The Extinction Agenda

by Michael Laurence

  Ramses somehow managed to drive with his left hand and hold his pistol on her with his right, all while hurtling down the icy road at a speed that would likely end the standoff long before they were able to do so on their own.

  “You have to trust us,” Mason said. Even that little movement sent electrical currents from the blade into his jaw and the roots of his teeth. “I’ve done everything you asked. What more can I do to prove that we’re on the same side?”

  “You can let me out.”

  “That’s not trust. That’s stupidity.”

  “I trust no one.”

  “At some point, you’re going to have to,” Mason said. “Right now, we’re your best hope of staying alive.”

  He felt the knife relax under his chin. His instinct was to grab her by the wrist and relieve her of the blade, but nothing good could come from it. He rested his hand gently on hers and waited.

  Her breathing slowed and took on a rhythmic quality.

  Mason reached to his left and lowered Ramses’ weapon from her head. Ramses glanced at him with a question in his eyes. Mason nodded to assure him that he knew what he was doing.

  “I am so tired,” she whispered. “I can not do this alone.”

  She removed the blade from beneath his chin and he replaced it with the back of his hand in an effort to stem the bleeding.

  “You’re not alone anymore.…”

  “Alejandra.”

  “Talk to me, Mace,” Gunnar said. “What in God’s name is going on?”

  “Everything’s under control. Just needed to take care of a little situation.”

  “One of many, I’m afraid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s he saying?” Ramses asked.

  Mason shushed him and tried to focus on Gunnar’s words while he adjusted the side mirror so he could see the woman in the backseat. She kept her face well hidden the entire time.

  “If they followed you by using the GPS in your car before, they’re probably already tracking your cell signal and are on the way to intercept you at your house.”

  “Then get out of there, Gunnar.”

  “I logged out and got the hell out of there the moment you were in the car.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “No way. Not over an unsecure line. Just get to someplace safe and I’ll find you.”

  “How do you propose doing that?”

  “Come on, Mace. Who do you think you’re talking to here? This is what I do for a living. I find things that no one else can.”

  A click and he was gone.

  “What did he say?” Ramses asked.

  “He said to go someplace safe and he’d find us.”

  “We’re better off splitting up. At least for a while. Besides, I’ve got a hunch I want to play, and a federal agent tagging along would kind of complicate things.”

  Ramses smiled.

  Mason had learned long ago that his doing so wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

  Ramses pushed the Mustang even harder, while Mason did his best not to dwell on the vision of his mangled corpse wrapped around a lightpost in a tangle of American steel. Instead, he focused on finding a way to get Alejandra—if that really was her name—to tell him everything she knew about the monster who had killed his wife, the man with the blue eyes, who at this very moment could be preparing to unleash a deadly virus upon an unsuspecting world.

  44

  The streetlights all flashed red near the heart of downtown, where a few cars, mostly upscale SUVs, finally joined them on the roads. The skyscrapers seemed somehow both taller and colder and the snow fell an ashen shade of gray. It was bizarre to think that this entire area essentially emptied at night, only to refill in the morning when the suburban migration commenced. It was an existence that flew in the face of millions of years of evolution, and yet one so ordinary that it was entirely outside Mason’s realm of comprehension.

  They pulled into the parking structure of a generic office building roughly a mile and a half from the one Ramses lived in and passed through two automated security gates. The building wasn’t tall enough to qualify as a skyscraper or short enough to call itself a complex. In the grand scheme of things, it was essentially invisible.

  The Mustang’s headlights contracted on the concrete wall as they headed straight toward a space labeled C42.

  “Where are we?” Alejandra asked.

  “Does it matter?” Ramses said.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Somewhere else you have to be?”

  They parked between an older BMW and a newer Audi and climbed out into the dimly lit garage. The sound of their footsteps was amplified tenfold. The only wet tracks belonged to the Mustang; the other cars had obviously been in here since before it started to snow.

  “You worried at all they’ll be able to link the Mustang to you?” Mason asked.

  “I’m sure they followed us via satellite, but there’s no way they’ll be able to trace the car back to me. It’s registered under the name of Anthony Montana at an address on the fourth floor.”

  “What’s on the fourth floor?”

  “An undercover DEA shop. Figured they’d get a kick out of the Scarface reference.”

  “They’ll know it was you, Ramses.”

  “You kidding me? They have no reason to suspect me. Besides, I was at Club Five all night. Probably at least fifty different people saw me there.”

  “We’re not dealing with the police, Ramses. These aren’t the kind of people who go through the normal channels or worry about things like gathering evidence.”

  Ramses grinned.

  “Welcome to my world, Special Agent Mason. It’s been so long since I’ve thought about the rules that I’m not entirely sure I even remember what they are anymore.”

  “They’ll still come for you.”

  “I’d be disappointed if they didn’t. But trust me on this one, Mace. I move in the same circles as people like this and have a whole lot of friends who wouldn’t be happy at all if anything were to happen to me.”

  “These friends. They’re the ones who told you about the building where the SWAT guys were killed, aren’t they? You’re going to have to introduce me sometime.”

