To his right, a broad staircase led upward to a semicircular landing framed by ornate stone balustrades upon which gargoyles perched. The grand facade was of the American neoclassical style favored for capitol buildings and courthouses, with ornate Corinthian columns, cornices, and bas-reliefs. He recognized the Latin words carved in the frieze. Audaces Fortuna Iuvat: “Fortune favors the brave.” Virgil, from The Aeneid. The benefits of a classical education.
Adjacent to it, across a narrow alleyway engulfed in darkness, was a similarly elaborate facade, only of a different architectural period. The design was of the classic Renaissance style, with Doric pilasters, arches, and entablatures. Above the cornice, the words Nulla Poena Sine Lege; Nulla Regula Sine Exceptione had been inscribed. “No punishment without law; no rule without exception.” Marble stairs led up to a door that didn’t look as though it had been opened in a century.
The structure immediately to his left showed much more recent signs of use. It was Gothic in style, as though yet another stop on the underground tour of European architecture. It was made of limestone that had taken on a dirty cast through the years, which added to the gloominess of its lancet arches and blind arcades. The words Disce Quasi Semper Vivam, Si Vivet Non Morietur had been carved above the threshold. “Learn as if you’ll live forever, live as though you’ll never die.” The door had been removed, and his light revealed just the faintest hint of a staircase leading upward.
The adjacent building was hidden behind a framework of platforms and plastic sheets. Someone was still working on whatever was behind there, although at this point he could only wonder why.
Mason had expected the track to end here, to encounter the tram that serviced the two stations, but he was wrong. The tracks went on indefinitely into the pitch-black tunnel for Lord only knew how long.
He’d run out of steam. His body had passed the point of exhaustion somewhere around the six-mile mark on the seven-mile jog. As had his mind. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d either slept or eaten. He somehow managed to climb the staircase under what he was certain was Flying W Ranch Supply. There was no door at the top. The stairs dumped him into a vast basement metered by pylons. The concrete walls were striped with rust. He figured this was where they’d kept the booze once upon a time, when crime was organized and criminals didn’t even try to pretend they were like everyone else.
Another staircase on the far side of the room led up to a massive warehouse that looked a whole lot more like a lumberyard than any sort of granary. There were mountains of two-by-fours and bags of cement, sheets of plywood and steel I beams, massive spools of cable and bundles of conduits, and a forklift parked beside a stack of rails that probably could have formed a line to the moon and back. The enormous garage doors were locked from the outside, forcing him to work his way through the maze of narrow, claustrophobic aisles until he found a single door that opened onto the actual storefront.
Mason passed aluminum troughs full of chicken scratch and cracked corn and seed mixtures of all colors and varieties. There was a whole selection of horse-related supplies to his left. A lone cash register with large buttons sat on a counter beside a discolored section where the melamine had worn away through the years. All he had to do was turn the lock, open the door, and—with the jangle of a bell—walk out onto the street once more.
Despite the snow and the ferocious wind, he was happy to be topside again. He walked through a parking lot that looked like any other, away from a building that could have been any building in any American city, and across a street people traveled every day without being any the wiser. He shoved aside the snow and plopped down on a bus bench. His in-laws and whoever else was responsible for the construction of the tunnel were so unconcerned that their plot would be discovered that they hadn’t even set an alarm. The authorities were obviously bought and paid for. Hell, the entire city was. He wondered if his father, the senator, had any idea what was going on in his state while he was away in Washington. There was no way he’d stand for any of this. His father and grandfather had helped to make this country what it was by imposing the will of the law on a largely lawless land. They’d be sickened to learn that everything they’d built had been disassembled by men wielding their pens and checkbooks like swords and shields.
Mason tapped the Bluetooth and connected to Gunnar.
“I was starting to think you’d decided to take a nap down there.”
“I could use a lift,” Mason said.
He stared down the road to the east, past the railroad tracks and the distant groves of trees, toward the stormy sky and the end of the world beneath it.
