The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  Mason caught a glimpse of the Asian display through the doorway to his right, where a Bengal tiger appeared ready to pounce from its hind legs and a cobra struck from the wall behind it, on their way into the African room. Gorillas and apes, crocodiles and pythons, and even the heads of a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus stared down from their mounts, all of them seemingly focused upon the lion frozen mid-roar in the center of the room.

  “Both the Panthera leo before you and its Indian cousin Panthera tigris tigris in the exhibit we just passed developed a taste for human flesh and killed fifteen men between them,” O’Leary said. “I wish I could have better captured the sheer ferocity they displayed in their final moments.”

  He ran his fingertips along the lion’s flank on the way into his inner sanctum, a workroom housing tables covered with taxidermy tools. The head of a baboon was clamped in an enormous vise on the central table, its teeth bared and its hollow sockets staring accusingly at them. Flames nearly overflowed from the hearth behind it and cast a strange wavering glare over the entire room.

  “I didn’t see the smoke from the street,” Mason said.

  “It’s vented on the back side of the building, above the industrial laundry.”

  O’Leary assumed his position before the primate’s skull, tilted it to better see into its left eye socket, and lowered his magnifying lenses. He clipped a cigar and clenched it between his teeth. A flick of his Zippo and he puffed until the cherry glowed bright red. He commenced working as though they weren’t even there.

  “Aren’t these things flammable?” Layne asked. She waved vaguely toward the trophies in various stages of completion on the surrounding tables, the racks of preservative chemicals, and the bags of stuffing material.

  “I’ve got news for you, Special Agent.” O’Leary smiled and revealed bright white teeth seemingly too large for his mouth. His black eyes, magnified by the lenses, glowed like charcoal on the brink of igniting. “Everything burns.”

  45

  “I was eighteen years old when I joined the army,” O’Leary said. He spoke with the same tone of longing and nostalgia old people generally used when talking about meeting their spouses or bringing their first child home from the hospital. “That would have made it ’64. They enlisted me in the Chemical Corps and shipped me off to Vietnam before my signature was even dry. As it turned out, I liked it so much, I stayed until they physically forced me onto a plane in ’73.”

  Up close, the signs of age were more readily apparent. The creases in his cheeks and at the corners of his eyes became furrows in the shadows cast by the fire. The joints of his remarkably dexterous hands appeared arthritic.

  “What did you do in the Chemical Corps?” Mason asked.

  “What didn’t I do?” He tweezed stray lashes from the baboon’s eyelid, set them delicately onto a small collection tray, and consulted a basketful of glass eyes of all different sizes, appraising one after another until he found the exact one he wanted. “I sprayed Agent Orange, launched mortar rounds, and shot every weapon at my disposal, but there was nothing I enjoyed more than watching the Vietcong and that infernal jungle of theirs burn.”

  “Napalm,” Ramses said.

  O’Leary winked at him and blew a mushroom cloud of smoke up toward the ceiling.

  “It wasn’t about the killing, though. There was just something awesome about watching that shell disappear through the treetops. There’s a moment when time stands still, right before the world turns to flames, a single second where everything goes quiet and if you listen closely, you can hear the whoosh of the fire god drawing his first breath of life.”

  He set his cigar in the ashtray so he could use both hands to shoehorn the eyeball into the socket. The golden iris reflected the firelight.

  “Maybe we haven’t been especially clear about why we’re here,” Mason said. “Ramses thought you might be able to help us figure out whom one would hire to produce mass quantities of nerve agents and where we might find him.”

  “I’m trying to do just that, but you must understand the historical context,” O’Leary said, clenching his cigar between his molars. Smoke drifted from his nostrils as he spoke. “Guys like me? We’re only useful in wartime. We came home to hippies and protests. You think any of them wanted to reintegrate us into their new society of free love and flower power? We were bona fide killers and no one had any use for our particular skill sets. Not even the army. The brass knew the coming war would be a cold one. We were in a race to see who could destroy the world the most times over, which meant the Chemical Corps had a new mission, and on a much grander scale, so they sent us to Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado.”

  “And put you to work at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.”

  “That’s right. I did my job like a good soldier, but I never cared for the kind of chemical weapons they had us making, invisible gasses that killed indiscriminately and without mercy. Without honor. And I saw them in action, too. Mostly on rabbits, and more times than I care to recall. Ugly things to watch. I even saw a man get exposed once. Poor bastard knew he was going to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it. That’s when I said enough’s enough and got the hell out of there. I bounced around Central and South America for a while after that, selling my services to the highest bidder until there were no more revolutions to fight, and then hooked up with a defense contractor that paid in cash, asked very little in return, and helped finance a comfortable retirement.”

  “Dealing weapons?” Layne said.

  “I provide hardware for connoisseurs and collectors, men like myself, who have what one might consider nontraditional needs. Not these gangbangers and street thugs. None of my products have been used in the commission of a crime, and every single one of them still has its serial number.”

  “So why the tunnel?”

