Red Equinox (12 page)

It was the first of several, and when she looked at the iron bridges that spanned the channel, she saw a black SWAT van led by two police motorcycles with their flashers on racing to catch up with whatever this procession was that had army trucks for a forward guard.

Her hair blew around her face as the cavalcade passed, and she watched them trundle northwest toward the Back Bay. When the rumble had mostly faded she led Django back inside and rode the freight elevator with him up to the loft. The stresses of the day were catching up with her, and now she only wanted to sleep. Hopefully the dog would let her. The idea of making him a fluffy bed of old blankets and towels kindled an unfamiliar maternal feeling in her, and she decided she would set it up beside her own bed.

Entering the building, she’d had it in mind to get on the computer for a brief scan of the local news sites and maybe Twitter, to find out what that police ruckus was all about, but back in the relative warmth of the loft, her head grew heavy, and by the time she’d made the dog a bed, her curiosity had faded into fatigue. Except, that wasn’t entirely true. What she’d lost was not her curiosity but the resolve to approach the machine where those impossible photos slumbered behind an eighth of an inch of hi-def liquid crystal. Those could wait for the light of day, and so could news of the world beyond her door.

Jason Brooks had given up on the hope that a dog might change his life back in 2010 when the Wonderland greyhound track was shut down by popular vote. After that he had moved on to horses, but he still missed the dogs. Horses made it look too easy, until one of them wiped out and threw a jockey and reminded you just how much mass and muscle was flying over the dirt; but dogs…dogs looked like they had a personal stake in the game. And a greyhound running like a mad motherfucker was a sight to behold. The track closure didn’t surprise him. Attitudes toward animals were changing in the twenty-first century, and of course the blue bleeding hearts of Massachusetts led the trend. The horses would probably be the next to go, but by then the state would at least have more casinos. For now, he divided his weekends between the First Light Casino on the Wampanoag reservation thirty minutes south of Boston, and the Suffolk Downs track just north of the city.

On the Saturday in September when Brooks’ fortunes shifted, it was a horse that did it, and while he did win some money that morning, he would wonder for a long time after if the wager had put him in the right place at the right time or quite the opposite.

Like all pivotal moments in a life, it came about by a chain of events. If he hadn’t bet on Noon Shadow in the first race of the day, he would have stayed at the track later. If he hadn’t quit after Noon Shadow placed first, he wouldn’t have been on the harbor ferry within an hour, nor would he have been on the T when the bomb went off. Blame it on the horse.

Blame it on Hurricane Sonia for flooding most of the Blue Line in 2017 and adding the ferry trip to his travel time. Whichever it was that put him underground on the right train to witness the massacre, it was part of a chain, and who could say where a chain began? Maybe it had
always
been his destiny to be on that train; because what were the chances of a SPECTRA agent being present when some psycho finally found a way to tear a hole in the fabric of reality?

So the big break in a career that had meandered from cop to detective to agent in a supralegal clandestine Intel agency turned on his gambling habit. Go figure. Two paydays in one. But every lucky break comes with a cost. The gambling habit had already cost him his wife, and the cost of witnessing the attack could take years to count—he knew that while he was still in the thick of it. It sure didn’t feel lucky at the time, but some people survived because he was on that train, so maybe
they
were lucky. Maybe.

A week prior, he had won and then lost big on the roulette wheel at First Light when red 23 kept coming up longer than it should have. Today, he had balanced the scales at the horse track and quit while he was ahead by reminding himself of a quote he’d seen online, and running it around his mind like a mantra (or a thoroughbred) as he walked to the payout window:
the safest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your pocket.

He caught the ferry at Wood Island station where the rest of the Blue Line was now growing barnacles under water, and connected to the Outbound Red Line at Kendall. The plan was to stop by the SPECTRA office at Harvard and log a couple hours on the secure network to make up for time lost on Friday when his lunch hour had turned into a bit of a Keno binge. He’d felt guilty about it all morning, and knew he wouldn’t be able to really enjoy celebrating the win tonight if he didn’t make right at work first. If he balanced the scales, he wouldn’t have to worry about how impossible it would be to go in on Sunday with a hangover. But he never did make it to the office, or to the bar after. The kid with the boom box got on at Central.

