Angel of Vengeance

Book 0: Agent Pendergast Series

by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child

Genres: Occult & Supernatural

Synopsis

Preston & Child continue their #1 bestselling series featuring FBI Special Agent Pendergast and Constance Greene, as they take a final stand against New York’s deadliest serial killer: Pendergast’s own ancestor…and Constance’s greatest enemy.
 
A desperate bargain is broken…

Constance Greene confronts Manhattan’s most dangerous serial killer, Enoch Leng, bartering for her sister's life – but she is betrayed and turned away empty-handed, incandescent with rage.
 
A clever trap is set…

Unknown to Leng, Pendergast’s brother, Diogenes, appears unexpectedly, offering to help—for mysterious reasons of his own. Disguised as a cleric, Diogenes establishes himself in New York's notorious Five Points slum, manipulating events like a chess master, watching Leng’s every move…and awaiting his own chance to strike.
 
A vengeful angel will not be deterred…

Meanwhile, as Pendergast focuses on saving the unstable Constance in her fanatical quest for vengeance, she strikes out on her own: to rescue her beloved siblings from a tragic fate and take savage retribution on Leng. But Leng is one step ahead and has a surprise for them all…

Release date: August 13, 2024

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 416

Sample

December 26, 1880

Wednesday

DIOGENES PENDERGAST HURLED HIMSELF into the time portal at the last minute. It ejected him into the past—into New York City of 1880—with such force that he was thrown onto the filthy cobblestones of the alleyway. With an instinctive motion, he twisted and rolled to absorb the impact, managing to cover himself with mud and horse manure in the process. Rising to his feet, he glanced back at the portal in time to catch a faint shimmer just as it winked out of existence. He briefly examined his soiled clothing with a muttered curse, but there was nothing he could do about it now. The quarry he was in pursuit of had jumped through the portal moments before… and was now gone. By no means must he be allowed to vanish into nineteenth-century New York.

Diogenes picked up the large leather valise he always carried with him—dropped in his fall—and hurried from the alleyway into a busy New York City intersection. His own era would call this place Times Square, but in these primitive times it still bore the name of the farmer’s field it had once been: Longacre. He made a mental note of the cul-de-sac he’d emerged from—identified by a grimy sign as Smee’s Alley—and peered around, looking for his man, taking in the horse-drawn carriages, the dusky shopfronts, and breathing in the heavy smell of coal smoke. And there he was: Gaspard Ferenc, hurrying down Broadway in the flow of foot traffic.

He took off after him at a quick walk. He had no concern Ferenc would realize he was being followed—the thick-headed fellow had no idea that Diogenes even existed, let alone that he had been spying on his doings for weeks… or had followed him through the time portal.

Why he had jumped back in time after Ferenc was something to ponder later. For now, he was strangely thrilled to have left his own sorry world behind.

He soon caught up to Ferenc and fell in step behind him. The man was dressed in a ridiculous motley of clothing, evidently assembled from whatever at hand might appear nineteenth century: a red plaid lumberjack shirt, black cargo pants, and Doc Martens. At least he’d tried to dress the part for this unknown errand of his; Diogenes had had no such time for preparation. The muck on his clothing was, in a perverse way, a godsend—it helped obscure the black turtleneck and trousers he’d been wearing while living secretly in the recesses of his brother’s Riverside Drive mansion. Such an incongruous outfit would draw even more attention than Ferenc’s.

Diogenes paused outside a restaurant, wiping his hand on a chalkboard that advertised pig trotters and smearing the chalk dust on his face. The whitening effect, he hoped, would make him look like a performer in one of the vaudeville novelty acts so popular in the theater district of the day. He then continued down Broadway after Ferenc, as he did so taking the opportunity to relieve two affluent gentlemen of their wallets and pocket watches.

