The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  Nothing.

  Mason slowed his heartbeat, steadied his nerves, and went up fast. He shoved the door upward. Hurdled the final few stairs. Jumped out of the floor in the middle of the main room. The door struck the floor behind him with a resounding crash.

  He pivoted in a circle, inspecting everything around him down the barrel of his pistol.

  Bare plank floor. Faded paths of wear. Behind him: a potbellied stove, disconnected from the ductwork. Low ceiling. Cobwebs from the corners to the light fixture overhead. To his left: a rear window, broken and boarded from the outside. No curtains on the bent rod. Straight ahead: a wall where framed pictures had once hung, a threadbare couch against it. To his right: the kitchen, through which he could see the living room. The front door, twenty feet away.

  He advanced in a shooter’s stance. Dust on the counters. The dishes in the sink had been there for so long that the flies wanted nothing to do with them.

  The living room showed more recent signs of habitation. A pillow and a blanket on the couch. A glass of water on the end table. But it was the front wall that immediately caught his attention. It was covered with photographs. Newspaper clippings. Computer printouts. All of men he didn’t recognize. Their eyes scratched out in every single one. New pictures. Old pictures. Young men in clothes that appeared to date all the way back to the fifties. Old men from the here and now. Most featured men in military uniforms. As individuals. In groups. The same faces through the years.

  A shadow passed across the seam of light around the boarded front window. The officers outside. One of them must have heard movement from inside the house. They had no idea he’d entered through the grain silo.

  Mason glanced at the front door. The dead bolt was in the horizontal position. Unlocked. There was duct tape across the door strike. On the inside. Silver. Flush. Recently applied. Wires trailing from it to a corroded tractor battery. The handle of a paint can connected the terminals. A small square of cardboard prevented it from touching the positive side and completing the circuit. Beneath the arch was a glass jar with amber fluid at the bottom and a pile of white powder separated from it by another piece of cardboard. Beside it, a second jar. Full of nails.

  The knob turned as if in slow motion.

  “Don’t!” Mason shouted.

  A spark snapped from the battery.

  He turned and dove into the kitchen.

  A sound like a shotgun blast behind him.

  Clattering noises like hail.

  A high-pitched hum inside his head.

  Smoke rolled over him.

  White powder shivered from the plaster walls.

  Flames crackled.

  Only then did he feel the pain.

  15

  A town with a population smaller than most shopping malls on a Saturday afternoon was accustomed to small-town problems. Everyone knew everyone else. More important, everyone knew everyone else’s mother. There was undoubtedly no one in town who would have ever imagined a day would come when a full two-fifths of Wray’s police force would be shredded by an improvised explosive device merely by opening the front door of a house they all knew as “the old Cavanaugh place.”

  Senior Officer Anthony Hill and Officer Drake Dodge hadn’t suffered. At least that’s what the medical examiner said. Their families would, however. Of that, there was no doubt. The entire town would, for that matter. Any loss of life in such a small community was like the amputation of a finger. It might not consume every waking thought, but there would always be reminders of what was missing.

  The explosion had been both violent and contained. The nails had done the real damage. Sharp one-inch roofing nails expelled outward at a speed of ten thousand feet per second squared. From a distance of roughly two feet. The ME’s office had needed shovels to collect the officers’ remains. Mason had been lucky. The kitchen wall had intercepted or altered the course of most of the nails. Those that passed through barely had enough momentum to embed themselves halfway into his right buttocks, thigh, and calf. Eleven in total. He’d thought the paramedic was joking when he produced a pair of pliers, but it pulled them right out. The wounds still hurt, though. As did the opposite cheek, where he’d been given a tetanus booster. He shifted his weight uncomfortably as he surveyed the damage to the inside of the house.

  “Believe it or not, that was an ingenious weapon,” Layne said from behind him.

  He turned around to face her.

  “That’s not very comforting.”