*   *   *

Darius Marlowe hadn’t deliberated much over his target. Inbound or Outbound? Park Street Station had crossed his mind, of course. The Boston Common could be considered the center of the city, but that made it harder to get out. Harvard Square, on the other hand, was a prestigious locale with more exit options. If he could jack a car at Harvard he’d have a better chance of getting out than if he were hemmed in by the urban labyrinth of the city proper. And striking so close to the ivory tower, beacon of all that was rational in the Western world, well, that certainly scored some points for a man who wanted to rattle nerves. These calculations flitted through his head, and he made his choice almost on impulse.

He sat on the station bench in a multicolored tile alcove with the CENTRAL sign above his head, the boom box at his feet. The dark domed eyes of cameras on poles suspended from the ceiling seemed to glare at the platform with omnidirectional scrutiny. He did his best to avoid staring back, but found his gaze darting toward them anyway, and each time it did he forced it to keep moving, turning his head to rest his eyes on something else. The game reminded him of checking out a hot girl without getting caught. But there were no hot girls waiting for the train, just a white guy about his own age in a Celtics jersey with a ponytail and a lot of leather jewelry. Darius looked past him at a black door beside what looked like a pair of fire hose spigots with red wheels in a recessed aluminum panel surrounded by more of the multicolored tile. There was a metal box with an emergency button, and a keypad backlit with red numbers. A red sign on the adjacent door proclaimed:

This Door Is Controlled &

Monitored By:

MBTA SECURITY

Use Employee I.D. To

Gain Access.

Darius’s eyes swept across the dome cameras again. He’d boarded the T at this stop before but had never noticed all these security details. Had he unwittingly chosen a station that housed a higher security presence than most? Charobim had been so intent on instructing him in the science of his mission that they hadn’t discussed reconnaissance or even target selection, and Darius had been given no particular orders regarding how to deal with security personnel if they approached him. He recalled an article he’d found on a local news blog while researching. A few years old, it had been written when the MBTA went digital and started tweeting delays and changes of service. The article was pretty inane, but the accompanying photo had raised his hairs, and he recalled it now in vivid detail: a group of men in white shirts and ties sitting at a command console in a dark room, around the perimeter of which ran a curved ribbon of monitors all lit up green with track maps and night vision video feeds of the tunnels. Was he being recorded right now, or only observed? Would they play the feed later to identify the man with the boom box, and if so, was his face in any facial recognition databases already? There was no way of knowing. He was wearing sunglasses, but that wouldn’t help much. But he had a minimal online presence, and that just might slow them down.

He felt perspiration in his armpits, even though he’d put on antiperspirant in the morning out of habit. The station smelled of hot brake pads but he knew he wasn’t sweating from the heat. He shifted on the bench and turned his back to the cameras, resisting the urge to touch the boom box, pick it up, and angle it away from the digital eyes as well.

A couple more people had gathered, milling around near the wide yellow line: a short Muslim woman in a headscarf dotted with zirconium chips, poking at a smartphone in a bright purple case; and a hipster in thick-rimmed glasses and an army cap, a backpack slung over one shoulder. The hipster looked as fidgety as Darius felt, and somehow watching him as he leaned over the yellow line and searched the depths of the tunnel for the light of a train calmed Darius.
You’re going to die in the next ten minutes and you have no idea. You’re anxious to get somewhere on time, but you will never arrive, and I know this, and you don’t.
If knowledge was power, then the knowledge of the assassin, the executioner, the slaughter man, was very empowering indeed.

Darius took a deep breath at the sound of the approaching train as it rumbled in and glided to a hissing stop.

