City of Endless Night

53

The night was bitter, without a breath of wind, a full moon just peeking above the towers of Building 93, throwing a bone-white light over the landscape. Clad in the camos and soft shoes Ozmian had forced on him, Agent Pendergast paused beyond the door of Building 44, the vapor from his breath trailing through the night air. Building 93 lay about a hundred yards away, a great black wedge against the moonlit sky, surrounded by a battered chain-link fence. A swath of open ground lay between him and the fence, covered with stubble and patches of crusty snow, with a scattering of dead trees and hollow stumps. A knoll rose on the right, covered with scrubby weeds.

To see Longstreet so brutally decapitated; to see D’Agosta beaten and trussed up like a pig for slaughter; to realize how utterly Ozmian had deceived him — the horror of it pressed in on Pendergast, threatening to unseat his intellect and overwhelm him with grief, fury, and self-reproach. He breathed deeply, closed his eyes, and centered his mind, thrusting those distractions aside. A minute passed — a precious minute, but he knew that if he did not regain his focus and balance, he would be lost for sure.

Sixty seconds later he opened his eyes. The night remained cold and soundless, the moonlight as clear as water. Now he began assembling various possibilities in his mind, running through the trajectories of potential actions, determining which of the branching sets to consider further and which to discard.

He concluded there was a better option than making a beeline for Building 93—and that was to immediately go on the offensive. He would strike hard at Ozmian the moment he exited Building 44. Moving with cat-like swiftness over the frozen ground, being careful to leave no trail, he circled the building, performing a quick reconnaissance. It was a two-story structure of brick, dilapidated but still sound, with a steeply pitched roof. The windows of both stories had been blocked with plywood covered in tin, and sealed so effectively that no light from inside leaked out. There would be no exit from one of those.

As he rounded the corner at the back of the building he spied a rear door. He gently touched the handle and found it was locked, then ran a finger along the exposed hinges and brought it to his nose. Fresh oil. A further examination revealed the hinges had recently been cleaned, as well.

Completing the reconnoiter, Pendergast understood that Building 44 had only two means of egress — front and back. The roof was too steep and exposed to allow for any escape that way. It was an ideal setup for an ambush.

Perhaps too ideal: it felt almost like a setup. In fact, as he reflected further, it was a setup: Ozmian was expecting him to hold back and press an attack the moment the man exited.

But setup or not, even if he chose to cover one of the exits at random, he still had a 50 percent chance of getting the drop on Ozmian. By anticipating Ozmian’s strategy, he could improve those odds.

Pendergast ran through the logic. Since Ozmian had previously prepared this rear door, he intended for this to be his exit point while Pendergast was staking out the front loading dock entrance. Given this train of deduction, Pendergast should therefore stake out the rear door.

But that logic, complex as it was, might still be too simple. If Ozmian were truly a clever man, he would anticipate that he, Pendergast, would discover the rear door, observe the freshly oiled hinges, and therefore stake out that exit point.

Therefore, Ozmian will leave by the front door. It was a clear case of double-reverse psychology. This oiled back door, so carefully prepared, was a red herring, a trap, created to lure Pendergast into making this an ambush point.

Four minutes left in his head start.

Pendergast slipped around to the front of the building once again, now convinced that this was where Ozmian would exit. As he scanned the frozen landscape, he saw an excellent point of cover: a dead oak tree still cloaked in the long moon-shadow cast by Building 93. He sprinted over to it, leapt up to grasp a low branch, swung himself up, climbed to a higher limb, and took up a crouching position, hidden behind the trunk. He removed his Les Baer, its cold weight a physical reassurance. Bracing himself against the trunk, he took a bead on the front loading dock.

Thirty seconds.

But then, even as the seconds ticked off, Pendergast once again had misgivings. Was he overthinking the situation, giving Ozmian too much credit? Perhaps the man had a simple plan after all to exit by the rear door. If he did, Pendergast not only would miss his chance but would be highly vulnerable in his position on the tree limb, especially if Ozmian did indeed plan to circle around from the rear and fire at him from the weedy knoll.

Ten seconds.

For better or worse he had made his choice. Iron sights trained on the metal rolling door, his shoulder braced against the trunk, he waited, stilling his breath.