The Extinction Agenda

by Michael Laurence

  He met her gaze for the first time.

  “Yes.”

  Mason left her at the graveside, staring in the opposite direction across the green field, toward where swans floated on a clear pond shaded by elms. In that moment, as he walked downhill toward his waiting car, he experienced complete clarity of thought.

  He might have failed to save Kane, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to avenge him.

  PART I

  Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.

  —Ronald Reagan, address to the annual meeting of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce (1961)

  TODAY

  7

  Denver, Colorado

  OCTOBER 27

  A lot of things had changed since Mason left Arizona. He’d changed. He no longer cared about his professional cap, let alone how many feathers it had. He could effectively do his job in the shadow of the Rockies, and there was no denying that he needed to spend more time with his wife. Or at least make more of an effort to do so. Besides, his wasn’t the only career to consider. He had to break down doors and shout at the top of his lungs to strike fear into the hearts of his adversaries. His wife could do so with a mere phone call. She represented the arm of the government whose reach crossed state lines and international borders, a three-letter entity that elicited terror in criminals and law-abiding citizens alike, an agency that served the principal and nonpartisan interests of the United States of America.

  His wife was an IRS agent, and a damn good one at that. Agent Angela Thornton Mason specialized in corporate fraud criminal investigations. She liked to say she could find a single dollar bill filtered through a dozen shell companies and offshore accounts in less time than it took to do her hair. Mason had no reason to doubt her. He’d witnessed her following paper trails so creative and circuitous that he doubted even the team of accountants who hid the money knew where it was anymore. He’d also spent roughly a quarter of his adult life waiting for her to do her hair.

  Unfortunately, there was one thing she could do that he simply couldn’t. She’d figured out a way to leave her work at the door.

  Mason, on the other hand, was unable to turn his mind off. No matter which line of thought he followed, it always led back to the nightmare in Arizona. Were it one of those things he could simply switch off like the ignition in his car when he pulled into the garage, he would have done so in a heartbeat. Without hesitation. A guy should only have to relive the deaths of his friends and colleagues so many times.

  He wasn’t so out of touch with the world around him that he couldn’t see what he was doing to Angie. She reached out, and he pulled away. She wanted to help him, to break down the walls he’d erected around himself. He understood that on a conscious level. The problem, however, was that the only way to bridge the growing chasm between them was to tell her what had happened at the quarry. Not the sanitized story that had garnered commendations for those who had survived. The truth. And even he wasn’t entirely sure what that was anymore. All he knew with any kind of certainty was that he was directly responsible for Kane’s death, that his split-second decision had cost his partner his life, that it was his fault there hadn’t even been enough of him left to bury.

  Maybe a part of him believed that needing her help was a sign of weakness. More likely, he subconsciously recognized the enormity of his failure and realized that it was only a matter of time before he failed her, too. He told himself that he was somehow insulating her from the knowledge that there were monsters out there smuggling horrible diseases into the country, sociopaths like the men in the quarry who didn’t spare a thought for their victims. He didn’t know what their endgame might have been, but every fiber of his being screamed that whatever it was, it wasn’t over.

  Not by a long shot.

  But while Mason was chasing ghosts, he lost sight of the living. It wasn’t until one morning, while he and Angie sat across a table set with their untouched breakfasts, that he noticed her staring into her lap and unconsciously twisting her wedding ring. A ring wasn’t a complicated piece of equipment. It was like a light switch in that sense. It was either on or it was off. Twisting implied a measure of uncertainty, and since the ring was on her finger at the time, it didn’t take a genius to figure out the alternative she was contemplating. He knew right then and there that either he changed something in a big hurry or he was going to lose her.

  If he hadn’t already.

  “Remember the day we met?” Mason asked.

  She continued to look down, but he saw the hint of a smile on her lips. The way the sunlight passing through the window of the eating nook fell on her auburn hair made it appear to glow. She was every bit as beautiful as she’d been the first time he saw her.

  “You were sitting in the bleachers, two rows back from the bench. We were down by one at the end of the second period. The buzzer had just gone off. I was heading toward the locker room when I looked up and there you were. Red sweater. Black snow cap. And the most amazing emerald eyes I’d ever seen.”

  She looked up, and he realized how long it had been since he’d actually made eye contact with his wife. Her hands ceased their restless movement.

  “You remember what I said?” he asked.

  “Of course I do. You were the most arrogant man I’d ever met.”

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  She shook her head and allowed herself to smile.

  “You said, ‘I’m going to win this game and then I’m going to take you out.’”

  “So I came out in the third period—”

  “And got checked so hard, you were barely able to make it off the ice.”

  “But I did exactly what I said I was going to do.”

  “You did nothing of the kind. You lost by three.”

  “Yet you were still waiting for me outside in the snow.”

  She smiled and reached across the table. He took her hand in his and felt her ring press into his palm.

  “I’m still waiting for you.”

  She squeezed his hand one last time and then rose and started clearing the dishes. He would have done anything for her. Anything except for the one thing she needed him to do.

