“It wouldn’t,” Mason said. “The murders are personal to the Scarecrow. Part of his own private agenda.”
“You think he’s playing both sides?”
“I think we’re dealing with a man who doesn’t have an exit strategy.”
Gunnar performed one final, thorough search of the network for any other foreign holdings and downloaded the pertinent information to his laptop, just in case it might prove useful later.
Mason figured that since his father’s team had already distanced him from Aebischer, it was probably best that he not say anything about what they’d learned, especially considering the kind of fallout he anticipated once this was all over. And it would be soon, one way or another. He could positively feel the inevitability of the coming confrontation, swelling like the pressure underneath the snowpack before an avalanche.
He and Gunnar descended the stairs into the parlor. The senator and Ariana were little more than wavering shapes through the glass fireplace in the dining room, but even then Mason could tell they were enjoying each other’s company. He didn’t want to disturb them any more than he already had. His father deserved a little bit of happiness in his life.
Mason closed the front door behind them with a soft click and headed back out into the cold.
52
As arranged, Gunnar’s plane had been refueled and was waiting when they arrived. The pilot had filed their flight plan and was ready to take them to Fallston Airport, a small commercial airfield a short distance from the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, where the command historian would be waiting for them at the Visitors Center. Mason’s rear end had barely hit the seat when his phone alerted him to an incoming video call. He answered before the second ring.
“Tell me you found him.”
“Roybal’s in the wind,” Ramses said.
“How can you be sure?”
Ramses turned around the camera and revealed a bedroom Mason didn’t recognize. The bed was unmade and the blinds were drawn. Several dresser drawers had been pulled out and the clock from the nightstand rested upside down on the floor. The view shifted and focused on the walk-in closet, which swayed from side to side as Ramses walked closer. The clothes had been shoved to either side, revealing a wall safe. The open door granted a clear view of the empty steel interior.
“Are you inside his house?” Mason asked.
“No one answered the door. What was I supposed to do?”
“Where’s Layne?”
“Waiting outside,” Ramses said. “Probably still going on about this whole breaking-and-entering kick she’s on. She can be a real downer, you know that?”
“You broke into his house?”
Ramses turned the camera back toward his face as he exited the master bedroom and passed through a dark hallway.
“See? That’s where we have a difference of opinion. I didn’t technically break anything. I just checked all the doors until I found one that opened.”
“He left the door unlocked?”
“Not in the strictest sense. The guy didn’t show up for work today. I was worried about him.”
Mason glanced out the window as the Citation XLS taxied toward the runway.
“Any sign of where he might have gone?” he asked.
“Depending upon how much cash he had in that safe, he could be anywhere by now. What I can tell you, though, is that wherever he went, he won’t be coming back.”
“Damn it,” Mason said. “Get out of there before someone sees you.”
“No chance of that. This place is on, like, ten acres in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t have bought a place like this on a policeman’s salary. This guy’s been dirty from the start.”
“Tell Layne to call in an anonymous tip.”
“She’s going to love that idea.”
“She’ll do it if it means someone will put out a BOLO on him.”
“Too late,” Gunnar said. “Roybal’s passport was stamped at the Peace Bridge border crossing outside of Buffalo about four hours ago.”
“Your guy at the impound lot must have tipped him off,” Ramses said.
“Barrie wouldn’t have said anything,” Mason said. “Roybal had to know he was in serious trouble when the names of the guys who died out in the Pine Barrens hit the wire. Can you track the GPS in his car or cell phone?”
“Both are disabled,” Gunnar said, “but their last known location was his home address.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Layne said. The image swiveled to show the kitchen, where she stood with her back to the camera as she carefully picked through a stack of mail on the eating bar with the end of her pen. “We’re wasting our time here.”
“I see someone decided to come in after all,” Ramses said. “Does that mean we’re friends again?”
“Roybal’s last incoming call was more than twenty-four hours ago,” Gunnar said. “His final outgoing call, however, was made roughly ten hours ago, the difference, if I’m not mistaken, is just about how long it would take to drive to Buffalo from there.”
“Who’d he call?” Mason asked.
“Give me a second.” Lines of code scrolled past on Gunnar’s screen. “The number was assigned to a cell phone with a serial number that can be traced to a bulk purchase from a company called Discount Corporate Sales, LLC, which sold them to … What do you know? East Coast Transportation Services.”
“The same company that paid him a quarter million to serve as a consultant,” Layne said.
The plane lurched as it ascended into a bank of clouds. Mason yawned to equalize the pressure.
“Is the GPS still active?” he asked.
“No,” Gunnar said. “But I can tell you its last geographical coordinates correspond to the East Coast Transportation Services hub in Newark.”
“We’ll hit it on our way back to the city,” Ramses said.
The plane rose above the clouds. The black waters of the Atlantic intermittently appeared below them.
“What did you learn about Bern?” Layne asked.
“AgrAmerica acquired a Swiss company called Aebischer Pharma,” Mason said. “It was the brainchild of some scientists from the Army Chemical Corps, who made a fortune selling antibiotics to the Department of Defense during the anthrax scare.”
