A skeletal structure rose from the dark horizon, tattered plastic drop cloths flapping over the gaps where entire sections of the external walls had been removed. The building was dark, save for a weak glow emanating from the top level. The sedan and Suburban sat silent and lifeless in the overgrown parking lot to the south of what had once been the main entrance.
Despite the tumbleweeds snarled in the chain-link fence, Mason identified a loose section and lifted it for the others to crawl under. He followed them into a mud lot spotted with heaps of construction materials covered with tarps. They split up as planned. He caught a glimpse of the officers—Rivers and Willis—streaking around either side of the building as he ducked beneath a plastic tarp and entered the main level, with Porter on his heels. Trapp and Rasmussen fanned out to his right.
Despite their best attempts at stealth, their wet soles squelched and echoed all around them. Water plinked into puddles on the concrete. The plastic drop cloths snapped in the gusting wind, which pattered them with raindrops that sounded like buckshot. Sporadic flashes of lightning limned concrete support posts, bare girders, and dangling cables with an ethereal blue glow. There were stacks of lumber and drywall near the exposed iron staircase to Mason’s left, which Porter ascended, his rifle raised toward the landing. He couldn’t see Trapp or Rasmussen climbing the matching staircase to his right, but he heard the hollow ting of one of their boots hitting the bottom stair a second after his did.
Mason held his Glock in a two-handed grip and pointed it upward as he climbed. He passed Porter on the landing and continued upward. Crouched beside the doorway to the second level. Waited for Porter to assume position on the other side.
The second level still had the majority of its framework, although giant holes had been punched through the plaster where thieves had stolen all of the copper. He detected movement in the shadows at the far end of the hallway. Even with the night vision, he could barely see Rivers peering out from the stairwell at the far end of the hall.
No sign of movement.
Mason gave the signal and they headed up the stairs again. As before, Porter cleared the first landing and Mason made sure no surprises awaited them at the top, where the stairs terminated at a concrete landing. They pressed their backs to the walls at either side of the doorway.
Time slowed to a crawl.
Mason tuned out the rushing of his pulse in his ears and concentrated on regulating his breathing. Listened for any sound to betray the presence of his prey. It had taken him a year to find anything resembling a lead on the men who had massacred the strike force in Arizona. A single mistake and he might never find them again. He couldn’t let that happen. He needed to end this.
Right here and now.
He eased the trigger into the sweet spot and stepped out into the open. The whole upper level had been scoured to the bare girders, save for the webs of electrical work woven between them. The wind had torn the plastic sheeting attached to the southern wall, making it snap and flare inward. Rainwater dribbled through the roof. Entire sections of the floor were missing. He could see down into rooms filled with scraps of wood and Sheetrock that had been tossed down from this level.
A small chamber had been erected in the center of the open area. A room roughly the size of an office cubicle. Each of the four walls consisted of opaque plastic sheeting stretched tightly from the floor to the ceiling. A faint glow radiated through it.
Mason felt more than saw Trapp and Rasmussen exit the darkened stairwell to his right as he advanced, sighting the dimly lit chamber down the barrel of his pistol. Rivers and Willis emerged from the stairwells on the opposite side of the building. Together, they converged on the plastic square.
Something wasn’t right.
Mason raised his night-vision apparatus. The light was messing with its optics. He glanced from the corner of his eye at Trapp, who advanced in a shooter’s stance, focused solely on the taut drop cloths.
He couldn’t put his finger on it. All he knew was that his instincts were screaming for him to pay attention to a message he couldn’t consciously decipher.
Trapp hung back. He must have sensed the same thing.
Porter and Rasmussen passed them and approached the makeshift chamber at the same pace as their teammates.
Again, dim light. No movement.
The plastic couldn’t have been drawn any tighter. All straight lines and corners. No entrance. No exit. There was something wrong with it, too. Fluid beaded on the inside.
Perspiration.
The four officers reached the cubicle.
“We’re too late,” Rivers said through speakers in their helmets.
Mason stopped and watched one of the droplets of condensation swell and then dribble down the plastic. He followed it with his eyes all the way to where it ran into a dark shape near the ground, leaning against the drop cloth. It almost looked like a body—
Porter grabbed the plastic and pulled it away.
The dim light flickered.
“No!” Mason shouted.
He whirled and sprinted in the opposite direction. Watched Trapp drop out of sight.
The floor opened up beneath Mason and he plummeted toward a heap of rubble. A wall of heat struck him from behind and sent him cartwheeling a heartbeat before the air filled with flames.
12
Mason climbed out of the back of the ambulance. He felt like he’d been hit by a train, but he knew better than to complain. A dozen stitches on his forearm and thigh, some bruises that looked a lot worse than they felt, and a mild concussion were vastly preferable to being wheeled from the building in a body bag and loaded into the back of the medical examiner’s van like the four officers who’d entered the administration building with them. Trapp had survived with little more than bumps and bruises and was already on his way to the Denver Field Office to be debriefed.
