The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  “I’m already in the security system,” Gunnar said through his earpiece. “Let me know when to open the door. I have satellite imagery of just about the entire area, but you’re in something of a blind spot.”

  “There’s a single security camera beside the awning. See what you can do about disrupting the feed just long enough for us to get inside.”

  “Now?”

  “Give us about ten more seconds.”

  He was reaching for the handle when he heard the thud of the lock disengaging and a droning buzz behind the heavy steel door. He drew it open and held it for Ramses and Layne before ducking out of the storm and closing it behind him. They found themselves in a concrete corridor with electrical boxes on one side and a sliding pass-through window with the Integrity Group International logo on the other. He could see the entirety of the small office, which looked like every other he’d ever been in. The door was closed and displayed a placard labeled BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

  “There’s nothing here,” he whispered.

  “You’ll find a staircase at the end of the hall,” Gunnar said. “Just to the left of the rear entrance to the kitchen of the restaurant next to the Barclay.”

  The muffled clatter of plates and silverware and the scents of pasta sauce and kitchen trash radiated through the steel door. Plastic racks used for washing glassware were stacked on a dolly beside it, nearly concealing the mouth of the narrow corridor to the left.

  Mason drew his weapon, crouched against the wall, and took a quick peek around the corner.

  “I’m looking at it now.”

  He clicked on his flashlight and aligned it with his pistol. Gestured for the others to wait behind him. Descended slowly. One foot and then the other. Sweeping his light across the floor and the ceiling in search of trip wires and sensors.

  “The hotel was built nearly a century ago on top of the underground tracks of what was once the New York Central Railroad,” Gunnar said. “It had its own station, which, like the tracks, is no longer in service.”

  Sporadic droplets of blood on the concrete stairs led him down into the darkness. There was no bulb in the overhead fixture. Pipes and conduits emerged from the ceiling and guided him toward an open machine room, inside of which he could hear the thrum of flowing water. There was a second door to his right. Blood smeared on the knob. Solid steel with a digital keypad mounted beside it. Closed-circuit cameras facing it from every available angle.

  “There’s a second security door,” Mason whispered.

  “I’m on it.”

  A metallic thud echoed from inside.

  “Can you tell if there are any counterincursion measures inside?”

  “You mean like a security system or laser sensors?”

  “If he was going to booby-trap one place, I’d have to believe it would be this one.”

  “I don’t see anything, but it would have to be hardwired to the grid for me to be able to detect it.”

  Mason glanced up the stairs at Ramses and Layne, then back at the door. Quickly scanned the seams for trip wires. Turned the knob. Slowly. Nudged it open.

  The smell that billowed from inside made his stomach clench. It was one he associated not with the dead, but with the dying. Sickness and ammonia. Chemicals consuming flesh. He forced himself to breathe through his mouth and shouldered the door inward, just wide enough to squeeze into the foyer.

  A light flickered from somewhere ahead, limning the walls of an industrial corridor. Tongue-depressor scarecrows hung from the ceiling, all of them wrapped in yarn the deep red color of arterial blood. They turned ever so slightly with the air currents of his passage, their shadows creating the sensation of movement all around him. The floor was bare concrete, cracked and repeatedly patched, the walls little more than wooden frames covered with rice paper. They were just opaque enough to conceal the contents of what appeared to be four distinct rooms in a linear sequence, down the narrow hallway branching from the main living space, in the center of which was the source of the vile aroma.

  A hospital bed surrounded by monitors, drip infusers, and warming units stocked with bags of saline and chemotherapy drugs dominated the space. The man underneath the covers was barely substantial enough to form a human-shaped bulge. His chest rose and fell slowly, in time with the clicking sound of the mechanical ventilator. His face was gaunt, his cheekbones prominent, and his closed eyes recessed. Tubes slithered from his mouth and nose, IVs from his arm. A bag of urine hung from the side of the bed, its contents a dark shade of yellow bordering on orange.

