Mason caught movement from the corner of his eye. He turned and saw that Alejandra had removed her hood and was gently tracing the scarring on her face with her fingertips. He recalled the words she had committed to memory through her desperate escape and her years in hiding, the words spoken by the most recent incarnation of the monster whose face adorned the wall before them now, the great-grandson of the man who first took up the mantle on a battlefield in France. The monster who called himself the Hoyl.
There’s just one problem we haven’t solved. How do we dispose of all of the bodies?
When Johan spoke again, it was in a tired voice, one that betrayed a lifetime spent chasing shadows.
“So I ask you again. Please, James. Please tell me how you got this man’s photograph.”
Mason turned to face Johan so he could watch the old man’s eyes.
“It’s a digital enhancement of a reflection. The reflection on the lens of my wife’s sunglasses on the day she was killed.”
“Your wife? That can’t be right. That would mean…”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“You must go now. I have much work to do.”
“Tell me what you know.”
As Johan started for the doorway, Mason grabbed him by the sleeve of his robe. Two men appeared from nowhere and seized Mason by either arm.
Johan shrugged back into his robe, straightened the lapels, and turned to face them, composed once more.
“I told you what you came here to find out. You know enough now. There are some things you are not yet ready to learn. For now, there is one goal upon which we must focus all our energies. Everything else is extraneous. We need to figure out what the Hoyl plans to do and where he intends to strike.”
He whirled and strode toward the Trophy Room.
“I’ve seen him before, you know,” Mason said.
Johan froze like a statue, his back to them.
“What do you mean, you’ve seen him?”
“The statement is fairly self-explanatory.”
“Where?”
“Arizona. One year ago.”
Johan gave a slight wave with his right hand and the pressure on Mason’s arms abated. The men stepped back just far enough that he wouldn’t be able to forget they were there.
“Very few men have seen him in person and survived the encounter.”
“I have.”
“Tell me about it.”
He kept his back to Mason so the younger man wouldn’t be able to read the desperation on his face, but Mason knew it was there. He could hear it in the old man’s voice.
“You first.”
Mason felt the men behind him move subtly closer. Johan took a long time to formulate his words.
“That they killed your wife is a bad sign. They would have done so only as a last resort. It was my understanding that her death was unrelated. Now it’s your turn.”
“Not until you give me something I can use. Tell me what you know about my wife. Is her family involved? Why did they kill Angie?”
Johan sighed and turned to face him.
“You have my sympathies, young James Mason. I, too, know the pain of losing a wife. There is no greater sorrow a man can endure.” His expression hardened and he finally revealed the true face of the man who could sign the orders to hunt down and kill the men in the Trophy Room. “Now you must become her avenging angel. Let no man stand in your way. Yes, I am certain your wife’s family is involved.”
Mason thought of Paul’s uncharacteristic mood and had no doubt that he had been party to the decision to murder his own daughter.
“It was at a rock quarry on the Tohono O’odham Reservation, not far from the border. We tracked him there—”
“He led you there.”
“It was an ambush. Nearly my entire team was killed, including my partner. I found the man with the blue eyes—the Hoyl—in a room filled with corpses, all of them hanging from the roof by chains. I looked him squarely in the eyes through the smoke and the flies and I … aimed my gun at his head … and I…”
“You must not hesitate again.”
“Not a chance.”
“These corpses?”
“All in various stages of decomposition.”
“Did you recognize any telltale signs of pathology? Sores. Bruising. Bleeding. Lesions on the skin.”
“I didn’t get a very good look. I was a little preoccupied with the man holding a gun to my partner’s head and the fact that the entire building was on fire around me.”
“Did he say anything?”
“No,” Mason said, and looked pointedly at Alejandra. “At least not to me.”
Johan followed his stare. Recognition dawned in the old man’s eyes.
“What did he say to you?”
“He said, ‘There’s just one problem we haven’t solved. How do we dispose of all the bodies?’”
Johan furrowed his brow. Then, with a flash of flannel, he was gone. The shuffling sound of his slippers followed him through the sublevel.
“I take it we’re done here,” Mason said.
“We would be happy to escort you to the door, sir,” the man in the cardigan said. “And make no mistake, we will be following your investigation with great interest.”
His accent was distinctly Middle Eastern, filtered through a formal British education. Dark hair, bushy eyebrows, light skin, an abundance of moles. He gestured toward the door with a half bow—as though he were a maître d’ seeing them to their table, rather than an enforcer whose cardigan shifted just enough to expose the butt of an Israeli Jericho 941 semiautomatic pistol—and led them up the stairs, through the living room, and to the front door.
He stood on the porch and watched them climb into their truck and drive away. The gate was already closing behind them when they hit the street.
“Where do we go from here?” Alejandra asked.
