The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  “Unfortunately, I do,” he said, and glanced at the list of interview candidates beside Mikkelson’s honeycombed face. He had to concentrate on maintaining a neutral expression to keep from betraying his surprise at the sight of the last name on the list.

  Slate Langbroek, chairman of the executive board of directors for Royal Nautilus Petroleum.

  At this very moment, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who was seemingly helping the Scarecrow enact his professional agenda while trying to keep from finding himself mounted to a cross in the middle of Central Park, was preparing to interview the man responsible for the Novichok threat, quite possibly even leading the Scarecrow to him for the coup de grâce, which would signify the end of his personal vendetta and the enactment of his professional obligations.

  Like Anomaly had intimated, however, there was an inherent flaw in that logic. If Marchment were an active participant in the plot to release the Novichok, why was he anywhere near New York City? And why was Langbroek here at all? Why in the world would he hire someone like the Scarecrow, who wanted to kill everyone responsible for his childhood trauma, when it was ultimately Langbroek’s company that had caused it?

  An agent pushed between them to get Algren’s attention.

  “I have the governor on his direct line again,” she said. “What am I supposed to tell him?”

  “The same thing you told the mayor. He’s just going to have to cancel—”

  “He said to tell you that in New York we don’t knuckle under for anyone. He’s not canceling anything. He’ll bring the entire NYPD and the National Guard with him if he has to.”

  Algren groaned.

  “I can see myself out,” Mason said, and headed for the door.

  He passed the agents coordinating directly with their sister task forces in Baltimore, D.C., and Philly and realized that, for better or worse, he’d put all of his eggs in one basket. With countless tourists in town and millions of celebrators preparing to flood the streets, the odds were definitely in his favor, but if he was wrong …

  Mason closed the door to the operations center behind him and made his way to the elevator. He waited until he was outside the building before calling Gunnar.

  “Did you get it?” he asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Gunnar said. “She must have called him about ten seconds after you left her office.”

  Mason smiled and hung up the phone. He’d known Algren wouldn’t be able to resist taking credit for deciphering the scarecrow design in the cornfield. Not only had she just given them Marchment’s phone number, which Gunnar could use to ascertain his GPS coordinates; she’d delivered a message to the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security that they knew what had happened at Edgewood. So even if they couldn’t use Marchment to lead them to the Scarecrow, they’d be able to count on Marchment to eventually lead the Scarecrow to them.

  Ramses pulled to the curb just as Mason hit the sidewalk. He opened the door and climbed into the backseat beside Gunnar.

  “What’s with the Rangers getup?” Ramses asked.

  “It was either this or the Giants.”

  “Not feeling the G-men right about now, are you?”

  “You could say that.”

  Ramses smirked and hit the gas.

  66

  The bogeyman had come, as the Scarecrow had known he would. Obedient to the end. Willing to do whatever he was told, no questions asked. All it had taken was a strategically timed text message with the hotel’s name, room number, and instructions to wait inside should the presumed sender not have arrived yet, and he’d come running. And, as expected, he’d come alone so that none of his underlings would suspect how completely he was owned by the man under whose name the room was registered.

  Marchment knocked one final time before testing the knob and finding it unlocked. The Scarecrow sensed the bogeyman’s indecision and prepared to improvise, but it relaxed when it heard the soft squeal of hinges and footsteps entering the suite. Even after all these years, it recognized those sounds and experienced the same ingrained physiological response. In that moment, it was once more a helpless child, its heart hammering in its chest, its pulse rushing in its ears. Its breathing accelerated, producing a rasping sound from the respirator of its gas mask and threatening to loosen the stoma cover on its neck. It battled the fear, forcing it down into the hollow core of its physical vessel, reminding itself that the child was dead. The Scarecrow had killed it and usurped its form, mercifully saving it from a lifetime of misery that could be traced back to the man on the other side of the wall.

  This was the lone point of weakness in its plan. All Marchment had to do was turn around and leave and it would never be able to isolate him again. It had to trust that the bogeyman’s fear and confusion would override his better judgment, that the message it had sent him using the bodies of the other surviving men from Edgewood would convince him to take just this one risk so he could find out why this was happening to someone like him, someone who was supposed to be untouchable. More important, he had to find out if the Novichok was really here and how quickly he needed to get out of the city.

  Both Marchment and his master had come to this dreary metropolis for one reason and one reason alone: They’d known that this was one of the few places in the world where the Novichok wasn’t. Or at least that was what they’d thought. Quintus didn’t even suspect that his plan had been co-opted by another, who’d given the Scarecrow something far more valuable than money; he’d given it a collection of classified black-and-white films that showed what had happened to it as a child, not to mention the men responsible for its never-ending misery, men who, by the time the clock struck midnight, would all be dead. And of equal consequence to its new master, Tertius Decimus, the Langbroek name would be destroyed and he would ascend within the Thirteen on the deaths of nine million people, a fraction of the carnage Quintus had envisioned, but more than enough to allow the man known as Thirteenth to implement the machinations of the insurrection he’d started with his subversion of the release of Secundus’s flu virus.

