“That must be some serious shit he’s keeping to himself if he’s cool with telling people he hunts Nazis for sport,” Ramses said. “Don’t get me wrong. If I’d known they were in season, I would have applied for a tag—”
“He would have told us if he knew who was responsible for the chemical threat,” Mason said. Johan had used them to help him ferret out and execute the Hoyl; he had no doubt the old man fully intended to do the same with whomever they were up against now. “Have any of the other precursor chemicals disappeared?”
“There are no reports of missing isopropanol, methylphophonyl dichloride, or dichloro(fluoro)nitromethane in anything resembling the kind of quantity one would require to convert that much hydrogen fluoride into Novichok A-234,” Gunnar said. “That doesn’t mean that smaller quantities couldn’t have been legally obtained without setting off any alarm bells. As you well know, a couple gallons of the finished product would be more than enough to depopulate a city the size of Los Angeles.”
“What about the company responsible for losing the chemical?”
“Ausland AG is a subsidiary of Royal Nautilus Petroleum, the sixth-largest corporation in the world. It specializes in the research and development of advanced materials and specialty chemicals, specifically the production of lightweight polymers and composites used in electronics, green technologies, and space travel. Its chemical-formulations wing primarily deals with soda ash and its derivatives and accounts for maybe thirty percent of its gross receipts, but it’s growing at an astronomical rate thanks to its commitment to lessening the environmental impact of agricultural and industrial chemicals, including refrigerants.”
“So what do your instincts tell you?”
Gunnar cocked his head and appeared momentarily contemplative. He had the uncanny ability of being able to intuit almost anything about a company with minimal information, and if he truly dug deep enough, there was no secret, no matter how well it was hidden, that he couldn’t find.
“I sincerely doubt anyone at Ausland is involved. We’re talking about a company with annual revenue in the tens of billions and facilities scattered throughout Europe. If someone on the inside wanted to divert any amount of a chemical, it would make more sense to do so at the source, where they’d have access to the raw materials prior to packaging and warehousing. And considering the volume of materials they produce and export, they’re the perfect choice for someone at the destination looking to skim a little off the top. I’d be surprised if anyone would have ever noticed the missing hydrogen fluoride were it not for the OCPW’s audit.”
“So it must have gone missing directly from the shipping containers,” Mason said. “While they were still on the boat.”
“Anyone with access and opportunity—the ship’s personnel, dockworkers, or even customs officials—could have transferred the chemicals to a separate container either prior to or upon reaching Port Newark and walked out with it right under the noses of the inspectors.”
“Good luck tracking down the names of every one of those employees over the last three years.”
“Exactly,” Gunnar said.
Ramses brushed past Mason and leaned over Gunnar’s other shoulder.
“Did you record that meeting?” he asked.
“Of course. What are you thinking?”
“Can you replay that section where the old guy bumped his computer?”
“Without breaking a sweat.” Gunnar breezed through several windows, fast-forwarded through the digital file, and paused when he reached his target. “Voilà.”
Mason leaned closer to the screen, a smile forming on his face.
“Well, what do you know?”
He immediately recognized the display from the rear chamber of Johan’s archives, where twenty dry-erase boards had been turned on end, arranged side by side and back-to-back, and covered with poorly focused photographs and handwritten notes. The central panel had been labeled MOST WANTED, and it had been on the one adjacent to it that the old man had posted everything he knew about the Hoyl. At the time, Mason had been so focused on the man who killed his wife that he hadn’t paid close enough attention to the other boards, but it suddenly struck him that these subjects were quite possibly other mass murderers just waiting for the chance to do the apocalyptic bidding of the Thirteen. Perhaps one of them even specialized in nerve gasses like Novichok A-234 and had been at some unknown stage of its manufacture inside the slaughterhouse before it burned down.
The webcam had captured maybe half of each board and the junction where they’d been pushed together. Gunnar advanced through the individual frames until he found the clearest one and zoomed in as far as the resolution would allow. While it still demonstrated significant blurring at the edges, most of the words were legible and the pictures reasonably sharp.
On the board to the left were photographs of an unidentifiable blond woman captured at a distance in fields strewn with bodies. She wore black in every picture, while the armed men in her entourage changed camouflage fatigues to match surroundings ranging from tropical jungles to barren deserts. The words VALKYRIE, WORLD, RATLINES, and INTERNATIONAL were written above the number 4. To the right were pictures of a figure never revealed in more than partial silhouette, little more than a figment of the imagination within the shadows of fallen buildings and alleys near where medical personnel treated casualties on sidewalks and in the streets. Most of the words beneath them had been cut off, but he could still make out EPIDEMIC, PURIFICATION, NAKAMURA, and the numbers 731 and 5.
“What is ‘Valkyrie’?” Alejandra asked. “I have not heard that word before.”
