The bomb squad had removed the IED from the monitor, which sat silent and dark beside the empty bed with its soiled sheets and veritable smorgasbord of DNA, seemingly all of which the ERT was hell-bent on collecting. They’d already confirmed that some amount of Novichok had been inside the apartment, having discovered residual traces in the workroom, but there was no way a single industrial canister would have made it down the narrow staircase, let alone the full load of two cargo containers. The biggest problem was they simply didn’t know how much had been produced and the only person who could have told them had taken that knowledge to her grave, but no one needed two flatbed trucks to transport the minimal amounts they were still recovering from the subway.
The lead forensics agent was in the Scarecrow’s workroom, watching over the shoulder of one of her specialists as he collected samples of blood and tissue from the drain at the end of the metal table. The equipment and ingredients used to make the LSD were already bagged and tagged and loaded into a plastic tub overflowing with evidence.
Mason cleared his throat and she turned around. It was the same freckled officer from Central Park, the one with the Puerto Rican accent. She acknowledged them with a nod and gestured for them to follow her down the hallway.
“We found it in the closet of what we’re calling the AV room,” she said. “I need to ask how you knew it would be there.”
“Educated guess,” Mason said.
“You’re going to need to come up with a better answer than that.”
She led them into the room at the end of the hall, where the surveillance monitors showed a steady stream of agents flowing in and out of the building, like ants from an anthill. The live feeds from both Grand Central Station and Times Square had been terminated in an effort to limit the amount of carnage broadcast around the clock on every network and cable news channel.
There was an old reel-to-reel projector on the floor amid stacks of circular metal canisters. It didn’t take a genius to realize they had to be around here somewhere. The human mind was designed with the most perfect bleach bit, the kind of mental defense that could wipe the hard drive clean in the event of trauma beyond its ability to cope. The fact that a woman in her early fifties hadn’t been able to repress the horrors she’d survived at Edgewood meant that either she didn’t want to forget or she’d been subjected to constant reminders beyond her physical deterioration and her brother’s slow demise.
Mason sat on the floor behind it and switched on the power.
“You sure you want to do this?” the lead investigator said. “I’ve only seen a few minutes and that was more than enough for me.”
He nodded as he perused the faded labels.
“We’re going to need a little time,” Layne said.
“Take all you need,” the criminalist said. “We have enough down here to keep us busy for the next week, and that’s without getting any sleep.”
She left them alone in the cold room. They could see straight into the hole in the wall and hear the voices of another overwhelmed team trying to understand how the Scarecrow had done everything she had right under their noses.
It took Mason a minute to figure out how to work the archaic machine, which made a loud buzzing sound as it projected the film onto the wall. The images were black and white and the way the frames jumped from side to side was disorienting, but there was no mistaking what was happening in the sterile white room with small beds lining the wall. It would have been completely bare if not for the tongue-depressor scarecrows hanging by paper clips from the brackets between the ceiling tiles. A little girl in the bed nearest the camera clung to one of them like a doll and pressed herself flat against the mattress as though in an attempt to merge with it. She couldn’t have been more than three or four years old.
A man in a white lab coat was seated beside her. Dr. Ichiro Nakamura, the monster from Unit 731, whose real name was Masao Matsuda. He said something in Japanese and the girl stopped her thrashing and stared at him through tear-drenched eyes. He held up a small canister with a clear mask attached to it, one just large enough to cover her tiny mouth and nose. She shook her head violently back and forth until the doctor barked a command and Marchment, little more than a teenager himself, rushed to the other side of the bed. He pinned her down and held her head to immobilize it.
A shrill scream from off-camera.
Marchment turned toward the source in time to see a young boy charging at him. He raised his forearm to ward off the flailing fists until he was able to get a grip on the boy’s upper arms and lift him from the ground. The child kicked at the much larger man’s knees, to no avail.
Nakamura spoke softly in Japanese and the boy immediately ceased struggling. Marchment looked warily at the doctor, who nodded for him to proceed, and set the boy back down on his feet.
The boy straightened his shirt, climbed onto the bed, and hugged the little girl, who looked just like him. She sobbed and clung to him, but he patiently pushed her away and scooted to the edge of the bed beside the doctor. He thrust out his chin and closed his eyes as tightly as he could.
The doctor slipped the elastic strap over the boy’s head, affixed the mask to the lower half of his face, and pressed the button to release the gas.
The boy’s eyes opened wide. His shoulders bucked. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He released a muffled scream that speckled the inside of the mask with blood.
Mason had to turn away. He recalled the initial briefing of the Dodge-Hill Strike Force, when Algren listed off the symptoms of sarin exposure and the lethal doses by injection, skin contact, and inhalation. Layne had commented that the information was awfully specific considering they were dealing with a banned chemical weapon of mass destruction.
So how did we get this information? she’d asked.
The army conducted its own experimentation with sarin in the fifties, Algren had said, but that’s neither here nor there.
