The door rebounded from the wall behind it and he stopped it with his shoulder. Pistol drawn, he advanced into the main room. The only real sound was the creaking of floorboards beneath his weight. There was an old couch and an even older rocking chair. Both of them had been shoved against the wall to hold the dusty curtains in place. A wood-burning stove sat cold and dark on the opposite side of the room. There were no pictures on the walls, only the discolorations where they had once hung. The floor was bare wood that had shrunken just enough that he could see the dirt underneath it in spots. The lines of wear were readily apparent. He followed the main path into the kitchen, where he found avocado-colored appliances that didn’t look like they’d been used in a decade.
The bedroom had seen use somewhat more recently. The mattress rested on the floor next to the box spring, both of which were stained and dirty. A cracked mirror hung on the wall beside a closet door that opened upon empty space. He could barely see his reflection through the dust.
The lone bathroom featured a claw-foot tub with a ring of rust and a toilet that he supposed was more appealing than the public stalls in a bus station, but just barely.
It didn’t look like anyone had been in here for quite some time, but with the rate the dust accumulated on him as he walked, it could have been only a few hours.
Mason exited the way he’d entered, without bothering to close the door behind him.
The crows scrabbled to keep him in sight as he rounded the side of the house and cut a path through waist-high weeds toward the outbuilding.
Only the charred framework and the northeastern corner of the structure remained to support what little of the roof survived. The walls along the front side—or at least what he assumed to be the front side—were completely absent, as were those on the western side and the majority of the northern. It was as though someone had arrived to put out the fire too late to salvage more than a portion of it, or perhaps the wind had merely shifted and blown the flames in a different direction.
He entered where he estimated the front door had once been. The ground inside was overgrown with weeds and wild grasses. He couldn’t see any hint of soot or ash on the soil. This place hadn’t burned anytime recently.
Snowflakes fell through the large gaps in the roof and twirled down around him like glitter.
The main room was roughly 40 feet deep and 150 feet wide. What looked like the blackened carcass of a platform or a stage protruded from the weeds to his left. Support posts stood every twenty feet. The majority were now black stumps, at least in the western half. Those in the eastern half were burned nearly all the way through, yet they somehow managed to hold a large chunk of the scorched roof aloft.
The knee-high vegetation made hissing sounds against his jeans. Tumbleweeds had collected against the rubble of what he suspected had once been an interior wall. He closed his eyes and pictured this place in better times. An auctioneer on a small wooden stage, a ramp to either side of him and a steer behind him. Farmers shouting out bids from the open area, where their wives fanned themselves and their rambunctious children climbed on bales of hay. The interior wall would have separated the auction floor from the holding pens, where the animals awaiting their turn had been led up the chute from the corrals to the north of the building.
He kicked through the weeds and broken wood toward what remained of the northern wall. All that was left of the stalls that ran the entire width of the building were square black nubs under the tangles of brown grass.
The smell of manure lingered. Faint. Smoke and ash. Burned wood. The merest hint of some kind of fuel. Old smells.
He caught something hard with the toe of his boot. It made a clanking sound. He knelt, swept aside the weeds, and extricated a length of rusted chain. The remainder was stuck solidly in the dirt. He looked up into the rafters, where the rusted metal wheel of a pulley still hung. There were more chains, rusted and broken, coiled on themselves in what was left of the adjacent stalls. They had hooks on the ends of them, too.
The sections of the wood-plank wall that still stood in the northeast corner were charcoaled and seemingly held together by the rusted hatch of the cattle chute, which had broken from its chain assembly and leaned in the doorway designed to admit livestock. There was a gap perhaps just wide enough to squeeze through between the fallen door and the frame. He could see the wooden ramp leading up to it from the maze of aged timber on the other side.
The walls formed a dead end in the corner. Feces and bones marked where some animal or other had once made a den. He brushed at the carbon scoring on the wood and exposed deep parallel scratches. They aligned just about perfectly with his fingertips.
The similarities to the quarry in Arizona were undeniable. The stalls with the chains dangling from the ceiling. The abandoned nature of the building. He tried not to envision the bodies of naked men and women hanging from the rafters as they decomposed. Tried not to hear the buzz of flies. The evil of this place radiated from the ground beneath his feet, where it had soaked into the soil on the blood of innocents.
Mason prayed it hadn’t been as bad as he imagined for the victims, that a merciful God had taken pity on them and spared them this misery, but there was no doubt in his mind that this was a place outside of His reach. And he knew full well that no matter how horrible he imagined it must have been, in the flesh it would have been infinitely worse.
He stepped back out of the corner, to find a cold wind had risen from the east. It rippled through the weeds and assaulted him with snowflakes.
Dark clouds spread outward across the sky.
Mason thought about his wife, who, for whatever reason, had sought out this place specifically, her relationship to the woman who had called him last night, and the reason why they would have been meeting with a federal prosecutor in a sleazy motel.
He’d seen what he’d come here to find, but he didn’t feel vindication, only sickness in the pit of his stomach. The sooner he was away from this wretched place, the better. He was only too happy to watch the burned barn fade back into the fields in his rearview mirror as he drove away.
