“My dear brother-in-law, Victor, who was there mere days ago.”
“It’s like you’re psychic.”
“Then this is where we must go,” Alejandra said. She knew even better than the rest of them what—or, more important, who—they were likely to find there.
“Without a doubt,” Mason said. “Can you get us the blueprints for that place, Gunnar?”
“Already on it.”
“What about satellite?”
“We don’t want to tip our hand. If I task a bird to that location, they’ll know it.”
“Then I’ll be going in blind.”
“Not necessarily.”
The left corner of Gunnar’s mouth curled upward into the hint of a smile.
His phone rang. The song was “Walk Like an Egyptian.” Mason had a pretty good idea to whom the ringtone had been assigned.
“It’s about time, Ramses. Are you certain this call isn’t being traced?” Gunnar rolled his eyes at the answer. “Yeah, yeah. I know.” A sigh. “Yes. He’s right here with me.” A pause. “Hang on a second. Just a sec— Hold on, for Christ’s sake. I can’t ask him if you don’t stop talking.… Okay, okay. Just a second. Mace, Ramses wants to know how you’re coming with that Hummer you owe him.”
“Tell him I’ve been kind of busy.”
“He said to tell you he’s been kind of— Fine. Hang on.” Gunnar put the call on speaker and set his phone on the dashboard. “There.”
“Are you there, Mace?” Ramses asked.
“Yeah,” Mason said. “But your Bronco didn’t make it.”
“You’re killing me, man. This is the reason why nobody helps each other anymore. Between you destroying all of my cars and your old man calling my clubs, I’m starting to think you’re trying to give me an aneurysm.”
“My old man? Why in the world would my dad be calling you?”
“That’s what people around here are starting to ask. There’s no good reason for a man in my position to be talking to a United States senator, especially one who sits on any number of subcommittees whose sole focus is the ruination of the majority of my business contacts.”
“Did he say what he wanted from you?”
“From me? You kidding? There’s nothing he wants from me, shy of my head mounted on his wall. He just wants to make sure his baby boy is okay, because Son of the Year isn’t returning any of his messages and no one seems to know where he is.”
The wind shifted direction and lifted the settled snow back into the air, momentarily obscuring the old depot.
“What did you tell him?”
“You’re not listening, are you? Nothing! The hell if I’m talking to him. He’s always had that way of seeing right through me. You know that. He’s your problem, man. Not mine.”
“Did those friends of yours have any useful information?”
“These things require some serious finesse. Everyone knows that Ramses doesn’t ask for favors, he grants them, so all kinds of red flags go up the moment he does. Ask the wrong person and next thing you know we’re all being fitted for toe tags.”
“You could have just said no.”
“You get some sort of perverse pleasure out of pushing my buttons, don’t you? Let’s just say it’s still a work in progress. I should have something by the time I catch up with you.”
“How do you know where—?”
“I ended up having a little chat, in a roundabout kind of way, with the personal assistant of an elderly gentleman, who, as it turns out, feels something of a kinship for you.”
The idea of Ramses having any sort of connection to Johan came from so far afield that it took Mason a second to catch up with the conversation.
“You talked to Mahler’s man?”
“He goes by Seraph, but his name’s actually Asher Ben-Menachem. Turns out we bumped elbows in Uzbekistan. He was a battalion commander in the Golani Brigade of the IDF back when I was playing G.I. Joe. I’m on my way up there right now to have a little powwow with him. Don’t start the fireworks without me.”
“Might want to push it a little harder, then. If I’m right about where we’re going and what we’re about to walk into, the show’s about to begin.”
“It’d be a whole lot easier if I still had my Mustang.”
“Point made.”
“Let me talk to Gunnar.”
“He’s sitting right here.”
“I mean in private.”
Gunnar killed the speaker and brought the phone to his ear. Mason watched him from the corner of his eye as he pulled out of the lot and headed back toward the highway. A few more cars had joined them on the road, but not many. The sand trucks were already out and about, plowing through the accumulation, gravel bouncing in their wake.
“Not yet,” Gunnar said. He instinctively peeked past Alejandra at Mason. “Now’s not the time, Ramses. I—”
Mason watched the road and tapped a tuneless rhythm on the steering wheel with his thumbs. Whatever the two of them were discussing made Gunnar uncomfortable in a way that recalled his more awkward youth.
“You know damn well I didn’t deliberately do any—” Gunnar lowered his voice. “Of course I want to make things right. You know every bit as well as I do that—”
“Do you think that monster will be waiting for us?” Alejandra asked.
“I’m counting on it,” Mason said. “It’s time to end this once and for all.”
Whether the Hoyl knew it or not, today was his last day on this earth.
“Fine, Ramses,” Gunnar said. “You know what? Ramses? Ramses. No, you … Just wait … Hold—hold up.… Check your email.… No, not that one. You know which one I’m talking about. You think I want this broadcast for the whole world to see? Are you even listening to me? Ramses. Ramses?”
Gunnar terminated the call and tapped some keys.