Ferenc entered a pawn shop a dozen blocks south of Longacre Square. Diogenes ducked into a nearby tailor shop and hastily purchased a shirt, Inverness cape, and hat, which he then put on. His leather valise was sufficiently worn and inconspicuous that it did not need further disguising. Buttoning the cape up to his neck and lowering the brim of his hat, he emerged again. Strolling past the pawn shop, he saw Ferenc concluding the sale of a jade figurine—stolen, by the looks of it, from the Pendergast family collection—in return for some folding money, a cape, and a cap. He left the shop and continued hurrying southward, Diogenes close behind.

What was Ferenc up to? The very mysteriousness of his errand, and the abruptness with which it had commenced, fascinated Diogenes. It was obviously premeditated, and probably involved making a great deal of money—greed, he knew, was one of Ferenc’s weaknesses—but what could his plan be? Without knowing it, Ferenc could ruin everything for Diogenes, and the wisest course would be to kill the man at once. But curiosity, among other thoughts more nebulous, stayed his hand. He would let the man’s little scheme play out.

It did not take long to see what he was up to. Minutes later, Ferenc crossed Twenty-Sixth Street and entered the New York Federal Bank of Commerce. After loitering a few moments at a desk reserved for filling out slips, he got in line at one of the teller stations. Diogenes got in another line. Soon Ferenc had reached the window and was being served. Almost immediately, Ferenc’s intended transaction grew problematic; his teller left the iron-barred window, returned again, left once more… only to return with a functionary of greater importance. But even this gentleman could not satisfy Ferenc.

Diogenes had by now shuffled close enough to catch the conversation, and any lingering mystery veiling Ferenc’s sordid little scheme quickly dissipated. The man was trying to exchange $100 in period paper for twenty-five of the rare $4 gold pieces known as “Stellas”—but the bank, unfortunately, had only two on hand, both in poor condition.

Diogenes felt a swelling of derision. So this complex and dangerous field trip into the past, where so much might be accomplished by a man of imagination and daring, was merely about filthy lucre after all. Ferenc wanted to take those rare coins back to the twenty-first century and sell them for a huge profit—but already he was making a hash of it. Diogenes’s amused contempt now mingled with disappointment verging on anger. He would kill the stupid little man as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

He watched as Ferenc, enraged by the failure of his scheme, vented his ire by cursing at the woman in line behind him. A guard came forward, and the ensuing struggle revealed a cheap digital watch on Ferenc’s wrist, which he’d obviously forgotten to remove. This alien object turned the minor altercation into an absurd melee, ending with the hapless Ferenc being handcuffed and dragged off in a steel-banded paddy wagon. Diogenes, watching with the rest of the crowd, overheard a policeman say the man was being transported to Bellevue Hospital. As the wagon doors closed behind him, Ferenc was loudly claiming to be from the future… and crying out Pendergast’s name.

Diogenes—who, like Mithridates, had managed to steel himself against almost anything—was nevertheless deeply disturbed to hear Ferenc shouting so recklessly. He, and his babbling explanations, could expose and ruin everything.

Diogenes hailed a fly carriage and followed the paddy wagon. What a perfect idiot Ferenc was: any good numismatist could have told him the Stellas were “pattern” coins, never authorized for circulation, and not normally available at a commercial bank. As he followed the paddy wagon, Diogenes mused on the irony that a man like Ferenc—brilliant enough to help design the Mars rover, or in this case repair a machine capable of crossing parallel universes—could be tripped up in an asinine get-rich-quick scheme through the vanity of inadequate preparation. Sic transit gloria mundi.

AFTER A FIFTEEN-MINUTE RIDE down bustling, carriage-filled streets, the wagon stopped at a secure rear entrance to Bellevue—a structure whose thick stone walls resembled the Bastille more than a hospital.

The fly carrying Diogenes stopped across the street as Ferenc was being manhandled inside the hospital, metal door slamming shut behind him.

“Twenty cents, an’ you please, mister,” the coachman told Diogenes.

“I’d like to wait for a spell, if you don’t mind,” Diogenes replied, conforming his speech to ne varietur rhythms of the 1880s. “I may require your services further.” And he handed the man a Morgan silver dollar that, an hour before, had been in the pocket of a portly gentleman on Broadway.

“All right, guv,” the man said, more than happy to idle away the time with a fare willing to pay for the privilege.