  “It’s not supposed to be. Building a bomb like that takes serious training and skill, especially to be able to improvise it from the items on hand. You can’t just pluck little pieces of ammonium nitrate out of fertilizer. Producing it involves a complex chemical reaction. Never mind combining it with the right amount of fuel oil at the right time. This is one very smart individual.”

  “Definitely the kind of person you’d hire to produce a large quantity of Novichok.”

  “Then how do you read the five victims out there who look like they’ve been crucified?” Layne asked. “We can’t possibly be dealing with another crime scene shared by two distinct mass murderers.”

  “I don’t want to speculate until the ME determines cause of death, but I’m inclined to agree. This feels disturbingly intimate. It’s like he chose this place specifically so he could take his time with his victims. So he wouldn’t miss a moment of their suffering.”

  “That’s why I was looking for you,” she said. “There’s something you need to see.”

  They passed the wall that had saved his life on their way out of the living room. It looked like it had taken a shotgun blast, as did the ceiling in the main room. There was little left of the front wall. The majority of the plaster was gone and the wooden support posts were scorched. The photographs lay in tatters amid the chunks of debris on the floor. Mason managed to get a decent shot of the only reasonably intact one on his cell phone.

  The main entrance had been widened by a good five feet. They’d found the doorknob across the yard, embedded in the trunk of a tree. He tried not to look at the brownish red spatters on the porch or think about the sound the little booties he wore over his shoes made when they peeled from the sticky surface.

  The entire yard was awash in the glow of portable lighting arrays. Shards of glass sparkled from the ground. The trees seemed to glow with the alternating red and blue glare from the cruiser blocking the driveway. The ambulance was still parked next to the Wray PD Caprice Classic and Mason’s pool Crown Victoria, both of which were dented to hell, pocked with chunks of biological matter, and filled with glass from the shattered windshields. They were going to have to find another way home.

  Layne led him past the cars and around the side of the house, toward where the cornfield glowed in the distance. The barking of tracking dogs echoed from the surrounding darkness.

  The temperature had fallen precipitously. Mason’s breath trailed him over his shoulder. The frosted weeds crunched underfoot.

  He’d assumed she was taking him out into the field, where the dead men were posed like scarecrows, right up until she veered from the path in the opposite direction after passing the tractor. The gap where the battery had been was readily apparent. They skirted a mountain of hay that looked like it had once been baled and found a ponderosa pine that grew forked from the ground, as though its trunk had split when it was little more than a sapling. One half stood reasonably straight; the other bent sideways before eventually righting itself.

  “He sat right here,” Layne said. “That’s where the dogs picked up his scent.”

  “The killer?”

  “He sat right there, fifty feet from his victims, and listened to them die. Maybe even talked to them while they did.”

  “Were they able to track him?” Mason asked.

  “He’d obviously been in this place for a while. His scent’s everywhere. They’re following it in any number of directions.” She turned away from him. “But that’s not why I brought you out here.
”

  Mason followed her stare to the upright portion of the tree, beside the killer’s surveillance position. The bark had been removed and four symbols carved directly into the pulp. The dribbles of sap were crusted on the outside but appeared to still be soft in the middle.

  久延毘古

  “It’s Japanese,” she said. “It translates to ‘Kuebiko,’ which is the name of the Shinto god of knowledge and agriculture. He’s traditionally depicted as an all-knowing, all-seeing scarecrow.”

  “I get the allusion to the way the men in the field are posed, but we figured that out on our own in all of about two seconds. Invoking the name of an obscure god to draw attention to the obvious doesn’t mesh with everything we know about this guy. There has to be more to it than that.”

  “My thoughts exactly. So I googled scarecrows in general and Kuebiko specifically.” Layne woke her cell phone and read from the screen. “‘By definition, a scarecrow is a decoy designed to resemble a human being. It’s placed in a field to discourage birds from consuming recently planted seeds or crops throughout the growing cycle. Large-scale and corporate farms use more modern means, like automatic noise guns and aluminum PET film ribbons to minimize crop predation. There are as many names for them as there are myths for their creation. Tattie-bogle, murmet, mommet, flay-crow, mog, shay, rook-scarer, and Feathertop. The earliest known historical account, however, comes from Kojiki, the oldest surviving book in Japan.’”

