“That doesn’t make any sense, Gunnar.”
“You’re telling me.” Mason heard a voice other than Gunnar’s, but couldn’t make out the words. “Look, Mace, I’ve got to handle something I’m actually being paid to take care of. So I’ll send you these pictures and you can figure out what to make of them.”
“Anything about the woman from the pay phone?”
“I doubt she knew the cameras were there or, even if she did, that we would have access to technology that allowed us to see the images. This is a woman who is accustomed to making sure that no one gets a good look at her. For my money, there’s something distinct about her that would make her readily identifiable and she’s used to going to such great lengths to hide it that the act itself has become second nature to her.”
“So, that’s a no?”
“You need to work on expressing your gratitude.” He sighed. “Correct. That’s a no.”
“And Fairacre?”
“Whoever did the work on that one knew what he was doing. I’ve tracked it back through half a dozen different shell companies all over the world, but I’ve yet to come to the end of the paper trail. Trust me, though, I will. This is the kind of thing I do for a living and I earn a fortune doing it. Make no mistake, I will find out who owns it.”
“What if I gave you a theoretical ending point? Would you be able to work backward?”
“It’s my turn to ask what you aren’t telling me.”
“I’m playing a hunch.”
“Okay. Yeah. I can do that. Hit me.”
“Try Global Allied Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals. Or maybe GABP.”
“Not a name I’m familiar with, Mace, and I know them all.”
“Then maybe it’s about time we learned a little more about them.”
35
Mason wanted nothing more than to pull to the side of the road and look at the pictures Gunnar had emailed to him, but the storm was getting worse by the second and he couldn’t risk being stuck out here if they closed the highway back into Denver. His eight o’clock deadline with the woman who’d sent him in search of Fairacre was rapidly approaching and there was no way on this planet he was going to miss it.
The accumulation encroached from the shoulders to the edge of the lanes, erasing the yellow lines. The interstate truckers he passed had their lights on and heaps of snow on their roofs.
By the time he reached the city proper, he’d driven out of the worst of it. The snow was hardly falling at his new home when he arrived, but he could see in his rearview mirror that it wasn’t far behind.
He pulled up to the gate and got out of his car. This was the most impulsive decision he’d ever made. Just looking at it now—this decrepit building surrounded by weeds and shrubs and cottonwoods that threatened to pull the roof right off of the garage, illegible graffiti on the facade, and a thick layer of dust on the insides of the windows—he had to laugh.
Mason realized just how tired he was as he stood on the desolate street with the sound of his laughter echoing across the industrial wasteland. When the echo finally died, he spoke to himself out loud. “What have I done?”
He unlocked the padlock with the combination the Realtor had given him, swung open the gate with a deafening squeal, and drove inside. He left the car running as he locked the gate behind him and then drove down the gravel driveway to the building itself. As arranged, the Realtor had left the middle garage door unlocked. He raised it and pulled his Grand Cherokee inside. It reeked like someone had used a ton of dust to soak up an oil spill, and hadn’t bothered to pick up the rodent carcasses rotting somewhere out of sight. He hoped the inside smelled a whole lot better.
The keys and the paperwork were sitting on the concrete stairs leading up to the interior door. Considering the money was already sitting in an escrow account, the agent wasn’t overly concerned about the title paperwork. Mason could fill it out at his leisure and mail it back in the envelope provided. With the state of the economy, the length of time the building had been on the market, and the fact that he’d offered a whole lot more than the Realtor had been prepared to accept, he’d been more than accommodating when it came to honoring Mason’s unusual requests. His goal had been to get into this place without putting forth any effort, to simply walk away from his old life and into a new one. Unfortunately, the moment he stepped through the door he realized that had been a pipe dream.
The interior looked like it had been ransacked by dust bunnies, the kind that breed in the absence of humanity and thrive without airflow. He stood there for a long moment, trying to figure out if it was physically possible to kick his own butt, then retrieved both of the laptops from his car and walked into his new home.
The Realtor had assured him that the interior was in good condition, and it probably had been the last time he was in here. Judging by the cobwebs and the sheer volume of dust that had accumulated on the drop cloths covering what Mason hoped might be furniture, he hadn’t been in here since approximately 1982. At least he’d been true to his word when he said he’d restore the water and electricity.
While his laptop was booting up, Mason searched for the bathroom, which was functional, but just barely. He immediately regretted yanking the drop cloth off of what turned out to be a desk. It took the dust forever to settle and even longer for him to stop coughing. He centered his computer on the table in front of him, opened his email program, and brought up Gunnar’s pictures, which just about knocked the wind out of him.
