He paused and watched the shadow for any indication that his presence had been detected. The figure appeared to be reaching up for something, lowering it, and then reaching back up for something else.
The sheet brushed against Mason’s shoulders as he ducked under the flames and dripping plastic.
The man’s posture stiffened. He reached for a silenced pistol on the shelf in front of him.
“Don’t do it,” Mason said.
The man made the grab and whirled to face him.
Mason saw the man’s eyes widen through the holes in his mask before the first bullet in the burst destroyed his respirator. The second took a bite out of the right side of his forehead, and the third struck the wall beside his ear. Given how fast it had happened, it looked as though his head had simply vanished.
His pistol clattered to the ground beside the large steel briefcase he’d been hurriedly stuffing with computer components. The wall behind him held an enormous shelving unit overflowing with servers and hard drives and monitors—all of them now spattered with his blood.
Mason turned around. On the far side of where the impromptu entrance had already melted clear up to the ceiling was a bank of portable generators. The existing decrepit wooden wall to his right, between the slats of which he could see the reflections of flames on plastic, was already smoldering.
The smoke washed over him from behind as he approached the lone exit, an uneven doorway that had been sealed with a double layer of plastic sheeting. He pushed one side to the left and the other to the right and stepped into a room mercifully free of smoke. To his left were steel drums with pumps on the top and long nozzles, like industrial-size weed sprayers. The floor was sealed concrete. There was a drain set into the middle. He could see through the plastic covering the back wall of the structure where it abutted the hillside. To his right was another plastic-sheet wall formed around what looked like the framework of a greenhouse that ran nearly the length of the building.
He paused at the second double-flap doorway and watched for movement inside.
A loud crashing sound to his right. The front half of the old structure came down. Flames leaped up over his head and raced across the roof.
Mason fired a triple burst through the drop cloth, lowered his shoulder, and dove through. The moment he hit the ground, he rolled until he got his feet under him and then stood facing into the greenhouse. No return fire. Which was a stroke of luck, considering he was so distracted by everything around him that he would have made an easy target.
He tried to breathe. Couldn’t. All he could do was look from one side of the room to the other. Stalls had been erected on either side of a central aisle. Nailed to the wall above each were handwritten signs with seemingly random assortments of numbers and letters. Bodies had been hung beneath them by chains connected to the overhead framework. Long chains with hooks that looped through the upper ribs at the junction of the thorax and the neck, and beneath the lower ribs above the waist. Through both shoulder girdles. The corpses were entirely naked and in various stages of decomposition. Their chins hung to their chests and their lips had curled back from their bared teeth. The woman closest to him had little hearts painted on her toenails. There had to be at least a dozen of them hanging on either side. All dark-haired and dark-skinned. And positively crawling with flies.
A man appeared in the aisle about twenty feet ahead of him, as though he’d simply materialized from the first plumes of smoke that drifted between them.
“Hands behind your head!” Mason shouted.
The man cocked his head first one way and then the other in a manner reminiscent of a predatory bird. He wore a full respirator mask over his face and a wide-brimmed Panama hat. The hint of a tie and a black suit coat were visible above the top of a gray butcher’s apron smeared with bloody handprints. His black leather shoes shined with the advancing flames.
“Down on your knees! Hands behind your head!”
The man tipped up his chin as though to better appraise Mason. His irises were a startling shade of blue outside of nature’s traditional palette. He had no brows and the skin around his eyes and on his forehead was pink and welted. Or maybe that was just the reflection on his face shield of the flames eating through the plastic walls.
Mason sighted the dot from his laser right between the man’s eyes.
As a kid, he could have parted the fur on a deer’s back at three hundred yards; Quantico had refined his innate ability and trained him to hit the ticks. There was no way he was missing from this distance.
The man with the blue eyes wagged his index finger at Mason and then pointed at the stall to his right. Kane stepped out from behind the wall, the slender barrel of a Steyr pressed into the soft spot behind his jaw and under his ear. Mason could barely see the crown of his captor’s head over Kane’s left shoulder. Kane shrugged, as though to let him know that things might not have been going as planned but that he still had everything under control.
Mason kept his laser pinned to the man’s forehead, below the brim of his hat.
More smoke drifted between them, momentarily concealing him. When he appeared again, there was a cell phone in his hand.
His eyes narrowed. At first it looked like he was wincing, but then it hit Mason. He was smiling beneath his mask.
“Shoot him,” Kane said through the comlink in Mason’s ear.
“You do and we’re all dead!” a deep voice shouted from behind his partner.
Mason could easily neutralize the man in the mask at this range, but even he might not be fast enough to get off another shot before the second man put a bullet through Kane’s head. If he took care of the more immediate threat to his partner, the man with the blue eyes would still be standing out in the open, with nowhere to hide.
“Shoot him, Mason.”
“This whole place is wired!”
“Take the shot, damn it!”
Mason swung his rifle toward the man trying to use Kane as a human shield. Pulled the trigger. Watched the top of the man’s head vanish as he looked over his partner’s shoulder.