  “Uh-uh. That’s not how it works. You, of all people, should know that I don’t sell out my friends at any price.” Ramses slipped a key off of his key ring and tossed it to Mason. “There’s an older-model Ford Bronco parked at the back of the hourly lot two blocks west and two blocks north of here. There’s a briefcase under the floor of the trunk that should come in handy. Don’t call me. Understand? I’ll track you down once the dust settles.”

  “How do you propose—?”

  “Please. It’s me. Ramses.”

  Mason nodded and glanced at Alejandra, who stood with her back to him, watching the ramp leading up to the sublevel above them.

  Ramses turned and headed for the door to the stairwell.

  “Hey,” Mason called after him. He stopped and turned around. “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t do this for you, Mace. I’ve been thinking about trading in that Mustang for a brand-new Hummer for a while now. If you know what I’m saying.”

  Mason couldn’t help but smile.

  “Don’t let them get away with what they did to Angie,” Ramses said.

  “Count on it.”

  “Not just out there.” He made a sweeping gesture toward the world without, then tapped his temple with his index finger. “But in here, Mace. They’ve got you flying off half-cocked in every direction at once. That’s how mistakes get made. If you want to have any chance of nailing them to the wall, you’re going to have to choke down that rage and figure out how to get a step ahead of them.”

  Ramses went through the door with a squeal. Mason heard him say good-bye, but he was fairly confident his old friend wasn’t talking to him. He was pretty sure Ramses was talking to the Mustang.

  Mason took Alejandra by the hand and pulled her toward the
opposite set of stairs, which he guessed would let out onto Larimer Street to the west. They needed to get moving. There weren’t a whole lot of pedestrians out there in the storm with whom they could blend.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  Alejandra jerked her arm out of his grasp and stumbled backward. She tripped over a seam in the concrete and went down hard on her rear end. Her hood fell back from her head in the process.

  “Do not touch me!”

  She looked up at Mason, and he had to concentrate to keep his expression from betraying his shock. He suddenly understood why she did everything in her power to conceal her face.

  “Okay. I won’t touch you again. But I need you to listen to me. We need to go. Right now. They could be here any second, and we want to be long gone when they arrive.”

  She pulled her hood back over her head and led the way toward the stairs.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “The last place they would ever expect us to go.”

  45

  The Bronco had been right where Ramses said it would be, only a whole lot harder to find buried under eight inches of snow. It started right up despite the cold, as though someone routinely performed maintenance on it. Mason had to wonder if he had any idea of the full extent of Ramses’ extracurricular activities. Nightclub owners who dealt in vices of the more innocent variety tended not to need getaway cars stashed within walking distance of a garage where a space was leased under a false name, and the nose of the DEA. The bottom line, though, was that he’d driven into the middle of a situation where he could have easily gotten himself killed to save Mason’s ass. Whatever else he might be, Ramses was just about the best friend he had right now. He and Gunnar—wherever in the world he was by now.

  Lord knows Mason could have used Trapp’s help, too, but he’d already put his partner in a bad-enough situation without asking him to risk his badge. Without his, Mason was operating in the gray area of legality, but he no longer cared about the consequences, at least not professionally. The man with the blue eyes was out there somewhere, and he fully intended to make sure that he and his entire organization burned. Only this time, there would be no hope of rising from the ashes.

  He stopped at a twenty-four-hour convenience store, where he picked up some beef jerky, a blueberry crumb cake, an armful of energy drinks, and two disposable cell phones with wireless Bluetooth capability. All of it was on Ramses, thanks to the roll of bills in the suitcase under the trunk, where Mason also found an Infinity high-capacity titanium Tiki .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol with an under-barrel light and enough ammo to shoot his way out of just about any situation.

  Feeling somewhat reinvigorated, he hit the road again, heading north. Alejandra sat next to him, her legs drawn up to her tiny frame. She seemed so small just sitting there with the buildings crawling past beside her. It was almost impossible to believe that she had survived Fairacre, which he might have been disinclined to believe had he not seen her face.

  “Are you going to tell me about it?” he asked.

  She didn’t speak for several minutes. She kept her features hidden beneath her hood, so he couldn’t even begin to guess at the thoughts going through her head. When she finally spoke, it was in an almost resigned voice.

  “What do you want to know?”

  Mason had a million questions, all fighting to be asked at the same time. He decided instead to have her start at the beginning, to let her tell her story in the way she saw fit, in hopes that she would divulge details about which he didn’t even know to ask.

  He watched the icy road through the blowing snow, which whipped first one way and then the other. It was all he could do to keep the Bronco’s tires aligned with the tracks the few cars out on the roads had laid for him. He glanced at the rearview mirror. At the vehicles that had slid onto the shoulders and off the road into the adjacent fields. At everything except the woman in the seat beside him as she spoke of horrors that convinced him that man’s capacity for evil truly knew no bounds.