The first picture was the one Gunnar had described over the phone. The dateline clearly indicated the photograph had been scanned from the issue of Der Stürmer dated March 14, 1939. It was possible that whoever’d scanned it had made a mistake. Judging by the clothing the primary subjects were wearing, however, the date couldn’t have been very far off. The caption was in German. Mason picked out the names SS Sturmbannführer Walter Bollmann and Wehrmacht Generalleutnant Wilhelm Fahrmbacher and the words Cairo and Egypt. The man front and center was dressed in a gray uniform with a black collar and his visor cap was pulled down low over his forehead. He stood before an Opel Admiral Cabriolet with the canvas top down. A man dressed in a leather trench coat and a peaked cap with an eagle insignia over the black visor sat in the backseat. A dozen other men surrounded the vehicle, smiling at the camera from beneath their pith helmets. They all wore beige uniforms that bore no insignia. Summer utilities. Only one man was not facing the camera. He was captured while turning his face away from the photographer, but Mason would have recognized him anywhere, even in faded black and white and with his features shadowed by the brim of his helmet. He’d stared into the man’s eyes as he’d incinerated Kane and seen his reflection on the lens of Angie’s sunglasses mere minutes before her death.
Mason now understood what Gunnar meant. There was no doubt in his mind that this was the man for whom he was searching. Only it couldn’t possibly be the same man, because he had been in his twenties when this picture was taken and that was roughly eighty years ago.
He opened the second picture and located the same man immediately. The name of the paper and the date had been translated into English: Hung Chung She Po (Chinese Times), February 27, 1956. There were three men in the front, wading in a rice paddy. They wore nondescript civilian clothes with broad-brimmed hats draped with mosquito netting. One seemed to be scooping something out of the water with a net while another provided a receptacle into which to deposit whatever the first man was catching. The third was the focus of the image. He held up a small discolored test tube to the sky, as though evaluating what was inside. The man in the back—the man with the blue eyes—was again captured in profile. His legs were blurred by motion as he shoved through the reeds toward the shore under a netted veil.
The third instance was from the British newspaper The Times. It was dated July 13, 1968, and Mason recognized Hong Kong even without the caption. A group of men in dated isolation suits and gas masks loaded bodies into the back of a panel truck. Right there
on the street. People wearing paper masks over their mouths and noses watched from beneath the awning of some sort of market. The man with the blue eyes stood in the crowd. Only a portion of his face was visible behind the plastic visor of his gas mask, but that was more than enough.
Der Spiegel. A German weekly magazine. September 1, 1976. The picture had been taken in a jungle of some kind. Gunnar had said Zaire; Mason had no reason to doubt him. The men wore black outfits, helmets, and, once again, gas masks. The man in the forefront knelt in the mud with some kind of field case full of eyedroppers and bottles. Another held back the broad, leathery leaves of a shrub. The man with the blue eyes was standing beside the trunk of a tree in the background, staring at something outside of the camera’s range, his face beneath his helmet devoid of expression.
May 20, 1981. The New York Times. “Searching for clues in the Congo,” the caption read. Two men who could have passed for astronauts in their white isolation suits and helmets were wrestling a screaming monkey into a burlap sack. The man with the blue eyes was barely visible over the left shoulder of the man holding the bag. He was wearing a jungle hat, a khaki vest, and a respirator. He appeared to be talking to another man, whose face was largely obscured by the man battling with the simian.
September 22, 1994. AP News Services. “USAMRIID scientists evaluate water quality of new aquifer in Surat, India.” There were two men standing in the water flowing though a ditch lined with wild grasses. One leaned on a staff while the other collected samples in a series of test tubes. The man with the blue eyes stood up on the bank with a group of men whose faces were cropped by the top of the image. He looked older, though. His belly had grown large and he held what might have been a cane, or maybe just a stick he’d found on the ground.
Mason leaned back in the chair and stared up into the cobwebs. This was an earth-shattering revelation, and yet none if it made the slightest bit of sense. There was something here, though, crying out for him to recognize it, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what. The only thing he knew with any certainty was that these pictures were the key to blowing this thing wide open.
The man he’d seen in Arizona before the world turned to light hadn’t been as old as the man in the final picture. At least not that he could tell. The lower half of his face had been concealed by a respirator and his skin had been burned to the consistency of wax, but his eyes hadn’t been those of an old man. And the man photographed in silhouette in the breezeway at the Peak View Inn had by no means been fat or elderly.
He opened the image capture from the lens of his wife’s sunglasses and stared at the man’s face. Even with his visage distorted by the curvature of her lens and his features remodeled by fire, Mason could tell he wasn’t as old as he appeared in 1994. At a guess, he would have said the man was in his late twenties in the first picture, the one from 1939, which would have made him in his eighties when he was photographed in India. There was no way the man he’d seen in person was more than a hundred years old.
Mason scrolled back through the images and watched the man with the blue eyes age from one decade to the next. The changes were subtle at first, but they were more exaggerated in the picture from the Congo and unmistakable in the one from Surat.
His laptop chimed to let him know a new email had been delivered to his in-box. When he saw it was from Gunnar, he clicked the subject line and opened the message. It contained three sentences: I expanded the database to include libraries, museums, and pop culture magazines, which I generally filter out, since the people I usually research aren’t historical, for one, or foolish enough to allow the paparazzi to capture them on film. The same pictures came up again, plus three more. Prepare to have your mind blown.
