Chapter 56
PENDERGAST SAT UTTERLY STILL in the darkness, his mind staggered by the cruel death of his partner and mentor. There would be time for recrimination—but now was the time for vengeance.
He made a quick exploration of his prison.
The walls were of riveted steel covered with filth, and the single massive door fit tightly and was immovable.
The floor was ankle-deep with a heavy layer of coal dust, grit, lumps, and fragments.
He could hear the murmur of voices from somewhere; a laugh; the sounds of machinery—but so attenuated, he could not even be sure which direction they came from.
His night vision was unusually sharp, and his stint training and operating with the Ghost Company had refined it further—but nevertheless he could make out absolutely nothing.
He tried his other senses. There was the faint smell of bilge and ancient urine often found in the bowels of old ships. There was a stronger, sulfurous odor as well. He was, it seemed, in the ship’s original coal bunker.
Deciding he could make no further discoveries without a more detailed physical search, he nevertheless remained where he was, thinking. There were other matters to consider before trying to escape—primarily the nature of his adversary, Magnus.
Pendergast was now certain Magnus possessed some degree of telepathic or extrasensory ability.
While this had previously been his assumption, he’d grown certain of it during the conversation that had just taken place, during which—as a test—Pendergast had allowed certain thoughts to take precedence in his consciousness, which Magnus had quickly picked up.
It seemed that Magnus’s ability was limited to the person directly in front of him and was inhibited by distance or intervening objects.
It was not long-range, nor could it penetrate walls or other obstructions.
In his mind, he returned to a photograph he’d observed in the study’s display cabinet.
It was an old Polaroid, a blurry shot of four men.
The younger three wore graduation robes, and all were kneeling in a jocular pose of obeisance to the older man—Telligren.
Two of the three students he also recognized: Magnus and Wickman, along with a third student, named in the studies Pendergast had unearthed, who had later committed suicide.
This was Telligren with his three cherry-picked graduate assistants who had volunteered to be guinea pigs in the PSI lab.
With Magnus, the experiment had apparently succeeded.
The other two proved to be ghastly mistakes: one a suicide, the other transformed into a uniquely psychotic serial killer.
Although, Pendergast thought grimly, it seemed likely that the PSI gift Magnus had acquired had not come without some dark or perverse side effect of its own.
How curious it was that Magnus displayed such a potentially damning photograph in plain view.
But of course it was in keeping with his character.
He was a man of whimsy and arrogance, who would smoke a cigar while watching an amputation and murder, who would cut off Wickman’s arm as a sort of final joke on the serial killer who cut off arms. He was a man who liked leaving clues such as the crossword puzzle behind for his private amusement, to toy with Chambers for sheer entertainment before murdering him.
The outline of the situation was now clear.
The PSI study had gone awry with the suicide of one of the subjects.
Telligren—with Magnus’s help—had erased all traces of the program’s existence.
But the medical experimentation had given Magnus a splendid gift, allowing him to become a brilliant young professor, a darling of society, and ultimately the king of his own little Xanadu.
It also gave him power over Telligren. Whether Magnus was a sadist from the beginning or had become one due to the medical procedure on his brain was a moot point.
However else he’d been changed, he was clearly a psychopath of far more refined nature than Wickman.
Did you perhaps find that Guatemalan dark roast a bit rich this morning, Agent Chambers? Cat got your tongue, it seems?
Pendergast let his thoughts linger on Chambers for a moment. His death was one of the cruelest he’d ever seen. Pendergast had not been out of the military so long that the Ghost Company’s creed had become anachronistic for him. Fidelitas usque ad mortem; Loyalty unto death.
There was unfinished business to attend to.
Most boys growing up in New Orleans had a fascination with steamboats.
Pendergast was no exception, but his younger brother Diogenes had been truly obsessed.
He designed his own paddleboats on paper, drawing all sorts of fanciful deck plans, engine blueprints, and interior decorations.
The two of them had eventually built a four-foot working model of a steamboat.
One night, they quietly took their craft to Big Lake in New Orleans City Park for its maiden launch.
They had borrowed an elderly neighbor’s Pekingese, Wiggles, to be the honored passenger.
