1
58 MILES OFF THE COAST OF CANCÚN, MEXICO
June 27
Slate Langbroek woke from a sound sleep and sat up in bed. He was certain he’d heard something. A thudding sound, like someone dropping a heavy object onto the floor above his cabin. He concentrated and listened.
The yacht rose and fell gently on the still sea. Waves broke softly against the hull. A gull cried in the distance.
He glanced at the clock. 4:12 A.M. The sun would be rising soon.
The chef was already at work in the galley. It smelled like roast pork. Or maybe a whole pig, if the faint scent of singed hair were to be believed.
A minute passed.
Two.
Maybe the sound had been part of his dream, which was always the same. He was standing on top of a ruby red staircase, a tower of digital billboards behind him. Each displayed his image, larger than life. The crowd filled the streets below him. Their eyes were upon him, their cheers as loud as thunder. A woman emerged from their ranks, dressed in samurai armor and wearing a conical straw hat that concealed her face. She extended her arms to either side and spoke without moving her mouth. A single word cut through the roar, penetrating his very being.
“Quintus.”
His heart pounded in his chest and he couldn’t seem to draw a breath. The voice hadn’t been part of his dream. He’d definitely heard it, spoken aloud from just outside his range of sight. And there were only twelve people who called him by that name, eight of whom would sacrifice their firstborn to claim it as their own. He’d prepared for this contingency though, planned every detail so meticulously that there was no way—
Thump.
The sound originated from beyond the foot of his bed, right outside the sliding glass door. The curtains billowed on the gentle breeze. He suddenly regretted leaving the door open so he could fall asleep with the cool air on his face.
Langbroek jumped from his bed, the marble tiles cold against his bare feet, and darted for the door. Slammed it closed and locked it. Finally caught his breath.
His hands were shaking so badly he could barely draw back the curtains.
The body lying on the deck outside of his cabin looked like it had been cooked. He recognized his private captain by the epaulettes on the shoulders of his uniform shirt, which was still burning in places. His hair was gone and the upper layers of his skin were charred.
“Jesus,” he whispered, letting the curtains fall from his hands.
He staggered backward. Clipped his bare heels on the tiles. Landed on his rear end. Kicked at the ground to propel himself up against the bed.
“Quintus.”
A creak of transferred weight on the deck outside the door.
Langbroek climbed onto his bed and hit the button to engage the electromagnetic locks. He stepped back down to the floor and walked to the center of the room. The walls were reinforced with steel plates, the windows made of bulletproof glass. His cabin was even equipped with a self-contained air supply in the event the boat sank. There was no way anyone could get to him in here, especially not in what little time they’d have once he triggered the emergency transponder and private military contractors stationed on both sides of the Yucatán Channel converged upon his location.
He felt a surge of anger. How dare the other twelve make such a brazen move against him. If they wanted a war, then by God, that was exactly what he was going to give them.
Langbroek strode to the door and ripped open the curtains. The body of his captain was gone. In its place stood a figure wearing a full-body metallic silver suit and clutching an apparatus that looked like an underwater camera in its gloved hands.
Quintus saw a distorted reflection of himself on the golden face shield of the intruder’s helmet.
“Tertius Decimus sends his regards,” the assassin said.
The aperture opened and a greenish blue light bloomed from behind the lens of the device.
Quintus shielded his eyes.
Felt the heat, even through the glass.
Screamed as his skin blistered.
And started to burn.
2
DENVER, COLORADO
July 2
Special Agent James Mason emerged from the elevator onto the fortieth floor of a building that resembled a giant obsidian stake driven into the heart of downtown Denver. He’d thrown on a plain white T-shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap, covering his sandy blond hair and shielding his blue eyes from the rising sun, which glared through the wall of windows to the east and made the surrounding skyscrapers appear to burn. It was surreal to think that the last time he was here he’d nearly died, when a helicopter crashed into the penthouse suite and turned the building into a towering inferno. While the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation had ruled it an accident—a combination of mechanical failure and pilot error—Mason knew that their explanation was the furthest thing from the truth. Had a hacker known as Anomaly not alerted him to the impending attack at the last possible second, his entire team would have been killed, right along with the pilot, whose body had been so badly burned that the medical examiner had been unable to identify him.
