“Trust me, this beast is cloaked in multiple layers of invisibility,” Ramses said. Mason glanced at Gunnar, who confirmed as much with a nod. “Why’d you look at him? You think I don’t have extensive experience conducting business online with total anonymity?”
Mason pretended not to hear him. While Ramses considered himself a purveyor of vices for clients of discriminating taste, there were aspects of his professional life that Mason would rather not know, largely because if his old friend ever fell from the legal tightrope he’d chosen to walk, Mason would have no choice but to take him down himself.
“Try it out,” Gunnar said. “Let’s see if Ramses is as good as he thinks he is.”
“Prepare to have your minds blown,” Ramses said, and offered Mason a wireless headset with an attached microphone. He switched the feed to the central monitor and brought up a program featuring six color-coded horizontal graphs labeled with different units of measurement for amplitude, all set against a constant axis of time, in milliseconds. It was an audiovisual biometrics program. Voiceprint analysis. “Of course, I did have a little help with some of the more intricate aspects of the programming.”
“A little?” Gunnar said. He reached past Ramses and hit the mouse. The monitor beside the biometrics display showed Mason’s face, as recorded by a camera that tracked his movements and superimposed a digital template composed of hundreds of dots connected by straight lines. Another click and a black mask with bloodred Xs for eyes appeared over his face. He turned from side to side and watched the mask re-form as though it were made from liquid. “There’s no way of removing the mask. It combines with your existing features in such a way that the two become so hopelessly and inextricably entwined that even I couldn’t separate them again.”
“Testing,” Mason said. “One, two, three.”
A markedly different voice emerged from the speakers with a split-second delay, almost like the echo caused by a bad cell phone connection. Jagged colored lines slashed across the graphs, followed in rapid succession by second, modified versions. His words appeared on the screen to the left of it in several columns at once, each containing a translation in a different language.
“The audiovisual modulator utilizes a randomizer function that alters both your voice and its behavioral tract, the combination of your unique voiceprint, inflection, and accent,” Gunnar said. “It literally converts it into a completely different voice with a discrete spectrogram entirely distinct from your own.”
“So there’s no way anyone will be able to identify my voice?” Mason said.
“Not a chance.”
“This bad boy’s ready to go live over a dozen radio frequencies and Internet channels,” Ramses said. “I’ll set it to record and then repeat at irregular intervals. The words themselves will be posted on any number of message boards and inserted into virtual chats using the screen name XQtioner. We’ll reach the right people, for sure, but it remains to be seen if any of them will reach back.”
Mason nodded and looked from Ramses to Gunnar to Alejandra. The moment felt monumental, as though they stood at the precipice of a life-altering event. He could see it in their eyes. They recognized it, too.
He turned to face the whiteboard they’d mounted to the wall beside the monitors, the primitive predecessor of the photographic display he’d assembled down the hall, and focused on the stylized cross symbol drawn in the center.
And let the words flow.
“A shadow organization has insinuated itself into our midst. It has quietly infiltrated our governments and compromised our law-enforcement agencies in an effort to manipulate the course of world events from behind the scenes. This entity wields so much money and power that there’s nothing beyond its reach. No goal it can’t achieve. No group or individual it can’t co-opt. And it’s no longer content to sit back and allow its subtle machinations to run their course. The time has come for it to step out into the open and claim the entire world as its own, but to do so, it needs to cull the global population to a more manageable size, one that can be more effectively controlled, more efficiently ruled. One that views it as the savior of mankind, rather than its oppressor. One unwilling to rise in revolt against the agency of its enslavement, a cabal that calls itself the Thirteen.”
Mason paused. He suddenly understood Ramses’ concern. The conspiracy theorists they hoped to reach weren’t the only ones hiding in the dark web. The monsters they were hunting were out there, too. Waiting. Watching. And they wouldn’t take kindly to someone poking a stick into the shadows where they lurked.
“At this very moment,” he continued, “they’re preparing to unleash hell upon this Earth, to inflict widespread and indiscriminate suffering beyond our worst nightmares, and whether we like it or not, we’re the only ones standing in their way. We have to stop them, and the only way to do so is by pooling our resources, starting with information. We need to know everything you’ve heard about them, no matter how anecdotal or inconsequential it might seem, if we’re to have any chance of identifying them and drawing them out into the open. It’s high time someone exposed them for what they truly are and put an end to their genocidal agenda, once and for all.”
PART I
Human population growth is probably the single most serious long-term threat to survival.… If it isn’t controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily by an increase in disease, starvation and war.
—HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh,
People magazine (1981)
5
GREELEY, COLORADO
December 25
Mason stood at the foot of his wife’s grave, unable to raise his eyes from the yellowed patch of sod, which had yet to firmly take root. Soon enough, the grass would grow thick and green, and only the marble headstone would stand testament to the fact that Angela Thornton Mason had ever existed at all.
