“I was thinking more along the lines of vaccines and therapeutic agents, although that’s a distinct possibility, and also part of the challenge of evaluating a company of this nature. There isn’t a single industry it hasn’t at least dipped a toe in.…” Gunnar furrowed his brow and looked Mason dead in the eyes. “That’s not the kind of answer you’re looking for, though, is it? You want to know if anyone associated with Nautilus wields the kind of power that could place him among the Thirteen.”
Mason hadn’t realized it until he heard the words spoken aloud, but that was precisely what he was asking. Someone at the top of the hierarchy of such a massive and profitable corporation would undoubtedly have access to the kind of wealth and connections that would make him a viable suspect.
“Well?” Ramses said.
“The problem with a company this large and diverse is that its power structure is divided and spread out across the entirety of its financial interests. Executive councils, management groups, and numerous boards of directors all functioning under the same umbrella. It’s like the federal government in that sense. There are so many checks and balances that no one person is ever in complete control, and the majority of the time the left hand has no idea what the right is doing. The closest thing it has to what one might consider a presidential-type leader is Slate Langbroek, the chairman of the executive board, which in his case is more of a figurehead role, since he doesn’t possess any true operational influence. He’s the guy the executive council keeps in the public eye so it can get the real work done behind closed boardroom doors.”
“People like Charles Raymond.”
“Exactly.”
“So how does someone with so much influence and prestige end up murdered in the same manner as the victims from the cornfield? He and Peter Cavanaugh were on the complete opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. What do a self-employed truck driver and a corporate executive have in common?”
“The Scarecrow,” Ramses said.
Mason grabbed his cell phone and flipped through his saved images until he found the snapshot of the photograph he’d found inside the farmhouse after the explosion. It had obviously been taken on a military installation and featured a group of twelve uniformed men, all of whose eyes had been scratched out. Raymond and his birthmark weren’t among them, but it stood to reason that whatever he’d done to incur the wrath of the Scarecrow was likely related to these men.
“Can you try running this picture through your program?” Mason asked. He slid his phone across the table to Gunnar. “I’m confident one of these guys is Cavanaugh, but our forensics team hasn’t had any luck conclusively identifying him, let alone any of the others. This is where everything started, and the key to figuring out the Scarecrow’s ultimate goal.”
“I don’t know, Mace. My program works by generating a faceprint that maps the relative location of facial features to one another, half of which involve the eyes specifically. Their color. Their width and shape. The distance between them and the breadth of the nose. The space between the outer corners and the sides of the face. The thickness of the eyebrows. The configuration of the eyelids. The rest of the face is far more susceptible to the ravages of age, too. A picture this old? These men have to be in their seventies by now. At least. I’d be surprised if even their closest friends at the time would recognize them anymore.”
“Will you at least try?”
“Of course. I just want you to understand that you’re asking for a miracle.”
He headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Mason asked.
“Do you see me carrying my laptop?” Gunnar asked.
“No.”
“Then I’d probably better go get it, don’t you think?”
Ramses laughed.
Mason glared at him. First of all, it wasn’t that funny. Second, he didn’t want to have to explain the presence of his unexpected guests to Layne, who was asleep just down the hall, if they woke her up.
“Come on,” Ramses said. “How often does Gunnar say anything remotely humorous? Try taking that stick out of your ass for a few minutes and see how it feels.”
“There could be as much as four thousand gallons of a lethal Soviet nerve agent right outside that door at this very moment. If someone so much as tossed a water balloon filled with it from the roof, you and I, and every single person within a half-mile radius, would be killed in just about the most horrific way imaginable.”
Ramses leaned his head to the side, causing his neck to make an audible cracking sound. He worked his jaw behind his closed lips. When he returned his head to its natural position, his eyes were cold and flat.
“So what do you need from me?”
“Call Alejandra and have her send this Anomaly guy a message.”
“What do you want her to say?”
“If he’s on the inside, like we suspect, then he potentially has access to sensitive information, and right now we need to learn everything we possibly can about Rand Marchment, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Where does he fit in?”
“That’s what we need to figure out, because if I’m right, not only will he lead us to the Scarecrow and the Novichok; he’ll lead us to the Thirteen.”
41
Gunnar’s laptop hummed while his program ran the photograph Mason had recovered from the farmhouse in Wray through an exhaustive series of databases, comparing the few facial features it could accurately map against pictures that would essentially have to have been taken within a few years either way and from the exact same angle to conclusively identify the subject.
Mason hovered impatiently, only now realizing the futility of his request.
“Still nothing?” he asked.
Gunnar shook his head. Despite the mutilation of their eyes, it was hard to believe the program hadn’t encountered a single photograph that was at least a partial match to any of them. Granted, their age placed their best years before the advent of the Internet, but their uniforms proved they’d been military at some point, which meant there had to be a record of them somewhere, and the fact that even Gunnar hadn’t been able to find it was more than a little troubling.
