Red Equinox (16 page)

And leave people like Hanson and his cronies at Limbus to protect the city? To protect my daughter?

“Huh? Playing card? I said ‘this case is hard.’ She’s a hardcase, this young lady.”

“So far, sure. You think she knows something, has some involvement?”

Brooks squinted at the horizon. “She probably just stumbled into it. Probably doesn’t really know shit. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“So why is she pushing back?”

“Oh, I don’t know…anger at being abducted? Maybe cooperating with authority just goes against her grain.”

“Well, the only connection we can find to the church is that photo she took of the reverend. She doesn’t seem to have many friends, but we’ll drag her teachers in here if we have to, and they’ll at least care about losing their jobs. We’re also trying to track down the guy who shows up in her phone records the most. Rafael Moreno. Might be a boyfriend.”

Brooks looked from the black orb in the sky to Hanson and back again, but the man clearly didn’t see it dripping darkness in thin swathes upon the city, like ribbons of oily black incense smoke that flowed down instead of up.

SPECTRA had found most of the people who had been in the train car, all of the survivors. Some were still in ICU at MGH, but the rest were being held in this facility under the auspices of a quarantine. They had been told that if the weapon were found to contain a biological agent, there could be a risk of contagion. While the idea had shaken them and made them harder to interview, it had at least kept the lawyers and the ACLU at bay. It didn’t keep the media away, though, and some of the survivors’ names had already been leaked. The government couldn’t hold them much longer. They had all tested negative for radiation and infectious germs, but they didn’t need to know that just yet. And Brooks’ superiors had made it clear that the real risk of releasing them was that their stories (or worse, their
perceptions
) might be contagious, especially given the number of reporters ready and willing to expose the general population. Brooks wasn’t exactly sure he understood these concerns. He’d heard of ideas going viral but had never taken the metaphor as literally as some of his superiors appeared to.

He knew only this: The subjects in holding all reported seeing the same weird shit on the train that he had. Except for one man and one woman who had been wearing earbuds and listening to music at the time. Those two had only seen the effects of the violence—people being ripped apart by invisible things. There was a possibility that those invisible things had not seen the Vietnamese engineer or the young lady student either, because neither had been harmed. Statistically that was well within the realm of coincidence because they weren’t the only ones left unscathed, but the others were mostly people who had been positioned at the other end of the subway car when the shit hit the fan. The two who had been wearing earbuds when it started had taken them out once they became aware of the massacre in full swing, but even then they hadn’t been able to see what was causing it.

Brooks had lied at his debriefing, claimed he’d been listening to his iPod as well and hadn’t been exposed to the sounds that started it all. He’d made the snap judgment to lie mostly on instinct when the pieces of the puzzle were still coming together, but he hadn’t regretted his choice yet. In the past twenty-four hours he’d only heard things that confirmed his gut decision. Like the suggestion from one of the Limbus operatives that they could wipe out the witnesses with an
actual
bio-war germ if it became necessary to make that the official story. Brooks hadn’t told anyone about the black sun he saw over the city, but when he’d visited a critical patient at Mass General, and realized that the man’s room was on the Western side of the building, he had pulled back the curtain and asked him if he saw anything. The man, an English professor at Tufts, had described the thing better than Brooks ever could.

The suspect with the boom box had been wearing high-end noise cancellation headphones, apparently as a prophylactic against what he’d unleashed. Like some kind of drug, the sound opened a new level of perception in those exposed. And somehow this expanded perception made them vulnerable to attack from what they saw. If the director found out Brooks had been exposed, he’d be sitting in one of the soundproofed rooms ten floors down with the rest of the cattle, waiting for a verdict.

Hanson was still talking. Brooks tried not to stare at that damned spot in the sky, tried to stay present.

“Sorry?”

“You don’t look so hot. You get any sleep since it happened?”

“No.”

“You should go get some before you pass out on your feet.”

“Not until we catch the guy. I’ll sleep then.” He couldn’t help glancing back at the sky and following the lines of two black tendrils that had become more prominent than the others. One of these led to the John Hancock Tower, the other (thicker and blacker) dripped behind that sci-fi looking building at 111 Huntington Avenue near the Christian Science Center.

