The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  Algren’s personal assistant wheeled around a cart with ice water and coffee before taking his leave. She commenced the moment he closed the door behind him.

  “Considering the nature of the threat we’re up against, we’ll begin with a brief introduction and then get right down to business.” She had a slight northeastern accent of the kind Mason attributed to a wealthy upbringing. Connecticut, maybe. “For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Diana Algren. I’m one of the assistant special agents in charge of the Denver Division of the FBI. I’ve been appointed to head up this task force. My role will be to provide oversight for our investigative efforts, coordinate the responses of all agencies, and facilitate the flow of information—to wit, all communications will go through me directly.”

  She glanced at her notes.

  “Also representing the Bureau are Special Agents James Mason and Jessica Layne, who were responsible for the initial discovery of the victims we’re attributing to an UNSUB who has some sort of sick fascination with scarecrows.” Mason nodded and Layne offered a half wave to those assembled. “Together, we bring to the table some of the brightest investigative minds in the world and a wealth of knowledge regarding the apprehension of serial murderers, a facet of this investigation we consider secondary to the manufacture and potential release of an unknown quantity of a Novichok agent theorized to be as much as four thousand gallons, although one we believe to be critical to the identification and apprehension of the principal parties involved.”

  One of the agents at the end of the table, sitting to Mason’s left, whistled appreciatively. He obviously recognized the damage one could inflict with that volume of chemical weaponry.

  “I would like to welcome Agents”—again, Algren looked at her notes—“Victoria Addison and Adrian Salazar from the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service. Their existing national framework of detection and response, including split-second activation of FEMA’s national and state-level emergency operations centers, should the worst-case scenario arise, will surely prove beneficial.”

  Addison had thick arms and large hands and a scar that ran from the corner of her mouth to her ear, as if she’d been caught by a fishing hook and torn herself free. Her brown eyes issued a challenge she appeared more than capable of backing up. Salazar, who had smooth tan skin and a broad chest, made eye contact with each of them. He looked out of his element in the conference room, but Mason could easily see him swinging a baton and cracking skulls in the field with a smile on his face.

  Algren turned to the newest arrivals, who’d entered after she’d already started and assumed the seats at the foot of the table so as not to interrupt. Mason glanced at them for the first time.

  “The contingent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is comprised of Special Agents—”

  “Becker?” Mason said.

  Special Agent Travis Becker looked up from beneath the brim of the ATF baseball cap that concealed his face. He was one of the few survivors of the Bradley Strike Force, which had stumbled onto the Hoyl’s trail in the Arizona desert a year ago. Had he not been outside the range of the explosion that destroyed the stone quarry, there would have been no one left to drag Mason from the burning rubble.

  “Glad to see you’re still among the living, Mason,” he said. “I wouldn’t have wagered my last dime on it.”

  “I’m encouraged to see that several of you already know—” Algren started to say.

  “Special Agent Marilu Johnson,” Becker’s partner said. She had dark skin and eyes, wore her hair in cornrows, and made no effort to hide her impatience. “What do you say we wrap up the formalities so we can get down to work?”

  “Agreed,” Algren said. “Our Bomb Recovery and Analysis Team is already on-site and eagerly anticipating any insight you might be able to provide into the signature of the IED.” Johnson nodded, suitably placated for the moment. “Field support will be provided by the Weld and Yuma County Sheriff’s Departments; the Denver, Fort Lupton, and Wray police; and the Rocky Mountain Regional Forensics Laboratory. And again, I must reiterate, all communications are to go through me.” She speared each of them with her gaze to drive home the importance of her request. “Now, if we’re all on the same page, I would like to direct your attention to the second page in your binders.”

  Mason opened his and leaned back in his chair. Algren was definitely on top of things. She’d already gathered pictures of the farm and the victims and assembled a significant amount of lab data.

  “For those of you who don’t know, the name Novichok—which means ‘newcomer’ in Russian—collectively refers to a group of fourth-generation chemical weapons developed by the Soviet Union under the guise of Project Foliant and known officially by their A-series designations. We believe that as many as five of these agents—A-230, 233, 234, 242, and 262—have been adapted for military use. Our intelligence, what little we have, is limited at best and owed to a whistle-blower named Vil Mirzayanov, who went public in 1992, on the eve of Russia’s signing of the Chemical Weapons Convention. While their scientists claim these chemical weapons are the deadliest ever made, they’ve never been tested on human beings. At least not officially. The British government believes that A-234—the same agent we’re dealing with here—was used in the attempted assassination of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018.

  “It’s essentially an evolved version of sarin, the most lethal of the four G-series agents developed in Germany prior to World War Two. While we have no data regarding exposure to A-234 specifically, the lethal dose of sarin in humans is a tenth of a milligram per kilogram subcutaneously, one milliliter in direct contact with the skin, or thirty-five milligrams per cubic meter of air. The most severe symptoms include bronchorrhea and bronchospasm—the combination of which leads to the victim drowning from the fluid in his lungs—and a host of more common signs you’ll be able to recognize by the mnemonic SLUDGE—salivation, lacrimation, urination, defecation, gastrointestinal distress, and emesis.”

