The Extinction Agenda

by Michael Laurence

  “Here.” She made a rustling sound. “Take this.”

  Mason accepted the cold butt of his Sigma. It was like shaking hands with an old friend.

  He made Alejandra repeat Ramses’ number one final time. If he didn’t survive this, he was counting on his old friend to finish it for him. Ramses might be a lot of things, but he was no coward. He would follow through, regardless of the consequences.

  “Be careful,” Mason whispered, and squeezed her hand in the darkness. “Remember. One hour. If I don’t make that phone call, you get as far away from here as you can.”

  He released her hand and struck off toward his fate.

  “When you find the man with the blue eyes, you must not hesitate.” Her soft footsteps dissipated behind him. “This time make certain he is dead.”

  Mason jacked his clip, counted the bullets, and quietly slid it home again.

  “There’s nothing in this world I’d like more,” he whispered, and advanced into the darkness.

  68

  Mason stayed low and against the wall. He knew he was getting close when he smelled fresh construction: sawdust, cement, and oil. The light started as a pinprick and grew progressively larger as he approached. He heard voices, but not clearly enough to make out the words. They sounded hollow thanks to the strange and distorted acoustics from the four-story courtyard beyond the dark tram, which sealed off the majority of the opening to the building, leaving little more than a horseshoe of light around it.

  He had to believe the men inside the building thought he was either dead or miles away, but he couldn’t afford to take anything for granted. They’d walked blindly into the trap at Steerman’s and barely made it out alive. There was no way of knowing what horrors awaited him ahead.

  The shadows faded by degree. It wasn’t long before he could clearly see his own outline, not much longer still until he would become fully exposed. He ducked to his left and used the tram to conceal his final approach.

  Mason paused and listened to the voices. They’d grown more distant even as he drew nearer. He made a break for the gap between the third and fourth cars. He could see just a hint of the open courtyard through the windows of the cars ahead of him.

  No sign of movement.

  He heard the footsteps. Farther away now. The voices were abruptly cut off by the sound of a closing door.

  The lights snapped off with a resounding thud.

  The resulting darkness was suffocating.

  Mason waited several minutes, peeling apart the layers of silence, listening for anything to betray the presence of sentries inside the complex. He stayed low and sprinted toward the front of the train. Crouched beside the lead car. Listened to the echo of his footsteps fade into oblivion.

  He mentally re-created the floor plan. Stairs diagonally across the courtyard to his right, leading up to the ground floor. To the left from there was a side entrance, alarmed from the outside. The main entrance was somewhere to the right of the landing, near where he’d last heard the voices.

  The tram couldn’t have arrived more than ten minutes before he had, but that was more than enough time to get Gunnar out of the building and into a car bound for any where in the world.

  If they hadn’t already killed him.

  Mason sprinted out into the courtyard and veered toward the stairs.

  The lights came on with an echoing boom, blinding him.

  He shielded his eyes.

  A slow clapping sound.

  Clap.

  Clap.

  Clap.

  “Bravo, Special Agent Mason.” It was the voice that haunted his dreams. “Or should I say former Special Agent Mason.”

  A clattering sound. Metallic.

  Mason turned toward the source of the voice and aimed his pistol at the silhouette emerging from behind a bank of spotlights, their blinding beams directed at the center of the circular courtyard. Right at him. There were three other sets. One to his left, another to his right, and a fourth at his back. He couldn’t tell if anyone lurked in the shadows behind them.

  A droplet of fluid struck the ground beside him with a wet slap.

  “I was beginning to wonder if you weren’t who we hoped you would be after all.” His voice sounded mechanical due to the respirator he still wore over his mouth and nose. “I’m delighted to be proved right. Now put that gun away before someone gets hurt.”

  “I don’t think so. That’s kind of the whole reason I brought it.”

  Another droplet streaked across his peripheral vision.

  “I wasn’t referring to either of us.”

  There was a rattling, clanking sound as the Hoyl finally stepped out into the light. In his right hand, he held a long length of chain, which stretched up into the rafters. He wore a broad-brimmed bowler hat and a long-tailed black suit jacket over a silk vest and a black tie. Mason locked eyes with his adversary. Those blue eyes. They were the same ones he’d seen through the smoke and the flies in the quarry at the moment of his partner’s death and in the reflection on his wife’s sunglasses mere minutes before hers.

  He sighted his Sigma right between them and tightened his finger on the trigger.

  A droplet spattered the shoulder of his jacket with a soft plat.

  “You really don’t want to do that,” the Hoyl said.

  “I’m pretty sure I do. In fact, I’ve been looking forward to doing this for a long time.”

  The Hoyl shook the chain and droplets rained down all around them a heartbeat later.

  “The problem would be that if you did, I’d let go of this chain,” he said. “And while I’m confident in your abilities as a marksman, I question how well you can … catch.”

  He drew out the last word for effect.

  Mason looked down at the ground, at the crimson droplets spattered on the concrete.

  And then it hit him.

  The Hoyl had beaten him again.

  “That’s right.” The monster’s eyes narrowed as he read Mason’s expression. “Go ahead. Look up. I’ll give you one glimpse for free.”

  Mason leaned back and looked way up toward the ceiling. The chain led at an angle from the Hoyl’s hand to a pulley on the second level, and then to another one all the way up in the darkness, where even the blinding lights couldn’t reach. And from it hung an inverted body, strung up by its heels.

