“Say … gain?” Gunnar’s voice crackled in and out of the static.
“There’s a structure down here.”
The hiss of interference abruptly ceased with the complete loss of signal.
He crawled to the end of the earthen tunnel and found himself staring down into a man-made corridor that obviously predated the construction of the buildings overhead. Every surface was composed of mortared bricks, old and cracked, from the walls to the arched ceiling and floor, which cradled a pool of stagnant water as black as oil.
It took some doing, but he managed to contort his body in the tight space and lower himself into a tunnel that smelled of another era. He shone his light one way and then the other. The passage extended well beyond the limited range of his beam in both directions.
He stared off into the darkness and extrapolated the tunnel’s course.
It led straight underneath Central Park.
60
“It’s called the Croton Aqueduct,” Gunnar said. The cell phone’s speaker made his voice sound tinny and echoed inside the empty house, where Mason, Layne, and Ramses had gathered to plot their next course of action. “It was built during a five-year span from 1837 to 1842, with the intention of carrying potable water forty-one miles from the Croton Watershed in Westchester County to the Croton Receiving Reservoir in the middle of Central Park, in the hope of combating worsening sanitation conditions responsible for epidemics of yellow fever and cholera. It was considered a marvel of modern engineering at the time and stimulated construction of city sewers and indoor plumbing, but within a matter of years, it could no longer keep up with the demands imposed by exponential population growth. Cholera returned, uncontrollable fires raged, and the New Croton Aqueduct was commissioned in 1884. The city had grown too much to simply dig up and replace the old one, so the new line had to be run several miles to the east, where it fed Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx. It was much larger, buried deeper underground, and carried three times as much water as its predecessor. The former receiving reservoir was filled in to create the Turtle Pond and the Great Lawn in 1940, while the old aqueduct remained in limited use until 1955.”
“So they just left it?” Mason said.
“By then, the entirety of New York City as we know it had been built on top of it. Think of it as a forty-one-mile hallway with water running down the middle of the floor. It had to be constructed in such a way that it descended exactly a quarter of an inch per hundred feet, thirteen inches for every mile, to keep the water flowing at a steady rate from the source. Most of that hallway to the north was built aboveground, followed the topography, and had to be buried under mounds of dirt. By the time it reached the public water supply in Central Park, it was barely a dozen feet underground. Are you going to knock down apartments and skyscrapers just to collapse a tunnel to nowhere or invest tens of millions of dollars in dirt and labor to fill it in underneath buildings that are already structurally sound? Of course not. Instead, they tore down most of the gatehouses, put locks on the remaining entrances, and started prosecuting trespassers.”
“You’re saying there’s still a forty-mile tunnel running underneath New York City.”
“Forty-one, technically, but only a small portion of that is actually beneath the city.”
“You know what we have to do,” Layne said.
Mason nodded and glanced at Ramses, who was strangely quiet.
“What do you think?”
“This whole city’s sitting on one great big man-made anthill. There are hundreds of miles of subway tunnels running underneath our feet, nearly all of which vent to the surface. You want to kill millions of people crammed into a small space? Try releasing an aerosolized weapon from trains moving through it at thirty miles an hour. The resulting cloud of gas would engulf the entire city within an hour. Think about the haze of dust that covered the entire island for days after the twin towers fell. Now imagine that as a lethal nerve agent.”
“Christ,” Layne whispered.
“The Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo orchestrated a similar attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995,” Gunnar said. “They used sarin—albeit of lesser, homemade quality—and released it as a liquid instead of a gas, but the five men who carried out the poorly executed assault still managed to kill thirteen innocent people and send five thousand more to the hospital. Had they received the proper training and the financial backing of an organization like the Thirteen, they could have easily realized their own apocalyptic prophecy.”
“It’s classic misdirection,” Ramses said. “You want freedom to move underground? Get everyone up top running around like chickens with their heads cut off.”
“You’re implying that the Scarecrow didn’t murder Raymond, and quite possibly Mikkelson, in Central Park because we discovered the bodies in Colorado before he could finish his display in the cornfield,” Mason said. “By your logic, this was his plan from the very beginning.”
“There’s a tunnel in the basement that would probably agree with me.”
If that were the case, then the Scarecrow had used the design in the cornfield to either manipulate them into believing there were three more victims he’d never intended to take back to Colorado, or the pattern had been complete when they … found … it.
Mason removed the star from his pocket, only now that he looked at it more closely, its points were irregularly spaced. Four tongue depressors had been bound together with yarn in such a way that they almost looked like a gingerbread man with a long neck, a wide, triangular torso, and short knobby arms and legs.
He removed his mini Maglite from his pocket, held the creation at arm’s length, and switched on the beam, projecting its shadow onto the wall.
The pattern had been staring them in the face since the beginning.
“It’s a scarecrow,” he said. “And look at the points formed by its hands, feet, and head.”
“They make the same design as the bodies in the cornfield,” Layne said. “We totally missed it.”
It didn’t matter now, though. Mikkelson was somewhere in the park, either dead or dying, and there was a madman out there with four thousand gallons of Novichok, access to an entire network of subterranean passageways, and a month’s head start.
