The Extinction Agenda

by Michael Laurence

  Johan led them through a narrow doorway into a room that served as a memorial to his extended family. There were portraits of men and women in gilded frames, all displayed with reverence. This was a sacred place, a family crypt of sorts. He gestured to each of the pictures in turn as he walked past.

  “My great-grandparents died in an overcrowded railcar bound for Dachau. Their two banker sons, Joseph and Heinrich, were executed in that same concentration camp by the gas their brother Wilhelm had helped to create. Their youngest son, Erich, was shot and killed before ever arriving at Auschwitz, where my grandfather’s sister died after having failed to cross the Polish border. One of her children survived. One. Of the twenty Mahlers in Germany at the start of the war, only one survived. My father had devoted every free second to finding out what had happened to them, like my grandfather would have wanted, only once he had, he still felt empty.”

  The doorway at the back led to a shrine of a completely different nature. Mason felt a chill when he entered that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

  “My father called this his ‘Trophy Room.’” Johan positively swelled with pride. “He tracked down the personnel records from all of the concentration camps. He got the names of every man and woman who ever served as a guard, every person who ever took up arms for the Nazi cause. From the most lowly Sturmmann all the way up to his Reichsführer. He collected all of the pictures he could find of each of them, hung them on these very walls, and then he started hunting them.”

  The people staring at them from the old photographs looked no different from anyone they might pass on the street, save for the swastikas and runic insignias on their uniforms. Human beings like any others. Men and women who had gotten swept up in a movement that promised an end to their hardship and suffering, and all they’d had to do was step across this one little line in the sand, then just one more, and one more still, until mass murder became patriotic.

  “It was our shared obsession,” Johan said. “We tracked the ratlines all the way to South America. We followed the flow of money from German banks to international banks owned by Nazi sympathizers. We pooled information and resources with other people like us from all around the world. We built an entire network dedicated to tracking down the war criminals who’d slipped through Nuremberg’s net. And once we found them, we did something about it.”

  Mason glanced at Gunnar, who wore the same expression of shock he could feel on his own face. Alejandra, however, betrayed nothing.

  “This was the first one,” Johan said.

  There were two pictures on a single placard, mounted side by side, both in black and white. They featured the same subject; of that there was no doubt. The image on the left was of a smiling man. His head was framed by an out-of-focus coil of razor wire. A rifle leaned against his shoulder. The picture directly beside it was of the same man, only a little older. There were creases around his eyes, which stared blankly at the camera. His lips were parted and his skin was waxen, and in the middle of his forehead was a silver coin. It had been used to cover the entrance wound of a bullet from a small-caliber pistol, judging by the powder tattoos around the coin and the almost nonexistent spatter on his nose and cheeks.

  There was a small brass label engraved with the numbers 04-092 above the name Rottenführer Abel Ahrens. It was old and faded and the engraving had almost been worn smooth from Johan doing exactly what he was doing now, running his fingertips across the discolored metal.

  “I remember my father standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders while I looked from one picture to the other for the longest time. Searching this man’s face for the demon inside of him and in the end realizing that there simply wasn’t one. This was just a man who had committed horrible crimes because he had chosen to do so. A man who had tried to get away with what he had done. And this picture on the right? This was merely the execution of the sentence he would have received had he stood trial before the International Military Tribunal.”

  Gone was the grandfatherly figure who had welcomed them into his home. This was a different person entirely, one with a faraway look in his eyes and the ability to stand in a room filled with the pictures of men he had sentenced to death and speak of them with the same detachment they must have felt when they did the very same thing to his relatives.

  The walls were positively covered with displays just like the one for 04-092. Men reduced to numbers and their lives reduced to photographs. And Mason realized that evil wasn’t merely the symptom of a disease; it was a condition of normalcy, one that everyone denied was inside them until the very moment they embraced it.

  The man in the cardigan, who’d brought their drinks, appeared from nowhere to whisk the empty mugs away. He’d been watching them so closely, he’d been able to tell when the last of them took a final sip.

  Gunnar had noticeably paled. Considering his skill set, Mason could only assume that he had unknowingly helped track down some of these men. Their blood was on his hands.

  “They’re all dead now,” Johan said. “Nearly all, anyway. Time has taken care of most everyone we missed. Justice has been served. The problem now isn’t that evil still exists, but, rather, that it has bred. It’s like pulling a weed, but missing the roots. They lie dormant for long periods of time before emerging at some new location and at some unforeseen time. Now we’re no longer dealing with an evil ideology or a prejudice against a single group of people. That was just the weed that was Hitler. The roots, though … the roots survived and new weeds are popping up everywhere you look. They hide behind their money and their power and have such strong allies that they’re nearly impossible to identify. Which is where you come in, Gunnar. Your services have proven invaluable, my friend. Speaking of which, you mentioned you have something to show me?”

  Gunnar looked at Mason from the corner of his eye, as though giving him one final opportunity to change his mind. And while the thought had occurred to Mason, he quickly dismissed it. They were talking about the man who had killed his wife and his partner. If Johan, with his proudly displayed pictures of men whose murders he had commissioned, could help him find the man with the blue eyes and bring him to justice, regardless of the method, then Mason had every intention of using him to do so. It turned out that he was more like this man, who had staged one of the largest serial-killing rampages about which the world would never know, than he cared to admit.