“That’s the same time frame as when Chenhav and Mosche would have been there.”
“Exactly.”
“So what’s the connection?” Layne asked.
“We’re looking at two scientists with ties to the World Health Organization potentially being in bed with the same company that made billions from its recommendation to prescribe that company’s proprietary drug. Discovering their bodies underneath a building where we found evidence of an engineered flu virus and the manufacture of a chemical weapon of mass destruction makes total sense in that context.”
“Yeah, but only from the perspective of these guys outliving their usefulness and needing to be eliminated.”
“Only five people were killed during the anthrax scare,” Mason said. “Maybe they developed consciences when they realized that this was the real deal and millions of people were going to die.”
“We need to get out of here,” Layne said. “A commanding officer of a state police sector doesn’t just blow off work without someone checking into it. Let me know what you find out at Edgewood.”
She terminated the call and left Mason staring at the blank screen of his phone. He set it down on the table, furrowed his brow, and looked at Gunnar.
“So let’s say Chenhav and Mosche were complicit in the plot to capitalize on the release of the anthrax back in ’01,” he said. “You can chalk that up to opportunism or greed, but there’s a huge difference between using your position to secure a WHO recommendation for a specific antibiotic and faking your own death. They had to throw away their careers, abandon their families and friends, and sacrifice everything they’d worked their entire lives to achieve. That’s an entirely different level of commitment.”
&nb
sp; “An ideological level,” Gunnar said.
“Exactly.”
Gunnar got up and checked in with the pilot, whose voice didn’t carry from the cockpit. He grabbed a couple bottles of water from the mini refrigerator on his way back and tossed one to Mason.
“We’re about twenty minutes out,” he said. “He’ll file the flight plans back to New York while we’re at the base.”
“You trust your pilot’s discretion?”
“For what I pay him, he’d remain celibate in the Playboy Mansion.”
“But there’s more to life than money,” Mason said. “Two scientists at the top of their respective fields had to be making a comfortable living. I can’t see them throwing away the lives they’d created for themselves for any amount.”
“Think about the pictures,” Gunnar said. “From ’89 to ’91, they were involved with the Society of Clinical Microbiologists and Virologists and the Israeli Medical Association. Two fairly standard professional organizations. Then we get to the mid-nineties, when they’re photographed at the Twentieth Assembly of the Society for Lasting International Peace and the Economic Strategy Conference of the US-Israel Science and Technology Alliance, and suddenly we’re dealing with an added element of politics.”
“So what happened between ’91 and ’94 that caused two scientists to step out of their labs and into the political arena?”
Gunnar lowered his eyes to his screen and his fingers buzzed on the keyboard.
“The Israeli-Palestinian peace process led to the Oslo Accords in ’93, which allowed the Palestinian Liberation Organization to relocate from Tunisia to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, paving the way for the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority.”
“Was that a bad thing?”
“It was to organizations like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who believed that nothing shy of the recognition of an autonomous Palestinian state was acceptable, and immediately launched attacks against Israel. The conflict escalated after the Philadelphia Conference, where the first President Bush outlined his new world order, which they interpreted as an assault on Islam itself and rededicated themselves to destroying Israel and promoting jihad throughout the region.”
Mason had a sinking sensation in his stomach that had nothing to do with the plane starting its descent into Maryland.
“Who did they lose?” he asked.
Gunnar glanced up at him over the top of the monitor.
“On April sixth, 1994, Holocaust Memorial Day, a suicide bomber pulled up beside a city bus and detonated a homemade explosive device. It was the first terrorist attack against a civilian target. Eight were killed, among them Bayla Mosche and David Chenhav, aged thirteen and sixteen, respectively, and the only children of our dead scientists.”
“Jesus,” Mason said. “That would explain how they ended up at a UN summit on sustainable population growth and a World Congress on CBRN threat and terrorism.”
“And it certainly checks the ideology box, but it doesn’t tell us how they went from wanting to save the world to actively participating in a plot to destroy it.”
Mason thought about the picture taken at the Twentieth Assembly of the Society for Lasting International Peace in Copenhagen, with Drs. Nitzan Chenhav and Yossi Mosche standing on either side of Andreas Mikkelson, managing director of Royal Nautilus Petroleum. And he thought about his wife, what her death had done to him and what he, in turn, had done to others.
“I think it just might.”
53
Fallston Airport wasn’t what one might consider a booming hub, which meant there wasn’t a professional transportation service, so they opted to use a ride-sharing company. The drive to the Edgewood facility was only twelve miles but promised to take twenty minutes. Mason told the driver of the black Crown Victoria, a skinny man in his early fifties named Anthony, who both looked and smelled like a direct descendant of the Marlboro Man, that he’d double the fare if he could cut that time in half. The driver had been so committed to the proposition that he’d been forced to add the caveat “if you get us there without killing us first.” How Gunnar managed to work with his laptop balanced on his thighs and the car seemingly hurtling toward certain doom was beyond Mason, who could barely keep up with the trees and fields whipping past.
