The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  “Valet parking only.”

  “So it’s access-controlled. The Scarecrow had to have a code or key card to get in.” He hurriedly checked the master bedroom. There were no suitcases or toiletries. He smelled something sweet, a scent that didn’t mesh with his surroundings. “This was his plan all along.”

  “What?”

  “We’re being set up.” Sirens erupted in the distance. “Get out of there, Layne. Langbroek was never here. The Scarecrow lured Marchment up to the suite and took him. And we walked right into the trap.”

  He remembered the expression on the face of the concierge in the lobby. He’d recognized that something was wrong and undoubtedly called security straight away. They’d probably been watching their cameras when he kicked in the front door of their twenty-grand-a-night Imperial Suite and were already on their way up.

  Mason holstered his pistol and ran for the door. Bolted across the hall and into the open stairwell at the same time the elevator dinged at the far end of the corridor. The white marble stairs were ornamental, designed for aesthetics over functionality. They were surprisingly steep and narrow, the railings polished wood with elaborate gold banisters. He jumped to the landing. Grabbed the rail. Swung around the tight curve, past a curtained window. Hit the next set of stairs, going way too fast, and nearly went sprawling into the seventeenth-floor hallway. Regained his balance and propelled himself toward the next flight. Skipped down them as fast as could.

  “We’re out of time,” he whispered. “Now that the Scarecrow has Marchment, he’s free to release the Novichok.”

  He paused on the sixteenth floor. Pressed his back to the wall. Hoped the men on the top floor hadn’t heard the echo of his footsteps from the marble stairs. Waited for them to pass the mouth of the stairwell on their way to the Imperial Suite, but they saw through his deception. A man with a broad chest and dark hair leaned over the railing.

  “He’s down there!”

  Mason hurled himself to the next landing. Rebounded from the wall beside the window. Launched himself down the next flight.

  A drumroll of footsteps overhead, coming down fast. Three men at least. One of them called for backup.

  The wail of sirens grew closer. It wouldn’t be long before the police had the building surrounded.

  “You have to go without me,” Mason whispered. “I’ll call you if I make it out of here.”

  Around one bend, down the stairs, around another. And another and another.

  The sixth-floor landing blew past beside him. It sounded like he was distancing himself from his pursuers, but he couldn’t spare a glance up and risk giving up ground in the process.

  A riot of voices flooded the stairwell from below.

  He knew exactly what that meant.

  A second security unit mounted the stairs from the main floor. They were going to attempt a pincer maneuver to catch him in the middle. Such a bold move undoubtedly meant they’d already disabled the elevators, so he’d find himself trapped if he attempted to elude the men on one of the few remaining floors between them. Even if there was a second stairwell on the far side, security was likely already rushing straight up it, with someone remotely coordinating their movements from a control center with a bank of monitors.

  By the time he reached the third floor, he could see the hands of the men gripping the rails as they ascended. They couldn’t have been more than twenty vertical feet down.

  He maintained his pace. If a confrontation was inevitable, then he’d rather force the issue with the men coming up. With his momentum, he could easily take down two of them. Any more than that and he ran the risk of the team above him catching up. Maybe he could take them all, but not before the police had every exit covered.

  At the same time he hit the second floor, the shadows of the men coming up the stairs fell upon the landing below him. A pair of men rounded the bend a heartbeat later. Their eyes widened at the sight of him and they reached for their weapons.

  The footsteps from above grew ever closer. Someone shouted that they had him surrounded.

  Two more men appeared on the landing below him. One of them raised his hands in a placating gesture.

  Mason climbed up onto the railing. He was twenty feet up, twenty-five at the most. If he bent his knees on impact and rolled to dispel his momentum, he might not break his legs.

  “Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be.”

  “Too late for that,” Mason said.

  He stepped out over the nothingness and felt his stomach rise into his chest.

  One of the security guards instinctively reached for him as he plummeted past.

  Mason seized the opportunity and caught him by the wrist. Pulled him hard against the rail, nearly right over the edge. Used the momentum to swing to the first-floor landing. Barely cleared the railing. Let go and was airborne for a split second before he hit the ground on his side. Slid into the hallway. Popped up and ran down the remaining stairs. Past the lobby and through the door to the street. Darted left and dove behind a van parked against the curb as a police cruiser screamed past. Rolled over the curb and beneath the undercarriage. Scurried out the other side on the asphalt. Lunged to his feet and sprinted toward the opposite sidewalk, using the van to screen him from the exit as his pursuers burst from the door.

  He’d barely rounded the corner when he heard shouting behind him. Row houses and leafless deciduous trees blew past to either side. Entire city blocks passed in a blur. The voices and sirens faded into the distance. He hurdled the wrought-iron fence enclosing the stoop of a five-story unit and landed in the recessed stairwell of the garden-level apartment.

  Mason removed his stealth phone from its holster and called Gunnar, who answered on the first ring. He sighed in relief and slumped to his rear end on a crust of ice and dead leaves.

  “I’m going to need a ride.”

  68

  “We have to get off the street,” Layne said. “The entire city is one great big camera.”