  It was a double cross on an apocalyptic scale. Surely Langbroek was beginning to understand that he’d never had any control over the events he’d set in motion, that he’d been manipulated from the start by an adversary of his own creation. Neither he nor Marchment had so much as suspected who the Scarecrow truly was, at least not until they learned the identities of the victims it had left for them in the cornfield. Maybe they’d even dismissed the killings as coincidental clear up until they found Raymond in Central Park, and now, with Mikkelson’s body undoubtedly being swarmed by investigators, there was no mistaking what was about to happen to them. Within a matter of hours, they would experience the same suffering they’d inflicted upon it.

  And the coup of Tertius Decimus would begin in earnest.

  The front door of the suite closed with a nearly inaudible click. The Scarecrow held its breath and listened. Several seconds passed before it heard footsteps in the interior hallway. It smiled beneath its mask, knowing with complete certainty that it had Marchment now.

  In its mind, it envisioned not the aged man with the silver hair and expensive suit, but the younger version with the buzz cut and olive-colored uniform, walking down the sterile white corridor with its father. It imagined the bogeyman raising the mask he’d used to expose it to the chemicals, but rather than pinning it over the mouth and nose of a child, he affixed it to his own face. And instead of inhaling sarin, he was breathing diethyl ether halogenated with fluorine, oxygen, and nitrous oxide, a homemade anesthetic of its own design, which was currently diffusing into the main room from a vaporizer unit hidden behind a chair, an invisible gas that would render him unconscious in under three minutes.

  The Scarecrow silently opened the closet door, stepped out into the bedroom, and crept down the hallway into the main room, where the bogeyman stood silhouetted against a circular window with red velvet curtains, his hands clasped behind his back. It wa
s an irresistible view that people paid tens of thousands of dollars a night to see, one within mere feet of the source of the faintly sweet-smelling gas.

  Marchment flickered before its eyes, as though projected from an eight-millimeter reel, only every other frame showed a different version of the bogeyman. Old man and then young. Suit and then uniform. Silver hair and then buzz cut. And yet the Scarecrow felt no corresponding change within itself. The child was dead and all that remained was a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together not from mismatched parts but from biomechanical components; rotted not by death but by disease; animated not by electricity but by hatred.

  The bogeyman swayed ever so slightly and had to brace himself against the wall. He stiffened at the realization that something was terribly wrong and glanced to his left. His eyes met those of the Scarecrow in the reflection from the window and the bogeyman saw it—truly saw it—for the first time.

  Marchment turned around, but by then it was already too late. His legs went out from underneath him and he collapsed to his knees. He grabbed onto the Scarecrow and tried to pull himself back to his feet.

  “No…” he said. His voice was watery from the anesthesia, his eyes unfocused, his grip growing weaker by the second.

  The sensation of his hands upon it ignited a fiery rage inside the Scarecrow. It grabbed the lamp from the end table and swung it with all of its might. The base struck Marchment squarely in the forehead, knocking him backward and spattering the window with a crimson arc. He folded in reverse, his body contorting awkwardly until his legs twisted out from underneath him and he collapsed onto his back. Blood trickled from his temple and dripped to the black-and-white patterned carpet.

  The Scarecrow could have stayed there all day watching the bogeyman bleed, but it had so much more in store for him.

  And so much more blood to shed.

  67

  “I’ve got a fix on Marchment’s GPS,” Gunnar said. “He’s at the St. Regis Hotel.”

  Ramses wove through the congestion, braking and accelerating in sudden bursts, jerking the wheel to merge the SUV into gaps that hardly appeared large enough.

  “I need an address,” Ramses said.

  “Two East Fifty-fifth Street.” Gunnar’s laptop bounced on his thighs, forcing him to hold it in place with one hand and type with the other. He minimized one window and maximized another. “Just off Fifth Ave.”

  “What the hell is he doing there?” Layne asked.

  “Meeting with Slate Langbroek,” Mason said.

  Gunner turned to face him and did an almost comical double take.

  “Langbroek’s in town? Why in God’s name would he be here when the entire city’s about to be enveloped in a cloud of Novichok?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Mason said. His phone vibrated and he answered it without checking the caller ID. “Mason.”

  “James?”

  His father’s voice caught him by surprise.

  “Now’s not a good time, Dad.”

  “Are you still in the District?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Ramses locked up the brakes and the tires screamed.

  “What was that?”

  “Like I said, not the best time.”

  “Please tell me you aren’t back in New York.”

  “I’m going to have to call you back.”

  “You need to get out of there, son. You’re in over your head. I was just informed that we have verified intel of a possible terrorist threat in Manhattan.”

  “You’re certain it’s in New York City and not Philadelphia or D.C.?”

  “Just get out of the city. Let counterterrorism handle it. From what I understand, you’re not even supposed to be there.”

  “Turn left here,” Gunnar said. “Two more blocks and it’ll be on your left.”

  “Look, Dad. I—”

  “Please, James,” the senator said. Mason detected a note of pleading in his father’s voice that he’d never heard there before. “For once in your life, do as I ask.”