  He was halfway up the stairs when she spoke in a voice so small, he couldn’t be entirely certain he’d heard it.

  “But I can’t wait forever.”

  8

  They lived in a two-bedroom turn-of-the-century bungalow in a trendy neighborhood, south of downtown. The house had been gutted and retrofitted with central heating and air, despite the fact that the massive Siberian elms and ponderosa pines kept the house shaded year-round. They’d left the original plaster walls alone, at Angie’s insistence. The only real concession Mason had sought was a satellite dish. No man should have to live like a savage in this day and age.

  The main floor consisted of a tiny living room with a massive bay window and a well-appointed and functional kitchen. It kind of had to be, considering how tiny it was. There was a dining room and a mudroom and a skinny staircase with a maple banister that led to the second floor and both bedrooms. The master was large enough for a king-size bed, but little else, and the bathroom still smelled faintly of the old people who’d lived there before them. Mason had commandeered the spare bedroom and converted it into a home office. He’d covered the walls with maps of Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and western Texas and riddled them with color-coded thumbtacks connected by lengths of yarn. Any even tangential reference to trafficking along the Mexican border was marked. By the time he added pictures and newspaper clippings and various notes, Angie had started calling it his “den.”

  He told her it was for his current assignment with the Metro Trafficking Task Force. And while that might have been true from a certain perspective, she understood that it was only peripherally related. That this room was where he kept the demons he’d brought back with him from the desert.

  There were eight different colors, each of which corresponded to
one of the major Mexican drug-trafficking organizations: the Sinaloa Federation, the Cártel del Golfo, the Knights Templar, La Familia Michoacana, the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, Los Mazatlecos, the Beltrán-Leyva Organization, and the various splinter groups of Los Zetas. The cartels functioned just like any other multibillion-dollar corporations. They branded themselves in a way that their rivals wouldn’t be able to miss. They each tended toward a main trafficking focus and a signature way of dealing with their competition. The Sinaloans controlled the lion’s share of the cocaine trafficking and had a penchant for beheading their rivals, mutilating their remains, and displaying them in public. The Zetas counted among their ranks a large number of former elite commandos from the Mexican Army whose skills allowed the organization to expand from drugs into extortion, kidnapping, and the protection racket. The New Generation Cartel of Jalisco favored indiscriminate slaughter and overt demonstrations of brutality. And on and on. It was depressing to see all the violence plotted out like this, visualizing the systematic conquest of the American Southwest by merciless merchants of death whose familia made the Sicilians look like Shriners.

  Rainbow colors radiated upward from the southern border, through towns like Tijuana and Monterrey, but the vast majority formed lightning bolts that shot into the interior of Arizona from Sonoyta, Sasabe, Agua Prieta, Naco, and Nogales, open sections of the desert where there were no fences, no deterrents, and an entire Native American reservation that served as a big red carpet. Apparently, the border strategy was to funnel all the trafficking into one narrow shipping lane, one that could potentially diminish the number of invaders by heat attrition, but otherwise was left largely untended, while U.S. Customs and Border Patrol stations filmed TV shows and showcased their taxpayer-funded armadas for the media. It was as though the policy makers had simply decided to leave the back door open for a lover to sneak in during the night while publicly decrying infidelity at the tops of their lungs.

  As though there were some things that the powers that be wanted to pass through the net.

  By weeding out the events he could conclusively attribute to known cartels, he was able to hone in on the reports that fell in the gray areas. The majority were merely crimes of opportunity, individuals or unaffiliated groups attempting to get a leg up, most of which culminated in arrests, deportation, or bloodshed. And then there were others that seemingly went unnoticed, events that he believed would lead him to those he was certain had eluded them at the quarry, the men responsible for smuggling the deadly virus into the country, not to mention the death of his partner.

  And a staggeringly high number of them involved fire.

  Mason discovered the first instance by accident. In a file related to the seizure of a large quantity of methamphetamines in the town of Eagar, northeast of Tucson, one of the responding officers noted that he’d been summoned to the scene while on his way to investigate a fire in a remote barn with suspected casualties. On a whim, Mason tracked down the report of the actual fire investigation, which consisted of about three formal sentences and a succinct summary involving presumed immigrants being trapped inside by a fire of their own accidental creation. He called the investigator—Sgt. Judd Morton with the Eagar PD—who informed him that such incidents weren’t as uncommon as he might think. These illegals exhausted themselves in the desert, broke into some rancher’s barn or shed, and crashed in the hay with a cigarette hanging from their mouths.

  And so it had been on his own dime that he traveled back to Arizona forty-eight hours later and stood before the charred rubble. He took pictures from every conceivable angle. Nothing remained. Not a single wall stood. The majority of the debris had been cleared and loaded onto a fleet of trucks that belonged to the deep treads positively littering the site, which was at the bottom of an arroyo, invisible from just about every vantage point. There were already fresh stacks of lumber and building materials waiting to give rise to a new structure. Were it not for the faint yellowish discoloration of the soot on the branches of the surrounding trees, he probably would have been able to let it go, but he’d learned a little about chemical accelerants after nearly being incinerated on his last visit and knew that benzene was a volatile and explosive aromatic hydrocarbon that burned with an almost dirty yellow chemical flame. A subsequent call to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed that the victims’ bodies had been converted to little more than ashes and hopelessly unidentifiable chunks of bone.