“A valkyrie, or valkyrja in Old Norse, is one of a group of females, depicted either with wings or on flying horses, who determine who lives and who dies on the field of battle,” Gunnar said. “They’re described in the Poetic Edda from the thirteenth century as ‘ladies of the War Lord, ready to ride,’ who ultimately sort the dead and take the greatest warriors to Valhalla.”
“We can only assume that’s her code name,” Mason said. “Either one she goes by professionally or one given to her by Johan.”
“The words world and international could literally apply to any location, organization, or event, which essentially obviates their use. Unless they’re part of a specific name or title, of course, but there’s no way of knowing for sure without being able to see the words preceding or following them.”
“What about ‘ratlines’?” Ramses asked.
“It’s likely in reference to the system of escape routes used to smuggle Nazi war criminals, enormous amounts of stolen wealth, advanced weaponry, and, many believe, even Hitler himself out of Germany and into South America after World War Two. Unless this woman is in her seventies or eighties, though, she couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with them. I would imagine it was one of the historical trails Johan followed to find her.”
“The Germans were behind the creation of just about every early chemical weapon, from mustard gas to sarin,” Mason said. “It’s not unreasonable to think that the men who were evacuated along those ratlines continued to develop them in Argentina. They could very well have figured out the Novichok formula on their own.”
“What about the number?” Alejandra asked.
“Four must indicate either her position in Johan’s most wanted or the member of the Thirteen with whom she’s affiliated,” Gunnar said. “It’s the number attached to the second individual I find most intriguing, though. The only real possibility beyond an area code in western Tennessee is that it corresponds with Unit 731, the covert biological and chemical research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War. It was responsible for experimentation on POWs that would have made even Mengele blush.”
“What kind of experimentation?” Alejandra asked.
The conversation had suddenly taken a very personal turn for her. While she’d survived the Hoyl’s testing, albeit permanently disfigured, her younger sister had not.
&nbs
p; “Injection of diseases disguised as vaccinations; exposure to fleas infected with the plague; deliberate infliction of frostbite and syphilis; forced pregnancy; food and water deprivation; and death by electrocution, pressure chamber, gas, anthrax, cholera, typhoid, and—Jesus—vivisection.”
“What is that?”
“Dissection of a living specimen,” Mason said.
“Unit 731 was responsible for the deaths of more than three thousand men, women, and children at its facility in the Pingfang District of China alone,” Gunnar said.
“What about ‘epidemic’ and ‘purification’?” Ramses asked.
“It was officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, but I can’t find any association with ‘Nakamura,’ which is the seventh most common surname in Japan. There’s plenty of information about its first chief medical officer, Lieutenant General Shirō Ishii; the microbiologist who succeeded him, Lieutenant Masaji Kitano; and Yoshio Shinozuka, who was conscripted at sixteen years of age to perform autopsies and vivisections and ultimately testified against the Japanese government, which has yet to officially acknowledge the unit’s existence.”
“I can see why these guys would appeal to the Thirteen,” Mason said, “but surely everyone associated with them is dead by now.”
“Not this guy,” Ramses said, and tapped the screen where the indistinct figure barely stood apart from the dark mouth of an alley framed by mountains of rubble. “He’s still out there somewhere.”
“So is this woman in black,” Alejandra said.
“And either one of them could be armed with knowledge of biological and chemical warfare gained from some of the most atrocious experimentation ever conducted,” Gunnar said.
“Chemical experimentation that could have been continuing inside the slaughterhouse where the Hoyl was testing his decomposition agent,” Mason said. “They had all of the right equipment, not to mention the formula for Novichok A-234.”
He stared at the pictures of the woman in black and the silhouette lurking in the shadows. His unconscious mind picked up on details his conscious mind had failed to recognize. He’d been so focused on the subjects and the bodies strewn all around them that he hadn’t immediately noticed that the woman’s armed escort and the medical professionals attempting to save the silhouette’s victims were wearing gas masks.
“Johan doesn’t do anything by accident,” he said. “I think he deliberately bumped his laptop. He wanted us to see those boards.”
“Why?” Ramses asked.
“Because he thinks one of these two is involved.”
PART II
The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation.
—John Francis Hylan,
ninety-sixth mayor of New York City (1922)
8
STEERMAN’S MEAT PROCESSING & PACKING PLANT | CRIME SCENE #1 | 4 MILES NORTH OF FORT LUPTON, COLORADO
December 27
Mason was now convinced there’d been a second operative working inside the slaughterhouse, one potentially responsible for producing mass quantities of Novichok in case the plot to release the flu virus failed. If either the blond woman with the Nazi roots or the shadowed figure associated with Unit 731 were involved, then he had to consider the possibility that what they were dealing with was no mere backup plan; it was a tactical escalation. A disease could be blamed on Mother Nature, but there was nothing natural or accidental about a chemical weapon attack. It was an open declaration of war against their entire species, a war that would be over before the first shot was even fired, unless he figured out a way to stop it, and the only place he could think to start was at what he considered ground zero.
“I can’t shake the feeling that someone was actively manufacturing chemical weapons in this place,” Mason said.