  He felt a pang of guilt, but there was nothing he could do about it. Someone needed to stop the Scarecrow and he was the only one who could do it.

  “I’ll take it under consideration.”

  “You have to be the most exasperating—”

  Mason terminated the call and stuffed the phone back into his jacket pocket.

  “Like I said, Langbroek’s movements are cloaked, so I can’t tell you when he arrived,” Gunnar said, “but there’s definitely someone registered in the Imperial Suite at the St. Regis under his name.”

  “Is Marchment with him?”

  “All I can say is that his GPS beacon’s static at that location.”

  “Drop me off at the front door,” Mason said. “You guys make sure no one slips out the back.”

  “What are we supposed to do if they try?” Layne asked. “Arrest them?”

  Mason didn’t reply. Arresting Langbroek was the furthest thing from his mind. All he cared about was preventing the release of the Novichok, by any means necessary.

  An eighteen-story Beaux Arts monolith rose above them, an opulent stone monument to the luxury and excess of early twentieth-century industrialism. He craned his neck in an effort to see the top. Somewhere on the highest floor was a man he believed to be a member of the Thirteen.

  Mason threw open the door and jumped out before Ramses had even stopped. He rounded the trunk and sprinted across the street toward the black-and-white awning above the entrance to the hotel. A porter in a green vest made a move to greet him, but Mason blew past him with a flash of his badge. He ran straight across the marble-tiled lobby to the elevator corridor and paced back and forth in front of four golden doors until one finally opened.

  A man in a black jacket with platinum name tag strode toward him, wearing a forced smile and carrying a short-range transceiver.

  Mason pressed the button for the top floor again and again until the golden panels whispered shut in the concierge’s face. The floor shuddered and he watched the numbers climb as he ascended.

  His heart hammered against his rib cage. He clenched and unclenched his fists. Felt the reassuring weight of his Glock in its holster.

  The man registered in the Imperial Suite was one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. He was also directly responsible for the murder of Mason’s wife and the subsequent annihilation of her family tree. He’d used the Thorntons to help modify a flu virus deadly enough to decimate the global population and thrown them away when he was done with them. He’d conspired with the Hoyl, and now the Scarecrow, to murder millions of people, and for what? Mason’s former partner could romanticize it all he wanted, claim the Thirteen were saving the world from drowning in its own numbers, but when it came right down to it, Kane had been wrong. This was all about the money. Langbroek stood to make billions from a medication designed to counteract the symptoms of the very gas he intended to release.

  The elevator dinged to announce Mason’s arrival. The doors opened on a tan-carpeted hallway, at the end of which were the twin paneled doors of the Imperial Suite. On the other side was a monster the likes of which the world had never known. Or at least one of thirteen.

  Mason knocked.

  His stealth phone vibrated against his hip, but he silenced it.

  Knocked again.

  His pulse thumped so hard in his temples that the edges of his vision throbbed. He listened for voices on the other side. For the sound of approaching footsteps.

  Again, his phone vibrated. He sent the call to voice mail with a swipe of his thumb.

  All he had to do was reach underneath his jacket, draw his weapon, and with one bullet he could end the greatest threat to humanity that no one would ever know about.

  He raised his fist and pounded on the door hard enough to make it rattle in its frame.

  Only silence from the other side.

  His phone vibrated again and he realized he’d been played. A man accustomed to hiding his movements would
n’t stay under his own name. The Scarecrow had already been waiting when Marchment arrived. He unholstered his phone and answered it.

  “Goddamn it, Mason!” Layne said before he could utter a single syllable. “You need to get down to the parking garage. Right now!”

  The ground seemed to fall out from beneath him.

  He hooked his Bluetooth to his ear and transferred the call. Stepped back, braced himself, and landed a solid kick right between the handles. The doors parted with a loud crack and slammed into the walls to either side of the foyer. He drew his weapon and entered in a shooter’s stance.

  “There’s a laundry cart down here,” Layne said. “The cloth kind. With a lot of blood soaked into it. And it’s still damp.”

  A table with fresh flowers was set in the entryway. The ornamental lighting reflected from black marble tile so glossy that it looked like an oil spill, save for the twin tire tracks running down the middle. To his left: a corridor terminating against a wall displaying original artwork, to either side of which was a doorway to a room outside his range of sight. Straight ahead was the master bedroom. To his right: the living room, where an end table rested on its side beside the lamp that had once stood upon it.

  “It looks like someone wheeled the cart out of the service elevator and to a space reserved for delivery vehicles,” Layne said.

  There was a black-and-white-patterned area rug on the hardwood floor. A mahogany coffee table surrounded by formal furniture covered with decorative pillows. Red velvet drapes hung beside circular recessed windows that reminded him of rifle sights. The one straight ahead overlooked Fifty-fifth Street and seemingly the entire city to the north, while the one to his right revealed a view of the sky above Park Avenue, marred by a high-velocity blood spatter on the glass. An iPhone rested on the cushion of the window seat, its screen a crimson smear.

  Marchment had been standing right where Mason was now when someone approached him from behind and waited for him to turn around before bludgeoning him upside the head.

  “It’s not a public garage, is it?” he asked.