  He nodded.

  Gunnar removed his laptop from beneath his arm, opened it, and turned it around so Johan could clearly see the screen.

  Mason watched Johan’s eyes. Watched the reflection of the image on his corneas. Watched the spark of recognition form. His eyes looked just like those of 04-092.

  “You know who this man is, don’t you?” Mason said.

  “Where did you get this picture?”

  “Tell me what you know first.”

  “When was this picture taken, damn it? How long ago?”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “You don’t understand, do you? This is a catastrophic development. I need to know when this picture was taken and where!”

  “Just over three weeks ago,” Gunnar said. “Denver.”

  “Dear God … It may already be too late.”

  Johan turned without explanation and passed from the Trophy Room into the final chamber, which was divided in half by a wall covered with dry-erase boards. There were at least twenty of them, all the size of blackboards, and all turned on their sides, so they went from floor to ceiling. At the very top of the center panel were two words written in bold capital letters: MOST WANTED. Each board was dedicated to a specific individual. At the top were pictures of the subject from every available angle, however few. Most showed little, if any, detail. These were men and women who had learned how not to be captured on film. Below each collection of pictures was what Mason assumed to be a code name. Some had real names written beneath their code names. Most didn’t. All of them had numbers he initially guessed were t
heir rankings in the top twenty. Some of the numbers were duplicated, and some subjects had multiple numbers beneath them. He found his guy right away. His eyes made him impossible to miss. As did the fact that he had more pictures than any of the others, and he was the only one with pictures more than a couple decades old, let alone half a century.

  There had to be thirty or so of them, all enlarged as far as the resolution would allow. Mason recognized the pictures he already had, although the ones in this display were either originals or created directly from the negatives. They were each labeled with the date they had been taken and covered a span from 1918 through 2017. There was a single code name, a dozen names he assumed to be aliases, and two numbers: 2 and 10.

  “He calls himself ‘the Hoyl’ to taunt us,” Johan said. “The Hoyl is the magical bird of Jewish lore that refused to taste the forbidden fruit when Adam offered it, and thus was never subjected to the punishment of expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Or mortality. It is almost like the phoenix, in that sense. It burns hot and fast, but rather than rising from its ashes, it becomes an egg from which it can be reborn. Just like the man who bears its name, whom we have already killed twice.”

  Johan tapped two different pictures: one in black and white, and the other the faded color Mason associated with his youth. Both featured the face of the man who called himself the Hoyl, but there were distinct differences. The black-and-white image depicted a man who had to have been in his seventies. His face was wrinkled, his bared teeth yellowed, his nose bulbous and veined. Not his eyes, though. They were neither young nor old. The only word Mason could summon to describe them was eternal. He, too, had a silver coin on his forehead, which concealed the entry wound of the bullet that had killed him, but not nearly as well. The skin had torn away from the exposed bone and appeared singed at the edges. There was blowback spatter all over his face.

  The other image showed a man who couldn’t have been much beyond his mid-fifties. The wrinkles were just starting to come in, and were doing so in a slightly different configuration. His front teeth appeared longer and whiter, as well. There were enough differences up close that it was obvious they were two distinct individuals from a shared lineage, undoubtedly father and son. Only their eyes were exactly the same. And the fact that both had silver coins covering the entry wounds on their foreheads.

  And yet still the sightings continued, clear up until the facial scarring appeared. Mason glanced at Alejandra, who had been silently trailing in their footsteps. She was staring into the face of her own personal demon with an expression he couldn’t interpret.

  “He’s gone by many aliases, but we believe his family name is Fischer. Unfortunately, it’s also the fourth most common surname in Germany. There are more than a quarter of a million Fischers in that one small country alone.” Johan tapped a picture that looked similar to the one Mason had from Egypt in 1939. It was of some sort of army company in 1934. Very formal. Twenty-two serious men staring at the camera. Someone had drawn red Xs on the chests of seventeen of them and written first names above the heads of the remaining five, scratched them out, then written different names. Only two of the five currently had names. “There were five Fischers in his battalion alone. Division z.b.V. Afrika. A special ops unit created for a specific goal in Africa prior to the war. We’ve only been able to match two of the men to verifiable casualties. The other three are all listed as ‘missing in action, presumed dead,’ which means no bodies were ever recovered. Their names were Fritz, Leopold, and Martin. We have no idea which belonged to the Hoyl. And that’s where the paper trail ends. He’s used a dozen different identities through the years. Nearly everything we know about him is anecdotal. But there is one thing we know about him for sure.”

  Johan looked at Gunnar and then directly at Mason.

  “Whenever he appears, people die.”

  56

  Lines had been drawn from the various pictures of the Hoyl to different handwritten paragraphs. There was a definitive time line to them. The first instance was the same photograph Gunnar had found of the man with the blue eyes in the tent in France, 1918. Johan tapped the picture.