Diogenes stared at the thick metal door behind which Ferenc had disappeared. This was most unfortunate. He should have killed him when he had the chance—indulging his own perverse curiosity had caused problems before.

He pondered the situation. Since Ferenc had been taken as a prisoner to Bellevue rather than the nearest station house, Diogenes knew he was bound for the insane ward. Given that, what should he do about it? He could still attempt to kill the man. That would require obtaining a disguise, putting on the false persona of an orderly or cleaner, and gaining access to the proper ward. None of these presented real problems; the most pressing issue was time.

Time… Time, indeed. He looked down at his shoes and trousers—the only articles of clothing still remaining from his own time, and which had gone unnoticed thanks to the mud and the Inverness cape. As he stared, he saw—beneath the mud—evidence of unusual charring on the cuffs of his trousers and on his work boots. He knew that Ferenc had, in effect, put that infernal machine of his on a timer of sorts—keeping the portal open long enough for him to get the coins and return. But this odd charring, along with the screaming and smoking of the machine Diogenes had observed as he followed Ferenc into the portal—

His thoughts were interrupted as a large black barouche pulled up to a different hospital entrance, one reserved for staff. The carriage door opened and a man in elegant attire stepped down. “Elegant” was perhaps an understatement: the man wore a long black double-breasted frock coat with a starched white collar, a silk ascot with a diamond pin, and a buttoned vest across which a gold watch chain traced a glittering arc. An orchid boutonniere—a purple dendrobium—was set off on his left lapel by a small fern curl.

Of intense interest to Diogenes was the pale, aquiline face, with its deep-set sapphire eyes behind small, oval-shaped glasses, and the fair hair and chiseled features that distinguished members of his own family. On his face was a look of distraction, preoccupation… or, perhaps, coldness.

Diogenes knew immediately this must be Professor Enoch Leng, famous for his novel treatment of mental alienation by operating directly on the brain. He was also known by another, even more distinguished name: Antoine Leng Pendergast, scion of the ancient New Orleans family, and the great-granduncle of Diogenes.

He watched as the consulting surgeon vanished into the walls of Bellevue.

What before had seemed a bad outcome might now become the worst possible. In short order, Diogenes felt sure, Leng would become acquainted with Gaspard Ferenc, the “madman” claiming to be from the future… and crying out for a man named Pendergast to save him.

Entering the hospital himself was now moot. Everything depended on what Leng did next. Although the cabbie protested it wasn’t necessary, Diogenes flipped him another silver dollar and waited.

In less than an hour, Ferenc emerged from the employee entrance, hardly able to walk, and was assisted into the carriage by a young man in a doctor’s uniform, with Leng following. Within moments, the carriage was trotting away—Diogenes giving his own driver instructions to follow at a distance.

Leng’s glossy carriage wound its way southward into the poorer neighborhoods of the city, finally arriving at the Five Points, New York’s most notorious slum: a maze of narrow alleys and filthy backstreets housing the most desperate and abandoned of the city’s residents. The fact that a carriage such as Leng’s could travel unmolested through this cesspool of vice and squalor was telling. Diogenes’s coachman now earned his two dollars by drawing a conspicuous pistol, ensuring their own less elegant vehicle remained untroubled.

Leng’s carriage pulled up near a Gothic Revival building on Catherine Street. An unsavory crowd was gathered before it, drawn by the gold-lettered sign over the entrance: J. C. SHOTTUM’S CABINET OF NATURAL PRODUCTIONS & CURIOSITIES. The carriage remained stationary a moment, horses stamping, while Leng stepped out, one arm curled protectively around the unresisting Ferenc. But rather than entering the Cabinet by the main entrance, they vanished immediately through a side door.

Diogenes asked his driver to move the cab to a safer spot at the end of the block and wait once again. He knew a great deal about his ancestor Enoch Leng. He knew that beneath Shottum’s Cabinet—and, indeed, much of the Five Points—was a labyrinthine arrangement of tunnels and passageways, relics of an abandoned waterworks that Leng had secretly repurposed for his grisly experiments.