“Merry Christmas, Angie,” he finally said, his frozen breath trailing back over his shoulder.
The wind whispered through the boughs of the spruces and rattled the skeletal branches of the poplars and elms. Dead leaves cartwheeled across the lawn and came to rest against the two adjacent mounds, which had been more recently filled and resodded. The proximity of the graves angered him, but at the same time, it was what she would have wanted. While the two men buried inside them—Paul and Victor Thornton—had been victims of their own insatiable greed, it didn’t change the fact that they were her father and brother, or mitigate their respective roles in her death.
Angie had always seen the best in people, even those whose actions Mason found irredeemable. It had been one of the more glaring differences between them. His wife had viewed others as the products of their circumstances, gifted with the potential to rise above them, while through the course of his work he’d seen so many succumb to their violent animalistic natures that he was convinced mankind had commenced its devolution. Discovering the existence of men like the Thirteen had only compounded this belief. He was no longer able to see the good in people. Worse, he was unable to sense it within himself. All he felt was rage, the desire to lash out at those who had robbed him of the only person in his life who’d given it meaning. And it didn’t help that their trail was growing colder by the minute while he searched for clues he was beginning to think he might never find.
Mason looked up into the blue sky to forestall the tears he could feel threatening to fall. A part of him resented it for its beauty, for without his wife in this world, it didn’t seem right that the sun should ever shine again.
“I can’t do this without you,” he whispered.
He lowered his head and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
There was so much he wanted to say, but the words eluded him. Angie had always been able to read him like a book anyway. Wherever she was now, she probably knew better than he did what he was feeling. He had no doubt she’d forgiven him for not being there when she’d needed him the most; he just hoped she’d be able to forgive him for the thi
ngs he feared he was going to have to do.
He walked carefully around the grave and placed a single red rose on top of her headstone, next to where the statue of a crying angel leaned over it, her cheek resting on her forearm, her cherubic features racked with sorrow. He wanted to lay his head down next to hers, but he knew that if he did, he’d never find the will to raise it again.
A hand settled gently onto his shoulder. He turned and found Ramses standing behind him. His old friend wore sunglasses to conceal whatever emotions he might have been experiencing. It was an unexpected gesture from a man Mason often forgot was more than a caricature, one who’d survived things so terrible, he hadn’t even shared the details with his closest friends.
“She’s in a better place,” Ramses said.
“Do you really believe that?”
“Most of the time.” He offered a half smile. “I’d hate to think the sacrifices good people make along the way don’t matter, that their lives serve no purpose other than to protect and enrich men who grow fat from their suffering.”
Mason nodded. He didn’t know what had happened to Ramses in Afghanistan, only that he’d learned more about loss than any man should have to, which was why his old friend had practically dragged him out here today. Had he not done so, Lord only knew how long it would have taken Mason to summon the strength to visit his wife’s grave on his own.
“I hope you’re right,” he said.
“When have I ever not been?”
The cell phone in the holster on Mason’s left hip vibrated. It was an encrypted stealth model with anti-interception technology and location-spoofing features that made it impossible to trace or tap, and alerted him if anyone so much as tried. The only way to unlock it was by allowing it to simultaneously run fingerprint and facial-recognition scans to confirm his identity. If either failed, not only would the device go into permanent lockdown mode, it would erase every byte of data and corrupt the processor. He placed his thumb on the scanner and raised the pinhole camera to his face. The screen awakened and displayed a message box, inside of which were three words that caused his pulse to race.
SOMEONE REACHED BACK.
Ramses tipped the screen so he could see it. “It’s about time.”
Mason kissed his fingertips and pressed them against his wife’s headstone.
“See you soon,” he whispered, and struck off toward Ramses’ car.
There were three numbers programmed into his stealth phone. He speed-dialed the first and waited for the call to connect. Gunnar answered on the first ring.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said.
“Try me,” Mason replied.
“I was just sitting here watching the monitors when a guy calling himself Anomaly—spelled using the Greek letters alpha and omega to replace the first A and the o, as in the beginning and end of all things—broke through the firewall using an algorithm the likes of which I’ve never seen before—high-end, military-grade stuff—and opened a chat window right in the middle of the screen. The entire exchange lasted less than fifteen seconds.”
“What did he say?”
Mason opened the passenger door of Ramses’ sleek black Jaguar F-Type and lowered himself into a seat that felt like it was mere inches above the asphalt. He put the call on speaker the moment Ramses climbed in and closed the door behind him.
“He said—and I quote—‘Never again speak of the Thirteen.’”
“Did you reply?”
“Of course,” Gunnar said. “I asked why not, to which he replied ‘You are on their radar now. They will come for you and there is nothing you can do to stop them.’”
The way he said it made the hairs rise on the backs of Mason’s arms.
“Let them come,” Ramses said. “It’ll save us the trouble of tracking them down.”
“Did he give you anything we can use?” Mason asked.
