The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

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  For Dani

  PROLOGUE

  No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli,

  The Art of War (1520)

  1

  SHELTER ISLAND, NEW YORK

  November 27

  The man seated at the Macassar ebony desk was not accustomed to being made to wait. He wore a tie the color of honey to call attention to his amber eyes and had the silver hair and aquiline nose of his forebears, as evidenced by the gold-framed portraits hanging in the trompe l’oeil arches. The fireplace behind him cast a flickering glare upon the Gothic armchairs, bookshelves, and red stag heads staring down at him from their mounts. The velvet drapes were drawn, stranding shadows as dark as his mood in the far corners of the room.

  He was known as Quintus, Latin for fifth, an honorific bequeathed to him by his father, although if everything went according to plan, he would soon assume the mantle of Quartus, if not higher. Even his esteemed great-grandfather had never aspired to such heights, and yet here he was on the cusp of elevating the status of his family name.

  For the last hundred years, the members of Pantheon Maioris Tredecim—literally translated from Latin as Pantheon Majority Thirteen—had been content in their respective roles, largely because they had all been in agreement about their vision of the future. Despite their numeric rankings, their voices had been equal. Decisions affecting all of them had been made by the majority, and always after considerable debate. Technology had shrunk the world, though. Gone were the geographic boundaries that had once defined their empires, blurring borders that had been carefully negotiated and strictly enforced since the advent of the syndicate nearly three and a half centuries ago, allowing the more ambitious among them to discreetly enter industries formerly considered off-limits to all but the specific member who controlled them, causing fortunes to fluctuate and tensions to rise.

  None of them had previously contested his ranking, as the wealth and power each honorific possessed had remained relatively constant. The path to ascension—rising in rank and stature—had been one that took decades, a combination of careful long-term planning by one house and a stroke of misfortune for another, and even then, Quintus was aware of it having happened only once every few generations. Time had changed that, however. Estates had diminished, members had grown complacent, and power had diffused through lineages that did nothing but squabble over it. Families were no longer satisfied with maintaining a seat at the table and conspired to rule it. While there had always been such men, none of them had ever attempted a coup d’état.

  Until now.

  Secundus had fired the first shot in a war that many of them believed had become inevitable. Although he’d vehemently denied it, his family, through subsequent generations, had patiently acquired solid minority holdings in critical resources outside of its designated sphere, resources that would increase exponentially in value after the coming cataclysm, the Great Culling, the time for which, they all agreed, was now at hand. While the other twelve argued over the ultimate mechanism by which they would thin the herd, he’d gambled on releasing one of his minion’s engineered viruses—the profits from the fallout would have easily doubled his already considerable estate and elevated him to Primus—and lost. In doing so, he’d not only risked exposing the entire organization; he’d altered its dynamics by sowing the seeds of distrust and instigating what Quintus speculated would become a thirteen-way free-for-all for supremacy that each could blame one of the others for starting.

  He’d spent his entire life preparing for this opportunity, though. As his father and grandfather had before him. And now, with Secundus’s failure to unleash his pandemic, his position was ripe for the taking. Tertius and Quartus were undoubtedly already implementing the machinations of their ascension and Quintus’s rise was by no means guaranteed, which meant he needed to succeed where Secundus had failed, and his entire plan hinged upon the man who had already missed the prearranged starting time of their virtual meeting.

  His laptop chimed to announce the arrival of an external user to his secure virtual conference room. The screen remained black for several moments before the shadowed form of a man drew contrast from the darkness. He wore a sugegasa, a conical Asian hat woven from straw. It was frayed around the brim and concealed the upper two-thirds of his face. Only the lobes of his ears, the tip of his nose, and his effeminate mouth and chin were visible above his slender neck and narrow shoulders.

  “You’re late,” Quintus said.

  The man made no reply. He rarely spoke, for reasons that were obvious to anyone who’d ever heard the sound of his voice.

  “I trust you had no trouble relocating my cache.”

  The man offered a nearly imperceptible nod.

  “Then I assume we’re still on schedule.”

  Again, a slight dip of the chin.

  “You know why I called this meeting. Are you prepared to commence?”

  A faint shake of the head.

  “Must I remind you that the remainder of your payment is contingent upon the successful demonstration of the efficacy of the product?”

  The sound of breathing from the speakers became agitated. Quintus intuited the man’s question.

  “You want to know what happened to the team at the slaughterhouse.”

  The man nodded.

  “Let’s just say that no one who knew you were there is in any kind of condition to share that information.”

  The man made no appreciable movement.

  “I’ve reviewed the forensics reports myself. The containment tanks were pulverized and buried under tons of burning rubble when the roof collapsed, and the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer failed to detect the presence of any of the precursor chemicals. Everyone with working knowledge of the experimentation is dead. No one has any idea you were ever there.”