He stepped aboard and took inventory of his victims. The car was bustling but not full, and he found a seat at the back. He’d chosen one of the rear cars, farthest from the driver. Even with aviator shades on, he noted the details of the car with heightened intensity, and although he intended to survive the dimensional breach, he couldn’t help thinking that this must be how a condemned man sees when he steps into the execution chamber. Everything seemed to glow and buzz under the fluorescent lights: the cardboard banner ads over the dark windows, the rainbow patterned upholstery of the seats, even the marbleized rubber floor.

“Nyarlathotep protect me that I may serve well the Great Old Ones,” he whispered under the rattle and screech of the accelerating train.

The seats to either side of him were vacant. Directly across the aisle sat a black lady with a leopard-print purse beside a fat white man in khakis and a blue blazer with a white baseball cap. They didn’t seem to be together, and neither made eye contact with him. Farther up the train, a Latina in a gray sweater and black skirt was talking loudly into her cell phone about some surgery she’d had recently and how the doctors weren’t as good as the ones at Beth Israel. Her nasal voice cut through the mechanical din. There were seats, but she was standing by choice, holding one of the rubber handles. A few seconds of her monologue gave Darius the impression that she was probably afraid to plant her ass on a public cushion. He wondered if she’d sanitized the hand loop with Purell, like some people did with shopping-cart handles. Beyond the loud, obnoxious lady, he could see random swatches of attire shifting around when the car took corners. A pink Red Sox jersey on a young girl with flaxen hair and shallow brown eyes that he couldn’t stand to look at; Adidas sneakers on what looked like a grad student with a heavy laptop bag; a plaid shirt on an Asian guy reading a Kindle and wearing black earbuds.

Darius strained his neck and counted the number of passengers wearing ear buds. There was a woman in a pantsuit with a Bluetooth headset, but those didn’t count. Aside from the Asian guy, he saw only one other person listening to music—a brunette who looked like a college student with an iPod.

“You’re cutting in and out,” the lady on the phone said, sounding annoyed, “We’re in the tunnel…I’ll call you back when we get above.”

Darius put his own headphones on now, an over-ear set with noise cancellation that immediately replaced the ambient noise with a white hiss. He could hear the bass drone of the train itself, but only dimly. He longed to hear the black speech when it emerged, but couldn’t risk it. Witnessing its effects would have to be enough. He reached into the inside breast pocket of his suede jacket and pressed play on his iPod, filling his ears with the Saturn Movement from Holst’s
The Planets
. He took his shades off, folded them, and tucked them into the same pocket. That was when he noticed the red-haired guy who looked like a cop, sitting across and a few yards down, staring at him.

Maybe he
was
a cop. Or maybe just some suspicious-looking Irish fuck from Southie. Well, what did it matter? No earbuds, so fuck him. Darius looked down at the boom box in his lap, tilted it up toward his face, and took one last peek at the pink organ through the black grill. Then he set it on the floor and tapped a button on top.

*   *   *

Jason Brooks had seen some weird shit demonstrated in the labs at Harvard and MIT in the two years since his security clearance came through with the Special Physics Emergent Counter Terror Recon Agency, but he had never yet witnessed anything like what happened when the kid on the Red Line pressed PLAY.

It began as a sound: a droning guttural chant, like a sutra swirling around in the vaulted heights of a Tibetan temple, far away, as if he were only hearing the reverberations as they ricocheted around stone pillars and filtered through draperies of many-layered silk. It was a sound of myriad voices that were somehow joined like an alloy of molten metals into a single androgynous voice—young and old, male and female, bestial and human, and something more than the sum of these parts, something shimmering with alien harmonics, pulsing with prehistoric sub-sonic sludge.

The two passengers sitting directly opposite the boom box looked up first, the black lady’s eyes startled away from the phone in her hand, and the heavy white guy in the sport coat and cap beside her letting his paperback drift closed without marking his page as his hand dropped to his abdomen. It looked to Jason like the sound was making him queasy, maybe even giving him a cramp deep in his bowels.

That
sound
. It was a malicious, sinuous thing, writhing and whipping the tight air in the train with hostile acoustics at the fringes of human hearing. He thought that if a service dog were in the car it would be rolling on the floor, shrieking in pain.