The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  He hit the button to kill the speaker, snatched the handset from the cradle, and spun his chair in the opposite direction.

  Mason blew through the office door into the command center and practically slammed into the same agent again. She cocked her head and stared up at him from beneath the brim of her cap. Her blue eyes were deceptive, the kind that made her appear to be an open book while simultaneously concealing her thoughts.

  “Look,” she said. “We got off on the wrong foot. I’m Special Agent Jessica Layne and I’m—”

  “Later,” he said.

  He brushed past her and strode down the aisle toward the front of the vehicle. There were three workstations, each of which featured a touch-screen monitor, short-range and satellite communications, and audio- and video-surveillance capabilities. Locker was already seated at one of them, the computer networked with his digital forensics system and a handful of transceivers lined up in front of him to connect him with his team in the field. Layne assumed the middle workstation beside him and glared up at Mason. The agent next to her had shoulder-length blond hair with purple streaks and wore her badge on a lanyard around her neck. Special Agent Gardner, Criminal Justice Information Services. They all swiveled in their chairs to face him.

  “We don’t know how much nerve gas was produced here, but we have to assume that each and every one of the vats recovered from the debris was filled to capacity,” Mason said. “That’s a total volume of more than four thousand gallons of what we believe to be Novichok A-234 in liquid form. And we don’t have the slightest idea where it is now.”

  “Anyone could have filled a flask or a bottle and carried some amount of it out of here in a pocket,” Gardner said. “For all we know, there could be hundreds of people like that out there, and we’ll never be able to find them.”

  “Any kid with a chemistry set and Internet access can make a couple liters of most nerve agents in his garage. That’s the kind of threat we face every single day. This is the major leagues. Novichok agents are fourth-generation chemical weapons so deadly and so complicated to manufacture that until today experts didn’t believe it was possible for nonstate actors to produce them. No one would take that kind of risk just to splash a little from a flask. We have to look at the big picture and focus on locating large quantities capable of doing significant damage.”

  “So where do we start?”

  12

  “We’re looking at an advanced chemical weapon synthesized from sarin and a chemical called dichloro(fluoro)nitromethane,” Locker said. “Under normal conditions, sarin is a binary compound; its primary precursor chemicals remain separated until they’re combined at the time of release, which prevents its rapid degradation and eliminates the risk of nontargeted exposure. You can’t just store it on a shelf without killing everyone within range. The dichloro(fluoro)nitromethane solves that problem by stabilizing the reaction between the precursor chemicals, effectively allowing the Novichok to persist in the environment long after sarin would have completely dissipated. Fortunately, every batch of sarin has a specific signature, like a fingerprint, defined by chemical impurities that pass, unchanged, from the precursor chemicals, which we can use to trace those precursors back to their suppliers and ascertain a list of buyers. I’ve made arrangements with Homeland’s incident response team to acquire a sample to run through the GC-MS to generate an impurity profile we can compare against our database of commercial chemical samples.”

  “We do the same thing to trace heroin and meth through distribution channels and back to their origin,” Gardner said. “It can take days to get any actionable intel from manufacturers, and even longer to follow the trail.”

  “We’re lucky in this case that there are so few suppliers, each of whose products have distinct impurities caused by the fossil fuels used as manufacturing feedstock and the hydrocarbons present in the air during processing, and we all know how persuasive the DHS can be when it comes to compelling answers from even the most unwilling subjects,” Locker responded.

  “I have no doubt they’ll be able to find the source, but we can’t afford to sit around waiting for them to do so,” Mason said. “That Novichok didn’t walk out of here on its own. They had to have moved it somehow, and they couldn’t have done so in just any containers.”

  “Precisely,” Locker said. He brought up an image of an industrial unit that looked like a cross between a propane tank and a torpedo. “While Novichok A-234 might be a whole lot more stable than its German predecessor, that doesn’t mean its transport isn’t without risk. Its main component is still sarin, which decomposes tin, aluminum, and cadmium-plated steel. Any decrease in pH will cause it to hydrolyze and form hydrofluoric acid. Exposure to heat can lead to combustion and vaporization, killing everyone for miles. They would have used ASME-rated cylinder tanks like this one—seven-foot-long barrels that hold roughly a hundred gallons apiece. They’re readily available and used to move any number of hazardous chemicals, which makes tracking the purchase of an unknown quantity impossible but limits the means by which up to forty of them could be transported out of here.”

  “They would have needed a fleet of trucks to accommodate that much weight,” Layne said.

  “The way I see it,” Mason said, “we’re dealing with a minimum of two twenty-foot shipping containers loaded onto flatbed heavy haulers. They’d blend in with highway traffic and could be stored invisibly on any industrial lot.”

  “So we’re never finding them.”

  “At some point in time, they were driven onto this property and then driven back off again, which means that somewhere there’s a record of it.”

  “We don’t have any satellite imagery for nearly two years predating our arrival,” Gardner said.

  “True, but there are only two ways out of here. Can you bring up an aerial map?”

  She pulled up the image on her monitor and leaned back so they could all see.