  “And what do you propose we do?” Ramses asked. “Take the subway?”

  “They’ll need time to check the security footage far enough back to find me getting out of this car,” Mason said. “They’ll deal with the blood in the suite first. The hotel’s primary concern will be a potential murder generating negative publicity, and the NYPD’s going to find itself embroiled in a turf war with the DHS once the name under which the room was registered crosses the wire and Algren can’t get ahold of Marchment.”

  “They’re going to assume you were responsible for whatever happened in that room,” Ramses said. “Once they ID you, every cop in the city will be looking for this vehicle. If they find us, there’ll be no one left to stop the Scarecrow.”

  He jerked the wheel to avoid hitting a cab that crossed into his lane without signaling.

  “Would it be too much to ask you not to switch lanes for ten seconds?” Gunnar said. He was practically folded in half over his laptop in a futile attempt to hold it still while he typed. Ramses just chuckled and switched lanes again. “Real mature.”

  “The Scarecrow killed Mikkelson a lot faster than his previous victims,” Mason said. “We don’t have much time to find where he took Marchment before he finishes his personal vendetta and moves on to fulfilling his professional obligations.”

  “If we’re right and he intends to release the Novichok on the subway, we don’t have a prayer of finding it in time,” Layne said. “There are more than six thousand individual cars servicing nearly five hundred stations on twenty-seven lines. Even if we knew exactly which cars he rigged, they’re in constant motion all around the city.”

  “Then our only option is to find the Scarecrow.”

  “This is him right here,” Gunnar said. He turned his laptop so Mason could see the screen. “I lifted this from the security system at the St. Regis.”

  The image had been acquired by a camera mounted near the ceiling and was time-stamped approximately five minutes before they’d arrived. It sho
wed the back of a white van directly underneath it and a row of expensive vehicles parked on the other side of the narrow lane. The Scarecrow had been captured in the process of loading the body into the back of the van from the cart, toppling it in the process. He stood in profile to the camera, the brim of a white baseball cap concealing the upper half of his face. His oversized white uniform hung from his diminutive frame, as he struggled to manhandle the larger man into the vehicle.

  “There has to be a better picture,” Mason said.

  “You’re lucky to have this one,” Gunnar said.

  “Can you run his face?”

  “Not a chance. I need a minimum of thirteen points of comparison.”

  “Damn it.”

  A beacon flashed in the upper right corner of the monitor. Gunnar furrowed his brow and buried his face in the screen again. He didn’t speak for several minutes while he opened and closed windows with blinding speed.

  “Here’s something interesting,” he finally said. “Nakamura slash Matsuda’s obituary said he was survived by two children, but I can’t find any record of them.”

  “Other than two empty seats on an airplane,” Mason said.

  “Precisely.”

  “He took two kids back with him from Edgewood?” Layne asked.

  “I can’t prove it, but I told you when Matsuda returned to Japan he founded a company called Kenkō Pharmaceuticals, right? He remained CEO until his passing, at which time the company was acquired by Kokoro Pharmaceuticals and absorbed into its corporate brand, effectively dissolving Kenkō and making his legal heirs, Kaemon and Kameko Matsuda, extraordinarily rich, after which they promptly disappeared. Assuming they’d ever been there at all. I can’t find any record of their births or deaths, let alone where they are now.”

  “Twins?”

  “Without access to anything resembling actual documentation, we can only speculate. Based on the names, though, I’d say we’re looking at a boy and a girl.”

  “Kaemon Matsuda,” Mason said, as though tasting the words. In his mind, the Scarecrow had become a larger-than-life, mythological construct. It was almost a letdown to learn that he was only human, and yet somehow that made his atrocities even worse.

  “If the good doctor was experimenting on them at Edgewood in the seventies, why would they stay with him all the way into the nineties?” Layne asked.

  “Because—for better or worse—he was their father,” Mason said.

  “Some of Unit 731’s more reprehensible crimes included the rape and forced impregnation of female prisoners to test the vertical transmission of diseases,” Gunnar said. “There’s no record of how many children were conceived in such a manner or how many survived whatever experimentation was conducted on them after birth. It’s possible he picked right back up where he’d left off at Edgewood.”

  “The military would never sanction rape,” Layne said.

  “True, but how hard would it be to secure the cooperation of a female volunteer being treated with experimental psychoactive drugs?”

  “Even if they weren’t biologically his,” Mason said, “he could have raised them not only to think they were but to believe that he’d saved them from whatever cruelties they’d been subjected to. For all we know, they viewed him as the heroic father figure who rescued them from the monsters at Edgewood.”

  “Surely they would have learned about their father being a war criminal,” Layne said. “That’s not the kind of secret a guy can hide forever.”

  “The government of Japan has yet to even formally acknowledge the atrocities committed by Unit 731,” Gunnar said. “Publicly outing the participants wouldn’t serve the official narrative.”

  “Accusations, then. It’s not like they lived in a vacuum.”

  “What if they weren’t Matsudas?” Mason asked.

  “They were at least long enough to inherit twenty million dollars each,” Gunnar said.

