There was no time to disarm the IED and they couldn’t take the risk of inadvertently setting it off. Finding the Scarecrow before she released the Novichok was all that mattered now. They were just going to have to hope Kaemon survived a little while longer.
Mason raised his pistol and followed the lone corridor deeper into the darkness. He glanced into the first room, his light sweeping across an industrial washbasin under an exposed spigot, to which a showerhead on a rubber hose had been mounted. The smell emanating from the rusted drain suggested it also served a secondary purpose.
“How long do you think they’ve been living down here?” Layne asked.
Mason could only shake his head. He was having a hard time rationalizing the implications of what they’d found. Kameko had brought her brother down here and taken care of him for what had to have been years, knowing the whole time that he would never leave this place. She’d been sitting in the darkness, listening to her brother slowly dying, and doing nothing but plotting her vengeance against the men who had hurt them as children.
There was a glaring hole in the center of his theory, however. Kameko couldn’t possibly be the Scarecrow.…
She was blind.
“Did you ever get the list of participants in the lawsuit against Edgewood?” Mason asked.
“Yeah,” Gunnar said, “but I haven’t even had time to look at the file.”
“Do me a favor and open it now, okay?”
“What am I looking for?”
“Trust me,” Mason said. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
Layne’s light passed behind the adjacent paper wall, inside of which was a low wooden platform with a thin futon mattress. The walls were decorated with bamboo scrolls featuring traditional Japanese artwork ranging from koi and pagodas to samurais and mountain ranges. And a figure wearing a conical straw hat and hanging from a cross, the artistic representation of the yarn dolls hanging all around them.
Kuebiko.
The Scarecrow.
“Neither of them is listed,” Gunnar said, “but the attorney’s retainer was paid from a NexGen discretionary account.”
“Why, exactly, are they suing?”
Mason entered the next room in the series. On his right was a wooden bench with a portable chemical fume hood, beneath which were a distilling flask, a stoppered vial, and a veritable apothecary of amber containers with handwritten labels: hexane, methanol, ammonia, sulfuric acid, and morning glory seeds. On his left was a stainless-steel table with an inset drain. It was covered with bloody gauze and sponges and a mess of surgical implements. If Marchment wasn’t already dead, he was definitely well on his way.
“More than half of the complainants in the class-action suit reported some form of cancer,” Gunnar said. “Most of them blood- or bone-related. Nearly all suffer from neurological disorders of varying severity, from tics to paralysis. Depression. Multiple sclerosis. The list goes on and on.”
“There are chemo drugs down here,” Mason said, “but it looks like Kaemon’s been beyond their reach for a while.”
“You think Kameko’s sick, too?”
“That would explain the Scarecrow’s lack of an exit strategy.”
“And her desire to kill every last one of the men who did this to them.”
The rice-paper wall of the next room glowed faintly purple from the black-light bulb illuminating a circular aquarium filled with tiny jellyfish, their tendrils dangling nearly to the rocks on the bottom. There were tanks with snakes, spiders, and flying insects crawling all over the inside of the glass.
“But then why would she be working for Langbroek when his family’s company played a significant role in their suffering?” Mason asked.
“It’s possible she doesn’t know about Nautilus’s involvement,” Gunnar said.
“Or, more likely, Langbroek doesn’t know about his family’s.” Mason felt a sudden tug of recognition from the back of his mind, a mental tip-of-the-tongue sensation, but the thought proved elusive. “He didn’t take over the company until decades after everything that happened at Edgewood.”
“Over here,” Ramses said.
His old friend’s voice came from the lone remaining room, at the far end of what had once been a railroad platform. The air grew noticeably colder with every step. The source of the flickering light he’d seen upon entering the apartment was back there, but neither the Scarecrow nor Marchment was. Five large flat-screen TVs had been mounted to the rear wall in three columns—two to either side and one in the middle—above a table of electrical components. The top row displayed footage from a local network of security cameras and every few seconds switched from one view to the next. The monitor on the left covered the outside of the building, the middle alternated views of the inside of the apartment, and the right showed various angles of what appeared to be a construction zone inside a large tunnel in the green-and-gray scale of night vision.
“In 1995, just prior to their disappearance, Kaemon and Kameko Nakamura each transferred five million dollars into the account of a Dr. Tatsuo Yamaguchi,” Gunnar said.
“You think he’s been treating them all this time?”
“I can’t confirm as much, but it makes sense.”
The other monitors featured imagery either hacked from remote security cameras or routed from live Internet feeds: Grand Central Station with its globe clock, vaulted windows, and constant stream of commuters and tourists, and Times Square, crammed full of revelers awash in flashing lights, preparing to count down the New Year. There wasn’t another night during the year when so many people would be out of their homes and on the streets, completely unprepared for a chemical attack.
“Dr. Yamaguchi isn’t an oncologist,” Gunnar said. “He’s a neurologist specializing in neuromuscular and neuro-opthalmologic disorders. That’s not to say he wouldn’t be able to prescribe the treatment for certain cancers, only that he’s not qualified to cover the broader spectrum. What’s most interesting about him, though, is that he was actually the specialist called in to treat the victims of the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway the same year the Nakamuras slash Matsudas dropped off the planet.”
“He’d definitely be my first choice if I’d been exposed as a child and was exhibiting adverse effects in my early adulthood,” Mason said. “After all, how much practical experience can any modern doctor have with sarin exposure?”
A flash of light from the corner of his eye.
He looked up at the top right monitor in time to see the light grow brighter and brighter, until it overwhelmed the night-vision apparatus. The feed switched to another angle, which revealed a silhouette wearing a broad conical hat staggering through the darkness, all details washed out by the bright light shining right at it.
“Where is this?” he asked, tapping the screen.
“It’s a subway tunnel like any other,” Ramses said. “She could be anywhere underneath the city, for all we know.”
“It can’t be any tunnel,” Layne said. “She wouldn’t be walking down the middle of a subway tunnel with an electrified third rail in the darkness like that.”
Mason glanced at the video receiver on the table underneath the middle TV. It was a wireless system, which meant the source had to be nearby, and yet he hadn’t heard the distant clatter of rails. The load-bearing walls were concrete and covered with what looked like acoustic padding, but that didn’t explain why he hadn’t felt so much as a single vibration from a passing train.
On the monitor, the Scarecrow rounded a bend and vanished from sight.
“What happened to the subway this platform used to service?” he asked.
“You’re in what remains of the aboveground train station,” Gunnar said. “They built this block on top of it, but not until after the new tracks were run underground.”
“So you’re saying there’s still a tunnel down there?”
If Gunnar replied, Mason didn’t hear him. He was too busy tearing the foam from the walls. It hadn’t been put there to dampen the sound of the subway, but, rather, to insulate the apartment against the cold radiating from the hollow earth.
He exposed an iron door beneath padding that had been cut in such a way as to conceal its size and shape. Someone had chiseled away the concrete covering it and used an acetylene torch to cut through the welded seal around it.
“Where did the train run?” he asked.
“It was originally part of the line connecting Boston and New Haven, which they rerouted to make room for the subway.”
Mason drew open the heavy door with a screech of metal. The air blowing into his face was even colder than it was outside and smelled of damp earth and dust. A rusted iron staircase led down into the darkness at a severe angle.
“So what’s down there now?”
“I’m working on it.”
Mason glanced at the monitor where the Scarecrow had been only seconds ago.
“It doesn’t matter, Gunnar. We’re going down there anyway.”