The officer nodded, brushed past them, and headed back toward the cordon. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
Locker climbed up onto the pontoon and leaned over the black body bag resting in the bottom of the boat. He unzipped it halfway and folded back the flap.
A horrible stench struck Mason. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand and stepped past Locker so he could better see the remains. The level of decomposition was more advanced than he’d anticipated. He slipped a nitrile glove onto his free hand, reached inside, and smeared the mud out of the dead man’s eyes and mouth. The skin was pallid and gelatinous, distended with absorbed fluids that contorted the features, and yet there was no doubt in his mind that this was the man he’d driven all the way out here to identify.
He turned away and stared across the plains toward the distant Rocky Mountains, their sharp, snowcapped peaks forming a serrated blade against the horizon. His former partner had done the exact same thing before setting into motion the series of events culminating in him shooting the ice beneath his own feet and vanishing into the dark water.
“You know how this works,” Locker said. “It’s a simple answer to a simple question.”
Mason remembered every detail of that night with perfect clarity. He’d sighted Kane down the barrel of his pistol as his former partner materialized from the blowing snow, his left arm hanging uselessly at his side, blood dripping from the gun clenched in his fist. They’d both known there was no way Mason could let him walk away, not after what he’d done, and yet he’d desperately attempted to justify his actions.
Everything I’ve done has been for my country!
His former partner had been part of a century-old plot to murder countless people with a genetically engineered flu virus. He’d conspired with Victor Thornton, Mason’s egomaniacal brother-in-law, and a seemingly immortal monster with piercing blue eyes known as the Hoyl, to integrate a bacterium that accelerated the process of decomposition into the deadly microbe’s viral envelope, preventing the threat of mutation and eliminating the need to dispose of the sheer quantity of bodies littering the streets in the wake of the resulting pandemic.
This is about survival. We’re fighting a war, whether you choose to admit it or not. A war we’re already losing.
Kane had helped track down the IRS agent who’d stumbled upon their financial trail during their plan’s lone window of vulnerability and burned her alive to cover their tracks. In doing so, he’d stolen from Mason the one thing in his life that mattered, for that investigative officer was his wife, Angie.
Our entire species is poised on the brink of extinction. We need to act decisively before it’s too late.
And he hated Kane for it. Equally, he hated him for drowning himself in the frigid water and taking the names of those who had pulled his strings to his grave with him. Men who hid behind their money and power, who believed themselves to be above the law.
I’m just a cog in the bigger machine. A machine that will continue to roll, with or without me. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
A machine known as the Thirteen.
They hadn’t just been experimenting with the Hoyl’s virus inside that slaughterhouse, Mason now knew; they’d been at some unknown stage in the production of a nerve gas deadlier than any the world has ever known, a chemical weapon of mass destruction capable of wiping out entire cities in a matter of seconds, a Novichok agent that was potentially somewhere out there right now. And Mason’s former partner had been the only man alive who could have led them to it.
“Is this the body of Special Agent Spencer Kane?” Locker asked.
Mason looked one last time at the distant horizon and started back toward his car.
“Make sure there’s nothing left of him when you’re done,” he said. “Not even ashes.”
3
DOWNTOWN DENVER
Mason pinned Kane’s picture to the wall. It was still hard to believe his former partner had been able to fool him so completely. And not just him, either. He’d convinced everyone, including the FBI, state and local authorities, multiple teams of forensic investigators, and Rand Marchment, head of the Bradley Strike Force, who’d personally delivered the news of his death to Mason while he was still in the hospital, recovering from the injuries he’d sustained while trying to save his partner. Kane had even deceived his own wife, who’d stood over his grave with Mason and made him feel as though her husband’s death was his fault, which he’d truly believed at the time.
He wrote “DECEASED” across the photo and stepped back to appraise his work. The picture of his dead partner was one of dozens he’d just finished posting on the wall. Together, they formed the foundation of his private investigation into the Thirteen. He’d painstakingly re-created the display Locker and his team had constructed in the conference room at division headquarters, including photographs from the various crime scenes associated with the deaths of his in-laws and the discovery of the remains of an estimated fifty undocumented immigrants in the burned ruins of the slaughterhouse, only he’d expanded upon it to include additional information that even the forensics specialists didn’t have. He’d added photos of various people related to the Thirteen, most notably Special Agent Jared Trapp, who, like Kane, had been Mason’s partner. Also like Kane, he was now dead, only by Mason’s hand, not his own.
It had been an act from which Mason derived no pleasure, but, rather, a sick feeling in his stomach at the realization of just how deeply the FBI had been compromised. As long as he didn’t know whom he could trust, his only option was to conduct his own investigation in parallel, not only to prevent tipping off other agents who might have been corrupted by the Thirteen but also to potentially expose the elements of subterfuge within their ranks. His special agent in charge, Gabriel Christensen, was about the closest thing to an ally he had inside the Bureau, and even then their relationship was defined by an uneasy kind of trust. Under the circumstances, though, that was about as much as he could hope for.