  “Maybe after his death, but what if up until that point they considered themselves Nakamuras? It makes sense to have given them the same last name as the man taking them out of the country. They would have needed some form of identification, right?”

  “And the Department of Defense only records the names of its personnel. The identification of all nongovernment passengers are purged after a year. They’d be listed as—here we go—‘minor children.’”

  “Can you find anything on Kaemon and Kameko Nakamura?”

  Even as he said it, he felt everything starting to come together, as though he were both a participant in and a witness to an event of historical magnitude, a moment of destiny.

  “What do you know?” Gunnar said. “Dr. Kaemon Nakamura. Graduated from the University of Tokyo with a degree in biochemistry. Doctorate in biomedical engineering from Kyoto University. Worked at Tokyo Medical University Hospital. Sat on the board of Kokoro Pharmaceuticals through the acquisition of Kenkō. And that’s where his trail ends.”

  “It can’t be,” Mason said. “What about his sister?”

  “Dr. Kameko Nakamura earned her bachelor’s in organic chemistry, followed by a medical degree. Both from the same schools her brother attended. Both the same years.”

  “What are they, Siamese twins?” Ramses said. “’Cause I’ve got to tell you, that would make for some seriously creepy shit.”

  “Obviously joined at the hip in some capacity, although all I can find about either of them are a handful of publication credits and mentions in professional societies.”

  “Which professional societies?” Mason asked.

  “The Japan Medical and Hospital Associations. World Medical Association. The International Supplement and Pharmaceutical Standardization Organization—”

  “The last two,” Mason said. “Remember the picture of Mosche and Chenhav at the SLIP conference in Copenhagen? Those were the societies they were there to represent.”

  “Jesus. You’re right.”

  Gunnar hammered the keys for several seconds, then flinched as though he’d been struck. Closed his eyes. His lips moved as though in silent debate with himself.

  Mason leaned closer and tilted the laptop on his old friend’s thighs to better see the image on the screen. It was from August 1994. The same Twentieth Assembly of the Society for Lasting International Peace where the Israeli scientists had been photographed with Andreas Mikkelson. None of them was in this picture, though. It was a group photo that showed a dozen men and women dressed in fancy suits and gowns, smiling for the camera. The caption read “Representatives of the international medical community,” but the people were identified only by organization, not by name. The man and woman of Asian origin at the far left of the image represented the Japan Medical Association.

  If they weren’t twins, they could have easily passed as such. Kaemon was maybe an inch or two taller than Kameko, but both were of similar build. Her hair was longer and cut in a way meant to deemphasize her face, presumably in an attempt to downplay the vertical scars running down her cheeks from underneath her sunglasses.

  Kaemon wore his bangs long, a tuxedo, and a blue tie that matched his sister’s full-length gown. He’d been captured in that split second after allowing his smile to fade, when his true expression of discomfort was plainly evident. Not to mention the grafts covering his forehead and nose, which had a vaguely spiderweb appearance. His sister held the crook of his arm in an almost intimate manner. It took Mason a moment to realize it was because she was blind.

  He used his thumb to cover the upper half of Kaemon’s face. He couldn’t be completely certain, but it looked an awful lot like the image capture of the Scarecrow standing on the street corner with the newspaper held up to his chin.

  Gunnar swiveled his computer to face him and again started typing.

  “Do you think—?” Mason started to ask, but Gunnar raised a finger to silence him.

  “What did you find?” Layne asked.

  “A picture of the Nakamuras at the same function where the dead men from behind the wall at the
slaughterhouse were photographed with Andreas Mikkelson.”

  “You’re sure it’s them?”

  “They aren’t identified by name, but what are the odds?”

  “One hundred percent,” Gunnar said. “There’s no record of either of them after they sold their father’s company, but I can tell you that the majority of their inheritance was used as startup capital for a Swiss company called NexGen Biotech, which is currently one of the leading designers of implantable medical devices and prosthetics in the world. Listed among its subsidiaries are asset management groups for both its corporate facilities and global investment properties. NexGen Asset Management handles the former, while the latter is delegated to a real estate holding company called Integrity Group International, which just happens to own the row house on Fifty-third Street where we found the tunnel to the Old Croton Aqueduct.”

  “You said at the time that Integrity owned several other properties around town,” Mason said.

  “It does, although it’s not what it owns that stands out, but, rather, what’s underneath it.”

  69

  The New York Office of Integrity Group International was little more than a pair of industrial doors behind the InterContinental Barclay New York and across the street from the side of the Waldorf-Astoria. They might have missed it entirely were it not for the discreet blue awning with the address in tiny white numbers and the security keypad beside the door. And the white van parked up on the sidewalk in front of it. Ramses drove past it once before finding an underground parking garage a few blocks away, where they left Gunnar with the engine running and his laptop propped on the steering wheel.

  The late-afternoon shadows of the skyscrapers fell heavily upon Forty-ninth Street, especially in the block immediately east of Park Avenue, where there were no storefront windows or neon signs. The snow had turned to sleet that assailed them from behind on the gusting wind. There was no one else on the street, despite the bustle a couple hundred feet away.

  “You ready to work your magic?” Mason asked.