“We need to know where he was stationed and when he was there,” Mason said.
“What about his health records?” Layne asked. “There should be a list of dates and treatment facilities we could use to establish a time line of his postings.”
“The military routinely filed the health records as part of the personnel files until ’92,” Gunnar said.
“What about his ex-wives?”
“Excellent idea. Assuming they were seen on the government’s dime, we ought to be able to figure out if he was ever stationed at the RMA.”
Mason’s phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. He grabbed it and checked the caller ID. The main line out of the Rocky Mountain Regional Forensic Laboratory. He made sure they were alone on the freezing street before putting the call on speaker so the others could hear.
“Mason.”
“SEAL,” Locker said.
“What?”
“It’s an acronym for sea, air, and land.”
Mason rubbed his temples with his thumb and middle finger.
“Start at the beginning, okay?”
“Your guy’s in the navy,” Locker said. “Or at least he was anyway. I ran the DNA sample I received from the Cumberland County ME through the Combined DNA Index System and got a hit pretty much right away, only it was for a six-year-old child in San Diego.”
“They incinerated a kid?”
Gunnar and Layne both stopped drinking and looked directly at Mason.
“You’re not listening. You know how CODIS includes pretty much every DNA sample ever uploaded, right? Well, in this case, a sample from a newborn was submitted as part of a paternity suit. This sample matched one belonging to an enlisted seaman, only when I attempted to access the corresponding data, there was nothing there. I mean gone. Poof. Totally missing. Someone with a serious clearance level had to physically go into the database and remove it. But since the kid’s sample was there, I was able to jump through a few hoops and get a peek at his birth certificate. That’s why it took so long to call you. I mean, jeez, you’d think I was trying to get a peek at the First Lady’s gynecological records—”
“Locker.”
“Major Ashley Marshall Saddler. Male. Thirty-four years old. Or at least he was. He was part of the SEAL team stationed in Damascus during the 2013 sarin attack, and I only know that much because it’s part of the Congressional Record. His trail ends in 2017, when he resigned his commission.”
“Where’s he been since then?”
“Sounds like a question worth answering.”
“Does Homeland know about this?”
“I don’t think so. The whole team packed up and left yesterday afternoon. My cheeks are starting to hurt from smiling so much.”
“Where did they go?”
“Let’s see. Where did they leave that note? It’s got to be around here somewhere.”
“Funny. Did they take everything with them?”
“Are you looking for something in particular?”
“The bodies of the Scarecrow’s victims.”
“Are you kidding me? They never even arrived.”
“Do you still have the pictures you guys took of them?”
“Of course. Even if they cleaned out my system on their way out the door, I utilize off-site backup to routinely save all data every hour. With as much evidence as we deal with here for open investigations and pending trials, we’d have to be the world’s biggest idiots to keep it all under one roof with a big old bull’s-eye on it.”
“Can you send them to me? Just the faces, okay?”
“What good can they possibly do you at this point? I heard you got the rug ripped out from under you, too.”
“We’re technically on standby for operational support.”
“Sounds like a paid vacation to me,” Locker said. “But you’re not letting this one go, are you?”
“Are you?”
Locker chuckled and hung up.
Gunnar jumped in the moment he was certain the call had ended.
“Major Ashley Saddler entered the private sector as a security consultant for a company called Kenward, whose stated mission is to ‘provide professional and efficient turnkey support services for commercial enterprises and developing governments.’ It specializes in risk management solutions and security services for government agencies and commercial industries from construction and mining to oil and gas.”
“It’s a private defense contractor,” Layne said.
“With a focus on the energy sector…”
Gunnar’s words trailed off and his eyes became distant.
“You said something earlier about a surge in energy futures trading,” Mason said.
“That can’t be a coincidence, but how did a private contractor end up as ashes inside a truck used to haul chemical weapons?”
Mason’s phone vibrated to alert him to the arrival of an email. Five of them, actually. Each labeled by victim number. He opened them and flipped through the attached pictures. Five men in varying stages of decomposition, photographed from several different angles. With and without their hats. Their flesh ravaged by birds, their eyes pecked out. Even had they still been there, they wouldn’t have done him any good, considering those of the men in the picture against which he compared them had been scratched out. Only one man stood apart, thanks to a prominent gold incisor tooth.
This was a long shot and he knew it. Even if the Scarecrow’s goal had been to hunt down eight of the twelve men in the picture and deliver his message to the remainder, the odds of the one man Mason hoped to find among the dead were at best less than fifty-fifty, but, for once, luck was on his side.
The man he was looking for was victim number two.
Mason had stood right in front of him and never known. The desiccated remains of the dead man’s musculature and tissues distorted the shape of his face and his skull to such a degree that he hardly looked human. Fortunately, all Mason needed was the teeth.
“What are you smiling about?” Layne asked.
He tilted the screen so she could see it, then passed the phone across the table to Gunnar.
“Hello, Mr. Ed,” she said.