  “There we go.”

  “‘He’s known as Kuebiko or, euphemistically, Yamada no Shodo, which translates to “someone left soaking wet from standing guard over mountain rice fields.” He’s incapable of walking, yet possesses a broad knowledge of all things.’”

  “The knowledge thing seems to fit, especially if we’re dealing with a man with a highly developed ego.”

  “Interesting you should mention ego. In Jungian terms, the scarecrow is the shadow, the inverse archetype of the ego.”

  “The darkness of our own creation.”

  “Kind of gives you goose bumps when you say it like that,” she said.

  “I’d imagine that’s the whole point.”

  “A more metaphorical interpretation is of the scarecrow as a straw man, a distorted version of ourselves that is at once both foreign and familiar. One that’s made of straw, essentially hollow inside. One that lacks some fundamental quality we ascribe to humanity.”

  “Like a conscience?”

  “Like a conscience.”

  “So we’re looking for a man who sees himself as an all-knowing shadow of a human being without a conscience.”

  “One who, like a scarecrow, is content to stand back and observe, a witness to the suffering of his victims instead of an active participant in it.”

  The way she said it made Mason’s blood run cold.

  It reminded him of the Hoyl, who must have spent countless hours studying his test subjects, from the moment symptoms manifested through the process of decomposition, although that was where the similarities ended. The Hoyl had been a clinician, detached from any emotional connection with his victims. He’d no more reveled in their pain than he had thrilled in their passing, unlike the man who’d brought his victims all the way out here so he could take his time with them and set up cameras to watch the men he’d entombed behind the wall at the end of the tunnel slowly suffocate.

  This was a different kind of monster entirely, one capable of inflicting inhuman cruelty without remorse, one who possessed the skill sets required to design the traps that had nearly killed Alejandra and decimated his SWAT team during the hunt for the Hoyl.

  One who could very well have access to thousands of gallons of the most lethal nerve gas ever developed and no compunction about using it.

  16

  ELSEWHERE

  Kuebiko’s entire life had been an execution by lingchi—the death of a thousand cuts—and with the final figurative slice, the last drops of humanity trickled to the concrete floor and drained through the rusted grate. All that remained now was the physical vessel, a vaguely human form stuffed with pain and misery, a husk animated by hatred and rage. The time had come to revisit that suffering upon the men who had taken such pleasure in inflicting it.

  “All … will … know … the … truth.”

  And with those words, Kuebiko became no more, leaving behind the Scarecrow, an all-knowing, all-seeing creature no longer constrained by the frailty of the flesh or the threat of damnation. Those were the failings of man and it was no longer one of their kind. It embraced its role in the coming nightmare, for, being dead already, it no longer felt fear. At long last, it would shine a light into the shadows and reveal not just the monsters but those who chose not to see their atrocities, making them complicit in the horrors perpetrated upon innocent men, women, and even children. They would pay for what they’d done—the whole godforsaken world would pay—starting with the men responsible for the interminable agony and culminating with the man who was ultimately to blame, even if he was too blind to see the role he’d played.

  “Blind…”

  The Scarecrow pressed its skeletal fingertip over the stoma in its throat and issued a harsh, rasping laugh. The sound echoed throughout the cold, insensate chamber, where it sat in complete darkness, by itself and yet not alone, breathing the dusty air and listening to the hum of machinery and the soft, dysrhythmic breathing of another from the live feed on its cell phone. In a matter of days, even that would be gone, but there would be no one left to bear witness to the silence.

  For the first time, it noticed the alarm beacon at the top of the screen. Someone had triggered the early warning system that it had built into the improvised explosive device attached to the front door of the farmhouse. The hunt would soon commence in earnest, but there was no hope of stopping the course of events that had already been set in motion.

