Slowly, Proctor swam back up toward consciousness from inky depths. It was a long swim, and it seemed to take a long time. At last he opened his eyes. The lids felt heavy, and it was all he could do not to close them again. What had happened? For a moment he lay motionless, taking in his surroundings. Then he realized: he was on the floor of his sitting room.
His sitting room.
I have a great many things to do…
All of a sudden, everything came back to him in a mad rush. He struggled to rise; failed; tried again with still-greater effort, and this time managed to push himself to a sitting position. His body felt like a sack of meal.
He glanced at his watch. Eleven fifteen AM. He’d been out just over thirty minutes.
Thirty minutes. God only knew what might have transpired in that time.
I have a great many things to do…
With a heroic effort, Proctor staggered to his feet. The room rocked and he steadied himself against a table, shaking his head violently in an attempt to clear it. He paused just a moment, trying to collect both his physical and mental faculties. Then he opened the table’s single drawer, pulled out a Glock 22, and stuffed it into his waistband.
The door to his set of rooms was open, the central hallway of the servants’ quarters visible beyond. He made for the open doorway, steadied himself against its frame, then lurched down the hall like a drunken man. Reaching the narrow back staircase, he grasped the railing tightly and half walked, half staggered down two flights of stairs to the mansion’s main floor. This effort, and the sense of extreme danger that enveloped him, combined to help sharpen his senses. He walked down a short corridor and opened the door at the end leading to the public rooms.
Here he paused, preparing to call for Mrs. Trask. Then he reconsidered. Announcing his presence was inadvisable. Besides, Mrs. Trask had in all probability already left to visit her ailing sister in Albany. And in any case she was not the person in greatest danger. That person was Constance.
Proctor stepped out onto the marble floor, preparing to enter the library, ride the elevator to the basement, and take whatever steps were necessary to protect her. But just outside the library he stopped again. He could see that, within, a table had been overturned, books and various papers spilling over the carpeting.
He glanced around quickly. To his right, the mansion’s grand reception hall — its walls lined with cabinets full of strange displays — was a mess. A plinth had been knocked over, the ancient Etruscan cinerary urn previously displayed upon it shattered into pieces. The oversize vase of freshly cut flowers that always stood in the middle of the hall, its contents changed daily by Mrs. Trask, now lay broken on the marble floor, two dozen roses and lilies disarrayed in puddles of water. At the far end of the hall, at the doorway leading to the refectory gallery, one of the cabinet doors was wide open, canted to one side, half ripped from its hinges. It looked as if someone had grasped it in a frantic attempt to avoid being dragged away.
All too clearly, these were signs of a terrific struggle. And they led — from the library, across the reception hall — directly toward the mansion’s front door. And the world beyond.
Proctor ran across the hall. In the long, narrow room beyond, he could see that the refectory table — at which, until recently, Constance had been occupied with researching the Pendergast family history — was a riot of disorder: books and papers strewn about, chairs knocked over, a laptop computer upended. And at the far end of the room, where a foyer led to the front hall, was something even more disturbing: the heavy front door — which was rarely unlocked, let alone opened — stood ajar, admitting brilliant late-morning sunlight.
As he took in these signs with mounting horror, Proctor heard — from beyond the open door — the muffled sound of a female voice, crying for help.
Ignoring the still-receding dizziness, he raced down the room, pulling the Glock from his waistband. He ran under an archway, through the front hall, then kicked the front door wide and paused under the porte cochere beyond to reconnoiter.
There, at the far end of the driveway, a Lincoln Navigator with smoked windows was idling, facing Riverside Drive. Its closest rear door was open. Just outside it was Constance Greene, her wrists bound behind her. She was facing away from him, struggling desperately; but there was no mistaking the bobbed cut of her hair and her olive Burberry trench coat. A man, also facing away from Proctor, had hold of her head and was just now pushing her violently into the rear seat and slamming the door behind her.
Proctor raised his gun and fired, but the man leapt over the car’s hood and through the driver’s door, the shot going just wide. Proctor’s second shot ricocheted off the bulletproof glass, even as the car accelerated with a cloud of rubber and lurched onto Riverside Drive, the form of Constance, still struggling wildly, visible through the tinted rear window. The car roared down the avenue and out of range.
Just before the assailant had leapt into the car, he had turned toward Proctor, and their eyes had met. There could be no mistaking the man’s features: his strange bichromatic eyes, the pale, chiseled face, the trim beard and ginger hair and look of cold cruelty… This was none other than Diogenes, Pendergast’s brother and implacable enemy, whom they had all believed dead — killed by Constance more than three years previous.
Now he had reappeared. And he had Constance.
The look in Diogenes’s eyes — the ferocity, the dark and perverse glitter of triumph — was so terrible that, for the briefest of moments, even the stoic Proctor was unmanned. But his paralysis lasted only a millisecond. Shaking off the dread and the sedative both, he took off after the car, running down the driveway and leaping over the trimmed border hedge with a single bound.