Mason nodded and approached Ramses.
“I know you stuck your neck out for me,” he said.
“Remind me not to do it again.” Ramses was surprisingly calm for someone about to be subjected to what promised to be a brutal interrogation. “Look, Mace. My attorney’s waiting for me at the station. What do you say we get this show on the road so I can be home before sunrise?”
“This isn’t going to be fun for you.”
“I’ve survived worse.” The way Ramses said it made Mason wonder what could have been traumatic enough to scar his old friend like that, but he realized he was probably better off not knowing. “Just do me a solid, okay? Don’t take me in like this. I have my reputation to think about.”
“What do you mean?” Mason asked.
“I can’t have anyone thinking I’m getting cozy with the feds.”
“Are you sure?”
Ramses nodded and visibly prepared himself.
Mason punched him squarely in the jaw.
Cheers erupted from the gathering of policemen.
Ramses dropped to one knee and let his head hang. He spat blood onto the concrete, then wiped his chin on his shoulder and stood up again.
“Anyone ever tell you that you hit like a girl?”
Trapp shoved him past Mason, toward where another agent was waiting to manhandle him into the rear seat of an unmarked FBI Crown Victoria. Mason glanced back at the sound of the closing car door and caught one last glimpse of Ramses’ face before he vanished in a blur of lights and sirens.
14
Mason went straight up to his den the moment he got home. As he placed a red thumbtack where the old airport had once been and connected it to the others with yarn, his frustration finally caught up with him. He wanted to tear everything from the walls, to lash out at something, anything. To feel, even momentarily, as though he actually had control over something in his life.
Instead, he simply stood in the middle of the room and let the light of the moon wash over him through the gap between the curtains.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” Angie said from the doorway behind him.
“I was trying not to wake you.”
“I waited up as long as I could. You should have called.”
Mason couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He didn’t want her to see him like this.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about. Something important.”
“Can it wait until the morning, Angie? It’s been a rough night.”
She drew a breath, as though she were about to speak. He prepared for the onslaught to commence. Instead, all he heard was the sound of her footsteps heading back down the hallway to their bedroom, which was a thousand times worse. She closed the door behind her with a soft click, and for the first time in his life, he felt utterly alone.
15
Mason woke up on the floor with a red line of sunlight bisecting his face. Angie was already gone. She’d left a note for him at his place at the table, beside an empty bowl and a box of cereal. He pretended not to see it. The message was clear, though. We need to talk tonight. Please. There was nothing he wanted to do less, but it was going to happen at some point, whether he liked it or not. Everything that was wrong between them was his fault and he knew it. He loved his wife and would do anything in the world for her, except for the one thing she would undoubtedly ask him to do.
He called his voice mail on his way to work. There were four messages. The first was from his father and it had been left two days ago. Had it really been that long since he’d last checked? He simply wasn’t in the mood for drama this morning, so he skipped it without listening. The second was from his wife at seven last night. All she said was that she hoped he was coming home soon, because she really needed to talk to him. He deleted it and moved on. The next call had come from his home number at just after ten, but the message consisted of nothing more than the click of the phone disconnecting. He didn’t recognize the number of the fourth caller. The message had come in just under an hour ago, presumably while he was in the shower. At first he heard nothing and almost deleted it. Then came the sound of clicking heels. And a voice he would have recognized anywhere.
“I need a room.”
The ground fell out from beneath him.
Mason pulled to the side of the road and pressed his hand over his opposite ear to better concentrate on the message. His pulse was thundering so loudly that he couldn’t decipher the reply of a deep voice he hadn’t heard before.
“Just one night.”
Another mumbled reply.
“Cash.”
There was a clunking sound and a metallic clatter. A lockbox opening.
A muffled crumpling sound as the caller adjusted his grip on the cell phone.
A dark finger of black smoke rose into the sky over the tops of the elm trees across the street. He watched it diffuse into the slate gray sky over the mountains as he strained to hear.
A scraping sound. A wooden stool on tile? Scooting closer. He could hear the deep voice humming.
The skittering sound of a key sliding across a countertop.
“Room’s around back. Corner suite. Park right in front of the door and no one will be able to see your car from the road.”
Another scraping sound as Angie snatched the key. He imagined her long nails, possibly the diamond of her engagement ring, raking the counter.
“No interruptions,” his wife said.
“You got it, Miss…” The clatter of a clipboard. “… Smith.”
The clacking of heels.
“Excuse me.” Angie’s voice was louder, closer to the microphone.
Another crumpling sound.
Then a click.
Mason felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. His pale face reflected from the inside of the driver’s side window against a sky now roiling with smoke.
“If you would like to replay this message,” a digitized female voice said, “please press…”
He didn’t know what to do. Where to go. His only thought was to drive. He pulled into traffic and heard the squeal of brakes. A silver sedan flashed across his rearview mirror. He didn’t even slow down.