To follow Leng into such a place would have been far more dangerous than slipping into the hospital. But the man’s carriage remained parked at the entrance. Whatever was going to happen would happen soon.

After another hour, Diogenes was rewarded for his patience. An ugly, misshapen man emerged from the side doorway, ushering a figure ahead of him over the muddy pavement and into Leng’s carriage. This figure was swathed in a woolen blanket, but a pair of feminine-looking feet—pale and bare—were briefly visible before being bundled into the interior. The man barked an order, and once again the carriage set off, passing Diogenes’s fly a moment later.

As Diogenes was deciding whether or not to follow the carriage, Leng himself re-emerged, moving quickly. He dashed up the street. At first, Diogenes thought he might be chasing his carriage, as if it had accidentally left without him, and he asked his driver to follow. But no: Leng was merely headed to a nearby and less dangerous thoroughfare, Ferry Street, where cabs were waiting at a stand. Leng hailed one, got in, and headed north along the wharves.

Diogenes found it unnecessary to issue more orders to his cabbie—the man was already shaking his reins and urging the horse forward.

Leng’s cab headed uptown at a good clip. The avenues broadened and straightened into a grid as they passed into the more modern part of the city. Several minutes later, Leng’s cab slowed, and Diogenes realized where he was going. Remarkable, he thought, that Leng had managed to extract information from Ferenc so quickly.

“Slow down,” said Diogenes in a low voice. “And be a good fellow, pull to the curb here on the left and wait.”

“Good as done, guv,” the cabdriver responded.

He watched as Leng stepped out of his carriage and hustled along the sidewalk, stopping to peer down a few alleyways that branched off Broadway from Longacre Square. Leng was no doubt looking for a particular alleyway—the one with the portal—and ice gripped Diogenes’s heart.

Now Leng crossed Seventh Avenue—through puddles of water, his expensive clothes becoming spattered with mud and ordure—and ducked into an alley on the far side: the filthy cul-de-sac marked Smee’s Alley.

“Remain here,” said Diogenes, exiting and moving quickly toward the same alleyway. He slowed at the entrance and, pretending to fumble for his pocket watch to check the time, glanced toward the alley. He could see Leng looking about, sweeping the air with a gold-handled cane, this way and that, as if searching for something invisible. The portal, thank God, had not reappeared.

After several minutes, his immediate fear now allayed, Diogenes strolled past the cul-de-sac and entered a nearby grogshop, where he could sit and observe Leng’s activities through a fly-specked window.

The man walked one way, then another, stopping a dozen times to look around, sometimes craning his neck up one of the bill-covered façades, other times pressing his palms against the brick walls or bending down to examine the cobbles, tapping about with his cane or poking it this way and that in the air. The afternoon lengthened; a winter dark began creeping up over the city. Finally, with evident frustration, Leng stalked from the alley and—with a curl of his index finger that reminded Diogenes of Titian’s St. John the Baptist—summoned another cab and was quickly lost in the gloom.

Diogenes could have followed, but decided against it. The disaster he feared had happened. Ferenc, of course, was either dead or would soon be—but Leng had already gotten from him everything he needed. That meant Leng knew about Pendergast, Constance, and the time machine. He knew where the portal had appeared and had been searching for it. If he’d managed to jump through it and into the twenty-first century, that would have been disastrous… because the fate of his world, his own world, hung in the balance. Diogenes thanked providence the portal was gone. He strongly suspected Ferenc had red-lined the machine and left it on too long while he’d lingered in this alternate universe. Even as he’d followed Ferenc through the portal, the machine had clearly been overheating. It had likely burned out, and the portal was gone, perhaps forever.

Diogenes had been so preoccupied with the immediate danger, he hadn’t stopped to consider that now he very well might be marooned here—with the others—for good.

He departed the grogshop and climbed back into the waiting cab.

“Where now, guv?”

