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  Fever Dream

  ( Pendergast - 10 )

  Douglas Preston;Lincoln Child

  By Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

  Cemetery Dance

  The Wheel of Darkness

  The Book of the Dead

  Dance of Death

  Brimstone

  Still Life with Crows

  The Cabinet of Curiosities

  The Ice Limit

  Thunderhead

  Riptide

  Reliquary

  Mount Dragon

  Relic

  In answer to a frequently asked reader question:

  The above titles are listed in descending order of publication. Almost all of them are stand-alone novels that need not be read in order, except for the pairs Relic/Reliquary and Dance of Death/The Book of the Dead, which are ideally read in sequence.

  By Douglas Preston

  Impact

  The Monster of Florence (with Mario Spezi)

  Blasphemy

  Tyrannosaur Canyon

  The Codex

  Ribbons of Time

  The Royal Road

  Talking to the Ground

  Jennie

  Cities of Gold

  Dinosaurs in the Attic

  By Lincoln Child

  Terminal Freeze

  Deep Storm

  Death Match

  Utopia

  Tales of the Dark 1-3

  Dark Banquet

  Dark Company

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright (c) 2010 by Splendide Mendax, Inc. and Lincoln Child

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/grandcentralpub

  First eBook Edition: May 2010

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56330-7

  Contents

  BY DOUGLAS PRESTON AND LINCOLN CHILD

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHORS' NOTE

  A PREVIEW OF GIDEON'S SWORD

  AN AUDIO PREVIEW OF GIDEON'S SWORD

  To Jaime Levine

  TWELVE YEARS AGO

  1

  Musalangu, Zambia

  THE SETTING SUN BLAZED THROUGH THE AFRICAN bush like a forest fire, hot yellow in the sweltering evening that gathered over the bush camp. The hills along the upper Makwele Stream rose in the east like blunt green teeth, framed against the sky.

  Several dusty canvas tents circled a beaten area shaded by a grove of old musasa trees, their branches spreading like emerald umbrellas over the safari camp. A thread of smoke from a cooking fire twisted up through the cover, carrying with it the tantalizing scent of burning mopane wood and roasting kudu.

  In the shade of the central tree, two figures, a man and a woman, were seated in camp chairs on either side of a table, drinking iced bourbon. They were dressed in dusty khakis, long pants and sleeves, protection against the tsetse flies that came out in the evening. They were in their late twenties. The man, slender and tall, was remarkable for a cool, almost icy paleness that seemed impervious to the heat. The coolness did not extend to the woman, who was lazily fanning herself with a large banana leaf, stirring the thick mane of auburn hair she had loosely tied back with a bit of salvaged twine. She was tanned and relaxed. The low murmur of their conversation, punctuated by an occasional laugh from the woman, was almost indistinguishable amid the sounds of the African bush: the calls of vervet monkeys, the screech of francolins and chattering of fire-finches, which mingled with the clattering of pots and pans in the kitchen tent. The evening chatter was underlain by the distant roar of a lion deep in the bush.

  The seated figures were Aloysius X. L. Pendergast and his wife of two years, Helen. They were at the tail end of a hunting safari in the Musalangu Game Management Area, where they had been shooting bushbuck and duiker under a herd reduction program granted by the Zambian government.

  "Care for another sundowner?" Pendergast asked his wife, raising the cocktail pitcher.

  "Another?" she replied with a laugh. "Aloysius, you wouldn't be planning an assault on my virtue, would you?"

  "The thought never entered my mind. I was hoping perhaps we could spend the night discussing Kant's concept of the categorical imperative."

  "Now you see, this is exactly what my mother warned me about. You marry a man because he's good with a rifle, only to find he has the brains of an ocelot."

  Pendergast chuckled, sipped his drink, glanced down at it. "African mint is rather harsh on the palate."

  "Poor Aloysius, you miss your juleps. Well, if you take that FBI job Mike Decker's offering, you can drink juleps day and night."

  He took another thoughtful sip and gazed at his wife. It was remarkable how quickly she tanned in the African sun. "I've decided not to take it."

  "Why not?"

  "I'm not sure I'm ready to stay in
New Orleans with all that it entails--the family complications, the unpleasant memories. And I've seen enough violence already, don't you think?"

  "I don't know--have you? You tell me so little about your past, even now."

  "I'm not cut out for the FBI. I don't like rules. In any case, you're all over the world with that Doctors With Wings outfit; we can live anywhere, as long as it's close to an international airport. 'Our two souls therefore endure not a breach, but an expansion, like gold to airy thinness beat.' "

  "Don't bring me to Africa and quote John Donne. Kipling, maybe."