16
By the time Mason drove into the lot of the field office—a modern four-story building composed of a checkerboard pattern of mismatched bomb- and bulletproof glass panels—he’d at least recovered a small measure of functionality. He redialed the number that had left the message, only to be redirected to a recording that the subscriber was either out of range or had turned off his or her phone. He debated calling his wife, but the last thing he wanted was the image his mind conjured with the thought of Angie answering her phone and talking to him while another man gripped her by the hips.
There’s something I need to talk to you about. Something important.
He turned on his scanner and dialed in a police band to call in a reverse listing on the phone number, only to find the channel buzzing with activity. Officers and ambulances responding to the fire that was now a dirty black smear over the Rockies. He was just about to turn to a different frequency when he heard two words that cut through the clutter in his brain.
“… room nine…”
He tried to focus on the voices.
“… responding. We got flames pouring out the roof of the whole west wing.…”
“… can’t tell how many people are in there.…”
“… see through all the smoke!”
“… Code Three to four eight one six Federal. That’s the Peak View.…”
“Oh God.”
Mason sped out of the parking lot and across town as fast as he could, all the while watching the smoky horizon drawing closer by the second. He drove on instinct alone. His mind couldn’t rationalize the flood of thoughts, let alone latch onto any one in particular. All he knew was he needed to get there.
And that he was already too late.
I need a room.
He hit I-70 and rocketed toward
the mountains, weaving through traffic to the tune of blaring horns and screeching brakes.
Just one night.
Took the Federal off-ramp so fast he nearly rolled his Grand Cherokee. Turned south and knifed through oncoming traffic.
Cash.
A steep hill rose ahead of him, at the bottom of which a thin stream flowed through a wide gravel bed littered with trash. He blew across it and ascended into the smoke. On the left, a whitewashed motel advertising hourly rates on a flickering neon sign, an adult bookstore with a live peep show, and trailer homes scattered uphill through the deciduous trees. On the right, fireworks warehouses that catered to out-of-state clientele, a Mexican market with bars on the windows. And set off behind them, beneath a tall sign with a stylized silhouette of a mountain range, was the source of the ink-black smoke and the flames flickering through the branches of the cottonwoods.
An officer had pulled his cruiser sideways across the entrance to the motel lot to bar access and stood beside it directing traffic. Mason drove straight up over the curb, crossed the parking lot of the market, and sped down the cracked asphalt drive into the trees.
No interruptions.
Two more cruisers blocked the road. He was out of his car and running before he even knew he was going to. He charged through a mist of ash and water. A crowd had gathered near the office of the adobe motel. It was an L-shaped unit that stretched westward and away from him, toward where the fire trucks were parked. The hillside fell away sharply on the other side of the building, where the trees grew in one impenetrable snarl all the way down to the invisible stream. Uniformed officers simultaneously questioned potential witnesses and tried to maintain something resembling a perimeter.
Mason shoved through the gathering and nearly bowled over an officer as he sprinted past the office door, through the breezeway, and rounded the back side. A concrete stairway led down to a dry pool set into the hillside. The doors to his left started with number sixteen and diminished as he ran. There were two ambulances in the lot west of the pool, on the other side of a Dumpster that looked like it hadn’t been emptied in months, their twirling lights staining the smoke. He saw the shapes of two other vehicles behind them, little more than shadows through the smoke. He was coughing so hard, he had to pull his shirt up over his mouth and nose. The streams from the fire hoses positively turned the sky to water above him. Smoke boiled through the roof of room number eleven; flames flickered behind the brown curtains. The front wall of unit ten was black. The door opened upon a room churning with smoke and fire. Flames had expanded the doorway to room number nine. Its half-consumed door was ten feet away on the short staircase leading down to the parking lot. The shattered glass from the window glittered on the ground, where it swirled with the black soot in the foamy water.
Mason stopped before what was left of the front wall of the room, water pouring down on him, and stared at his soaked feet for a long moment before he finally summoned the courage to look inside.
The world slowed around him.
He heard shouting, as though from a great distance.
Smoke gusted across the room on sheets of water propelled by the high-pressure hoses. Through the tempest he saw a dresser turned to charcoal, an old TV with a shattered tube, the blackened door to the bathroom. And to the right, in the center of the room, what was left of a king-size bed. All that remained of the painting hanging on the scorched wall above it was a single tattered corner where roses still bloomed. And beneath the bloodred flowers, tangled on top of the bed, were two blackened corpses, their flesh cooked to their bones. Everything that could burn was already gone. Two human beings reduced to black shapes with their mouths wide open, lying on top of each other in a position that left little room for interpretation.
Someone grabbed him from behind. The next thing he knew, he was pinned under a man’s weight while his arms were twisted behind his back. He drew in a breath that came with a mouthful of filthy water. Gagged. The man shouted down at him, but Mason was oblivious to the words. All of his attention was focused on the Lexus CT 200h hybrid in the parking lot. Matador red mica. It was covered with soot and ash, but there was no mistaking it. He parked his car beside it in his garage every night.
Something broke inside of him and he shouted in anguish.
He prayed for the water to rise over his face and usher him into the darkness.
