Plot
Pendergast and Constance are relaxing in the library at 891 Riverside. Constance is going through recent correspondence. She shows Pendergast a note from Corrie Swanson, and that she won the Roswell Prize at her graduation (which Pendergast attended). She also mentions a thank you note from D’Agosta and Laura Hayward, thanking him for a dinner party he threw for their wedding. They hear a knock at the door. Alban, Pendergast’s son, is standing there, but immediately collapses. He’s dead.
Pendergast engages in a spirited chase of the car but loses it: the helicopter that he requested from the NYPD doesn’t arrive in time to pursue the vehicle. Pendergast is then called into the office of the police officer in charge of the case, Lt. Peter Angler. Pendergast provides no more than the minimal information, angering the lieutenant.
After the meeting, Pendergast asks Mime to delete the DNA evidence that would identify Alban as Pendergast’s son. He then meets with a CIA operative (with whom he had met during the events described in Brimstone), concerning Operation Wildfire. This is the monitoring operation, led by Pendergast, to find Alban’s location.
D’Agosta, just having returned from his honeymoon in Oahu, is called to a murder at the New York Museum of Natural History (NYCNH). A technician, Vincent Marsala was bludgeoned to death. Pendergast attends the autopsy of his son, Alban, A precious stone is found in his stomach, and Pendergast requests access to it. Angler agrees, after all the proper protocols are followed, he will allow Pendergast to borrow the stone—for no more than 24 hours.
Vinnie is making no progress on the murder of the museum employee. Meanwhile, Pendergast presents the stone (turns out to be turquoise) to Dr. Paden for his help in identifying the mine from whence it came. However, he hasn’t been able to do that yet. Also, the CIA operative calls Pendergast and tells him he’s not been able to find out anything about Alban’s movements. Frustrated by the lack of progress, he consults with Constance. She recommends that he find a diversion. So, he offers to help D’Agosta on his murder case. While talking with D’Agosta, Dr. Frisby, the head curator for the Osteology department, trades barbs with Pendergast, who puts him in his place.
Dr. Paden informs Pendergast that the turquoise stone came from a played out mine, the Golden Spider, on the edge of the Salton Sea. Pendergast goes to the Salton Sea, and meets with a man, Mr. Cayute. Cayute seems to have collected items from the area, and sold some of them. Pendergast pretends to be interested in his items, even paying for some of them, while he’s really trying to get information on any activity that Cayute might have noticed near the mine entrance.
D’Agosta enlists Margo Green to help him find out why the visiting scientist was interested in the specific Hottentot skeleton. Margo quickly determines that it is not the remains of a male Hottentot. It is the skeleton of a late-nineteenth-century woman, about 60 years old. And one of her femurs is missing from the remains. Margo thinks it’s possible that the remains are those of the wife of the person that prepared the remains, a Dr. Padgett. There were rumors that his wife had disappeared.
Pendergast scopes out the mine and the Salton Fontainebleau, a luxury hotel back in the 1950’s. As he is walking through the hotel, trying to find the back entrance to the mine, he is attacked. He and his silent attacker struggle, with Pendergast eventually subduing his opponent. However, he is knocked out by some sort of gas. As he sinks into unconsciousness, he hears a voice say, “You have Alban to thank for this.”
Vinnie works with the curator, Sandoval, and a police tech, Bonomo, to create an image of the visiting scientist. They are able to come up with a very good likeness of the man in question.
Pendergast interviews the man he fought, but the man won’t talk at all. He then goes back to the mine and Fontainebleau and finds all traces of the previous days removed: including the man, Cayute, and the shack in which he’d apparently been living.
The man Pendergast fought, and who inhaled the same vapor, seems to be going mad. He is smelling lilies, as is Pendergast. This is also the same man that posed as a scientist, stole the femur, and then killed the museum employee, Marsala. Both men have been poisoned with an elixir that was developed by Pendergast’s great-grandfather, Hezekiah Pendergast. Someone seems to be taking revenge for the deaths that the elixir caused.
Pendergast, with the help of Lt. Angler, traces Alban’s entry into the USA from Brazil. And, with the help of local police, determines that he was living in a favela, an autonomous enclave for criminal behavior. The biggest of these, and last remaining one, is called City of Angels. Pendergast ventures there to find evidence of what happened to Alban. Pendergast is already showing effects of his poisoning, and injects himself with drugs to lessen the effects.
Pendergast enters the favela and is brought before the leader. The leader says he will tell Pendergast the story of Alban. Meanwhile, D’Agosta is told that the man who fought Pendergast and was also poisoned killed himself. Vinny is heading out to the prison to get more information.
Pendergast learns that Alban met a woman, fell in love, and was expecting a child. But then the ruthless leader of the favela burned down Alban’s house, killing his pregnant wife. He killed the drug lord and his henchmen in revenge/justice. He then took over leadership of the favela, and made it into something better, where the people could live in peace.
Pendergast uses Chongg Ran to visualize Alban’s life in the favela, from when he came home to find his house burning. This leads him to Switzerland, to visit Tristam, where he learns about Alban’s visit to Tristam a few months earlier. Alban apologized to Tristam and said that he was going to the USA to right a wrong. He had set something in motion (probably revenge against Pendergast) and wanted to undo it.
Vinnie discovers that the museum murderer (also the man who attacked Pendergast) had extensive plastic surgery. He, Margo Green, and Bonomo, with the help of a plastic surgeon, reconstruct the face of the museum murderer. D’Agosta puts the image into the police facial database and soon gets a hit. The man is Howard Rudd. Three years ago, he borrowed money from some bad people. He then disappeared, leaving his wife and children. He had plastic surgery, then killed the museum employee and fought with Pendergast. Most likely he did all this to repay his debt.
