The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  A chime announced the arrival of the man on the other end.

  “Showtime,” Ramses said. He’d run a cord from Mason’s laptop to a separate monitor on the other side of the room so that he, Alejandra, and Gunnar could watch from the couch. “Let’s see if this guy’s really got that hair-trigger-personality thing going on, like you seem to think.”

  Mason checked his image in the box in the upper right corner of the screen to confirm that the wall behind him didn’t betray any secrets that the other man didn’t already know. He wanted the pictures of the crime scenes to serve as a visual reminder of their shared history, both for what they’d accomplished and what they’d lost, in the hope of forging an emotional connection.

  He approved the man’s request and the screen went black for several seconds before an elderly man with a full head of white hair and a beard like Santa Claus appeared. He wore flannel pajamas buttoned all the way up to his neck and a fuzzy blue bathrobe. The smile on his ruddy face was genuine and without so much as a hint of the true nature of the man himself.

  “Young James Mason!” the old man said. He’d positioned a dry-erase board behind him to provide a seamless white backdrop. “I am pleasantly surprised to see you again so soon.”

  Ramses looked at Mason over the top of the monitor and raised his eyebrows in disbelief.

  “I trust you enjoyed your holiday season,” the old man said. His eyes clouded and his smile became a frown. “In so much as someone in your position can. I understand better than most how you must feel, especially under the circumstances. Fortunately, I can still see my beloved Dolores in the eyes of my children and grandchildren, despite their being scattered to the four winds. I am not so technologically adept that I am overly proficient with such things as Skype and FaceTime, but they allowed me to share each and every one of those eight magical nights with them.”

  His face abruptly brightened and his smile returned.

  “Thanks for agreeing to meet with me, Johan,” Mason said. “I only wish we’d been able to do so in person—”

  “So you could scour my archives for the information you didn’t know to look for when you were here last?” The old man smirked and playfully wagged his finger at the camera. “One does not reach such an advanced age without learning a few things in the process.”

  Johan Mahler was the ultimate dichotomy, a perfect schizophrenic who was not only aware of his human and inhuman sides but embraced both with everything he had. This half was not only impossible not to like but made it hard to believe that the other half actually existed. He and Mason had been introduced by Gunnar, who’d used his considerable skills at even greater monetary gain to follow the paper trails of men he believed Johan had targeted for their financial interests or professional vulnerabilities. Instead, his services had been utilized to track down some of the most elusive Nazi war criminals who’d escaped justice at Nuremberg so that Johan’s pet assassin—a man who called himself Seraph—could execute them in cold blood. Photographs of their lifeless faces now hung beside the old black-and-white pictures of their younger selves during the war. Those keepsakes adorned the walls of Johan’s trophy room, hidden in the secure bunker underneath the Mahler mansion, which had been built by his grandfather, whose entire extended family had been eradicated during the Holocaust. His son, Johan’s father, had joined forces with the Nakam Group to make sure that not even the lowliest Nazi Anwärter or Bewerber escaped their wrath.

  In Johan’s eyes, they’d deserved to die for the crimes they had committed against his people, his heritage, his family. Mason, in turn, had used him to find and subsequently kill those who were responsible for the death of his wife. He’d never forget the expression on Johan’s face when he explained how much the two of them were alike. Nor would Mason forget how he’d felt when he realized the old man was right.

  “I don’t know what Gunnar told you, but I need—”

  “Oh, I know exactly what you need, James. In fact, I am rather surprised it took you so long.”

  As if on cue, a man wearing a gray sweater vest and a cranberry button-down shirt materialized at Johan’s side. He had pale skin, bushy eyebrows, and thick, dark hair, and while he appeared to be the old man’s caretaker/butler, Mason knew he was much more than that. Asher Ben-Menachem had been a battalion commander in the Golani Brigade of the Israeli Defense Forces, through his service to which he had first come into contact with Ramses in the Middle East, although Mason didn’t know any of the details and wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to, given everything else he knew about the man, who now placed a stack of photographs on the table in front of Johan and took his leave.

  “You are concerned that you didn’t completely eliminate the threat, that some unknown reservoir of the virus or, heaven forbid, the Hoyl himself has survived,” Johan said.

  “Something to that effect,” Mason replied.

  “I do not have all of the answers you seek, but perhaps I can at least offer peace of mind.”

  He lifted the first photograph from the top of the stack and held it up to his webcam. Pictures could be doctored in any number of ways, from something as simple as changing the color of the eyes to more dramatic alterations that could reshape the structure of the face and render the subject unrecognizable. At the same time, however, there were some things that simply couldn’t be Photoshopped. Chief among them was the spark of animation, the intangible quality of life. There was no artist or computer program on the planet that could effectively give life or take it. Anyone who’d ever seen photos of a murder scene recognized this universal truth, which was why the picture erased any doubts Mason might have had.

  “This is one of my most treasured possessions, and I have you to thank for it,” Johan said. “Do you question its authenticity?”