But it was. It was here and it was now. It had been the process of ascertaining that information that had brought them to this singular, catastrophic moment in time, which had resulted in the deaths of innocent people in Times Square. They’d been right about the Scarecrow’s having personal and professional agendas, but they’d been dead wrong about one thing: The two had never been in opposition. They’d been aligned from the very beginning. And while she might have fulfilled her professional obligations to a large extent, she’d failed to tie off all of her personal loose ends. Lucky for her, Mason was on the case. He fully intended to make sure that Marchment was held accountable for his actions and that Langbroek paid for his family’s contributions to the nightmare experimentation at Edgewood, his personal involvement with the production of the Novichok, and the massacre in Times Square. More important, he was going to use him to track down the rest of the Thirteen.
And then he was going to make every single one of them pay.
77
Marchment had been airlifted to New York–Presbyterian, where he’d passed straight through the emergency room and into a surgical suite. The surgeon had repaired the damaged vessels in his neck and was optimistic about his recovery. Despite saving his life, Ramses had been remanded into federal custody and taken to the twenty-third floor of the Javits Federal Building, at least until they sorted out the nature of his involvement.
Algren had been generous enough to let Mason and Layne see him, although she’d given them only five minutes to do so and demanded they report to her office for their debriefings the moment they were done. She might not have known everything that had transpired, but the fact that they weren’t in cuffs was a positive sign. Ramses, on the other hand, was shackled to the arm of a chair facing the maze of cubicles. He sat silently, a contented smile on his face and his eyes closed. He opened one at the sound of their approach, then closed it again.
“What’s the saying?” he said. “Let no good deed go unpunished?”
“The doctors think Marchment will pull through,” Layne said. “You saved his life
.”
“Don’t sign me up for sainthood just yet. I only did it because he has information we need. I’d have been fine letting him bleed out on the floor.”
Mason smirked. His old friend talked a good game, but when it came right down to it, he was full of shit. He’d acted on instinct, without conscious thought or deliberation, and in doing so had saved the life of a man who would have been at peace with the release of the Novichok. In fact, his heroics were probably the only reason they hadn’t all been gunned down where they stood by the DHS agents surrounding them in the terminal. Ramses might have been a lot of things, most of them not even remotely endearing, but he was also the bravest person Mason had ever met and one of the few people he knew would lay down his life for him, and one of even fewer for whom he would do the same.
“I’ll see what I can do about getting you out of here,” he said.
“Take your time, Mace. This is the most rest I’ve had in days. And, truth be told, the boss lady back there’s totally rocking the whole cougar vibe. I’m thinking that might require further investigation. You should have seen the way she was looking at me, like she wanted to devour me.”
He was undoubtedly right about Algren, although for entirely different reasons than he thought.
Mason followed Layne down the hall toward the command center, which currently resembled the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. There were agents everywhere. Shouting into their phones, studying monitors, nearly trampling one another in their hurry to get to wherever they needed to go. Algren saw them coming through the bedlam and diverted them into an interrogation room on the other side of the corridor. She closed the door behind them and gestured for them to take the seats across the table from her.
“You both know the drill,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and her hands shook from too much caffeine. “This room is wired for video and sound and everything you say will be recorded.”
The door opened behind her with an explosion of noise and three men in suits entered the room. None of them needed an introduction. Mason recognized Thomas Wallace, director of the FBI; Susanne Clavenger, the U.S. attorney general; and Derek Archer, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They pulled chairs up to the table and hung their jackets over the backs.
Mason sighed and settled in.
This was definitely going to take a while.
78
By the time Mason left the Federal Building, the sun was preparing to set once more. The exhaustion was a physical entity inside his body. His cell phone let him know that he had fifteen missed calls but only three messages. He listened to them as he and Layne walked without a destination in mind. Traffic across the entire city was in gridlock, so they weren’t getting out of there anytime soon.
“James?” his father said. “I just wanted to call to make sure you were okay. I heard that you were right there when … you know, when everything happened. I’m sure you have your hands full, but just … just call me back when you can, okay? Or text me. Either way. I need to know you’re safe.”
The second call was from Gunnar, who was already talking when the recording started.
“… to talk to you pronto. I figured out something you’re definitely going to want to hear.”
His phone vibrated in his hand. He recognized the number right away.
“I was just listening to your message—”
“It doesn’t matter. Just shut your mouth and listen, okay?”
Gunnar had his undivided attention.
“Give me a second, okay?” Mason said, and put the call on speaker so Layne could hear. “What did you find?”
“So I was sitting there in the car, waiting for your GPS signal to pop back online, when it hit me that Novichok gas could come up through the grates in the sidewalk at any moment and that the car windows wouldn’t be able to keep it out. Not that I didn’t have complete faith in your ability to stop the attack on the subway, but it’s only natural for a man sitting on enough Novichok to wipe out the population of the entire eastern seaboard to at least consider the idea of saving his own skin, which brought to mind Major Delvin Roybal, who’s got to be so deep in the Canadian Rockies by now that he’s probably speaking French.”