“You okay?” Gunnar asked. “You don’t sound like yourself.”
Mason had debated the merits of feeding starving children with a father capable of giving the order to murder his only daughter, and had discussed global expansion with a businessman complicit in a plot to release a deadly disease upon an unsuspecting world. He’d looked them in the eyes without sensing so much as a hint of the true depths of their depravity, or the kinds of horrors they intended to smuggle through those depths and into the windowless structure on the back side of their property. These were men he’d considered family, yet they’d robbed him of the one thing in his life that mattered. And all for what? Money?
“Yeah. I’ll be fine.”
But when it came right down to it, he wasn’t sure anything would be fine ever again, not as long as there were men out there like the Thorntons and the Hoyl, who wanted nothing more than to watch the world burn.
60
“No one’s actually sure why the tunnels were built,” Gunnar said. He’d utilized his time while Mason was underground to do a little digging into the matter, in hopes of discovering something useful. Judging by the glint in his eye, he had, but he was certainly taking his sweet time getting to it. “That intersection specifically—Eighth Avenue and Seventh Street—was the center of commerce around the turn of the twentieth century. On one corner you had the grand Oasis Hotel, where people like Charles Lindbergh stayed. Across the street were the Jackson Opera House and the Chief Theater. Catty-corner to them was Farmer’s Supply and Machinery, which was pretty much the sole rancher’s supply store within a fifty-mile radius. The lot across from it, at one point or another, housed a hardware store, a sporting goods store, and half a dozen grocery and mercantile stores.”
This time, Mason did the driving, freeing Gunnar to work with his laptop on his thighs. They’d filled up the old gas-guzzler and grabbed some food and coffee while they were at it. He was starting to feel more like himself already. The truck idled in the parking lot of the old train station, now the Chamber of Commerce, while he finished off his first cup and started on the second.
“Most people believe the construction of the tunnels wasn’t initially meant to be secretive at all. The most benign explanation for their existence is that the buildings shared a common source of forced-air heating and the tunnels were used to distribute it from a central coal furnace. There are all sorts of rumors, too. Everything from theater actors sneaking under the street to rendezvous with groupies in the hotel to entire underground networks of gambling and bootlegging. People have found tunnels throughout this entire area—beneath houses, under the bank, in the middle of streets. But, for whatever reason, they just got closed up, and no one mentioned them again. They even found one right beneath where we are right now, which connected the train depot to the old Farmer’s Supply, presumably to move liquor from the arriving trains into the city. Tunnels have been discovered as far as five blocks away, including what some claim to be a whole network designed to evade hostile Indians.”
“So they already had an existing infrastructure of primitive tunnels to build upon.”
“More than that,” Gunnar said. “We’re not just talking about holes dug in the dirt with lanterns hanging from the old cribbing. These tunnels were constructed with brick and mortar. Real solid, arched numbers. My point being that they weren’t made by your aver
age smugglers. Bootlegging was a serious business, but not one anybody thought would last forever. An enormous amount of money had to have been invested in the construction, right? You don’t hire crews and spend years creating an entire subterranean labyrinth when repealing Prohibition would immediately make it obsolete. You don’t throw down piles of cash just so some stage actor can shag a farmer’s daughter, either. And if you’re too cheap to heat your buildings individually, then you’re not going to blow exorbitant sums on the connecting tunnels, knowing full well they’re going to be covered with a foot of soot in no time flat. You have to take a step back, factor the equation down to its simplest financial components, and evaluate it in a historical context. Essentially what I do for a living, only in this case, it’s for companies that no longer exist, and using business models that were outdated a century ago.
