She helped the agent to his feet. Pendergast stumbled a little, leaning heavily on her arm. “Shine your light on our friend a moment, if you please,” he said.
The Fairhaven-thing was shuffling along one wall of the room. He ran into a large wooden cabinet, stopped, backed up, came forward again, as if unable to negotiate the obstacle. Pendergast gazed at the thing for a moment, then turned away.
“He’s no longer a threat,” he murmured. “Let’s get back upstairs, as quickly as possible.”
They retraced their steps back through the chambers of the subbasement, Pendergast stopping periodically to rest. Slowly, painfully, they mounted the stairs.
In the operating room, Smithback lay on the table, still unconscious. Nora scanned the monitors quickly: the vitals remained weak, but steady. The liter bag of saline was almost empty, and she replaced it with a third. Pendergast bent over the journalist, drew back the covers, and examined him. After a few moments, he stepped back.
“He’ll survive,” he said simply.
Nora felt a huge sense of relief.
“Now I’m going to need some help. Help me get my jacket and shirt off.”
Nora untied the jacket around Pendergast’s midsection, then helped him remove his shirt, exposing a ragged hole in his abdomen, thickly encrusted in blood. More blood was dripping from his shattered elbow.
“Roll that tray of surgical instruments this way,” he said, gesturing with his good hand.
Nora rolled the tray over. She could not help but notice that his torso, although slender, was powerfully muscled.
“Grab those clamps over there, too, please.” Pendergast swabbed the blood away from the abdominal wound, then irrigated it with Betadine.
“Don’t you want something for the pain? I know there’s some—”
“No time.”Pendergast dropped the bloody gauze to the floor and angled the overhead light toward the wound in his abdomen. “I have to tie off these bleeders before I grow any weaker.”
Nora watched him inspect the wound.
“Shine that light a little lower, would you? There, that’s good. Now, if you’d hand me that clamp?”
Although Nora had a strong stomach, watching Pendergast probe his own abdomen made her feel distinctly queasy. After a moment he laid down the clamp, took up a scalpel, and made a short cut perpendicular to the wound.
“You’re not going to operate on yourself, are you?”
Pendergast shook his head. “Just a quick-and-dirty effort to stop the bleeding. But I’ve got to reach this colic vein, which, with all my exertion, has unfortunately retracted.” He made another little cut, and then probed into the wound with a large, tweezer-like instrument.
Nora winced, tried to think of something else. “How are we going to get out of here?” she asked again.
“Through the basement tunnels. My research on this area turned up the fact that a river brigand once lived along this stretch of Riverside. Based on the extent of the cellars below us, I feel certain now that this was his residence. Did you notice the superb view of the Hudson the house commanded?”
“No,” Nora replied, swallowing. “Can’t say I did.”
“That’s understandable, considering the North River Water Pollution Control Plant now blocks much of the view,” Pendergast said as he fished a large vein out of the wound with the clamp. “But a hundred and fifty years ago, this house would have had a sweeping view of the lower Hudson. River pirates were fairly common in the early nineteenth century. They would slip out onto the river after dark to hijack moored ships or capture passengers for ransom.”He paused while he examined the end of the vein. “Leng must have known this. A large subbasement was the first thing he wanted in a house. I believe we will find a way down to the river, via the subbasement. Hand me that absorbable suture, if you please? No, the larger one, the 4-0. Thank you.”
Nora looked on, wincing inwardly, as Pendergast ligated the vein.
“Good,” he said a few moments later, as he released the clamp and put the suture aside. “That vein was causing most of the bleeding. I can do nothing about my spleen, which has obviously been perforated, so I’ll merely cauterize the smaller bleeders and close the wound. Would you hand me the electrocauterer, please? Yes, that’s it.”
Nora handed the device—a narrow blue pencil at the end of a wire, two buttons marked cut and cauterize on its side—to the FBI agent. Once again, he bent over his wound. There was a sharp crackling sound as he cauterized a vein. This was followed by another crackling noise—much longer this time—and a thin wisp of smoke rose into the air. Nora averted her eyes.
“What was Leng’s ultimate project?” she asked.
Pendergast did not respond immediately. “Enoch Leng wanted to heal the human race,” he said at last, still bent over the wound. “He wanted to save it.”
For a moment, Nora wasn’t sure she had heard correctly. “Save the human race? But he was killing people. Scores of people.”
“So he was.” Another crackling noise.
“Save it how?”
“By eliminating it.”