of the center, behind a closed glass door, Pendergast and Howard Longstreet sat at a conference table. A white-noise machine masked their conversation from any passersby. Although this room served as one of Longstreet’s numerous satellite offices within Federal Plaza, it was bare save for two laptops, a phone on the table, and a monitor on one wall.

“Your trip to Exmouth was instructive,” Longstreet was telling Pendergast. “Thanks to the landlord, we have identities for both Diogenes and his female companion.”

“I wouldn’t put much stock in Diogenes’s identity,” Pendergast said. “I believe he has two types — long-term ‘avatars’ such as Hugo Menzies that he carefully cultivates and that will stand up to official scrutiny, and throwaway names like the one he registered in the Exmouth cottage under, and the one he used to charter the plane that — I’m assuming — my associate Proctor was chasing. Those aren’t worth investigating. The long-term identities are what we need to concern ourselves with. I’m not sure how many he still uses, but after he lost the Menzies identity, and what happened at Stromboli, I would doubt he has many left. At this point, having to sustain double, triple, or quadruple lives might be a burden to him.”

“Well,” said Longstreet, “his accomplice is no question mark at all. Flavia Greyling is in fact her real name. She’s got a long and disturbing history. There are a couple of law enforcement agencies that would like to chat with her. Interesting that she used her real first name during her time in Exmouth.”

“It seems to speak to a certain disdain for the authorities.”

“Agreed.” Longstreet tapped some keys and an image appeared on the monitor: a young woman with blond hair, ice-blue eyes, and high, prominent cheekbones. The photo was evidently a mug shot and, judging by the height scale being measured in meters, had been taken in some foreign country.

“There she is,” Longstreet said, waving at the image. “On one of the few occasions when someone actually managed to get her in custody.” He consulted the computer in front of him. “She was born twenty-four years ago in Cape Town, South Africa. When she was eight, both of her parents were found beaten to death with what the coroner believed was a cricket bat. The weapon was never found, and the deaths were ascribed to a home invasion. Unsolved. After their deaths, she passed through a series of foster homes — never staying for more than a few months. Kicked out, one after the other, the families often citing fear of physical violence. Finally, she ended up a ward of the state — put in an orphanage. Reports from social workers who interviewed her there said she’d been the victim of sexual abuse by her father from an early age. They described her as maladapted, aggressive, manipulative, withdrawn, fascinated by martial arts and weapons — particularly knives, real or improvised, which were always being confiscated from her person — and prone to violence.”

Longstreet used a mouse to scroll through the data on his screen. “It was not long before she was moved from an orphanage to a reformatory. Several instances of assault were noted during her residency there; in one case, she beat a fellow inmate almost to death. Ultimately, when she was fifteen, a request was made that she be transferred to a high-security prison, despite her age. The reformatory staff was simply unable to control her. But before the red tape could be completed, she escaped — stabbing a psychologist through the eye with a pen and killing him in the process.”

He perused the screen a moment. “They tried to run her down, but she was a wily one. She left in her wake a trail of crime and violence. She evinced a hatred of men: one of her favorite tactics was to loiter around in seedy neighborhoods until someone either solicited her or tried to molest her, at which point she would castrate him and stuff his genitals into his mouth.”

“Charming,” Pendergast murmured.

“At around sixteen, her wanderings took her to Japan, where she got involved with a yakuza gang. After some kind of violent falling-out that the Tokyo police are still investigating, she apparently went to Canton, China, where she joined one of that city’s triads. According to our intelligence sources, her natural affinity for violence helped her rise quickly through the ranks. Almost immediately, she graduated from a ‘49’ to a ‘426’—a ‘Red Pole’ enforcer, whose specialty was managing and carrying out offensive operations. By twenty-one, she was set to rise still higher within the organization, when something happened, we don’t know what, and she left China for the United States.”

Longstreet looked away from the screen. “In the years since, she’s made her home here, although it appears she left the country for Europe on a few occasions. Based on the crimes she’s presumably committed, she appears to be an extremely highly functioning sociopath, who kills and maims primarily for her own amusement. She has shown a remarkable ability to hide in plain sight and to evade the authorities at every turn. That mug shot is the only one we have of her, taken in Amsterdam. She escaped the following day.”

“An ideal accomplice for Diogenes,” Pendergast said.

“Precisely.” Longstreet sighed. “Having identified Greyling is a coup, without doubt — and yet, given her ability to successfully elude law enforcement in the past, I’m not sure how much material progress we’ll make.” He glanced at Pendergast. “I presume you searched the cottage where they stayed with particular care?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“It had been meticulously cleaned.”

Longstreet stretched, ran a hand through his long steel-colored hair. “We’ll send a CSU there anyway.”

“I doubt if they’ll find more than this.” Pendergast reached into his pocket, withdrew something in a plastic bag, and handed it to Longstreet: a small slip of robin’s-egg-blue paper.

Longstreet took it. “Interesting.”

“I found it wedged between two floorboards near an air vent.”

As Longstreet turned the bag over in his hands, Pendergast continued. “It’s a partial receipt for a piece of jewelry — a gold ring with a rare tanzanite gemstone. I would speculate it was a present from Diogenes to Flavia — a reward, perhaps, for a job well done.”

“So, with luck, we can use this to trace the purchase back to Diogenes,” said Longstreet. “If we knew where this ring was purchased. Too bad the name of the store has been torn off.”

“But we do know the store. There is only one that uses that particular color as the face they present to the world.”

Longstreet glanced at the receipt again. And then he smiled — a slow, triumphant smile.