The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  An attack on D.C. could wipe out the government and obliterate the chain of command, paralyzing the entire country and eliminating anything resembling a coherent emergency response. Any professional football team, from the Giants and Jets to the Ravens and Redskins, promised at least seventy thousand spectators at their games, whose deaths would be broadcast on live TV. There were 8.5 million people in New York City alone, all of them concentrated into an area that could easily be purged in a single afternoon with a handful of drones retrofitted with aerial-dispersion units. Not to mention the million people, most of them tourists, gearing up to cram into Times Square, while another billion watched the ball drop from their homes all around the globe. Four thousand gallons was more than enough to literally depopulate the entire eastern seaboard ten times over.

  Mason removed his key chain from his pocket and turned on the mini Maglite. He alternately swept it across the ground and into the branches of the burned pines as he headed east from the tracks. If the firefighter was right about the fire starting elsewhere, then he needed to find the source. The responding officers might have believed the trucks had been abandoned out here for years, but he was convinced that wasn’t the case, and yet there was something about the attempted incineration of the vehicles that didn’t sit right with him.

  “The UNSUB either doesn’t think there’s any way we can catch him or he doesn’t fear the consequences,” Layne said, as though reading his mind.

  “He’s playing with us,” Mason said. “Taunting us. He’s confident there’s nothing we can do to stop him.”

  “Someone knows who he is. We find whoever that is and that person can lead us to him.”

  “So far, everyone who’s come into direct contact with him is dead.”

  As soon as he said it, he realized that likely wasn’t the case at all. In fact, he just might know someone who’d seen him and survived.

  “What?” Layne asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You did this squinty thing and got all quiet. Something clicked for you, didn’t it?”

  A veritable wall of trees rose from the dead earth ahead of them. A shadow passed through the thicket and scampered behind the shrubs. They were nearly to the far side of the burn and hadn’t seen any sign of where the fire might have started.

  “Maybe.”

  “But you aren’t going to tell me, are you?”

  The carpet of pine needles and dead leaves had burned another twenty feet into the forest. The needles of the surviving pines were withered, their bark charred and dusted with white ash. Their blackened branches had frozen in the direction the wind had been blowing at the time and the leaves of the few surviving saplings curled toward the direction of the burn.

  “The fire started somewhere around here,” Mason said.

  “Not going to answer my question?” Layne asked.

  Scorched trunks stood around them like pillars supporting the rapidly darkening sky. Mason walked a winding path through them, shining his flashlight from the ground into the upper reaches. He had no idea what he was looking for, only that he’d know it when he found it.

  It was Layne who did.

  “Over here,” she said.

  Mason followed the sound of her voice. The aura of her flashlight limned what at one time must have been an exceptionally dense section of the forest. Several trees had fallen against one another and the adjacent rock formation, creating what almost looked like the frame of a tepee. Layne knelt inside of it, her back to him. He squeezed in beside her and followed her beam deeper into the darkness, toward where a handful of shards from a beer bottle reflected from the scorched earth at the base of the stone, its face scored black with carbon.

  He recognized it immediately. Someone had ignited a Molotov cocktail and hurled it against the rock. But if even he could tell how the fire had started …

  “Damn,” Mason whispered.

  He drew his Glock. Turned around. Found himself staring straight up the sight line of a pistol—And into the deputy’s face.

  “I really wish you hadn’t found that,” Mills said.

  23

  “Drop your weapons. Right there in the dirt. And keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Mason removed his finger from the trigger. Placed it along the length of the barrel. Held the pistol away from his body. He wanted the deputy focused on it, not on him.

  “You can still walk away from this,” Mason said.

  He heard the crackle of detritus from off to his left. Maybe fifty feet away. Just beyond the edge of the forest. There was at least one other hostile out there. If the rock formation behind him was six o’clock, that placed the second man around eight.

  “But I can’t let you,” Mills said. His voice was high and tight. Scared. He hadn’t anticipated this situation and wasn’t entirely prepared to deal with it. The fact that he hadn’t shot them both in the back of the head meant he was waiting for someone else to do it for him. “Now lay your weapons on the ground. Don’t even think about trying anything stupid.”

  Another rustling sound from the thicket to Mason’s right. Two-thirty, three o’clock.

  He lowered his pistol to the ground and cautiously raised his hands to his sides.

  “So you took a little cash to make some evidence go away,” Layne said. She slowly turned her hips and shoulders so that she could see him. “I mean, who hasn’t? Right? It’s not like you killed anyone. We can work this out. It’s not you we want anyway. Give us the guy who paid you and we all go home tonight. No one has to know.”

  The snap of a twig announced a fourth man. Behind Mills. Moving into position to get a clear shot around him.

  They couldn’t let him get there.

  “You have no idea who you’re dealing with,” Mills said. He readjusted his grip on his pistol. Trying to work up the nerve. “These people? There’s nothing they don’t know. Nothing they won’t do.”

  Mason glanced at Layne from the corner of his eye. Her left hand was flat on the ground, her right beneath her jacket. Her thighs were tensed underneath her. She licked her lips, slowly. Didn’t blink once.

