Page 59 of The Cabinet of Dr. Leng

“Have you been to his mansion?”

“No, we spent all our time down south. He never talked about his personal life—I don’t know anything about it. Except for Constance, of course.”

“Yeah, he doesn’t talk about it because he comes from a…well, kind of a crazy family. Eccentric as all hell. He’s got this psycho brother—” He stopped. “I’d better shut up and let him tell you that stuff himself. Is he still your partner?”

“No, that was just for a couple of unusual cases.”

“So you’re not going to work with him again?”

Coldmoon shook his head. “No idea. He can be pretty challenging to partner with. Maybe you know about that?”

D’Agosta had to laugh. “Oh, yeah. We should pay him a visit—together. That would be something.” But even as he said this, he realized it was a bad idea. Pendergast didn’t like casual socializing.

“Where are you staying?” he asked, changing the subject.

“The FBI rented me a place on Amsterdam and Ninety-First Street.”

“Nice.” D’Agosta glanced at his watch. It was past six. “Hey, I better get home to my wife,” he said.

Coldmoon finished his beer and forked up the last bit of bubble and squeak from his plate, dropped a twenty on the table, and rose. “Vinnie, thanks for coming out for a drink. Glad to be working with you.”

“That goes double. Your call saved my ass on this case: we weren’t making any progress at all.”

As D’Agosta walked across the park in the direction of Second Avenue, he marveled at the coincidence. It seemed like a good sign—and he felt, for the first time in a long while, a sense that things might have turned around for him.

38

DR. GASPARD FERENC WASon his knees, bent over a complicated assembly of wires and integrated circuits, trying to work out a problem in multidimensional internal symmetry, when he heard the soft but unmistakable sound of the zinc-lined door opening.

Keeping his eyes on his work, he cursed under his breath. It had taken him twenty minutes of mental computation to get “in the zone”—what programmers liked to call that heightened state of consciousness during which they wrote their best code. He wasn’t going to waste it on an interruption from that goddamned hovering Proctor.

“Go away!” he snapped over his shoulder. “You’ll get my report in an hour.”

“By all means, finish what you’re doing,” came the reply. “I’ll wait here, if you don’t mind.”

Ferenc sat up and turned around, in time to see Pendergast flick some dust away from the edge of the soapstone table and perch himself.

This was a surprise. Since their first meeting almost a week earlier, Pendergast hadn’t made a single appearance in the basement room that housed the machine, at least when he was there. The two had had dinner together only on his first night, accompanied by wines and cognacs to the point where Ferenc overslept the next day. At that dinner, Pendergast asked many searching questions about the machine, but it had been too early for Ferenc to say anything definite. After that, he had dined alone in the mansion’s huge dining room for two nights, which creeped him out sufficiently to ask Mrs. Trask to bring dinner to his room from then on.

It was Proctor who visited the lab twice a day for progress reports and at other, unexpected times. Ferenc did not like Proctor. The more Ferenc saw of him, the more menace the man seemed to radiate, and the more unsettled he felt in his presence. The chauffeur or bodyguard or whatever the hell he was neverdidanything threatening or hostile; in fact, he hardly ever spoke—just listened to Ferenc’s verbal progress report once in the morning and once in the afternoon, taking no notes.

After that dinner, Ferenc had scarcely seen Pendergast at all. But now here he was, sitting on the edge of the lab table.

Ferenc felt a flicker of pride: the machine looked nothing like it had the week before, with its ruined transistors and scorched oscillators. Now it was surrounded by a delicate scaffolding holding parts and circuit boards and a variety of precision components. From a string run across the ceiling hung pages of diagrams and equations. A powerful generator hummed away, vented through a pipe in the ceiling, its power cords snaking across the floor.

Pendergast’s gaze remained, annoyingly, on Ferenc himself, and he finally gave up trying to concentrate. Ferenc was not one to be micromanaged, even with a paycheck like this one—a characteristic that, along with his habit of looking uninvited into the work of other teams, had helped speed his departure from the Rover project. The reports he’d given Proctor—punctuated by frequent, urgent requests for supplies—had been vague. But he sensed that, with this man, such a tactic might backfire.

“It’s annoying, being interrupted,” Pendergast said. “But now that almost a week has passed, I’d like a summary of your progress in a rather less piecemeal form than I’ve been able to glean from Proctor.”

“Right,” Ferenc said, slapping the machine-tool dust from his knees.

“Although brevity and nontechnical explanations would be appreciated, I find myself curious about some of the items you’ve asked Proctor to obtain.” He extracted a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “Gallium. Arsenic. Pure, unalloyed gold. A high-precision milling device. Collimation optics, vertically integrated diode laser bars configured for 1060-nanometer wavelengths. Several, ah, AixiZ modules…did I pronounce that properly?”

Ferenc nodded.

“And the item that gave Proctor the greatest difficulty: a nuclear adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator.” Pendergast slipped the sheet back into his jacket. “Your shopping expenses now equal the size of your compensation.” He lapsed into silence, gazing at Ferenc with those unsettling pale eyes.

“Look, when I began this project, I thought it would cost a lot more than that,” Ferenc said. “Consider yourself lucky.”

---