“Special Agent Mason?” she asked.
He held up his badge for her benefit. She scrutinized it for several seconds, nodded, and proffered her hand.
“Brenda Peele, public affairs specialist and command historian. I’ve assembled what I believe to be a solid collection of artifacts from the time frame you requested. I hope it will be of some use in your investigation. Now, if you’ll come with me…”
Mason followed her inside and into a small museum, where she guided him through a veritable maze of displays featuring educational and historical signs, pictures, and relics.
“President Woodrow Wilson authorized the construction of the U.S. military’s first large-scale chemical-production facility right here on the Gunpowder Neck Reservation on October sixteenth, 1917. It was renamed Edgewood Arsenal the following year and commissioned as the Gas Offense Production Division of the Chemical Warfare Service, under the command of Major General William Sibert. As you can see from the aerial photograph on your right, at that time there were four production plants for chlorine, chloropicrin, mustard, and phosgene, as well as three seventy-five-millimeter-shell filling plants, the testing of which occurred to the north at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.”
They breezed past a banner celebrating the base’s centennial anniversary, a detailed time line stenciled on the wall, and Lucite cases containing early gas masks, containment glove boxes, and field detectors.
“When we entered World War Two,” she said, “we learned that our stockpiles of toxic gasses and chemical agents were woefully inadequate compared to the new stable of German nerve agents, which we officially tested here during the war. We determined that sarin, also known as GB, would be the best addition to our arsenal, although we didn’t commence with the pilot program until 1952. Mass production was established at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado two years later. The sixties brought extensive challenges for the Chemical Corps, which was forced to essentially justify its existence following wars fought in Europe and Korea without the aid of chemical weaponry. In response, we shifted our focus from production to research and development. We designed the M17 gas mask, the M8 automated gas detector, and the M11 decontamination sprayer and pioneered what was known as the Incapacitation Program, through which we attempted to produce an agent capable of rendering our adversaries inoperative without violating the tenets of the Geneva Protocol.”
Peele led Mason through a closed door, down a ramp, and into a conference room with a podium and projector screen at the front. Several cardboard boxes with inset handles and lids had been stacked on one side of the long table, their contents spread across the polished wood.
“While we don’t house personnel files on the premises, we do curate a fairly extensive library of photographs, memorabilia, and declassified research. You see, the history of an installation like this one is every bit as important as its future. The work performed here is critical to our understanding of modern warfare, the defense of our troops abroad, and, God forbid, the safety of our citizens at home.”
“Thanks for preparing all of this for me,” Mason said.
“It’s no trouble at all,” she said. “If this information can be of use to you in an investigation with national security ramifications, I’m only too happy to help. The time frame in question is what we consider the dawn of modern chemical warfare and, in my opinion, one of the most interesting times in our history. For nearly thirty years, we were primarily concerned with blister agents like mustard gas and lewisite, for which we developed antidotes and designed protective gear, and then all of a sudden we were faced with the possibility of the Nazis using nerve gasses against us. Our research here was not only integral to understanding the threat posed by these G-series agents but in developing the means of counteracting their effects in a very short period of time.”
Mason walked the length of the table, studying the old black-and-white pictures as he went. There were men in lab coats, white shirts with black ties, traditional uniforms, and hospital gowns.
“You tested on your own people?”
“This was a different era, you must understand,” she said. “Soliciting volunteers from within our own ranks was routine procedure. Even the chief of Clinical Research at the time, Dr. Tobin von der Nuell, understood how this might be perceived, and he subjected himself to all procedures before allowing them to be conducted on others. That’s him right there.”
She pointed at a picture of a heavyset man with bushy white hair in a hospital bed. He inhaled from a device held by a man in a white lab coat, while men with ties took notes in hardbound journals.
“What were these volunteers exposed to?”
“Low doses of G-series agents, V-series agents, experimental cures, and psychoactive drugs like BZ and LSD. All under the direct supervision of a highly trained medical staff.”
“Speaking of the staff, do you happen to have any pictures of them?”
She walked around to the spread of photographs on the opposite side of the table. There was a group picture of men in uniform, seated in bleachers, all of them young and male, presumably the volunteers. There were nurses in crisp white uniforms and paper hats tending to patients, drawing liquid into syringes, and serving meals. Massive bare rooms filled with beds and primitive vital-signs monitors. Doctors with neckties and lab coats, interviewing test subjects, taking notes, and one of all of them posed as though for a class picture. She picked it up and handed it to Mason.
“This was our primary treatment staff,” she said. “The majority of the doctors were civilians and wore lab coats to distinguish themselves from the other specialists.”
Mason studied the fifteen young men, only a couple of whom could have been out of their twenties, searching their faces for any identifiable features. None of them looked familiar. He flipped over the picture and glanced at the back, where someone had written in pencil “A-Team Members, 1975.” The names of each of the men were listed from left to right and by row. He recognized two of them right away.