  Mason turned at the sound of footsteps. Layne’s light flashed across him and settled on the bed.

  “What the hell is this?” Ramses said.

  Mason glanced back at the body. Furrowed his brow. This was definitely the same man from the picture taken at the SLIP conference. He wore a wig that had been styled so that the bangs covered his scarred forehead and deformed nose, to which a delicate layer of makeup had been applied. He’d been dressed in a charcoal suit with a silk ascot and matching handkerchief, as though a mortician were in the midst of preparing him to be loaded into his coffin.

  “Kaemon Nakamura,” he said.

  “Jesus,” Layne whispered. “That means—”

  “Kameko Nakamura is the Scarecrow.”

  They’d been wrong about everything from the start.

  “Look at the monitor,” Ramses said.

  Squiggly colored lines crossed a screen displaying Kaemon’s blood pressure, heart rate, pulse oxygenation, and EKG rhythm. The sine waves barely strayed from the horizontal, but that wasn’t what had caught Ramses’ eye so much as the oxygen tanks strapped to the wheeled post. Someone had removed the nozzles, bound them together with duct tape, and hardwired them to the monitor.

  Mason recognized its function immediately.

  It was an improvised explosive device, the monitor serving as the detonator.

  Once the input flatlined, rather than sounding an alarm, the bomb would go off, cremating Kaemon and incinerating any evidence that he’d ever been here. And judging by the readings, it wouldn’t be long before that happened. Arming it meant that wherever Kameko was now, she wasn’t coming back.

  The endgame had been set in motion.

  70

  There was no time to disarm the IED and they couldn’t take the risk of inadvertently setting it off. Finding the Scarecrow before she released the Novichok was all that mattered now. They were just going to have to hope Kaemon survived a little while longer.

  Mason raised his pistol and followed the lone corridor deeper into the darkness. He glanced into the first room, his light sweeping across an industrial washbasin under an exposed spigot, to which a showerhead on a rubber hose had been mounted. The smell emanating from the rusted drain suggested it also served a secondary purpose.

  “How long do you think they’ve been living down here?” Layne asked.

  Mason could only shake his head. He was having a hard time rationalizing the implications of what they’d found. Kameko had brought her brother down here and taken care of him for what had to have been years, knowing the whole time that he would never leave this place. She’d been sitting in the darkness, listening to her brother slowly dying, and doing nothing but plotting her vengeance against the men who had hurt them as children.

  There was a glaring hole in the center of his theory, however. Kameko couldn’t possibly be the Scarecrow.…

  She was blind.

  “Did you ever get the list of participants in the lawsuit against Edgewood?” Mason asked.

  “Yeah,” Gunnar said, “but I haven’t even had time to look at the file.”

  “Do me a favor and open it now, okay?”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Trust me,” Mason said. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

  Layne’s light passed behind the adjacent paper wall, inside of which was a low wooden platform with a thin futon mattress. The walls were decorated with bamboo scrolls featuring traditiona
l Japanese artwork ranging from koi and pagodas to samurais and mountain ranges. And a figure wearing a conical straw hat and hanging from a cross, the artistic representation of the yarn dolls hanging all around them.

  Kuebiko.

  The Scarecrow.

  “Neither of them is listed,” Gunnar said, “but the attorney’s retainer was paid from a NexGen discretionary account.”

  “Why, exactly, are they suing?”

  Mason entered the next room in the series. On his right was a wooden bench with a portable chemical fume hood, beneath which were a distilling flask, a stoppered vial, and a veritable apothecary of amber containers with handwritten labels: hexane, methanol, ammonia, sulfuric acid, and morning glory seeds. On his left was a stainless-steel table with an inset drain. It was covered with bloody gauze and sponges and a mess of surgical implements. If Marchment wasn’t already dead, he was definitely well on his way.

