The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  Two agents took up position at the top of the staircase, one on either side of the door. They examined the seams for trip wires while a third slid an articulating camera underneath the door and surveilled the hallway on a handheld monitor. There was a single elevator to the left, its surface a golden metal polished to reflect the light of the overhead fixture like the midday sun. The walls were hardwood-paneled, the floor marble. There was nothing between them and the opposite stairwell.

  “South stairwell clear,” the third man whispered through the earpiece.

  “North stairwell clear,” an unfamiliar voice whispered. “We go on my mark.”

  There was only one residential penthouse on the top floor. It was roughly 2,400 square feet and surrounded on two sides by a private L-shaped balcony. They’d enter into a blind foyer, with the entire suite to their right, at the end of a short corridor that terminated in a trident-shaped fork. To the left were the bedroom and bath. Straight ahead, the great room. To the right, the study and, beyond it, the narrow kitchen.

  “Go.”

  An officer opened the door—slowly, carefully—and the others fell into formation, one behind the other. They converged on the apartment at the exact same time as the second team from the far stairwell. One of the men removed from his bag a compact through-wall radar unit that looked like a massive iPad with vertical handles. He ran it along the plaster to make sure there was no one lying in wait on the other side and then stepped back to make room for another officer, who used a crowbar to remove the trim around the door, revealing a half-inch gap metered by wooden spacers, between which they could see that the dead bolt wasn’t engaged. There was no sign of trip wires or remote sensors, either.

  The rubber sweep at the bottom of the door left just enough room for the tech specialist to feed the articulating camera underneath. He held up the monitor so they could all see while he turned the camera to look at the back side of the door. There was nothing connected to either the knob or the dead bolt, and the chain wasn’t hooked. He turned the camera to view the corridor. To the left, a coat closet. Door closed. No apparent trip wires. To the right, a hallway with open thresholds on both sides and the aura of moonlight from the great room.

  “Give me infrared,” the voice in Mason’s ear whispered.

  The color on the screen turned a pale shade of green but didn’t reveal any laser beams rigged across the hallway.

  “You know your assignments,” the team leader whispered. “Keep your eyes open and don’t touch a goddamn thing. No heroes today. Are we clear?”

  Mason raised his pistol and stepped into position to follow the men into the apartment. He sensed Layne at his right hip, felt the nerves radiating from her. Cleared his mind and concentrated on regulating his breathing. Time slowed to a crawl. He became acutely aware of everything around him.

  He heard the order in his left ear as though from a great distance. The world around him sped up with the opening of the front door. He funneled through the doorway and into the narrow corridor.

  The men in front of him moved like specters through the darkness, the fabric of their suits shimmering in the moonlight flooding through the wall of glass overlooking the park. Some veered left, others right. Mason led the remainder past the outer forks and into the great room. All of the furniture had been shoved to the sides, leaving the area rug in the middle of the room bare. The drapes had been torn down and cast aside. The entire rear wall was composed of windows that granted a spectacular view of the city skyline through the railing along the terrace. The silhouettes of their external penetration team darted past on their way to the lone outside egress, around the corner to the right, near the kitchen.

  A telescope had been mounted on a tripod right against the glass and angled down toward the park. It was two and a half feet long, with a barrel easily eight inches wide. While Mason knew little about such things, he figured it must have had some impressive magnification. More than enough to get a good close-up of the man staked to the cross in the distant park.

  Voices erupted from the earpiece.

  “Bedroom clear.”

  “Study clear.”

  “Kitchen clear.”

  “Terrace clear.”

  “Something’s not right,” Mason said. The Scarecrow had outthought them every step of the way. Every move he’d made had been carefully planned and executed. He’d led them here for a reason, and based on everything Mason knew about him, that reason was to simultaneously flaunt his brilliance and attempt to derail their investigation. He’d led them here to kill them all. “He wouldn’t have left without arming whatever trap he’d set for us.”

  “I agree,” Layne said. “We’re missing something.”

  Mason tried to put himself inside the Scarecrow’s head. He would have anticipated the tactical units coming in from both the front door and the terrace. To inflict maximum damage, he would have wanted them all in the same place at the same time. He liked the killings to be intimate in proportion, yet devastating in their ferocity.

  Mason ducked out of the living room and slipped past the other men into the bedroom. Again, the rear wall was composed entirely of windows, through which the pale glow of moonlight passed. There were no photographs on the nightstand, nothing of an even remotely personal nature. The bed was perfectly made and the walk-in closet stood open. Shirts on one side, suit jackets on the other.

  “Maybe we got here faster than he anticipated and didn’t give him enough time to set a trap,” Layne said. She followed Mason across the hallway and into the study. The furniture was leather, the lighting recessed. A bookcase adorned with tomes that appeared to have been chosen for aesthetic value dominated one wall; another was nearly concealed behind a monolithic flat-screen TV. A vase of withering flowers and a marble statue of a reclining nude sat on the glass coffee table. “Surely we would have seen it by now if he had.”

