Free The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child Page A

pictures of the clusters of antennas, dishes, and microwave horns on the building roofs. But other requests were not so clear. Glinn wanted to know, for example, if the area between the wall and the outer fence was dirt, grass, or gravel. He had asked for a downstream sample from the brook running past the facility. Strangest of all, he had asked D’Agosta to collect all the trash he could find in a certain stretch of the brook. He had asked them to observe the prison through a full twenty-four-hour period, keeping a log of every activity they could note: prisoner exercise times, the movements of guards, the comings and goings of suppliers, contractors, and del ivery people. He wanted to know the times when the lights went on and off. And he wanted it all recorded to the nearest second.
    D’Agosta paused to murmur some observations into the digital recorder Glinn had given him. He heard the faint whirring of Proctor’s camera, the patter of rain on leaves.
    He stretched. “Jesus, it really kills me to think of Pendergast in there.”
    “It must be very hard on him, sir,” said Proctor in his usual impenetrable way. The man was no mere chauffeur—D’Agosta had figured that out as soon as he saw him break down and stow away a CAR-15/XM-177 Commando in less than sixty seconds—but he could never seem to penetrate Proctor’s Jeeves-like opacity. The soft click and whir of the camera continued.
    The radio on his belt squawked. “Vehicle,” came Glinn’s voice.
    A moment later, a pair of headlights flashed through the bare branches of the trees, approaching on the single road leading to Herkmoor, which ran up the hill from the town two miles away. Proctor quickly swung the lens of his camera around. D’Agosta clapped the binoculars to his eyes, the gain automatically adjusting to compensate for the changing contrasts of dark and light.
    The truck came out of the woods and into the glow of lights surrounding the prison. It looked like a food-service truck of some kind, and as it turned, D’Agosta could read the logo on the side, Helmer’s Meats and By-Products . It stopped at the guardhouse, presented a sheaf of documents, and was waved through. The three sets of gates opened automatically, one after the other, the gate ahead not opening until the one behind had closed. The soft clicking of the camera’s shutter continued. D’Agosta checked his stopwatch, murmured into the recorder. He turned to Proctor.
    “Here comes tomorrow’s meat loaf,” he said, making a feeble joke.
    “Yes, sir.”
    D’Agosta thought of Pendergast, the supreme gourmet, eating whatever it was that truck was bringing. He wondered how the agent was handling it.
    The truck entered the inner service drive, did a two-point turn, and backed up into a covered loading dock, where it was obscured from view. D’Agosta made another entry on the digital recorder, then settled down to wait. Sixteen minutes later, the vehicle drove back out.
    He glanced at his watch. Almost one o’clock. “I’m heading down to get that water and air sample, and do the magnetic drag.”
    “Be careful.”
    D’Agosta shouldered his small knapsack and retreated to the back side of the hill, making his way down through bare trees, scrub, and mountain laurel. Everything was sopping wet, and water dripped from the trees. Here and there, small patches of damp snow glistened beneath the branches. He didn’t need a light once he’d rounded the hill—there was enough glow from Herkmoor to light up most of the mountain.
    D’Agosta was glad of the activity. During the wait on top, he’d had too much time to think. And thinking was the last thing he wanted to do: thinking about his upcoming disciplinary trial, which might very well end in his dismissal from the NYPD. It seemed incredible what had happened in the last few months: his sudden promotion to the NYPD; his blossoming relationship with Laura Hayward; his reconnection with Agent Pendergast. And then it had all