“Without a lead, that could be days,” Hanson said.

“You think it will be?” He balked at the prospect of sitting around waiting for a lead. He needed a reason to get back in the field where he could make up for his losses on the train.

“No. The facial recognition software’s come a long way, and he’s in the database somewhere. Everyone is now, thanks to social media. He’ll turn up on some gas station cam. Just a matter of time. And the geeks dissecting his device will come up with some kind of explanation. Or a theory anyway. A foothold for what we’re dealing with.”

“Well, I’m not good at waiting. I’d like to try something.”

“What’s that?”

“The witnesses. The ‘mass hallucination group.’ Let’s get some of them out of the basement and ask them if they see anything else that we can’t. Take them up to the top of the Pru and see if they can spot any residual weirdness anywhere. It just might lead us to the guy or his associates.”

Daniel Northrup, SPECTRA’s own top spook, had joined the conversation, lit a cigarette, and planted his shoulder blades and the bottom of one shoe against the wall. Smoking was supposed to be illegal in the government building, but Northrup was a law unto himself. He’d been staring at the veined marble tiles that covered the lower half of the walls and listening to the exchange between Brooks and Hanson. Now he swiveled his head in their direction and Brooks found himself marveling, as usual, at the perfect frosting in the man’s sideburns and temples, and wondering if anyone could be so vain as to dye gray
into
their black hair to get that distinguished effect.

Northrup poked the air gently but emphatically with the burning cherry. “We are
not
taking them out in public. You can have three at a top floor window of this building.”

Brooks nodded.

“Well? Get on it,” Northrup said, exhaling a drag.

*   *   *

Becca swallowed her pride and asked the guard to bring her an Ibuprofen and an Ace bandage for her wrist. That was the last contact she’d had for what felt like two hours, but at least it had brought enough relief to keep her idle mind from dwelling on the injury and how stupid she’d been to attack an armed soldier, or cop, or paramilitary goon. Whatever. When the door opened again, Jason Brooks was holding her army green camera bag, presumably with her Nikon in it.

“You ever do any aerial photography?” he asked.

“Can’t say I have.”

“First time for everything.” He handed her the bag. She took it without thinking, and a sharp pain shot through her wrist. She shifted the bag to her left hand and wondered if she could even operate her camera with the injury. Brooks frowned at her and raised an eyebrow at the Ace bandage.

“It’s from hitting one of your thugs,” she said. “I don’t know if I can hold my camera with it. Damned brick of a thing. What do you want me to shoot, anyway?”

“The city. From a helicopter.”

Becca laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“Uh, don’t you guys have all kinds of satellites for that? Are budget cuts so bad that you need an art student with no zoom lens?”

“I want your infrared images. Whatever it is you normally do to get the pictures.”

“Well, I doubt I can do much good with a sprained wrist in a moving helicopter.”

“I’ll get you a brace. If you do this, I’ll get you that talk with your so-called uncle too, deal?”

“You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

“Your dog’s been fed. I saw to it.”

“So your guys are still raiding my underwear drawer?”

“No, they’re gone. And you could maybe be home tomorrow if you cooperate.”

“I doubt that. Did you catch the guy yet? The guy who bombed the tunnel?”

“I can’t talk about that. And nobody said it was a bomb.”

“Can’t talk about it or can’t talk about it with a suspect in custody? ‘Cause that’s what I am right?”

“Look, I don’t really need you, now that I think about it. I’ll go fetch a tech to fly with me and use your camera while you sit here and stew.”

Becca raised an eyebrow.
“My camera?”
She set her jaw and shook her head. “Not without me.”

*   *   *

They gathered on the roof, a crew of four: the pilot, Agent Brooks, Becca, and a squat, pudgy, bald guy with two-days of stubble on his face. She thought he might be another military type, but he was dressed in jeans, a plaid shirt, and sneakers. Her next guess was I.T. guy, and maybe he
was,
somewhere, but not here at Government Center. He gave off a nervous vibe, and then it clicked, and she realized that he was in custody, too.

