“Raymond was long gone by then,” Layne said. “He was at a similar facility called the Edgewood Arsenal from 1972 to 1978.”
“Where was that?” Mason asked.
“Where are you by now?”
“Probably somewhere over Maryland. Why?”
“Look down.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“It’s just outside of Baltimore, on Chesapeake Bay,” she said. “It’s now called the U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center and is considered the principal research and development resource for nonmedical chemical and biological defense. We’re talking gas masks, personal protective gear, detection devices, whatnot.”
“So one manufactures the weapons, the other the defense against them.” Mason paused and considered the implications. “That’s why they needed an R and D team. They had to test their products.”
“According to the Department of Defense,” Gunnar said, “the U.S. Army Chemical Corps conducted classified medical experiments at the Edgewood Arsenal from 1955 to 1975 with the stated mission of testing protective clothing and pharmaceuticals and studying the impact of low-dose chemical warfare agents on military personnel. Roughly seven thousand soldiers were exposed to upward of two hundred different chemicals, among them anticholinesterase nerve agents like GB and VX, mustard gas, irritants and riot-control agents, and psychoactive drugs like LSD and PCP.”
“You see why I don’t want anything to do with these assholes?” Ramses said. “They were experimenting on their own people, for Christ’s sake.”
“Where did they get their test subjects?” Mason asked.
“They were solicited through the Medical Research Volunteer Program,” Gunnar said. “Primarily from Baker Company.”
“Later renamed Bravo Company, or Company B,” Ramses said. “These were your standard enlisted infantrymen. Foot soldiers. Grist for the mill. Expendables.”
“If the woman who lived across the hall from the apartment the Scarecrow maintained in Mayfair Towers was right about his age,” Mason said, “he couldn’t have been much more than a child during the time Raymond was participating in the experimentation.”
“Which makes him unlikely to have been affected on a personal level,” Layne said.
“Unless they experimented on his parents,” Ramses said.
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves here,” Mason said. “We need to figure out if any of the other victims were at Edgewood. Can your contact get us a list of the men stationed there?”
“It’s a work in progress,” Layne said. “Hopefully, someone’s pulling the records from the National Archives as we speak.”
“What about the volunteers?”
“Long-term follow-up was practically nonexistent,” Gunnar said. “By the early eighties, the National Academy of Sciences could only track down about sixty percent of them. There was a class action lawsuit filed in the early nineties, though. I could probably get a list of those who participated without much difficulty.”
“Do it,” Mason said. “What about our dead Israeli scientists? Chenhav and Mosche, the biochemist who left the message in blood. Can we connect either of them to the RMA or Edgewood?”
“At the time of the plane crash, both men were in their late thirties, which means they would have been teenagers during the time frame in question,” Gunnar said. “I did find something interesting while looking into them, though. Another plane went down near the Russian border six weeks earlier, on October fourth. Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 was shot down by the Ukrainian Air Force en route from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk, Russia. Everyone on board was killed, including thirty-eight Russians and forty Israelis, among them five microbiologists, three of whom worked in advanced medical research.”
“What do you mean, ‘shot down’?” Layne said.
“According to Ukrainian officials, it was inadvertently hit by an antiaircraft missile during testing. Supposedly, the main fuselage is on the bottom of the Black Sea at a depth of more than three thousand feet, too deep for divers to retrieve the black box, so no one can dispute their account.”
“That’s convenient.”
“What were they all doing on the same plane?” Mason asked.
“There’s no way of knowing for sure,” Gunnar said. “What I can tell you, though, is that Novosibirsk is considered the scientific capital of Siberia. It boasts more than fifty research facilities and thirteen full universities in a city the size of metro Denver.”
“That’s seven dead Israeli scientists in a two-month span.”
“Immediately following the terrorist attack on nine/eleven.”
They were onto something of critical importance. Mason could positively feel it.
“What would five Israeli microbiologists do in the scientific capital of Siberia?” he asked.
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” Gunnar said. “Let’s look at it from a historical perspective. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and left the country a shambles. The world’s largest state-controlled economy suddenly had to transition to a market-oriented model, which nearly collapsed the central bank and caused double-digit inflation. They had to slash their Cold War military budget, eliminate their social-welfare systems, and run up the national debt just to remain afloat. Fortunately, they had a massive arsenal of weapons and trade partners willing to pay exorbitant prices, especially Iran.”
“Which posed a credible threat to Israel’s national security.”
“Exactly, so if you were Israel, what would you do?”
“I’d make sure I not only possessed the same weaponry as my enemies but any possible advantage I could gain.”
He was suddenly reminded of what Johan had said about America bringing the German scientists into the fold after the war to help ramp up its military for the seemingly inevitable conflict with the Soviet Union. Was it so hard to believe that with their geographical proximity, the Soviets had simply taken the technology itself?
