Relic (Pendergast, #1)

by Douglas Preston

“He’s called twice already this afternoon,” the Director snapped at Cuthbert. “I can’t avoid him forever. Sooner or later he’s going to raise a stink about being denied access to the crates. He may well drag this Mbwun business into it. There’s going to be controversy.”

So I return rebuk’d to my content, And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.

“Aha! Here’s Jörgensen. Botany. Says he’s retired. How come he still has an office?” “Not unusual in this place,” Margo replied. “Independently wealthy people with little else to fill up their time.

The government found something on top of that tepui. Maybe gold, platinum, placer deposits. You can detect lots of things with satellites these days. Anyway, the tepui was fired from the air in the spring of ’88.” “Fired?” Margo asked. “Burned clear with napalm,” Jörgensen said.

They hauled in Japanese hydraulic mining equipment and literally washed away huge sections of the mountain. No doubt they leached the gold and platinum or whatever with cyanic compounds, then just let the poison run into the rivers. There’s nothing, I mean nothing, left. That’s why the Museum never sent a second expedition down to search for the remains of the first.”

He wanted to get back to the Museum with his seed pods. He learned that Whittlesey intended to scale the tepui and look for the Kothoga, and it alarmed him. He was afraid the crates would be seized at dockside and he wouldn’t get his precious pods out. They split up. Whittlesey went on deeper into the jungle, up the tepui, and was never seen again.

“Rumors that the Museum Beast got him?” Smithback asked. Jörgensen’s smile faded. “Not exactly. But it caused all the rumors of the curse to resurface. Now everyone, they said, who had come in contact with the crates had died.

The Kothoga, according to a Yanomamo informant, had made a deal with a being called Zilashkee. This was a creature like our Mephistopheles, but even more extreme: all the evil and death in the world emanated from this thing, which slithered around on the peak of the tepui. Or so the legend went.

Kothoga would get the Zilashkee’s child for a servant in return for killing and eating all of their own children, and vowing forevermore to worship him and only him.

He knew of only one surefire method to ease his hurt: a treasure hunt. Many of the Superstition exhibition’s most prized artifacts were the direct result of his treasure hunts. Moriarty had a deep love for the Museum’s vast collections, and he was more familiar with its obscure and secret corners than many longtime staffers. Shy, Moriarty had few friends and often passed his time researching and locating long-forgotten relics from the Museum’s storerooms.

D’Agosta examined the letter inside. It was from Washington, putting the New York Field Office of the FBI, and one Special Agent Spencer Coffey, in charge of the case. Stapled to the directive were two memos. One, from the Governor’s office, formally demanded the change and accepted full responsibility for the transfer of power. The second, with a United States Senate letterhead, D’Agosta folded up without bothering to read. He handed the envelope back. “So you guys finally snuck in the back door.”

Maxwell now insists on returning with his “find.” Idiotic fellow, nuisance is that almost everyone else is returning also. They turned back with all but two of our guides just after lunch.

hut showed the very same plant. She looked at the disk more closely: it depicted people harvesting these very plants from the swamp in a ceremony of sorts. The faces on the figures were twisted, full of sorrow. Very strange.

Many plants carry viruses like this. A bit of DNA or RNA in a protein coat. They infect the plant, take over some of its cells, then they insert their genetic material into the plant’s genes. The plant genes start producing more viruses, instead of what they’re supposed to produce. The oak-gall virus makes those brown balls you see on oak leaves, but otherwise it’s harmless.

“And the creature that’s loose in this Museum is eating the hypothalamus of its victims! So it must need these hormones—perhaps it’s even addicted to these hormones,” Frock blurted. “Think: there are only two sources: the plants—which, thanks to this unique virus, are probably saturated with the hormones—and the human hypothalamus. When the creature can’t get the fibers, it eats the brain!”

“Then they discover gold and platinum on that tepui! Isn’t that what Jörgensen told you? Shortly after the expedition fell apart, they fired the tepui, built a road, brought in heavy mining equipment. They destroyed the entire ecosystem of that tepui, and the Kothoga tribe with it.

Jesus, thought D’Agosta. There are five FBI guys just hanging around in the Great Rotunda, picking their noses. “My men are tied up, Coffey. Use one of your Rambos over there.

