The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [362]
She turned abruptly as the sound of a second shot echoed up from the dark staircase. It sounded faint, muffled, as if coming from deep underground.
For a moment she stood motionless, lanced by fear. What had happened? Had Pendergast shot—or been shot?
Then she turned back toward Smithback’s inert form. Only one man was going to come up that staircase: Pendergast, or the other. When the time came, she’d deal with it. Right now, her responsibility lay with Smithback. And she wasn’t going to leave him.
She glanced back at the vitals: blood pressure down to 70 over 35; the heart rate slowing too, now, down to 80 beats per minute. At first, this latter development sent relief coursing through her. But then another thought struck, and she raised her palm to Smithback’s forehead. It was growing as cold as his limbs had been.
Bradycardia, she thought, as panic replaced the transitory feeling of relief. When blood loss is persistent, and there are no more areas for the body to shut down, the patient decompensates. The critical areas start to go. The heart slows. And then stops for good.
Hand still on Smithback’s forehead, Nora turned her frantic gaze back to the EKG. It looked strangely diminished, the spikes smaller, the frequency slower. The pulse was now 50 beats per minute.
She dropped her hands to Smithback’s shoulders, shook him roughly. “Bill!” she cried. “Bill, damn it, come on! Please!”
The peeping of the EKG grew erratic. Slowed.
There was nothing more she could do.
She stared at the monitors for a moment, a horrible feeling of powerlessness stealing over her. And then she closed her eyes and let her head sink onto Smithback’s shoulder: bare, motionless, cold as a marble tomb.
NINE
PENDERGAST STUMBLED PAST THE LONG TABLES OF THE OLD laboratory. Another spasm of pain wracked his gut and he paused momentarily, mentally willing it to pass. Despite the severity of his wounds, he had so far managed to keep one corner of his mind clear, sharp, free of distraction. He tried to focus on that corner through the thickening fog of pain; tried to observe and understand what lay around him.
Titration and distillation apparatuses, beakers and retorts, burners; a vast thicket of glassware and metal. And yet, despite the extent of the equipment, there seemed to be few clues to the project Leng had been working on. Chemistry was chemistry, and you used the same tools and equipment, regardless of what chemicals you were synthesizing or isolating. There were a larger number of hoods and vintage glove boxes than Pendergast expected, implying that Leng had been handling poisons or radioactive substances in his laboratory. But even this merely corroborated what he had already surmised.
The only surprise had been the state of the laboratory. There was no mass spectrometer, no X-ray diffraction equipment, no electrophoresis apparatus, and certainly no DNA sequencer. No computers, nothing that seemed to contain any integrated circuits. There was nothing to reflect the revolution in biochemistry technology that had occurred since the 1960s. Judging by the age of the equipment and its neglected condition, it looked, in fact, as if all work in the lab had ceased around fifty years before.
But that made no sense. Leng would certainly have availed himself of the latest scientific developments, the most modern equipment, to help him in his quest. And, until very recently, the man had been alive.
Could Leng have finished his project? If so, where was it? What was it? Was it somewhere in this vast basement? Or had he given up?
The flicker of Fairhaven’s light was licking closer now, and Pendergast ceased speculating and forced himself onward. There was a door in the far wall, and he dragged