“The Russian military became a clearinghouse,” Mason said. “Proprietary assault rifles, machine guns, and pistols were popping up all over the world in the hands of people who shouldn’t have had them. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’d been willing to part with some of the nastier aspects of their arsenal, too. For the right price.”
“You think the Israeli scientists were buying biological or chemical weapons?” Layne asked.
“I think they’d already bought whatever it was. You don’t send microbiologists to negotiate a deal. You send them to train on technology or verify the authenticity of a sample. You send them because they’re the only ones who know how to safely handle whatever they’re bringing back.”
“What do you think that was?”
“I don’t know,” Mason said. “But someone didn’t want them taking it back with them.”
“And the following month,” Layne said, “two more scientists allegedly died on the return trip from Bern—which we now know not to be the case—only to magically reappear two decades later beneath a building used to manufacture biological and chemical weapons.”
“If someone deliberately crashed their plane, they could have just as easily downed it on the way to Bern, instead of on the way back,” Gunnar said. “They wanted Chenhav and Mosche to reach Switzerland before they made them disappear. More than a hundred people were killed so that no one would ever find out what they’d bought or what they intended to do with it.”
“We need to know why they were there,” Mason said.
He recognized the magnitude of the statement the moment it crossed his lips.
Bern was where the trails of both the Scarecrow and the Hoyl converged, mass murderers specializing in chemical and biological weapons, respectively. And if Mason was right, there was only one person who possessed that knowledge, whether he knew it or not: the new owner of AgrInitiative, formerly AgrAmerica, and almost Global Allied Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals.
The Honorable J. R. Mason III.
His fath
er.
49
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Mason arranged for a car to be waiting for them when they arrived at Ronald Reagan National Airport. He’d expected the service to send something fairly ordinary, but he’d apparently forgotten the kind of clout his name carried in the District, especially considering he shared it with his father. The Town Car had been idling on the tarmac, with the driver standing at attention beside the passenger door. If he was surprised to see the younger James Richmond Mason and not the senator, it didn’t show on his expressionless face. He simply opened the rear door, ushered them inside, and assumed his seat behind the wheel.
His father’s address was already programmed into the GPS. It was only five miles from the airport but promised to take twenty minutes, thanks to an accident on the George Washington Memorial Parkway and the standard Capitol Hill snafu. He hadn’t visited his father in D.C. since right after his first election to the Senate, at which time he’d been staying in a mansion that essentially amounted to a frat house for elected officials, none of whom left their offices for longer than it took to sleep. Since then, however, his old man had acquired a town house about half a mile from the Capitol Building—using his own personal funds, despite the story the media had tried to sell at the time.
Gunnar opened his laptop on his thighs the moment he had his seat belt fastened and resumed his work. His fingers were a blur on the keyboard, and the images on the screen flashed past at lightning speed. Mason brought up the picture of the twelve men posed in front of the building at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal on his cell phone. The Scarecrow had already killed as many as half of them. Presumably time had contributed some amount of attrition, as well. If the profilers were right, two of the remaining men had been chosen to finish the design in the field, one of whom was to be the centerpiece. If he was right about Marchment’s being one of them, the Scarecrow was going to have a hell of a time getting to him with a phalanx of DHS agents surrounding him at all times, but he’d undoubtedly taken that into consideration from the start and already had a plan in place, presumably one that would be enacted prior to releasing the Novichok. Or would he use its release to draw Marchment out into the open? Either way, both factored prominently into the endgame, which Mason could feel approaching with the inevitability of a thunderstorm building against the horizon.
He swiped away the picture, opened his email, and clicked on a new message from Locker, who’d attached several photographs of the man he’d identified from the ashes in the front seat of the flatbed. The first was from Maj. Ashley Saddler’s personnel file and featured him standing in dress uniform in front of an American flag. He didn’t look like an Ashley. In fact, he looked like the kind of guy who’d beat the hell out of anyone who called him by that name. His neck was thicker than his head and tested the strength of his collar. His ears were small and the lobes bowed outward. The muscles in his broad jaw bulged as a state of normalcy. His steel gray eyes were as flat as his buzz cut.
The remainder of the images had been taken in the field and showed a man who positively dwarfed his companions. He was the human equivalent of a tank leading a motorcade of Jeeps. His Colt M4A1 rifle looked tiny propped against his meaty shoulder and in the grasp of his massive hands. He wore camouflage fatigues and still stood apart from his surroundings like a bear from the forest.
“The odds of dying in a plane crash are one in five point four million,” Gunnar said. “The odds of seven men in the same field and from the same country dying in the same manner over a span of two months are infinitesimal, so I broadened my search parameters and found a veritable run on scientists.”
“What do you mean?”
“Seventy more of them died between 2001 and 2007.”
“Is that statistically higher than any other profession?”