While copying such sensitive imagery and displaying it in the house of a private citizen was a violation of any number of laws, he didn’t see where he had much of a choice in the matter. His new place was still being renovated to make it suitable for habitation by more than termites, and there were presumably construction workers coming and going throughout the day—although he’d yet to actually see any of them doing so—which was why he’d been forced to commandeer a spare room in his old friend Ramses Donovan’s apartment. The sprawling suite encompassed the top two floors of a forty-two-story skyscraper driven like an ebon stake into the heart of downtown Denver. His old friend had gutted both levels and transformed them into his own personal den of debauchery, complete with a private club illuminated by reptile terrariums, a bedroom that had at one time probably had a numbered-ticket dispenser mounted beside the door, and a vault stocked with an arsenal capable of withstanding a siege.
Mason had stripped the walls and proceeded to tack pictures to them, starting with what he believed to be the historical foundation of the Thirteen, including black-and-white photographs of Thomas Elliot Richter and R. J. Mueller, infamous robber barons from the late nineteenth century, who’d collaborated with the previous incarnations of the Hoyl to release his vile diseases and profit from the sale of the cures. Their lines of financial inheritance had proved murky and convoluted, with money flowing through countless shell companies and offshore accounts, while their power had been distributed unevenly throughout subsequent generations.
His wife’s family tree was heavily represented, too. Her great-grandfather had conspired with Richter to create the Spanish flu, which killed between fifty and a hundred million people at the end of World War I, so they could make billions from their patent on aspirin. Her father and brother had entered the biotechnology field and attempted a similar financial coup, one that had destroyed what little remained of the Thornton bloodline, which had come to an abrupt end with Angie.
Mason traced the cont
ours of her face with his fingertips. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to label her as deceased. It was an act of finality, one he wasn’t certain he’d ever be able to perform, at least not while the Thirteen were still out there, and it was her memory that fanned the flames of his vengeance.
He heard a soft gasp behind him and glanced back. Alejandra Vigil stood in the doorway. She seemed to be looking straight through him, staring at the pictures of the crime scenes. The color had drained from her face, which made the scarred half appear more prominent. Gone was the flush of life he’d grown accustomed to seeing over the past week, replaced by the hardness of the woman who’d miraculously survived the horrors perpetrated at the locations hanging from the walls around her.
“I’m sure the last thing in the world you want is to be reminded of what happened,” he said, “but it feels like—”
“We are missing something,” she said, and slowly entered the room.
“Yeah, and whatever it is just might be the only thing that can help us find the people ultimately responsible for what happened to you.”
Before enduring unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Hoyl, she’d been with Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales. Had it not been for her training and an almost superhuman will to live, she never would have survived to lead Mason to the man who’d killed his wife. He hated making her relive the events, but there was simply no other way. She’d seen things that no one else had, which was part of the reason why she hadn’t returned to Mexico and the special forces unit she’d abandoned to search for her missing sister; the other part being Ramses, who rarely let anyone get close to him, especially not whichever flavor of the month was currently sharing his bed.
Alejandra walked past photographs stolen straight from her worst nightmares. Mason had arranged them chronologically, starting with the burned remains of the barn and subterranean chambers at Fairacre Ranch, where she’d been taken after surviving the injection of the deadly virus and her subsequent trek across the Sonoran Desert. It was there that she’d been subjected to the decomposition bacterium that had caused her disfigurement, and there where she’d inflicted the same damage upon the Hoyl.
The internal setup of the structure was similar to that of the rock quarry his strike force had stumbled upon the previous year in Arizona, where undocumented immigrants who’d been exposed to various incarnations of the monster’s virus had been strung up in wooden stalls and left to rot. He’d discovered the same carnage inside the slaughterhouse, officially classified as Crime Scene 1—CS1—at the southern end of a secret twenty-two-mile subterranean tunnel.
She hesitated near the detail photographs of the knocking pen that had once been used to immobilize and incapacitate cows being led to slaughter. The walls of the contraption had buckled beneath the weight of the fallen roof and its metal surfaces were scored with carbon from the fire that had consumed the building around it. Mason had found her inside of it, her arms drawn behind her back to hold the chain suspending a guillotinelike mechanism above her neck and a captive-bolt gun pressed to her forehead, the cord attached to its firing rod clenched between her teeth. Had she let go of either, he would have discovered her with her neck broken and a hole punched through her skull.
Alejandra surveyed pictures of the lake where they’d found Kane’s body—CS2—and the wreckage of the tram—CS3—he’d used to escape the conflagration inside a three-story concrete building—CS4—on the AgrAmerica complex, the corporate headquarters of the Thornton family’s agricultural empire, where Mason had killed the Hoyl. There were snapshots of mountains of scorched rubble and body bags containing the burned remains that had been dragged out from beneath it.
The final set of photographs had been taken inside the abandoned building near the old airport where Mason had lost nearly an entire SWAT team. They’d gone in with the intention of disrupting a deal for a biological weapon, only to find that not only were they too late but that they’d been expected. A trap Locker had called a “sophisticated self-cleansing gas chamber” had been set for them, using a burning lantern and a dense cloud of methane gas sealed inside a cubicle formed from airtight plastic sheeting. The moment they’d torn the opaque barrier, the concentration of methane had dropped to a combustible level and nearly incinerated them all.
