Ozmian emerged cautiously from the rubble, keeping to cover. Those shots Pendergast had fired into the dust cloud had seriously unnerved him, due to their random nature and his inability to anticipate them. One of them had come so close he felt the snap of wind as it passed his ear. For the first time, Ozmian felt a twinge of uncertainty. But he quickly shook it off. Wasn’t this what he’d most wanted — a supremely cunning, able opponent? He knew, deep down, that he would prevail.
He moved alongside the ragged edges where the corner of Wing D had collapsed, keeping to the darkness and the brushy overgrowth at the edges of the abandoned building. Switching on his flashlight, he scanned the ground for signs of Pendergast but could see nothing. Coming to a broken window frame, he gave the interior a quick recon and then ducked in, proceeding down a vacant hallway. The tracks in the hall were old, and again he could find no sign of Pendergast.
He needed to find his quarry’s trail. That meant executing a maneuver known as “cutting for sign”—moving in a broad circle at right angles to the quarry’s track, attempting to pick it up. Reaching the end of the hallway, he started down another, cutting for sign, expecting at any moment to intersect Pendergast’s tracks.
In the basement, traversing almost the entire length of the building, Pendergast passed a heating plant, storage rooms, a small block of padded prison cells, finally stopping in a vast archive full of rotting files. It was pitch black belowground and he had no choice but to use the flashlight. Despite everything he had passed, he’d found nothing and no place that would help him escape or turn the tables on his pursuer. There was something stupid, if not futile, in continuing this farce: running randomly through this vast building, hoping for a fresh idea. He was up against a savant, a man who could not be beaten. And yet no one was unbeatable; every human had a chink in his armor. He now had some insight into Ozmian’s psychology, his vulnerability, but how could he turn that to his advantage? Where was that fissure in his armor and, even if found, how would he stick in the sword? The man was perhaps the most complex and ingenious opponent he had ever come up against. “Know your enemy” was the first dictum of Sun Tzu in his Art of War. And the saying contained within it the obvious answer: if there was anyplace in the entire world where he could learn about this man and his deepest weaknesses, it was right here: in the basement, in the archives.
Pendergast paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts and taking in the vast room with his flashlight. It was almost uncanny that he was there, in this immense space stuffed with tales of madness, misery, and horror: the archives of a gigantic mental hospital. He understood now that his own subconscious had led him here.
The archives consisted of racks of filing cabinets on a scaffolding of metal shelves, rising from floor to ceiling. Each aisle had its own pair of rolling ladders, necessary to reach the upper level of cabinets. As Pendergast moved through the space, trying to understand how it was organized, he became aware that the hospital, in its century of operation, had accumulated a staggering quantity of data in the form of patient histories, notes, Dictaphone recordings, diagnoses, correspondence, personnel files, and legal documents. Over the course of its lifetime, the hospital had housed tens of thousands of mental patients, perhaps even hundreds of thousands; the numbers only confirmed Pendergast’s belief that there were vast numbers of mentally ill people in the world. If anything, he thought, the archive was rather modest, considering the collective insanity of the human race.
The aisles and rows were laid out in a grid, the aisles marked with letters and the rows with numbers. Moving down several aisles, consulting the numbers and rows, Pendergast located what he was looking for, seized the rolling ladder, slid it into place, and climbed, flashlight between his teeth. He yanked open a drawer, pawed through it greedily, got to the back, then opened another and another, pulling out folders and tossing them, until he realized that what he was looking for was simply not there.
He slid down the ladder, paused a moment to recalculate, then moved down the aisle to a second place, opening another series of drawers. The screech of rusty metal echoed in the space, and he was acutely aware that the glow of his flashlight would make a perfect target. He had to complete this search before Ozmian picked up his trail and entered the room.
He moved to the next aisle, then the next. He was running out of time. In one drawer he unexpectedly found a rolled-up set of reduced-size building plans. Flipping through them, he extracted one and stuffed it in his waistband. Useful, but not what he was looking for. He moved on.
Ozmian had cut for sign across half of the building’s first floor, from one side to the other, to no avail; but now, as he moved to the staircase, preparing to climb to the second floor, he finally hit Pendergast’s trail. It was remarkably faint — the man had been moving with the utmost care — but there was no possible way to completely erase it, especially to Ozmian’s keen eye. To his surprise, the tracks were headed not upstairs, but rather down…into the basement.