  Millions of people would die, just not where anyone expected, especially the man who’d commissioned the Scarecrow’s services, the same man who’d unknowingly created it in the first place.

  A hiss erupted from the hole in its throat, a roar to which it couldn’t even give voice. It crawled over the earthen mounds, struggled to its feet, and stormed out of the main room. Its wheezing exhalations trailed it down the hallway and into the room it had created with a single purpose in mind. The old man locked in the cage in the corner attempted to cry out at the sound of the approaching footsteps, but the duct tape turned the noise into a muffled grunt. His wrists and feet were bound together, forcing him into a fetal position, making it impossible for him to move in the slightest. He struggled to breathe through the mucus burbling from his nose. His eyes widened, but it was so dark that the old man couldn’t have seen his hand in front of his face, let alone the silhouette standing before it.

  The Scarecrow could, though. It could see everything.

  “Do … you … remember … me?”

  A desperate flurry of grunts to the negative. The old man tried to speak, but there would be no talking his way out of what was to come.

  The Scarecrow reached up, grabbed one of the handcrafted objects hanging from the ceiling—starlike designs made from wooden tongue depressors bound together with yarn to form what almost looked like little men, or perhaps stick-figure dolls—and thrust it through the cage, into the old man’s hand.

  “How … about … now?”

  The old man turned it over and over until recognition dawned.

  He screamed into the duct tape and thrashed against his restraints.

  The Scarecrow savored the exquisite sounds of his suffering.

  PART III

  If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

  —Abraham Lincoln,

  Lyceum Address (1838)

  17

  DECEMBER 28

  Considering their pool car was covered with evidence and not going anywhere for the foreseeable future, a deputy from the Yuma County Sheriff’s Department had been assigned to drive M
ason and Layne back to the FBI building on East Thirty-sixth Avenue. Mason had taken the backseat, so he had room to shift uncomfortably on his rear end as the painkillers slowly wore off. Layne had fallen asleep in the passenger seat pretty much right away, her arms tucked into her jacket and her forehead resting against the window, which finally gave him the opportunity to review the results of Gunnar’s research into his new partner’s background.

  The email consisted of a short note—She looks clean, at least on paper—and three attached files: a summary of findings, a basic financial audit, and her federal personnel file. Mason started with her finances. She hadn’t received any large influxes of cash and didn’t appear overly vulnerable to being bought. She had a solid four figures in her savings account, a decent start on a 401(k) plan, and rented a reasonably priced condo in an affordable neighborhood. Minimal credit-card and student-loan debt. Responsible, if not entirely frugal, spending patterns.

  He moved on to Gunnar’s summary of her personal history, a bullet-pointed list that told a reasonably comprehensive story. Born in Topeka and moved to Colorado at age four. Athlete in high school. Held down the same job through college. Applied to the FBI months before graduation. Her father was a Lutheran minister, her mother a teacher. Her younger sister had been killed at fourteen by a drunk driver, the son of a city councilman, who was later acquitted of manslaughter and sentenced to community service and a temporary suspension of his license. It was likely this injustice that had driven Layne and her older sister, an assistant district attorney, into law enforcement.

  Her personnel file described an agent who was tenacious and driven, and yet one whose ambition didn’t drip from every page. Details of her previous assignment were sparse to nonexistent, which essentially meshed with an administrative role. She had a TS/SCI security clearance, meaning she’d been vetted as thoroughly as humanly possible by the FBI and subjected to additional polygraph testing in order for her to be able to access sensitive compartmented information. Her performance reviews were simultaneously exemplary and marred by caveats. Maybe not caveats so much as backhanded compliments. One in particular seemed to sum up all of them. Her most recent supervisor had written: “She’s bullheaded and deterministic, which will serve her well in the field.” The way Mason read it, she required a certain measure of autonomy and didn’t necessarily play well with others. In a nutshell, she didn’t like being told what to do.