By the time they made it back to the Scarecrow’s apartment, Kaemon had been removed from his bed and taken to the nearest secure intensive care unit, where he was being treated under heavily armed guard. His early prognosis was grim, especially considering the doctors didn’t have any idea what they were dealing with and no one seemed to have a clue how to track down Dr. Tatsuo Yamaguchi, assuming he was even still in the country. Considering even Kaemon’s sister, who’d obviously been his primary caregiver for years, had written him off, the likelihood of his physician’s having remained nearby was slim, especially if he’d known what Kameko intended to do. Mason looked forward to tracking him down and asking him in person.
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.