Mason scribbled four words on the napkin and underlined them multiple times.
“Who else knows all of this?” he asked.
“Outside of the ME, the DHS, and however many people Mack told, only us,” Becker said. “Johnson agreed that we should bypass reporting this to Algren, at least until I can do so in person, and see if we can figure out where this thing is going. I can’t imagine Homeland isn’t every bit as eager as we are to get the Novichok off the streets, but they’re slow-walking, if not actively shunting, the flow of information critical to a federal investigation, and I want to know why.”
“You’re not the only one,” Mason said. “Let me know the moment you find out anything, okay?”
“You do the same,” Becker said. “And keep your eyes open, Mason. Something’s really wrong here. I can feel it.”
29
Mason ended the call and stared at the words he’d written on the napkin. His conclusion made total sense. Someone who didn’t understand how the nivalenol worked would have ended his suffering long before the third day. Instead, all five of the victims had waited at least seventy-two hours before biting the ampoules. It was always possible the UNSUB had painstakingly explained the escalation of symptoms, but there was no reason for men who were about to die to take him at his word. Not unless they had a specific background. Not unless they were—
“Chemical engineers like him?” Layne said, reading what he’d written on the napkin.
“He knew his victims through the course of his work,” Mason said.
“They must have done something a whole lot worse than getting him fired for him to kill them in such a brutal way.”
The waitress abandoned her magazine and returned to the kitchen. Mason could see her through the porthole window, leaning against the wall and texting on her phone.
“But where did he work with them?” he asked.
“I think we’re on the right track looking into a military background.”
“Then his victims should have already been ID’d.”
“Who’s to say they haven’t been?”
Mason set down his mug harder than he’d intended. The waitress glanced up from the kitchen. Their eyes met through the porthole window. He waved an apology and she returned her attention to her phone.
“If any chemical engineers have been reported missing over the past six months,” Layne said, “there ought to be record of it somewhere. Especially if they have working knowledge of WMDs. We can then cross-reference it against the personnel list from the army.”
“There’s still something we’re overlooking here, though,” Mason said. “This guy is like an evil MacGyver. He can make a bomb out of the junk on hand, a suicide pill using bad sushi, and a biological torture device from mushrooms. It’s not just about inflicting maximum damage for this guy; it’s about putting his victims in a position where they literally hold their lives in their own hands.”
“But Chenhav and Mosche were different. They were an extension of his professional persona.”
“Were they?” Mason asked. “Maybe there’s some amount of overlap between the two.”
The trucker emerged from the restroom. He returned to his stool and glanced up at the TV, where a reporter stood framed against the backdrop of a forest stained red and blue by the light bars of police cruisers.
“The one who left the message on the ceiling,” Layne said. “He was a scientist, too, wasn’t he?”
“Right. So what are numbers to a scientist?”
“They could mean anything.”
“Of course, but why use a code to deliver a message unless you only want a certain faction to be able to decipher it, especially when the message itself is more important than the potential for a few additional minutes of life?”
“There’s no evidence to suggest that either of them was involved with the military, the flu experimentation, or the production of the Novichok. For all we know, these two guys were nothing more than successful scientists at the top of their respective fields. What kind of people would they expect to find their bodies and recognize the code, let alone be able to crack it?”
“Someone who would understand the implications of what had happened to them.”
“You think it’s a warning?”
The larger trucker elbowed his companion, who looked up at the screen. The ticker on the screen read POLICE CLOSE NYC CENTRAL PARK.
“Mosche worked with WHO’s bioterrorism readiness program,” Mason said. “If someone wanted to negatively impact the international state of preparedness in anticipation of releasing a deadly virus, eliminating one of the men responsible makes a lot of sense.”
“As far as the world knows, he’s been dead for two decades. Surely every single military and medical response protocol has been updated multiple times since then.”
“But he’s definitely the kind of guy you’d want if you were trying to anticipate and counteract those protocols.”
“They can’t be closely held secrets if they expect to be able to coordinate emergency responses with agencies on both the federal and local levels.”
“We’re missing something obvious,” Mason said. “Mosche had to know his remains would be found by someone who recognized the slaughterhouse for what it truly was. He left the message for someone who would have known to look behind the false wall. Someone familiar with the layout of both the building and the tunnel.”
“You think Chenhav and Mosche were complicit in what went on there?”
“It makes sense.”
“Then why kill them?”
“Probably caught them by surprise, too,” Mason replied.
“So they left a warning for other people like them,” Layne said. “One that whoever found it would recognize the moment he saw it.”
“We’ve already ruled out phone and Social Security numbers, bank accounts and wireless transfer confirmations.”
“It’s not an IP address and the corresponding geographical location is in the middle of the ocean.”
“We’re thinking too broadly. How would one scientist use numbers to communicate a specific message to another scientist?”
“He was a microbiologist, right?”
