Reliquary

= 45 =

D’AGOSTA GAZED at the small pile of rubber and chromed parts, picked one up, then dropped it again in disgust. “It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Could these have been left there by accident?”

“I assure you, Vincent,” Pendergast said, “they were carefully arranged on the altar, almost as if they were some kind of offering.” There was a silence while he paced restlessly across the lab. “There’s another thing I’m uneasy about. Kawakita was the one who was growing the lily in tanks, after all. Why would they kill him and burn the lab? Why would they destroy their only source of the drug? The one thing an addict is most terrified of is losing his connection. And the lab was burned deliberately. You said there were trace accelerants in the ashes.”

“Unless they were growing it somewhere else,” D’Agosta said, fingering his breast pocket absently.

“Go ahead and light up,” Margo said.

D’Agosta eyed her. “Really?”

Margo smiled and nodded. “Just this once. But don’t tell Director Merriam.”

D’Agosta brightened. “It’ll be our secret.” He slipped the cigar out, jabbed a pencil into its head, and moved to the lone window, lifting the sash wide. He lit up and puffed the clouds of smoke contentedly out over Central Park.

I wish I had a vice I enjoyed half as much as that, Margo thought as she watched idly.

“I considered the possibility of an alternate supply,” Pendergast was saying. “And I kept my eyes open for signs of an underground garden. But there was no evidence of one. Such a lily farm would require still water and fresh air. I can’t imagine where they could be hiding it underground.”

D’Agosta blew another stream of blue smoke out the window, resting his elbows on the windowsill. “Look at that mess,” he said, nodding southward. “Horlocker’s going to have kittens when he sees that.”

Margo walked to the window and let her gaze fall over the rich green mantle of Central Park, shadowy and mysterious beneath the pink of the western sunset. To her right, along Central Park South, she could hear the faint sound of countless horns. A great mass of marchers was moving into Grand Army Plaza with the slow flow of molasses.

“That’s some march,” she said.

“You’re damn right it is,” D’Agosta said. “And those people vote.”

“I hope Dr. Frock’s car service didn’t get stuck in all that on his way home,” she murmured. “He hates crowds.”

She let her eyes drift northward, over the Sheep Meadow and the Bethesda fountain, toward the placid oval of the Reservoir. At midnight, that calm body of water would let loose twenty million cubic feet of death into the lowest levels of Manhattan. She felt a sudden pang for the Wrinklers caught below. It wasn’t exactly due process. But then her mind drifted back to the bloody mouse cages, to the sudden viciousness of the B. meresgerii. It was a deadly drug; one that increased a thousand-fold the natural aggressiveness that evolution had built into almost all living creatures. And Kawakita, infected himself, believed the process to be irreversible…

“I’m glad we’re up here and not down there,” D’Agosta murmured, puffing meditatively.

Margo nodded. She could see, out of the corner of her eye, Pendergast pacing the room behind her, picking up things, putting them down again.

When the sun next rises over the Park, Margo thought, the Reservoir will be twenty million cubic feet lighter. Her eyes rested on the surface of the water, its hint of internal light reflecting the oranges, reds, and greens of the sunset. It was a beautiful scene, its quiet tranquility in stark contrast to the marching and the frantic horns twenty blocks to the south.

Then she frowned. I’ve never seen a green sunset before.

She strained to make out the darkening surface of water, rapidly disappearing into shadow. In the dying glow she could clearly see dull patches of green on the surface of the water. A strange and awful thought had crept unbidden into her mind. Still water and fresh air…

It’s impossible, she thought. Someone surely would have noticed. Or would they?

She turned from the window and glanced at Pendergast. He caught her eye, saw the look in it, and ceased his pacing.

“Margo?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

She said nothing, and Pendergast followed her gaze out toward the Reservoir, stared for a moment, then stiffened visibly. When he looked back at her, she could see the same dawning realization in his own eyes.

“I think we’d better take a look,” Pendergast said quietly.

The Central Park Reservoir was separated from the surrounding jogging path by a tall chain-link fence. D’Agosta grasped the base of the fence and tugged it violently from the ground. With Pendergast and D’Agosta close behind, Margo scrambled down the gravel service path to the water’s edge, wading out to a patch of small, oddly shaped lily pads, terrifying in their familiarity. She tore the closest one from the group and held it up, water dripping from its pulpy roots.

“Liliceae mbwunensis,” she said. “They’re growing it in the Reservoir. That’s how Kawakita planned to solve his supply problem. Aquariums are limited. So not only did he engineer the drug, but he was also hybridizing the plant to grow in a temperate climate.”

“There’s your alternative source,” D’Agosta said, still puffing on the cigar.

Pendergast waded in after her, his hands sweeping the dark waters, ripping up plants and examining them in the twilight. Several joggers stopped abruptly in their robotic courses around the water, staring wide-eyed at the bizarre sight: a young woman in a lab coat, an overweight man with a cigar glowing like a firebrand in his mouth, and a tall, strikingly blond man in an expensively tailored black suit, standing up to their chests in the Manhattan drinking supply.

Pendergast held up one of the plants, a large nut-brown pod hanging from its stem. The pod had curled open. “They’re going to seed,” Pendergast said quietly. “Flushing the Reservoir will simply dump this plant and its deadly cargo into the Hudson River—and into the ocean.”

There was a silence, punctuated only by the distant cacophony of horns.

“But this thing can’t grow in saltwater,” Pendergast continued. “Can it, Dr. Green?”

“No, of course not. The salinity…” A sudden terrible thought burned its way through Margo’s consciousness. “Oh, Jesus. How stupid of me.”

Pendergast turned toward her, eyebrows raised.

“The salinity,” she repeated.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Pendergast replied.

“The only single-celled animal affected by the viral drug was B. meresgerii,” Margo continued slowly. “There’s one difference between B. meresgerii and the other organisms we tested with the drug. The agar plates for B. meresgerii were saline plates. B. meresgerii is a marine organism. It lives in a saline environment.”

“So?” asked D’Agosta.

“It’s a common way to activate a virus. Just add a small amount of saline solution to the viral culture. In the cold, fresh reservoir water, the plant stays dormant. But when those seeds hit the saltwater, it’ll activate the virus. And dump the drug into the ecosystem.”

“The Hudson,” said Pendergast, “is tidal all the way up past Manhattan.”

Margo dropped the plant and took a step back. “We saw what the drug did to just one microscopic organism. If it’s released into the ocean, God knows what the end result would be. The marine ecology could be totally disrupted. And the food chain is dependent on the oceans.”

“Hold on,” said D’Agosta. “The ocean’s a pretty big place.”

“The ocean distributes many seeds of freshwater and land-growing plants,” Margo said. “Who knows what plants and animals the virus will colonize and multiply in? And if the plant propagates in the ocean—or if the seeds find their way into estuaries and wetlands—it won’t make any difference.”

Pendergast waded out of the water and slung the plant over his shoulder, its bulbous, knotted roots staining the narrow line of his shoulders.

“We’ve got three hours,” he said.