“You found Roybal?” Layne said.
“Just listen, okay? So that got me thinking about the company that paid him to dispose of the flatbeds, which he would have done had that trooper not recognized the significance of the trucks and had them hauled to impound. But here’s the thing. That’s not a quarter-of-a-million-dollar job. Not by a long shot. The guys who actually started the fire and tried to kill you to cover it up? They only received ten grand apiece and they took all the risks. What could Roybal have possibly done for these guys that was worth twenty-five times as much? And then it hit me.”
“He was in charge of the Hazardous Material Transportation Unit,” Mason said.
“And special operations for Homeland Security, don’t forget. So I hacked into the computer network of East Coast Transportation Services—you know, the guys who paid him for his consultation—and did a little poking around. And guess what I found? A contract signed on November eighth for the lease of two flatbed trucks. That’s not out of the ordinary at all. In fact, they leased a dozen others that same day. What is, however, is the fact that they were paid half a million dollars for those trucks.”
Mason nodded toward a plaza with an odd maze of benches beside the Federal Building, where they found seats away from the handful of other people braving the cold.
“There’s the source of the money,” Layne said. “Who signed the check?”
“Aegis Asset Management,” Gunnar said. “The same company that owned the apartment where Charles Raymond was living.”
“Do you know where the trucks were heading?” Mason asked.
“Not very far at all. In fact, they never even left Newark.”
“How do you know?”
“The license plates of the vehicles were listed on the lease, as were the numbers of the RFID tags the Port Authority registers to commercial vehicles for automated entry through the marine terminal gates. I was able to confirm both passed through security at the Port Newark Container Terminal that same day.”
“Roybal was in charge of Marine Services. That’s where he earned his money.”
“There’s no record of the containers being dropped off, though, let alone where they might have been shipped. Assuming they were even shipped at all.”
“Langbroek wouldn’t have been anywhere near the city if they were still sitting on the docks. Any kind of accident and a gust of wind could carry a cloud of deadly gas across the Hudson.”
“So where did it go?”
Mason closed his eyes and tried to imagine where someone like Slate Langbroek would ship thousands of gallons of Novichok. He felt as though they’d tied off just about every loose end except the one Gunnar had brought up on the night he and Layne were nearly killed in the Pine Barrens. When he opened his eyes again, he felt everything falling into place around him.
“Energy futures,” he said.
“What are energy futures?” Layne asked.
“The name’s something of a misnomer,” Gunnar said. “They aren’t like stocks, where you’re investing in the future of a business or industry. They’re essentially deals between a buyer and a seller that a certain amount of a product—in this case, crude oil—will be delivered by a certain date and will be purchased for a prearranged price. Not only does such an agreement reduce the risk in a market where the cost of a barrel of oil changes by the hour; it provides both the producer and the consumer with the price certainty they require for daily operations. Speculators make a killing buying futures. The producer is guaranteed the negotiated price for the oil, but if the market rises, the investor can then turn around and sell it for more than he paid.”
“The higher the price of oil climbs, the more money the futures are ultimately worth,” Mason said. “And there are really only two basic factors tha
t influence that price: supply and demand. So if someone wanted to increase the price, he’d either need to decrease the availability or create an artificial demand.”
He was reminded of something Gunnar had said earlier, in the back of the car on the way to Edgewood.
What can I say? Langbroeks have long memories.
Mason smiled and looked directly at Layne.
“I know where the Novichok is.”
EPILOGUE
Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.
—James A. Garfield,
Inaugural Address (1881)
SHELTER ISLAND, NEW YORK
January 2
Mason sprinted to the edge of the tree line and crouched in the deep shadows, his respirations harsh inside his gas mask. His black CBRN suit was nearly indistinguishable from the darkness thanks to the sparse moonlight permeating the dense cloud cover. Waves thundered inland and crashed against the dock on the far side of the estate, inside of which their thermal-equipped drone had detected two distinct heat signatures. His heart raced at the prospect of one of them belonging to Slate Langbroek.
“We go in on my mark,” he whispered into his inset microphone. “You know your assignments.”
They’d been unable to track the head of Royal Nautilus Petroleum through the chaos in Times Square, and an exhaustive search of every hospital within a hundred miles confirmed that he hadn’t been admitted under his or any other name, but he couldn’t have gone far. A single street-level camera had captured him rising from the sidewalk in front of the TKTS booth, his visibly broken arm cradled to his chest and his face covered with blood. Fortunately, they’d discovered a Queen Anne–style mansion on five acres overlooking Peconic Bay among Aegis Asset Management’s holdings, and it looked like the perfect location for an extended convalescence.
The Annihilation Protocol Page 45