“Chenhav was the microbiologist. Mosche was the biochem…”
Mason’s words trailed off as he caught the tail of a thought that had eluded him until now.
“What?” Layne asked.
“Son of a bitch.”
Mason set his phone on the table in front of him, grabbed a fresh napkin, and scribbled down the numbers Mosche had written in his own blood on the ceiling of his tomb.
1 6 2 0 7 5 2 4 8 7 4.
“Talk to me, Mason. What are you thinking?”
His mind was moving too quickly to formulate a reply. He opened a browser and entered a search at the prompt. Brought up the resultant image. Zoomed in. Positioned his phone right above the napkin so he could clearly see both the numbers and the screen.
“The periodic table?” Layne said.
Mason tuned out everything around him and set to work.
One: hydrogen. Six: carbon. Two: helium. Zero? No zero.
“Damn.”
Hydrogen was H. Carbon, C. Helium, He.
H-C-He?
His phone vibrated. He swiped away the incoming call. He needed to be able to see what he was doing.
One and six could be sixteen. Sixteen was sulfur. Two and zero? Twenty. Twenty was calcium.
Sulfur was S. Calcium, Ca.
S-Ca.
The rest tumbled into place from there.
Seven and five was seventy-five. Seventy-five was rhenium.
Two and four was twenty-four. Twenty-four was chromium.
Eight and seven. Eighty-seven was francium. No. Separate the eight from the seven. Eight was oxygen.
Seven and four. Seventy-four was tungsten.
“Sulfur, calcium, rhenium, chromium, oxygen, and tungsten,” he said.
; “An organic metal of some kind?” Layne asked.
“No.”
Mason wrote the abbreviations for the elements on the napkin beneath the corresponding numbers.
16 20 75 24 8 74.
S Ca Re Cr O W.
“It’s more than just a metaphor to him,” Layne said. “Like the killings themselves, it has personal significance. He not only thinks of himself as a scarecrow—”
“He is the Scarecrow.”
Layne’s cell phone chimed. She removed it from her pocket and checked the caller ID.
“Algren,” she said, and answered on the second ring. “This is Layne.”
Mason checked his phone log. His missed call had come from the strike force leader, too.
“What?” Layne said. She lowered the phone from her mouth. “Check your email, Mason. Hurry.”
Mason opened his mailbox and tapped the incoming message from Algren. It contained a picture that took several seconds to open. At first, he couldn’t tell what it was. Everything was either dark or grainy. There were trees everywhere, and between them, what almost looked like—
He glanced up at the TV and then back at the picture. Pulled out his wallet and tossed two twenties on the table. Grabbed his coat.
“Finish the call in the car,” he said, and headed for the door.
The behavioral analysts had been right. The UNSUB wasn’t done. He’d left another dead man bound to a cross.
Right in the middle of Central Park.
30
ELSEWHERE
The Scarecrow felt neither elation nor sorrow. In fact, it felt nothing at all, a regrettable consequence of the abandonment of its humanity. Even the death of one of its primary tormentors failed to trigger an emotional response, not even a hint of satisfaction. It had merely watched from a distance as the man suffered through the sheer agony for as long as he could bear before ending his own life. The duration of his misery had seemed to pass in the blink of an eye, little more than a morbid reality show playing in the background of a fever dream.
In a sense, the being that had once inhabited this form had already preceded this body into the grave, casting aside this empty shell to implement a plan quarried from the mind of a terrified child, forged by an advanced education, honed to a razor’s edge during the subsequent years in hiding, and now ready to be plunged into the heart of a world that had used it and thrown it away, a diseased slab of meat rotting from the inside out, a final insult mirrored by the slow death of its opposite half—its better half—the half that had been the only thing tethering it to its former life. It cared nothing for the man who thought himself its master or the internal war waging within his organization. Let the Thirteen destroy one another and the entire world with them. They were responsible for all that was wrong with this damned species, the living embodiment of the greed that had led to the deliberate infliction of such horrific pain upon a group of powerless children in a cold, sterile room. One lineage in particular: Quintus. The memory of the agony that family had inflicted had been purged from its blood, the sins of the father washed away, and thus the bloodline itself needed to come to an end. And the last man bearing it was so caught up in his attempted coup that he didn’t even realize that he’d invited the fox into the henhouse, and it was about to slaughter everything inside.
A frigid breeze howled across the roofline.
The Scarecrow again pressed its eye to the telescope and watched the shadowed forms moving through the trees in the red and blue glare of police lights, scurrying like roaches around a crumb, unaware that the entire place was about to be fumigated. If only they could see it, silhouetted against the roofline, and recognize their communal fate, but they’d never seen it in life, so why should the moments before death be any different?