Unknown to Pendergast, however, Diogenes had secretly wanted to reprise, in miniature, the infamous 1865 explosion and sinking of the steamship Sultana, in which eighteen hundred lives were lost. So at the last minute, sending Pendergast away on the pretext of a diversion, he’d strapped a timer and a bandolier of M-80s beneath the model’s waterline.
The miniature motor worked, the boat began sailing across the still waters of the lake, Wiggles barking joyfully in excitement… and then the boat was blown to kingdom come, along with Wiggles.
From his brother’s point of view, it had been a spectacular success.
Pendergast shook off this memory and its aftermath. But there was a method to the madness of recalling it: Pendergast had an intimate knowledge of the typical paddle steamer.
Clearly, as evidenced by the empty coal bunker, Magnus had thrown out the old boilers.
He could feel the vibration of what were clearly modern diesels.
While a portion of the boat had been elegantly restored—as he noted during the brief time he’d been escorted out of the study, belowdecks, and along corridors to this black empty space—it was obvious to Pendergast that much of the belowdecks interior spaces were still in their original state.
Pendergast sat in the darkness, still motionless. He could feel the diesels throbbing, hear the faint thrumming of water along the outside hull. Magnus was taking a little cruise.
Cat got your tongue?
Pendergast didn’t know what Magnus had planned, and his desire, his rage, to avenge his partner could not wait.
A second exploration of the coal bunker was in order.
He moved at speed—keeping his arms ahead of him, feeling the walls, the floors, choking in the dust, memorizing every rivet and seam.
The bunker was approximately ten feet by ten and featureless, beyond a steel truss of some kind.
It had broken or been sheared off where it met the inner wall and now lay diagonally across the little room.
What was it? He sounded the deep past again in his brain.
His brother, he remembered, had wanted to have their scale-model paddle wheeler burn coal for power instead of using batteries.
He’d tried to convince Pendergast, but in the end it would have made the model too cumbersome and heavy for two young boys to fabricate.
He thought about what he’d observed when he’d first boarded the Fant?me.
It was the type of paddle steamer with the boilers belowdecks.
The coal, he remembered, was brought by barges and loaded aboard into coal ports spaced along the hull.
“Trimmers” inside the coal ports would send the coal down chutes to the boiler room, where it would be bunkered.
All coal-fired vessels, large or small, had employed this technique.
The Titanic might have had a dozen or more coal ports; the Fant?me, with only two boilers, would probably have had only one.
And he was inside it.
Immediately, he got down on his hands and knees and began searching the ancient metal floor, pushing aside the coal dust and debris and feeling the metal beneath.
After a few moments, his fingernails caught on something and he felt around it: the outlines of a hatch in the floor.
He wedged his fingernails underneath and pulled, but the cover didn’t budge.
Standing up, he felt around and seized the broken spar. Feeling up and down it, he located a piece of twisted metal along the lower section of the broken edge. He wrenched it free and tried using it as a lever to raise the chute cover.
No good. A century of coal, rust, and disuse had sealed it fast against anything less than a jackhammer.
Pendergast sat down again, turning the piece of metal over in his hands. The vessel was at speed now, the water thrumming along the hull.
That broken steel truss, he recalled, had a name: it was a strongback, intended to keep the coal port closed and seaworthy when under way.
Once all the coal had been loaded aboard, the ship’s carpenter would seal the coal ports from water intrusion with red lead and fix the strongbacks against the ports.
That meant there was another possible escape route—out the loading port in the side of the hull: disused, long forgotten, and no doubt painted over with the fresh coat Magnus had applied.
And red lead, he knew, not only lost its seaworthiness over time… but it was soft.
He rose and, working quickly once again, felt along the inner wall of the hold until his fingers found the outline of the coal port.
These edges yielded to his improvised prybar.
He coated the hatch hinges liberally with coal dust to keep them from squeaking—and he also took the time to blacken his exposed skin with the same grime.
He cautiously pushed the hatch open—dark water was rushing by just feet below him, the occasional spatter of bow wake hitting his face—and, using its upper edge as a step, hoisted himself up to the railing.
A quick look around in the golden evening light showed the promenade to be deserted. He pushed the coal hatch closed with one foot, then—stealthily, stealthily—eased himself over the railing and onto the cargo deck.