  If she’d been compromised like his previous partners, then now was her chance to finish what they’d started. She could easily put a bullet in the back of his head before he could turn around. Or maybe she was simply biding her time, waiting to see if the deputy could find the nerve to do it for her.

  “Think about it, Mills,” Mason said. “You’ve already outlived your usefulness to them. You were dead the moment we came out here.”

  The truth of his words hit the deputy squarely in the face. His expression morphed from one of indecision to outright terror. Whoever they were, these people scared the living hell out of him.

  Mills swallowed hard. Used both hands to steady his aim.

  Three o’clock to Mason’s right. Past Layne. No clear shot through the fallen trees.

  Nine o’clock to his left. Again, no clear shot.

  The deputy ahead of him. High noon.

  A fourth man moving clockwise. He’d have a clear shot past Mills’s left shoulder when he reached one o’clock.

  The rock formation at his back, barring retreat.

  Mason hoped he and Layne were on the same page, or this was going to be a painful team-building exercise, although the fact that she hadn’t shot him herself was at least a step in the right direction.

  “Just give us a name,” she said.

  “They know where I live. Where my parents live. My girlfriend. My little sister, for Christ’s sake. I tell you anything and they’re dead. All of them. Don’t you see?”

  The fourth man stepped out from behind a scorched tree and into the clearing behind the deputy.

  It was now or never.

  Mason lunged to his feet. Caught Mills by surprise. Got inside his arms. Grabbed him by the jacket. Lifted and shoved him sideways.

  The bullet punched through the deputy’s shoulder, screamed past Mason’s ear, and ricocheted from the rock formati
on before he even heard the crack of gunfire. He dove for his Glock as the second bullet hit Mills squarely in the spine. Grabbed it and rolled to his left. Raised the barrel and fired toward the gunman, who was already on the move. Hit a tree trunk right behind him with an explosion of charcoal.

  Layne was a blur in his peripheral vision. A flash of discharge and chunks of wood burst from the fallen trunk beside her head. She instinctively ducked, then started firing.

  Mason popped up and dove headfirst into the burned debris. Crashed through sharp branches. Landed hard on his side. Rolled and used his momentum to propel himself to his feet. Right in front of a man wearing camouflage hunting gear. The man’s eyes widened and he pressed his cheek to the stock of his rifle—

  Mason shot him in the chest and was running again before the body even hit the ground.

  There were at least two men still standing. Maybe more. And they undoubtedly knew these woods far better than either he or Layne did. He couldn’t afford to let them vanish into the forest, at least not until he got some answers.

  Mason sprinted around the scorched trees toward where he’d last seen the fourth man. Passed the trunk his bullet had struck.

  Layne materialized to his right, running in the opposite direction of the third man, who was sprawled on the ground, his face buried in the soot. She had a bead on the fourth man and the angle to cut him off. He veered away from her and right into Mason’s line of sight.

  A single shot and the man grabbed his thigh. Tumbled to the ground with a shout. Pushed himself back up and tried to hobble. Fell again.

  Mason followed him in a shooter’s stance. He glanced from one side to the other and back again to make sure they weren’t being led into another ambush.

  “Drop your weapon!” Layne shouted.

  The man crawled behind the trunk of a burned tree. Sat up and tucked his legs to his chest. Raised his weapon.

  “It’s over,” Mason said.

  The man peeked around the side of the trunk and Layne fired right past his face. He ducked back. His shoulders heaved with his heavy breathing. He knew there was no way out of this situation.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It is.”

  He moved with the speed of purpose. Pressed the barrel of his pistol to his temple.

  Mason aimed and prepared to shoot.

  The other man beat him to it.

  A flash of discharge from behind the tree. Spatters of fluid captured within its corona, as though frozen in time. Then darkness once more.

  The report echoed through the desolate forest.

  “Jesus,” Layne said. “What the hell was that?”

  The man’s hand fell limply to his side, his blood sizzling on the barrel. He leaned slowly out from behind the tree and collapsed onto his side. The exiting bullet had blown out the entire side of his skull.

  Mason sighted the forest down his Glock in case there were still any more of them out there.

  “Welcome to my world,” he said.

  24

  The lights from the state police cruisers stained the surrounding forest in alternating shades of red and blue, making the shadows lurking behind the trees appear to pulsate. The entire highway was shut down and every available officer in the county was either already here or well on his way. The forensic team’s van was angled across the shoulder of the road, its headlights directed toward the forest, where the evidence response team documented the crime scene. The occasional flash of a photograph caused the distant trees to draw contrast from the night.

  Mason sat in the back of the ambulance parked on the opposite side of the road, pressing an ice pack against the base of his skull and listening to his partner’s phone call. Her side of the conversation anyway. She spoke quietly so as not to distract the paramedic stitching up the nasty gash on her forearm.

