She’d found the people responsible for testing the virus on the undocumented aliens. For the slaughter of the SWAT team in the administration building and the strike force in Arizona. For the murder of his partner, Spencer Kane. And, in doing so, she’d forced them to step out of the shadows and placed herself on a collision course with the man with the blue eyes.
And now she was dead.
PART III
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.
—Abraham Lincoln, letter to Col. William F. Elkins (1864)
29
Denver, Colorado
NOVEMBER 13
Mason’s great-grandfather, the first James Richmond Mason, was larger than life. At least from a historical perspective. He died before Mason was born, but not without first placing his indelible stamp on a nation in transition. He started his career as an attorney, no better or worse than any other. He earned his law degree from the New York Law School and began his professional life as a defense counselor before sidestepping into corporate law, where he handled famous clients like William Henry Vanderbilt, Thomas Elliot Richter, Henry Clay Frick, William Waldorf Astor, and R. J. Mueller, whose combined fortunes represented nearly half of the world’s wealth around the turn of the twentieth century.
He could have lived a long and comfortable life on those retainers alone. Instead, he decided to utilize his station for the public good. He maintained his legal status as special counselor to his existing clients and helped establish the Mueller Endowment and the Richter Foundation, all while hurling himself into the political arena, the War Department specifically. He helped expand the scope of the existing branches of the military and organize schools of advanced study for the special forces, for which he was rewarded with a position in Teddy Roosevelt’s cabinet.
None of his ideas was implemented a moment too soon, it turned out. It wasn’t long before the country found itself embroiled in World War I, during which he served as special envoy to Great Britain and France on behalf of then president Woodrow Wilson. All the while, he worked toward peace through international cooperation by helping to found the League of Nations and the International Congruity Alliance. He even managed to find the time to marry Mason’s great-grandmother, Isabella Touring Mason, and produce an heir. When he finally “retired,” he served as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and director of the Richter Foundation, a position he used to endow the Society for Lasting International Peace.
Mason remembered hearing those stories as a kid and thinking that was just what old people did in those days. As if there was nothing extraordinary about his great-grandfather’s achievements. It wasn’t until he read about him—the first James Richmond Mason, whose name he bore—in his freshman U.S. history class that he recognized the significance of what his great-grandfather had accomplished as a single human being in a sea of billions.
He’d felt small and insignificant in a way he never had before. Until that moment, he’d cultivated the same worldview as every other teenager: The sun and the moon revolved around him and there was no life on the planet more important than his own. The feeling that no matter what he did he would never fulfill the expectations set forth for him and live up to his family name had been almost crippling. He was a fourteen-year-old kid whose greatest personal achievement consisted of being able to run a spaghetti noodle in through his nose and out of his mouth, and suddenly he was burdened by the expectation that he would fulfill some magnificent destiny for which he had no blueprint.
Now here he was, shoving his way through the crowded corridors in the Federal Building, water squelching from his ruined shoes, smelling like he’d just crawled through a sewer. He’d spent the night in his car and couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten anything even remotely resembling a good night’s sleep. He couldn’t have been any further from living up to the Grand Mason Destiny if he tried.
His only lead was the house at 6900 Market Street. It was registered to a man named Herman Jacobsen, who, coincidentally, was CEO of more than thirty corporations, president of another twenty, and sat on the board of directors for nearly two hundred others. The fact that Mr. Jacobson had died in 1997 seemed to be doing little to impede his goal of world financial domination. The actual business being run at that physical location—Colorado Corporate Trust, or CCT—was registered and incorporated in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Only as Mason read through its corporate filings on the computer in his office did he truly realize the scope of its reach.
CCT didn’t merely provide incorporation services; it provided entire companies. Complete corporate entities with CEOs, like Mr. Jacobsen, and board members and practicing lawyers on retainer, who could instantly invoke the attorney-client privilege. Real histories that could be tracked and investigated and proved to be perfectly legitimate. On paper, anyway. CCT offered something better than a shell company in the booming industry of financial deceit; it sold what’s known in the financial sector as “shelf” companies.
These were dummy businesses that had been launched years before, incorporated under fictitious names, registered to provide nonexistent products or services, and then set up on a shelf to age like wine. The longer they aged, the more they cost. Some sold for high six-figure sums, while the majority changed hands in the upper five-figure range.
CCT offered a full-service plan. It provided a receptionist who fielded calls for all the different businesses, relayed the messages to the appropriate contact addresses, and managed the various websites. All in addition to forwarding the mail that found its way into each of the corporate “suites” he’d discovered in the flooded basement.
It was a scam of monumental proportions, the kind of con that made a whole lot of very rich people even richer by allowing them to hide assets in unrelated companies where no one would think to look, duck regulations that applied only to certain industries, and funnel profits into accounts the IRS couldn’t find, let alone reach. This was the kind of completely legal, yet entirely unethical, financial deceit the government purportedly wanted to make transparent, and yet not one of the six hundred companies housed at 6900 Market Street had ever been subjected to more than a superficial financial audit.