17
The last time Mason had seen Blaine Martin—alive, anyway—he was guiding Angie down the hallway with his hand on her lower back and his lips to her ear. Had he stepped up right then and there, his wife would still be alive. He hadn’t recognized the threat, or maybe he’d simply chosen not to. He’d just been so certain that he and Angie would be able to work out their problems. Never once had he so much as considered the idea of her straying, but he had to accept his own culpability. He found it easy to hate the special prosecutor, even easier to hate himself. After all, Martin was the monster of his own creation.
He was one of those guys who radiated confidence from his veneers to his just-so tan to his every-hair-in-place style. In so many ways, he was both like Mason and not. He was the Mason of a different time line, one in which he finished law school instead of dropping out to join the FBI. The Mason who opted for the BMW over the Grand Cherokee. The Mason who wore Brooks Brothers suits rather than jeans and a T-shirt. And apparently the Mason his wife had wished he could have been. And for the life of him, he couldn’t fault her for it. He brought nothing but grief to those who loved him, and over the past few years he had spent nearly as much time graveside as Death himself.
He watched Martin’s funeral from a distance, concealed behind the branches of a weeping willow. He recognized a handful of people, most of whom he’d met through his wife, and watched without feeling anything as Martin’s parents and a woman in her mid-thirties openly grieved. Had anyone asked him why he was there, he wouldn’t have been able to come up with a single reason. Maybe a part of him wanted to see the kind of world into which his wife had been lured, a world in which she would ultimately have been safe from the demons that walked in his shadow.
By the time Martin’s parents said their good-byes and the woman Mason assumed was his wife had fallen to her knees beside the hole, he felt like a voyeur.
His wife’s funeral was a different story. He’d felt the weight of every single pair of eyes of those in attendance boring through him. No one knew what to say to him, which was fine, considering he wouldn’t have known how to respond. Everyone was well aware of how she’d died. Despite his alibi, he could see in their eyes that they weren’t entirely convinced he hadn’t been party to her death. After all, were their roles reversed, each and every one of them knew they’d at least contemplate the notion of exacting a measure of revenge. What it all came down to was that he had turned into an object of pity in their eyes, a man who hadn’t been husband enough for his wife or good enough at his job to keep her out of harm’s reach. To keep her alive. He was a failure on every level. And it was human nature to treat failure like a disease.
Angie’s mother, who’d moved to an estate in Palm Springs several years prior as something of a trial separation, had made an effort to be cordial, but her father hadn’t even been able to look at him. He’d simply stared at the closed casket and then at her grave with an almost impassive expression on his face, as though his inner being had checked out and left only his physical vessel in attendance. The one time Mason met his stare, it was as though his father-in-law didn’t even see him, which he considered a blessing. He was sorry the man had lost his daughter, but he wasn’t sure if he could convey that without allowing a hint of anger to enter his voice. It wasn’t like they’d ever been especially close, anyway.
Paul Thornton wasn’t the kind of man who went out of his way to welcome a guy into the fold. He was the patriarch of the Thornton family empire and still managed the day-to-day operations and the corporate assets, despite rapidly approaching the age when men of his stature started looking f
orward to honing their golf swings and, in his case, to Angie’s older brother Victor taking the reins. Paul’s grandfather, Wesley Thornton, had grown the business from the chief supplier of beef in the state to one of the three largest meat producers in the country, mainly by ruining the competition, seizing their land, and paying the right people to be looking the other way while he did so.
His son and Angie’s grandfather, Francis “Frank” Thornton, had diversified into corn, wheat, and various grains and turned a multimillion-dollar cattle ranch into a billion-dollar agricultural empire. While Frank still dabbled in the business from the comfort of his motorized wheelchair, Paul had been CEO of AgrAmerica and the public figurehead since long before Mason even met him. Considering the levels of success his predecessors had achieved, there seemed to be little more he could do than maintain the status quo, but Paul wasn’t the kind to just sit on his inheritance. He gambled—and gambled in a huge way—on genetically engineered crops and led the charge in pioneering the use of hormones and steroids in livestock.
A part of him had always thought that Angie would eventually bring her financial acumen back to the family business. More than that, though, he was proud of his daughter for going her own way and not simply accepting the crown. Probably the only reason he’d allowed Mason to marry his daughter, at least in his own mind, was because Mason came from enough money that Paul could be confident he wasn’t after his. Plus, Mason’s relationship with Angie could potentially be used to curry favor with his father, a United States senator, who sat on any number of agricultural committees and chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
Before Paul headed back to his waiting limousine, he’d shaken Mason’s hand, opened his mouth as though about to say something, then simply nodded and walked away.
Mason’s own father, the esteemed J. R. Mason, had stood beside him through the whole process. He’d taken care all the arrangements for him. Or, more likely, had one of his staffers do so for him. Either way, Mason appreciated it. His old man had even returned from Washington for the entire week, which might not have sounded like much, but for his father, it was a grand gesture of support. He wasn’t one of those touchy-feely guys who did things like express his emotions, participate in any kind of physical displays of affection, or acknowledge the existence of anyone or anything outside himself, for that matter, but he’d been there when Mason needed him and allowed him plenty of space when he didn’t, for which he was grateful.
The Extinction Agenda Page 7