  The DHS had yet to produce the list of the surviving members of the Chemical Corps with experience in either the production or decommission of chemical weapons that it had promised to Locker. The FPS contingent on the strike force—Addison and Salazar—had volunteered to follow up but had yet to make any headway. Now that they’d drawn out the enemy, though, there was no time to waste, so Layne had called an acquaintance at the Army Criminal Investigations Command in an effort to bypass formal channels and procure the personnel information they needed if they were going to figure out who had the kind of skill set required to produce the Novichok. It couldn’t have been a very long list and the UNSUB’s name had to be on it.

  Mason watched a handful of criminalists in white jumpsuits comb through the sheriff department’s Tahoe in search of answers they’d never find to questions they didn’t know to ask. All they knew was that four of their colleagues were lying dead in the Barrens and they’d probably never understand why.

  Deputy Karl Mills had been a decorated officer, an usher at church, and volunteer wildfire fighter in his spare time. Wes Phelps and Gino Tomassi had been full-time firefighters with a combined twenty years of service to the New Jersey Forest Fire Service and not so much as a single misdemeanor between them. Only Tom Wahl, the man who’d decorated the forest with the contents of his skull, had anything remotely resembling a criminal record, which included little more than a single conviction for poaching and a pair of drunk and disorderly charges. All four of them had recently caught up on mortgages that had fallen several months behind.

  Mason could only guess where the men had been approached about taking care of the flatbeds and the body inside, but they’d obviously received the carrot before they were shown the stick. Mexican cartels used similar tactics to guarantee the loyalty of their narcos, whose families were dragged into the streets and publicly executed if they skimmed so much as a peso, which was why officers had been dispatched to the homes of known family members of the decedents. Regardless of the locals’ insistence to the contrary, Mason knew they weren’t dealing with a drug-trafficking organization. The Thirteen were as patient as they were ruthless. The moment those four men failed to preserve their secret, the names of their loved ones had been written on a ledger somewhere, and would be checked off at some unknown time in the future.

  “The army’s going to send us a list of all personnel who either worked with the creation of or the subsequent decommission of their chemical weapons stockpiles,” Layne said. “Apparently, it’s a really long list that covers nearly eighty years.”

  “Did they give you a time frame?” Mason asked.

  “Sometime tomorrow. The majority of the records are still on paper and housed at the National Archives in St. Louis, so someone’s going to have to physically pull the files.”

  Mason nodded. He’d expected worse.

  “What about Algren?” he asked. “What’d she have to say about all of this?”

  Layne had reported the news of their ambush to the head of the strike force while Mason had cleared the area to make sure there weren’t any other attackers.

  “She’s already reached out to the Bureau chiefs in Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and D.C. to secure additional resources,” Layne said.

  “Did you ask her about the precursor chemicals?”

  “Homeland’s still working on it.”

  “There are only six domestic manufacturers.”

  “Right, which is why she’s trying an end around with white-collar crimes to get their records through back channels.”

  “So she said a whole lot of nothing.”

  Layne smirked and pulled her sleeve down over the bandage on her forearm, baring her teeth when it grazed the wound.

  “She scheduled a conference call for two hours from now. Hopefully, the other agents will be able to give us something useful.”

  Mason moved the compress from the base of his skull to his forehead. He was more angry than he was hurt, mainly at himself for the way everything had gone down. The men they’d killed weren’t sadistic murderers. They’d simply been desperate and made a deal with the devil, then panicked when the FBI showed up, seemingly out of the b
lue. Had he and Layne not found the broken glass and recognized what it meant, those four men would still be alive, but they would have wasted even more time coming to the realization that the UNSUB’s trail ended here. Their only actual leads were sitting in various morgues, awaiting identification and formal determination of cause of death, both of which were taking an absurd amount of time, especially considering that at any moment countless people could die in a manner he wouldn’t have wished upon his worst enemy.

  Layne’s phone chimed to alert her to an incoming text message. She awakened the device and studied the screen.

  “Algren says Behavioral’s expecting our call.”

  “Didn’t she already forward them everything we had on the UNSUB? Surely there’s enough there to generate at least a preliminary profile.”

  “They apparently need help—and I quote—‘qualifying a curious dichotomy of character.’”

  Mason knew exactly what they meant. There was a duality to the UNSUB that defied classification, more than merely having personal and professional aspects of his personality. He simultaneously exhibited a desire to kill and an unwillingness to do so. He didn’t murder his victims himself, so, technically, there was no blood on his hands. He’d given the men behind the wall the choice of either asphyxiating or triggering the release of the sarin. A case could be made that by doing so he’d demonstrated mercy, while at the same time subjecting them to an obscene level of cruelty. Had his only goal been to wipe out millions of people, they’d be dead already.

  There was more to his plot than any of them could see. If he was anything like the Hoyl, then someone even more dangerous was pulling his strings. The Novichok A-234 was a means to an end for the master, but it was the suffering of his victims that fueled the UNSUB. They needed to be stopped before, like an eclipse, their motivations aligned and darkness descended.

  “You okay handling this one?” Mason asked.

  “Sure.” She raised an eyebrow. “What are you going to do?”