She took a deep breath and submerged herself in the dark, murky water. She held her breath until she could hold it no more, then tried to angle her face to expose as little as possible above the surface while she gulped in air. As she came up, brilliance flooded her eyes.
“Don’t move!” cried a voice. “Raise your hands!”
She slowly rose and, a few moments later, Pendergast did likewise. Her eyes were dazzled by the sudden glare of spotlights, but could make out, backlit, half a dozen figures carrying heavy weapons.
“Come out!”
They worked their way out of the stand of mangroves. The men surrounded them. One searched Pendergast, taking his gun, a knife, other things from his person.
“Hands on head. Move.” The soldiers pushed them from behind and they proceeded out into the deluge. Ahead, in an island of sawgrass, the helicopter had eased down, whipping the grass into a frenzy.
“To the chopper.”
With their hands on their heads, they waded out of the channel and toward the helicopter. As they approached, the cargo door opened and a woman appeared. She gazed at them for a moment, then said: “Mr. Pendergast. How unlovely to see you again.”
46
IT WAS A DARK, quiet, rainy evening. The police barricades and bad weather had left Captiva Island feeling almost deserted. Turner Beach was still closed and the investigation had driven away most of the usual tourist traffic. A storm was rolling in.
North of Turner Beach, back from the water, sat the Mortlach House. Its whimsical Victorian lines stood against the dark sky. No lights gleamed in its tall windows, and no murmur of voices came from within. It stood among the sleeping dunes, and a curious no-man’s-land of saltwort and sea grapes separated it from the sprawling waterfront properties that began farther to the north. The only sound was the regular susurrus of breakers along the beach, and the occasional car crossing Blind Pass Bridge.
And then a figure rose from an observation point tucked away in the dunes: the figure of a bearded man carrying a canvas duffel, moving with the utmost care. Wearing a lumpy gray raincoat, he was barely visible, approaching slowly, furtively, from the north, weaving a path through the dunes.
The man crossed the plot of wild grasses and reached the side of the Mortlach House unseen. He paused for a long moment, listening and watching, and then moved on.
On the northern side of the house, invisible beneath a stand of cabbage palms, a three-foot piece of high-density polyethylene—painted brown to resemble the surrounding soil—lay on the ground, abutting the structure and pitched at a slight angle away from it. Once he reached it, the man stopped again to listen. There was no noise other than the low crackle of the police scanner that had been left on the porch. It had been there for days now, on twenty-four/seven, with or without any human listener. If anything, its low white-noise hiss had proven useful to him. His long observation had established that the house was quiet. One man had left several days ago with luggage and the pale man had left in the morning. The girl was still in the house, her shadowy figure seen against the gauze curtains in an upstairs bedroom, reading a book.
The man knelt, grabbed hold of the thick HDPE plastic, and slowly moved the edge up to expose a hole. The material was waterproof and virtually indestructible, and he was able to swivel it sideways with relative ease. He slipped carefully down into the black hole that yawned beneath, then pulled the covering back into place overhead, precisely where it had been before he arrived.
The entire operation had been completed without noise of any kind.
Now, beneath ground level and sheltered from the rain, the man crouched. He was no longer visible to anyone: a stray passerby, a cop riding an ATV…or an occupant of the house itself. And yet, his heart was beating fast with anxiety. The meticulously planned successes, the many failures, all combined with long periods of brooding and fearful speculation to make this a moment of triumph mixed with the greatest apprehension. It was this apprehension, in fact, that had caused him to move up this final moment to early evening, instead of his usual nocturnal hours: he simply could not wait any longer. Besides, it was so gloomy it might just as well have been midnight—and in any case, he was no longer visible.
Ahead of him, a rude brick-lined declivity descended into the ground, stopping abruptly at the foundation wall of the house about six feet ahead. The walls of bricks were heavily covered by verdure and old spiderwebs, and the ground beneath him—actually steps, roughed out but never finished—was a combination of clay, sand, and brackish water seeping in from the improvised covering above. It was a messy, nasty-smelling tunnel, but he’d been here many times before and no longer noticed. It had originally been intended as a stairway up from a basement exit, but the door had never been cut in the stem walls of the house and the project had been abandoned decades before.
The soft hush of the surf was more a sensation than a sound down here. Slowly he relaxed, heart returning to its normal rhythm.
He made his way down the unfinished stone stairs until he smelled, more than saw, the foundation of the house an inch or two before him. On the far side of this wall was the basement.
He let the canvas bag slip to the damp ground, then eased it open and removed the tools of his trade: a small chisel; a rubber mallet; an ice pick; and a large filleting knife: long, cruel, and very sharp. There were others, such as a pair of brake spring pliers: normally reserved for automotive work, whose curved jaw tips resembled the fangs of a rattlesnake. Many of these tools had served him well in the hours leading up to this.
Others would be of use to him once he was inside.
After arraying his tools on the lowest step, he straightened up. Turning his attention again to the foundation wall of the house, he stretched out his fingers and ran them along the lower edge of the mucky surface until he found what he was looking for: the cake of mud that concealed his painstaking efforts. With his nails, he plucked the fragments away, catching them in his other hand and letting them drop soundlessly at his feet.
Mud removed, he took a tiny penlight from his equipment, turned it to its lowest setting, and let it travel along the newly exposed brickwork. It revealed a course of old blocks of a curious blue color, stretchers alternating with headers in the ancient masonry pattern known as Flemish bond. The mortar between the bricks had been almost completely removed along the length of three feet over a total of six courses, each directly above another. He had done this work with a chisel over many nights. Working as silently as possible had of course made the work take longer. But what awaited him on the far side of that wall—on the inside of the house—would make it all worthwhile.
The bricks above and below the section he’d worked on were the regular deep reddish color. He had intentionally chosen to work on the courses of Staffordshire blue brick—used to contain rising damp—because they were not load bearing. Nevertheless, he’d removed the mortar from between so many bricks that he’d decided to insert wooden shims to keep the wall from sagging. He’d cut the shims short so they would not show through his layer of mud, and the pliers would be necessary to pull them out. With the penlight, he carefully scrutinized the wall, wiping off mud here and there, using the edge of the chisel to pick out bits of remaining mortar, making sure everything was in readiness. Then he turned, put down the chisel, and picked up the pliers. He’d been waiting for this moment a long, long time.