“Bottom line. Why does anyone do anything? Sex, money, or power. It didn’t take a whole lot of money to buy sex back then, and even minimal power has always been enough to pretty much guarantee a steady stream of action. So we’re left with money and power. Who has them and who wants them? In a colony full of religious teetotalers and moral idealists, only one man stands out. Wesley Thornton. Your wife’s great-grandfather. By 1900, he’d snatched up nearly two-thirds of all of the active ranches in the area. He had the trade cornered. He’d expanded his kingdom as far as it could go. And anytime something like that happens, the only thing left to do is conquer another kingdom, which he did in the form of entering the railroad game. He bought controlling interest in the small Cache la Poudre Line, leveraged it to outright buy the depot behind us, as well as a dozen others along the line, and then sold his interests in the railroad itself to Thomas Elliot Richter, who eventually traded it to R. J. Mueller in a deal that allowed him to monopolize the oil trade.
“Superficially, not much there. Thornton cashed in on a commodity and increased his fortune. On the practical side, he now controlled access to the Rio Grande train line from just north of the Wyoming state line all the way down through Denver.”
“You said he sold the railroad.”
“But he kept the depots. Think of them as seaports and him as the harbormaster. He determined what got on and what got off and how much it cost for each item to do so. Now, in 1908 he entered into a partnership with a company called StockCo Holdings and bought a large plot of land in an area that came to be called Island Grove, seven blocks north-northwest of the train depot. A heavily wooded lot near the river. The stated mission of this partnership was to establish a hog farm that would revolutionize the industry and bring it in line with the standards and profitability of cattle production. This side venture was snakebit from the start, though. Dozens of hogs died the first month, as did two of their hired hands. By the spring of 1909, they’d lost more than two thousand head. And four employees. All from pneumonia. Or at least that’s what was reported. There’s even a picture here from the Colorado Historical Society.”
Gunnar turned his computer so that Alejandra and Mason could see. The image had obviously been scanned from a photograph that had seen better days. The emulsification was spiderwebbed with cracks, but Mason could still clearly see the subject: a broad expanse of mud partitioned into pens, riddled with bloated white carcasses. The picture had been taken from a distant vantage point, through trees that framed the corners with blurry leaves. The focus was the sheer amount of carnage, the dead pigs everywhere. Not necessarily the men picking their way through the remains in primitive gas masks and baggy white gowns.
He looked up at Gunnar, who smiled at the recognition in his eyes. He could see where his old friend was going with this line of thought, could practically hear the tumblers falling into place.
“With their hogs dead, AgrAmerica and StockCo were forced to cut their losses and abandon their shared venture. In exchange for the cleanup, the land was given to the city and the families of the deceased employees were compensated. But they weren’t the only ones. StockCo reimbursed AgrAmerica for its purchase of the now-dead livestock in the form of corporate shares, which, considering the colossal failure of the hog farm experiment, were worthless on paper. However, when StockCo’s parent company rolled it back and merged it with a more successful subsidiary, those shares carried over to the sister company and were suddenly valuable again. In fact, great-grandpa Wesley leveraged them into a seat on the board of the parent company, traded them in small amounts on the open market until their value peaked, and then cashed them in to the tune of forty-three million dollars. His initial investment in two thousand dead pigs was reimbursed at a rate of more than twenty thousand dollars a head at a time when a hog cost less than five bucks. Are you following me so far?”
Mason could only nod and stare at his coffee, which was growing cold in his hand.
“In 1912, construction workers discovered a tunnel beneath a property two blocks to the north-northwest when part of the site collapsed, revealing what they believed to be a section of this mythical ‘Indian tunnel,’ but if you look at the map, it falls right in line with the tunnel you were just in. The city paid for the ground to be closed up once more. One of the workers was quoted at the time as saying it smelled like something had died down there. Later that same year, Wesley began selling off all of his railroad depots.”
“Get to the part about the owner of StockCo,” Alejandra said.