Kane stumbled forward and the Steyr fell away from his head.
Mason’s laser sight sliced through the smoke like a scythe. He was already firing before it reached the man with the blue eyes, who stumbled backward when the first bullet took him high in the shoulder. A ribbon of blood unspooled behind him. He pressed his thumb to the screen of his cell phone.
Mason saw his eyes.
His ultramarine eyes.
The reflection of a ball of fire blossomed inside them.
Then the world became light.
And pain.
6
Mason awoke with a groan and tried to sit up. Something sharp prodded the inside of his elbow. He tried to pull it out, but someone held his hand.
“Shh,” a soft voice whispered. “Try not to move.”
He glanced around the room. A large window, through which he saw only sky. A cord tethering him to an IV bag. A bedside monitor displaying his racing heart rate. Walls the same color of yellow as the blanket covering him. A television mounted near the ceiling. Laminate cabinets and a bathroom.
His eyes finally settled on his wife, who was seated beside his bed in a faux-leather chair. She was smiling despite the tears on her cheeks.
“Hey, Angie.”
She placed her hand on his cheek and buried her face into his neck.
“Don’t you ever do this to me again,” she said. “You hear me?”
He tried to wrap his arm around her back, but even thinking about moving ignited the pain that spread throughout his body. It felt like he’d been kicked squarely in the chest by a horse, and his face … he could see stitches from the corner of his eye, feel the warmth of superficial burns on his forehead. He kissed the top of her head and regretted even that minuscule movement.
“Kane?” he asked.
She raised her face, and he read the truth in her expression. Her lips quivered and fresh tears shimmered in
her emerald eyes.
“He didn’t make it.”
Mason let his head fall back onto the pillow and stared up at the ceiling.
It was his fault Kane was dead. Had he listened to his partner and killed the man with the blue eyes, he would have prevented the explosion and maybe even still been fast enough to hit the second man. Or maybe shooting the man in the hat would have provided enough of a distraction for Kane to take care of his captor himself. Or perhaps after witnessing his partner’s death, the second man would have been willing to trade Kane’s life for his freedom. None of those possibilities had registered in Mason’s mind at the time, though. His sole focus had been on saving his partner, whose blood was now on his hands.
The door opened and a lanky man with chest hair blooming from the V-neck of his scrub top entered. He wore a white lab coat, and a stethoscope was bundled into a pocket stitched with red letters. Dr. Alan O’Ryan. A man in a black suit followed him into the room.
“Mrs. Mason…” the man said.
“He just woke up,” Angie said. “There’s no way in hell I’m leaving him.”
Mason sized up the man with a single glance. He positively reeked of power. Tailored suit. Expensive watch. Polished leather shoes. Silver hair. Dark, alert eyes that dismissed everything around him except for Mason.
“It’s okay, Angie,” Mason said. “Agent Marchment and I only need a few minutes.”
His wife’s eyes sought his. She recognized the name, either from him or through the course of her own work, and understood the gravity of the situation. Mason nodded subtly to assure her that everything was under control. She brought his hand to her lips, kissed his knuckles, and gently placed his arm beside his leg.
“I’ll be right outside if you need me.”
“This won’t take long,” Marchment said.
Angie brushed past him without a word. She opened the door, looked back, and closed it gently behind her.
“I think that’s the first time she’s left your side since she got here last night,” Dr. O’Ryan said. He smiled, removed Mason’s chart from the bracket on the bed, and set about making notations.
Marchment sat in the chair Angie had vacated, slid a folder out from beneath his jacket, and removed a report. Mason already had a pretty good idea what it said. The ranking DEA agent and bureaucrat ostensibly in charge of the Bradley Strike Force waited for the doctor to check Mason’s vitals, examine his EKG strip, perform a cursory physical examination, and test his pupils before clearing his throat. The doctor took the hint. He returned the chart to its holder and disappeared into the hallway.
“The secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security wanted me to personally congratulate you on the success of your mission,” Marchment said. “Thanks to our strike force, whatever contagion was inside that quarry never left the reservation. No one outside of this room may ever know it, but the country’s a safer place because of you.”
“The men in the building,” Mason said. “They knew we were coming. They could have easily smuggled the virus out through the open desert.”
“We have every reason to believe the threat was contained.”
“Until people start dying,” Mason said.
Marchment smiled patiently and straightened the stack of papers on his thighs. Whatever Mason might have thought, his superior obviously wasn’t going to hear it, not when he’d already taken credit for the victory.
“You’ve been through a lot these past few days. You both have. What do you say we run through this debriefing so you can get back to your wife?”
Mason took a deep breath, steeled himself, and listened as Marchment detailed the fate of his colleagues.