“Nocturnal—active at night. External mucoid nasal glands—that means it has a ‘wet’ nose, possessed by animals with a keen scent. Highly involute conchae—also a trait of animals with enhanced olfactory organs. Reduced optic chiasm—that is the part of the brain that processes eyesight. What we have is a creature with a preternatural sense of smell and very poor eyesight that hunts nocturnally.”

the creature lives by smell, hunts by smell, thinks by smell. I’ve often heard it said that a dog sees an entire landscape of smell, as complex and beautiful as any landscape we see with our eyes. But the olfactory sense is more primitive than sight, and as a result, such animals also have a highly instinctual, primitive reaction to smell. That is what frightens me.” “I’m not sure I understand.” “In a few minutes, thousands of people will be arriving in the Museum. They will be congregating together in an enclosed space. The creature will be smelling the concentrated hormonal scent of all these people.

Margo, we must stop this opening. Otherwise, we might as well be ringing the dinner bell.”

She’s trying to prove that the wanderings of Henry the Fourth after the second crusade were really just a fugue state brought on by acute stress response.

“Walden, I want you to tell those Museum guards to slow down the flow. Too many goddamn people are crowding in here.” “Ten-four, Lieutenant.”

“What the hell do you think Pendergast is up to?” Coffey said to another of his agents. He was glad Pendergast was out of his hair for the time being, but he was nervous at the thought of the Southerner wandering around, beholden to no one.

The streaks of dried blood on the head and chest of the mummy looked like they had come from above. Trying to remain inconspicuous, he leaned as close to the case as possible and peered up. Above the mummy’s head, the top of the case was open, exposing a ceiling crawling with steam pipes and ductwork. A hand, a watch, and the cuff of a blue shirt protruded over the edge of the case.

His gaze followed the array of delicacies that went on for fifty feet worth of table. He had never seen anything like it and he wasn’t about to let any of it get away.

The huge wooden stelae surrounding the entrance had collapsed in giant pieces. D’Agosta could see limp arms and legs protruding from beneath the intricately carved columns. Bailey rushed over. “There’re at least eight people crushed here, Lieutenant. I don’t think any of them are still alive.”

D’Agosta played his beam along the wall, found the service area, the dark outlines of the stairwell door. It was closed. He thought he smelled something strange in the air: a peculiar, rotten odor he couldn’t place. But the room stunk to begin with. Half the damn guests must have lost control of their plumbing when the lights failed.

Personally, I think that while these emergency doors may prevent our own rescue, they won’t hamper the beast’s movement much. I believe it’s been around long enough to find its own secret ways, and that it can move throughout the Museum—or, at least, the lower levels—practically at will.” Margo nodded. “We think it’s been living in the Museum for years.

“What did we do wrong?” Wright asked plaintively. “That’s clear enough,” said Cuthbert. “Five years ago, we had a chance to solve this thing.” “What do you mean?” asked Rickman, coming back toward them. “You know very well what. I’m talking about Montague’s disappearance. We should have taken care of the problem then, instead of pretending it never happened. All that blood in the basement near the Whittlesey crates, Montague gone missing. In hindsight, we now know exactly what happened to him.

‘He that has a mind to fight, let him fight, for now is the time.’”

Whatever the case, he knew that what was happening to him down here was going to be worth a fortune. Book party at Le Cirque. Good Morning America, the Today Show, Donahue, and Oprah.

Sitting in the dim light, waiting for the arrival of a nightmarish creature, listening to Pendergast narrate a hunting story in his typical unhurried manner, Margo felt a sense of unreality begin to creep over her.

“What you’re saying is that it detected our trap,” Pendergast said, a note of disbelief in his voice. “Let me ask you, Pendergast. Would you have fallen for that trap?” Pendergast was silent. “I suppose not,” he said at length. “Well, then,” said Frock. “We underestimated the creature. We must stop thinking of it as a dumb animal.

before the monstrous skeleton of a carnivorous dryptosaurus, its head down, jaws open, and huge claws extended. Cuthbert had always relished the scale and drama of this room, but now it frightened him. Now he knew what it was like to be hunted.

“Get the gun away from him,” someone else said. “Is he the one we’re after?” “No, they said an animal. But don’t take any chances.”

We just heard firing from upstairs. Are we going to need more evacuation—?” “Get the hell out!” Coffey screamed. “Get your asses out! Get the fuck out and pull up the ladder!” “Sir, what about the rest of the SWAT team? We can’t leave those men—” “They’re dead! Understand? That’s an order!”