  " 'Every woman knows all about everything,' " he intoned.

  "On second thought, spare me the Kipling as well. What did you do as a teenager, memorize Bartlett's?"

  "Among other things." Pendergast glanced up. A figure was approaching along the trail from the west. He was a tall Nyimba tribesman, dressed in shorts and a dirty T-shirt, an ancient rifle slung over his shoulders, carrying a forked walking stick. As he approached the camp, he paused and cried out a greeting in Bemba, the local lingua franca, which was answered by welcoming shouts from the kitchen tent. He then proceeded into camp and approached the table at which the Pendergasts were seated.

  Both rose. "Umu-ntu u-mo umu-suma a-afika," Pendergast said by way of greeting, and grasped the man's dusty, warm hand, Zambian-fashion. The man proffered his walking stick to Pendergast; there was a note wedged into its fork.

  "For me?" Pendergast asked, switching to English.

  "From the district commissioner."

  Pendergast shot a glance at his wife, then removed the note and unfolded it.My dear Pendergast,I wish to have a conversation with you immediately via SSB. There has been a nasty business at Kingazu Camp--very nasty.Alistair Woking, DCSouth LuangwaPS. Dear chap, you know perfectly well that regulations require you to have SSB communications set up at every bush camp. It is most annoying to have to send a runner like this.

  "I don't like the sound of that," said Helen Pendergast, looking over her husband's shoulder. "What do you think this 'nasty business' is?"

  "Perhaps a photo tourist has suffered the amorous advances of a rhinoceros."

  "That's not funny," Helen said, laughing all the same.

  "It is rutting season, you know." Pendergast folded the note and shoved it in his breast pocket. "I'm very much afraid this means our shooting safari is over."

  He walked over to the tent, opened a box, and began screwing together the battered pieces of an aerial antenna, which he then carried up into a musasa tree and wired to an upper branch. Climbing back down, he plugged the wire into the single side-band radio he had placed on the table, turned on the unit, adjusted the dials to the correct frequency, and sent out a call. In a moment the irritated voice of the district commissioner came back, squawking and scratchy.

  "Pendergast? For God's sake, where are you?"

  "Upper Makwele Stream camp."

  "Blast. I was hoping you were nearer the Banta Road. Why the devil don't you keep your SSB connected? I've been trying to reach you for hours!"

  "May I ask what's happened?"

  "Over at Kingazu Camp. A German tourist was killed by a lion."

  "What idiot allowed that to happen?"

  "It wasn't like that. The lion came right into camp in broad daylight, jumped the man as he was walking back to his hut from the dining tent, and dragged him screaming into the bush."

  "And then?"

  "Surely you can imagine 'and then'! The wife was hysterical, the whole camp went into an uproar, they had to bring in a helicopter to airlift out the tourists. The camp staff left behind are scared shiteless. This fellow was a well-known photographer in Germany--bloody bad for business!"

  "Did you track the lion?"

  "We have trackers and guns, but nobody who'll go into the bush after this lion. Nobody with the experience--or the ballocks. That's why we need you, Pendergast. We need you down here to track that bugger and... well... recover the remains of the poor German before there's nothing left to bury."

  "You haven't even recovered the body?"

  "Nobody will go out there after the bloody thing! You know what Kingazu Camp is like, all the dense brush that's come up because of the elephant poaching. We need a damned experienced hunter. And I needn't remind you that terms of your professional hunting license require you to deal with rogue man-eaters as, and if, it becomes necessary."

  "I see."

  "Where'd you leave your Rover?"

  "At the Fala Pans."

  "Get cracking as fast as you can. Don't bother breaking camp, just grab your guns and get down here."

  "It'll take a day, at least. Are you sure there isn't anyone closer who can help you?"

  "Nobody. At least, nobody I'd trust."

  Pendergast glanced at his wife. She smiled, winked, mimed the shooting of a pistol with one bronzed hand. "All right. We'll get moving right away."

  "One other thing." The DC's voice hesitated and there was a silence over the radio, filled with hissing and crackling.

  "What?"

  "Probably not very important. The wife who witnessed the attack. She said..." Another pause.

  "Yes?"

  "She said the lion was peculiar."

  "How so?"

  "It had a red mane."

  "You mean, a little darker than usual? That's not so uncommon."