“Despite the lack of physical evidence?” Locker said.
“I know, right?” Mason offered a half smile for the forensic specialist’s benefit. “I just keep thinking about those stainless-steel vats, the mattress I remember seeing in the room next to them, and how good these guys are at covering their tracks. Throw in the level-two EOC activation and potentially hundreds of pounds of missing hydrogen fluoride, and physical evidence is just about the only thing we don’t have.”
He followed Locker through the field of rubble that had once been Steerman’s slaughterhouse, the building at the end of the underground tunnel that connected it to the former AgrAmerica complex, CS4. The forensics specialist hadn’t been surprised to learn about the missing chemicals but, considering he’d found no trace of them, didn’t seem overly concerned.
“We’re already taking every conceivable precaution,” Locker said. “I have my team retest the soil after every vertical inch we clear. There’s no way I’d let my people work out here in anything less than Level B hazmat suits if there was the slightest chance of exposure to anything stronger than chlorine bleach, let alone a nerve gas.”
It had been within the walls of this awful place that Mason had found dead immigrants hanging from meat hooks, left to rot. Men and women who’d succumbed to the Hoyl’s virus, unwilling participants in his testing of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had confirmed to be a strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza engineered from the original Spanish flu, HPAI H1N1. The bacterium that piggybacked on its viral envelope—a species genetically similar to one oil companies dumped into the ocean to consume the crude spilled from tankers—had been designed to accelerate the process of decomposition to a matter of weeks, dissolving the remains of the infected to a consistency that could be hosed down industrial drains.
Locker guided him along a narrow cordoned walkway running between sections of the ruined building that had been gridded off and painstakingly excavated a single millimeter at a time.
“In addition to my team, we have more than fifty archaeologists of various specialties from the Museum of Nature and Science working out here on a voluntary basis,” Locker said. “We’ve collected a significant number of meat hooks and pieces of the overhead tracks they were once attached to, but we haven’t been able to find anything remotely identifiable of the people who’d been suspended from them.”
They passed a woman crouching over one of the floor drains. She reached inside with a pair of tweezers as long as chopsticks, extricated a small bone, and set it on a collection tray. The man in the adjacent grid wore a welder’s mask and used an acetylene torch to break up a mass of metal and calcified matter that had been fused to the concrete by the intense heat of the blaze.
“You’re only now getting down to the killing floor?” Mason said.
“No one’s ever had to investigate a crime scene of this nature before. Instead of inadvertently discovering we were dealing with the site of a mass murder after removing tons of debris, we entered into the investigation with that knowledge, meaning that every speck of dust potentially contains evidence. Throw in the confirmed presence of a lethal virus, an unclassified decomposition accelerant, and a potential chemical threat, and we’ve been forced to proceed with such extreme caution that we’ve had to move most of the larger debris by hand in an attempt to preserve what little is left of the victims. We’re talking unidentifiable bone fragments and handfuls of teeth, most of them at least partially consumed by a fire chemically fueled to such high temperatures that the foundation itself buckled. We can’t even conclusively determine how many people died here, let alone begin the process of identifying them.”
Mason nodded his understanding. Even with complete skeletons, they likely still wouldn’t be able to ID the victims. The Hoyl had specifically chosen them for his twisted experimentation for that very reason. They were undocumented and hailed from countries where most couldn’t afford proper medical or dental care, and certainly not the kind of X-rays they’d need for comparison. Most of the countries in question didn’t even collect DNA for
missing-person cases.
The larger evidence was stored inside a chain-link enclosure that had been erected in one of the crowd pens where cattle had once grazed while awaiting their turn in the knocking pen. The vats he’d seen on the second floor were near the back. The stainless steel was scored black with carbon, scratched to hell, and deformed by the weight of the collapsed roof. The handwheels had broken off, the digital displays had melted, and the surviving pressure valves had been collected in a bucket.
“We found twenty of these containment vessels in quadrant four,” Locker said. “They’re modified fermenter units, the kind used by microbreweries, capable of holding a little under eight hundred liters.”
“That’s not as bad as I thought,” Mason said.
“Each. We’re talking about two hundred gallons apiece, or four thousand gallons between them. If someone had access to Novichok A-234 in that kind of quantity and dispersed it strategically enough, he could easily wipe out the entire population of the Earth several times over. But, like I told you before, we didn’t detect any chemical agents on the inner surfaces or functional components. That’s not to say there never were any, only that trace amounts would have burned off.”
“So you can’t tell what they might have been used to produce,” Mason said.
“Or if they were ever used to produce anything at all. All I can tell you with any confidence is that they hadn’t been filled at the time of the explosion, or they wouldn’t have flattened like that. Some residual amount of their contents would have been spared as a result of the internal pressurization.”
“I guess that’s something.”
“That’s not to say they didn’t intend to use them to produce chemical weapons or hadn’t used them to do so in the past.”
The Annihilation Protocol Page 5