The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  “I have a few phone calls of my own to make, starting with the Yuma County ME. There’s no reason we shouldn’t have COD for the men in the cornfield by now.”

  Mason tossed her the car keys so she could have a little privacy to talk to Behavioral. Truth be told, he needed some space of his own. He knew exactly how Layne would feel about his utilizing help from outside their ranks, and he wasn’t prepared to explain his rationale for doing so, at least not until he was certain he could trust her. Not killing him when she’d been presented with the perfect opportunity was a positive development in that regard, though.

  He wandered away from the commotion and punched in the number for the Yuma County ME. The number rang several times before the call was routed to an automated service. He disconnected and tried again, but achieved the same result. They must have set incoming calls to the main line to forward automatically. He returned his phone to his pocket, drew the stealth model, and speed-dialed Gunnar, who answered on the second ring.

  “What are you doing in New Jersey?”

  That Gunnar could triangulate his location in a matter of seconds didn’t surprise Mason. In fact, nothing his old friend did surprised him anymore.

  “That’s kind of why I’m calling,” Mason said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind reaching out to Johan on my behalf.”

  “Does this have anything to do with the sudden surge in energy futures trading?”

  “That’s your area,” Mason said. “I’m trying to get some answers and encountering an unusual amount of resistance through routine channels.”

  “I take it this meeting will need to be virtual in nature.”

  “Time’s of the essence.”

  “He’ll want to know why.”

  “Let his curiosity get the better of him.”

  Gunnar was still chuckling when Mason ended the call. He was about to head back to the car, when he remembered the connection he’d made right before the ambush. He speed-dialed number three on his stealth phone. If he was right about the UNSUB and his MO, then there was a very real chance that Alejandra had seen him while he was rigging the knocking pen to kill her. Any detail she could remember about him, no matter how small, would be hugely beneficial right about now.

  He glanced back at the Crown Vic, where Layne sat in the passenger seat with the door open and her legs hanging out the side. Her posture, specifically the way she hung her head, suggested her arm was bothering her considerably more than she let on. Had she been co-opted by the Thirteen, all she would have had to do was stand down and let the men take him.

  Her voice carried to him from the distance. While he wasn’t close enough to make out her words, the tension and frustration in her voice were unmistakable. She was either an incredibly gifted actress or maybe, just maybe, she was exactly who she claimed to be. He needed to figure out which was the case, and in a hurry, because he could positively feel the investigative momentum building. The time would soon come when he was going to have to trust her, and the consequences of being wrong would be catastrophic.

  Alejandra picked up right before the call could go to voice mail. She sounded like he’d awakened her from a deep sleep.

  “Hello, James,” she said.

  “Tell him this had better be important,” Ramses said in the background.

  “I wouldn’t have even considered calling and dredging all of this up again if it weren’t,” Mason said. “There’s something I need to know, and you’re the only one who might be able to help me.”

  Alejandra was silent for so long that he feared the call might have been dropped.

  “I will help you if I can,” she said.

  “Think back to that night at the slaughterhouse. I want you to try to remember everything you can, specifically about when you were taken prisoner outside the complex.”

  Her exhalations came faster, heavier, as she mentally returned to the woods near the slaughterhouse, where she’d been posted with a Thunderstorm bullpup assault rifle with an under-barrel grenade launcher, waiting for him to give the signal to blow the whole place to hell.

  At that point, Mason had been out of contact with Gunnar and her for maybe five minutes, which he’d rationalized as their cellular signals being unable to penetrate the cinder-block walls. He hadn’t been upstairs in the room with the massive stainless-steel vats for more than three minutes, tops. It was then that he’d recognized the nature of the trap he’d inadvertently sprung and sprinted back down the stairs to the killing floor, where he’d found her bound in the knocking pen. That amounted to roughly eight minutes for which he couldn’t account. Eight minutes the Hoyl had used to abduct Gunnar and load him onto the tram in the underground tunnel. Eight minutes for an accomplice Mason now believed to be the UNSUB to rig Alejandra in a death trap designed to buy the two monsters time to escape.

  “I did not hear him behind me,” she said. “Not until it was too late. When I turned around, all I saw was a dark shape against the snow. It was blowing in my face. From behind him. He covered my mouth and nose with a cloth. It smelled of chemicals. Then everything went black.”

  “You lost consciousness.”

  “Yes, but not for very long. I do not think so anyway. I remember the snow. He dragged me through the snow by my arms.”

  “Did you see the man who took you? Do you remember anything about him?”

  “I remember moonlight, and then darkness. Snow, then no snow. He took me inside.”

  “Was he still dragging you?”

  “Yes. The floor was slick. Greasy. The smell … the feeling against my skin…”

  “There was no light at all?”

  “Not at first. Not until he turned on his flashlight.”

  “Did you see him then?”

  She was quiet for a long moment before speaking.

  “I saw his boots. Rubber soles. They squeaked on the floor. Black boots. Laces.”

  “Were they large? Small? What size do you think?”