“It knows what’s going on, it knows exactly what’s happening.” “What the hell does that mean?” “It hates us,” said Cuthbert. As the medics threw open the door of an ambulance, Coffey yelled, “What did it look like?” “There was sadness in its eyes,” said Cuthbert. “Infinite sadness.” “He’s a lunatic,” said Coffey to no one in particular.

“Sir, we’ve just had a report of a dead body floating in the Hudson River. It was spotted down at the Boat Basin. Seems like it was flushed out of one of the big storm drains.” “Who the fuck cares about—” “Sir, it’s a woman wearing an evening gown, and it’s been tentatively identified as one of the people missing from the party.”

The only women still unaccounted for inside apparently went down into the basement two hours ago.” “You mean, with the Mayor?” “I guess that would be right, sir.” Coffey felt his bladder weakening. It couldn’t be true. That fucking Pendergast. Fucking D’Agosta.

“Look, that steel ladder appears to be pretty strong,” he urged. “If we can fasten our belts together and loop them over that ladder, we can wait for the water to rise enough so we can grab the lower rung.” “I can’t wait that long!” someone cried. D’Agosta glared. “Smithback, that’s the fucking worst idea I ever heard,” he growled. “Besides, half the men here are wearing cummerbunds.”

“I’ve got a lighter,” one voice said. “Shall I see if it still works?” “Careful,” said someone else. “Smells like methane, if you ask me.” Smithback winced as a wavering yellow flame illuminated the chamber. “Oh, Jesus!” somebody screamed. The chamber was suddenly plunged into darkness again as the hand holding the lighter involuntarily jerked away—but not before Smithback got a single, devastating image of what lay around him.

Hung on the supports were a variety of human corpses, their forms seeming to waver in the dull glow of the flame. Smithback saw, but did not immediately comprehend, that all of the corpses had been decapitated. Scattered on the floor along the wall beneath were small ruined objects that he knew must be heads.

“But the creature,” Margo explained to Allen, “had a primate’s face. Eyes rotated to the front for stereoscopic vision. A direct path to the brain. And with that incredibly thick skull, once you put a bullet inside the brain, it would simply bounce around until it was spent.”

“It truly was part reptile, part primate. I won’t go into the technical details—I’ll leave that to Gregory Kawakita, who I’ve put to work analyzing what data we do have—but it appears that the reptilian genes are what gave the creature its strength, speed, and muscle mass. The primate genes contributed the intelligence and possibly made it endothermic. Warm-blooded. A formidable combination.”

Wright, Rickman, Cuthbert, and perhaps Ippolito—suspected there was something prowling the Museum. When a vast quantity of blood was found in the Old Basement, they had it washed away without notifying the police. When Montague’s disappearance coincided with that discovery, the group did nothing to shed any light on the event.

Frock shook his head. “I doubt if it will be offered me, Gregory. Once the dust settles, rational heads will prevail. I’m too controversial. Besides, the Directorship doesn’t interest me. I have too much new material here for me to delay my next book any longer.”

the killings didn’t start in New Orleans. There was a very similar murder in Belém, in the warehouse where the crates had been housed while awaiting shipping. I learned about it when I was investigating the shipboard killings.”

“Apparently it was Whittlesey’s family crest. We found it in the lair; a piece of it, anyway. Why the beast carried it from the Amazon we’ll never know, but there it is.” “We found other artifacts in there, too,” said D’Agosta, through a mouthful of cake. “Along with a pile of Maxwell’s seed pods. The thing was a regular collector.”

We looked up the guy whose name was inscribed inside the watch, and he told us he’d lost it three years ago. He’d visited the Museum, and been pickpocketed.” D’Agosta shrugged. “Maybe that pickpocket is one of the unidentified bodies. Or maybe we’ll never find him.” “The creature kept it hung by its chain from a nail in the wall of its lair,” Pendergast said. “It liked beautiful things. Another sign of intelligence, I suppose.”

“What’ll we drink to?” asked D’Agosta, as the glasses were filled. “To my book,” said Smithback. “To Special Agent Pendergast, and a safe journey home,” Frock said. “To the memory of George Moriarty,” Margo said quietly. “To George Moriarty.” There was a silence. “God bless us, everyone,” Smithback intoned. Margo punched him playfully.