“Second Lieutenant Vance Edwards,” Gunnar said. “In the flesh. Or what’s left of it anyway.”
They might have closed the book on his story, but perhaps men named Danvers and Milton Bradley were still out there somewhere. And there was one place where they knew all three men had been stationed at the same time, the same place where all of the various threads of the investigation appeared to converge.
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal.
47
Elsewhere
The Scarecrow waited until it was certain the man was fully incapacitated before reaching through the bars of his cage and checking his pulse and respiration rate, just to be sure. It unlocked the cage, grabbed the man by his collar, and pulled him out onto the floor. His wrists bled from where he’d attempted to use one of the tongue depressors to sever his bindings, reminding the Scarecrow of how it had once done the same thing, although for entirely different, and equally futile, reasons. In response, they had taken away all of the tongue depressors and the scarecrows it had made from them. The very same man who had demonstrated how to make them had gathered them all in a bag and taken them away, the same man now lying unconscious at its feet.
A hissing sound erupted from its throat and it kicked the man. Over and over. Until blood trickled from his ear.
“No…” the Scarecrow said aloud. “Not … yet.”
For as much as it wanted the man to suffer, it had been planning his death for so long that it needed everything to be perfect, the precise way it had envisioned his denouement for nearly half a century, during which time it had tried to create a normal life for itself, only to see it derailed by the painful and degenerative conditions that not only consumed it from the inside but also caused the physical deformations responsible for the expressions of revulsion on the faces of those it passed on the street, forc
ing isolation upon it, trapping it within its own mind, where it rehearsed its ultimate transformation and the misery it would inflict upon its tormentors through the lonely days and sleepless nights, at least until it had found a group of like-minded individuals, a family, for as long as that had lasted.
Now, with its other half dying and its family destroyed, all it had left was the vengeance it had been plotting since the first time the men in their white lab coats entered its room, since the first time it breathed from the mask, electrifying the passageways of its nerves, like so many lightning bolts striking beneath its skin, triggering the muscular contractions and the nausea that would cripple it for days at a time. It had spent years meticulously stalking those responsible, tracking their movements, cataloging every aspect of their lives, not merely waiting for the perfect opportunity but creating it. Carefully inching closer and closer to the man whose family had been behind everything, working its way into his sphere of influence until such time as it was able to plant the seed of its revenge with his most trusted adviser, who, in the end, had proved that trust to be misplaced. His time would come soon, only on the grandest stage possible, one from which everyone in the world would see him fall, taking his godforsaken name with him.
It had received a far better offer for the services it had rendered anyway, one that would serve as the perfect posthumous insult, a proposal relayed to it by the Hoyl, a faithful believer in the mission of his true master, whose goals aligned perfectly with those of the Scarecrow. A master who wanted Quintus to realize with his final thoughts that he had never had any control over the coup he believed he had started, that he’d been outmaneuvered from the very beginning by another, the mastermind whose machinations had set the coming war into motion, who’d used the Hoyl to orchestrate the downfall of Secundus and now employed the Scarecrow to destroy Quintus. It cared nothing for the internal politics of the Thirteen. The only thing that mattered was knowing that it would live long enough to kill Quintus, and die knowing that it was taking millions of people with it, achieving a dream first envisioned in the mind of a terrified child, a dream its family had failed to achieve a quarter of a century ago.
The Scarecrow dragged the man down the hallway, through the dirt, and into the cold room, its breath pluming from its lips. It released the man’s arms and let them fall to the floor. The back of his head rebounded from the concrete hard enough to make his teeth click. It rolled him over a mound of broken flooring and packed earth to the edge of the hole. With a smile, it nudged him over the edge, descended the ladder behind him, and stepped down, planting one foot to either side of his head. It watched the man’s chest rise and fall and blood flow from a laceration on his cheek for several minutes before scooting him onto the travois and strapping him down.
A faint tapping sound emanated from its backpack, which caused its smile to grow even wider.
The Scarecrow donned its harness, hooked the straps to the contraption, and struck off into the darkness.
PART V
An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.
—Woodrow Wilson,
The New Freedom (1912)
48
DECEMBER 30
“I found it,” Gunnar said.
Mason set aside his laptop, crossed the aisle, and sat on the opposite side of the table from his old friend. He’d ridden in private jets before, but Gunnar’s Cessna Citation XLS was unlike any he’d ever seen. It was only fifty-two feet long but had been customized to more closely resemble an apartment than an aircraft. The seats were bluish gray and upholstered with leather as soft as butter, the woodwork maple and polished to a reflective shine. The fore cabin featured a functional kitchen, and the aft cabin had been turned into a bedroom.
The flight from Republic Airport in East Farmingdale, New York, to Washington, D.C., was an hour and ten minutes, about half an hour less than it would take Ramses and Layne to drive from Brooklyn to the New Jersey State Police Headquarters in West Trenton. She’d insisted upon going with him to track down Maj. Delvin Roybal to make sure everything was handled the proper way, which was fine with Mason, because his was a task that needed to be conducted in person.