  “Average. I think. Perhaps slightly smaller.” Mason imagined her closing her eyes while she relived the experience, an expression of torment on her face. “There was something else. The boots. They were taped where he tucked in his pants. I remember the tape. Black, like the boots. Like they tell you to do in Altar before you set out across the border and into the desert. To keep sand from getting inside.”

  “Or snow,” Mason said. It sounded like the kind of thing a man would do if he were preparing to leave on foot rather than by way of an underground tram. “Anything else about him? Anything at all?”

  “He led me to the pen. Dropped me on the ground. The metal was cold. Wet from his footsteps. I heard the screech of the chain. He held it in one hand, lifted my head by the hood of my sweatshirt with the other. Rested my neck on the … on the crush, then pulled my arms behind me. He placed the chain in my hands. Helped me close them around it. Squeezed them tight.”

  “He didn’t say anything?”

  “He did not have to.”

  “What about his hands?”

  “They were cold. And the fingers. They moved like the legs of la araña. Of a spider. They were small but strong. Very strong.”

  “He had to walk around in front of you after that, didn’t he?”

  “He kept the light pointed in my eyes. I could not see his face. Only his boceto, his … silueta.”

  “His silhouette?”

  “Yes. His hat, mostly. It was triangular. Like a cone, only flatter. The brim was very wide.”

  “The Hoyl wore those broad-brimmed hats, but that wasn’t him, was it?” Mason said.

  “Who else could it have…?” Alejandra’s voice trailed off as everything fell into place for her. “This man. He is the one we are hunting.”

  “Yeah,” Mason said. He turned around and looked at Layne, who stared back at him from across the distance. She was undoubtedly wondering what was taking him so long. “And I need all the help I can get to find him before a whole lot of people die.”

  “You must p
romise me that you will make sure he can never do to anyone else what he did to me.”

  “With pleasure, but I need to find him first. Try to remember everything you possibly can. Anything you might have seen or heard. The sound of his voice. Any unique physical trait. Anything at all I can use to identify him.”

  Several seconds passed, during which he could hear only the harsh rhythm of her breathing. When she finally spoke, it was in a firm voice.

  “Metal,” she said. “He had metal on his face. After he taped the flashlight to the chair, he turned around and stared at me. Like he was judging his own work. I remember reflections from his face. From his eyes. Like stars. His eyes looked like stars.”

  25

  It was a fifteen-mile drive to the Cumberland County ME’s office in the town of Woodbine. Mason figured if he pushed it through the tight turns of the national forest, he could make it in under twenty minutes. Layne rode in the passenger seat, with her laptop open on her thighs, the photographs of the five victims in the cornfield and the two behind the wall arranged on her screen like some hellish version of The Brady Bunch.

  “So we’re dealing with seven victims that we currently attribute to our UNSUB,” she said. “But what about the person who was incinerated in the truck? Where does he fit in?”

  “You know as well as I do that the guys who attacked us tonight didn’t kill him,” Mason said.

  “So you think he was already inside the vehicle when they set it on fire?”

  “Stands to reason, and if they believed they were potentially looking at murder charges in addition to arson, that would justify their panic.”

  “Okay. So we have three subsets of victims.”

  “And three distinct MOs,” Mason said. “The two men in the tunnel were presumably used as guinea pigs to test the efficacy of the Novichok, and the men in the cornfield were displayed in a manner that more closely fits the mold of a serial killer.”

  “We don’t know how the man in the truck was killed, though.”

  “That’s the point. We’re not supposed to. There’s something about either his identity or the manner of his death that would compromise their plans.”

  “‘Their’?”

  “We’ve already established that the UNSUB has no fear of getting caught, which means that someone else does. Someone threatened by the potential identification of the remains.”

  “Then what’s the UNSUB’s relationship to this second person?”

  “I think you were right when you drew a distinction between the personal and professional nature of his crimes. Manufacturing the Novichok was professional. Testing it on the men in the tunnel and torturing the men in the field were personal.”

  “So where does the body in the truck fit in?”

  “If we assume the second man in this scenario hired the UNSUB for his ability to manufacture a large quantity of Novichok and then the four men from tonight to clean up after him, then I’m betting the man in the truck is the link between the two.”

  “We need to figure out who he was.”

  “Or else this is where the trail ends.”

  Layne closed her computer, cradled it to her chest, and brought her feet up onto the seat. She rolled down the window and leaned her face into the breeze.

  “You know what I don’t understand?” she said. “Let’s say we’re right and one man hired another to mass-produce a chemical weapon. That’s a straight-up business transaction. Cash for Novichok. They could have built a lab anywhere, loaded the product onto any truck, and we would never have known. Why set up shop in a building where there’s already other horrible stuff going on, and why kill five men on the same property where he stole the trucks? It’s like he’s leaving bread crumbs for us.”

  Mason thought about the chemical formula he’d found on the clipboard in the otherwise sanitized lab.

  “He wants us to find him,” he said.

  “But we already know he’s fully convinced that we can’t.”

  “Then he’s leading us toward something.”

