“It’s too long to be a phone number or a Social Security number,” Mason said.
“Maybe a bank account,” Locker said. “A wireless routing number. An IP address. A code of some kind. It could mean absolutely anything. Or it could mean nothing. We’re talking about a man hung up by his wrists and sealed behind a wall with another man, who might not have been alive at the time. He had to understand on a primal level that he was about to die. For all we know, he could have just been writing random numbers to keep from giving in to panic, which would have caused him to deplete his finite amount of oxygen even faster.”
“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
“We have to consider every possibility. If we only look for what we expect to see, invariably we’ll find it.”
The Hoyl had employed a specific MO at each of the sites Mason had used to track him. He’d recruited test subjects desperate to cross the border, injected them with a cocktail of viruses and bacteria, and then hung them from hooks so he could study them as they decomposed. When he moved to a different location, he incinerated every trace that he’d been there, leaving behind so little physical evidence that no one would ever know the horrors that had transpired there. And while his victims had endured unimaginable suffering, he hadn’t exposed them to an unnecessary element of sadism. As vile as his actions had been, they’d been clinical in their execution.
This crime scene didn’t fit his mold.
These men had been cuffed and forced to watch helplessly as they were entombed behind a solid foot of concrete. An unconscionable amount of evil had been invested in their torture, much like the death traps he was now certain had been rigged by someone other than the Hoyl, a second monster, someone who either had no fear that his work would be discovered or simply didn’t care, but what were the odds of two unique mass murderers using the same base of operations? And what did the numbers mean?
They needed to get behind that wall.
The other victim drifted in and out of focus at the edge of the camera’s range. Another man. Same physical condition. No immediately identifiable characteristics.
The probe advanced toward him—
“Wait.” Locker leaned forward so quickly that he had to grab his headset to keep it from falling off. “Back up. Back up. Retract two inches and turn ten—no … fifteen degrees. There. Right there.” He sat back again. “Well, what do you know?”
A white box protruded from the rear wall. It had a black half sphere on its face. A lens of some kind.
“Can you get a little closer to it?” Mason asked.
“Move in,” Locker said. “Carefully.”
The borescope lurched closer and closer to the black dome. The thin cords extending from the housing were nearly concealed by spiderwebs. The one on the left was connected to the camera facing the first victim. Mason could only assume the one on the right similarly led to the camera focused on the second.
“It’s a motion detector,” he said.
A third cord went straight up. The camera traced its course to the ceiling, where it bent sharply to the right and disappeared beneath a mass of webbing. Extrapolating its path revealed a silver casing that would have been indistinguishable from the webs had the light not reflected from it. An enormous widow scurried away from the camera, throwing its nightmarish shadow across the narrow side wall.
“And that’s the power source,” Locker said. “Movement triggers the motion detector, which causes the cameras to start recording. The victims must have been unconscious when they were walled in there.”
“But even if that were the case, they would have remained unconscious for only so long. Why go to the effort of installing a motion detector when the cameras could have just been set to record for the entire duration? Can you track the signal to see where they were transmitting the feed?”
“Cameras like that broadcast on a predetermined frequency that’s sent out in all directions at once. Any receiver within its range could intercept the signal.”
“How far are we talking?”
“I’d have to evaluate the camera to know for sure. I can’t imagine it would be more than a mile, although a signal repeater could add another mile, mile and a half.”
Mason grabbed the transceiver corresponding to the frequency for operational support, pressed the button, and spoke into it.
“I need to know every physical structure within a three-mile radius,” he said.
“Copy.”
He released the button and turned to Locker.
“It was probably just transmitting to someone watching inside the slaughterhouse, but we need to make sure we’re not missing something out there.”
“We’re definitely missing something in here,” Locker said.
Mason knew exactly what he meant. A crucial detail was staring him right in the face, and yet, for the life of him, he couldn’t see it. He imagined waking up and finding himself entombed in darkness, his arms starting to go numb from diminished blood flow and shackled above his head. He could almost taste the stale air, growing warmer and thinner with every inhalation. His first instinct was to panic, to pull against his restraints, to kick at the walls, triggering the motion detector within a matter of seconds.
That reaction didn’t fit with what he saw on the screen, though.
He thought about the condition of the remains. The skin on the wrists was intact. The same was true of the knees. In their situation, he would have practically ripped off his own hands trying to pry them from the cuffs and banged his knees bloody against the wall. Unless they’d been tranquilized, the physical evidence didn’t add up.
“Andrews,” Locker said. “Can you see if there are any more cords coming off of that box?”
“There could be a hundred, for all I can tell. That mass of webs is so thick, you’d need a flamethrower to cut through it.”
The man who’d painted the numbers in his own blood would have known without a doubt that he was never getting out of there alive. He would have reached a point where he was laboring to breathe, and still he’d only moved a single finger. Why? A cervical injury could have caused near-complete paralysis, but that didn’t mesh with the need to install a motion—
That was the key.
“They knew it was there,” Mason said. “The motion detector. They held perfectly still, even knowing they were about to die. One of them gambled on moving a single finger. That’s all he dared. One digit, high and hopefully outside the range of the sensors. He scraped his fingertip against the concrete with enough force to split the skin and peel back the nail. The message was so important, he risked triggering the motion detector, which has to be connected to something that scared him a hell of a lot more than any camera.”
“I don’t like this,” Locker said.
“Get your men out of there.”
“Retract the cable and seal the hole,” he said into the microphone.
“With pleasure,” Andrews said. “I can’t wait to take off this infernal suit. It feels like there’re spiders crawling all over me.”
Mason watched the silver box fade back into the darkness. The dead man’s hand materialized from the edge of the screen, followed by his mummified arm, the distorted profile of his face.