The long process of transformation, the release of all of the sadness and rage, the stripping away of its humanity, like so many layers of skin, had stranded it in a form of purgatory, neither alive nor dead, a figment of its own imagination, a ghost haunting its own life, such as it was. Even when it had shared its work and living space—while brewing its ultimate creation and inserting that infernal oil-consuming bacterium into the viral envelope of that wretched disease—the others had gone out of their way to avoid it, as though its physical deformities were a contagion, rather than the result of the cruelty of savages just like them. Only the man with the blue eyes, the man for whom its other half had designed the respirator following his unfortunate accident, had been different. In the Hoyl, the Scarecrow had found not just a kindred spirit but a mentor and, in many ways, the closest thing it’d had to a friend in as long as it could remember. They’d shared many commonalities, from their disfigurements and the prosthetics that caused others to look away in disgust to their desire to lash out at a world that had done everything in its power to break them.
The screech of tires drew the Scarecrow’s eye to the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse, where a black Crown Victoria skidded to a halt at the police barricade. Agents in federal windbreakers disgorged from the front doors. The man who’d been driving the vehicle turned and surveyed his surroundings.
Here was one more thing they had in common: the man looking back at it from the distance.
This was the same man who’d walked right past the Scarecrow in the darkness on the killing floor of the slaughterhouse, the man for whom it had rigged one of its most ingenious traps, the man who’d murdered the Hoyl. It smiled at the realization that this man would die with all of the others, despite the assurances it had made to its true master, who wanted to end the Quintus bloodline nearly as badly as it did.
Soon, the investigators would figure out the nature of the tableau in the park and orchestrate a siege on its staging ground, but by then it would be long gone and there would be nothing they could do to stop it.
The Scarecrow tucked the telescope under its arm and retreated into the shadows.
Let them come.
They’ll find hell waiting.
PART IV
For you see, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.
—Benjamin Disraeli,
Coningsby (1844)
31
NEW YORK CITY
December 29
“Who found him?” Mason asked.
Special Agent Nick Barbieri had been waiting at the police cordon off of West Drive when they arrived. He had dark eyes, a hawkish nose, and permanent five o’clock shadow. The back of his windbreaker was stenciled with FBI in large letters, and beneath them, in smaller print, Joint Terrorism Task Force. He wore an olive green Kevlar vest underneath it, his sidearm in a tactical holster strapped to his thigh, and talked over his shoulder as he led them deeper into the park.
“The report was called in anonymously through the main JTTF tip line,” he said.
“Counterterrorism?”
“Domestic section.”
“Why’d they call you?”
“That was the first question we asked ourselves when we got here.”
“Did you trace the call?” Layne asked.
“To the number assigned to a disposable cell phone purchased at a Duane Reade in Chelsea.”
“Voiceprint analysis?”
“Computerized.”
“He wanted us to find the body,” Mason said.
“More like he got tired of waiting for us to do so.”
Barbieri guided them away from the main path and uphill into a dense thicket of sycamore, oak, and black cherry trees, their bare branches sparkling with frost. The ground was carpeted with dead leaves that crunched underfoot. They were in the very center of Central Park, at the heart of one of the most populous cities in the world, and yet it almost felt like they were out in the country, as they couldn’t see a single skyscraper.
“What’s this?” Layne asked. “Some sort of nature conservatory?”
“It’s called the Ramble. Thirty-eight acre
s of some of the densest forest you’ll find on the eastern seaboard. You could easily get lost if you ditched the trail.”
“How is it possible no one saw anything?” Mason asked.
“There are people everywhere out here in the summer,” Barbieri said. “Not so much in the winter, especially not at night. And definitely not where we’re going.”
An aura of light radiated from behind the trees in the distance. The hill grew steeper, the damp leaves slicker. Jagged crests of Manhattan schist rose from the slope, dictating a wending course through the maze of tree trunks. A stream trickled somewhere nearby.
“Who all knows about the discovery?” Layne asked.
“Just my team,” Barbieri said. “And now you.”
“How much does the media know?”
“We told them we’re conducting a joint red team exercise with the DHS. Their Office of Counter Terrorism’s Public Safety Unit does that kind of thing all the time to audit our infrastructure and response times. Generally not in Central Park, though.”
“They won’t see through it?”
Barbieri looked back at her and winked.
“They report what we tell them.”
The lights grew brighter. They heard voices and saw shadows moving through the trees. Two officers wearing navy fatigues and Kevlar vests with the words Police DHS stenciled across the front materialized from the glare of portable lights positioned in a half circle around them.
A handful of forensic techs from the FBI’s Evidence Response Team crashed through the forested area in their white jumpsuits, sweeping their flashlights across the mat of dead leaves and marking potential evidence with numbered placards. Two stood together in the middle of a small clearing barely wide enough for the horizontal bar of the cross. They turned at the sound of crunching leaves and shone their handheld spotlights into the faces of the newcomers.
The Annihilation Protocol Page 18