“It’s the penthouse apartment.” Barbieri spoke into the microphone inside his tactical gas mask as they jogged up the stairwell of the thirty-six-story tower. His voice was loud in Mason’s earpiece. “The owner’s listed as Aegis Asset Management, a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Nautilus Petroleum.”
“The oil company?” Layne said. She was still trying to Velcro the straps of her Kevlar vest over her chest, a feat made even more difficult by the full-body CBRN outfit underneath it. The black GORE CHEMPAK tactical suits made them look like Imperial TIE fighter pilots from Star Wars, but they were Class 3–rated for protection from chemical, biological, and radiological threats. “Why would an oil company need an apartment?”
“Diversification? Executive compensation package? Half of these luxury apartments are owned by corporations or foreign nationals. One like this goes for upward of four million dollars.”
Mason’s heavy breathing echoed inside his mask. The visor narrowed his peripheral vision to an uncomfortable extent, making him feel like he was playing a first-person-shooter video game.
“Who’s the registered occupant?” he asked.
“Charles Raymond. Managing director of Research and Development.”
They rounded one bend after another, hot on the heels of the other tactical officers. The team was divided into four units, each consisting of four highly trained FBI SWAT officers. One ascended the south stairwell, the other the north. The third had already secured the main level, and the fourth was currently on a helicopter, preparing to rappel onto the roof of the building. From there, they could reach the private terrace surrounding the penthouse apartment, cover the back door, and prevent the Scarecrow from jumping down to one of the balconies of the units underneath it.
“What do we know about this guy Raymond?”
“Next to nothing at this point. Seventy-three years old. Divorced. Two adult children. Doctorate in mechanical engineering from Stanford. No criminal record.”
“Military experience?”
“None that I’m aware of.”
Layne glanced back at Mason as she hit the landing and launched herself up the next flight. The door to the thirty-fifth floor flashed past behind her. They’d been counting on the victim in the park being the owner of the suite and having a military background. Maybe the apartment had simply been the only one that offered the Scarecrow the view he needed and the body of Charles Raymond was waiting inside, although it couldn’t be coincidence that this was now the second time they’d heard the name Royal Nautilus in conjunction with this case.
Two agents took up position at the top of the staircase, one on either side of the door. They examined the seams for trip wires while a third slid an articulating camera underneath the door and surveilled the hallway on a handheld monitor. There was a single elevator to the left, its surface a golden metal polished to reflect the light of the overhead fixture like the midday sun. The walls were hardwood-paneled, the floor marble. There was nothing between them and the opposite stairwell.
“South stairwell clear,” the third man whispered through the earpiece.
“North stairwell clear,” an unfamiliar voice whispered. “We go on my mark.”
There was only one residential penthouse on the top floor. It was roughly 2,400 square feet and surrounded on two sides by a private L-shaped balcony. They’d enter into a blind foyer, with the entire suite to their right, at the end of a short corridor that terminated in a trident-shaped fork. To the left were the bedroom and bath. Straight ahead, the great room. To the right, the study and, beyond it, the narrow kitchen.
“Go.”
An officer opened the door—slowly, carefully—and the others fell into formation, one behind the other. They converged on the apartment at the exact same time as the second team from the far stairwell. One of the men removed from his bag a compact through-wall radar unit that looked like a massive iPad with vertical handles. He ran it along the plaster to make sure there was no one lying in wait on the other side and then stepped back to make room for another officer, who used a crowbar to remove the trim around the door, revealing a half-inch gap metered by wooden spacers, between which they could see that the dead bolt wasn’t engaged. There was no sign of trip wires or remote sensors, either.
The rubber sweep at the bottom of the door left just enough room for the tech specialist to feed the articulating camera underneath. He held up the monitor so they could all see while he turned the camera to look at the back side of the door. There was nothing connected to either the knob or the dead bolt, and the chain wasn’t hooked. He turned the camera to view the corridor. To the left, a coat closet. Door closed. No apparent trip wires. To the right, a hallway with open thresholds on both sides and the aura of moonlight from the great room.
“Give me infrared,” the voice in Mason’s ear whispered.
The color on the screen turned a pale shade of green but didn’t reveal any laser beams rigged across the hallway.
“You know your assignments,” the team leader whispered. “Keep your eyes open and don’t touch a goddamn thing. No heroes today. Are we clear?”
Mason raised his pistol and stepped into position to follow the men into the apartment. He sensed Layne at his right hip, felt the nerves radiating from her. Cleared his mind and concentrated on regulating his breathing. Time slowed to a crawl. He became acutely aware of everything around him.