“Pretty freaking unbelievable, right?” Ramses Donovan said. He wore a button-down shirt open to the chest, his ebon hair slicked back, and an expression of pride as he gestured to his private nightclub, which offered a stunning 360-degree panoramic view of the entire front range of the Rocky Mountains. “I was starting to think they might never finish.”
Mason took in the room around him. Everything looked just as it had before, and yet different at the same time. The leather of the seats was a slightly darker color, the lighted terrariums built into the support columns subtly altered, and the freestanding wet bars not quite where they’d been before, or perhaps his recollection was tainted by the memory of the chopper’s spotlight turning them into silhouettes in the seconds before impact.
“I don’t know how you can move back in here after what happened,” Special Agent Jessica Layne said. She walked between the tables, tracing the contours of the booths with her fingertips. Her raven black hair was pulled up from her slender neck and her sapphire eyes betrayed nothing of the thoughts playing out behind them. “It’s only a matter of time before they take another shot at you.”
“Let them,” Ramses said. He’d never even considered living anywhere else. It would have been a betrayal of everything that made him who he was: the human personification of the middle finger. The placid exterior was a disguise, though, one so transparent that Mason could practically see the rage boiling underneath it. When Ramses found the man responsible for destroying his sanctum and uprooting him from his life, he was going to tear him apart with his bare hands. “They know where to find me.”
“Which, fortunately, is no longer at my place,” Mason said.
“No offense, but if I’d been forced to spend another night in that dump of yours I’d have put a gun in my mouth.”
From Mason’s experience, any statement qualified by a phrase like “no offense” was meant to have the exact opposite effect, but he didn’t take the insult personally. The building he called home—which at various times in its existence had been a tire shop, a used-car dealership, and a gallery for graffiti artists ambitious enough to scale the twelve-foot chain-link fence—stuck out like a sore thumb, even from the abandoned industrial wasteland surrounding it. Ramses had largely had his run of the place for the past six months while his penthouse was being rebuilt and Mason was splitting time between the Denver and Manhattan field offices of the FBI, sifting through the fallout of the Times Square Massacre on New Year’s Eve, during which the Scarecrow—a woman formerly known as Kameko Nakamura—had dispersed Novichok gas from handheld vaporizer units at the stroke of midnight. She’d killed 107 innocent people and overwhelmed emergency rooms with thousands more, but she’d failed to assassinate her primary target, Slate Langbroek, whose family had been responsible for the twisted experimentation to which she and her cherished brother, Kaemon, had been subjected as children. The chairman of the executive board of directors for Royal Nautilus Petroleum might have escaped her wrath and slipped through the Bureau’s net, but he’d eventually have to come up for air, and when he did, Mason and his team would be waiting.
Assuming, of course, the Thirteen didn’t find him first.
Mason leaned against one of the elaborate terrariums, inside of which was a waterfall surrounded by tropical trees and blooming plants. The sound of running water and the scent of damp soil were strangely calming. When he didn’t immediately see anything slithering or crawling around inside, he tapped on the glass.
“Do that again and you’ll be wearing a cast,” Ramses said. In another life, he would have made an amazing zoologist, albeit one who might not have made the best tour guide for small children.
A tortoise emerged from the foliage at the edge of the water. The right half of its shell appeared to have been burned.
“It survived the explosion?” Mason said.
“Nearly every animal in my collection did. Reptiles are resilient creatures. See the green tree python in that enclosure over there? He escaped the fire and was living in the ductwork until about two weeks ago. You should have seen the look on the contractor’s face when he told me what he’d found.”
“That snake’s what, six feet long?” Layne said. “How did no one know it was there?”