Mason thanked the paramedic and made his way across the muddy lot. The sedan and the Suburban had been rented with fake driver’s licenses and neither of the two cars that passed through their net had license plates or any identifiable features. He hoped the physical evidence would be a little more helpful.
A uniformed officer controlled access to the building with a digital clipboard. Mason signed in and followed the passage the CSRT had outlined where people could walk without contaminating the crime scene. There were only a few evidence specialists in their white jumpsuits on the first floor. He found more activity on the second floor, where the hallway was now awash with light. Looking through one of the massive holes in the wall, he saw a crew of criminalists photographing, videotaping, and collecting trace evidence from what had once served as an office. The walls were scored black. He smelled a petrochemical accelerant. Maybe a hint of something almost sweet. An iron ladder led upward into a black-rimmed hole in the ceiling, through which an intense light shined.
The nature of the trap finally struck him. This office was directly beneath the room made of plastic sheeting on the top floor.
There were even more people working on the third level. A scorched starburst covered the ground, at the center of which was what was left of the framework of the ruined structure. He saw the hole in the floor that had saved his life. Had he run in any other direction, he’d have been on his way to the morgue, too.
There was another smell up here, almost hidden beneath the scents of burned wood, consumed carbon, and chemicals. One he knew all too well. One that still haunted his dreams.
From where Mason stood, he could see five distinct bodies. Or at least what was left of them. They were skeletal and black, their arms curled to their chests like a dead bird’s feet. Their mouths were wide open, as though screaming into the abyss that had opened before them. Whoever they were, he owed them a debt of gratitude. Had he not watched that droplet of condensation roll down the plastic to where one of them had fallen against the drop cloth, he might have been a step too slow.
A white-garbed investigator broke away from the others and walked to
ward him from across the room. The glare of the intense bulbs made his face shield appear to glow. He was mere feet away when Mason finally saw his face.
Todd Locker wore his greasy hair long, and small glasses were perched on the tip of his nose. It was the kind of eccentric look you’d expect from someone in his forties, but Mason couldn’t imagine that Locker was even as old as he was. He was thin and effeminate, but had a deep, melodic voice that made even the description of the butchered remains in a quadruple homicide sound almost as though the victims had simply drifted off into a peaceful sleep. As the assistant director of the Rocky Mountain Forensics Laboratory, it was his job to coordinate the efforts of the evidence-collection teams with the various law-enforcement agencies on-site. When it came to the meticulous investigation of a crime scene, there was no one better than Locker. Unfortunately, talking to him was often an exercise in frustration. You never knew where he was going to start or end up. He tended to jump right into the middle of the conversation at a seemingly random point only he knew.
“Contractures,” he said. Mason stared expectantly at him for several seconds before he finally proceeded. “The victims were dead before the fire consumed them.”
“So you figure this was somebody attempting to kill two birds with one stone? Clean up his mess and take us out in the process?”
“You aren’t listening. The dead guys have contractures. That means every muscle in their bodies tightened to such a degree that they essentially folded in upon themselves. Imagine every joint capable of bending doing so up to and then beyond its physical limits, like the way an insect shrivels under a magnifying glass.”
“I know what contractures are, but I’m not sure I understand the implications.”
“We have five bodies. Each of these five bodies has premortem contractures. That’s not the kind of thing that happens when you get stabbed or shot or beaten to death. It’s a specific physiological response elicited in five distinct individuals. A specific autonomic response, meaning some external stimulus acted upon their central nervous systems. That’s not the kind of thing that can happen without some sort of pathological impetus.”
“A biological agent,” Mason said.
Something clenched inside him.
“There’s absolutely no trace of whatever agent might have been used. We found the melted remains of what we believe to be some sort of aerial dispersion mechanism, but that’s about it. And you smell that syrupy scent? My working hypothesis is that they spread the agent on some kind of atomically stable yet combustible liquid aromatic hydrocarbon. The GC–MS ought to be able to determine which one, but based on the way they sealed the chamber and maintained static airflow around the flame you described, I’m guessing the violent reaction to oxygen was designed to both consume and obliterate whatever traces might have otherwise existed. Contrary to outward appearances, this was a very sophisticated self-cleansing gas chamber. Considering this agent incapacitated the men inside before they could even rip through a single sheet of plastic, there’s no way it had sufficient time to metabolize.”
“What are you saying?”
“Look at the condition of the remains. Whatever killed them was undoubtedly incinerated with the outermost layers of tissue.”
“So why would someone make sure we followed their trail only to have it end here?”
“Best of luck with that.”
Locker offered a bashful grin and headed back into the destruction zone.
Mason was going to need a lot more than luck. He knew all about biological agents, hydrocarbons, and cooked meat. It had taken him all this time to even come this close to finding the people he suspected were ultimately behind the massacre at the stone quarry. Whether they had intended to kill him or merely send a message, their plan had achieved the opposite effect. He was more determined than ever to track them down.