Brooks introduced them. “Becca this is Tom, Tom, Becca. He’s the eyes and you’re the lens, okay? Tom has a special kind of…
perception
that will guide us to the sites I want you to photograph.” The pilot started the rotors. The bird was a big military type, and she wondered if it was the same one they’d brought her here in, but having had a bag over her head for that ride, she couldn’t say for sure. She’d only seen it briefly through her window on approach.

Brooks gave her a hand climbing in and gestured to a seat. Becca buckled up and examined her camera, checked the settings and the card. They hadn’t replaced it with a blank; she could still see her last set of photos. Brooks took the seat beside the pilot and passed headsets around. Tom stared at the sky, his gaze fixed on something only he could see, his fingers knotted in his lap, knuckles white. She wondered if he had a fear of flying or if his stress was all about the “special perception” Brooks had mentioned. Becca tried smiling when he glanced at her, just a tight little one, nothing too generous, but his gaze slid over her and back out the window beside her.

Becca feared heights, but planes had never really bothered her. Something about not being able to fall out of a plane. But when her Urbex friends went up on rooftops and water towers, she hung back. Edges with drops scared her. Nina had suggested that this might have to do with a fear of her own self-destructive urges and some impulse to jump whispering in the base of her brain. She’d had to admit that sounded about right. Nina wasn’t too damned shabby as a shrink.

But helicopters, well, she’d not been exposed to them much before the past twenty-four hours, so she wasn’t sure how she felt about them, though they seemed fundamentally untrustworthy. Flying in a machine that couldn’t glide to a landing in an emergency had always struck her as unnatural, and she wondered as they lurched off the pad if she couldn’t maybe have one of those black bags over her head after all.

Her stomach dropped when they crested the edge of the building they’d been perched on and she saw the little figures of people and their shadows on the plaza below. Then the bird tilted and swung over the city, past the gold dome of the State House, skirting Beacon Hill to the right, and soaring over the yellow and russet swatches of the Boston Common in fall splendor. Leaving the park behind, they were soon moving among the skyscrapers of Copley Square.

Tom leaned toward his window, his breath fogging the glass, his eyes wide with terror or awe at some empty spot in the sky. Brooks was looking at it too. He turned to Tom, and Becca heard his voice in the headset asking, “What do you see?”

“Same thing we saw from the window. Black smoke dripping from the black moon down to the ground, only now I can see exactly where it’s going.”

“Where?”

“The Hancock Tower. It’s like a magnet for it. But it’s not as heavy there as it is beyond the Prudential.”

Brooks sat back in his seat. To the pilot he said, “Veer right and go wide of the Hancock, then pass between the Pru and one-eleven. Can you do that?”

“Yes sir.”

Becca stared at the blue-mirrored surface of the John Hancock Tower, the tallest building in Boston. All she could see were several strata of cloud cover reflected in its blue façade and the black speck of the helicopter passing across it like a fruit fly buzzing a glass of ice water. No black smoke.

She gripped her seat as they passed between the Prudential Tower and the thing she’d heard referred to as the R2-D2 building. Brooks was instructing the pilot to drop lower, and damned if he didn’t seem to be looking at something as he gave the directions. He sure wasn’t consulting Tom, and she wondered if the first and only consultation so far had been for the purpose of confirming something he could see for himself. For a moment there was the feeling of passing through a corridor of steel and glass, and then they were soaring over the Christian Science Center, their shadow traversing the vast silver rectangle of the reflecting pool.

The water rippled, and at first Becca thought it was from the wind until she noticed a pattern coalescing around the center of the pool. For a fleeting second she thought the helicopter was causing the disturbance, but when they had swept across the water and arced around over the great stone church, she craned her neck and saw that the water was still agitated, just in that spot. There were a few people strolling beside the pool and sitting on the edges of the stone planters that ran along Huntington Ave. Some of them were looking skyward at the helicopter, but she couldn’t tell if any had noticed the ripples.