The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  The IED had been shaped to inflict the most visceral damage possible to those within a relatively narrow blast radius. Had it been designed to explode outward in all directions, Mason and Layne would have been killed with the others, rather than hurled over the edge of the thirty-sixth-floor terrace, five hundred feet above the ground.

  The lead ERT agent caught up with them and led them out onto the balcony. Despite the police lights flashing from the street below them, the remainder of the city remained dark and oblivious.

  “We found traces of ammonium nitrate, ethyl alcohol, nitromethane, and powdered aluminum,” the woman said. She was short and pale, which made her freckles stand out like beacons. “In the hands of a skilled chemist or a munitions expert, those are the ingredients one would use to make homemade C-4.”

  “Where can you buy those supplies?” Layne asked. “Maybe someone working there will be able to remember him and give us a physical description.”

  “The ammonium nitrate can be prilled from most common fertilizers. You can get the alcohol from an auto-parts store and the rest from any college chemistry lab.”

  “What about the detonator?” Mason asked.

  “We haven’t found any traces of it, but the way you described how it worked, he could have easily made it himself from a doorbell, some nichrome wire, and a lithium-ion battery.”

  “So that’s a dead end,” Layne said.

  “Not necessarily. He didn’t make the explosive here and we found no traces of the chemicals in the apartment below us. Homemade C-4 doesn’t have the same shelf life as weapons-grade plastic explosives. It’s the kind of thing you want to use pretty much right after making it, which means his base of operations can’t be too far from here. Definitely in the city.”

  “Who owns the apartment downstairs?” Mason asked.

  “A company called Maledict Management Services.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “I thought you might have, since its corporate headquarters is in Colorado and the IRS is currently investigating it for fraud.”

  Mason connected the dots. During the hunt for the Hoyl, he’d stumbled upon a criminal enterprise that incorporated hundreds of fictitious companies, created verifiable histories for them, and set them up on shelves to age like bottles of wine.

  Maledict must have been one of them.

  “It’s a shelf company,” Mason said. “Does it own any other properties?”

  “Not anywhere around here.”

  “The woman across the hall said she hadn’t seen anyone in the apartment downstairs in a month.”

  “Your guys are conducting the interviews. All I can say is, the evidence doesn’t support that observation.”

  “Someone must have seen him, then.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  “Let us know if you find anything else,” Mason said. “Anything at all.”

  She nodded and walked back into what was left of the great room.

  “That wasn’t very helpful,” Layne said.

  “Maybe not, but it supports our theory that the Scarecrow has some amount of military experience. Get ahold of your contact at army CIC and see what you can do about expediting the personnel list of everyone who was involved with the production and decommission of its chemical arsenal. And while you’re at it, find out if they have anything on the guy who lived here. Charles Raymond. The Scarecrow targeted him specifically and stalked him for what looks like months, judging by the pictures.”

  Despite the victim’s facial deformities, identification had been a piece of cake, thanks to a birthmark on Raymond’s temple that appeared in just about every picture ever taken of him.

  “Why kill him here when he could be made to suffer for days on end in the middle of nowhere, like the others?” Layne asked. “The Scarecrow was lucky to get a single day in a place like this. Even with as well as he chose the location.”

  “We must have discovered the victims in the cornfield too soon and forced him to enact a fallback plan he already had in place,” Mason said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He poured the concrete for that post bracket at least a year ago, and think how long it must have taken to secure the apartment underneath the victim’s.”

  “He has to have been planning this for years.”

  “Maybe even longer,” Mason said. “I can’t shake the feeling that this all goes back to the army. We need that personnel list.”

  “I’ll follow up with my contact,” Layne said. “And one of us had better update Algren, too.”

  “You handle the calls and I’ll set up a meeting with the woman who lived across the hall from the Scarecrow. She must have gotten a good look at him at some point and ought to be able to provide a physical description, if nothing else. Maybe your guy will come through and she’ll be able to ID him from the personnel files.”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  “I should also grab a couple of rooms,” he said. “There’s a hotel a block over, on Seventy-first. We’re going to have to sleep sometime, and we could probably use a base of operations for the time being.”

  “I’ll call you if I find out anything,” Layne said.

  Mason nodded and headed back through the ruined penthouse suite. While he wanted nothing more than to scrub off the soot under a hot shower, it would have to wait. What he needed most right now was some time on his own. Until he was completely convinced that Layne hadn’t been compromised, like his two previous partners, there were certain aspects of the investigation he needed to keep to himself—namely, his sources. With Homeland actively attempting to prevent the release of the autopsies of the victims in the cornfield and dragging its feet on providing the names of the men who’d served in the chemical corps, he was going to have to find a way to work around them, especially if he wanted to figure out why they were obstructing the investigation.

  There was only one man he knew who might be able to help him find out the truth and, fortunately, he was already expecting Mason’s call.