  “This is the first recorded sighting, nearly twenty years prior to the picture taken of a younger version with the z.b.V. Afrika Division. We call this man Fischer F One, for first generation. Patriarch of the clan Hoyl. This picture was taken roughly two months prior to the outbreak of the Spanish influenza during World War One, which claimed an estimated fifty to one hundred million lives.”

  “You’re suggesting this man is responsible for a global pandemic,” Mason said.

  “I’m not suggesting anything. Bear with me. This man here is Fischer F Two, whom we believe to be the son of F One. We don’t know why or how successive generations look nearly identical. Eugenics. Selective breeding. In vitro fertilization. Maybe just strong genes. Regardless of the means, they are bred and raised to continue the diabolical work of their forebears and perpetuate the illusion of immortality. This is him in 1942. Egypt. He’s photographed here and … here with various high-ranking officials at both Nazi Party headquarters and IG Farben, the company responsible for the development and production of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and early biotechnology. Farben subsidiaries manufactured the various nerve agents that killed millions of my people and that monsters like Mengele used in concentration camps to perform human testing on unwilling subjects. They turned the country into their own private lab while the German forces were divided among three different fronts. One of them in the deserts of Africa, where, in 1942, an outbreak of malaria—a tropical disease—claimed thousands.

  “And here. China, 1956. An older F Two is again photographed at the epicenter of a pandemic. The Asian flu—H2N2—started right here in the heart of the Guizhou Province and killed more than two million worldwide.” Johan grew more animated as he talked. “Here. Hong Kong, 1968. Photographed just days after the first recorded case of the Hong Kong flu—H3N2—which killed another million.

  “Now along comes F Three—distinguished by this mole you can clearly see below his left eye—and a change in modus operandi. Enter the violent age of hemorrhagic fevers and viruses that attack the immune system. Zaire, 1976. The first cases of the Ebola virus, a horrible disease with a ninety-plus percent fatality rate. The Ubangi River Basin in the Congo, 1981. Later determined to be the origin of the AIDS epidemic.”

  Mason found it hard to swallow that one small group of men with the same lineage could be responsible for the deaths of more than a hundred million people, but he was positively choking on the sheer amount of coincidences.

  “Enter F Four. September 1994. The Gujarat State of India. A suddenly younger version of the Hoyl is photographed in Surat during an outbreak of the plague. The Black Death, mind you. A disease that had been considered controlled for more than eighty years. China, 2002. The SARS coronavirus. The first of what one might consider the highly contagious ‘designer influenzas.’ It may have killed fewer than a thousand people, but it generated more than one hundred million dollars in revenue for the pharmaceutical company that just happened to be sitting on an ‘experimental’ vaccine.”

  “You’re claiming collusion with big business? That this is all about money?”

  “Everything is about money,” Johan said. “There have been more outbreaks of various epidemics since the start of the twenty-first century than there were in the previous century and a half, despite all of the advances in sanitation, hygiene, and medicine. Nasty, nasty diseases, too. Dengue fever, Ebola, cholera, the plague. Now we’re talking about things like mad cow disease and prions. Nature knows how to adapt, but she isn’t capable of working at such staggering speeds. Somewhere there are men cooking up our ultimate demise in laboratories flying corporate flags, funding their research by profiteering from the vaccines for the very diseases they create. Did you know that the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the Fortune Five Hundred gross more than the other four hundred and ninety companies combined?” He tapped the pi
cture of the man with the blue eyes standing behind the rack of slaughtered pigs hung by their hooves. “Look here. F Four. Mexico, 2009. H1N1, just another minor variation on the same flu virus. The swine flu vaccine brought in more than three point three billion in revenue and was used to dose nearly every government, military, and health-care employee—whether they wanted the mandatory vaccine or not—and the droves of civilians who lined up to deplete the ‘limited’ supplies, which, again, just happened to be ready and waiting.

  “This one Fischer bloodline alone helped create a global environment of fear and the complete reliance on pharmaceuticals, which one could consider the twenty-first century equivalent of eighteenth-century gold, nineteenth-century steel, and twentieth-century oil. We’re talking about an industry that routinely charges markups of ten thousand percent or more, which by itself is driving private health insurance and hospitals to the brink of ruin. And the only theoretical means of salvaging the system is by government intervention and a national system of socialized medicine, which plays right into their hands. Now you have the IRS monitoring every cent you make or spend, a Department of Health with every detail of your personal medical history, a Department of Homeland Security with unlimited power to search and detain under the Patriot Act, the most powerful army the planet has ever seen, and all of the country’s finances held in a privatized Federal Reserve controlled by the very same interests that initially financed and implemented the very same model in Germany following the end of the First World War. The Gestapo, the health division of the Reich Interior Ministry, the Shutzstaffel and Sturmabteilung, the Wehrmacht, and the national, privatized Deutsche Reichsbank—different names for exactly the same thing. And now … violà. National socialism. The Land of the Free becomes a military state that no longer functions to serve the interests of the masses, but, rather, the financial interests of the few who are suddenly one step closer to the global rule they desire. And this man—” Tap-tap-tap. “This man is their key to doing it.”