Fever Dream - Douglas Preston [170]
Naturally, he would prefer the self-guided shooting.
Ten years before, Esterhazy and Pendergast had spent a week at Kilchurn. The lodge sat in the middle of a vast and wild estate of forty thousand acres, once the private hunting preserve of the lairds of Atholl. Esterhazy had been deeply impressed by the empty, rugged landscape, the deep lochs hidden in the folds of the land, the swift streams bursting with trout and salmon, the windswept moorlands and the forbidding Foulmire, the heather braes and wooded glens. A man could disappear forever in a land like that, his bones left to molder, unseen, lashed by wind and rain until nothing was left.
Taking another lazy sip of the single-malt, which had now warmed in his cradling palm, he felt calmer. All was not lost by any means. In fact, things had taken a turn for the better—for the first time in a long while. He laid the brochure aside and took up a short note, written in an old-fashioned copperplate hand on cream-colored, heavy laid paper.
The Dakota
New York City
24 April
My dear Judson,
I thank you most sincerely for your kind invitation. After some reflection I believe I will take you up on your offer, and gladly. Perhaps you are right that the recent events have taken a certain toll. It would be delightful to see Kilchurn Lodge again after so many years. A fortnight’s holiday would be a welcome respite—and your company is always a pleasure.
In answer to your question, I plan to bring my Purdey 16-bore, an H&H Royal over-and-under in .410 caliber, and a .300 H&H bolt-action for stalking deer.
With affectionate regards,
A. Pendergast
AUTHORS’ NOTE
While most towns and other locations in Fever Dream are completely imaginary, we have in a few instances employed our own version of existing places such as New Orleans and Baton Rouge. In such cases, we have not hesitated to alter geography, topology, history, and other details to suit the needs of the story.
All persons, locales, police departments, corporations, institutions, museums, and governmental agencies mentioned in this novel are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
Dear Reader,
We have an important announcement to make: we will soon be launching an exciting new series of thrillers featuring a rather uncommon “investigator” by the name of Gideon Crew. We are having an absolutely amazing time writing the first novel in the series, which will be published in the winter of 2011. We’re sorry we can’t give you any information about this novel except its title: Gideon’s Sword. We want to keep everthing else a surprise. Stay tuned to our website, www.prestonchild.com—we’ll have more to tell you in the near future.
We hasten to assure you that our devotion to Agent Pendergast remains undimmed and that we will continue to write novels featuring the world’s most enigmatic FBI agent with the same frequency as before.
Thanks again for your continuing interest and support.
Best wishes,
Douglas & Lincoln
GIDEON’S SWORD
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Coming Winter 2011
1
August 1988
Nothing in his twelve years of life had prepared Gideon Crew for that day. Every insignificant detail, every trivial gesture, every sound and smell, became frozen as if in a block of glass, unchanging and permanent, ready to be examined at will.
His mother was driving him home from his tennis lesson in their Plymouth station wagon. It was a hot day, well up in the nineties, the kind where clothes stick to one’s skin and sunlight has the texture of flypaper. Gideon had turned the dashboard vents onto his