  “This is where we are right now.” Mason tapped the touch screen and the image zoomed in on a ten-mile square. “As you can see, the only access to this place is by County Road Thirty-seven, which originates at CR Eighteen to the south and ends at CR Twenty-six to the north. Regardless of which one you take, the only way out of this area is by getting on Highway Eighty-five either right here or … here.”

  “Those are just ordinary off-ramps,” Layne said. “They don’t have traffic lights with cameras we can access.”

  “But there are weather cams for road conditions.”

  The special agent smiled.

  “I’m on it,” Gardner said. “I have access to the Department of Transportation’s archives, but it would save me a lot of time if I had a theoretical window.”

  Mason recalled how the second floor of the slaughterhouse appeared to have been abandoned in a rush, and not too long before he arrived.

  “Try thirty to forty-five days ago and work your way backward from there.”

  “I’ll check to see if any shipping containers or vehicles have been reported missing,” Layne said.

  “Good idea,” Mason replied. “And I want aerial photographs of everything within a hundred-mile radius. Those shipping containers are the size of railroad cars. Any number of them should be easy to spot.”

  “My guys can scan the satellite footage of the entire eastern plains in a matter of minutes,” Locker said. He grabbed one of the transceivers and started giving orders.

  Mason felt the pressure of lost time bearing down on him. Those tanks could have traveled anywhere in the world by now. If they didn’t find that convoy and at least pick up its trail soon—

  “I’ve got them,” Gardner said.

  He leaned over her shoulder and studied the image on her screen. The resolution wasn’t nearly as sharp as that of a traffic cam, but he could clearly see two heavy haulers descending an off-ramp from the vantage point of what he assumed to be a light pole. Both trucks were flatbeds with anonymous corrugated shipping containers on the back, the kind bulk carriers shipped
to every port around the world. They were old and rusted and looked just like every other he’d seen.

  “When was this?” he asked.

  “November sixth. Fifty-one days ago.”

  Mason closed his eyes. He knew the date well. It was the same day the Thirteen had murdered his wife. While the Hoyl was burning Angie alive, a team had been hurriedly extricating the Novichok, due to the window of vulnerability she’d exposed.

  “This picture was taken on the northbound ramp onto Highway Eighty-five at nine-forty-three A.M.,” Gardner said. She switched to a different image. “Here they are arriving two days earlier, November fourth. Ten-fifty-eight P.M. The off-ramp from Eighty-five, six miles to the south.”

  He opened his eyes and studied the picture, which showed two flatbed trucks in the bottom right corner of the screen as they turned east onto County Road 18. The angle was different, but he was certain they were the same vehicles.

  “I’ll search the surrounding highway cams,” Locker said. “They had to have originated somewhere. We should be able to pick them up again and follow them back—There. Ten-thirty-six P.M. Merging onto northbound Eighty-five from Highway Fifty-two east.”

  “Keep going,” Layne said.

  “There are only a handful of cameras between there and the Kansas border, all of them on I-Seventy-six, but I’ll check them anyway.”

  “What do we know about these trucks?” Mason asked.

  “Give me a second,” Layne said. She imported the picture into the database and waited for the system to produce a match. “Sterling flatbeds. Model LT9500. Year: 2006. Twenty-four-foot bed.” She closed the window with the hauler’s specs and opened the database for stolen vehicles. “No matching models have been reported missing.”

  “Can you clean up these pictures?” Mason asked. “See if we can get a better look at the trucks themselves?”

  “Give me just a second,” Gardner said.

  A series of filters passed over the image, one after another.

  “What does that say?” Layne asked. “On the side of the container.”

  Gardner zoomed in on the blurry letters.

  “Triton,” she said.

  “It’s a global lessor of marine shipping containers,” Locker added.

  “So there should be a record of who leased them,” Mason said.

  “Not necessarily. Their business model is for their product to maintain the youngest age profile of all containers in service. Something that old would have been retired and sold wholesale years ago.”

  “License plates?”

  “I don’t have the angle,” Gardner said. “I can’t get a clear shot of either end. These cameras were designed to capture the road conditions, not the cars themselves.”

  “Zoom in on the side of that truck,” Mason said. “The one turning right. What’s that on the passenger door?”

  Gardner did as he asked. There was a logo beneath the window with words stenciled above it and to either side. They were old and faded and half-concealed by mud spattered from the tires. She again worked her magic with the filters and the logo resolved as well as it was going to, but the lettering remained out of focus and pixilated.

  “Is that an ampersand?” Mason asked.

  “There are two local hauling companies whose registered names use an ampersand,” Locker said. “Errol and Sons Junk Removal and Front Range Transportation and Hauling.”

  Mason leaned closer to the screen. If he looked closely enough, he could see the jagged line of a stylized mountain range cutting through the symbol and, above it, arched lettering he could almost imagine reading Front Range.

  “What do we know about the second one?”

  “Front Range? It’s incorporated as an LLC doing business at 19640 East County Road Forty-five.”

  “Where is that?”

  “North of Wray,” Gardner said. “Near the Kansas border.”

  “That fits with the trucks coming in from the east,” Mason said.