  Mason was 100 percent certain that this was the man he’d last seen being hauled up into the rafters by the chain wrapped around his neck. Someone had wiped the soot from his face, but it had been a rushed job, and a gray paste remained along his hairline. The quality of the lighting made his skin look waxy and his scars more pronounced. His blond eyebrows and hair were patchy and grew in wiry tufts. His nose and mouth were skeletal where the bacterium he’d meant to use to accelerate the decomposition of those killed by his virus had eaten through his flesh. The deep lacerations he’d inflicted upon his own neck were raw and puckered. But it was his eyes—those awful blue eyes—that proved that the Hoyl was utterly and unmistakably dead.

  “No,” Mason said.

  Johan lowered the picture and set it aside.

  “I will spare you asking your next question and give you the only answer I can,” he said. The expression on his face was one of sympathy. “We have not detected the presence of his replacement, although we remain vigilant. When another Hoyl emerges, as we have no doubt he will, we will make certain he joins the rest of his lineage in the grave.”

  The remainder of the stack contained pictures of each of the previous generations of Hoyls. Johan held them up to the camera, one after the other, to illustrate his point. Their faces were dissimilar enough that when viewed in sequence, the differences were apparent, although much less so than the obvious similarities. They all had the same blond hair and blue eyes and shared the same bloodline, one that could only be traced as far as the surname Fischer, the fourth most common in Germany. The first two photos—F1 and F2, respectively—were in black and white and showed only the faces of the dead men, their lifeless eyes staring fixedly at the camera. Powder burns surrounded the coins on their foreheads. The third was in faded color and featured F3 slogging through a mangrove swamp with men in white isolation suits, but unlike his predecessors, he was still very much alive. There was still at least one more Hoyl out there, one who specialized in hemorrhagic fevers and likely didn’t take kindly to Mason’s having killed his son.

  “How can we be certain he didn’t just pick up where his son left off?” Mason asked.

  “Every Hoyl has a unique signature. Believe me when
I say that you would know if F3 were here. He is anything but subtle.”

  Whether Mason liked it or not, their destinies were forever entwined, but wherever the third incarnation of the Hoyl was now, he couldn’t have been responsible for the elevated activation levels of the emergency operations centers, which had been raised long before he could have found out about his son’s death. Plus, the risk of exposure was too great; if there was one thing the Hoyl knew how to do, it was to strike when least expected and vanish again as though he’d never been there at all.

  Mason recalled what Kane had said before he’d been forced to shoot him.

  You think ours was the only game in town?

  Between the discovery of the chemical formula for Novichok A-234 and the distinct MO exhibited by the sadistic death traps in the knocking pen and the gas chamber, he was starting to believe that a second would-be mass murderer had been inside the slaughterhouse, preparing a backup plan in case the flu virus failed, one reliant upon the most lethal nerve gas ever imagined. If his instincts were right, by killing F4, he’d eliminated the only witness who knew his identity.

  He could almost hear the Hoyl laughing at him from beyond the grave.

  “Did any of the Fischer incarnations have known accomplices?” he asked.

  “Outside of associations of convenience, they were solitary creatures whose masters kept them on a short leash,” Johan said.

  “And you know who these masters are, don’t you?”

  “They have had many through the years.”

  “As many as thirteen?”

  “Very good, James. Perhaps there is hope for you yet.”

  “What do you know about the Thirteen?”

  “More than you are capable of understanding as of yet, I’m afraid.”

  “You’d be surprised what I’m capable of understanding.”

  “And you would be more surprised by what you are not,” Johan said.

  Here was where Mason needed to tread carefully. He needed to find out what Johan knew about the initial activation of the emergency operations centers, but he had very little in the way of collateral and couldn’t risk giving it up too quickly.

  “Are you familiar with FEMA’s system of emergency operations centers?” he asked.

  Johan stiffened ever so slightly.

  “I assume you are referring to the current level-two activation status,” he said. “You suspect there is a reason for its current state of elevation, considering you thought you had eliminated the threat posed by the virus.”

  Mason didn’t reply.

  “Neither the elevation of FEMA’s activation levels nor the timing of its decision to raise them strikes me as unusual, given the nature of the Hoyl’s plot,” Johan said. “In fact, I am somewhat perplexed as to why it did not raise the activation status to level one, especially here, which leads me to believe they have no reason to suspect the viral threat has not been contained.”

  “If that’s the case, then why not lower the activation to level three?” Mason asked.

  “That is a question for which I have no answer, at least not a direct one.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I fear the truth lies in the fact that the activation level was raised in several states six weeks prior to its ultimate elevation in the remainder.”

  “Which ones?” Mason asked.

  “California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Washington, D.C.”

  “Is there any significance beyond the fact that they contain the highest population centers and standard terrorist targets?”

  “That I do not know. Not for sure anyway.”

  Mason was quite confident he did, but that information would come at a price, one he was more than prepared to pay. The time had come to put all of his cards on the table.

  “Do any of the Thirteen have an affinity for chemical weapons?”

  Johan looked him dead in the eyes. Gone was the affable grandfather with the endearing affectations. In his place sat a man who might have looked like him, but who was completely unlike him in every way, as though the muscles he’d used to hold himself together had relaxed enough to let his inner beast claw its way out.