  The man’s lips tightened.

  “As far as the Thirteen are concerned, you were only there for your experience in bioengineering, to help incorporate that infernal bacterium into the Hoyl’s virus. None of them has the slightest idea of what you were working on for me. Or what I intend to do with it. Trust me when I say that if they did, we’d both already be dead or spending what little time we have left on the run, like Secundus.”

  The man’s facial expression remained unchanged.

  Quintus felt a surge of anger. He was in charge. The man on the screen was his subordinate and in no position to dictate the direction of this meeting. The hardest part of his job was already done. Anyone could finish it from here for a fraction of the cost. He should just consider himself fortunate that Quintus hadn’t already had him killed.

  “The Hoyl is dead. His men are dead. Your lab was sanitized before the entire building was incinerated. Any residual traces of the chemicals burned off in the fire. The other twelve in the p
antheon are oblivious. My assistant and I are the only two people alive who know what you were doing there.”

  A knock on his office door. There was only one person who would have dared to interrupt him. He pressed the button underneath his desktop and the lock disengaged.

  The door opened inward and a hulking silhouette entered from the anteroom. While Marshall was technically his personal assistant, he hadn’t been hired for his secretarial skills. The former U.S. Navy SEAL was the team leader of his personal security detail, which formed a veritable special ops team at his command, day and night. He stood close to seven feet tall and looked like he’d been chiseled from a mountain. His buzz cut was flat, his face angular, and his chest muscular enough to absorb a shotgun blast.

  “This arrived at the gate.” He carried a rectangular box in his massive hands. “The guy who dropped it off claimed he was given fifty dollars to deliver it to this address. He was told we’d be expecting it.”

  An unsettling smile appeared from the shadows beneath the brim of the man’s triangular hat on the monitor. Quintus glanced up at his assistant, who confirmed his suspicion with a nod.

  “What’s in the box?” he asked.

  The man’s smile widened and revealed his teeth all the way back to his molars.

  It appeared to be an ordinary cardboard box with Japanese characters scrawled on the top. Quintus recognized them. He knew exactly what they meant.

  “I demand an answer,” he said. “What’s in the box?”

  The man’s smile didn’t falter. He made a rolling gesture with his delicate hand.

  Quintus nodded to Marshall, who grabbed the box and walked halfway across the room with it.

  “Carefully,” he said to Marshall.

  His assistant removed a knife from beneath his jacket and slit the tape. Lifted an edge. Tried to see inside. Cautiously raised the opposite flap. He appeared genuinely confused until his eyes suddenly widened and locked onto his employer’s.

  “What is it?” Quintus asked.

  Marshall reached inside, pulled out a gas mask, and let the box fall to the floor. The color drained from his face.

  Quintus glanced at the empty box on the floor.

  There wasn’t a second mask.

  “Give it to me!” he shouted. “Hurry!”

  Marshall looked at the gas mask, then at Quintus, and then at the gas mask again.

  The man on the screen started to laugh. It was a horrible sound, like a wet, rasping cough.

  “I order you to give it to me!”

  His most trusted confidant, the man who had sworn to protect his life, met his stare.

  Marshall’s free hand clenched into a fist. He bared his teeth and released a humming noise from deep in his chest. Took several deep breaths.

  “I’ve seen what it does,” he said. “How it kills. The pain. Jesus Christ. I can’t … I’m sorry.”

  He quickly donned the gas mask.

  “You can’t do this to me!” Quintus shouted at the laptop monitor. “Do you have any idea who I am? The other twelve will scour the globe to find you. And when they do, you will be subjected to suffering beyond any the world has ever known. You and everyone you hold dear.”

  The man on the screen continued to make that awful laughing sound.

  Marshall stiffened. Sputtered. His eyes widened. Filled with tears. His pupils shrank to pinpricks. He coughed. Grabbed his chest. Tore at his shirt. Vomited into the mask.

  Quintus looked at the man on the computer screen, whose laughter abruptly ceased.

  Marshall collapsed to the floor. Started to convulse. Flopped onto his back. Gasped. Choked. His entire body clenched, then went limp. He issued a hissing sound that freckled the inside of the visor with blood as his chest deflated.

  It didn’t rise again.

  That had been the promised demonstration.

  The Novichok agent had been inside the gas mask, presumably within the canister filter itself.

  Less than thirty seconds. Start to finish.

  Had Quintus opened the box, there was no doubt in his mind that he would have put on the gas mask. The man on the screen had gambled that his hired hand would betray him and, in doing so, eliminated the only other person who could connect either of them to the slaughterhouse.