At the moment, Mason only cared about one of those six hundred.
Fairacre Ranch Surplus and Auction was incorporated in August 1998, with the stated mission of providing consignment and auction services for everything from used equipment to seeds and grain. The corporation owned a single plot of land roughly in the middle of nowhere on the plains east of Brush, Colorado. Herman Jacobsen was listed as the sole proprietor of the limited-liability corporation and had posted gross revenue of less than fifteen thousand dollars annually ever since. The website featured pictures of what looked like pieces of junk and the seemingly absurd prices at which bidding would begin. There were even testimonials from satisfied customers on both sides of the dealings.
It had to be one of the most perfectly orchestrated frauds he’d ever seen.
He understood how auditing their financials wouldn’t be in the company’s best interests, especially if a routine tax audit had been passed up the chain to a bulldog like Angie, but what could it possibly have to do with the woman who would be calling him in roughly ten hours? He needed to find out who actually owned the corporate entity and what they were trying to hide. And without his wife’s records, he could think of only one place to start.
30
Mason had just rounded the corner from his office when he ran into SAC Christensen, who was on his way in.
“I thought you were going to
come see me first thing this morning.”
He was unable to interpret the expression on his boss’s face until he crinkled his nose and looked down at Mason’s filthy pants. There was no mistaking that one.
“Sorry, Chris. I was running down a lead and it totally slipped my mind.”
“A lead? For which case?”
Mason opened his mouth, then realized anything he might say would only make the situation worse. He closed it again and averted his stare.
Christensen nodded, as if confirming some inner suspicion. The vein in his forehead bulged and his lips writhed. When he finally spoke, it was through clenched teeth.
“My office. Now.”
Mason followed him down the hallway. Everyone they passed sensed Chris’s mood and cleared the way. Even his secretary tried to look busy when he passed her desk and opened the glass door to his office. Mason knew he was in big trouble when he saw his partner sitting in the chair facing the special agent in charge’s desk. Trapp stiffened when they entered, but didn’t turn to face him.
A part of Mason had always known this was how it would play out. Were the shoe on the other foot, he might have done the same thing. He would have talked to his partner before ratting him out, though. Then again, he hadn’t given Trapp any warning that he was going to put him in this position in the first place. Mason couldn’t blame him for covering his ass.
“Sit.”
Christensen eased into the high-backed leather chair behind his desk and stared holes through Mason. There were no pictures of his family. No homemade cards or pictures drawn in crayon. He only knew Christensen had a wife because he’d seen her once at an awards banquet years ago, and guessed he had a son because there was a rising star in Behavioral at Quantico with the same last name. This office belonged solely to the special agent in charge.
Mason sat and glanced over at Trapp. As usual, he looked like the wind had blown him in. He acknowledged Mason from the corner of his eye.
“Was I in some way unclear about my expectations when I told you to be in my office first thing this morning?” Christensen asked.
“No, sir.”
Mason looked his boss in the eyes and saw the fire that was about to consume him.
“And when I forbade you from participating in the investigation of your wife’s death, did my choice of words confuse you?”
“Is ‘forbade’ really—?”
“Damn it, Mason!”
“No, sir.”
“Then why in God’s name are we sitting here right now?”
He stood abruptly and turned to face the window. On a clear day, you could see all the way across the city to where the mountains met the sky. Today, a dirty haze of smog clung jealously to the skyscrapers.
“Sir. Special Agent Trapp had no knowledge—”
“You don’t think I already know that? Who the hell do you think that is sitting next to you looking like he just sold out his mother for a back-alley hand job?”
Trapp finally looked at Mason, who made a gesture he hoped his partner would interpret as an apology. Then he turned back to Christensen, steadied himself, and took it squarely on the chin.
* * *
The whole meeting was a blur, for as Christensen was verbally undressing Mason, he experienced a moment of mental clarity that had thus far eluded him and was actually able to plot a course that would get him moving in the right direction. Granted, the logical part of him recognized that he was a man standing naked in his front yard, cackling wildly as he hurled torches onto the thatch roof of his own house, but it was a liberating feeling. As Christensen had shed his personal skin in favor of the professional when he entered his office, Mason was shedding his professional skin, which had suddenly become far too constrictive. He was unencumbered by any ties that bound him to his former life, save for one.
And right now, that was the only thing that mattered.
Mason watched himself hand over his badge and Glock as though from a distance. He heard the word suspension, but was too lost in thought to notice the length of time that preceded it.
He left the building unescorted, which he supposed said something about the severity of his predicament, and sat in his car with zero security clearance and just about as many personal possessions.
That was about to change, though.