“Royal Nautilus Petroleum is one of the oldest multinational corporations in the world, so its history is pretty well documented,” Gunnar said. “Formed in 1907 in an effort to compete with Thomas Elliot Richter’s Great American Oil. It’s currently the largest company, by revenue, in Europe and the sixth largest in the world. It has interests in everything from petrochemicals to biofuels, a presence in nearly every country on the planet, and owns drilling rights to some of the most lucrative reserves in the entire world, including those in Iraq and the North Sea.”
“How does a company like that end up working out of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal?”
“Nautilus Petroleum first entered the chemical business in 1929, when it formed a partnership with Centrum Steelworks, which produced commercial ammonia as a by-product of its steel-manufacturing process. Under the Nautilus Chemical Company banner, they commenced production of ammonia from natural gas and expanded into chemical solvents, synthetic rubber, liquid detergents, and, later, industrial pesticides, the foundation of what would become chemical weapons.”
“What about this guy Mikkelson?”
“All right,” Gunnar said. “Andreas Mikkelson served as managing director from 1978 to 1994, after which he assumed the role of deputy chairman of the board of directors, a position he still holds to this day, along with managing a handful of special projects.”
“So he still has a large role in the company.”
“Maybe not in its day-to-day operations, but he definitely helps shape the course of its future. He’s the third-highest-ranking official, next to the chairman of the board and the CEO, and by far the most tenured among them.”
“What puts him at the SLIP Assembly in Copenhagen and brings him into contact with Chenhav and Mosche?”
“Nautilus would have had a large stake in any energy-based economic reform, for starters, and while a petroleum company may sound like a strange bedfellow for any socialized-medicine initiative, you have to remember that most active pharmaceutical ingredients are produced by chemical synthesis. In fact, early antidepressants were actually by-products of the oil-refining process. A government-run single-payer model would allow it to lean on the elected officials it already owned to secure contracts and fix prices.”
“That still doesn’t explain what Mikkelson has in common with two Israeli scientists who’d just lost their children.”
“Like I initially said, the picture looks like your standard PR photo op. As much as I loathe coincidence, we have to consider the possibility that there was no preexisting relationship between them.”
An ornate sign composed of mortared slate and adorned with bronze placards featuring the logos of the U.S. Army, U.S. Army Materiel Command, and U.S. Army Installation Management Command blew past, announcing their arrival at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.
“What was Mikkelson’s role prior to joining the executive council?” Mason asked.
“Give me a second,” Gunnar said.
The driver pulled up to the security gate and rolled down his window. Two soldiers in camo fatigues and tan boots stepped out from behind the smoked glass of the guardhouse. The taller of the two approached the vehicle and asked to see their IDs, while the other walked a German shepherd around the car, allowing it to sniff for explosive materials underneath the carriage and inside the wheel wells.
“Here we go,” Gunnar said. “Bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and doctorate in cognitive neurosciences from Radboud University in the Netherlands. He was lured away from a neurosurgical residency at the university’s medical center by Nautilus Chemical Company and sent to the Emeryville Research Center in Houston, where his team pioneered a class of materials called block copolymers, whose
medical applications include artificial heart valves. He was rewarded with a more prominent role in the R and D department, which included supervisory duties at both the Rocky Mountain and Edgewood arsenals.”
“And he leveraged whatever he did there into a promotion to managing director,” Mason said.
The guard raised the gate and saluted them as they passed. Long industrial buildings with peaked aluminum roofs intermittently appeared through groves of barren trees. The driver wended through the forest and pulled up to the curb in front of the Visitors Center, a squat building with tinted glass and a corrugated roof.
“Thanks for the ride,” Mason said, and handed a stack of twenties to the driver. “And for getting us here in one piece. Mind sticking around for a while? I don’t think I’m going to be inside for very long, and we’re going to need a ride back to the airport.”
“Same deal?”
“Plus your time.”
“You got it,” the driver said. “And hey, I know they frown upon us eavesdropping on our passengers, but I couldn’t help overhearing you guys talking about Royal Nautilus. You need to be careful dealing with those guys. They helped finance the rise of the Nazis before World War Two.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“I come from a military family. My granddad stormed the beaches of Normandy. Lost two brothers and a lot of friends that day. Said he’d sooner push his car ten miles through the desert than buy a single gallon of gas from people like them, who stirred up that shit in the first place, just to make a quick buck. And having personally dealt with those guys in the Iraqi oil fields during Desert Storm, I’ve got to say I wholeheartedly agree with him.”
Mason turned to face Gunnar.
“Is that true?”
“I can vouch for Nautilus’s picking up the drilling rights to most of Iraq following the war, but I’ll have to look into the rest,” Gunnar said.
Mason climbed out of the car and watched it swing around and park in the closest space. He was halfway up the front walk when a soldier wearing a Class B uniform with a navy skirt and a black cardigan emerged from the sliding glass doors and strode straight toward him. She had blue eyes, an abundance of freckles, and auburn hair drawn into a tight bun at the base of her skull. The insignia on her shoulder identified her as a specialist.
The Annihilation Protocol Page 31