  “My name is Alejandra María de Yautepec Vigil.” Her voice was soft, distant, and carried a palpable note of sorrow. “I am from San Bartolo, Oaxaca. A village of only six hundred people, in the mountains near the Gulf of Tehuantepec. My family has grown coffee beans on the same land since before my great-grandfather was born. We lived in the house where he was raised. All of us. My parents and brothers. My grandmother. My aunt and uncle and their children. One big family.”

  Despite being unable to see her expression, Mason could tell she was wearing a wistful smile. Her eyes had turned inward to the time and place she retreated when there was nowhere else to hide.

  “Sounds nice,” he said.

  “It is. Was, anyway. Before the economy collapsed. One day we woke up and our entire harvest was worth half of what we needed to survive. We could no longer even afford to buy food. The struggles of my village were noticed by a Catholic missionary group. They promised they would show us how to make ten times as much money for the same beans we were already harvesting, if we were willing to work for it. They sent our men—among them my father and my older brother, Pablo—to Agua Prieta, fifteen hundred miles to the north, to learn about modern roasting methods and organizing co-ops from other successful villagers, who would teach them the trade in exchange for one year of their labor. They would even be given their own roasters and packaging materials. Everything would have been so perfect.…”

  Her voice trailed off. Several miles passed in silence while he waited for her to continue. The mere fact that she was sitting here with him now meant that something had gone terribly wrong. When she finally spoke, he could tell she’d been crying.

  “My father and the other men … they never made it home.”

  “What happened?”

  “One of the men from San Carlos, a village twenty miles away. This man. He found their bus. It was off the road. In the river. There was no one inside. He said … he said it looked like it had been there for a long time. And inside … inside there were holes. Bullet holes. And blood. The seats … they were covered with it. Everything our men had brought back with them. Everything they had worked for the last year to earn. The future of our village. It was all gone.”

  “One of the cartels?”

  “Who else would have done such a thing? These narcos. They are not men. They are animals. They took everything from us and left us to starve. My grandmother, she gave the food from her plate to my sister, Gabriela, and me. We watched her waste away and die. Mi abuelita. She gave her life for ours. It was then that I decided to leave. I would not take food from the mouth of another. I would make as much money as I could and send it back to help my family. And I would find a way to make the pinche narcos pay for what they had done to us.”

  “What did you do?”

  “There are only so many things a woman with few skills and little education can do in Mexico. I could either sell my body or join the army. To them I was just another guacha to fight and die in a war we could not win. They trained me and, most important, paid me to fight in the streets of my own country. And when they saw how good I was at killing narcos—how much I enjoyed doing so—they promoted me to Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales.”

  “Special Forces? That would explain a few things.”

  “They assigned me to the Second SF Brigade and sent me to San Miguel de los Jagüeyes to train in urban combat. Taught me how to blend in with the people around me. Go places others could not go. Gather information to be used as blackmail. Get close to targets others could not reach. No man fears a woman so small until she has a knife to his throat.”

  Mason had learned that lesson the hard way. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

  “I was part of the team that captured Omar Treviño Morales and brought Los Zetas to its knees. It was not long after that raid, while I was still in Monterrey, that I received a letter from my sister asking for my help. All communications were routed through a central address, so it was already th
ree weeks old when it arrived. By the time I returned home, my sister was gone. I found the coffee fields burned and mota—marijuana—growing from the soil. While I was on the other side of the country fighting Los Zetas, the men of Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación took my village. They dragged the missionaries into the streets and killed them for all to see. They bribed federales to guard the fields and look the other way while they abused my people. I can only imagine the things they must have done to my little sister.”

  He had to slow the vehicle to combat the worsening roads. It wasn’t snowing as hard as it had been, but the wind had gathered strength in its stead. At least Ramses had given him a tank like this old Bronco.

  “Gabriela was only sixteen years old. I was not there to protect her when she needed me, and my mother was too scared to try. It is no wonder she ran away. And while I had been of age to join the army, she had not, which left her with even fewer choices. She did not know where to find me, and I knew she would not run away from abuse only to sell herself into it. As children, we had heard the stories of America and promised each other we would go there one day. I was certain that was where she had gone. I swore to my mother I would not return without Gabriela.… I have not spoken with her since the night I left.”

  Mason knew better than to ask why. Her sister’s absence was answer enough.

  “So you went after her.”

  “It did not take long to find the man who took my sister north. He called himself ‘Papi.’ Everyone knew that for two thousand pesos he would take them as far as Altar.” Mason was familiar with the small Sonoran town. It was a common staging ground for migrants preparing to make a run for the border, a place where desperate men and women negotiated deals with human smugglers and embarked upon the grueling trek into the scorching desert. “So I went there and showed her picture to everyone on the street. To all of the people sleeping outside the maquiladoras, hoping to find work on the assembly lines. To all of the vendors selling supplies from their stalls. I finally found a man who recognized her in one of the hospedajes, a guesthouse where he shared a tiny room with fifteen others. He said it had been close to a week since last he saw her. In the plaza. Talking to a man everyone knew was a coyote. He said I would recognize this man by his cowboy hat and snakeskin boots.