“It happens more often than you’d think,” Ramses said. “Just last year, a western diamondback broke out of its cage in Arizona and somehow got into the plumbing. It came right up through the toilet of a restaurant down the street four months later and bit a guy squarely on the ass. Some dude in Wisconsin had an eight-foot red-tailed boa that he thought had escaped his apartment complex; ten months later it fell out of the ceiling onto his neighbor while she was sleeping. Hell, the Bronx Zoo lost an Egyptian cobra, which keepers eventually found, and a venomous mangrove snake that’s still on the loose. After the kind of beating the entire staff took in the papers and on social media, it’s no wonder nobody stepped forward to claim the mamushi that turned up in Brooklyn a few months back.”
“What in God’s name is a mamushi?”
“A species of pit viper,” Ramses said. “It’s the deadliest snake in—”
“Japan,” Mason said, finishing his old friend’s sentence for him. He caught the tail end of a thought and tried to hang on before it slipped through his grasp. “Show me where they found it.”
Ramses nodded and led them to a broad spiral staircase, which ascended into a marble anteroom with water trickling down three of the walls. The fourth was secured by a digital keypad and receded like the door of an elevator, admitting them into the private lair of a man who was probably even an enigma to himself.
Unlike the level below them, the residential suite had been completely remodeled. The living room looked roughly the same, with a monster flat-screen TV surrounded by furniture that appeared soft enough to swallow a man whole, only it was maybe half the size and there was no longer a swimming pool in the roof overhead. The computer setup off of the stainless-steel kitchen was gone, replaced by a security system displaying live footage of the building from every conceivable angle, inside and out.
Mason and Layne followed Ramses into the hallway, immediately forked to the left, and entered a room that hadn’t been there before. A networked workstation with six monitors, modeled after the secure website the Thirteen had used to covertly communicate and influence global events, dominated the far wall, while the remainder had been plastered with photographic displays of everyone and everything even peripherally related to the secretive cabal. There were pictures of four generations of Langbroeks, whose involvement with the Nazi Party and the U.S. Army’s chemical arsenal had laid the foundation for the Novichok threat; the Nakamura family, whose human experimentation for the Japanese army’s nefarious Unit 731 had continued stateside after World War II and given rise to the Scarecrow; and members of the Richter and Thornton bloodlines, who’d conspired to engineer and release numerous historical pandemics using their pet monster, the Hoyl.
Somewhere, hidden among them, were the threads that would unravel the mystery of the Thirteen.
“What do you think of the new command center?” Gunnar Backstrom asked, swiveling around in the captain’s chair at the terminal. He wore his bangs long to conceal the better part of the vertical scar that bisected his right eyebrow and cheek, and a Brioni dress shirt with a royal blue tie loosened at the collar, which was about as close as he came to going casual. “I’m just putting on the finishing touches.”
“Impressive,” Mason said.
Ramses slipped past Gunnar and opened a search window on the main monitor. He breezed through a series of links and brought up a map of Brooklyn. Four red dots, each labeled with a number corresponding to the legend at the bottom, were clustered just inland from the waterfront district.
“A man was bitten by a venomous snake in Mother Cabrini Park on May sixteenth,” Ramses said. “Animal control subsequently trapped and euthanized a seventeen-inch, reddish brown serpent identified as Gloydius blomhoffii, also known as the Japanese moccasin or mamushi, suspected to have been illegally imported and kept as a pet. Subsequent sightings of snakes matching the same description have been reported in Carroll Park, near St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and in the parking lot of the Seventy-sixth Precinct, although no other specimens have been captured.”
“What are you thinking?” Layne asked.
“If I’m right,” Mason said, “we might have finally caught a break in the hunt for Dr. Tatsuo Yamaguchi.”
The Japanese neurologist had risen to international acclaim as one of the world’s foremost experts on the treatment of nerve gas exposure following the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995 by a cult known as Aum Shinrikyo. He’d vanished from the public eye shortly thereafter, only to reappear decades later as the personal physician of the Nakamura twins. As the lone link who could potentially connect the Scarecrow to Slate Langbroek—and, by extension, the Thirteen—Mason’s team had spent the last six months scouring the globe in search of him, but so far hadn’t turned up a single trace.