“This place is different,” she said, tapping the pictures.
Mason knew what she meant. While he was certain it was connected to the other crime scenes, it felt somehow separate.
“The Hoyl killed his victims in a clinical, dispassionate manner,” he said. “This explosion was designed to inflict the most visceral damage possible, like the trap he set for you in the slaughterhouse. From a behavioral standpoint, it’s a completely different MO.”
“An emotional one.”
“Exactly,” he said. “It doesn’t mesh with anything else we know about him.”
“He hated me for what I did to him.”
“I don’t doubt that for a second, but if killing you were truly that important to him, why wouldn’t he have done it himself? Why waste time rigging the knocking pen when the building was about to come down on his head?”
“Because he wanted me to know I was going to die,” she whispered. She unconsciously placed her hand on her scarred cheek. “He wanted me to suffer.”
Alejandra turned away from the pictures and tried to brush past him before he could see the glint of fear in her eye. She nearly bumped into Gunnar Backstrom as he entered the room. He’d shed his Caraceni suit jacket, loosened his tie, and rolled up his sleeves, ready to get down to business.
“The system’s live,” he said. “I’m ready whenever you are.”
Ramses slipped in behind him and leaned against the back wall. His tight black V-neck revealed portions of the tattoos on his upper pecs, between which hung a Teutonic cross on a rawhide cord. As usual, he wore his jet-black hair slicked back and an unreadable expression on his face.
“What’d you do to upset Allie—?” he started to say, but stopped when he saw what Mason had done to the room. “The hell, man?”
“I did a little redecorating,” Mason said.
“You don’t see me coming into that roach motel of yours and putting holes in your walls. Not that you don’t have enough already. Holes, I mean.”
“Probably roaches, too,” Gunnar said.
“Funny. You were saying…?”
Gunnar smirked.
“Everything’s logged in and ready to go. Time to cast out our bait and see if anything bites.”
4
“Once we start down this road, there’s no turning back,” Ramses said. The computer setup in front of him was so advanced, it resembled the bridge of a starship. He spun around in his leather command chair and looked at each of them in turn. “We’re about to take a deep dive into a dark hole with no bottom.”
Mason fully understood the ramifications of what they were preparing to do. While he appreciated his old friend’s concern, he’d passed the point of no return long ago. The moment the Thirteen murdered his wife, they’d declared a war that couldn’t end without the complete annihilation of one side or the other.
“What choice do we have?” he asked. “We have no leads on the Thirteen and no way of knowing whether or not they were able to produce any quantity of Novichok A-234, a single drop of which would be enough to kill everyone in this room.”
“I’m still not convinced this is the right approach, though,” Gunnar said from his perch on the stool at the eating bar. The wavering blue reflections of the moonlight passing through the glass-bottomed swimming pool above him highlighted the scar running down his forehead, through his eyebrow, and over his cheekbone, a parting gift from the Hoyl. “This is like opening the Pandora’s box of crazy.”
Gunnar was brilliant in ways that defied comprehension. He possessed a preternatural understanding of high finance and the ability to bend technology to his will, skill sets he’d combined to re-create the secret website the Thirteen had used to both communicat
e and manipulate global financial events. Each of the nine monitors mounted to the wall above the computer displayed a different function, from stock indices and network feeds to satellite-positioning beacons and monitors upon which data and real-time conversations scrolled past so quickly that he’d been forced to write an NSA-style algorithm to pluck specific keywords and phrases out of the ether. Hidden somewhere within this torrent of information were the clues that would ultimately lead them to the members of the organization they were hunting.
“You know as well as I do that every conspiracy theory contains a seed of truth,” Ramses said.
“True, but you’re talking about cultivating the ones sown in fields of insanity.”
“Even potentially unreliable sources are better than no sources at all,” Mason said. “A single viable lead is all we need. We can’t just sit around waiting for something else to happen. We need to get our message out there and hope to God we find the Novichok in time.”
“Surely we are not the only ones who know of the Thirteen,” Alejandra said. She padded across the tiled floor in her bare feet and grabbed a six-pack from a refrigerator filled almost exclusively with beer. “Someone will reply to us. It is up to us to decide if they can be trusted.”
She offered a bottle to each of them, hopped up on the desk behind Ramses, and crossed her legs in front of her. He unconsciously stroked her calf with the back of his hand, an intimate display of affection Mason was unaccustomed to seeing from him.
“Then we need to agree right here and now that we don’t act on any information until we’re able to authenticate it,” Gunnar said. “I don’t like the idea of dealing with people who hide behind screen names.”
“Speaking of which,” Mason said, “are you sure none of this can be traced back to us? We don’t want the Thirteen to see us coming until we’re in a position to make our move. Considering they’ve infiltrated the FBI and however many other agencies, they have more than enough power to shut us down before we even get started.”
The Annihilation Protocol Page 2