  “To make sure it stays that way. You want to see my weapons in action? Deploy the military in the streets and my clients will come out of the woodwork. The people who buy my wares are the kind who hope to God never to have to use them.”

  “And people like Ramses serve as the middleman,” Mason said. “How much money does my good friend here bring in for you?”

  “Enough to negotiate a deal to help federal agents I wouldn’t otherwise have been inclined to invite into my home,” O’Leary said.

  Mason had to remind himself that Ramses was merely a broker who connected sinners with their vices and not an active participant in their damnation. Besides, the conversation had strayed and needed to be brought back in line.

  “The men who made the nerve gasses?” he prompted.

  “We’re talking about scientists who dreamed up ways of killing people in the worst-possible ways. From far away, where they wouldn’t get any blood on their hands. And you never saw them anywhere near the North Plants, where we manufactured sarin in those enormous vats. The only guys I really got to know out there were the ones working inside the hazard suits, moving drums from one bunker to another.”

  “Could any of those guys make it?”

  “What do you think we were getting paid to do? You have to understand the difference between making it and creating it. We essentially worked an assembly line. Spin this wheel. Monitor that gauge. Log the volume and flow rates. Switch drums. It was almost like making beer. Everyone had a role in producing it, but none of us ever really had the whole recipe.”

  “What about the scientists in charge of creating it? How many of them do you think there were?”

  “We didn’t spend a whole lot of time with the brain trust. You have to remember that this was the army and there was a chain of command. A grunt like me didn’t rub elbows with officers.”

  “Do you remember if any of them were of Asian origin?”

  “You mean like the Vietcong? There wouldn’t have been any of them back then, not with so many of us fresh from fighting in Vietnam and having lost so many friends.”

  “What about the scientists themselves?” Mason asked. “Do you remember any
of their names?”

  “Some days, I don’t even remember my own.” He smiled wistfully and readjusted the baboon’s head in the vise so he could view the opposite socket. “Time and age take a steep toll, I’m afraid, no matter how hard you rage against it. It’s one of nature’s most backhanded gifts: We forget much of the past so we don’t have to see how little the present resembles it or recognize that there’s no role for us in the future. It’s been so long since I even thought about those days that not a single name springs to mind, but I might be able to recall something about them if you can refresh my memory.”

  Mason removed his phone from his pocket and passed it to O’Leary.

  “How about faces? Do you recognize any of these guys?”

  The older man held the smartphone sideways and at arm’s length. The inverted image reflected from his magnifying lenses.

  “Kind of difficult to place them with their eyes scratched out.” He flipped up his lenses. “When did you say this was taken?”

  “We’re not sure,” Layne said. “What do you think?”

  “Maybe ’68? Or ’70, at the very latest.”

  “Do you recognize where it was taken?” Mason asked.

  “Could be any base anywhere around the world. All of them looked the same back then.”

  “How about the men themselves?”

  “You can hardly see any part of their faces, the way they’ve been disfigured.”

  “We really need you to try,” Layne said. “Identifying these men is of critical importance to our investigation. Believe me when I say we wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  O’Leary blew one final gust of smoke up into the cloud trapped against the ceiling and stared at her for several seconds, as though truly seeing her for the first time.

  “There’s a chemical weapon in play and you don’t have any idea where it is, do you?” he said.

  “You’re partly right,” Mason said.

  “Which part?” O’Leary stubbed out his cigar and seemed to inflate with an unspoken challenge. “The part about a chemical weapon being in play or the part where you don’t know where the hell it is?”

  Mason’s patience had already worn thin and he wasn’t in the mood to justify his situation to an arms dealer who had no more qualms about killing than the man they were hunting.

  “Just look at the picture again,” he said. “Tell us what we need to know and we’ll be on our way.”

  “It’s like that, is it?”

  Ramses stepped between them and locked eyes with O’Leary.

  “You know me, Rhino. I wouldn’t have brought these guys here if we had any other option. This is an active situation and we need your help to end it.”

  “Does this have anything to do with what’s going on in Central Park?”

  Ramses stared Rhino down for several seconds before the older man slowly nodded, lowered his lenses, and looked at the picture again.

  “You need to understand that it’s been half a century. None of these guys look even slightly fam—Hold up. Him there.” He tapped the screen. “That guy right there.”

  Mason walked around behind him and looked over his shoulder. He was pointing at one of the taller men, standing third from the right. The man had broad shoulders and an elongated head with a buzz cut. He had big front teeth and showed his gums when he smiled. Mason pinched the man’s face between his fingers and drew them apart to magnify the image.

  “Yeah,” O’Leary said. “I remember him. Second Lieutenant Vance Edwards. Guys used to call him ‘Mr. Ed’ because of those big old teeth. That’s the only reason I recognize him. He didn’t go anywhere without that guy who looked like a pug. Denver, maybe. No, Danvers. And Milton Bradley, like the board-game maker. I don’t know if that was his name or just what they called him, though. And bear in mind, ’68 was before I met any of them. They might not have known each other way back then, but they were thicker than thieves by ’73. If I were a betting man, I’d say at least one of those scratched-out faces belongs to them.”