The truth was, Mason simply didn’t know.
He was just about to close his eyes and succumb to exhaustion, when he caught a glimpse of the smile forming on Gunnar’s face.
And then he realized why.
The Thorntons had gone to great lengths to make sure no one knew about their new windowless corporate headquarters on the AgrAmerica lot, which meant there was undoubtedly something inside they didn’t want anyone to see. He had a hunch they weren’t about to offer him a personal tour, so he was just going to have to arrange one for himself.
It was time to find out what they were hiding.
PART V
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt, letter to Col. Edward Mandell House (1933)
57
Greeley, Colorado
NOVEMBER 16
Alejandra and others like her had been injected with various pathogens and used as mules to carry them across the border. They were undocumented aliens. There was no record of their existence. For all anyone knew, they’d simply wandered out across the red sands and vanished into thin air.
Neither the risk nor the exposure was great at all for those responsible—unlike just about every other option. The CDC had installed quarantine stations in all of the major international airports and screened passengers for a host of symptoms. There was also the distinct possibility of uncontrolled exposure. Any vehicle, whether a car or a boat, could be subjected to a random search at the border. The only way of guaranteeing acquisition of the test subjects was by funneling them through a dangerous, uninhabitable desert wasteland those responsible had arranged to leave unguarded and unfenced.
But what was their ultimate goal?
Were they testing the afflicted for antibodies, determining the level of lethality, or did they simply want to find out what would happen? Mason could only assume that the entity the Hoyl represented was collecting these diseases in the wild and working on them somewhere out of the countr
y, away from oversight.
If everything Johan said was true, then in addition to the plague, cholera, Ebola, and dengue fever, these men had access to several different and largely fatal varieties of influenza.
Mason still couldn’t see the endgame, though. Was it possible that Johan was right and it was all about money? That someone, somewhere, was sitting on the vaccine, just waiting for the outbreak so he could make billions from the cure for the disease he had created? That theory definitely fit with Gunnar’s feeling that something big was on the horizon, especially when you factored in the specific stocks being traded.
The most pressing question was, where did they propose to release it? Some village in the middle of nowhere or right in the heart of Times Square?
And how did the trap in the administrative building out by the old airport, where the SWAT team had been killed, fit in? The small chamber had been sealed with plastic sheeting, and some sort of biological agent had obviously been released inside. It had the feel of some sort of deal, but were the dead men lying on the ground inside the purveyors of the disease or the cure? Or was it just another test? And why leave the evidence there to be found when the ultimate goal had always been to incinerate it?
Most important, why kill Angie when all she potentially had to go on was the blackened ruins of Fairacre and the hidden subterranean chamber she likely would never have found underneath it, especially considering all of the equipment had been removed or destroyed?
The only thing Mason knew for certain was that regardless of the angle at which he looked at the problem, he ended up looking at Paul and Victor. He just couldn’t figure out why. If they were buying their way into the world of pharmaceuticals, then popping up out of nowhere with the cure for some terrifying new virus would definitely put them on the map, but nothing in that line of logic necessitated the death of their daughter and sister, respectively. Mason’s wife.
The fact that Angie hadn’t known her family was investing a fortune into building a new corporate headquarters for an entity her father had never once mentioned to her didn’t sit well with Mason. Nor did Gunnar’s lack of knowledge about the Thorntons’ new venture, Global Allied Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals. They both made it their business to know such things, which meant that considerable effort had been invested in concealing that information, not to mention the enormous structure being raised on AgrAmerica’s back nine. There was something crucial he was missing and only one place he could think to look.
They weren’t going to let him just waltz through the front gates this time, though.
There was enough activity around the construction site that he probably could work his way into the crowd, but if anyone recognized him, he was screwed. Their only real option was to wait for the place to empty out for the night. The flaw in that plan was that the entire complex would be on heightened awareness because of the morning’s events at Fairacre. Fortunately, he’d already dealt with at least part of Paul’s security force while he was there.
Gunner proposed the idea of going in right at quitting time, during the mass exodus of bodies and vehicles. Security would still have to search the cars on the way out, and they’d be on high alert for any incoming traffic. They would be expecting Mason to come under the cover of darkness, if they even suspected such a bold move at all. Five o’clock. That was his magic window. He needed to be in the building before everyone else was out and security tightened the cordon around it. The challenge from there would be getting out, but Gunnar assured him that he had everything under control.
“Easy for you to say. You’ll be miles away from the action.”
“You’re not the only one with his neck on the proverbial chopping block. Their cybersurveillance team is undoubtedly already at maximum readiness. If they so much as sense I’m attempting to gain access to their system, they’ll initiate whatever active defensive countermeasures they employ and shut down their entire network. Any potential intrusions will stand out like beacons. They’ll be able to cut through my web of proxy servers and VPNs and isolate my IP address in a matter of minutes.”