32
Fairacre was the key. If Mason was right about the stalls in the auction house having been used to test the virus on human subjects—like he’d seen firsthand at the quarry in Arizona—then he’d finally found the lead he needed. Angie had obviously recognized there was something important about it, too. The woman who would be calling him later tonight had said that his wife had been carrying the audit of Fairacre with her when they were supposed to meet at the motel, the same day the man with the blue eyes miraculously returned from the dead and murdered her, just as he had Mason’s partner, Spencer Kane. He could positively feel the connections starting to line up.
Whoever had purchased the Fairacre shelf corporation was out there somewhere at this very moment. Mason was looking for someone with money, someone who, whether intentionally or not, had stepped out of the fringes and into an industry where there were no strangers. Whether the farmers on these plains grew produce, harvested grains, or ranched cattle, it was a small-enough community that everyone knew one another. More important, they had to keep tabs on the competition if they were going to survive in the cutthroat agricultural world. An unknown entity purchasing an old cattle auction house wouldn’t have gone unnoticed, even one that didn’t subsequently burn to the ground. Someone had to know something, especially someone who made it his business to learn everything there was to know, if only to use that information to ruin anyone who stood in his way. And since Mason was already all the way out here …
The AgrAmerica corporate headquarters were north of the city of Greeley, which began in the same fashion as many other frontier towns, as a stagecoach station. Following the Civil War, a newspaperman by the name of Nathan C. Meeker arrived and founded the Union Temperance Colony, a religious utopia that pioneered irrigation techniques that turned the small private enterprise into an agricultural juggernaut seemingly overnight. Co-ops developed and mon
ey flowed, but where there was wealth, there was always someone who wanted a larger cut of it. Chief among them was Angie’s great-grandfather, Wesley Harrison Thornton, who had seized the reins of the cattle industry the moment the colony’s founder and moral backbone left for the White River Indian Agency, where he later died in infamy.
As it grew, Greeley became something of a big city crammed into a small town’s body. It had a disproportionately large immigrant population, thanks to Angie’s grandfather Frank, who pioneered the use of cheap, mostly illegal labor. He brought them in by the truckload and set them to work in the meat-processing plants, where the loss of fingers or a hand, or even a full arm, was considered a small price to pay for employment. Town officials ignored such minor incidents and the authorities always seemed to be looking the other way. Especially when it came to anything that happened out near the AgrAmerica feed lots, processing plants, packing facilities, or corporate HQ, which was why Mason was surprised to see a pair of uniformed policemen bolstering the security presence at the front gates.
The AgrAmerica campus was more reminiscent of a military base than the home of the soon-to-be second-largest agricultural conglomerate in the world. The five-hundred-acre administrative complex was surrounded by a twenty-foot chain-link fence capped with concertina wire and a ditch with reeds and stagnant water he was certain his father-in-law thought of as a moat. There was one entrance and access was controlled by a guard shack staffed by a private security firm. There were never fewer than a dozen guards on duty at any given time, two of whom paced circles around incoming vehicles, using long poles with mirrors on the end to search underneath them. Another used a German shepherd—which shed like nobody’s business, as Mason well knew—to search inside every car, as it had been trained to smell any sort of contaminated biological matter by the metabolic wastes the organisms produced. All while the main guard checked credentials and eventually raised the gate.
The inadvertent admittance of a single pathogenic organism could potentially compromise any number of sensitive research projects and set the scientists back years. Of course, the company was less worried about the biological matter coming in than going out. Genetically modified seeds and organisms were worth fortunes on the open market and could potentially make one company and break another, which was one of the main reasons why the scientists on the more delicate projects were actually required to live on-site through the duration of their contracts.
He passed through security with only a cursory inspection—by their standards, anyway. After all, he’d married into the family and been here a dozen times before. That didn’t mean he could come and go as he pleased, though. His father-in-law’s personal assistant had been notified of his arrival and instructed the guard to send him directly back to Building Seed, where his father-in-law would meet him when he finished whatever megaimportant thing he was doing.
Mason dreaded talking to him. Maybe Paul didn’t blame him for Angie’s death, but if that were the case, he’d be the only one in the room who didn’t. Mason wasn’t prepared to share the fact that he believed she’d been murdered because of a case she was investigating, though, so he needed to tap-dance around discussing it at all. Not that he could pretend it hadn’t happened. They would always have that between them and Mason would forever be a reminder of what Paul had lost.
Building A had once encompassed the entirety of the corporate empire. It was a single-story structure that looked like an elementary school and housed a visitor’s center and the offices of lower-level management. Building B rose across the field behind it, which featured a man-made pond with a spectacular water display surrounded by a ring of flags. The building itself was far less impressive. It was a great gray monolith—that kind of looked like a dormitory—with smoked-glass windows and balconies off the offices of department heads. There was a helipad on the roof, and the top three floors served as temporary living quarters for visiting VIPs.