“Right. StockCo was absorbed by its sister company, Western Agricultural Consortium, which, until 1908, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Mueller Steel, who sold it to Tectonic Shale & Oil, whose parent company was—duht-duh-duh-dahh—Great American Oil. Your in-laws shared a forty-three-million-dollar mess of dead pigs with Thomas Elliot Richter, the richest man in the country. And it gets better. The Richter Foundation—the charitable arm of the corporate juggernaut—was the largest contributor to the research that resulted in the formation of Unified Pharmacopeia, a joint venture between Mueller Steel and Great American Oil. Unified then bought all of Bayer AG’s patents and holdings, which were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1917. The act itself was repealed just long enough for those assets to be auctioned off, chief among them the patent to a revolutionary new drug called aspirin. Unified immediately commenced mass production of the most powerful medicine the world had ever known and amassed stockpiles large enough to treat the millions afflicted with the Spanish flu the following year. Unified made nearly a billion dollars in the process. And what did research scientists learn in 2009 when they exhumed several victims of the pandemic whose bodies had been frozen in the Alaskan ice? That the Spanish flu was a variation of the influenza A virus, H1N1 specifically, which began its life as an avian flu that was passed to humans with one slight detour in between. Care to wager a guess as to what?”
“Pigs,” Mason said.
“You got it. The most deadly pandemic in the history of the world started as a cough in a duck and mutated into something far worse in a field full of dead hogs. And the company that profited most from it was an early pharmaceutical company selling aspirin, using a recipe it had ripped off—with the government’s help—from Bayer. A company half-owned by Great American Oil, the charitable foundation of which took a sudden interest in the treatment of those afflicted, as evidenced by—”
“The photograph from the Library of Congress. The one with the man with the blue eyes, a doctor with the Richter Foundation, treating casualties in a tent in France during World War One. The first known appearance of the Hoyl.”
“A century ago, Mace,” Gunnar said in little more than a whisper. “They’ve been doing this for so long, they’ve got it down to a science.”
“Then it is time someone stopped them,” Alejandra said.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Mason said. “Do me a favor, Gunnar. Extrapolate the course of the tunnel in both directions and compare the properties situated along its projected course to any of AgrAmerica’s or GABP’s current holdings. There has to be a match. Whatever lies at the far end of the tunnel
is the key to understanding what’s happening now.”
Gunnar’s fingers flew across the keyboard, as though the computer were an extension of himself.
“Nothing here. At least nothing on a direct line.”
“Try properties that list the same corporate address as Fairacre.”
Mason felt the connection even as he said it. This was where everything came together. This was the reason his wife had been killed. He closed his eyes and saw Angie’s face, watched a smile form on her lips. He would have given anything to cling to that image forever.
“There it is. Steerman’s Meat Processing and Packing. Fifteen miles south-southeast of here. Nine miles north of Fort Lupton. Middle of freaking nowhere. Give me a second.” His fingers buzzed across the keys. “It was originally family-held, owned and operated by Angus T. Steerman. Seriously. That was his real name. It was in his family for three generations. Started by Delbert Chester Steerman in 1919, following his return from the war. Grew the business to a couple thousand head and made a comfortable living. Turned it over in 1953 to his three sons, who promptly converted it into a commercial slaughterhouse and purchased a fleet of semis with freezers to distribute their products. Made a killing through the mid-eighties. Grew complacent. Made some bad investments and even worse business decisions. Turned the company over to their combined eight children, who ran it into the ground in a matter of years. Angus bought out his two sisters and all five cousins in an attempt to make a go of it on his own. He lasted until 1994 before filing Chapter Seven and liquidating all of the assets in a fire sale. The freezer trucks went to Safeway for pennies on the dollar, the cattle sold by the head, and the physical property was obtained by a company named Mountain States Land Development. Now Mountain States, you’ll be surprised to learn, had only one other holding, a penthouse suite in a nonexistent office building in Commerce City, which it sold, along with the Steerman land, to an international agriculture consortium with offices in Switzerland. And who would you imagine sits on this Swiss company’s board?”
The Extinction Agenda Page 31