  36

  On his way to the hotel, Mason arranged an interview with the woman from the apartment across the hall from the one the Scarecrow had used to surveil Charles Raymond. He’d already logged into the secure virtual conference room by the time he reached his room on the tenth floor, alerting Johan to his arrival. If Gunnar had piqued the old man’s curiosity about the nature of the call as well as he thought he had, then Mason wouldn’t have to wait very long. In fact, he’d barely set down his laptop on the small table when the screen brightened and Johan appeared on the monitor, wearing a fuzzy blue bathrobe over linen pajamas. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. The corner of his mouth twitched, betraying his impatience.

  Mason wished they were having this conversation in person. There was so much he wanted to know and even more he didn’t yet know to ask, but right now, there was specific information he needed from this man and he didn’t have the time or patience to jump through hoops to get it.

  “Hello again, my young friend,” Johan said. “I must confess I am somewhat perplexed as to why you insisted upon meeting again so soon, and under such auspicious circumstances. To what do I owe this rather unexpected pleasure?”

  “I need answers and I’ve encountered an extreme amount of resistance trying to get them,” Mason said.

  “I am flattered that you think I might be of assistance and, of course, I will help you in any way that I can.”

  “What do you know about Novichok agents?”

  Johan raised his brows, as though mildly surprised.

  “I am only peripherally aware of the attempts of the Soviet Union to improve upon the foundation laid by German scientists.”

  “This version in particular—A-234—is an upgrade of sarin that makes it not only chemically stable but persistent in both liquid and gaseous forms.”

  “Are you certain we are dealing with one based upon sarin and not one of the other G-series agents? Think carefully. The ans
wer is of great consequence. We do not wish to find ourselves following the wrong trail.”

  Mason thought of the whiteboards in Johan’s archives that had displayed the pictures of the woman in black and the shadowed figure. The answer to this very question likely determined which one of them was waiting at the end of that trail. The former led to Colonia Dignidad in Chile via a network of ratlines, the latter to the dissolution of Unit 731 and the eventual formation of a cult that had launched a chemical attack on the Japanese parliament, a cult he was beginning to believe had given rise to a man who thought of himself as the Scarecrow. A man who’d never been photographed as more than a silhouette among the shadows, spawned from the residua of an organization without conscience or compassion, a vile entity responsible for the horrific medical experimentation resulting in the deaths of thousands of prisoners of war. A man who now had access to enough Novichok A-234 to extinguish all life on the planet and the willingness to use it.

  “There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said.

  “Have you seen it with your own eyes?”

  Mason didn’t reply.

  “Then we must proceed with alacrity,” Johan said. “I fear we might already be too late.”

  “What do you know?”

  Johan sighed and settled back into his seat.

  “I told you about my great-uncle Wilhelm, who worked as a chemist for IG Farben, the German industrial conglomerate that developed the Zyklon gas used to kill millions of my people in the concentration camps. He was part of a team that developed a pesticide that demonstrated applications above and beyond the mere extermination of insects, as he ultimately learned for himself. It was shipped off to the German Army Weapons Office, along with the other chemicals that were rushed into mass production and would come to be known as the G-series agents—tabun, sarin, soman, and cyclosarin—stockpiles of which were estimated to have reached as much as ten tons.”

  “If Hitler had weapons that deadly at his disposal, why didn’t he use them?” Mason asked.

  “Not for lack of want, I assure you. Some speculate it was because of the indiscriminate manner by which they kill, but considering his willingness to send his own troops to the slaughter, I refute any theories of conscience. I believe he had a plan, but he simply ran out of time. His development department was on the verge of perfecting the V-2 rocket, which was rumored to be able to reach even our distant shores. Had the tides of war not turned when they did, he would have wiped out his opposition from afar and paved the way for the conquest of Asia and the Americas.”

  “So the war ended and there were ten tons of chemical weapons just sitting around, waiting for someone to take them?”

  “You would think so, would you not? And yet there is no record to indicate what happened to those stores, one way or the other. It is rumored the Soviets took them. As you must know, by the end of the war, ours was an uneasy alliance at best. The fate of those weapons, however, is of no consequence in the grand design. Now that everyone had the recipe, the former Allies could simply go back home and begin manufacturing it for themselves. Which is precisely what we did. After all, the most effective weapon is the one everyone has. The fear of reprisals—mutually assured destruction—obviates its use. Hence, the need to tinker with the formula to improve upon the design.”

  Mason recalled the question his father had posed: If you wanted to make something like that, who would you hire to do it? That was the question at the very heart of the investigation, the answer to which the DHS seemed desperate to prevent them from learning, the reason why it had attempted to conceal the results of the autopsies of the victims in the cornfield, why it had so desperately needed Locker to identify the dead men from behind the wall, and why it had yet to provide the list of military personnel with working knowledge of the production of chemical weapons.

  It feared that the Scarecrow was one of its own.

  “Who was responsible for its manufacture? Where does someone find the kind of men willing to produce Nazi-designed weapons of mass destruction?”