He heard the order in his left ear as though from a great distance. The world around him sped up with the opening of the front door. He funneled through the doorway and into the narrow corridor.
The men in front of him moved like specters through the darkness, the fabric of their suits shimmering in the moonlight flooding through the wall of glass overlooking the park. Some veered left, others right. Mason led the remainder past the outer forks and into the great room. All of the furniture had been shoved to the sides, leaving the area rug in the middle of the room bare. The drapes had been torn down and cast aside. The entire rear wall was composed of windows that granted a spectacular view of the city skyline through the railing along the terrace. The silhouettes of their external penetration team darted past on their way to the lone outside egress, around the corner to the right, near the kitchen.
A telescope had been mounted on a tripod right against the glass and angled down toward the park. It was two and a half feet long, with a barrel easily eight inches wide. While Mason knew little about such things, he figured it must have had some impressive magnification. More than enough to get a good close-up of the man staked to the cross in the distant park.
Voices erupted from the earpiece.
“Bedroom clear.”
“Study clear.”
“Kitchen clear.”
“Terrace clear.”
“Something’s not right,” Mason said. The Scarecrow had outthought them every step of the way. Every move he’d made had been carefully planned and executed. He’d led them here for a reason, and based on everything Mason knew about him, that reason was to simultaneously flaunt his brilliance and attempt to derail their investigation. He’d led them here to kill them all. “He wouldn’t have left without arming whatever trap he’d set for us.”
“I agree,” Layne said. “We’re missing something.”
Mason tried to put himself inside the Scarecrow’s head. He would have anticipated the tactical units coming in from both the front door and the terrace. To inflict maximum damage, he would have wanted them all in the same place at the same time. He liked the killings to be intimate in proportion, yet devastating in their ferocity.
Mason ducked out of the living room and slipped past the other men into the bedroom. Again, the rear wall was composed entirely of windows, through which the pale glow of moonlight passed. There were no photographs on the nightstand, nothing of an even remotely personal nature. The bed was perfectly made and the walk-in closet stood open. Shirts on one side, suit jackets on the other.
“Maybe we got here faster than he anticipated and didn’t give him enough time to set a trap,” Layne said. She followed Mason across the hallway and into the study. The furniture was leather, the lighting recessed. A bookcase adorned with tomes that appeared to have been chosen for aesthetic value dominated one wall; another was nearly concealed behind a monolithic flat-screen TV. A vase of withering flowers and a marble statue of a reclining nude sat on the glass coffee table. “Surely we would have seen it by now if he had.”
The kitchen was on the other side of the bookcase. The countertops were bare and the stainless-steel appliances sparkling clean. Mason resisted the urge to check the drawers and cabinets and passed the terrace door, which the fourth team had left open, admitting the night air and the constant din of traffic.
“The false wall in the tunnel looked different from the others,” Mason said. “He’d known we’d eventually recognize it, but he’d expected us to just knock it down, which would have triggered the motion detector and released enough Novichok to kill us all. He’d rigged the IED to the door at the farmhouse for the same reason. Whether or not we found the bodies in the cornfield, he knew that if we’d tracked him that far, when no one answered the front door, we’d try to open it, and—boom—no more investigators.”
“So what’s obvious here?” Layne asked. “What stands apart from everything else?”
The answer hit him squarely in the face.
He turned to his left, toward the great room. The majority of the agents were gathered in there, near where the telescope sat on its tripod. All by itself.
Barbieri stepped away from the others. Leaned closer to the eyepiece, pressed his mask against it.
Mason heard the click from across the room.
“What the hell?” Barbieri said. He brought his eye away from the lens. “I can’t even see—”
“Down!” Mason shouted, and tackled Layne through the open door leading onto the terrace.
The explosion tore through the room and everyone in it. A fist of fire hit Mason from behind and hurled him across the tiled balcony. Glass exploded outward like buckshot. He lost his grip on Layne, then visual on her as the churning smoke overtook them.
His back struck the railing.
Layne collided with him a split second later.
The railing tore from its moorings with a metallic screech.
Mason felt it give, then lean outward over the nothingness.
He wrapped his arms around Layne. Tried to roll away from the railing as it toppled backward over the roofline and plummeted toward the street. He heard it crash onto something behind and below them.
Flames raced across the terrace.
A wave of superheated air buffeted them over the edge.
And into the open air.