“Are you going to tell me about it or are we just going to pretend I didn’t hear any of that?” Mason said.
“Now’s not the time, Mace. Believe me.”
“How are we going to get into this place?” Alejandra asked. “We cannot just walk up and knock on the door.”
Mason thought about the bush beater Ramses had given him earlier. He figured it would probably work quite nicely as a door knocker, too.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
61
The Steerman complex was situated at the southeastern corner of a 963-acre parcel, the majority of which had been divided into stockyards that provided a steady supply of meat for the grinders. All that remained now was a ruined framework of fallen fences overgrown with weeds. The most recent satellite images Gunnar could find were already two years old. They were just going to have to hope that not very much had changed in that time.
The core of buildings formed a nice tight cluster maybe a mile and a half in from the main dirt road. Tall weeds grew from the cracked asphalt of the tarmac. The family homestead sat off to the east, away from the commercial operations, surrounded by several large outbuildings, one of which appeared to have fallen to the ground. The commercial zone was deeper into the property to the northwest, at the heart of the maze of stock pens and cattle chutes that wended their way up to the largest building, which was the size of a department store. It had a multitiered roof connected by metal ladders and several tall industrial chimneys. Roads led from either side of the main building through the curved cattle funnels—or races—and the crowd pens, which were barely visible through the overgrowth.
For as much information as they could glean from the old satellite images, there was even more they couldn’t. They hadn’t been able to find blueprints for any of the buildings. All they had to go on was a generic floor plan for a modern industrial slaughterhouse, which meant that Mason needed to familiarize himself with the basic layout and the function of each of the various rooms so that he wouldn’t be walking in there completely blind.
The cattle would have been led from their stock pens into sma
ller crowd pens, funneled through a series of races so narrow that they couldn’t turn around, and then up a ramp, through a chute, and into a cage called a knocking pen, where a guillotinelike device colloquially termed a neck crush was used to immobilize the animal’s head so it could be percussed by a captive-bolt gun. From there, the carcasses were skinned, decapitated, and carried along an overhead conveyor down the butchering line from the precooler to the cooler to the preparation room on their way to either the freezers or the docks.
And that was just the killing floor.
There were offices and locker rooms and lounges and bathrooms and storage rooms and any number of facilities now considered obsolete. Boiler rooms, furnace rooms, scalding rooms, elevated walkways for constant supervision. Not to mention the entire second and third levels. And, of course, there was a tunnel leading right up to it from beneath the barren fields.
In other words, he was really little better off now than he’d been before, but at least he’d be able to recognize where he was as he stumbled blindly from room to room.
He hoped.
Then again, they could always arrive and find the whole place burned to the ground.
He doubted it, though. It felt like everything had been building up to this. From the discovery of the flu virus and the death of his partner in the Arizona desert to the reappearance of the Hoyl and the subsequent murder of his wife, whose investigation had exposed the solitary weakness in the conspiracy, a financial trail that led from a shelf company in Commerce City to the Fairacre property on the eastern plains to a tunnel hidden inside a windowless building on the AgrAmerica lot. It had all brought him to where he was right now, crouched in the snow beside a concrete access building roughly two miles north-northwest of Steerman’s slaughterhouse.
Mason’s watch read 3:40 A.M.
He crawled through the small door and out of the storm. The wheel of the hatch took some serious torque, but he managed to open it. He lost the cell signal to his Bluetooth before he was even halfway down. Thirty seconds later, he was kneeling on the cold ground, listening to the darkness around him. Judging by the smell, this section of the tunnel was newer than the one under downtown Greeley. He risked turning on the Infinity’s under-barrel light. The LED output had already dimmed significantly, which meant he was going to have to use it sparingly.
The tunnel looked exactly the same as it had fifteen miles to the north: smooth, rounded concrete with electrical boxes and conduits traversing the walls and the ceiling. The only real difference was the scoring on the rails. These tracks were in use and had been for some time, if sparingly. He took a mental snapshot and killed the beam. The resultant darkness was complete.
Mason leaned his right shoulder against the wall beside him and used it as a guide to help him travel as fast as he could. He had a pretty good mental odometer, and at this pace it wouldn’t take him much more than half an hour to cover the two miles. The problem would be finding what he was looking for once he was inside.
He was walking into a trap and he knew it. The element of surprise would work to his advantage, but what he was really counting on was what the men had said about someone looking out for him. His guardian angel. A second’s hesitation was all he would need, as he had no such angel sitting on his shoulder.
The mile mark came and went. He was starting to get edgy. He carried the pistol higher and in a two-handed grip. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, at least as well as they were going to. He could make out the faintest hint of the rail to his left, and he was coming to anticipate the turnoffs by the changing intonation of his footsteps. He slowed at a mile and a half to minimize the sound of his advance. He didn’t risk using the light at all. Another quarter of a mile and he was in full shooter’s stance, his heart pounding in his ears. He focused on slowing it, on metering its rhythm. Opened his mouth to quiet his breathing.
He could positively taste it now. This was it.