“I told him we were looking for information that would lead us to them,” Gunnar said. “He said—and again I quote—‘Ask yourself why FEMA would trigger the level-two activation of its EOCs in the forty-eight contiguous states.’ And then he terminated the connection.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency had established emergency operations centers in every state to help streamline its response to natural and man-made disasters. These EOCs coordinated with various national agencies and managed on-site operations of local medical, firefighting, and law-enforcement personnel. Level-two activation indicated there was the potential for an incident that necessitated the involvement of several of the agencies that formed the EOCs, requiring round-the-clock staffing to monitor a developing situation. A danger level that high was generally reserved for hurricanes or wildfires that promised significant casualties or actionable intel suggesting an impending terrorist attack, catastrophes that would require federal assistance if they failed in their efforts to control them, localized events generally confined by geography. Activation on a national scale implied they were dealing with a much larger threat, which also explained why the Department of Homeland Security, the federal branch responsible for the administration of FEMA, was hovering over Locker’s investigation.
“Can you find out when the activation was triggered?” Mason asked.
“Give me a second,” Gunnar said. His fingers buzzed across his keyboard. “November seventeenth.”
“Nothing overly suspicious about that,” Ramses said. “It’s the day after we ended the threat of the flu virus.”
“And the day the formal investigation commenced,” Mason said. “I’ll bet Anomaly knows all of this and he’s just testing us.”
“That was my theory, at least initially,” Gunnar said. “But it doesn’t explain why FEMA hasn’t lowered the activation level.”
“Do you think they know about the chemical formula I found?”
“They might by now, but they couldn’t have learned about it until maybe three weeks ago, at the earliest. That leaves roughly two weeks during which they were actively monitoring a situation that had nothing to do with your discovery.”
“They must have intelligence that we don’t,” Mason said. “Are they waiting for the flu virus to crop up somewhere else?”
“Everyone who had anything to do with that plot is dead,” Ramses said.
“Not everyone,” Mason said. “The man who commissioned the Hoyl to create the virus is still out there.”
There was another explanation he’d been reluctant to consider until now. Perhaps they hadn’t derailed the plan to launch the pandemic after all. The Hoyl was composed of a group of men who shared the same lineage, all of whom had taken up the mantle to perpetuate the illusion of immortality. Thus, only one could be active at any given time, regardless of how many were out there. A new version might appear following the death of his predecessor or merely rise to the forefront when called upon to fulfill his role in the extinction agenda of his masters. Each had a unique skill set when it came to engineering diseases, an unmistakable signature that separated him from the others, like warheads in the apocalyptic arsenal of the Thirteen.
They were identified using the biological abbreviation for filial generation, F, and their respective number in their bloodline. Mason had seen incontrovertible proof of the deaths of the early iterations known as F1 and F2, but the version immediately preceding the one he’d killed, the father of the monster that murdered his wife, had been conspicuously absent. Was it possible the incarnation known as F3 had picked up where his son left off? And was he preparing to release the virus at that very moment?
Or, worse, had F4 somehow survived? Mason clearly remembered the scarred man struggling to pry the chain from around his neck as it pulled him up into the darkness, but he’d never actually seen a body, as he’d been trapped in his debriefing while the remains were being collected, and any pictures of the monster’s corpse that might have been taken were conspicuously absent from the crime-scene report.
And what, if anything, did either of them have to do with
the chemical formula he’d found in the slaughterhouse?
It was time he demanded some answers from a man who wasn’t likely to give them—at least not for free.
“Do me a favor, Gunnar,” Mason said. “See if you can arrange a meeting with an old friend of ours. Emphasis on old, not on friend.”
“Are you sure that’s the approach you want to take?”
“I have a hunch that if there’s anyone who can help us figure out what’s going on here, it’s him.”
6
DOWNTOWN DENVER
December 26
Mason glanced at the monitor of his laptop, which he’d set up on a table in the room he’d appropriated from Ramses. The clock read 11:13 A.M., and yet the screen remained blank.
“He should have logged in by now.”
“It’s all part of the negotiations,” Gunnar said. “He wants to make us sweat a little first. Nothing tips the scales like desperation.”
The man they hoped would be able to offer some insight into the continued elevation of FEMA’s activation levels was already fifteen minutes late for the virtual meeting they’d arranged in an encrypted conference room, and that was on top of the six hours he’d made them wait for his initial reply to Gunnar’s request for a sit-down, which he’d then scheduled for the following day, presumably to remind them who held all of the cards.
“Trust me, I’ll get the answers out of him,” Mason said. “One way or another.”
He’d hoped they’d be able to conduct their business in person at the man’s home, beneath which was a bunker that housed a veritable treasure trove of documents and artifacts available nowhere else in the world. He was certain that hidden within them, somewhere, were the identities of the Thirteen, which was undoubtedly why the man had insisted that their meeting be conducted online. He wasn’t about to give up that information—assuming he even knew he had it—for nothing.
The Annihilation Protocol Page 3