The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [356]
But then he remembered what else Pendergast had said: something about Leng working on something completely different. That was absurd, clearly a red herring. What could be bigger than the prolongation of the human life span? What else could this huge collection of chemicals be for, if not that?
He shook these speculations from his mind. Once Pendergast was dealt with and the girl harvested, there would be plenty of time for exploration.
He raked the ground with his light. There was more blood, along with a ragged set of footprints that headed straight through the corridor of bottles. He had to be careful, exceedingly careful. The last thing he wanted to do was begin shooting up these rows of precious liquids, destroying the very treasure he had strived so hard to find. He raised his arm, aimed the handgun, applied pressure to the grip. A small red dot appeared on the far wall. Excellent. Although the laser would not be sighted in precisely, it would nevertheless leave little margin for error.
Releasing his pressure on the laser grip, the Surgeon moved cautiously through the vast apothecary. Each bottle, he could see now, had been meticulously labeled in a spidery script, with both a name and a chemical formula. At the far end, he ducked beneath a low archway into an identical narrow room. The bottles in the next room were full of solid chemicals—chunks of minerals, glittering crystals, ground powders, metal shavings.
It seemed that the arcanum, the formula, was far more complicated than he had envisioned. Why else would Leng need all these chemicals?
He continued following Pendergast’s trail. The footsteps were no longer a single-minded beeline past the endless rows of glass. Instead, the Surgeon began to notice quick detours in the footsteps toward a particular cabinet or other, almost as if the man was looking for something.
In another moment he had reached a Romanesque vault at the end of the forest of cabinets. A hanging tapestry with a fringe of gold brocade covered the archway beyond. He edged nearer, keeping his body once again behind a pillar, and parted the curtain with the gun barrel while shining his torch through the gap. Another room met his eye: larger, broader, filled with oaken cases fronted by glass. Pendergast’s trail led right into the thick of them.
The Surgeon crept forward with infinite care. Again, Pendergast’s tracks seemed to explore the collection, stopping at occasional cases. His tracks had begun to take on an irregular, weaving pattern. It was the spoor of a gravely wounded animal. The blood was not diminishing. If anything, the bleeding was getting worse. Almost certainly that meant a shot to the gut. There was no need to hurry, to force a confrontation. The longer he waited, the weaker Pendergast would become.
He reached a spot where a larger pool of blood shone in the beam of his flashlight. Clearly, Pendergast had stopped here. He had been looking at something, and the Surgeon peered into the case to see what it was. It wasn’t more chemicals, as he had assumed. Instead, the case was filled with thousands of mounted insects, all exactly alike. It was an odd-looking bug with sharp horns on its iridescent head. He moved to the next case. Strange: this contained bottles housing only insect parts. Here were bottles filled with gossamer dragonfly wings, while over there were others with what looked like curled-up abdomens of honeybees. Yet others held innumerable tiny, dried-up white spiders. He moved to the next case. It contained desiccated salamanders and wrinkled frogs in a multitude of bright colors; a row of jars containing a variety of scorpion tails; other jars full of numberless evil-looking