“Have you ever been caught?”
“Of course not. You?”
“The FBI tends to frown upon the whole breaking-and-entering thing.”
“When it suits its purposes.” Gunnar smirked. “You’re burning daylight.”
“He is right,” Alejandra said. “This is our only chance.”
Mason nodded, climbed out of the truck, and sprinted toward the tree line. He watched the old pickup drive around the bend from where he crouched in the shrubs before turning his attention to the southeast and the distant compound. They’d stopped at Walmart, where he’d bought a new Bluetooth, a canvas tarp, a box of antiviral face masks, and a white hooded sweatsuit large enough to fit over his black clothes.
They’d settled on a drop-off point just southwest of the small community of Ault, behind a warehouse on the outskirts of town. From there, it was roughly six miles across largely open terrain to the northwestern corner of AgrAmerica’s perimeter. He’d be able to cling to the cover of the trees through an expanse of frozen wetlands for a good portion of that distance, but he’d be completely exposed during his final approach.
At least the weather had seen fit to do him a favor. The storm, which had taken a breather for several hours, had found its second wind. The flakes were the size of moths and fluttered on the attenuated breeze beneath the canopy and outright swarmed in the clearings. Visibility was limited, for which he was extremely grateful. He was also counting on there being no satellite surveillance of the complex. If he was right, the Thorntons didn’t want anyone to get a good look at whatever they were doing back there. It was a gamble, though. If he was wrong, anyone watching the feed would be able to see him the moment he broke cover and started for the fence.
From there, he was depending on Gunnar to work his magic.
Mason didn’t have any idea what he would find in the new building. He remembered how Victor had steered him away from it and back to his car. Victor wasn’t the kind of guy who did anything without a reason, and Mason certainly couldn’t remember another time when his brother-in-law had thrown his arm over his shoulders like they were friends, let alone family. There was definitely something inside that building, and it was high time he figured out what.
He made his way through the marshlands as quickly and quietly as he could, clinging to the edges of the cattails and staying beneath the cottonwoods and pines, until he finally broke cover about a mile and a half from his destination. The cattails continued along the edge of the marsh for another couple hundred yards, beyond which he could see little more than a seamless stretch of whiteness through the sheeting snow.
Mason tapped his earpiece to connect to Gunnar.
“How does it look from here?”
“The imagery I have to work with is a year old, but it looks like there’s a fieldstone retaining wall just to the west of the marsh,” Gunnar replied.
“It’ll have to work. Are we clear of any satellite?”
“If there’s one overhead, I can’t find it.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
“Very reassuring. What’s the status of security?”
“I’m in their system now. So far, no alarms have been raised. I have audio on the security forces on the grounds, video inside the compound, and access to the perimeter alarms. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill corporate security system, Mace. It has all the bells and whistles. We’re talking motion sensors and outward-facing infrared cameras along the entire fence line. You trigger any of those sensors and those cameras will zero in on you.”
“You’re sure you can handle them?”
“Piece of cake,” Gunnar said. “Just keep your eyes open.”
Mason started forward at a crouch, then stopped.
“Gunnar?”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you doing all of this for me?”
&n
bsp; “You’re not the only one who has a personal stake in taking these guys down.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Let’s just say I don’t take kindly to being manipulated,” Gunnar said. “Now get moving. I’m already starting to see an increase in traffic exiting the gate.”
Mason charged through the edge of the cattails. The muscles in his legs were already burning and he had a long way to go in a short period of time. He found the retaining wall without much difficulty. It was old and had fallen in spots, but what remained was just high enough to obscure his approach until he was within range of the complex.
The perimeter fence alternately appeared and disappeared through the storm. It was maybe three hundred feet away, across the open terrain, with nothing resembling cover in between.
“Talk to me, Gunnar.”
“We’ve got a ton of activity at the main gates, but that’s about it.”
“What about the cameras and motion sensors in the northwest corner?”
“Prepared to loop the feed from the cameras and disable the motion sensors on your mark.”
He could barely see the silhouette of the new building through the snow. There were still cars in the lot, judging by the diffuse glare of headlights. There was no sign of anyone lying in wait for him, though.
“Now would be a good time, Gunnar.”
“How long do you need?”
“Every second you can give me.”
Mason dropped to his hands and knees and crawled out from behind the wall. The accumulation came halfway up his thighs and nearly to his elbows. He stayed as low as he could to minimize his profile. While he was confident that with the ferocity of the storm no one would be able to separate him from the surrounding snow at a distance, his shadow would be a dead giveaway. As would the trail he was leaving behind him.
The Extinction Agenda Page 29