  The pictures he took that day were the first he tacked up on his wall. Others followed, the majority of which he copied from the investigative files or clipped from small-town newspapers. Some incidents lacked photos, so he simply pinned up the paragraph-long mentions he found hidden toward the back of the local sections.

  A surprising number of the fire-related immigrant deaths were accidental, as Sergeant Morton had said, but there were still a good number that had been ruled as such that Mason simply didn’t buy. In most cases, the victims were discovered to have various degrees of burns over their bodies. Some weren’t even burned at all; they had merely succumbed to the smoke. It was the incidents in which no physical remains had been salvageable that he discreetly looked into in his spare time. He plotted them on his maps with red thumbtacks and connected them with red yarn. Six incidents in all. Hardly enough to form a readily identifiable pattern by anyone’s standards, but the nature of the coincidental elements they shared was impossible to ignore. That, and the fact that the line connecting all six incidents shot straight upward like an arrow from the quarry where his team had been ambushed on the Tohono O’odham Reservation into Saguache, Colorado, southeast of Pueblo.

  He had discovered an unidentified ninth organization operating under the radar on an interstate route that led directly into the heart of Colorado.

  9

  The Metro Trafficking Task Force was organized by the Department of Justice, specifically the United States Attorney’s Office, and combined the resources of the DEA, FBI, ICE, Colorado State Patrol, and local police and sheriff’s departments. Its stated mission expanded upon the basic pursuit and apprehension of individuals responsible for the import and distribution of narcotics to encompass all the various forms of trafficking—from human beings to weapons—along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. While the task force was primarily staffed and funded at the state and local levels, the various federal agencies assisted with operational and tactical support when needed and interceded when investigations crossed state lines.

  Mason had volunteered to serve as the FBI’s liaison to the task force so he could gain access to inside information and keep himself close to any investigation even peripherally related to what had happened in Arizona and his newly identified ninth trafficking organization. The flaw was that he had to sit through these weekly meetings in the conference room at the Denver Federal Center, which tended to last anywhere between forever and eternity, but they beat filling out paperwork, which was why he was running late this morning.

  He slipped in through the rear door, to find the conference room dark, save for the screen at the front of the room, beside which stood a woman he immediately recognized, even in the dim light. He rarely crossed paths with his wife in a professional capacity, but she never failed to impress him. When Angie was in her element, she commanded the room, just as she did now. She wore a gray skirt suit with a cream blouse, and her wavy red hair was pulled back in a ponytail. The light from the projector reflected from reading glasses he didn’t know she wore.

  Mason leaned against the back wall while his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  “We’re basically at the mercy of the banks.” Angie clicked through slides featuring account numbers and dollar amounts. “We have no choice but to rely on them to voluntarily report suspicious financial activity. If they don’t, it’s nearly impossible for us to track interest paid to foreign account holders, since the funds aren’t subject to federal income tax.”

  “You’re suggesting the banks are complicit?”
an officer asked from a table near the front of the room.

  There were eight rectangular tables, each large enough to accommodate a dozen people, yet only a few, clustered together by affiliation, sat at each. Most handled undercover operatives and confidential informants or supervised those who did. The remainder were advisers or bureaucrats representing the various oversight committees. Mason recognized the federal contingent at the table farthest from the stage and took the open seat beside his partner.

  “What I’m telling you is that banks are in the business of making money. There’s a reason that U.S. banks are the preferred choice for laundering cartel profits.” Angie clicked her remote and the screen changed to a world map with arrows radiating outward from Mexico, the largest of which struck America right in the heartland. “During the last fifty years, more than one hundred billion dollars in illegal money has flowed out of Mexico and into the international financial system. Now, you have to understand that a commercial bank makes roughly eighteen percent profit on the money it takes in, so its sole mission is to get as much money through the door as humanly possibly. An investment bank earns close to a quarter on every dollar it brings in. This is a huge industry that’s threatened by anyone who tries to cut off the flow of cash, especially task forces like this one.”

  “I’ll never be able to figure out how you landed someone like her,” Mason’s partner whispered.

  Special Agent Jared Trapp looked like a windstorm followed him wherever he went. His hair was a mess, his clothes disheveled, and somehow he’d already grown a week’s worth of stubble in the last few hours, all of which combined to make people instinctively underestimate him. He and Mason had been partners for nearly eight months now and had pretty much hit it off right away, undoubtedly because Trapp had worked with Kane during the investigation into the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on 9/11. Mason figured that gave him the kind of motivation he needed in a partner if they were going to track down those responsible for their mutual friend’s death.