13
“They knew I was getting close, Chris. They had that trap ready and waiting because they could feel me right on their tail. But they made one big mistake.”
“What’s that?”
“They missed.”
Mason had known Special Agent in Charge Gabriel Christensen for almost three years, but he still hadn’t quite figured out how to read him. Chris wasn’t your typical government bureaucrat. He’d learned how to walk the fine line between taking care of his agents and playing the game of politics. That was to say he bowed to no one and was fair to a fault. Often brutally so. As they stood outside the back door of Club Five, bathed in the glow of the pulsing red and blue police lights, Mason could see the toll the job had taken on him. His silver hair was thinning on top and the lines around his eyes and mouth had deepened enough to fill with shadows. He still cut a formidable presence in his dark suit, despite the burden he bore on their behalf.
“I thought you were going to say their big mistake was killing four police officers.” He didn’t look at Mason when he spoke. He didn’t have to. “How’s the wife, Mason?”
The change of subject was so sudden, he couldn’t formulate a reply.
“Don’t think for a second that I don’t know what this job can do to you,” he said. “It gets under your skin, like an itch you can’t scratch. It becomes all you can think about. Day and night. Until one morning you wake up and you’ve become someone even you don’t recognize anymore. That’s no way to live.”
“You weren’t there, Chris. You didn’t have to watch Kane die. You don’t know what it’s like to see your partner consumed by flames every time you close your eyes.”
“I’ve seen more good men killed than anyone should have to, but that doesn’t mean I carry their weight lightly. You have to leave the job at the door or else you’ll drive away your reasons for doing it in the first place. And then you’re no use to anyone.”
Christensen turned away from the crime scene and made his way through the police cordon. Mason lost him behind the throng of bystanders trying to get a peek past the uniformed officers who’d used their vehicles to seal off the alley. The club had cleared out the moment he and Trapp entered with an entourage of policemen. Now that the party people knew the drama wasn’t for them, they’d regained their curiosity.
Christensen’s words had more than stung; they’d been a warning on both a personal and a professional level. Mason had become his job. He lived it and breathed it and allowed it to consume him. Every waking moment was spent in the pursuit of the traffickers who thought they could flood this country with drugs, weapons, and even human beings.
America had galvanized behind the tragedy of 9/11 and launched a war against an entire nation for the actions of its extremist minority. All while civilians were butchered and beheaded in border towns, drugs flooded into the nation’s school systems, and young people and innocents and law-enforcement personnel were killed by the tens of thousands every year. Why did the media turn one into a televised event and refuse to cover the other when narco-insurgents racked up body counts on American soil that rivaled any Al-Qaeda nutjob’s wet dreams? The answer was both simple and infuriating.
Money.
It was more lucrative to wage a war than to win it.
But Mason had discovered there were worse things than drugs crossing the Mexican border. Far worse things. He couldn’t simply stand by and let it happen. The consequences of doing so would be catastrophic. It terrified him to imagine what people like the man with the blue eyes and the Panama hat intended to do with the kind of biological agent he’d been experimenting with in the abandoned stone quarry. He wasn’t so blind to the inner workings of his mind that he failed to recognize that he’d thrown himself into the war in the hopes of destroying one ghost and avenging another.
The thumping beat struck him from behind. His shadow stretched away from him across the muddy puddles on a mat of colored lights. And then the closing door sealed off the club once more. He turned to face Ramses, whose hands were cuffed behind his back. Trapp shoved him toward the alley by the back of his jacket.
“I take
it things didn’t go quite as planned?”
“Four officers were killed, Ramses.”
“The glass is always half empty with you, isn’t it? You should be thankful that the rest of you survived.”
“Tell that to them,” Mason said, and inclined his chin toward the gathering of uniformed officers just outside the police cordon.
“They don’t look like they’d be overly receptive to my particular brand of positivity. I’ve got a hunch my dance card’s going to be full for the rest of the night.”
Mason stepped around Ramses and spoke so that only Trapp could hear him.
“I need you to take him in. Personally. Make sure he arrives in one piece.”
“I told you, Mason. Donovan doesn’t get a pass. I say we turn him over to the nearest uniform and wash our hands of him.”
“You and I both know we were set up tonight. Just like my strike force last year in Arizona. If the two events are connected, as I suspect, Ramses is just about the only one who can help us connect the dots. We need him alive and in working order if we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
“The DPD wants blood. I can’t make any guarantees.”
Mason glanced toward the officers, whose eyes bored straight through him and into Ramses. Rojas and Telford were among them, the black face paint smeared from their eyes and cheeks by tears. He could positively feel the rage radiating from them. Not that he blamed them. He would have felt the very same way in their position, but if he allowed them to take Ramses in, his old friend would never make it to the precinct.
“Do this for me, okay?” Mason looked his partner in the eyes until Trapp grudgingly nodded. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. If you’re wrong about Donovan, I’ll feed him to those sharks myself.”
The Extinction Agenda Page 6