He might not have had an eidetic memory, but recalling seven numbers he’d seen the night before wasn’t beyond his abilities. Neither was throwing down a quarter of a million dollars with a simple transaction he could make from his cell phone. After all, he’d inherited his wife’s trust fund, despite his father-in-law’s lawyer’s best efforts to block it. He didn’t imagine Angie would mind if he used a small portion of it to help him catch her murderer. He could have drawn from his own trust fund, but he wasn’t in the mood to field an angry call from his father.
The listing agent had been more than happy to part with the property and undoubtedly would have negotiated the price. Mason didn’t care about the money, though. He wanted expediency and was willing to pay for it.
And he was in a hurry to get out of town.
He wasn’t about to let anything as inconsequential as the loss of his badge keep him from doing his job.
31
Mason made one quick stop before he hit the highway. He bought a thermal long-sleeve shirt and jeans, a pair of Wolverine work boots, and a winter jacket, and left his reeking clothes in the Dumpster behind the store. It was roughly ninety miles from Denver to Brush. He made the drive in just over an hour.
The town itself reminded him of every other small town in Colorado. There was a main street and side streets with businesses that suffered for not being on the main street. It was probably just a prejudice of his, but everything looked dusty. Then again, considering the wind leaped up from the flat plains without warning and blew the loose dirt sideways from the sugar-beet fields, everything probably was actually covered with a layer of dust.
The whole small-town lifestyle seemed foreign to him, as though not only had he descended in altitude, but had traveled back in time. There was a part of him that wished life could really be this simple. And then he saw how full the parking lot was at the Drink King Bar and realized that it wasn’t.
He blew through the town in less time than it took to program the address for Fairacre Ranch Surplus and Auction into his GPS. The computerized voice guided him off the highway and onto a poorly marked off-ramp. He headed southeast from there, across a seemingly interminable stretch of beet and winter-wheat fields and feral acreages that appeared to be cultivating tumbleweeds.
The slate gray horizon promised snow.
The silver arches of massive sprinkler systems with airplane tires flew past. None of them looked like they’d been moved in quite some time. Occasionally, a small house materialized from the fields in the distance, followed in short measure by the arrow-straight dirt driveway that serviced it. The bubblegum pink asphalt gave way to gravel, which pinged from the undercarriage and wheel wells. A rooster tail of dust rose behind the Grand Cherokee.
He had a hunch he was nearing his destination even before the computer voice finally piped up and let him know that his turn was coming. The barbed-wire fence to his right had fallen in sections. Several seasons’ worth of tumbleweeds were inextricably tangled with the wires. Half of the weathered gray posts were broken or absent altogether. Whatever had once grown in the fields had died long ago. Wild grasses and weeds ran rampant among the desiccated carcasses of sunflowers. A rickety cross stood testament to the passing of a scarecrow. The crows had made themselves at home in its absence. They lined the telephone wires and flapped to stay balanced on top of weeds that couldn’t accommodate their weight. He could feel them following him with their eyes.
Mason pulled off the road onto a driveway that was nearly overgrown with dead weeds and stared through the skein of dust on his windshield toward the wooden structure barely visible at the farthest extent of his vision, then got out and dragged the aluminum
gate off into the weeds.
He drove slowly, taking in everything around him.
The homestead rose ahead of him, simultaneously growing from the flatlands and decomposing before his very eyes as he neared. It was situated just this side of a ravine. Judging by the skeletal cottonwoods, no water had flowed through there for a long time. The branches were spotted with crows.
The road widened into a turnaround, in the center of which was a hump of bare dirt where he guessed flowers had once grown around the rusted wagon wheel standing from it. The house was a stereotypical ranch, the whitewash sandblasted to the bare gray wood. Behind it was another, larger wooden outbuilding, or at least what was left of it. The charred remains of a cattle chute led into it from the rear. A series of interconnected corrals formed a veritable timber maze in the field to the north.
He parked and let the dust settle before he climbed out. Everything was still. No wind rattled through the dry fields. Nothing moved behind any of the windows. Even the crows perched along the roofline seemed to be frozen in time as they watched him walk around to the back of his car and open the trunk, where he kept his own personal Smith & Wesson Sigma series model SW9VE in the cutout beneath the false floor. It was a beautiful American-made handgun that seemed to have been designed to fit his palm specifically. It held sixteen 9 mm rounds in the magazine and one in the breech. With the custom chrome slide, two-tone black polymer finish, and laser sight, it looked positively futuristic. He pulled it out, checked the clip, and shoved it into the recently vacated holster beneath his left arm.
The sound of the closing trunk echoed across the prairie.
Gravel crunched underfoot as he approached the front door of the house. He gave it a solid rap and felt the wood shudder. There wasn’t so much as a single tire track on the windswept turnaround. He tried the knob. It didn’t work. He stepped back and tried his foot. It worked like a charm.
The Extinction Agenda Page 14