He turned it over again and studied two of the men standing in the back row. With their flattops and baby faces, they were hardly reminiscent of the men they would become so many years later.
Charles Raymond and Andreas Mikkelson.
The current managing director of Research and Development and the deputy chairman of the board of directors of Royal Nautilus Petroleum.
54
“What role did Royal Nautilus Petroleum have to play in the human experimentation?” Mason asked.
“It had existing relationships with both the Chemical Corps and the Department of Defense through its work at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal,” Peele said. “The testing here was an extension of what they were doing in Colorado, so it was only logical that their experts be integrated into our scientific team. Not only was it imperative that we understand the effects on the human body of the chemical weapons they were helping us manufacture but we also needed a partner with ready access to every existing chemical, an extensive research and development department, and the infrastructure to put our theoretical incapacitating agent into production at the drop of a hat.”
“Were you able to produce it?”
“Regrettably, no. We learned that the reaction to psychoactive agents is completely independent of dose and subject to the individual’s physiology, much like tolerance to alcohol.”
“What about sarin?”
“It’s a completely different animal.” She looked away when she spoke. “As one would imagine, the subjects’ reactions were entirely predictable, although the severity of symptoms varied by dose and body weight.”
Mason removed the pictures Peele had found of the Nautilus contingent from a folder labeled “Human Volunteer Program, 1975.” One showed Mikkelson monitoring the pressure on a tank of compressed gas while a soldier with electrodes attached to his head breathed through the mask attached to it. In another, Raymond was wearing thick rubber gloves while drawing a colorless liquid into a syringe. Mikkelson sedati
ng a man in the throes of a seizure, saliva foaming from his mouth. The two men together in an office setting. Separately at the bedsides of men with sunken eyes and pallid skin, who didn’t look like they were enjoying the experience. Men in khaki uniforms with black ties looked over their shoulders and took notes in just about every one of them.
“The men with the ties,” Mason said. “Were they doctors, too?”
“They were army personnel,” Peele said. “While some were physicians, the majority were engineers from the Chemical Corps.”
“Do you have a staff photograph of them?”
Peele shuffled through the pictures until she found the one she was looking for and handed it to Mason. There were sixteen men in three uneven rows, all wearing khaki dress uniforms and long black ties. He recognized Mr. Ed right off the bat. Second Lieutenant Vance Edwards was seated in the middle row between a stocky man with thinning hair and thick-rimmed glasses and another with a thin face, long neck, and prominent Adam’s apple. He flipped it over and saw the names written on the back. His heart raced as he read them.
They were all here. The three men O’Leary had remembered from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and the man who’d owned the flatbeds used to transport the Novichok. Second Lieutenant Vance Edwards. Chief Warrant Officer Martin, not Milton, Bradley. Sergeants Jack Danvers and Peter Cavanaugh.
He turned it back over and looked at the faces again. A man in the back row caught his eye. He had dark eyes and a pale complexion. His smile revealed a golden incisor. The writing on the other side identified him as Cpl. Donald Helford.
Three of the dead men from the cornfield were in this picture. Quite possibly even all five of them. They represented the military contingent, and the man killed in Central Park the civilian. Six of what Behavioral believed to be a total of eight victims. Someone was missing, though, someone Mason was certain had to be here somewhere. And if he was right, it would confirm everything he thought he knew, including the names of the final two victims.
Something caught his eye. It took a second for his conscious mind to catch up with his unconscious. He grabbed one of the photographs and took a closer look at the group of men in the background. One of them was definitively of Asian origin, the first Mason had seen in any of the pictures, but he wasn’t identified on the back. He tapped the man’s face.
“Who’s this?”
Peele leaned over his shoulder.
“I believe that’s Dr. Nakamura.” Mason immediately recognized the name from the interview with the woman who lived across the hall from the Scarecrow and the most-wanted board in Johan’s archives. “He was chief of the Clinical Investigation Branch and the lone remaining holdover from a team brought in from Japan in 1953 to help coordinate the launch of the Human Volunteer Program.”
“He looks like he has to be in his thirties here. At least.”
“I can’t speak to that with any authority.”
That meant he would be in his eighties by now. No matter how well he’d taken care of himself, there was no way anyone could have mistaken him for someone in his late forties or early fifties, but if he’d started a family, his child would be about that age now.
“What do you know about him?” Mason asked.
“Very little, I’m afraid,” she said. “He was actually a pediatrician in Japan, believe it or not, but he was employed as a civilian contractor. Like all of the others, he left in 1975, when the program was terminated.”
“Why wasn’t he in the picture with the other doctors?”
“I have no idea.”
“What about his first name?”
“Ichiro.”