Mason enlarged the message and scrolled down to the first picture. It was black and white and so old that it had begun to crack around the edges. There were two women with heavy, old-fashioned white nurse’s uniforms and hats. They wore white cloth masks tied over their mouths and noses. Spread out before them was an array of cots draped with thin men under horse blankets, their faces sunken and their eyes closed. IVs in glass bottles hung over their beds. A man with a smock and cap was administering something through a syringe into the emaciated arm of one of the patients. Only the upper half of his head was visible above his cloth mask. That was enough, though. More than enough. The caption beneath the picture read: “Library of Congress; National Photo Company. Richter Foundation physicians treat members of the First Division, Cantigny, France, 1918.”
He looked more closely at the man in the picture. At his eyes. It wasn’t possible. It simply was not possible. Judging by his wrinkles and the slight recession of his hairline, he had to be in his forties or fifties. By now even his headstone would look older than the man he’d seen in the flesh.
The second picture had been taken eighty-four years later and half a world away. It was from November 2002. Newsweek. “Soldiers inspect poultry as farmers arrive at an outdoor market in Shunde, Foshan.” Men in camouflaged fatigues, respirators, and shoulder-length gloves dug through a cart brimming with what looked like the featherless carcasses of ducks. Several soldiers with assault rifles held a crowd at bay, toward the right side of which was a man wearing a wide-brimmed Panama hat and a suit that looked like the kind English bankers wore in the thirties. The camera caught him turning. His eyes were a startling shade of blue, but his face was unscarred.
The final picture was from a Mexican shock rag called ¡El Nuevo Alarma! dated March 15, 2009. Heavily armed federales guarded a macabre display that would never have been printed in an American tabloid. Dozens of hogs had been strung up by their rear hooves and their throats slit. Their filthy bodies were covered with flies. Behind them, against the backdrop of a lush tropical forest, the man with the blue eyes gestured to several soldiers, who obediently turned to look. This was the man who had smiled at Mason as he brought the quarry down on his head and at his wife moments before he killed her.
A century’s worth of photographic evidence of an immortal man who cropped up all around the world, seemingly sticking his head out once every decade or so. Never drawing attention to himself. Only being captured on film in a handful of cases, even though he appeared to be in a position of authority in each scene. And not once was he identified in any of the pictures.
Mason’s cell phone rang. He glanced at his watch. Eight o’clock on the nose.
It was time.
His pulse made a rushing sound in his ears.
He slowly blew out his breath, closed his eyes, and answered in a voice he hoped made him sound a whole lot more confident than he felt.
36
The woman had given Mason an address and then immediately disconnected. Finding it online had been a piece of cake. Getting there, on the other hand, took some doing. He’d gotten off of Highway 287 south onto Highway 285 west and then taken the first exit to the north. It struck him immediately that she’d chosen a location with two major thoroughfares within a hundred yards of an isolated point that required a circuitous approach to reach by vehicle.
The residential neighborhood was dark, the houses run-down. This was the kind of neighborhood that attracted the deaf and the blind, the people upon whom you could always count not to have seen or heard anything.
He rounded a bend and descended into a shallow valley, at the bottom of which flowed the same river that ran behind his new home. Turning to the south, he came upon a vast stretch of flat land surrounded by a tall ramshackle fence and even taller evergreens. It wasn’t until he saw what remained of the movie screen that he realized where he was.
This old drive-in theater was the perfect location for a clandestine meeting, especially on short notice. There was only one way to reach it by car, and his headlights would have been visible moving through the dark neighborhood uphill. She could have a car waiting for her off either of the intersecting highways, he realized. All she would have to do is hop the fence—which had already fallen in sections—run down the hil
l and across the river to the east or charge through the woods to the south and she’d be miles away before he ever got his car out of the neighborhood.
He passed the ticket booth and the concession stand. Every window had been boarded over and covered with graffiti. The chain had been cut and the gate dragged back into the weeds. The ground rose and fell in front of him. The peaks were crowned with weeds that had to be at least three feet tall and nearly buried under the heavy snow. He could barely see the tops of the metal posts that had been stripped of their speakers. His only option was to take the circuitous route around so as not to tear out his undercarriage on anything lurking beneath the weeds or crumple his hood around one of the poles.
The woman could have been hiding in any number of places. There were several exceptional vantage points from which to view his approach from afar, all of them densely forested by design so as not to allow anyone a clear view of the screen without paying admission. Had he been in her position, he would have chosen a location to the south, somewhere behind the screen. He’d have his car waiting by the eastbound ramp on 285. Sprint downhill, under the westbound lanes, and she’d have access to any number of major north-south corridors.
Mason rolled to a stop and glanced at the clock: 8:18 P.M.
The falling snowflakes glittered in his headlights. There were no other tracks. Given how fast the snow was accumulating, though, his own would be invisible soon enough. It was a location as dark as any within twenty miles. The only illumination came from the headlights that winked through the trees from the highways.
His phone rang, and he picked it up immediately.
“Drive in front of the screen,” the woman said. “Back up to it, so you are facing the direction you came from. Get out of your vehicle, but leave the door open. Drop your keys on the seat. Stand ten feet in front of your car, facing the screen.”
The Extinction Agenda Page 17