  O’Leary handed Mason’s phone back to him. He tried to push it back to encourage the old man to take another look, but it was clear he had nothing more to offer.

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. O’Leary,” Layne said.

  “Come back anytime you want, Special Agent.”

  Mason scribbled his number on a piece of scratch paper and dropped it on the counter beside the one-eyed baboon’s head.

  “In case you think of anything else.”

  “Can I interest you in an AK-12 or -74 while you’re here?”

  “You do realize we’re federal agents, right?” Layne said.

  “That doesn’t mean the government won’t take away your guns with the rest of ours.”

  Mason could still hear him laughing all the way through the anteroom and into the hallway, where Ramses caught up with him and spun him around.

  “What the hell were you thinking back there? This is my world out here. Not yours. It’s my name, my reputation on the line.”

  Mason nodded his understanding. He knew his old friend had gone out on a limb trying to help him, but something about O’Leary had rubbed him the wrong way, something more than being surrounded by the carcasses of his conquests.

  “Show some respect, Mace,” Ramses said, and started down the stairs. “This is the underworld, and now you’re in it.”

  46

  Mason drove on autopilot, allowing Ramses to guide him out of the industrial district while his mind ran through what they’d learned. O’Leary had been able to provide a positive ID for one of the men in the picture, and possibly enough information about the man’s entourage to track them down, too, but he hadn’t been able to shine any light on the Scarecrow himself. If he were truly in his late forties or early fifties, he wouldn’t have been in the army at the same time as those men anyway. In fact, he might not even have been born yet, which meant he encountered those men after O’Leary took his leave, and presumably sometime during the era when the country was ramping down its production of chemical weapons and starting to actively dispose of them. So if he’d been a chemical engineer for Uncle Sam, his face should have been among those from the personnel files Layne had received, unless he’d deliberately altered it, which brought Mason to what Alejandra had said about his eyes.

  The stars intrigued Mason. His first thought was that Alejandra had seen the reflection from the face shield of a gas mask, but it should have cast a single reflection, not two, which made him think of what the woman from across the hall had said about Nakamura wearing tinted glasses, presumably due to sensitivity to light, but lenses like that were made with scratchproof and antiglare coatings. While he couldn’t entirely exclude the use of eyeglasses, or even magnifying lenses like O’Leary had been wearing, what else could possibly look like metal reflecting from a man’s eyes?

  Perhaps the Scarecrow wasn’t specifically of Japanese descent after all. It was always possible that something about the culture spoke to him. The kanji characters were one thing, but the mycotoxin from the Fusarium nivale mushroom, the saxitoxin derived from the puffer fish, and the venomous tentacles of the habu-kurage hadn’t been chosen at random. They were integral to the message he was trying to deliver. Either he viewed that culture as part of his identity or he’d taken on his identity in response to a cultural wrong. There probably weren’t many Japanese citizens who hadn’t at least considered the notion of avenging the deaths of the two hundred thousand people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but these men, specifically, were the Scarecrow’s targets, not their flag. Releasing a chemical weapon in a major city center would definitely qualify as a proportional, if belated, response, although that would be considered a personal motive, whereas the Scarecrow had been treating every aspect of the production and transport of the Novichok as a professional obligation.

  And everywhere Mason turned, he found himself looking back in time at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and finding the Department of Homeland Security hurriedly setting up
roadblocks all around it. The men in the pictures were the key. While that was where their association began, it wasn’t until some unknown number of years later that they crossed paths with the man who would become the Scarecrow.

  They dropped Ramses off at a car-rental place near the Transit Authority and went around the corner to wait for him at a trendy café that was mercifully still serving coffee. They’d be able to cover twice as much ground with a second SUV, and suddenly Mason felt like heading south, away from the city. Lost in the accumulation of bodies were the two Israeli scientists, who now stood apart from the rest of the victims specifically for their lack of direct involvement with the U.S. military, and yet identifying them had been of great consequence to the DHS. He needed to figure out why, and it all started with Bern, their last known location before their staged deaths.

  Layne ordered at the counter while Mason and Gunnar sat outside on the dark street. A bitterly cold breeze assailed them from the east. Tiny snowflakes accumulated on the umbrella above their table and tapped against the front window, through which he could barely see Layne in the line of the crowded, dimly lit coffeehouse. Photocopied handbills advertising concerts and protests were posted in the window beside a professional poster promising a sneak peek at the future of renewable green energy in Times Square.

  “You were right,” Gunnar said. “Peter Cavanaugh is on this personnel list your partner got from the army.”

  “Can you access his Official Military Personnel File?”

  Layne backed out the front door with four mugs balanced on a wooden tray. She set them on the table and squeezed behind Mason to get to the chair next to him.

  “His OMPF is long gone,” Gunnar said.

  “Homeland probably made it disappear the moment we figured out who owned the trucks,” Mason said. “What do we have on him?”

  “All I see here is his name on a list, which at least confirms what you already knew, I guess.”