There had to be at least fifty puncture wounds on Mikkelson’s head and neck alone. The pain must have been excruciating, but the helpless feeling of being unable to prevent those horrifying creatures from turning him into a human pincushion would have been a thousand times worse. The Scarecrow hadn’t been afforded the luxury of time to make Mikkelson suffer for days on end, which meant the agony needed to be so exquisite that he’d willingly thrust his head forward and strangle himself with the ligature before the venom took its toll.
“I count seven so far,” Layne said. She lifted the bottom edge of the flannel shirt and a wasp came with it. “Make that eight.”
“Be careful,” Mason said.
The wail of sirens drifted across the deserted park.
“I’m picking up movement on the satellite,” Gunnar said. “Multiple squad cars converging at the cordon along Terrace Drive. Get out of there before someone sees you.”
Mason looked up at the camera in the tree.
“Someone already has.” He turned to Layne. “Time to go.”
“What’s going on?”
“The Scarecrow’s been watching us the entire time. He must have called in the discovery of the body himself.”
Layne obviously understood the implications. They couldn’t afford to be caught and sidelined. She lowered herself through the hole and Mason hurried down behind her.
“The police are entering the park on foot,” Gunnar said.
“I need you to find Marchment,” Mason said. He dragged the manhole cover back into place and mounted the ladder. “We have to get to him before the Scarecrow, who undoubtedly already knows where he is.”
“… try … going to know…”
“You’re breaking up.”
Mason lost the connection as he launched himself down the wooden ladder. Layne was already halfway down and moving at a rapid click. Ramses’ light was so far to the south that it barely highlighted the walls of the tunnel in the distance.
They needed to be long gone by the time the responding officers discovered the manhole and came down here looking for Mikkelson’s killer.
Mason hit the ground right behind Layne and ran as fast as he dared. The ground was covered with chunks of rock, sporadic puddles, and all kinds of wooden and metallic scrap, not to mention the enormous rusted rails and uneven railroad ties cutting straight down the middle.
Ramses heard them coming and shone his light into their faces. He’d just reached a point where the two tracks merged into one. The tunnel narrowed by half and the mortared slate and bare granite gave way to bricks.
“The police should be discovering Mikkelson’s body at any second,” Mason said. “We need to get out of the tunnels before they’re overrun with cops. If we’re taken off the board, there’ll be no one left to stop the Scarecrow, who’s preparing to make his move on Marchment as we speak.”
He struck off deeper into the tunnel, jogging straight down the middle of the tracks. He felt, more than heard, the thrum of a train careening through the earth ahead of him. They had to be getting close.
Handmade red bricks gave way to commercial white ones, and finally to concrete. An elevated walkway appeared on the side of the tunnel, followed in short measure by rectangular pillars that supported a naked framework of iron girders. The passage curved to the left, charting a course to the east. He’d barely rounded the bend when his beam focused on a mountain of rubble that sealed off the tunnel. He pulled up short and swept his light across it. Massive chunks of granite had fallen from the ceiling, knocking down the horizontal girders and the support posts in the process.
“There has to be a way through,” Layne said.
Mason crawled up onto the barricade and picked his way over the jagged, fractured edges of stone and concrete. A thick layer of dust clung to every surface, with the exception of a patch on the rock uphill to his right, where he saw a distinct palm print. Someone had gripped the edge and used it as leverage. He scooted laterally toward it and shone his light into a narrow gap nearly flush with the ceiling.
“Over here,” he said, and squeezed inside. The passage was barely high enough to accommodate his chest and limited his depth of inspiration. For a moment, he feared he might get stuck, but he forced himself onward, squirming over broken concrete and under sharp protrusions from the roof. He wriggled out the other side, onto the end of an iron girder, and picked his way down the mountain of rubble, seemingly traveling from one century to the next in the process.
The pillars and girders were positively covered with graffiti, one layer on top of another. Trash and broken glass littered the ground, from which the tracks had been removed. The tunnel terminated against a concrete wall with an iron gate set into the lone doorway. The padlock on the latch had been broken, granting access to a narrow staircase leading down into an open space, from which the sound of his footsteps echoed.
He passed underneath an ornate brick arch and entered what must have been designed as an upscale station some fifty years ago. Mosaic tiles, most shattered or cracked, covered the walls beneath decades of accumulated spray paint. Fragments were scattered across the ground amid a modern midden of industrial refuse. The benches once bolted to the floor had been uprooted and smashed.
A tremor shivered through the ground.
The far wall was newer and utilitarian in design, a simple concrete barrier with a single inset metal door, the trim around which was buckled by the crowbar someone had used to pry it open from the other side. All Mason had to do was push it open—
A blinding light struck him a heartbeat before the train rocketed past on the far track, on the opposite side of a divider formed from girders sunken vertically into the ground every few feet. Subsequent cars thundered past at a staggering rate of speed, the faces of the passengers crammed inside a zoetropic blur. And then it was gone, stranding him once more in darkness.