The Scarecrow had used that name so there’d be no mistaking his identity. It must have set off all sorts of alarm bells, which was why Marchment had usurped the investigation the second they learned the name of the occupant living in the apartment below Charles Raymond’s. The deputy secretary of the DHS was connected to this place, somehow, and finding out how was critical to understanding what was happening now, nearly half a century later.
“I don’t see any pictures of a man I believe was here during this time frame.”
“If you know his name, perhaps I can help you locate him.”
“Rand Marchment.”
Peele’s demeanor suddenly changed. Her smile faltered and her brow lowered.
“There are no pictures of him here.”
It was a strange, oddly specific response.
“You know who I’m talking about, though,” Mason said. “Don’t you?”
“As I said, there are no pictures of him here.”
“But he was stationed at Edgewood?”
“Yes, although he was only a private second class at the time.”
“You’re certain of it?”
“I’m not comfortable discussing this with you,” she said.
“This information is crucial to my investigation,” Mason said. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that millions of lives are potentially at stake.”
She stared into his face for several seconds before nodding to herself.
“I received a call from the deputy secretary of Homeland Security himself asking me to personally remove all photographs of him from our collection.”
“Didn’t that strike you as an odd request?”
“It’s not my place to say.”
“But it did.” Mason smiled. “Which was why you did as he asked but didn’t dispose of them.”
Peele’s expression remained impassive.
“That would have been a slap in the face to someone charged with the curation of the history of a vaunted institution like this,” he said.
“Like I said, the history of this installation is every bit as important as its future.”
“So if you were to have removed the pictures from your archive…” he prompted.
“I would have probably placed them in a manila folder at the bottom of one of the boxes.” She straightened her cardigan and fixed her stare on a random point in the distance. “Is there any way I can be of further assistance?”
“You’ve been a tremendous help.”
“I’ll be in the museum if you have any questions. Feel free to peruse the material at your leisure, although I insist that nothing leave this room.”
And with that she strode out of the conference room and closed the door behind her.
Mason found the envelope underneath the inner flap of one of the boxes. There were only four pictures inside and, considering Marchment’s rank at the time, he wasn’t identified in any of them.
In the first picture, he wore a drab olive uniform and physically restrained a volunteer in a white undershirt. The man was in obvious physical distress, which presumably necessitated the injection Marchment jabbed into his shoulder.
The second showed him among a group at a cafeteria table, with the rest of the staff seated behind him by specialty. All of the doctors were together at a table beside that of the nurses, while the men in ties occupied another. Marchment sat at the end of the bench, ignoring his food and tablemates and staring at the men in lab coats.
In the third, he leaned over the side of a hospital bed and pinned down the shoulders of the man under the covers while Mikkelson administered a gaseous agent.
He wasn’t the focus of the fourth image. In fact, he was barely visible at the edge, his face in profile and his mouth open in conversation with the man in the center, readily identifiable as Dr. Ichiro Nakamura. They’d been captured walking down a narrow corridor toward an open doorway, through which Mason could see a row of hospital beds. Dozens of shadows stretched across the tiled floor, elongated by the angle of the light that cast them. They almost looked like stars. A silhouette was visible through the crack near the hinges, as though someone were hiding behind the door.
Mason removed his cell phone from his pocket and took pictures of each of them, along with the group photographs, front and back, and forwarded them to Gunnar. That Marchment had been at Edgewood didn’t surprise hi
m; what did, however, was the deputy secretary’s request to purge his likeness from the archives once he had the power to do so. Something terrible had happened here, something so awful that it created a monster like the Scarecrow and damned eight men to the worst deaths imaginable. He only hoped the key to unlocking the secret wasn’t lost in the annals of time.
Peele was standing at attention beside the front doors when he left. Doing what she had done had taken serious courage. He thanked her for her time and for the service she’d provided for her country.
The Crown Vic was in the same parking place, only Gunnar was now in the front seat, talking to the driver. He saw Mason coming down the walk and jumped out of the car.
“You are not going to believe what I just found.”
55
“Sir Hendrick Langbroek was named the first chairman of Royal Nautilus Petroleum in 1907,” Gunnar said. “He was knighted by the British Crown for ensuring the steady flow of oil during World War I, championed the company’s expansion into the chemical business, and commissioned the construction of refineries throughout the world. Langbroek even negotiated the purchase of the Azerbaijan oil field in Baku, Russia, right by the Iranian border, which, at the time, was responsible for nearly half of the world’s oil production. The acquisition ensured that Nautilus became the second-largest oil company in the world, extended its influence around the globe, and positioned it to save the Nazi party when it was on the brink of financial ruin.”
Again, the driver sped across the countryside with an almost sadistic gleam in his eye. Were it not for the impending sense of disaster that seemed to intensify with each passing moment, Mason might have considered rescinding his offer, but there were only two victims left, and once they were dead, the Scarecrow would be free to deliver his professional coup de grâce.
The Annihilation Protocol Page 32