Lt. Angler is able to trace Alban’s movements to a small town near Schroon Lake. The only thing there is a consulting firm that does work for the US military, run by John Barbeaux. Barbeaux had an ancestor that was poisoned by Hezekiah's elixir, and now it seems to have killed his son. The elixir is capable of causing epigenetic changes, which can be passed down to descendants of the poisoned victim.
Alban seems to have contacted Barbeaux, and told him about his father, and asked that Barbeaux seek revenge on Pendergast. Barbeaux then sent Rudd to the museum to retrieve a bone of one of Hezekiah's victim. He then formulated a concentrated form of the elixir, and lured Pendergast to the Salton Sea. There, Rudd distracted Pendergast long enough for them both to be poisoned by the vapor of the elixir.
Lt. Anger, along with his aide-de-camp, Sgt. Loomis Slade, go to Red Mountain Industries to question Barbeaux. Barbeaux has Slade shoot Angler, killing him. We learn that Slade has been on Barbeaux’s payroll for years.
Constance has also managed to unearth all of this information (other than the murder of Angler). Margo, Constance, and D’Agosta plan to force Barbeaux to give them the formula to the elixir so that they can create an antidote to save the dying Pendergast. Pendergast is against this, as he fears going up against Barbeaux will be dangerous. It seems that Alban tried to call off the vengeance against his father, after the events that occurred in Brazil in the favela, where he had a change of heart. Most likely, rather than canceling the plot against Pendergast, he instead killed Alban and dumped his body at Pendergast’s doorstep.
Constance discovers a formula for an antidote in a hidden box in one of Enoch Leng’s rooms in the basement of the mansion. She and Margo are tracking down the items from the list. Two are hard-to-find or extinct botanicals. They tell D’Agosta of their plans to steal one from the museum and another from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Unfortunately, Slade has placed a listening device in the unused office next to Vinny’s, and now has communicated to Barbeaux the women’s plans.
Vinny is trying to get a subpoena against Barbeaux. From the book:
The chain of reasoning seemed obvious to D’Agosta: Barbeaux had hired Howard Rudd to pose as the fake Dr. Jonathan Waldron, who had in turn used Victor Marsala in order to get access to the skeleton of the long-dead Mrs. Padgett. Barbeaux needed a bone from that skeleton in order to reverse-engineer the components of Hezekiah Pendergast’s elixir, thus allowing him to resynthesize that elixir and use it on Pendergast. D’Agosta had no doubt that, once Alban was placed on Pendergast’s doorstep and the plot was in motion, Rudd killed Marsala as a way of tying up loose ends. It seemed equally clear that Barbeaux had then used Rudd as bait to lure Pendergast into the animal handling room at the Salton Fontainebleau—and been gassed with the elixir for his trouble. All in seeking revenge for Hezekiah’s poisoning of Barbeaux’s great-grandparents and the death of his son.
Vinnie's theory is that Barbeaux had hired Rudd three years earlier, paid off his gambling debts, changed his face and identity, kept him on his payroll for the occasional odd job. Rudd had to stay because if he didn't, Barbeaux would harm or kill his family.
Margo retrieves the thismia americana from a vault in the museum. As she is leaving the vault, Dr. Frisby accosts her, accuses her of stealing from the museum, and threatens her with prosecution. But before he can do anything further, Slade stabs him in the neck with a buckthorn, killing him. He then prepares to kill Margo in the same manner, after she refuses to give up the plant specimens in her bag.
Meanwhile, Pendergast has rallied himself from his deathbed and gone in search of Constance, whom he knows is headed for the Botanical Gardens. She enters the gardens by hopping over a fence. She sees several of Barbeaux’s men inside. She sneaks in and evades them for a while, until she is caught.
Margo is being chased by Slade inside the museum. She retrieves some poison darts and a blowgun, but drops them when she runs into Slade. He takes them and blows some darts at her as she runs, missing her. But he corners her and prepares to blow a final, lethal dart.
Barbeaux appears in front of Constance, asking for the name of the plant she seeks. He has her men torture her: until Pendergast blows off the top of one of the henchman’s head, and then kills a couple more. But then, in his weakened state, he too is captured. Barbeaux tells him of his plan, and how Alban came back asking for him to call it off. He then was able to strangle Alban in a spontaneous attack. He realized Alban’s ability to see a few moments into the future, so his attack had to be spontaneous. Depositing Alban’s corpse on Pendergast’s doorstep was the final detail he needed for his plan: how to lure Pendergast out to the Salton Sea.
Margo is able to kill Slade, by pushing a T-Rex skull onto him, impaling him. Constance is able to escape from Barbeaux’s henchmen as part of ruse by Pendergast.
Constance kills all of Barbeaux’s henchmen, then kills Barbeaux himself, tricking him into putting his arm into a pool in which Constance had added Somme triflic acid. He dies in agony. Constance and Margo then mix the ingredients for the antidote. In an ambulance on the way to the hospital, they prepare the antidote for injection. At the hospital, just as it appears that Pendergast is failing, Margo injects Pendergast. And, lo and behold, he is saved.
Epilogue. Constance and Pendergast are in Louisiana. They are liquidating Penumbra mansion and all of the items that came directly from Hezekiah's fortune. Pendergast also sells the parking lot that was built on the ruins of the former house that burned down. But the sale has a clause: no digging below ground level. For, as we know, there are Pendergast crypts beneath the parking lot.