Mason stepped out onto the concrete platform that ran beside the live rails.
“Was I right or was I right?” Ramses said.
While his theory about the tunnel beneath the row house on Eighty-fifth reaching the subway had borne out, it was physically impossible for anyone to have moved massive industrial canisters of Novichok along the route they’d taken to reach this point, let alone through either of the two nearly vertical surface-access hatches. Either it had been broken down into countless smaller vessels—a process that exponentially increased the chances of accidental release—and smuggled through here one container at a time or it had never been down here at all.
“Someone’s coming,” Layne said.
Mason followed her line of sight to where a light appeared in the far distance, faint at first, but growing brighter by the second. At the same moment he realized it wasn’t moving fast enough to be a train, he recognized that it was swinging from side to side. A flashlight held in the hand of someone running toward them. The officers in the park must have discovered the manhole and dispatched backup from the nearest subway station.
“Damn it.” He switched off his Maglite and sprinted in the direction the train had just gone. There were overhead lights every twenty feet, which meant they needed to round the coming bend first or they’d be caught out in the open. “There has to be a way to reach the street from the next station.”
If they could get there first, they’d be able to blend into the early-morning crowds on the platform and merge into the flow of pedestrian traffic—
More lights materialized ahead, coming straight at them from the opposite direction.
They were trapped.
The ground trembled underfoot and he heard the distant rattle of an approaching train.
They had to find a way out before the officers converged on their position. To his left: a seamless concrete wall. To his right: the southbound track, four feet down, and the northbound track, a dozen feet farther away, on the other side of the divider. Steel I beams aligned with the support posts ran horizontally overhead, beneath the arched ceiling.
&nbs
p; The headlights of a train brightened the tunnel at the farthest reaches of sight. In a matter of seconds, they’d be clearly visible to their pursuers from both directions.
Mason jumped down and hurdled the southbound track. Lunged. Planted his foot against one of the vertical girders and launched himself upward. Caught the bottom edge of the I beam. Pulled his legs up. Rolled his entire body on top, beneath the concrete ceiling.
Ramses was already hauling himself up onto the adjacent girder when Mason looked his way.
Layne was nearly a full foot shorter than either of them; there was no way she’d be able to make it on her own.
Mason leaned over the side. Squeezed his thighs around the steel. Let go with one hand and dangled upside down.
The rumble of the train bearing down on them made the entire world shake.
Layne recognized what he was doing. She sprinted toward the girder. Jumped and kicked it with her right foot. Turned as she propelled herself through the air toward his outstretched hand. Caught him just below his elbow with both hands, her momentum nearly wrenching her from his grasp before he secured a grip on her upper arm.
The headlights of the oncoming train struck her legs and stretched their shadows along the track.
She wasn’t going to make it.
The rumble became a roar.
Mason shouted with the exertion and pulled with everything he had.
Layne screamed as the train raced toward her legs.
63
Layne released Mason’s arm with her right hand and took hold of the beam. Drew her legs up. Transferred her weight to the steel. He wrapped his arm around her back and dragged her on top of him as the train screamed past mere inches below them.
Tha-thumpthumpthump. Tha-thumpthumpthump.
She reached around his chest and clung to the I beam to keep the slipstream from tearing them from their perch and hurling them out over the tracks.
The final car blew past below them and sped out of sight, its lights receding into the darkness with it.
Footsteps closed from both directions and converged underneath them. Mason caught a glimpse of navy blue uniforms and Kevlar vests bearing the words Police DHS and heard the voices of at least four men below him.
“Did you see anyone?”
“Negative. No one got past us.”
“The suspect must still be in the tunnels.”
“There’s no way we’re finding him if he is.”
“Doesn’t change the fact we’re going in there after him.”
“Radio ahead and let the units in the park know we’re coming their way from the rails.”
The officers might have been right about how the Scarecrow had entered the subway, but they were wrong about one crucial detail: He’d already gotten past them.
The chorus of running footsteps headed toward the closed platform leading back underneath Central Park.
Mason stared at Layne while he waited until he was certain the police were gone. She appeared so small and vulnerable, and yet possessed staggering inner strength belied by her size. He suddenly understood how someone as small as the Scarecrow could have overwhelmed and physically manhandled seven men larger than he was, even men with military training in their formative years. He must have spent his entire life stoking his hatred for them until it burned with the intensity of hellfire.
Layne released him and averted her eyes.
“What do you say we get out of here?” she said.
She shimmied backward down his legs until she had enough room to lower herself over the edge, then dropped to the ground with a muffled thump. By the time Mason joined her, Ramses was already up on the walkway and heading toward the next station in line, from which the second group of officers had appeared. Both teams must have already been at their respective stops when the officers in the park discovered Mikkelson’s body and the underground tunnel, which meant that Marchment had deliberately posted them there. Was he preparing for a catastrophic event on the subway or just taking routine terrorism precautions in response to the Novichok threat?