“Walk us through it,” Gunnar said.
“Using the mamushi to kill the doctor she blamed for failing to save her brother’s life fits the Scarecrow’s MO. While she maintained a professional distance from the potential victims of the plot to release the Novichok, she took her time with the people she believed had wronged her on a personal level, using the stinger of a box jellyfish, the neurotoxin of a puffer fish, and the venom of a swarm of giant hornets—all endemic to Japan—to make them suffer as she had.”
“So you think that’s why we haven’t been able to find Yamaguchi?” Layne asked. “Because he’s already dead?”
“Either his body’s waiting for us in an apartment within range of those four sightings or he got the hell out of there when he discovered the snakes,” Mason said.
“Which means that everything inside that apartment should still be exactly how he left it and, one way or another, we’ll find him, whether rotting inside or through whatever evidence he didn’t have time to destroy.”
“Someone would have noticed by now,” Ramses said. “The first month he missed his rent payment, the landlord would have been banging on his door—”
“Unless he owned the place and had all of his bills set up to be paid automatically from an account that could comfortably cover all of his expenses for the foreseeable future,” Gunnar said. He booted Ramses from the computer and scooted up to the console. His fingers blurred across the keyboard. “If that’s the case, then I should be able to rule out a full ninety percent of the population in that area, focus on the remaining ten, and—”
A dialogue box appeared in the middle of the screen, eclipsing the lines of code scrolling past.
“Anomaly,” Ramses said.
“He exploited the crack in the firewall,” Gunnar said. They’d collectively decided to leave the vulnerability so that the hacker could communicate with them, and not just because he’d saved their lives. By doing so, he’d revealed that he wasn’t merely inside their investigation into the Thirteen; he was inside the organization itself. Whatever his endgame, he needed them alive and they needed to figure out why. “The system’s attempting to trace his location before he slips back out.”
Gunnar opened the tracking program on the adjacent screen, which displayed the green outline of the world map on a black backdrop. A beacon surrounded by pulsating colored rings formed on their location. An orange line shot straight from it to a white dot on the East Coast, from which another line streaked across the Atlantic to a green ring in Central Europe.
Three words appeared in the box: ¡El Nuevo Alarma!
“It’s an online Mexican shock rag featuring graphic coverage of cartel violence,” Ramses said.
The orange line sliced diagonally across the Middle East to the tip of Somalia, then east toward China, where it faded before reaching a yellow dot that had only started to form.
“We lost him,” Gunnar said. He minimized the tracking program, opened the ¡El Nuevo Alarma! website, and scrolled past pictures of a silver sedan riddled with bullet holes, headless corpses displayed beneath a banner with words painted in Spanish, and body parts washed up on a beach. He stopped when he reached a photograph of a partially burned yacht with bodies littering its deck. It had been taken yesterday evening, if the date stamp in the corner and the angle of the shadows were to be believed. He cleaned up the resolution, zoomed in on the ship, and laced his fingers behind his head. “Well, what do you know?”
There was no mistaking Slate Langbroek’s yacht. Or the reality that he was undoubtedly already dead.
“Do you think Anomaly figured out that we had a lead on Yamaguchi and fed us the yacht to buy the Thirteen enough time to beat us to him?” Layne asked.
“If he was in our system while we were researching the mamushi sightings, he could have easily pieced it together,” Gunnar said.
“We have to find Yamaguchi first,” Mason said. “And we need to get someone we trust on that yacht before whatever evidence it might hold disappears. Where’s Alejandra right now?”
“Hunting the Jalisco New Generation Cartel,” Ramses said, “which means she could be just about anywhere in the eastern half of Mexico.”
“She’s still closer than we are. Find out where that yacht is and see how fast she can get there.”
Mason abruptly turned and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Gunnar asked.
“Brooklyn,” Mason said. “Layne and I have some snakes of our own to hunt.”
Copyright © 2021 by Michael Laurence McBride