Ozmian felt a surge of satisfaction. He had never been in the basement and had no idea what was down there, but he felt sure the presumably maze-like space and absolute darkness would be to his own advantage, and for Pendergast a dead end. On top of that, he retained a single overwhelming advantage: he was on the offense and his quarry in continuous retreat.
He headed down the stairwell into the darkness, one hand tracing along the wall, moving cautiously and silently, his heart thumping in anticipation of what was to come.
Pendergast had searched all the expected places without finding what he needed. Of course he hadn’t found it, he reflected bitterly; it was no longer there. The records had been removed years ago. A man like Ozmian wouldn’t leave dynamite like that lying around, even in a decaying and abandoned archive. He would have sent someone in to find and destroy it.
Pendergast’s search had revealed the organization of the archives, and it now occurred to him that, at the time when this part of King’s Park was finally investigated for malpractice and cruelty and subsequently shut down, there might be an appendix of files that escaped notice. They would, logically, be at the very end, rather than in their normal alphabetical and date-related places. He moved quickly to the last row of cabinets, in the farthest corner of the archives. Although still encrusted with rust, cobwebs, and mildew, these were slightly newer and of a different model. The drawers were also labeled differently. Evidently, the files within lay outside the established archiving system. After a quick search he came upon a drawer labeled:
RESTRICTED
INVESTIGATIONS / REPORTS / PERSONNEL GRIEVANCES
PENDING AG ORDER OF CLOSURE
It was locked, but a sharp twist in the keyhole with his knife broke the flimsy bolt. After sliding open the drawer with another loud screech of rusted metal, he riffled through the contents, his spidery fingers flying over the tabs and raising a small cloud of dust. Halting, he seized a fat file with some paperwork clipped to its outside edge. Suddenly he crouched, switching off his light and listening. When he had entered the archives, he had closed the rusty door at the far end of the room. It had just opened with a creak.
Ozmian had arrived.
This was catastrophic; he simply would not have the time he needed. Nevertheless, with infinite care, keeping his light off, he rose and moved through the blackness by feeling the cabinets as he went, making for the rear exit. A short journey across open space brought him to the cinder-block outer wall of the archive room, which he again followed by feel. There was a closed door somewhere along this wall, and he was not far from it. He waited, listening acutely. Was that the faint, whispery crunch of footfall on grit? Another faint sound, at the very limit of audibility, reached him; then another. Ozmian was creeping toward him in the dark.
Aiming the Les Baer, he waited. If he fired at the sound, he would probably miss, and the flash would give Ozmian a target for return fire. The risk was too great. The man had surely heard the opening of the last cabinet and knew Pendergast was in the room, but he probably did not know exactly where.
Pendergast remained at the wall, unmoving, hardly breathing. Another faint crunch of a footfall. This one was closer. He might just chance a shot, risky as it was. Aiming the gun into the darkness, he placed his finger on the trigger and waited for another sound; and then it came — the whisper of dust being compressed by a foot.
He fired two rapid shots even as he threw himself sideways, the double flash illuminating Ozmian about seventy feet down the adjacent aisle. Ozmian instantly returned fire, but the rounds slammed into the wall above Pendergast’s prone body, peppering him with concrete chips. Into the dark he fired five more times at Ozmian’s last location, again spacing his shots in anticipation of the possible ways he might move — but each flash showed Ozmian at a place where his shot was not, even as the man returned fire, forcing him to dive for cover into the next row of cabinets. In the vast echoing and re-echoing of shots in the cavernous space, Pendergast took the opportunity to sprint down the aisle, running in the dark; he found a row by touch, ran down that in turn, then wheeled into a new aisle and another row before coming to a halt, crouching and catching his breath when silence returned. Moving again with the utmost caution, he headed via a roundabout route back to the rear exit, feeling his way along; within minutes he found it, and — easing the door open with a creak — ducked through and slammed it behind him, even as he heard Ozmian firing at the sound, a round hitting the thick metal door but not penetrating it. There was a bolt here, and he thrust it home; that, at least, would buy him another few minutes to do what he had to do.
Flicking on his flashlight, he looked quickly through the files he had gleaned, page after page, until he stopped at one particular sheet. He slipped it out, tucked it in his pocket, glanced at the building plans…and then proceeded down the hall, not even bothering to tread lightly. At the far end, he came to a small green door, which he pushed open and then shut and locked behind him, even as he heard Ozmian trying to get through the archive door.
He had a great deal of work to do to prepare for Ozmian’s arrival.