A butterfly settled on Mason’s knee. He watched it open and close its powder blue wings several times before again taking flight.
“I’ll tell you why. It’s because the people who live in those godforsaken deserts choose to do so. Even though they’re dying off in droves. They just sit there and wait for someone to save them. To send them food and medicine. To send them magic seeds that will grow in their barren soil. To make their clouds for them.”
“So why do you do it?”
A wistful smile traced Paul’s lips, and then it was gone. He didn’t need to reply; they both knew the answer. It was for no other reason than he could.
“Did you know that in just over a decade the world’s population will reach eight billion? That’s more than even optimistic estimates suggest the planet can sustain. We’ll run out of water. Food. Every resource we depend upon will be depleted. And why? Because we’re keeping entire peoples alive with our medical and scientific advances, when a hundred years ago they would have died off. Back then, we would have shrugged and chalked it up to natural selection.”
“I figure that’s probably good for your business, though. Don’t you?”
Paul sat up abruptly and looked at him with eyes that reminded him of his wife’s. He’d aged a lifetime since Mason had really looked at him last. The lines on his face were more pronounced, the silver hair at his temples had overtaken his entire head, and it was readily apparent just how tired he was.
“I’ve spent my entire life taking care of everyone else at the cost of the few people who truly matter to me. How is that even remotely fair?”
“I’ve asked myself the same question.”
Paul looked at him with a curious expression on his face, then leaned back in his seat again and returned his attention to the clouds.
“It was a nice service. As far as such things go. Angela would have approved.”
Mason closed his eyes and focused on not letting his breathing betray him.
“I saw you there. With Frank.”
“Victor was there, too.”
“I didn’t see him. I guess I just assumed he was still in Germany.”
“Switzerland. And why on earth would you think for a second that he’d miss his sister’s funeral?”
“He never showed much interest in her life up to that point.”
Paul’s hand clenched into a fist. Mason had pushed that button harder than he’d meant to, but he wasn’t particularly concerned about his father-in-law’s feelings. Strange, though, that Paul seemed to be sparing his. While his anger was evident, he almost appeared resigned. Everyone grieved in different ways, he supposed.
“Why are you here, James?”
“I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Anything to do with pulling a quarter of a million dollars out of my daughter’s trust fund to buy a run-down warehouse?” He looked at Mason from the corner of his eye. “Didn’t want to dip into your own? Worried the good senator might not approve?”
“It has to do with a case I’m working.”
“A man doesn’t find himself in a position like mine by accident, son. Think of me as a big old spider in an even bigger web. Nothing happens without plucking on one of those threads. You’re off the reservation on whatever it is you’re doing, and some seem to think you’re on the verge of losing more than your badge.”
“Are you threatening me, Paul?”
“You aren’t listening. If you and I were going to lock horns, you’d see me coming from a mile off. Games are for children, and I…” He paused when he realized what he’d said. “I’m too old for games. So are you, James.”
“You’re just looking out for me, then, right? I didn’t know we had that kind of relationship.”
“I have a busy schedule to keep.”
“I can see that.”
“You don’t want me as an enemy, son.”
Mason leaned forward and shook his head. He hoped the movement would make Paul turn to face him. He was only going to get one shot at this, so he needed to make it count. When the bench creaked, he turned and looked Paul squarely in the eye.
“What do you know about a company called Fairacre?”
“Nothing,” Paul said. He stood and tucked his tie back into his jacket. “I trust we’re through here, then?”
Apparently, they were.
“Always a pleasure to see you, James. Pass along my best to your father. Despite the circumstances, I do hope you and I can maintain a friendly relationship. My daughter was everything to me. Maybe one day you’ll help me see the world through the eyes of the woman she’d become. Assuming you knew.”
Mason had been prepared for worse.
“I can see myself out,” he said, but Paul didn’t hear him. He was already walking away, as though by physically turning his back on Mason, he’d made him disappear.
It didn’t matter. Mason had what he needed now. He just wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to do with it.
He’d recognized the expression on Paul’s face when he asked about Fairacre. He’d seen it before, when they first met. Angie had brought him to this very building, what felt like a lifetime ago, to meet her father.
“Daddy, there’s someone I want you to meet,” she’d said.
Paul had turned to Mason expectantly, as though he’d better not be wasting his time.
“This is my boyfriend. James Mason.”
Paul had stepped toward him, wiped his palm on his thigh in a practiced motion meant to show he was just a regular guy, and extended his hand. The expression on his face when he spoke had been the same one he just exhibited.
“Pleased to meet you, James.”
Even then Mason had known he was lying.
33
Mason couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around the implications of Paul’s knowledge of Fairacre. If he only recognized the name, why wouldn’t he just say so? Of course, having heard of it didn’t necessarily mean that he had any idea of the horrors that had potentially transpired inside the auction house. But why else would he feel the need to lie? To get the answers Mason needed, he had to find out who had purchased the Fairacre shelf corporation. Until then, he was just going to have to trust his instincts, and right now they were telling him to follow the dirt road to the west of Building Seed toward where all of the action was.
