The New York Office of Integrity Group International was little more than a pair of industrial doors behind the InterContinental Barclay New York and across the street from the side of the Waldorf-Astoria. They might have missed it entirely were it not for the discreet blue awning with the address in tiny white numbers and the security keypad beside the door. And the white van parked up on the sidewalk in front of it. Ramses drove past it once before finding an underground parking garage a few blocks away, where they left Gunnar with the engine running and his laptop propped on the steering wheel.
The late-afternoon shadows of the skyscrapers fell heavily upon Forty-ninth Street, especially in the block immediately east of Park Avenue, where there were no storefront windows or neon signs. The snow had turned to sleet that assailed them from behind on the gusting wind. There was no one else on the street, despite the bustle a couple hundred feet away.
“You ready to work your magic?” Mason asked.
“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.