“I have no idea, but you have to hear the way some of them went out. A biomedical scientist found splattered on the sidewalk outside the parking garage of his office building. An expert on DNA sequencing slashed to death with a sword. An Australian scientist working on a vaccine to protect against biochemical weapons found dead in the air lock of his lab cooler. A renowned virologist found three hundred miles away from where he’d abandoned his car. A defected Russian bioweapons authority found dead after announcing his intention to exhume the bodies of ten victims of the 1918 Spanish flu in hopes of creating a vaccine. A microbiologist working on AIDS and liver cancer research found beaten to death outside his lab. Throw in your seven Israelis and that’s thirteen dead scientists in the three months following nine/eleven alone, which verges on statistically impossible.”
Mason closed his eyes and focused on his old friend’s words. He felt as though he were on the brink of fitting two pieces of the puzzle into place, but the revelation eluded him.
“Listen to some of these other causes of death over the following six years,” Gunnar said. “Bandit attack. Home invasion. Arsenic poisoning. Suicides. Stabbings. Plane crashes. Several hit and runs. Multiple counts of blunt trauma to the head. We aren’t talking about minor players, either. The majority of these guys were leaders in their respective fields. A full third were developing vaccines for viruses with potential weapons applications. Another third were hematologists, doctors who specialize in the blood and blood-borne pathogens. Nuclear physicists. Biological warfare experts. The list goes on and on.”
The timing couldn’t be coincidental. The terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, had changed the world more than any single event in recent history, catalyzing the reaction that produced entire populations willing to exchange their freedom for safety, their privacy for security. People welcomed the NSA into their most intimate conversations, the government into their homes, and Big Brother into cameras on every street corner. All they asked in return was that they be able to go about their daily lives without the threat of fiery death raining down on them from the sky. They trusted the dawning police state not to abuse the power they’d bestowed upon it, powers custom-tailored to an entity like the Thirteen, which through strategic planning had planted operatives at the highest levels, wiring itself into every home in the Western world, entering without a warrant and monitoring every aspect of their lives, positioning itself to quell any potential resistance before it even started.
It made perfect sense that a syndicate that drew its power from fear would want to aggressively invest in other similar catastrophes all around the world to effectively complete the full transfer of authority, using biological or chemical attacks that would make the destruction of the twin towers at the World Trade Center pale by comparison. To pull off such an ambitious global coup, not only would it need to gather the scientists with the requisite skills to create those cataclysmic events; it needed to remove those who could derail their plans from the equation. And considering how quickly it had acted after the planes hit, there was no doubt that this had been the Thirteen’s plan all along.
“Kind of has the feel of not only paving the way for bioterrorists but setting the fields involved with preparedness back in the process, doesn’t it?” Mason said.
“A man with more than a decade’s head start researching the Spanish flu could have certainly stood in the way of the Hoyl’s plans,” Gunnar said. “The same way an Australian scientist working on an inoculation against biochemical weapons of mass destruction might have been a big hindrance when it came to the release of large quantities of Novichok.”
“Are you certain this is all viable intelligence?” Mason asked.
“I’m not pulling this off some conspiracy theorist’s blog. We’re talking about major sources. The New York Times, Denver Post, Los Angeles Times, London—”
“That’s not what I mean. All I’m saying is that you can connect any pattern of dots if you try hard enough.”
Gunnar smirked.
“You seem to have forgotten who you’re dealing with.”
The Town Car crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and Mason caught a glimpse of the Library of Congress in the distanc
e. They passed Seward Square and entered a neighborhood marked by skeletal deciduous trees and nineteenth-century row houses that appeared to have been stretched vertically to compress as many units as possible into the allotted space. They had formal stoops and the kind of ornate cornices and woodworking details around the windows that Mason generally associated with museums.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Mason said. “If all of these scientists were killed and their bodies left to be found, why were Mosche and Chenhav kept around for so long before they were executed?”
The driver pulled up against the curb and parked in front of a two-story house with basement windows partially concealed behind an elaborate wrought-iron fence. The facade was greenish gray, the door a bright rose color, and the stairs black. A silhouette passed behind the drapes hanging in the oriel bay window of the parlor.
“They were obviously contributing in some way.”
“And they couldn’t possibly have done so for two decades without doing so of their own free will.”
The driver opened his door and stepped out onto the street. The frigid breeze cut through the warm interior and chased dead leaves across the asphalt.
“This is the part I always find awkward,” Gunnar said. He waited patiently for the driver to open his door before climbing out and stepping aside for Mason to do the same. He slipped the chauffeur a tip so discreetly that Mason nearly missed it. Sometimes it was hard to believe that this was the adult form of the kid who’d worn a hairnet and worked in the school cafeteria to send money back home to his grandparents. “Are you sure we shouldn’t have called first?”
“What, and give him a chance to slip out before we got here?”
“To make sure he has access to the information we need.”
“Trust me, he has it,” Mason said. “He hired a cybersecurity firm to install servers and equip a remote-access terminal in his guest bedroom so he could network with his executives at AgrInitiative.”
“You just didn’t want to give him enough notice that he could have matching sweaters waiting when you arrived.”
The Annihilation Protocol Page 29