  “More than half of the complainants in the class-action suit reported some form of cancer,” Gunnar said. “Most of them blood- or bone-related. Nearly all suffer from neurological disorders of varying severity, from tics to paralysis. Depression. Multiple sclerosis. The list goes on and on.”

  “There are chemo drugs down here,” Mason said, “but it looks like Kaemon’s been beyond their reach for a while.”

  “You think Kameko’s sick, too?”

  “That would explain the Scarecrow’s lack of an exit strategy.”

  “And her desire to kill every last one of the men who did this to them.”

  The rice-paper wall of the next room glowed faintly purple from the black-light bulb illuminating a circular aquarium filled with tiny jellyfish, their tendrils dangling nearly to the rocks on the bottom. There were tanks with snakes, spiders, and flying insects crawling all over the inside of the glass.

  “But then why would she be working for Langbroek when his family’s company played a significant role in their suffering?” Mason asked.

  “It’s possible she doesn’t know about Nautilus’s involvement,” Gunnar said.

  “Or, more likely, Langbroek doesn’t know about his family’s.” Mason felt a sudden tug of recognition from the back of his mind, a mental tip-of-the-tongue sensation, but the thought proved elusive. “He didn’t take over the company until decades after everything that happened at Edgewood.”

  “Over here,” Ramses said.

  His old friend’s voice came from the lone remaining room, at the far end of what had once been a railroad platform. The air grew noticeably colder with every step. The source of the flickering light he’d seen upon entering the apartment was back there, but neither the Scarecrow nor Marchment was. Five large flat-screen TVs had been mounted to the rear wall in three columns—two to either side and one in the middle—above a table of electrical components. The top row displayed footage from a local network of security cameras and every few seconds switched from one view to the next. The monitor on the left covered the outside of the building, the middle alternated views of the inside of the apartment, and the right showed various angles of what appeared to be a construction zone inside a large tunnel in the green-and-gray scale of night vision.

  “In 1995, just prior to their disappearance, Kaemon and Kameko Nakamura each transferred five million dollars into the account of a Dr. Tatsuo Yamaguchi,” Gunnar said.

  “You think he’s been treating them all this time?”

  “I can’t confirm as much, but it makes sense.”

  The other monitors featured imagery either hacked from remote security cameras or routed from live Internet feeds: Grand Central Station with its globe clock, vaulted windows, and constant stream of commuters and tourists, and Times Square, crammed full of revelers awash in flashing lights, preparing to count down the New Year. There wasn’t another night during the year when so many people would be out of their homes and on the streets, completely unprepared for a chemical attack.

  “Dr. Yamaguchi isn’t an oncologist,” Gunnar said. “He’s a neurologist specializing in neuromuscular and neuro-opthalmologic disorders. That’s not to say he wouldn’t be able to prescribe the treatment for certain cancers, only that he’s not qualified to cover the broader spectrum. What’s most interesting about him, though, is that he was actually the specialist called in to treat the victims of the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway the same year the Nakamuras slash Matsudas dropped off the planet.”

  “He’d definitely be my first choice if I’d been exposed as a child and was exhibiting adverse effects in my early adulthood,” Mason said. “After all, how much practical experience can any modern doctor have with sarin exposure?”

  A flash of light from the corner of his eye.

  He looked up at the top right monitor in time to see the light grow brighter and brighter, until it overwhelmed the night-vision apparatus. The feed switched to another angle, which revealed a silhouette wearing a broad conical hat staggering through the darkness, all details washed out by the bright light shining right at it.

  “Where is this?” he asked, tapping the screen.

  “It’s a subway tunnel like any other,” Ramses said. “She could be anywhere underneath the city, for all we know.”

  “It can’t be any tunnel,” Layne said. “She wouldn’t be walking down the middle of a subway tunnel with an electrified third rail in the darkness like that.”