Diogenes remained silent a moment, considering his new situation. Portal or no, there were many things he had to accomplish. First things first: he needed to set up a chessboard in his mind, ponder the placement of the pieces, and decide what the next moves should be. And to do that, he needed a base of operations. Leng knew about not only the presence of Constance Greene, but that of his own brother, Aloysius—and this knowledge made the man infinitely more dangerous.

But there was something else that Leng knew nothing about.

Diogenes cleared his throat. “My good man,” he said. “Do you happen to know of any rooms to let? Preferably quiet and out of the way—perhaps a neighborhood where people can be relied upon to mind their own business?”

“I do indeed, sir,” said the man. And he shook the reins again.

ONE MILE TO THE northeast, NYPD lieutenant commander Vincent D’Agosta was balanced precariously on a stone lintel below the first-floor window of a mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Eighth Street. He began climbing the rough façade in hopes of secretly gaining entrance, but he was now having second thoughts about this plan. The uneven blocks of stone, oblong shapes in the dark, felt cold as ice. And it was dark—darker than he’d ever imagined Fifth Avenue could be. This was both good and bad: good because no pedestrian or passing carriage could see his lame-ass attempt at climbing; bad because he could barely see what he was doing himself.

He glanced up at the second-floor window, which was open, curtains billowing. Leng’s Igor-like assistant, the sadistic bastard named Munck, had just made this same climb, opened that window, and entered the house—the precise thing Pendergast had told D’Agosta to prevent.

He started up to the next story, and reached a section where only the projecting stones and sloppy mortar offered purchase. Trying to ignore his pounding heart, he pulled himself up again, then paused to catch his breath, careful not to look down, muscles dancing and jerking from the unusual exertion.

Under no circumstances are you to reveal yourself to Constance, Pendergast had said. If Munck appears, stop him. You may have to kill him. Well, he hadn’t stopped him: Munck, like a cat burglar, had slipped up the wall and into the house before D’Agosta—from his blind across the street—could react. Yet D’Agosta couldn’t alert Constance Greene inside. That would spoil everything.

So what was he doing now? Trying to get his neck broken.

Only five feet separated him from the second-floor window—but the stone blocks here offered little opportunity for a grab-and-hoist. Still, he had to keep going—or he’d run out of muscle power and fall.

He moved to the edge of his precarious perch above the first-floor window. Nearby was a ring driven into the stone by the builders. Without giving himself time to think, he mustered strength for a hop across space, stretched out, and managed to grasp it. Hauling himself up, he got his foot on the ring groped blindly at the sloping sill of the window ledge, and managed to get a handhold on the wooden casement. Suddenly, the mortar crumbled beneath his feet, and—with a surge of panic—he chinned up by brute force, dragging himself over the threshold and falling headfirst into the darkened room beyond. He lay on the floor, gasping for breath, heart pounding, palms and fingers and knees scraped and stinging.

A fight with Laura, his wife, had started all this. She’d walked out—and on an angry impulse, he’d gone to see Pendergast and agreed against his own better judgment to help him. And ultimately, that little fight had sent him tumbling from his comfortable twenty-first-century life into the nineteenth century, where he was now gasping on the floor in pursuit of a murdering bastard who should, by rights, have been dead for over a hundred years.

Shit on a stick, he’d better get moving. He lumbered to his feet in the dark, empty room, pulled the Colt .45 from his pocket, then tiptoed to the door and opened it silently.

Beyond lay an elegant corridor—with a man crumpled upon the floor, motionless, his blood soaking into the carpet. Munck had already murdered someone.

Closer to D’Agosta, a door opened and a cloaked figure emerged—Munck—holding a little girl by the neck. She was gagged, eyes like saucers. Munck turned, saw D’Agosta, and quickly raised a knife to her throat.

“Drop the gun now,” he ordered D’Agosta in a whisper.

D’Agosta froze.

“Now,” said Munck, pricking the girl’s flesh with the tip of his knife.

D’Agosta held out his arm and let the gun swing by the trigger guard.

“On the carpet,” the man said.

D’Agosta knelt to comply.

“I’m going to leave,” Munck told him. “If you raise any alarm before we’re out the front door, I cut her throat.”