  “That’s some very specific data,” Layne said. “I thought the Nazis never used it.”

  “They didn’t. Had they, the war might have had a different outcome.”

  “So how did we get this information?”

  “The sarin attacks in Iraq, Japan, and, most recently, Syria corroborated data extrapolated by our own military,” Algren said. “The army conducted its own experimentation with sarin in the fifties, but that’s neither here nor there.”

  “The Chemical Corps had its own production facilities back then,” Addison said. “The stockpiles are long gone, but surely some of the men responsible for creating them are still around. Salazar and I can reach out to the National Personnel Records Center and requisition their files. Maybe they can help identify the uniformed men in the photographs we collected from the farmhouse, too.”

  “I trust Homeland can expedite the process,” Algren said. “Now, if you’ll all turn to page five, the first picture is an aerial view of the Cavanaugh property at 19640 East County Road Forty-five. The location where each victim was found is marked with an X. Of particular note is their relationship to and distance from one another. While they form a ringlike pattern, it’s premature to conclude that a circle was the intended design, when it’s apparent we interrupted the UNSUB before he completed it.

  “The following pages show each of the five victims from various angles. We’ve only been able to identify one of them so far: the owner of the property, Peter Cavanaugh, marked as number two on your diagram. I want you to pay special attention to the detail images, especially those on pages twenty-three, twenty-eight, and thirty-two.”

  The first picture displayed a man’s leg from roughly mid-thigh down. The soft tissues were black and eroded where the rope had been used to bind it to the post. The discoloration extended all the way from the knee through the swollen foot.

  The second image was similar, although the subject displayed much more advanced stages of decomposition.
An arrow marker had been placed beside the leg to indicate a diagonal fracture line through the tibia, the edges of which were visibly coarse.

  The third featured a forearm proximal to the wrist. The rotting skin on the radial side exhibited significant damage from avian activity. The ulnar side, which had been bound inferiorly, was distended with the purplish swelling of settled blood, or hypostasis.

  Mason immediately recognized the significance.

  “He kept them alive for several days after tying them up there.”

  “Precisely,” Algren said.

  “Has the ME determined COD yet?”

  “We anticipated having a preliminary report of findings prior to this briefing, but we’re assured it’s forthcoming.”

  “You said there were pictures of all five victims,” Johnson said. “I assume that doesn’t include the officers killed in the explosion.”

  “Correct. Their deaths are to be considered superfluous to our investigation and the stated mission of this strike force. While the murders are a tragedy—one I fully expect you to use as motivation to catch this monster—these two officers, specifically, were not the UNSUB’s intended targets. It could just as easily have been Mason and Layne who opened the door.”

  Mason hadn’t actually thought about it like that until she said it out loud. He was grateful not to have received more than eleven nails in his leg and butt, no matter how badly the wounds still hurt. Everything was moving so fast that he hadn’t paused to contemplate how much differently things could have gone had he entered through the front door instead of the silo.

  “The explosion was designed to serve the same purpose as the trap he laid for us in the tunnel below the slaughterhouse,” he said. “The dispersal of the chemical weapon and the IED connected to the door were both designed to eliminate the lead officers and set back, if not outright derail, the investigation from the start.”

  “Which means he’s familiar with law-enforcement procedure,” Layne said, “but not intimately so. For my money, his background is in a field tangential to ours.”

  “A solid observation,” Algren said. “I’ll submit it to Behavioral with our profile request.”

  The last page featured a close-up photograph of the Japanese kanji characters the killer had carved into the pine trunk. Mason couldn’t shake the feeling that they were more than a calling card; the killer was sending a specific message, but what did it mean and who was the intended recipient? Anyone even remotely familiar with law-enforcement procedures would know they wouldn’t allow the message to be released to the media, and there were too many variables involved with the discovery of a crime scene and the establishment of jurisdiction to guarantee the presence of a specific agency. The message had to be for someone other than the responding officers, although presumably someone who would receive the message through them, a theory that meshed with Layne’s assessment.

  There was a knock at the door. Algren’s PA entered without waiting for a reply, strode across the room, and whispered into her ear. Her expression remained unchanged.

  “Thank you, Roger.” She rose and smoothed her jacket and skirt. “You’ll have to excuse me.”

  Her assistant held open the door to the anteroom for her. A man stepped into view from the right and proffered what looked like a photograph printed on plain paper. She took it from him and furrowed her brow.

  The door closed and concealed her from view.

  “What do you think that’s all about?” Layne asked.

  Mason could only shake his head. Something was happening. He could feel it.

  Algren opened the door and returned to the head of the table.

  “We found the trucks we believe were used to transport the Novichok from the slaughterhouse.”

  “Where?” Mason asked.

  “New Jersey.”