  “There we go,” Ramses said.

  Mason glared at his old friend to shut him up and once more matched Johan’s stare. He’d seen exactly what he’d expected during the transformation: a complete and utter lack of surprise.

  “What do you know?” Johan asked. “Tell me, boy. Time is of the essence.”

  “While I was inside the slaughterhouse, I found a chemical formula written on a torn piece of paper.”

  “Why am I only now learning of this?”

  “Because we can’t prove that any amount of it was manufactured, and everything we’ve tested has come back negative for the presence of any of the precursor.…” His voice trailed off as everything came together in his head. “That’s why FEMA raised its levels of readiness in the states with the highest-value targets and why you weren’t surprised when I mentioned chemical weapons. The precursor chemicals were already in play.”

  Johan sighed and settled back into his chair. The fire faded from his eyes. When he spoke again, it was in a voice of resignation.

  “Are you familiar with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons?”

  “It’s the international watchdog agency in charge of verifying compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention,” Mason said.

  “On September thirtieth, the OPCW reported that a random audit of a Swiss chemical company revealed that every one of its shipments of hydrogen fluoride bound for Port Newark, New Jersey, over the past three years had arrived hundreds of pounds short, a negligible amount when dealing with thousands of metric tons, or millions of pounds. A few hundredths of a percent, in fact. Well within the standard deviation one would expect to observe between scales.”

  “What’s the significance?”

  “Hydrogen fluoride is a common compound used in the creation of hydrofluoric acid and the manufacture of fluorocarbons to be used as refrigerants. If you were to mix it with methylphosphonyl dichloride, however, you would create methylphosphonyl difluoride, which, when combined with isopropanol, produces sarin.”

  “And no one has any idea where thousands of pounds of it might have gone?”

  “It’s always possible the calibration of the scales was just far enough off to make it appear as though some seemingly insignificant amount of a substance transported in drums nearly as large as the industrial shipping containers that housed them was missing, when it actually wasn’t.”

  “Hence the level-two activation level while the EOCs monitored the situation,” Mason said.

  “Which you have now confirmed, at least to some degree, is cause for more than mere concern,” Johan said. His brow furrowed and his eyes turned momentarily inward. “I fear the enemy is much closer to implementing its plans than I suspected. I regret that I must take my leave if I am to reach out to my network and try to get to the bottom of this.”

  He reached toward his computer to terminate the connection, bumping it in the process. The camera swung wildly to the side, blurring past the old man and the whiteboard behind him before settling momentarily upon two other dry-erase boards that had been pushed together and covered with photographs and handwritten notes. They quickly vanished and Johan once more appeared, his features distorted by their proximity to the lens.

  “Wait,” Mason said. “You didn’t answer my question. Tell me who we’re up against so I can end this once and for all.”

  Johan paused, his face pale, his expression unreadable.

  “You are up against the clock, James, and you are already out of time,” he said. A rustling sound and the screen darkened. His disembodied voice emerged from the speaker a heartbeat before he exited the virtual conference room. “We all are.”

  7

  “There’s nothing out there about the missing hydrogen fluoride beyond a few brief notations saying pretty much what we alr
eady know,” Gunnar said. He’d assumed Mason’s place at the table, leaving him to watch over his old friend’s shoulder as information scrolled past at dizzying speeds on the screen. “It’s really not that uncommon an occurrence; it’s the fact that it happened to the same supplier over such a long period of time and with such regularity that makes it raise a few eyebrows.”

  “More than a few, judging by FEMA’s response,” Mason said.

  “That’s the thing, Mace. Their reaction, even given the potential severity of the threat, is disproportional to the known facts. A level-three activation in the states immediately surrounding New Jersey, where the chemicals were diverted, appears to be the established protocol.”

  “They obviously know more than they’re letting on,” Ramses said from where he’d sprawled on the couch with his head on Alejandra’s lap.

  “Of course they do,” she said. “We would be fools to think otherwise.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Gunnar said. “Without additional intelligence, it comes across as a knee-jerk response to a situation that potentially doesn’t even exist.”

  “Johan seemed to think it was real enough,” Mason said.

  “In case you didn’t notice, that guy’s got a serious case of Jekyll and Hyde,” Ramses said.

  “He is a sweet man,” Alejandra said.

  “Who has obvious trust issues.” Ramses abruptly stood and walked a circuit of the room, studying the photographs of the crime scenes on the walls. “I mean, what’s with the whole secrecy act? ‘I fear the enemy is much closer to implementing its plans than I suspected.’ Who says stuff like that? You’d think if he actually knew who was involved, he’d be happy enough to point us in the right direction and let us do our thing.”

  “I’ve been asking myself the same thing ever since I first met him,” Mason said. “He obviously needs our help, but he’s not prepared to tell us why. My gut tells me it’s because there’s something he doesn’t want us to find out about him.”

  “I’ve worked with his kind many times before,” Gunnar said. “He’s trying to control the flow of information so that we see only what’s in front of us. For my money, he’s leading us toward some grand revelation, although at this point I hesitate to even speculate as to what it might be.”