“Are you reading this the same way I am?” Gunnar asked.
“We’re looking for ghosts.”
“Like I said, Mace, making people disappear is easier said than done in this day and age.”
“There has to be a reason the Scarecrow left pictures like this one for us to find,” Mason said.
Gunnar leaned back, inclined his chin, and looked momentarily contemplative.
“I have an idea,” he said. “I’m not sure if it’ll work, but it’s worth a try.”
“What are you thinking?”
Gunnar brought up the picture of the men standing in front of the government installation and zoomed in on the barracks.
“Look just above the roofline,” he said. “See the crown of that red-and-white-checkered water tower to the left and what almost looks like the top level of a parking garage to the right? Over there. With the external walkways and the electrical works. It’s possible that if I tweak the program so that it treats the physical structures like facial features, we might be able to use them to identify the location. We’d have to encounter another photograph taken from pretty much the same distance and angle or it won’t generate even a partial match, but maybe if I’m able to broaden the tolerances, we just might get lucky.”
“It’s worth a try,” Mason said. “It’s not like you can get fewer than zero hits.”
Gunnar set to work without another word. His fingers flew across the keyboard, opening and closing screens faster than Mason could visually keep up.
Ramses burst into the room from the outer hallway, his phone pressed to his ear.
“Allie sent the message like you wanted,” he said. “She’d barely finished typing when Anomaly replied, but she doesn’t know how to respond.”
“What did he say?” Mas
on asked.
“That you’re asking the wrong question.”
Ramses put the call on speaker and handed his phone to Mason.
“Alejandra,” he said. “What, exactly, did you ask him?”
“I wrote ‘What do you know about Rand Marchment?’” she said.
It was a simple question that could have been interpreted in any number of ways, an open-ended query meant to draw out whatever information their anonymous source wanted to share. That Anomaly deflected implied not that he couldn’t answer the question, but, rather, that they needed to rephrase it to get the answer they wanted. It suddenly struck Mason that Anomaly shared his suspicions about Marchment, the very ones he’d been contemplating since his debriefing last night. How had he been promoted into the right positions to manipulate the investigations into both the Hoyl and the Scarecrow? What was his relationship to the Thirteen, and to what lengths was he willing to go to carry out their plans?
“Type this,” Mason said. “‘What do you not know about Rand Marchment?’”
He heard the clicking sounds of Alejandra pecking at the keys nearly two thousand miles away.
“Let me see what I can find,” Gunnar said. He opened a new window and set to work, lines of code blurring past. “I ought to at least be able to access his federal personnel file.”
“Here is his response,” Alejandra said. “‘That is the right question.’”
“So what’s the answer?” Mason asked.
Again, he heard her fingertips striking the keyboard.
“‘How he came to power,’” she said. “What do you want me to— Never mind. He terminated the connection.”
“That’s not especially helpful,” Mason said.
“This guy’s just messing with us,” Ramses said.
“Maybe he is,” Gunnar said, “but there are several distinct gaps in Marchment’s personnel file. The first corresponds to the late seventies and early eighties, when he went from a private in the army to a special agent in the DEA; the second, more than thirty years later, when he was promoted from chief of the regional office in Mexico City to assistant administrator of the Operational Support Division, the number-four man in the entire Drug Enforcement Administration.”
“What did he do during those missing years?” Mason asked.
“To go from being an enlisted soldier in the army to a special agent in the DEA, he would have had to secure his discharge and then earn a college degree,” Ramses said.
“That explains the first gap,” Gunnar said. “What about the second?”
“The cartels are wired into everything in Mexico. The DEA can’t afford for them to find out the names of its agents, both for their safety and the safety of their loved ones back home. It’s a distinct possibility that those records were either never entered into a searchable database or deliberately deleted.”
“So both of these gaps could be completely innocuous—”
“And our boy Anomaly is full of shit,” Ramses said.
“Or it was during those missing years that he was co-opted by the Thirteen,” Mason said. “We need to figure out exactly where he was and what he was doing.”
“I’ll look into his financials and see what I can find,” Gunnar said. “It’s hard to believe that a man so obviously ambitious could be bought with the promise of promotion alone. There’s only so much power that can be amassed within the constraints of the system.”
And yet here was a man who’d rocketed through the ranks into a position one step removed from a cabinet official, a man whose career trajectory could very well have followed that of Peter Cavanaugh and, quite possibly, that of the other men they’d found dead on his property. Based on their age and the pictures displayed inside the farmhouse, it was more than likely that the victims had served at the same time as Marchment. Maybe the deputy secretary’s face was even among those with their eyes scratched out, which would explain his extreme reaction to the mere mention of the Scarecrow.