He drove into a makeshift lot where a construction trailer had been set on a dusty skirt and surrounded with heavy machinery. There were earthmovers and cement mixers and trucks of all shapes and sizes—pickups, flatbeds, Caterpillars. Industrial Dumpsters overflowed with waste, and construction scraps were heaped in seemingly arbitrary piles. The road was deeply rutted from the enormous tires of the earthmovers. He parked in the flattened weeds, amid a random assortment of cars he assumed belonged to the workmen. One car stood apart from the others: a sleek black Cadillac SUV that didn’t have a single speck of dust on it.
Mason’s phone rang. He surveyed the scene in front of him, looking for the man he knew was out there somewhere, and answered without taking his eyes off of the building.
“It’s about time, Gunnar. Tell me you have something for me.”
There was no immediate reply. He was just about to see if he’d dropped the call, when the person on the other end spoke and made him wish he’d checked the caller ID.
“James … What on God’s green earth are you doing?”
It was his father.
“Right now? Just sitting in my car, watching the world pass by.”
“Can you imagine my surprise when I received a phone call informing me that my son had been suspended?”
“Kind of caught me off guard, too. Look, Dad, I—”
“Do you know the lengths to which I had to go to convince the director of the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation to even consider overriding your special agent in charge’s disciplinary action?”
“This has nothing to do with you, Dad. Believe it or not, I can handle this on my own.”
Mason spotted a tall man in a dark suit standing in the middle of a circle of men wearing flannel shirts, jeans, and dirty work boots and gesturing toward the structure towering over them.
“Nothing to do with me? My son’s decided to flush his career down the toilet and it has nothing to do with me? I refuse to stand by and watch you self-destruct. Regardless of what you might think, you are my son and it’s my duty as your father to intercede when I see you making the kind of decisions that will have lasting consequences.”
“I appreciate your concern, but everything’s under control. Really.”
The man in the suit broke away from the others. Mason wanted to catch him before he found out he was here. He needed the man’s first reaction to be unguarded.
“I loved her, too, you know. Angie was like a daughter to me. And don’t think for a second that I don’t know exactly what you’re dealing with. I lived it. I survived it. I triumphed over it. You need to focus on something else. Find a project. A goal. Something at which you can direct all of your energies.”
“Way ahead of you, Dad.”
He ended the call and climbed out of the car. The door was barely closed when the phone started ringing again. His father wasn’t the kind to give up easily, but he was also a patient man who recognized that the key to winning any battle was in the timing. That was one of the few lessons he had taught Mason that actually stuck.
He intercepted Victor when he reached for the handle of his car door.
“Sorry I didn’t see you at the funeral,” Mason said.
Victor stiffened at the sound of his voice. He saw his brother-in-law’s eyes widen in the reflection on his window. He was composed when he turned to face Mason. He and Angie had never been especially close. She was five years younger and the product of Paul’s second marriage. Mason had never met Victor’s mother, but it wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that he didn’t actually have one and that Paul had instead figured out a way to clone himself. Victor was simply a younger version, with the same mannerisms and expressions and laugh. Only he was about three inches taller. He was being groomed to one day take the reins of AgrAmerica. That was, if he could pry them from Paul’s cold, dead grasp.
Victor proffered his hand and Mason shook it.
“Jim, I didn’t expect to see you. Always a pleasant surprise, of course. What brings you all the way out here into cattle country?”
“I was up this way, so I figured I’d swing by and talk to your old man. I didn’t know you were in town.”
“I haven’t been back for very long. I was in Switzerland, getting the Bern branch off the ground.”
“Why Bern?”
“It’s a beautiful city, for one. For another, we’re looking to establish an Eastern European presence, but aren’t quite ready to jump in with both feet. The area isn’t as politically stable as we would like. At least not yet. Besides, the Swiss are a little more forward-thinking when it comes to the direction our company has chosen.”
“You mean their regulations are more relaxed.”
“I prefer the term progressive, but there is something to be said for a government that understands its relationship to industry. That’s not why you drove all the way out here, though. Where are my manners?” He draped his arm over Mason’s shoulders, guided him away from his car, and made a grand sweeping gesture toward the construction. “Allow me to present the future world headquarters of Global Allied Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals.”
“No more AgrAmerica?”
“The name itself implies a limited reach. If we want to compete in the international market, we need to begin thinking and acting with a much broader set of parameters.”
“So I take it you won’t be calling it Building E?”
“Please. A and B are old and outdated. They look like they were built by Neanderthals. And my father can have his little glass lab. What we need is a building that says we are a leader in the market, a leader in the business world as a whole. It needs to be a building that people will recognize, no matter where they live. A grand structure that fits the vision of the corporate brand. It needs to scream confidence and power.”