They rounded a bend and a pinprick of light appeared in the distance. It grew steadily brighter until it illuminated a subway platform lined with impatient people, all staring away from them and toward where the next southbound train would burst from the dark tunnel. The sign on the wall read: LEXINGTON AV-63 ST. They crouched in the shadows and watched two NYPD officers in full tactical gear work through the crowd on the northbound side as a train pulled into the station, forming a barrier between them.
Mason seized the opportunity and emerged from the shadows onto the platform, where he blended in with the other passengers, one of whom, he could have sworn, looked like Johan’s caretaker, Asher Ben-Menachem, but he vanished into the throngs before Mason could get a better look. He kept his head down to conceal his face from the security cameras until he was through the turnstiles and making his way up the stairs to the street. Cars honked and sirens wailed from some distance away. His phone was already ringing when his first foot hit the sidewalk. He tapped his earpiece to connect.
“Park Avenue’s a block to the west,” Gunnar said. “Start walking and try to look nonchalant. Turn right when you get there and keep going. You’ll pass a church. I’ll meet you in the parking structure on the next block up.”
“How long do we have?”
“You hear those sirens? They’re responding to a call for support at the subway station you just left.”
Police cruisers screamed toward them. One screeched to a halt against the curb beside the stairwell access, while the other raced to secure the main entrance to the station, across the street on the ground level of a brown-brick apartment building.
“There were uniformed officers posted at both of the stations near where we came out from under the park,” Mason said.
“The city always bolsters its infrastructure security around the holidays,” Gunnar said. “They don’t take any chances with two million people prepared to descend upon an open-air venue with inherent security limitations like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. There’ve been officers at every station around the clock for the past two weeks.”
“That’s before we even knew the Scarecrow was here,” Mason said. “Posting four officers seems like overkill for what have to be fairly average stations, though.”
“If they so much as suspected he was going to hit the city, the first thing they would have done is lock down the main transportation hubs.”
“Which would have triggered a panic and impeded Homeland’s movements, maybe even forced the Scarecrow’s hand.”
Mason turned right on Park Avenue, ducked under a construction awning, and wove through the foot traffic between support posts. Layne and Ramses followed, looking like they’d just crawled out of a Dumpster.
“What do you see on satellite?” Mason asked.
“Police converging on the subway stations at Fifty-seventh and Sixty-third and at least thirty guys in white jumpsuits and navy windbreakers surrounding the knoll where you found Mikkelson’s body,” Gunnar said. “And speaking of our good friend Andreas, he wasn’t heading downtown every day for fun. He was working with the research and development arm of the New York City Urban Development Corporation on a project to help transition the city to renewable energy sources.”
“That doesn’t sound like it’s in Nautilus’s best interests.”
“Fossil fuels will soon go the way of the dinosaurs. Literally. Green energy’s the wave of the future. All of the major oil companies have bowed to pressure from shareholders and environmental interests and invested heavily in both clean and renewable sources. And not just out of the goodness of their hearts, either. Within the next twenty years, the renewable energy industry is projected to produce revenue surpassing Big Oil, even in its heyday.”
“And in the meantime, Slate Langbroek gets a huge influx of pharmaceutical cash from Aebischer’s nerve gas medication and takes a huge step toward achieving the genocidal goals of the Thirteen
by killing over nine million people.”
“Wiping out one of the world’s largest cities is a big step in the right direction, but it’s nowhere close to thinning the population to a level that can be more effectively ruled.”
“Maybe New York City is just the first phase and only a small amount of the Novichok is here. The Scarecrow had plenty of time to divide it into smaller containers and ship it to every major port in the world.”
“In which case, we’re all fucked,” Ramses said from behind him.
“Stands to reason,” Gunnar said. “There’s no way someone could have moved thousands of gallons of anything in massive containers into one of the busiest subway systems in the world without anyone noticing, especially during the holiday season. He really only needs a fraction of it anyway. If someone was smart enough, he could probably figure out a central location from which trains would be leaving in all different directions at once and rig them with remote devices to slowly release the gas. They’d be carrying a deadly cloud outward at thirty miles an hour, propelling gusts straight up from vents throughout the five boroughs.”
Mason quickened his pace as more sirens joined the chorus. Cruisers streaked past on the other side of the median, which was metered by light poles adorned with banners advertising something called the Green Smart Grid at the Renaissance. The parking garage was an underground structure below a residential building. Gunnar had backed the Escalade into a space facing the entrance. He disconnected the call when he saw them descending the ramp, climbed out of the car, and tossed the keys to Ramses.
“And the Scarecrow’s had his run of the entire subway system for the last month,” Mason said. “For all we know, he’s already installed those devices on half of the trains in town.”
“He’d pick the busiest and most centralized hub he could find from which to launch the attack.”
“So we need to get there first,” Layne said.
“We don’t know which station he’s going to use and we don’t have the manpower to cover them all, but we do know one place he’s going to be for sure,” Mason said, and turned to Gunnar. “We need to find Marchment. Tell me Alejandra heard back from Anomaly.”
The Annihilation Protocol Page 38