  Johan blinked several times and for a moment appeared genuinely confused.

  “You mean you do not know?”

  Mason did his best to maintain a neutral expression.

  “The same Nazis who were making it over there,” Johan said. “The very same ones who devoted their lives to exterminating every Jew on the planet. We brought them back to America with us. You must understand that our country did not enter the First World War as the global force it is today. We celebrated our victory in that war by roaring through the twenties and colonizing within our borders. Europe, on the other hand, was faced with the daunting task of rebuilding. Cities lay in ruin. Entire populations were displaced. All around these people were signs of death and destruction. It wasn’t enough to defeat a momentarily reunited Germany; it needed to be ground beneath their collective heel.”

  “All while millions were dying from the Spanish flu,” Mason said. “Just so the companies holding the patent for the cure could make billions.”

  “And billions more could be stolen from Germany, or at least that’s how its citizens perceived it. While their fathers and brothers were still rotting in the fields and trenches, the victors began systematically dismantling their country. They were stripped of their colonies and saddled with prohibitive sanctions. Their perceived oppressors, aided by ‘evil’ Jewish bankers, imposed crippling financial reparations. When they were unable to pay, what little they owned was taken from them.”

  Mason glanced at his watch. He was already running late. Layne was going to have to interview the woman from the apartment across the hall from the Scarecrow’s without him.

  “An entire generation was raised in poverty and steeped in resentment,” Johan said. “It was only natural that it had a twenty-year head start on the rest of us when it came to preparing for what it considered a war to reunify the Germanic peoples, a Second World War we easily could have—and probably should have—lost. We could not allow ourselves to be caught off guard again, especially with the Communist tide rising over Eastern Europe. So we set about building an arsenal the likes of which the world had never known.”

  It was strange that Johan could talk about the prewar Germans in an almost sympathetic manner, even while actively hunting Nazi war criminals and anyone who might have aided them along the way. Mason supposed it was all a matter of choices, and theirs had placed them on a collision course with an assassin with a .22, a camera, and a sack of worthless coins.

  “Two decades is an eternity in an arms race,” Johan said. “We had tanks and planes, but that was nothing compared to intercontinental rockets and weapons of mass destruction. We could not smuggle them out of Germany under the noses of the Soviets, so instead, we collected the scientists and engineers who designed and built them. We struck a deal with the devil under the guise of Operation Paperclip and seemingly overnight went from lagging behind to leading the race toward Armageddon.”

  “What does this have to do with what’s happening now?” Mason asked.

  “Everything,” Johan said. He grew increasingly animated as he talked. “We offered amnesty to murderers responsible for the deaths of millions from the safety of their offices and labs and executed their minions at Nuremberg. We brought them to America and they picked right up where they’d left off. In exchange for citizenship, they gave us the fields of nuclear chemistry and atomic physics. We granted them safe passage to and from both Germany and Argentina, and they reciprocated with uranium enrichment and NASA. They gave us the advanced technology of their air force, and we delivered it into the hands of Lockheed and Martin Marietta. We welcomed the enemy into our midst and built our entire scientific and military infrastructure around them!”

  Mason was familiar with Operation Paperclip. There’d been plenty of recognizable public figures among its organizers—like James Forrestal, the first secretary of defense, and Sheldon Boscage, grandfather of a future president—and even more among the recruits. Walter Dornberge
r, a major general in the Luftwaffe, had developed guided and air-to-surface missiles for the U.S. Air Force. Wernher von Braun, a major in the SS, who’d helped design the V-2 rocket, had used his expertise to help land the first men on the moon. Reinhard Gehlen, a Wehrmacht lieutenant general, and his network of spies had been integrated into the CIA to keep tabs on the Soviets.

  “The marriage of Paperclip and the armed forces birthed the facilities at Fort Detrick—home of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research—from which sprung specialized installations all across the country, including one of the largest chemical weapons manufacturing sites in the world, within miles of downtown Denver.”

  “I’ve lived in Colorado my entire life,” Mason said. “I’d know if that were the case.”

  “You’ve been to the airport, haven’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “All of that land from Commerce City to DIA was once the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a secured base responsible for the production and warehousing of the majority of the country’s chemical arsenal. Around the turn of the century, it was designated a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency, which remediated it and transformed it into a wildlife refuge—at least the parts that aren’t still hazardous—but it was only one of many, most of which are still in use today, in one capacity or another.”

  “So for the better half of the last century, if you were in the market for someone with ready access to or working knowledge of the manufacture of chemical weapons of mass destruction, you could have found him within shouting distance of the Capitol Building.”

  “Among other places, but you obviously see my point. It would not be difficult to find someone with practical experience making sarin if you had connections within the military-industrial complex.”

  “Then if I were looking for someone to help mass-produce a large volume of sarin to serve as a precursor to A-234, then odds are that someone served at one of these installations.”