  "Not darker than usual. This lion's mane was deep red. Almost blood red."

  There was a very long silence. And then the DC spoke again. "But of course it can't be the same lion. That was forty years ago in northern Botswana. I've never heard of a lion living more than twenty-five years. Have you?"

  Pendergast said nothing as he switched off the radio, his silvery eyes glittering in the dying twilight of the African bush.

  2

  Kingazu Camp, Luangwa River

  THE LAND ROVER BANGED AND LURCHED ALONG the Banta Road, a bad track in a country legendary for them. Pendergast turned the wheel violently left and right to avoid the yawning potholes, some almost half as deep as the bashed-up Rover. The windows were wide open--the air-conditioning was broken--and the interior of the car was awash in dust blown in by the occasional vehicle passing in the other direction.

  They had left Makwele Stream just before dawn, making the twelve-mile trek through the bush without guides, carrying nothing but their weapons, water, a hard salami, and chapati bread. They reached their car around noon. For several hours now they had been passing through sporadic, hardscrabble villages: circular buildings of lashed sticks with conical roofs of thatch, dirt streets clogged with loose cattle and sheep. The sky was a cloudless, pale, almost watery blue.

  Helen Pendergast fiddled with her scarf, pulling it more tightly around her hair in a losing battle with the omnipresent dust. It stuck to every exposed inch of their sweaty skin, giving them a scrofulous appearance.

  "It's strange," she said as they crawled through yet another village, avoiding chickens and small children. "I mean, that there isn't a hunter closer by to take care of this lion problem. After all, you're not exactly a crack shot." She smiled wryly; this was a frequent tease.

  "That's why I'm counting on you."

  "You know I don't like killing animals I can't eat."

  "How about killing animals that can eat us?"

  "Perhaps I can make an exception there." She angled the sun visor into a new position, then turned toward Pendergast, her eyes--blue with flecks of violet--narrowed by the bright light. "So. What was that business about the red mane?"

  "A lot of nonsense. There's an old legend knocking about this part of Africa concerning a red-maned, man-eating lion."

  "Tell me about it." Her eyes sparkled with interest; the local stories fascinated her.

  "Very well. About forty years ago--the story goes--a drought struck the southern Luangwa Valley. Game grew very scarce. A pride of lions that hunted in the valley starved to death, one by one, until only a single survivor remained--a pregnant lioness. She survived by dig
ging up and eating the corpses at a local Nyimba cemetery."

  "How horrible," Helen said with relish.

  "They say she gave birth to a cub with a flaming red mane."

  "Go on."

  "The villagers were angry with this continuing desecration of their burial grounds. Eventually they tracked down the lioness, killed her, skinned her, and nailed her hide to a frame in the village square. Then they held a dance to celebrate her demise. At dawn, while the villagers were sleeping off the effects of all the maize beer they'd downed, a red-maned lion snuck into the village, killed three of the sleeping men, then carried off a boy. They found his gnawed bones a couple of days later in a stand of long grass a few miles off."

  "Good Lord."

  "Over the years, the Red Lion, or the Dabu Gor as it was called in the Bemba language, killed and ate a large number of locals. It was very clever, they said: as clever as a man. It shifted ranges frequently and sometimes crossed borders to evade capture. The local Nyimba claimed the Red Lion could not survive without the nourishment of human flesh--but with it, he would live forever."

  Pendergast paused to circumnavigate a pothole almost lunar in its depth and extent.

  "And?"

  "That's the story."

  "But what happened to the lion? Was he ever killed?"

  "A number of professional hunters tried to track him, without success. He just kept killing until he died of old age--if he did die, that is." Pendergast rolled his eyes toward her dramatically.

  "Really, Aloysius! You know it can't be the same lion."

  "It might be a descendant, carrying the same genetic mutation."

  "And perhaps the same tastes," said Helen, with a ghoulish smile.

  As the afternoon turned to evening, they passed through two more deserted villages, the usual cries of children and lowing of cattle replaced by the drone of insects. They arrived at Kingazu Camp after sunset, as a blue twilight was settling over the bush. The camp stood on the Luangwa River, a cluster of rondevaals arranged along the banks, with an open-air bar and a dining shelter.

  "What a delightful setting," Helen said as she looked around.

  "Kingazu is one of the oldest safari camps in the country," Pendergast replied. "It was founded in the 1950s, when Zambia was still part of Northern Rhodesia, by a hunter who realized that taking people out to photograph animals could be just as exciting as killing them--and a lot more remunerative."