  “The business is registered to a man named Peter Cavanaugh,” Locker said. “Seventy-two years old. No kids. Divorced twice. One wife lives in Reno, the other in Cheyenne. He inherited both the land and the business from his father upon his death in 1994. It looks like he was a one-man operation, hiring himself out locally through Craigslist and subcontracting for larger trucking operations moving agricultural supplies throughout Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming.”

  “Can you track the GPS beacons in his trucks?”

  “That model predates the routine installation of global-positioning beacons,” Layne said. “I can try tracking them by their VIN numbers, but we would have already found them if he’d reported them missing.”

  “Then either they aren’t stolen,” Mason said, “or Cavanaugh isn’t around to report them.”

  “What do we know about him?” Layne asked.

  “There hasn’t been any activity in either his personal account or his business account for more than two months,” Locker said.

  “Credit cards?” Mason asked.

  “Maxed out a year ago.”

  “He could be working under the table.”

  “A distinct possibility, given his field, but it’s nearly impossible to drop off the grid like this.”

  “What about phone records?”

  “He doesn’t have a landline and the last outgoing call from his cell phone of record was sixty-two days ago.”

  “GPS location of his phone?”

  “Nothing,” Locker said. “Either he removed the SIM card or the battery’s dead.”

  “Last known location?”

  “His home address.”

  “Bring up satellite imagery of that property,” Mason said.

  Gardner switched programs and zeroed in on the eastern plains near the town of Wray. Several zooms later, Mason was staring at a small farmhouse with a large outbuilding, a barn, and a grain silo. There was nothing around it but endless fields and scattered groves of trees. The nearest house was at least a dozen miles away.

  “When was this picture taken?” Mason asked.

  Gardner closed the image and opened the archives, which listed the sequential photographs by date.

  “November twelfth,” she said.

  “Bring up the previous image. May seventeenth.”

  She clicked it and the photograph appeared. It looked identical to the one from six months later, only with the notable addition of the trucks parked in front of the outbuilding. Both had rusted shipping containers loaded onto their beds.

  “Send everything you have to my phone,” Mason said. “And contact the Wray PD and county sheriff’s department. I want that property locked down right now. No one gets in or out of there until I arrive. And have them dispatch a K-9 unit. We’re going to need help covering that much ground in a short amount of time.”

  He rushed down the aisle, opened the office door, and leaned inside.

  “We ID’d the trucks they used to transport the Novichok out of here,” he said. “They’re registered to a guy named Cavanaugh. I’m on my way to his place right now.”

  Chris looked up from his computer monitor and covered the mouthpiece of the phone.

  “Take Layne with you.”

  Mason glanced over his shoulder at the diminutive agent, who was already putting on her windbreaker and heading toward him, and then back at Chris.

  “Why would I do that?” he asked.

  “Because she’s your new partner.”

  13

  WRAY, COLORADO

  Mason turned north from the highway and had to ride down into a ditch to get around the police cruiser parked lengthwise across the dirt road, which cut straight through the endless grasslands toward a swatch of barren cottonwoods, barely visible against the gloaming. If Mason was right, their destination was just on the other side of them.

  He’d made the 140-mile drive in under an hour and a half, during which time the brain trust back at the command center had been able to discover little they didn’t already kno
w. Cavanaugh had been honorably discharged from the army in the early eighties and earned his Class A driver’s license shortly thereafter. He’d driven for various interstate-trucking companies until his father’s passing, after which he’d seemingly settled into his old man’s life. Not a single arrest or traffic ticket. Nothing to suggest he’d so much as crossed paths with the men Mason was hunting.

  Gunnar’s search had proven considerably more fruitful, but the opportunity to view the results had yet to present itself. Mason had tasked his old friend with finding out everything he possibly could about his new partner, Special Agent Jessica Layne. He wished he’d been given a chance to thoroughly vet her prior to her assignment, but he had to believe Chris had left no stone unturned, considering his department had been compromised by Mason’s last two partners, who’d served interests other than their country’s. Not to mention the fact that they’d tried to kill him on multiple occasions. He needed to forearm himself with every iota of information he could find, and not just to protect himself. If she were similarly corrupted, then maybe he could use her to lead him to the Thirteen.

  Layne’s assignment had been to coordinate the search of the property on the eastern plains with local law enforcement, but between calls, she’d been reasonably forthcoming with her answers to the few personal questions he’d asked. She’d graduated in the top 25 percent of her class at Colorado State and the top 10 percent at Quantico. She had a degree in psychology and advanced certifications in various subspecialties. Her prior posting had been in Virginia, where she said her duties had been largely administrative, but since her family lived up north, in Fort Collins, she’d jumped at the chance to return home and get out into the field. If she knew anything about the situation she was stepping into, she did a good job of hiding it.

  Mason watched her from the corner of his eye. His new partner rode with her feet on the passenger seat, her knees drawn to her chest, and the grip of a Glock 27 protruding from the holster on her hip. She looked to be somewhere in her mid- to late twenties and couldn’t have been more than five six in heels, although he doubted she owned any, but she carried herself in a manner that made her seem much larger.