“We have to go down there,” Mason said.
“What we need to do is call this in to Algren,” Layne said. “Homeland’s counterterrorism unit is far better equipped to handle this than we are. There’s no way to potentially search all of the tunnels down there without their manpower.”
“What makes you think she’ll believe us?”
“If she finds Mikkelson’s body in Central Park, she won’t have much of a choice.”
“And Marchment will make sure we’re sidelined again.”
“He does that and we die with the rest of the city,” Ramses said.
“Do you really believe he’d be anywhere near this place if that was his goal?” Layne said. “A man motivated by power and greed wouldn’t willingly sacrifice himself.”
“But he doesn’t have to be in the city when the Novichok’s released. He just has to keep everyone trying to stop it away until it’s too late to do anything about it.”
“Even if we convince Algren to try, she can’t override Marchment,” Mason said. “The only thing she’ll accomplish is letting him know that we’re onto him and giving him a chance to stop us.”
“I don’t like this,” Layne said, “but you’re right. I don’t see where we have any other choice.”
Mason stared at her for a long moment. Sized her up. This was the point of no return.
“Once we go down there, we’re on the wrong side of the equation,” he said. “There’ll be no talking our way out of it if they find us in that tunnel, and should anyone try to stand in our way…”
He let the implications hang between them. She needed to understand the ramifications of the course of action to which she was committing herself. They’d be going after the Scarecrow without any bac
kup or support and deliberately placing themselves at odds with the Department of Homeland Security. In the strict eyes of the law, once they entered that tunnel, they became the bad guys.
“Nine million lives are at stake,” she said. “That’s more than ten percent of the world’s population. I might be on the wrong side of the law, but I’ll be damned if I’m not on the right side of history.”
“If we succeed,” Mason said. “We’re running out of time.”
“Then you’d better start trusting me.”
“I trust you.”
“With everything.”
She looked deliberately from Mason to Ramses and back again.
“Bust his balls all you like,” Ramses said, “but don’t go bringing mine into this.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” Mason said. “If we survive this, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
She stared him down for several seconds before nodding to herself, jacking a round into the chamber of her pistol, and heading for the stairs to the basement.
Mason grabbed his phone and switched it from speaker to Bluetooth.
“Are you still there, Gunnar?” Mason asked.
“I just sent maps of both the New York City waterworks and subway lines to your email,” he said. “Ramses was right. The whole island is positively honeycombed with passages, including entire subway lines that haven’t been used in decades.”
“Thanks, man. We’re going to need them.”
“You obviously won’t have a signal down there, so I won’t be able to help you at all.”
“Just mark my GPS and keep an eye on that satellite feed. If you can see us, so can they.”
“Be careful down there, Mace.” The note of concern in Gunnar’s voice was unsettling. “You know what the Scarecrow is capable of.”
Did they, though? Mason’s biggest fear was that they’d only scratched the surface.
PART VI
By thus dividing the voters we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers to lead the common herd.
—J. P. Morgan,
“Banker’s Manifesto” (1892)
61
DECEMBER 31
Mason, Ramses, and Layne walked single file through a narrow brick aqueduct easily large enough to accommodate a procession of torpedolike, pressurized liquid containers, which could have been unloaded from the flatbeds at any of the remaining functional gatehouses north of the city and shuttled invisibly underground, assuming the Novichok hadn’t already been transferred into smaller containers for ease of dispersion. And that was the problem; they didn’t know what they were looking for any more than they knew where to find it.
Mason explored the tunnel with his flashlight beam, which seemed to dispel little more than the darkness in the immediate vicinity of the lens. He could barely hear a thing over the thunder of his pulse and the splashing of their footsteps in water that smelled like sewage. They had to be underneath Central Park by now, and yet they hadn’t encountered a single surface-access chute or lateral branch.
“Keep your eyes open for trip wires and motion sensors,” he said, his whispered voice echoing from the confines. “Watch for any kind of mechanism that requires movement or force to trigger it.”
Ramses stayed right on his heels to take advantage of the faint glow. While he didn’t have a flashlight, he’d miraculously procured a platinum-plated Sig P226 9mm semiautomatic pistol that shimmered in his grasp. Layne brought up the rear, alternately shining her beam behind them and casting their shadows ahead of them.
“You really think he rigged the tunnel?” Ramses asked.
“I’d be shocked if he didn’t,” Layne said. “If this guy’s as smart as we think he is, he planned for someone to find this aqueduct and set up a way for us to kill ourselves.”
“Wonderful. And here I thought the smell was the best part of this little field trip.”
Mason traced the contours of the tunnel with his light. Sections of the ceiling had crumbled, exposing the rugged bedrock overhead and littering the ground with broken bricks and mortar. Someone had shoved them to the side to clear a path. The air was impossibly still. The sounds of their passage carried hundreds of feet ahead of them into the darkness. Their lights made them easy targets, but turning them off would make them even more vulnerable to whatever trap had been set for them. He brainstormed every possible container or dispersal device that could be used to vaporize chemicals or aerosolize liquids. Watched for any hoses or nozzles or reflections from metal. Listened for the hiss of pressurized gas that would signify it was already too late.