A sour scent joined that of the dust. A biological stench. A taste as much as a smell. He remembered it clearly. It was the same one he’d followed through the burning building in Arizona a year ago.
With those memories came others. The plastic sheeting melting up to the ceiling, dripping smoldering liquid. Smoke swirling all around him. Flames consuming the wooden walls. Dark silhouettes dangling from chains. The reek of decomposition and the buzz of flies. The man with the blue eyes, smiling behind his respirator. Kane emerging from one of the stalls, shouting for Mason to take the shot. The man holding a gun to the base of his partner’s skull, his head snapping backward as his forehead burst. Again, those horrible blue eyes, staring at him down the barrel of his pistol. Mocking him. Then heat and light, which faded into a vision of his wife.
Angie looked up at him and he recognized the longing in her eyes. The longing for him to return from wherever he’d gone, to rejoin her in the land of the living. He saw the hope in her expression, which told him that her heart was his, for better or worse, and that it was up to him to make things right between them, that she would wait for him until the end of time if she had to. Then she donned a pair of sunglasses and he saw the face of the man who had stolen her from him. Saw his inhumanly blue eyes and his horrible smile. And then he saw only flames.
Mason would not fail them again.
The sound of his footsteps changed. Slowly. If there was such a thing as the note of finality, it was the echo of footsteps dying against a concrete wall. A flat noise with no depth. It was the sound of the end.
He clicked on the light and shined it ahead of him. The beam reflected from a large slanted rectangle maybe three feet up from the tracks. It was a sheet of Plexiglas, through which he could see thin vertical posts, chain-link fencing, and maybe the hint of a doorway in the rear. It was a tram, as he’d initially guessed. There were four cars in all, with sliding doors that opened on both sides. They were closed, but there was no missing the subdivisions inside. The cages. It was a prison transport vehicle. Backed right up against a bare concrete wall, which was a slightly lighter shade of gray than those surrounding it, a more recent addition.
There had to be an ingress nearby.
Right there. At the end of the tunnel, nearly abutting the wall. A heavy steel door.
Mason scanned the edges. No wires or infrared or any other devices on this side. The door opened outward, toward him. He’d be able to see inside before entering. For whatever that was worth. If it was alarmed on the inside, there would be no way to avoid setting it off. It didn’t matter now anyway.
They’d know he was here soon enough.
He switched off the light, stood in the darkness while his eyes adjusted, then took hold of the handle.
The metal was cold in his grasp.
He focused his senses, steadied his breathing, and turned the knob.
62
The smell hit Mason squarely in the face. It took all of his concentration to keep from vomiting. He closed the door behind him as quietly as he could. It was every bit as dark inside as it was in the tunnel, only about twenty degrees warmer. And much more humid. The sweat was already flowing under his multiple layers. He held his gun in his right hand and used his left to guide him along the wall.
Beneath the smell of death was something else. Desiccated straw and manure. Maybe earth and mildew. And the faintest hint of chemicals, fuel of some kind. Considering the Hoyl’s proclivity for fire, he had a pretty good idea what it was for.
The walls were polished concrete, with the kind of finish that made them easy to hose down. As was the floor, which caused his rubber soles to squeak despite his best efforts. He found the stairs with his right foot and ascended slowly. Rounded the landing. Continued upward. The stench grew stronger with every step. The last time he’d been in a place like this, he was wearing a respirator mask. He would have killed for one now. The antiviral face mask covering his nose and mouth protected him from exposure to diseases and bodily fluids, but it didn’t do a blasted thing for the smell.
Another
steel door sealed the top of the staircase, only this one was flush with the ceiling. It was much older than anything else he’d encountered. The rivets were rusted or missing entirely in some spots. He pressed his cheek against the hatch and listened for anything on the other side, felt for subtle vibrations, then put his shoulder into it and raised it high enough to crawl out. He slowly lowered the lid and crouched against the wall. There was no sign of anyone around him.
He checked his Bluetooth. A single bar was all he needed. And probably all he got.
“I’m inside,” Mason whispered. The sound echoed from a room he realized was much larger than he’d initially thought.
“Right on schedule,” Gunnar said. “Any resistance?”
“Negative. At least so far.”
“This is too easy, Mace.”
“Don’t jinx it. Maybe we’ve finally caught a break.”
“You know that’s not the case.”
“A guy can dream, right?” He turned on his light and cupped the lens in his palm. “Are you in position?”
“Yeah. I’ve got to tell you, though. I’d feel a whole lot better about this if I had some sort of visual on the property. I can’t even find a security system to hack into. This place is totally off the grid.”
“Have you scanned the radio frequencies yet?”
“There’s nothing on the cellular bands. I still need a few more minutes on the lower frequencies. Any sort of short-range handheld is going to utilize such a long wavelength that I’ll practically leave be line of sight to intercept it.”
“Don’t get yourself killed trying.”
“Certainly not foremost on today’s agenda. Besides, I’ve got Alejandra watching my back.” Gunnar lowered his voice. “You ever see a woman handle a grenade launcher? There’s something incredibly sexy about it.”
The Extinction Agenda Page 32