  The kitchen was on the other side of the bookcase. The countertops were bare and the stainless-steel appliances sparkling clean. Mason resisted the urge to check the drawers and cabinets and passed the terrace door, which the fourth team had left open, admitting the night air and the constant din of traffic.

  “The false wall in the tunnel looked different from the others,” Mason said. “He’d known we’d eventually recognize it, but he’d expected us to just knock it down, which would have triggered the motion detector and released enough Novichok to kill us all. He’d rigged the IED to the door at the farmhouse for the same reason. Whether or not we found the bodies in the cornfield, he knew that if we’d tracked him that far, when no one answered the front door, we’d try to open it, and—boom—no more investigators.”

  “So what’s obvious here?” Layne asked. “What stands apart from everything else?”

  The answer hit him squarely in the face.

  He turned to his left, toward the great room. The majority of the agents were gathered in there, near where the telescope sat on its tripod. All by itself.

  Barbieri stepped away from the others. Leaned closer to the eyepiece, pressed his mask against it.

  Mason heard the click from across the room.

  “What the hell?” Barbieri said. He brought his eye away from the lens. “I can’t even see—”

  “Down!” Mason shouted, and tackled Layne through the open door leading onto the terrace.

  The explosion tore through the room and everyone in it. A fist of fire hit Mason from behind and hurled him across the tiled balcony. Glass exploded outward like buckshot. He lost his grip on Layne, then visual on her as the churning smoke overtook them.

  His back struck the railing.

  Layne collided with him a split second later.

  The railing tore from its moorings with a metallic screech.

  Mason felt it give, then lean outward over the nothingness.

  He wrapped his arms around Layne. Tried to roll away from the railing as it toppled backward over the roofline and plummeted toward the street. He heard it crash onto something b
ehind and below them.

  Flames raced across the terrace.

  A wave of superheated air buffeted them over the edge.

  And into the open air.

  34

  A sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach.

  Weightlessness.

  Wind whistling past his ears.

  A solid mass of fire raced out over the rooftop and across the sky overhead.

  Mason caught a glimpse of the building across the street from the corner of his eye, its windows rushing upward.

  The bricks to the other side of him were a blur.

  He pulled Layne tightly against him. If he could absorb the brunt of the fall, then maybe she might survive—

  Impact.

  Parallel bars bit into the muscles of his back. Bent. What little breath he’d managed to inhale on the way down burst past his lips.

  He toppled forward and lost his grip on Layne. Tumbled down the fallen railing, bounced from the balcony, and slammed into the thick glass door of the apartment below Raymond’s.

  Came to rest.

  Mason pushed himself to his hands and knees. Struggled to recapture his breath. Felt the pressure in his chest break and air flood into his lungs.

  “Layne!”

  She lay facedown on the concrete, her gas mask broken, her eyes closed. Her entire face was black with soot and glistened with blood. She groaned and tried to rise. Failed. Bared her teeth in determination and tried again. Managed to roll onto her right hip.

  Mason knelt beside her and helped prop her up against the wall beside the door leading into the apartment. They’d landed on its balcony, which was maybe fifteen feet long but only five feet deep. The railing that had fallen from the roof was bent nearly in half and folded over the side.

  A car alarm blared from the street far below them. Sirens erupted in the distance.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Layne thrust out her hand in response. He grabbed it and helped her to her feet. She staggered to the edge of the balcony and leaned out over West Seventy-second Street, thirty-five stories below. Stepped back and closed her eyes. Breathed out a long, slow sigh of relief.

  Smoke still gushed from the roofline above them, but there was no sign of flames.

  Mason grabbed the doorknob, which turned easily in his hand and opened into the great room. There was no furniture. The floor was hardwood and the walls were bare. He was about to conclude that it was empty when he detected a flickering light from the corner of his eye.

  “We have to get back up there!” Layne said.

  “Go,” Mason said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  She limped past him, hit the hallway, and rushed for the front door.

  Mason followed the source of the light around the corner and into the bedroom. Blackout curtains covered the windows. The closet doors stood open, revealing deep shadows. There was no furniture. Only a telescope that lay shattered in the corner, a TV mounted to the wall, and a mat made of woven straw underneath it. The power was on and the screen was divided into quadrants. The bottom two were uniformly black, while the upper two were gray and marred by a wavering glow. He recognized what he was seeing as smoke when a man’s silhouette passed through it, clearing a passage, through which he caught a momentary glimpse of a bed and a nightstand. The quadrant beside it looked nearly identical, only the wall underneath the camera was actively burning. He deciphered the outline of the reclining nude on the coffee table.

  The television was just bright enough to illuminate the photographs covering every inch of the wall surrounding it. They all featured the same man in various poses, never once looking at the camera. On the street. In the park. Getting into a Town Car. Through the window of a restaurant. His eyes were scratched out in every one of them.

  “Jesus,” Mason whispered. And then it hit him. “The Scarecrow was right underneath our feet.”