  Mason glanced at the video receiver on the table underneath the middle TV. It was a wireless system, which meant the source had to be nearby, and yet he hadn’t heard the distant clatter of rails. The load-bearing walls were concrete and covered with what looked like acoustic padding, but that didn’t explain why he hadn’t felt so much as a single vibration from a passing train.

  On the monitor, the Scarecrow rounded a bend and vanished from sight.

  “What happened to the subway this platform used to service?” he asked.

  “You’re in what remains of the aboveground train station,” Gunnar said. “They built this block on top of it, but not until after the new tracks were run underground.”

  “So you’re saying there’s still a tunnel down there?”

  If Gunnar replied, Mason didn’t hear him. He was too busy tearing the foam from the walls. It hadn’t been put there to dampen the sound of the subway, but, rather, to insulate the apartment against the cold radiating from the hollow earth.

  He exposed an iron door beneath padding that had been cut in such a way as to conceal its size and shape. Someone had chiseled away the concrete covering it and used an acetylene torch to cut through the welded seal around it.

  “Where did the train run?” he asked.

  “It was originally part of the line connecting Boston and New Haven, which they rerouted to make room for the subway.”

  Mason drew open the heavy door with a screech of metal. The air blowing into his face was even colder than it was outside and smelled of damp earth and dust. A rusted iron staircase led down into the darkness at a severe angle.

  “So what’s down there now?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Mason glanced at the monitor where the Scarecrow had been only seconds ago.

  “It doesn’t matter, Gunnar. We’re going down there anyway.”

  71

  Mason descended the staircase into a small concrete chamber with rusted pipes on the walls.

  “… Track Sixty-one,” Gunnar said. His voice cut in and out as the connection degenerated. “Originally designed … connect Grand Central … to an underground station at the Waldorf-Astoria, so … rich and famous … come and go without … to rub elbows with the unwashed masses topside, but it … never put into active service. It … served as FDR’s private station … he was in town. He even … his own custom railcar to help reach … elevator that would take his armored limousine up … the parking garage so no one … see him using his wheelchair. It’s rumored … occasional president still uses … but outside of that … just collecting dust. Considering the only known surface access … t
hrough the Waldorf, I’m surprised … able to get in there at all.”

  A rough-edged hole opened onto a concrete pad surrounded by dirt and separated from the tracks by a wall with arched thresholds. Massive electrical boxes, now more rust than metal, clung to it. Conduits protruded from them but only reached as far as the exposed iron girders overhead, many of which were still braced by warped wooden posts. There were mounds of construction scraps and trash everywhere. Sheets of particle- and fiberboard had been left to disintegrate into soil that smelled like a combination of a root cellar and a latrine.

  “Where does it go?” Mason asked. His voice echoed into the distance, from which he heard the faint thuck-thuck, thuck-thuck of an approaching train.

  He hopped down from the residual platform and swept his flashlight beam across twin rails supported by weathered ties.

  “It’s not … long track … connects track sixty and Grand Central…”

  “Which would be the perfect location to trigger as many remote dispersal units as possible.”

  “… since it’s a terminal … every train has … stop there. She … easily arm fifty … same time … send them … back out … city … gas all … way.”

  “And she’s somewhere ahead of us on the tracks at this very moment.”

  “… breaking up … can’t understand…”

  “I’m about to lose my signal, Gunnar. I need you to get ahold of Algren at the New York Field Office. Tell her what’s going on and have her dispatch units from Grand Central into the tunnel toward us. We’ll trap the Scarecrow between us so she can’t reach the station.”

  The only response was the crackle of static.

  “Gunnar?”

  “We have to keep going and hope he heard you,” Ramses said. “She can’t be too far ahead, and the three of us should be able to take her.”

  “What about Marchment?” Layne asked. “There was only one person on the screen and he wasn’t in the apartment.”

  “He has to be down here somewhere,” Mason said. “He’s not our priority, though. We have to stop the Scarecrow from releasing the Novichok and hope Marchment’s still alive when we find him.”