The mud and sediment preserved the smoothed trail of the travoislike contraption the Scarecrow had used to drag his victims into the park, erasing his own footprints in the process. Only smudged and partial impressions of work boots with a deep tread remained.
Mason’s breathing was uncomfortably loud in his own ears. His pulse throbbed at the outer edges of his vision. His nerves were downed power lines. Each step brought him closer to setting off the trap he had yet to identify. There was no doubt in his mind that it was coming. He just prayed they recognized it before it was too—
He stopped mid-stride. There was an astringent smell. Chemicals of some kind.
Layne must have noticed it, too. Her light swept across his back and threw his shadow from one side of the tunnel to the other.
“I don’t like this,” she whispered.
“You were fine with everything up until now?” Ramses said.
“Chemical smells dissipate. This is too strong to have been here for very long.”
She didn’t need to remind them that the lack of circulation meant the source had to be nearby and they still hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary.
Mason slowly lowered himself to his chest in the shallow water and shone his beam across the surface. No shimmer of fishing line or infrared laser projectors.
Layne traced the arched ceiling with her light. There wasn’t so much as a single cobweb. A section of bricks had fallen, creating a hollow filled with shadows at the farthest reaches of her beam.
Mason stood and shone his light straight down at the water, but he couldn’t see anything through the disturbed sediment. He stepped to either side, straddled the water, and advanced in straight-legged scissor movements to avoid stepping anywhere he couldn’t clearly see the ground.
The smell grew stronger by the second.
“We have to be missing something,” Layne whispered.
Mason paused and studied his surroundings. Slowly. Carefully. No trip wires or pressure plates. No motion detectors or power sources. Nothing but a caustic scent that reminded him of bleach, only not exactly. Like bleach mixed with fuel oil.
“Smells like a pool,” Ramses said.
“Chlorine,” Mason whispered. “Definitely chlorine. But there’s something else. Kerosene? Paint thinner?”
“Where is it?” Layne whispered. A note of panic crept into her voice. “I can’t see a damn thing.”
There was nowhere to hide a bottle or a bucket. No recesses in the walls. Nothing stood apart from the bricks or the darkness, and yet the smell continued to grow stronger.
The right combination of chemicals available in nearly every grocery or hardware store could produce noxious, potentially even toxic gasses from which they wouldn’t be able to escape. Gasses strong enough to overcome them before they reached the nearest surface-access point.
Or worse.
“We’ve got to be right on top of it,” Ramses said.
Mason inched close enough to shine his light into the shadowed recess where the fallen bricks had once been. Judging by the discoloration, the granite had been exposed for decades. Unlike the piles of rubble they’d passed previously, however, this one hadn’t been shoved aside to make way for the transport the Scarecrow had used to move his victims. It sat right in the middle, forcing him to drag the travois out of the water, as evidenced by the sludge sme
ared up the sloped wall. There was something odd about the arrangement of bricks, too. Almost as though the pile had been deliberately stacked.
“One of us should hang back,” Layne whispered. “Just in case. We can’t afford to risk all of us dying at once.”
Mason stopped and squatted as low as he could possibly go. He shone his light just above the surface of the water, from one side of the tunnel to the other, and noticed two things simultaneously.
A reflection from something buried under the bricks.
And a small black dome protruding from the top of the mound.
“Turn off your light,” he said.
He took a mental snapshot and switched off his flashlight. Turned and snatched Layne’s from her grasp. Extinguished it and prayed it wasn’t already too late.
“Talk to me, Mace,” Ramses said.
Mason closed his eyes, tuned out the metronomic dripping of condensation, and concentrated on the memory of what he’d seen in that fleeting moment before he killed the lights. He described every minuscule detail, as though to grant permanence to the mental photograph that was already starting to fade.
“There’s an ornamental streetlight underneath the bricks,” he said. “Like they have in London, only smaller. Black wrought-iron frame. Glass windows. A single inverted lightbulb with a hole drilled into it, near the fitting, which someone used to fill it with fluid. Two liquids, different densities. The one that settled to the bottom is yellow and oily. The upper is clear but sparkles with what looks like glitter. You can still see it, if you look hard enough. Little glowing dots, suspended in the fluid.”
He remembered from a crash course on chemistry and terrorist applications at the Academy that substances that glowed in the dark contained some amount of phosphorous.
And with that realization, he suddenly understood exactly what the trap had been designed to do.
“The upper fluid is chlorine,” he said. “The particles suspended in it are granules of oxidized phosphorus. The bottom layer is a sulfur-based industrial solvent, like thiodiglycol. Separate, they’re stable, but catalyze the mixture of the three and you’re looking at producing mustard gas. Throw in a large-enough electrical charge and you’d have a miniature napalm bomb that would shower us all with glass and flaming chemicals, even as the gas blisters our skin and shreds our lungs.”
The Annihilation Protocol Page 36