  He sprinted out of the room, down the hallway, through the front door, and into the main hallway. The recessed ceiling fixtures snapped off and the dim red emergency lights came on. The fire alarm blared.

  The door across the hall opened and a terrified woman peeked out.

  “Did you see anyone come out of this apartment?” he shouted.

  “No one’s been there in a month. What’s going on?”

  He pressed the button for the elevator a dozen times, but it didn’t light up. It must have shut down automatically when the emergency systems kicked on.

  “Where’s the nearest emergency exit?”

  She pointed past him down the hallway. He turned and raced toward the closed door at the end. Burst through it into the stairwell. Grabbed the railing. Jumped down to the landing. Careened from the wall. Propelled himself down to the next floor.

  Mason pressed the button on the side of his mask to open the main communication channel.

  “Cover every exit from the building,” he said. “He’s heading down one of the stairwells right now. Make sure he doesn’t get out!”

  The only response was a faint hum of static from his earpiece.

  He cleared the stairs two at a time. Used the railings to swing around the landings. One floor after another. The bottom was so far down, he couldn’t even see it.

  The door to the thirty-second floor opened and he barely avoided slamming into the man entering the stairwell. Gray hair. Pajamas. Slippers and a robe. A woman behind him, silk nightie, eyes wide.

  He blew past them and tried his comlink again.

  “Can anybody hear me?”

  The explosion must have damaged his transceiver. He couldn’t even hear his own voice through the speaker.

  Walls blurred past. People emerged from the doorways leading to the floors, all wearing hurriedly assembled outfits and matching expressions of confusion and terror.

  “Coming through,” Mason said, and wove between them.

  One landing after another. He hurdled the railing and jumped across the gap to get past an elderly couple. Dodged a woman carrying a fluffy dog with a pink bow. Thundered all the way to the bottom. Shouldered open the door and emerged into an enclosed courtyard backing onto Seventy-third Street. There was debris everywhere. Police cruisers screeched to the curb, painting the growing crowd in swirling shades of red and blue.

  Mason fought his way through it and sprinted toward a black Yukon with government plates, which skidded to the curb and bounced up onto the sidewalk. An agent wearing an FBI windbreaker and ball cap was halfway out the door before he even killed the engine. He brought a portable transceiver to his lips and cocked his head up toward the smoke roiling into the night sky.

  “Seal off the building!” Mason shouted.

  An ambulance screamed down the street toward them. A fire truck converged from the opposite direction, going the wrong way down the one-way street.

  The agent turned toward him, reached for his weapon, and nearly drew it before recognizing a fellow agent beneath the soot.

  “What the hell happened up there?”

  Mason snatched the transceiver from his grasp and pressed the button.

  “This is Special Agent James Mason. Badge number victor-tango-alpha-zero-one-one-two-nine-six-three-two-three. I need the Mayfair Towers sealed off right now. No one leaves the premises.”

  “There are over four hundred apartments in that building,” the dispatcher said. “We can’t contain every single occupant.”

  “We already have officers in place directing evacuees to the nearest shelters,” the agent said.

  “Then round them up. None of them gets out of here until I say so.”

  “We have to move everyone to a safe distance until we know the structural integrity of the complex hasn’t been compromised.”

  Policemen were already breaking up the crowd in the courtyard and leading them out onto the street, where even more people congregated on the sidewalks. Some walked, others ran, but most stayed where they were and aimed their cell phones at the top of the tower. An officer in a yellow reflective
vest guided a group of people out from the courtyard on the far side of the building, presumably from the opposite stairwell.

  Mason watched helplessly as they dispersed.

  An NYPD helicopter thundered across the sky and hovered above the penthouse, its spotlight sweeping the roofline.

  Firefighters and paramedics raced past. Pushed through the throngs disgorging from the stairwell.

  A news crew took up position across the street and started filming.

  The residents around Mason were little more than silhouettes dissipating into the shadows. For all he knew, the Scarecrow was long gone. Then again, he could have been standing mere feet away and Mason wouldn’t have recognized him.

  He tore off his mask and spiked it on the ground in frustration.

  “Get me the footage from every camera that records so much as a single floor of this building,” he said, and thrust the transceiver into the agent’s chest. “One of them must have captured him.”

  35

  Mason and Layne worked their way through what was left of the penthouse apartment while emergency response team agents in white jumpsuits took photographs and collected evidence. The windows were all gone, the support posts between them charred and smoldering. Mounds of rubble filled the great room. The furniture had burned to the charcoaled framework and bare springs. Mistlike spatters of blood decorated the walls. Metal fragments from the rigged telescope were embedded in what was left of the scorched ceiling.

  The other rooms had survived relatively unscathed, along with the agents who’d been inside them when the bomb went off. The eight men within the blast radius, however, had been killed instantly. The tube of the telescope had served to funnel the blast, blowing straight through the men and the upper half of the wall behind them. The agents in the study and the kitchen had been peppered with shrapnel but were going to recover, thanks to Layne and the officers from the bedroom, who’d dragged them out into the hallway.