Building Seed functioned as something of a cross between R&D and a giant trophy case. Technically, it was actually two separate buildings, C and D, thus the übercreative nickname—CD: Seed. He doubted he was the only one to roll his eyes at the explanation, just the only one who’d done so in front of the CEO while sleeping with his daughter.
Mason had been inside just twice. The last time had been years ago, before Arizona, but it wasn’t the kind of place a guy could easily forget. The two buildings were bridged by an elaborate glass structure reminiscent of the Louvre. It was an architectural marvel, which, while stunning, paled in comparison to what was housed inside. Crops grew in every conceivable way: from soil, from sponges, from indoor ponds, from vertical surfaces, from where the roots adhered to glass balls suspended in midair. It was like walking into an M. C. Escher drawing, the way the bioengineers overcame the constraints of space and gravity. There were fruits and vegetables of all shapes and sizes, pollinated by bees the color of the setting sun and butterflies with wings nearly as big as a grown man’s hands. They called it “the Bridge to the Future,” or simply the “Futures,” and it was a sealed environment. In addition to showcasing the company’s featured long-term visions, it housed the pet projects of the various engineers, who were given carte blanche to follow their hearts as long as they performed their contracted jobs to Paul’s satisfaction.
Visitor parking was behind the main entrance to Building C. Mason was really in no hurry to talk to Paul, so he sat in his car for a few minutes to collect his thoughts and formulate the best approach. He watched cranes raising what looked like HVAC equipment onto the roof of a monolithic structure across the acreage behind him in his rearview mirror. Whatever Paul was building back there was flat-out enormous. It looked almost like a shopping center or an airport. Trust the Thorntons not to do anything half-assed.
He closed his eyes, let out a long sigh, and climbed out of the car. The temperature felt as though it had fallen a good ten degrees already. The snowflakes were only marginally larger, but that was about to change. The storm clouds darkened as they gathered over the distant mountains in the reflection on the glass facade as he strode toward the door, which opened onto the main lobby. The floors were polished marble, the deep chairs leather, and the potted plants imported from some tropical paradise or other. He was greeted by a woman who made no introduction. She simply ushered him through the access-controlled door beside the reception desk and into the hallway on the other side.
“Mr. Thornton will meet you in the Futures momentarily.” The security badge clipped to the lapel of her cream-colored blouse identified her as Ava Dietrich, but didn’t list her title. Mason could barely hear her over the clacking of her stiletto heels and the resulting echo. She was tall and thin, but had the musculature of an athlete. Her calves bulged with each step and her triceps formed inverted Vs as she swung her arms. She wore her platinum blond hair longer in the front than in the back. “I should advise you that Mr. Thornton has a very busy schedule today and can’t afford to spare more than a few minutes of his time.”
Mason figured he was supposed to say something that would make him sound grateful, but he just nodded and watched the closed doorways pass on either side. She took the first right and used her badge, which contained a security microchip, to activate the stainless-steel door. It slid back into the wall only long enough for them to pass through, then closed behind them. There was another door in front of them, identical to the last. He knew from previous visits that these doors could not be opened at the same time. Considering the nature of the experimental species inside, it was a necessary precaution. Any one of these engineered crops or animals could potentially decimate its natural counterparts and have ruinous effects on the entire ecosystem.
It was more than mere paranoia, though. Any number of anti-GMO organizations and lobbies were ready and waiting to sink their teeth into such a juicy morsel.
The blond woman opened the interior door without a word and showed him into the vast greenhouse. She glanced back at him over her shoulder. He ca
ught the briefest glimpse of eyes a cold shade of blue, like the frozen heart of a glacier, and then she was gone with the clatter of heels.
Mason wasn’t easily impressed, but he had to admit this place could do it every time. He probably should have been concerned on some level about this kind of thing being an abomination of nature, but if you could develop crops that would grow in arid regions where children were starving to death every single day, why the hell would anyone object? Of course, these were also regions where the average female produced more than four offspring. Were all of them to survive, the population boom would be loud enough to hear around the globe. He just wasn’t the kind of guy who enjoyed knowing that somewhere children were dying while the civilized world waged endless moral debates about the merits of feeding them.
He wasn’t about to share that thought with Paul, who’d learned more about dying children than any father should have to. He’d been so still that Mason hadn’t even noticed he was there. Just sitting on the other side of a garden planted with tall golden grains, leaning back on a bench, staring up at the sky through the slanted glass wall overhead. Mason sat down beside him, laced his fingers over his belly, and followed his father-in-law’s gaze.
The leading edge of the storm scudded past. He couldn’t remember ever seeing clouds move so fast.
“Ever wonder why we don’t make clouds?” Mason could tell by the tone of Paul’s voice that it was a rhetorical question. He didn’t care what Mason thought, anyway. He had something to say and, as usual, would say it in his own way. “We can make fake snow and ice. Why not clouds? They could bring rain to regions where nothing will grow and help forestall the effects of climate change while we figure out a long-term solution. Really … how hard could it be?”
The Extinction Agenda Page 15