Mason had no doubt Marchment had been the intended recipient of the monster’s message in the cornfield, the high-ranking official inside the investigation who knew exactly who he was and what he intended to do, but if Marchment had truly been corrupted by the Thirteen, then what did he have to fear from their pet monster? And why was he in the city if there were thousands of gallons of Novichok just waiting to be released? The answers they needed were hidden in the past, at a time when the most heinous war criminals were integrated into the military infrastructure and in a place where they labored to produce one of the most fearsome arsenals the world had ever known, weapons of mass destruction that had evolved into the threat hanging over their heads at this very moment, and there was only one place to look.
He turned to Ramses and held his stare.
“I need to know about the army.”
His old friend’s eyes narrowed. The expression on his face became one completely lacking in emotion. It felt as though the air had been sucked out of the room.
“Fuck you, Mason.” He ground his teeth back and forth and glared at Mason without once blinking. “There are very few things that are off-limits to you. That’s one of them.”
“This isn’t about you, Ramses. It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with you at all.”
“That part of my life exists at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. Nothing gets in or out. You hear me?”
“I need to know where you’d have to look to find someone who knew how to make chemical weapons.”
“Go to YouTube and you’ll find a dozen tutorials. It’s not rocket science, man.”
“I’m not talking about small quantities. The man who nearly killed Alejandra, the man with stars for eyes. He calls himself the Scarecrow and he’s out there right now. Sitting on enough Novichok to wipe out this entire city a thousand times over. And we’re running out of time to stop him.”
Ramses was silent for a full minute. His eyes became distant. When he finally spoke, it was in a hollow voice.
“That kind of thing was way before my time. You probably know more about it than I do.”
“Nearly all of the sarin was produced at facilities like the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado. Chances are the Scarecrow worked at one of them prior to their being decommissioned. I was hoping you’d be able to tell me something about them, or maybe what happened to the chemical engineers who designed those weapons.”
“That’s not the kind of thing they put in the recruitment brochure.”
“What about the men who worked there? The people who actually mixed the chemicals and assembled the weapons?”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
“The army knows exactly who this guy is.”
“If they did, they would have interceded by now.”
“Rank and file, maybe, but not the bigwigs. This plays right into their hands.”
“Under what circumstances does releasing a chemical weapon and killing millions of civilians benefit the military?”
“You’re kidding, right? At this very moment, there are more than twenty thousand U.S. troops deployed on American soil in defiance of the Posse Comitatus Act and under the auspices of, quote, unquote, ‘specialized training for urban conflict and general preparedness for civil unrest and CBRN attack.’ Twenty thousand troops who can be dispatched at the drop of a hat and assembled in any city in the country within a matter of hours. We’re not talking about the National Guard here, either. This is the First Brigade Combat Team of the Third Infantry, the same guys who spearheaded the coalition forces and took Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom, some of the most highly trained men at our disposal. And right now, they’re camped out at NORTHCOM, just waiting to step in and assist law enforcement and emergency management. Not just them, either. The Unified Command Plan puts nearly the entire mother-loving air force under USNORTHCOM’s emergency command. You think it matters what we do? The powers that pull the strings? They release a ton of nerve gas and kill millions, they win. The
y turn the military loose in our streets in response and they win again. I don’t know if you’re paying attention, but this entire fucking game’s already been rigged from start to finish.”
“Do you really believe that?” Mason asked.
Ramses sighed and ran his fingers through his slick hair.
“Depends on when you ask. You stare at this stuff long enough and you start seeing patterns that aren’t necessarily there.”
“No one wants martial law,” Gunnar said.
“If that’s really what you think, then you aren’t paying attention,” Ramses said. “Getting power is one thing; keeping it is another. You can’t rule the world without conquering it first.”
“If you’re suggesting the Thirteen have the ability to use the United States military as their own private security force, then we’ve already lost.”
“Someone still has to try,” Mason said.
Ramses looked him up and down, then nodded.
“The Scarecrow, you say? What’s with these fucking nutjobs and the lame-ass names?”
“I don’t know … Ramses.”
He smiled.
“I don’t have the answers you’re looking for, but I think I know someone who just might.”
42
If Mason’s old friends were going to stick around New York for any length of time, they were going to need to find somewhere else to stay, which Ramses made abundantly clear every chance he got. The Plaza Hotel was just across Central Park, on Fifth Avenue, the walk to which would afford him the opportunity to discreetly observe what was going on inside the park and around the Mayfair Towers. He could probably also use some privacy to call the contact he believed would be able to illuminate some of the finer aspects of the art of chemical weapons manufacture. If Mason was right about the nature of their relationship, having a federal agent within earshot while doing so would likely cramp his style.
“You’re going to seriously owe me for this one,” Ramses said.
“Put it on my tab,” Mason said.
“The whole point of extending a tab is so that it can one day be repaid. You know that, right?”
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