  “His partner, the man who hired him?” Layne asked. “Why would he want to do that?”

  “Because he has his own agenda.”

  “But is it separate from the dispersal of the Novichok? That’s our priority. We don’t have time to explore every tangent.”

  “There has to be a relationship between the first two subsets of victims and the UNSUB for him to have wanted them to suffer so badly before their deaths,” Mason said. “And if my theory is right, the dead man from the truck somehow links him to his business partner, which means that the victims are the key to finding both of them.”

  “We need to ID them,” Layne said.

  The headlights diffused into the surrounding forest, which encroached from the sides of the road. They caught the occasional flash of eye shine from nocturnal animals in the deep shadows.

  “Do me a favor,” Mason said. He removed his cell phone from his pocket and handed it to her. “Scroll through my contacts until you find Locker’s number, call him, and put him on speaker.”

  She did as he asked. Locker answered in an exhausted voice on the fourth ring.

  “You’re on speaker,” Mason said. “Special Agent Layne is here with me. Tell us you have some good news.”

  “Wilkinson was released from the hospital today and they expect Andrews to be able to go home by the end of the week.”

  Mason had gotten so caught up in the hunt that he’d nearly forgotten about the men who’d been exposed to the Novichok in the tunnel.

  “What happened to them isn’t on you.”

  “Maybe not, but if we don’t find this guy before he dips into his stockpile, the next time will be.”

  “We won’t let that happen,” Layne said.

  “I like your optimism, but from everything I’ve heard, we’re no closer to finding him now than we were yesterday.”

  “Who’s your source?” Mason asked.

  “Are you kidding? I’ve had Homeland crawling all over me since the moment they arrived.”

  “Even with their EOCs at heightened awareness, they had that hazmat team on-site awfully quickly, don’t you think? It’s almost like they were just sitting around waiting for something to happen.”

  “I have no doubt they know more about the situation than they’re letting on. We only know as much as we do because they’ve allowed it to filter down to us.”

  “Are they starting to clamp down on the flow of information?”

  “Not really. It’s strange. It’s almost like they’re just hovering around the periphery, waiting for something to happen.”

  “You think they anticipate a mass-casualty event?”

  “That’s what I thought at first, but their level of involvement doesn’t mesh with a theoretical threat level that high.”

  “Then what else could they be waiting for?” Layne asked.

  “Good question. They’ve basically set up shop right here in my lab, and yet they’re taking a hands-off approach. It’s like their presence is meant to remind us of who’s in charge, but they’ve yet to assume command. You know what that means, right?”

  Unfortunately, Mason did.

  The Department of Homeland Security was an autonomous agency whose directorship was a cabinet-level position, making it beholden neither to Congress nor the people of the United States. It fell under the auspices of the president of the United States himself, in effect creating his own private army. That wasn’t to say that Homeland didn’t have the best interests of the country at heart, only that it was under no obligation to divulge those interests. Or even justify the means by which it pursued them.

  For Locker, that meant he had agents watching his every move, poring over his work, and using it to draw conclusions to which he wasn’t privy, until such time as they either seized control or simply up and left. Their arrival had been too well timed and their actions strangely unpredictable. They merely maintained a presence inside the lab and on the Dodge-Hill Strike Force, wa
iting for the right moment to assert their authority.

  Mason wasn’t about to let that happen. He refused to be cut out of an investigation peripherally related to his wife’s death, the aftermath of which had revealed a shadow entity powerful enough to influence global events and, he now suspected, utilize the DHS for its own ends. They’d stumbled upon a plot they’d never been meant to find and now the investigation was about to be usurped by an agency capable of making it disappear beneath the shroud of national security.

  “It means we’re running out of time,” Mason said.

  “Surely anyone purchasing isopropanol or methylphosphonyl dichloride in the kind of volume required to convert potentially thousands of pounds of hydrogen fluoride into a viable nerve agent should be pretty easy to find, don’t you think?” Locker said.

  “The Homeland contingent on the strike force is following that lead.”

  “That alone should tell you everything you need to know. Either they’re grossly incompetent, which I highly doubt, or they already have a pretty good idea of where it originated.”

  “So why haven’t they stepped in and taken over the investigation?” Layne asked.

  There had to be an element Homeland still didn’t know, something they were unable to find out on their own. That was why they hadn’t thrown up the shield of the Patriot Act and sent them all packing. They needed Locker, or at least his resources, but what could he possibly have or be able to provide that they couldn’t get on their own?

  Mason slowed as he left the forest behind and entered the city limits. The traffic light at the main intersection flashed yellow, highlighting the darkened storefronts lining the sleepy thoroughfare. Another block and he turned into an asphalt lot beside a sign that read SOUTHERN REGION MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE. He parked right in front, beside a newer-model Escalade, which presumably meant the ME was already set up and waiting for them. They needed to pick her brain. There had to be a way to identify the cremated remains—

  The final piece fell into place.

  He suddenly understood exactly why the DHS was taking such a passive role. It needed something that only Locker was in a position to provide.