* * *
Of the eighteen law-enforcement officers who had launched the assault on the stone quarry, only five had survived. Becker had maintained his position up the mountainside; the sniper who’d watched the first explosion tear through his teammates had not. Had the ATF agent not shown that kind of discipline, he might not have survived to drag Mason out of the rubble. The pilot of the crippled Black Hawk had managed to land it on the opposite ridge. Land being a subjective term, anyway. He’d sustained significant intracranial hemorrhaging, but Razor had gotten the worst of it. The doctors were optimistic that he’d at least regain partial use of his legs. Templeton, who’d been miles away from the disaster, escaped largely unscathed. At least physically. He wouldn’t soon be able to forget the images he’d witnessed via satellite relay or the accompanying sounds of his colleagues being slaughtered.
Forensics teams were still sifting through the wreckage and anticipated they’d be doing so until roughly the end of time. As it was, they were going to have to get exceptionally lucky to make any positive identifications of the victims Mason had seen hanging from chains, especially after the second explosion incinerated their bodies and dropped the rear half of the building and countless tons of rock onto what little remained. If their theory about the victims having been undocumented aliens was right, no one would ever know to come looking for them, let alone in storage boxes at the Pima County morgue. Grim as it was, at least there’d been enough left of them to confirm that the virus hadn’t survived the blast, a fact corroborated by the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, which claimed it dealt with emerging infections like this one on a daily basis and seemed genuinely disappointed to be leaving with little more than a sack of dead birds.
Most of those who died in the siege were shipped back home to their loved ones. In most cases, their next of kin had to content themselves with ashes and not be too picky about whose they might actually be.
Mason signed himself out of the hospital AMA so he could ride back to Denver with Kane’s coffin. There was nothing inside it, but that wasn’t the point. His widow deserved to have a polished box with a flag draped over it unloaded from the cargo hold of a plane. She deserved a proper funeral with a motorcade. And she deserved the courtesy of her husband’s partner looking her in the eye when he told her that her husband had died with valor in the service of his country. That he had died a hero.
As he stood over Kane’s grave, leaning on his crutches and staring at the empty coffin, he thought about what he could have done differently. Truth be told, he’d thought of nothing else since awakening in the hospital. The fact that everything had transpired too quickly was no excuse. He’d been in a position to save his partner’s life and he’d failed. He remembered Kane’s final words in his earpiece, the expression on his partner’s face when he took the shot over his shoulder, and the pair of inhumanly blue eyes beneath the brim of a Panama hat as the world became fire. There were a dozen different choices he could have made, any one of which could have led to Kane standing beside him rather than his widow, whom Mason hadn’t even known existed until he was informed she would be receiving the coffin at the airport.
Kane had always preached the importance of separating the personal from the professional. Of all the things his partner had taught him, that was the one thing Mason wished would have stuck.
“Spencer never told you about me, did he?” she said.
Mason shook his head and continued to stare down at the empty casket.
“That’s my Spencer, all right.” She smiled and tipped her face to the sky. The tears on her cheeks glistened. Her name was Christina and she was beautiful in a way Mason attributed to class and wealth. Her dark hair was pulled back with enough force to draw lines of strain from the corners of her brown eyes to her temples. “He talked about you, though. You should know that.”
Mason glanced at her from the corner of his eye.
“He saw a lot of himself in you. Or maybe he just saw a younger version of himself.” She sighed. “You were with him when he died.”
It was a statement, not a question. Mason had known he would eventually have to address the issue, but he had trouble recalling the words he’d rehearsed thousands of times in anticipation.
“He died a brave man in the service of a country that wil
l never be able to repay the debt—”
She cut him off with a laugh. There was no humor in it.
When he looked up, she was trying to wipe away her tears without smearing her mascara.
“You all tell the same stories, which is to say you speak without actually saying anything. I know my husband is—was … a brave man. I know he cared deeply about his country. Probably more than anything else. I know things about him that I will never share with anyone. Because they’re mine. Mine in a way that maybe someday you’ll understand.” She gave up the battle and smeared her makeup across her cheeks. “Tell me his last words.”
Mason looked downhill toward where Angie waited in the car, her face hidden behind the reflection of the sun on the tinted window. He prayed his wife would never be in this woman’s position.
“He said, ‘Take the shot, damn it.’”
Christina was quiet for a long moment. When he looked up, she wore an expression he couldn’t quite interpret.
“I figured it would be something like that.” She sniffed. “I was hoping he made his peace with God at the end.”
He debated about trying to tell her what she needed to hear, but he realized she’d see right through him.
“Spencer always said we Catholics have a ‘good gig,’” she said. “That we can do whatever we want in life as long as we ask for absolution at the end. So that was how he lived, with the belief that with his dying breath he could weasel his way through the gates of heaven and meet me there.”
Mason didn’t want to tell her that the room in which her husband died—a room filled with the decomposing remains of anonymous immigrants hanging from the ceiling by meat hooks—was obviously beyond even God’s sight.
“Tell me…” She took Mason’s hand and turned him so that she could look into his eyes. He was self-conscious of his lack of eyebrows. Not to mention the C-shaped scar around his left eye. They were further reminders that he had lived, while others, including her husband, had died. “Could you have saved him?”
The Extinction Agenda Page 3