  20

  Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport

  The agent assigned to drive Mason and Layne to the small commercial field delivered them right to the door of a Cessna 560 Citation, the pilot of which waited just long enough for them to close the door behind them before ramping up the engines and starting to roll. They navigated the narrow aisle, dropped their bags on two of the rear-facing seats, and sat across the small tables from them. By the time they fastened their seat belts, the plane had already left the ground and commenced its steep ascent. They spent maybe twenty minutes reviewing the case file before agreeing that they’d better take advantage of the opportunity to sleep while they could.

  Layne kicked off her shoes, drew her feet up onto the seat, and leaned her head against the closed shade. By the time Mason zipped his binder into his travel bag, she was already snoring softly.

  The small plane was one of the older models in the FBI’s fleet, as attested to by the gray vinyl upholstery and the frayed edges of the seat belts, but it had been upgraded to incorporate Wi-Fi and surveillance equipment that probably saw a lot more use than anyone cared to admit. He logged in to his federal email account to make sure there was nothing urgent he needed to deal with before sacrificing the next three hours to what he anticipated to be the slumber of the dead. The only message was from Algren, who’d sent him a link to the secure cloud she’d set up for the task force to share files and a brief note saying she’d arranged for them to meet with a representative of the New Jersey State Police at the lot in Port Norris, where the missing trucks had been impounded.

  Mason set his federal phone on the table and was just about to close his eyes, when he felt a vibration against his left hip.

  He glanced across the aisle at Layne to confirm she was still sleeping before removing his stealth phone from its holster and allowing it to scan his thumbprint and face. The screen awakened and revealed a message from Gunnar.

  CAN YOU TALK?

  Again, he checked to make sure his new partner was asleep before texting back.

  NO, BUT I CAN LISTEN.

  Mason plugged a wireless bud into his ear, leaned against the window, and tilted the screen so that only he could see it. He answered the call the moment his phone started to vibrate in his hand. Gunnar materialized a heartbeat later, with Ramses’ kitchen behind him.

  “I take it you’re on the job?” he said.

  Mason tipped the phone just far enough for his old friend to see the porthole window of the private plane.

  “Then I’ll make this quick,” Gunnar said. “When it comes to the two possible suspects from Johan’s top twenty—the woman in black and the man in the shadows—I’m afraid we’re way behind. Like seventy-five years, the end of World War Two. While I’m still nowhere close to being able to identify them, it’s important that you understand the historical perspective, because, if I’m right, we’re dealing with some really bad individuals and it’s imperative that you don’t underestimate them.”

  Mason nodded for him to proceed.

  “In many ways, the backgrounds of the two subjects are a lot alike, at least in so far as what we believe to be the trail that led Johan to them, although I have yet to pick up the scent of either, which ought to tell you everything you need to know about how closely guarded their identities are. Maybe not in the sense of state’s secrets, but, rather, the effort invested in covering their historical tracks. You see, in order to smuggle anyone even peripherally related to the Nazis out of Germany under the noses of the occupying Allied forces, new identities needed to be created out of thin air, obliterating anything resembling an actual paper trail.”

  Gunnar disappeared and a series of documents appeared in his place. They were yellowed and faded and worn around the edges. Each contained both typed and handwritten material and dates ranging from the late forties to the early fifties. They were written in French, Italian, German, and languages Mason didn’t immediately recognize. And each had been stamped with an unmistakable red logo, long since faded to pink, a plus sign encircled by words readily identifiable in any language: International Committee of the Red Cross.

  “There were two primary ratl
ines,” Gunnar said. “One ran from Germany to Spain, and then to Argentina; the other from Germany to Rome to Genoa, then to various destinations from Mexico to Chile, and everywhere in between. The majority of these emigrations were arranged by the, quote, unquote, ‘humanitarian efforts’ of the Catholic Church, quite possibly even under the direction of the Holy See. You have to remember that Mussolini’s Italy was part of Hitler’s Axis, so it should come as no surprise that the Vatican would be sensitive to the plight of Roman allies seeking to avoid the trials at Nuremberg, which were viewed as essentially rubber-stamp death-penalty hearings. A network of priests and bishops arranged for false identification papers to be issued by the Vatican Refugee Organization, which could then be used to obtain displaced persons passports from the Red Cross, providing the documentation these people needed to obtain legitimate visas, effectively killing off their true identities and starting over again with completely untraceable new names.”

  Mason opened a dialogue box and texted a question.

  WHAT ABOUT THE WOMAN?

  “I’m still trying to pick up her trail,” Gunnar said. “She obviously had to have been born sometime after that, which implies that Johan found her by tracing her lineage, and I think I have a pretty good idea of where she might have been at some point. Remember, these weren’t your standard rank-and-file Nazis. We’re talking about people like Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon; Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust; Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp; Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz; and Paul Shäfer, a medic in the Wehrmacht who worked his way into central Chile and started a closed community rooted in Nazi ideology and a kind of revivalist Christianity. He called this place Colonia Dignidad—Dignity Colony—and within its walls, he and his devotees continued their vile experimentation on political prisoners supplied by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and his secret police. While there’s little actual evidence of the horrors perpetrated by this community over the next forty years, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume they continued working with both biological and chemical weaponry.”