The man lowered the knife as he began backing toward the staircase. In that moment, D’Agosta realized that—despite the orders he’d been given—he had no option but to act.

He sprang up and body-slammed the son of a bitch, who in turn lashed out with the knife, slicing D’Agosta’s forearm as he warded off the blow. Still gripping the girl, Munck staggered, regained his footing, then swung his knife around with the intention of sinking it in D’Agosta’s back. But he was encumbered by the girl, and this allowed D’Agosta to punch upward, striking the descending forearm and slamming it against the wall, the knife flying.

Again, Munck backed toward the stairway, dragging the girl with him. Just then, the decorative drapery on one wall was flung aside, and out of a door hidden behind it appeared a woman. She rushed at Munck with a poker.

“Meurs, bâtard!” she cried.

Clasping the girl to him, Munck raised his left hand in an odd, martial salute, twisting his wrist as he did so. There was a clang of ringing steel—and suddenly three long, thin blades shot out from their hiding place within his sleeve, forming a spring-loaded claw beneath his fingers. The woman swung the poker, but Munck ducked and swept his arm in a wide angle, slashing her brutally across the midsection. As she fell back, Munck lunged with animal swiftness toward D’Agosta, who pivoted away, but though the bloodied claw just missed him, its metal framework impacted violently with his temple. His vision exploded in a swirl of stars as he staggered, bracing himself against the wall to avoid falling. The man raced down the stairs, hauling the girl with him. D’Agosta, head clearing, snatched his gun from the floor and lurched after them.

He could hear the house coming urgently to life. Reaching the bottom landing, he saw Munck make a beeline across the entryway and through the first of two doors leading to the street. D’Agosta raised his gun, but hesitated, unable to get a bead on the man without risking hitting the girl.

Suddenly, flying out of a darkened parlor, came a figure—Constance—stiletto raised, terrible in the swift silence of her attack. Munck reached the outer door and grasped the handle, yanking it open, but Constance slammed it closed again with her body; D’Agosta saw a flash of steel and Munck lurched back with a cry, cut across the face. But then, collecting himself, he sprang at Constance, his nightmare device raking her knife arm and dislodging the stiletto. He yanked the door open again and leapt out with the girl into the cold December night. Constance, blood welling from her torn sleeve, grabbed her knife from the floor and took up pursuit.

D’Agosta tried to follow. But as he reached the threshold, a wave of dizziness forced him to stop… even as he saw the man—Munck—clambering into the compartment of a sleek trap that had just pulled up in front of the mansion. A gloved hand heaved Munck inside, the girl clutched close… and then the horses took off, galloping at high speed down Fifth Avenue and vanishing into the winter darkness.

He saw the pursuing Constance race down the steps and sprint to the corner… where she sank to her knees in the dirty snow, letting forth an incoherent cry of rage and pain, stretching out her bloody hands into the night, stiletto glittering in the gaslight.

The scene began to whirl around him, and D’Agosta felt himself collapse onto the entryway. Then darkness closed in and he lost the struggle to maintain consciousness.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed, but it could not have been long. He found himself lying on the floor of the parlor, looking up at Constance, who stood over him, violet eyes raging.

A coachman arrived with a thud of heavy boots and quickly took in the scene. “Your Grace, you’re injured!” he cried in a coarse Irish accent.

“Murphy, attend to Féline,” Constance said. “And find Joe and protect him. There may be others in the house.”

More staff began arriving, frightened by the commotion. Constance was still staring at D’Agosta, her terrible look making him forget his pounding head, the dire situation… everything. He wanted to say something, explain, but he couldn’t think clearly enough to speak. Instead, he struggled to a sitting position, head swimming.

A maid was attending to Constance’s injured arm, wrapping it in linen cloth, but she had retained her stiletto and was now pointing it at D’Agosta with her other hand. “Before I kill you,” she said in a low, trembling voice, “I want an explanation.”

D’Agosta still couldn’t find the words. As Constance moved closer, and he wondered with strange detachment if she was really about to cut his throat, he heard as if from very far away the clatter of a galloping horse—a. . .