The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  The Scarecrow stared at Slate Langbroek, willing the man to see it. It wanted him to understand what was about to happen, to know who was responsible, to recognize that he’d been betrayed.

  The ball reached the halfway mark.

  Thirty seconds and counting.

  The officers manning the perimeter looked past the crowds and up toward the glowing orb.

  For the most fleeting of seconds.

  Just long enough for the Scarecrow to climb over the barricade.

  * * *

  Marchment placed his hand on top of Mason’s. The older man’s chin quivered, but he steeled it long enough to offer a single firm nod.

  “There has to be a way to disconnect it,” Mason said.

  00:00:29.

  00:00:28.

  Marchment wrapped the catheters in his fist and gave them a sharp tug.

  Blood spurted from the ends of the tubes and flooded the open wound in his neck. He clapped his hand over it and dropped to his knees. Blood sluiced between his fingers and spattered the marble tiles.

  “Call an ambulance!” Mason shouted.

  He was just about to thrust his own hand into the blood in an effort to pinch off the vessels when he caught a glimpse of the timer from the corner of his eye.

  It was still running.

  00:00:23.

  00:00:22.

  The silver canisters that looked like batteries had to be capacitors, which stored enough charge that even if Marchment decided to be a hero, there would still be enough left to finish the countdown. The Scarecrow had completed both her personal and professional missions in one decisive stroke. Marchment would bleed out by his own hand and the aerosol units on the subway trains would still be activated.

  They were all going to die.

  00:00:16.

  00:00:15.

  Mason looked all around him. There had to be some way to stop it, but even if he managed to tear apart the detonator to get to the capacitors underneath the generator, there was no way of knowing how much residual current was already traveling through the circuits. It wouldn’t take much juice to send out a signal, assuming there weren’t other fail-safes already in place to prevent its disarmament.

  00:00:14.

  00:00:13.

  He remembered the janitor he’d nearly run down on his way into the concourse. The mop clattering from his hands. The bucket of dirty water.

  No matter how much power they possessed, no electrical components could conduct a charge large enough to deliver a signal if their circuit boards were fried.

  00:00:12.

  00:00:11.

  Mason grabbed the device and sprinted toward the arcade, where a pair of JTTF agents had the corridor blocked off and the barrels of their rifles pointed right at him.

  00:00:10.

  00:00:09.

  Their eyes widened in surprise. They hadn’t expected him to run directly at them. He could only hope they wouldn’t riddle him with bullets before he reached the mop bucket behind them.

  00:00:08.

  00:00:07.

  “Don’t shoot!” he shouted.

  The agents leaned their cheeks against the stocks of their weapons. Drew a bead on center mass. Moved their index fingers from the sides of the barrels onto the triggers.

  They were going to fire and there was nothing he could do about it.

  00:00:06.

  00:00:05.

  Gunfire from behind him. Bullets struck the marble arch above the agents’ heads. They instinctively hit the deck as marble fragments rained down on them.

  Mason dove between them, slid across the wet floor toward the mop bucket.

  00:00:04.

  00:00:03.

  Thrust the device into the filthy water. Felt a zap of current pass though his forearms.

  He heard the rumble of footsteps behind him and turned in time to see agents converging at the center of the concourse from seemingly everywhere at once. Layne dropped her smoldering pistol and raised her hands. They tackled her into the puddle of blood on the ground beside Ramses, who struggled to keep his fingers clamped on the torn vein inside Marchment’s neck with a knee between his shoulder blades and his other arm wrenched behind his back.

  A heartbeat later, Mason was pinned under the weight of one man while another forced his face down into the water from the overturned mop bucket.

  The device lay mere inches away, the face of the timer dark.

  * * *

  “Two!” the crowd roared.

  The Scarecrow scaled the plinth and stood in front of the statue of Father Duffy, the cross at its back. It raised its arms out to either side. In each hand it held an electric vaporizer modified to hold canisters of a substance no e-cigarette manufacturer had ever imagined they’d be used to disperse.

  “One!”

  Kameko Nakamura experienced a moment of lucidity as she looked upon the sea of humanity staring up at the glowing crystal ball. She felt neither sorrow nor pity, for where had they been when the soldiers were exposing helpless children to chemical weapons and experimental cures? Where had they been when the tumor formed in her brother’s brain, even as the muscular sclerosis ate through it? Where had they been when the cancer eroded her optic nerves and vocal cords, or later, when she developed Huntington’s disease–like symptoms of a condition no doctor had ever seen before, one that robbed her of everything in her life that mattered?

  The lights died with a thud that reverberated through the earth. Darkness filled the square, overwhelming the portable lights and raised cell phone cameras, which limned the scene with an ethereal glow, like a poorly developed photograph from a bygone era.

  The whole world seemed to hold its breath.

  Lights blossomed from everywhere at once. The billboards came to life. Music blared. Fireworks exploded. Confetti filled the air.

  Kameko’s rage exploded from the breathing stoma in her throat as a violent hiss, releasing all of the pain and the years of suffering, all of the anger for what they’d done to her brother and her, and all of her hatred in that one animalistic sound.