“It’s going to have to scream pretty loud if you actually want people to know it’s here. You can barely see it from the other buildings, let alone from the road.”
Victor’s laugh was the kind they taught in classes for the rich and condescending.
“You kill me, Jim. Tell you what, come back when she’s finished and I’ll give you the personal tour. Then you’ll see what I’m talking about.” He casually turned Mason once more and ushered him toward his car. “I’d love to catch up, but I’m already running late for a meeting I’m not at liberty to discuss, with people who aren’t accustomed to being made to wait. I only budgeted enough time to make my presence known. For what we’re paying these guys, it’s important they understand that they have to keep this project on schedule. Starting after eight or knocking off a minute before five won’t be tolerated.”
“Have you tried giving the foreman a whip?”
Victor laughed.
“It’s too bad we never really got a chance to get to know each other, but I hope you realize that you’ll always be part of the Thornton clan, Jim.” He cupped his hand over the side of his mouth as though to impart a secret. “Lord only knows we could use someone on the right side of the law in this family.”
Again, the laugh, the handshake, the clap on the shoulder. And then he was in his car, preparing to back up. Mason stepped closer and signaled for him to roll down his window.
“I almost forgot. I was just talking to your dad about a property east of here that came up in an investigation I’m working. He thought you might know about it. Fairacre Ranch Surplus and Auction? You know anything about it?”
“What on earth would make you think that I know anything about ranching?”
Victor laughed at the old family joke they all told, then rolled up his window and drove away in a cloud of dust that made the snowflakes that had settled on the ground rise once more. Mason had seen it, though. The brief whitening of his brother-in-law’s knuckles as he squeezed the wheel just a little tighter. The slight bulge of his jaw muscles. The prominence of the vein in his temple. The way his eyes darted quickly to his right before he spoke.
Like his father, he knew something about the Fairacre property.
And lied about it.
34
Mason watched Victor’s car drive all the way across the field before climbing into his own. All of this about GABP was new to him. Surely Angie would have mentioned it had she known, especially considering the size of the building and how much money they must have been spending. It was easily twice the size of all of the other buildings combined, but as far as he could see, there wasn’t a single window. He couldn’t imagine something that impressive being built just to create more office space, even executive suites.
The flakes on the windshield cleared with a single pass of the wipers. There were two messages on his phone. He figured one of them was his father calling him back to get in the last word. He checked the incoming call log. In addition to his father’s cell number, there was another he immediately recognized. He called it back without listening to the message.
“Tell me you have something I can use,” Mason said as soon as Gunnar answered.
“I take it you didn’t listen to my message.”
“I saw the number. Figured I’d rather hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. What’ve you got?”
“Remember that picture you sent me? The one with the guy with the hat and half a face?”
Mason sat up straight. Gunnar had his undivided attention. They were talking about the man who had killed his wife and his partner, Angie and Kane.
“Did I lose you, Mace? You still there?”
“Tell me you know where I can find him.”
“When, you mean. I can’t tell you where he is now, but I can tell you where he was.”
“What the hell
is that supposed to mean?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. I cleaned up his image, which ended up erasing a lot of the scarring, and fed it through a dozen different facial-recognition databases, including your own Next Generation Identification system. All that got me was a whole lot of nothing. So, on a whim, I ran it through a little program of my own design that also searches an enormous database of periodicals, newspapers, and other printed documents in both public and private collections. Anything that at some point or other has been scanned or uploaded to the Net. That’s where I found six separate incidences of his face in photographs.”
“So give me what you’ve got and I’ll figure out how to make sense of it.”
“Yeah. Good luck with that, Mace.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“The first instance I found of his face was in a black-and-white photograph from a newspaper.”
“Good. That ought to help establish the link I’m—”
“Slow down, man. Listen to what I’m saying. The first instance was in a German newspaper called Der Stürmer from March fourteenth—get this—1939.”
“There’s no way. That would make him, like, a hundred years old. The man I saw couldn’t even have been fifty. Your program screwed up.”
“Not a chance. It might match fewer points on the face than the NGI system does, but it’s no less accurate. I’m telling you, Mace. That’s him. That’s the same man. At least according to the program.”
“I guess you’re going to have to spell it out for me.”
“I’ll speak slowly so even you can understand. In 1939, your guy was photographed in Cairo, Egypt, and the picture was printed in a German paper.”
“What else have you got?”
“Seriously? We’re just going to gloss right over that?”
“I need something useful, Gunnar. You said six pictures, right? What about the others?”
“Guizhou, China, 1956. Hong Kong, 1968. Zaire, 1976. The Congo, 1981. India, 1994. This guy’s been all over the place, but not once has he been identified in any of the captions. None of them is especially clear. All you can see in any of them is part of his face in the background of photographs where he, I assume, was captured on film without his knowledge.”
The Extinction Agenda Page 16