Gunnar spun around his laptop. The aerial photograph on the screen was in faded color and taken at such an angle as to suggest it had been snapped from a plane shortly after takeoff. A gray sky filled with clouds. The jagged blue line of the Rockies on the distant horizon. Brown prairie in between. A red-and-white-checkered water tower stood on tall striped legs maybe a hundred yards west of a row of buildings, including a warehouse with a radio tower, an industrial plant crowned with smokestacks, and a six-story building that looked like a parking garage, with exterior walkways and electrical works on the roof. And in front of them, at the point where the main road entered from the south, a plain white L-shaped building with a flat roof. If one were to gather a dozen uniformed men in front of it, a picture could be taken in such a way as to show the crown of the water tower above the roofline to the upper left and the massive structure to the right.
The caption had been scratched directly into the picture itself, scraping away the emulsion.
It read simply: RMA. North Plants. 1967.
“What are the odds, right?” Gunnar said.
Mason nodded. He grabbed his laptop, searched the Internet until he found detailed imagery of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal on a site devoted to Superfund’s various remediation projects, and set it up next to Gunnar’s so he could view both screens at the same time. The RMA had been built on a grid composed of twenty-five equal squares, each a mile to a side. The majority of the plants were clustered on the six in the center. The South Plants were separated from the North Plants by an open-air chemical evaporation basin and a series of disposal trenches. Apart from the occasional dirt road, the remainder of the site had been left undeveloped. There were dozens of outlying lakes to the east, most of which had been earmarked for sediment remediation, and a network of chemical sewers to the north and west more reminiscent of the roots of a tree than the standard right angles of military construction.
Gunnar leaned closer so he could see.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“I’m not sure, but something happened here that no one wants us to know about.”
Mason opened the file containing aerial photographs from the site survey during the early eighties, shots taken by a camera attached to the underside of an airplane, detailing each of the grids, one by one. Dirt roads stood apart from flatlands composed of yellow and brown weeds and grasses. Tree-lined streams and gullies. Natural lakes ringed with cattails and asphalt-lined evaporative basins shaped like diamonds. Both the North and South Plants were the size of small towns.
He tracked down the legend to see what had once been housed there. The North Plants, as O’Leary had described, featured buildings for chemical production, weapons assembly, and warehousing. The South Plants, on the other hand, formed a veritable city unto itself in the middle of the sprawling Rocky Mountain Arsenal complex, one that hadn’t belonged to the army at all, but, rather, to a private corporation, simultaneously allowing it to share the same facilities as a military regiment amassing the largest chemical arsenal the world had ever known and shielding it from regulatory oversight.
Mason had to read the name twice to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him.
Royal Nautilus Petroleum.
His head swirled with the implications. He thought about the chemical subsidiary from which the hydrogen fluoride had been diverted, the decomposition bacterium reminiscent of the kind oil companies used to consume spills, Charles Raymond with his bulging eyes and split tongue, and the picture Gunnar had found of Mosche and Chenhav—the two dead Israeli scientists—with Andreas Mikkelson, managing director of the very same company that had occupied the South Plants of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal while the twelve men with their eyes scratched out had been stationed there.
“Holy shit,” Gunnar said.
&
nbsp; Mason’s phone vibrated. He recognized Layne’s number and answered on speaker.
“I was just about to call you,” he said.
“My contact from the army finally got back to me about the guy we found in Central Park,” she said. “Turns out Charles Raymond was never actually in the military, but he was registered as a civilian contractor from 1968 to 1992, which makes his records just recent enough to have been uploaded to the modern system. And you’ll never guess where he was assigned.”
“The Rocky Mountain Arsenal.”
“You really know how to take all the fun out of this, don’t you?”
“We only just learned that Royal Nautilus Petroleum owned a large portion of the South Plants.”
“Which presumably puts Raymond in the same place at the same time as the rest of the Scarecrow’s victims.”
“Did your guy know the nature of the arrangement between the army and Royal Nautilus?” Mason asked.
“No, but he was able to confirm that Raymond’s credentials listed him as Research and Development,” Layne said.
“The presence of an R and D contingent suggests a relationship beyond the simple manufacture of precursor chemicals.”
“Precisely,” Gunnar said. He toggled between windows as he read from the trove of information he’d amassed in a matter of minutes. “Nautilus Chemical Company, a division of Royal Nautilus Petroleum, purchased on-site operations in 1952 and used them for the manufacture of herbicides and pesticides. Among the chemicals it produced were dichlor—an integral component of sarin—and aldrin, dieldrin, and malathion, all of which have since been banned. They discharged millions of gallons of liquid waste into natural depressions in the ground and buried solid waste in unlined holes. Accidental spills in the range of hundreds of thousands of gallons precipitated a plan to inject chemical waste into a twelve-thousand-foot-deep well, which caused earthquakes throughout the Denver area. They discontinued on-site operations in 1982.”
The Annihilation Protocol Page 28