On the left screen, Wilkinson crouched behind Andrews with what looked like a caulk gun, waiting for him to reel in the camera.
“Slow it down,” Locker said. “Give me a nice steady pace.”
There was something in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Mason was just about to ask Locker what he’d figured out, when it suddenly hit him.
“They left this for us to find,” he said. “If we’d demo’d the wall instead of going in with a borescope, we’d have triggered the motion detector ourselves.”
“Exactly,” Locker said. “We need to take a step back and evaluate everything we know. Like you said, that motion detector has to be connected to something else, and we’d damn well better make sure we know what before we set it off.”
The camera retreated in halting increments.
Slowly.
Mason thought about all of the widows crawling around in there, about the dead man and his ruined finger. The motion detector looked like the kind people mounted above their garages to turn on the porch light when someone approached, definitely not the most sensitive variety.
A black shape emerged from a web in the victim’s armpit and dropped straight down toward the camera. Its red hourglass came into sharp focus, then blurred as it repeatedly struck at the lens.
“Jesus!” Andrews said.
The camera raced downward and to the side. The spider continued to strike at the lens. The probe grazed the dead man’s flank, and the widow skittered off into a tear in the skin along the curve of the lower ribs.
“Careful in there,” Locker said. “Try to maintain a steady pace.”
“There are four buildings within the prescribed radius,” a voice said from the transceiver. “And we’ve already been over each of them with a fine-tooth comb.”
Mason pressed the button and spoke into the transceiver without taking his eyes from the monitors.
“Nothing out of the ordinary?”
“Everything’s either abandoned or condemned. These guys picked the perfect place. We couldn’t find anyone to question inside of ten miles.”
“Check them again.”
“Copy that.”
The borescope retreated maybe an inch before abruptly stopping.
“It’s snagged on something,” Andrews said.
“Extricate it as gently as you can,” Locker instructed.
Mason watched Andrews on the left monitor. The specialist’s back hunched as he pulled on the articulating cord. The view on the right remained unchanged for several seconds, then jerked quickly downward. Rebounded from the knobby knee. Whipped sideways and hit the other leg.
“Everything okay down there?” Locker asked.
“That’s about enough excitement for one day,” Andrews said.
A faint hissing sound emanated from the monitor. Or maybe from one of the transceivers underneath it.
The image on the right screen went momentarily out of focus. When the aperture rectified, there were spiders everywhere. Scurrying through the webs. Streaking past the camera.
Andrews resumed retracting the borescope and everything became a blur. Mason caught a glimpse of blackened skin. Ankle. Foot. Toes. Webs. And then the floor, which was positively covered with dead spiders. The screen turned black as Andrews pulled the camera through the wall.
“Close her up,” he said.
Wilkinson pumped the sealant into the hole while Andrews coiled the remaining length of the borescope. When he looked back at the camera, his entire face was beaded with sweat behind his face shield.
“And all without letting a single one of those bastards out of there,” he said.
Mason felt a sinking sensation in his stomach.
Andrews pulled off his hood and wiped his forehead on his upper arm. His hair was positively drenched with sweat, which rolled down his cheeks like tears.
“How do you want to handle this from here, chief?” Andrews looked directly into the camera, as though he could see Locker. “We can have a demo crew out here in under an hour—”
“Put your helmet back on,” Locker said in little more than a whisper.
Mason glanced at him in time to see the color drain from his face. He turned back to the monitor, where Andrews dabbed his eyes with the back of his wrist. His upper lip glistened. Twin vertical lines. Mucus, not sweat.
“Say again, chief?”
“Put your helmet back on!”
The hissing sound.
The falling widows.
The carpet of dead spiders.
Mason finally realized why the dead men inside the wall had been so scared to move. They’d known the kind of agonizing death that awaited them if they activated the motion detector, but the trap hadn’t just been set for them.
It had been set for those who would inevitably find their bodies.
Andrews looked straight into the camera. His brown eyes widened a heartbeat before his pupils constricted to pinpricks. The corner of his mouth pulled sharply back toward his ear. The tendons in his neck tightened. He gagged and tugged at the collar of his isolation suit. Fell to the ground. Arched his back. Bared his teeth.
“Jesus!” Wilkinson shouted. “He’s seizing!”
He stood over his convulsing partner, paralyzed by indecision.
“Listen to me very carefully,” Locker said. “There’s a first-aid tackle box on the table. Inside you’ll find the Mark One Kit. It’s in a black pouch with two syringes inside.” He switched to the third team’s channel. “Standby with decontamination. And get a hazmat team out here.”
“What’s going on—?” a voice responded, but Locker cut it off when he switched back to Wilkinson.
“You know what to do from here. Inject the smaller of the two—the atropine—directly into his lateral thigh muscle. Right through his suit. Don’t jab it. Just push the needle all the way in and hold it there for ten seconds. Follow with the pralidoxime.”
On the left screen, Wilkinson ran to the table, threw open the first-aid kit, and spilled the contents onto the table. Rummaged through them until he found what he was looking for. Held it up to the camera.
“Hurry,” Locker said.
Wilkinson fell on top of Andrews. Struggled to pin him down. Stabbed the autoinjector into his thigh.
Mason closed his eyes as everything came together in his head. The Novichok had been removed before they even knew this place existed. That’s why they hadn’t found any traces of precursor chemicals in the rubble. Had everything gone as planned, no one would have known that the crushed vats had been used for the creation of the deadly nerve gas and the only people who could have figured it out would have been killed when they broke down the concrete wall, effectively crippling the investigation before it even started.
They’d finally caught a break, such as it was.
At this very moment, an unknown quantity of the deadliest nerve agent known to man was in play.
And they needed to find it.