  Colors flashed behind her, casting the shadow of the cross and her outstretched arms onto the unsuspecting onlookers below her.

  She heard the voice of Slate Langbroek, the man she knew as Quintus, through the speakers. He had no idea the product he’d paid for would be the death of him. As far as he knew, it was thousands of miles away, not inside specially designed cartridges in the handheld vaporizer units and aerial-dispersal mechanisms affixed to the trains leaving Grand Central Station at that very moment. Quintus might have paid her a fortune, but Tertius Decimus, who had much to gain from Langbroek’s death and the release of the Novichok, had given her information even she hadn’t known about an oil company that had entered into a deal with the military to help produce and test chemical weapons. More important, he’d given her the opportunity to take what was rightfully hers.

  Revenge.

  All eyes looked in her direction. Cameras swung to face her. Focused on her.

  Her sugegasa fell from her head, revealing the digital prosthetic lenses of her brother’s design that served as her eyes, the hole in her neck through which she could speak only with the aid of a laryngophone, and the discolored patches where her hair had never regrown after the chemotherapy.

  And in that fleeting moment, the entire world was forced to bear witness to what it had done to her.

  The Scarecrow pressed the buttons on the vaporizers with her thumbs.

  And released deadly, invisible clouds of Novichok A-234.

  PART VII

  Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

  —Frederick Douglass,

  speech given in Washington, D.C., on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Emancipation (1886)

  74

  JANUARY 1

  Mas
on had never been to Times Square, but he knew it well from countless pictures and movies and New Year’s Eve celebrations. It was a place of magic and wonder, a monument to everything that was truly and rightly American, although now it was unrecognizable even to those who knew it best. And it would never be the same again.

  He picked his way though the chaos in a CBRN suit, his respirations loud in his ears. He felt numb, disconnected from his physical being, as though merely a spectator watching through his own eyes. That things could have been infinitely worse was of little consolation to him, or to the families of the sixty-six men and women whose bodies were wrapped in military green blankets, or to the countless others crying in pain as they were triaged under the flashing lights. Had the wind been blowing in any other direction, the casualties could have easily been in the thousands.

  A steady stream of ambulances struggled through the congestion of abandoned cars to get the worst-afflicted of the victims to whatever hospitals still had enough beds to take them, while those deemed in less severe condition received treatment right there on the sidewalk by nurses, doctors, firefighters, and emergency personnel. Volunteers who’d charged selflessly into action without thought or concern for their personal safety, only for that of the victims sprawled everywhere, screaming and sobbing and begging for help, a veritable war zone in the heart of a city that had never truly recovered from the last great act of terror, and while this one paled by comparison, it was somehow made worse by the fact that the perpetrator hadn’t been a violent extremist who hated everything the country stood for, but, rather, a trained physician who’d embraced the monster within her, one that was neither her fault nor within her control. None of those details would ever be allowed to come out, though. The world needed to see Kameko Nakamura as the devil made flesh, if only so people would be able to sleep at night.

  “We should have seen this coming,” Layne said through the speaker in his left ear.

  While he wanted to say something reassuring, he couldn’t find the words. The truth of the matter was that she was right. They should have made the connection that the Nautilus contingent had been in New York City working on the Green Smart Grid project and recognized the implications when they saw the monitor displaying live footage from Times Square in the Scarecrow’s apartment.

  They found the evidence response team clustered around the statue of Father Duffy, which stood like a tombstone over an empty square filled with trash and confetti and awash with bodily fluids of all kinds, smeared where the trampled bodies had been dragged away. Those unfortunate enough to have been within a ten-foot radius had died within seconds, while those near the periphery of the hot zone probably wished they had. There would be many more deaths announced before the night was over.

  Mason pushed through the cordon surrounding the lone body left untouched and stared down at the Scarecrow for the first time. Kameko Nakamura lay on her side, her body so small and fragile that Mason wondered how she’d ever been able to pull it all off. She was dressed like a samurai with a lamellar cuirass, or dō, made from hand-stitched rawhide strips, matching kote sleeves, and a skirtlike plated haidate. Her sugegasa rested against the base of the plinth near the wooden geta sandal she’d lost in the fall. She’d landed squarely on her face, breaking her jaw and her lower row of teeth. Blood leaked from the hole in her windpipe. Her eyes were obviously artificial. The irises were recessed and took up the entire space between the lids. The outer ring was composed of small titanium plates that appeared to function like the aperture of a camera, opening and closing in response to varying levels of light, while the inner sensors were concentric rings of what almost looked like solar cells, at the heart of which was a photosensitive array that reflected the bright lights shining down on her remains.

  “Stars for eyes,” Mason said.

  “What?” Layne asked.

  “Nothing.” He stood and forced himself to look away. What a waste of a brilliant mind. “Just one last piece falling into place.”