  When the man finally spoke, it was in a gravelly voice. His cadence was strange, halting. He had to take deep breaths between words.

  “I trust … you … approve.”

  Quintus walked around his desk and stood over Marshall, whose blood and vomit concealed his face. Like the gas itself, they were completely contained inside the mask. The formerly imposing figure was now little more than a useless mound of flesh.

  He was going to need a new assistant.

  “Yes,” he said. “I believe that will work just fine.”

  When he returned to the laptop, the man was already gone.

  2

  REDLEAF LAKE | CRIME SCENE #2 | GREELEY, COLORADO

  December 2

  Special Agent James Mason struck off toward the distant police cordon, his FBI windbreaker flaring on the breeze, his sunglasses shielding his blue eyes from the winter sun. His hair had grown shaggy, but getting it cut was the furthest thing from his mind.

  “Are you sure it’s him?” he asked.

  “The remains have been down there under all that mud, doing little more than breeding bacteria for the last week,” Todd Locker said. He had a deep, melodic voice that sounded strange coming from someone who looked remarkably like a tall, skinny mole. “All I can say with any kind of certainty is that the decedent is definitively male and somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty years old.”

  “There should be some rather unmistakable characteristics.”

  “Gunshot wounds to both shoulders. Front to back, through and through. Exit wounds consistent with what one would expect from nine-millimeter rounds. He had fluid in his lungs, meaning he was still breathing when he went under. So unless you’re telling me we’re looking for more than one body matching that description, I’m fairly confident this is your guy, but that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  Mason nodded. He’d given the assistant director of the Rocky Mountain Regional Forensic Laboratory explicit instructions to call him the moment the divers recovered the body from the bottom of the frozen lake. He needed to be sure this time. He’d already buried his former partner once.

  Locker led him from the makeshift parking lot toward a line of skeletal aspens, which served as the framework for a cordon of yellow police tape. He wore his dark hair in a ponytail that bisected the letters CSRT emblazoned across the back of his windbreaker. Tiny round glasses perched on the tip of his nose. His neck was tattooed with a biomechanical design reminiscent of H. R. Giger’s work on Alien. It was a carefully cultivated appearance intended to keep him out of the courtroom and in the field, where he could better utilize his skills.

  Mason flashed his badge at the waiting officer, who controlled access to the site with a digital clipboard. Locker needed no introduction. He showed his ID as a courtesy, thanked the officer by his first name, and struck off through the tall weeds toward the distant lake.

  Everything had changed since Mason was last here. Save for the drifts that lingered in the shade of the trees, all of the snow had melted, leaving the field muddy and choppy with the footprints of the crime-scene response team and police divers, who’d been out here dredging the lake for the past five days. Since it froze from the top down, only the surface had turned to ice. The twelve feet of water and twenty inches of sediment beneath it hadn’t even been close. Of course, the task of recovering the body would have been a whole lot faster and easier had the weather been more accommodating and their manpower not been divided between four separate crime scenes, none of which was anything resembling textbook. Between the burned ruins of the slaughterhouse, this lake, the wreckage of the tram in the underground tunnel, and the Global Allied Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals building at the former AgrAmerica
complex, Locker had his hands more than full. Especially if Mason was right about the implications of the torn piece of paper he’d found.

  And the chemical formula written on it.

  He looked back over his shoulder to make sure he was out of earshot before speaking. Very few people involved with the investigation had been apprised of some of the more sensitive details, chief among them that the formula belonged to one of the Soviet Union’s rumored Cold War–era Novichok agents, designed to both increase the efficacy of and stabilize the ordinarily volatile German nerve gas sarin, allowing it to persist exponentially longer in the environment in both liquid and gaseous forms.

  “Have you found any evidence to suggest they were successfully able to produce any Novichok?”

  “We’ve scoured what’s left of the slaughterhouse with state-of-the-art carbon nanotube detectors and run thousands of soil and residue samples through the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, but we haven’t found so much as a trace of a single precursor chemical. Chances are the fire would have consumed them anyway. Assuming they were even there in the first place.”

  “We can’t afford to assume anything.”

  “You’re telling me. I’ve got the DHS sniffing all around the periphery of this investigation.”

  Mason nodded his understanding. The Department of Homeland Security was a veritable army beholden only to the president and granted authority under the Patriot Act to do everything it deemed necessary to protect the citizens of the United States, including insinuating itself into any investigation with potential national security implications.

  A gray shape appeared through the cattails, where a raft with an outboard motor had been dragged through the shallows and onto dry ground. The diver who’d recovered the remains sat on the side while he changed out of his neoprene wet suit. He glanced up at the sound of the men crashing toward him through the reeds.

  “Can you give us a few minutes?” Locker asked.