  The podium had been knocked down the stairs and broken into a dozen pieces. There were spatters of blood on the top few rows, where an NYPD officer had tackled Jonathan Feltman, director of the Department of City Planning, in an attempt to shield him from the surprise attack. Unfortunately, despite his heroics, both of their names were listed among those of the deceased. As was that of Aidan Dunham, president of the New York City Urban Development Corporation. Governor Andrews had been evacuated on the first wave of medical choppers, while both Slate Langbroek and the mayor, Reuben Covington, had jumped over the railing and landed on the street below. While they’d presumably survived, their current locations had yet to be established.

  Mason walked around behind the ruby red staircase, where harried nurses treated patients on blankets in front of the TKTS booth. There were patterns of blood underneath the overhang, where the men had struck the sidewalk. He hoped they belonged to Langbroek and that, wherever he was hiding, his wounds hurt. Very, very badly.

  There was something about the whole situation that didn’t sit right with him, though, something that had been troubling him since Mikkelson’s abduction, but he hadn’t quite been able to define it until after Marchment’s. And now, with Langbroek being at ground zero, it simply made no sense.

  “Why were they here?” he said. “If they knew the Novichok was in Manhattan and about to be released on the subway, why the hell were they anywhere within a thousand miles of this place?”

  “Plausible deniability?” Layne said. “No one would ever suspect them if they were among the survivors.”

  “If the devices on the trains had been activated as planned, there wouldn’t have been any survivors. At least not this close to Grand Central.”

  “You think they didn’t know?”

  Mason looked straight up at the lighted billboards reaching into the sky on the narrow face of the Renaissance Hotel. The Nautilus Energy logo flashed on the uppermost of the twenty-foot-tall screens. He recalled what Gunnar had said days ago.

  Does this have anything to do with the sudden surge in energy futures trading?

  “No,” Mason said. “They weren’t worried about an attack taking place here because they knew for a fact that the Novichok—or at least what they’d thought was all of the Novichok—was somewhere else.”

  75

  For the first time in its storied history, not a single subway train sped through the underground tunnels beneath the city and wouldn’t again until every one of its six thousand cars was cleared of remote dispersal devices. They’d already recovered sixteen of them within a three-block radius of Grand Central Terminal and were only now expanding their search to the surrounding stations, including Times Square–Forty-second Street, where there was one attached to the number 7 train, which sat lifeless on the platform when Mason and Layne arrived. The silver doors stood open, revealing vacant seats and empty walkways that glowed faintly green beneath the interior lights.

  The MTA workers who’d found the device stood off to the side, about as far away from it as they could physically get without exiting the station. None of them had any desire to be there, but there was no one more qualified to determine if there were any foreign objects attached to the trains than they were, let alone in anything resembling an expeditious manner.

  They’d made it clear, however, that they weren’t touching the devices. That was someone else’s problem, and the mayor, being currently indisposed, was in no position to object.

  “Show me,” Mason said.

  A bearded man with a hard hat and an orange reflective vest broke away from the others. He approached as though preparing to proffer his hand, but thought better of it when he realized the implications of their isolation suits and veered toward the yellow tiles lining the edge of the platform. Dropped down onto the tracks behind the last car. Crouched and shone his flashlight up into the undercarriage.

  “She could have easily leaned over the edge while everyone was boarding and slipped it right up underneath there,”
the man said.

  Mason jumped down behind him and craned his neck to see the device. It was the same thing he’d seen on the train pulling into Grand Central Station when he arrived, and yet somehow it seemed even smaller up close. The homemade unit had been spray-painted black and affixed to the underside of the train with an electromagnet. Were it not for the antenna, it would have been indistinguishable from the other mechanical components. He recognized a battery pack, a remote transceiver, and a stainless-steel reservoir equipped with a high-pressure nozzle.

  “Hold that light still for me, okay?” Mason said, and reached for the device.

  “No freaking way.” The man practically jumped straight up onto the platform. “You’re on your own from here.”

  “I got it,” Layne said.

  She grabbed the flashlight and shone it upward from underneath so the shadows from Mason’s hands wouldn’t hide the unit as he disconnected the battery and released the magnet. He took it carefully in both hands and removed it from the train. The liquid Novichok sloshed inside the reservoir, which couldn’t have been much larger than a whiskey flask.

  “How much fluid do you think this holds?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe twelve ounces?”

  “What’s that? A can of Coke? If you figure a six-pack is roughly a half gallon, you could put one of these not just on every train but on every single car on every train and still only use a thousand gallons.” Mason looked up and met her stare. He could tell she was thinking the exact same thing. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  76

  By the time they made it back to the Scarecrow’s apartment, Kaemon had been removed from his bed and taken to the nearest secure intensive care unit, where he was being treated under heavily armed guard. His early prognosis was grim, especially considering the doctors didn’t have any idea what they were dealing with and no one seemed to have a clue how to track down Dr. Tatsuo Yamaguchi, assuming he was even still in the country. Considering even Kaemon’s sister, who’d obviously been his primary caregiver for years, had written him off, the likelihood of his physician’s having remained nearby was slim, especially if he’d known what Kameko intended to do. Mason looked forward to tracking him down and asking him in person.