  Gunnar.

  His arms dangled toward the ground. He slowly twirled one way, then back in the other. A droplet of blood materialized about halfway between them and seemed to take forever to hit the ground at Mason’s feet.

  When he looked up from the spatter of his old friend’s blood, it was with sheer and unadulterated hatred in his eyes.

  The Hoyl gave the chain a shake just to remind him of the consequences of doing what he was thinking.

  “You’re not going to be needing that gun.” He nodded and Mason heard footsteps from his right. A small hand in a leather glove closed around the barrel. A woman’s hand. She held on to it until he finally let go.

  The Hoyl stepped forward, trailing the end of the chain behind him on the ground like a snake. He gave a slight bow and his hat rolled down his arm into his hand. His blond hair grew in tufts from his scarred scalp. He reseated his hat and accepted the pistol from the woman Mason recognized from his meeting with Paul. Ava Dietrich. The woman with the platinum hair and taut calves. Her face was devoid of expression.

  “You can all come out,” the Hoyl said. “He can’t hurt you now.”

  Mason kept his eyes on the Hoyl as the others emerged from where they’d been hiding behind the trailers upon which the light assemblies had been mounted. A single set of footsteps behind him. Another set to his left. A third to his right, from the shadows where the woman had originally been. The men to either side still wore their security uniforms. He recognized them from the guard shack at the front gate of the AgrAmerica complex, just like the man he’d killed at Fairacre.

  Dietrich retreated back into the shadows as two more figures em
erged from behind the Hoyl and stepped into the light. Two men Mason would have recognized anywhere.

  Victor strode forward with his head held high and a smirk on his face. It was the expression of a man who’d known from the start of the game that the outcome had never been in doubt.

  Paul stayed a step behind his son. His expression was one of a sleepwalker awakening and finding himself in unfamiliar surroundings.

  Mason looked from Paul to Victor, and finally directly at the Hoyl when he spoke.

  “Make no mistake. I’m going to kill you. Each and every one of you.”

  “Perhaps one day,” the Hoyl said, “but today is not that day.”

  69

  “Quit playing with him and get this over with,” Victor said.

  The Hoyl stepped forward and shook the chain. More droplets of Gunnar’s blood pattered on the ground. He looked down at Mason’s Sigma in his hand, turned it over, and shook his head disapprovingly.

  “A primitive weapon. Ugly and loud. Point and squeeze. Bang! Someone’s dead. It’s too easy. Your enemies are here one second, gone the next. They simply cease to exist.”

  “Maybe I’m missing something, but I was under the impression that was the whole point,” Mason said.

  “Have you used this archaic instrument recently?”

  “My custom Sigma? Yeah. I used it to make several of your friends ‘simply cease to exist.’”

  “Friends? Friends are a liability, Special Agent Mason. I believe your current predicament proves as much. I have no doubt that had you elected to let Mr. Backstrom fall, you could have killed me and at least two of the others. Maybe all of us. Am I mistaken?”

  Mason didn’t reply. The Hoyl was trying to get inside his head, to keep him off balance, to prevent him from realizing that he still had a modicum of control over the situation. If his nemesis wanted him dead, he would have killed Mason the moment he hesitated to shoot. There was something the Hoyl needed from him, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what.

  “What about the lovely Ms. Vigil? Pray tell. Even when you realized that the building was about to turn to flames around you, did you attempt to save her? Or was it already too late? Was it the sound of the blank firing that drew you to her bleeding corpse? Did you risk your own life in a futile attempt to save a woman you barely knew?”

  Mason kept his expression studiously neutral. It might not have been much of one, but he’d gained a slight advantage.

  “You’re right,” Mason said. “I didn’t know her nearly as well as you did. I’ll bet you think about her every time you look at that Freddy Krueger face of yours in the mirror.”

  The smile in the Hoyl’s eyes never faltered.

  “My only regret is that I didn’t have the opportunity to spend her final moments with her.”

  “I’d be happy to give you the chance to see her again.”

  “You had that chance and you didn’t take it. That particular threat rings hollow now.”

  “Don’t think for a second that you’re leaving here alive. You signed your death warrant when you murdered my wife.”

  “The lovely Mrs. Angela Thornton Mason? Did I kill her or was I merely the instrument of her demise? Like this gun.” He waved Mason’s Sigma in front of him as a reminder. “Do you blame the weapon for a person’s death or the man who pulled the trigger? The gun exists for no other reason than to perform a single function. You point it at whomever you want to die and pull the trigger. It’s quite a simplistic mechanism.”

  “So you’re a victim in all of this? An innocent weapon that merely performed its designated function?”

  The Hoyl held out the gun. The woman stepped into the light, took it from him, and aimed it first at Mason’s chest, then at his face.

  He kept his eyes locked on the Hoyl’s the entire time.

  “Unlike the gun pointed at your head, I am anything but a simplistic mechanism. I take great pride in what I do. And great pleasure. The gun derives no satisfaction from its task. It is little more than an extension of a killer’s arm, while the Hoyl is death personified. In his various incarnations, he has crossbred pathogens, brought historical epidemics back from the dead, and created viruses more frightening than any God could design. He has engineered more vaccines than any pharmaceutical company, saved more lives than the Red Cross, and contributed more to mankind’s understanding of disease than the CDC. He is the weapon wielded by men of prescience and the purveyor of their salvation. He is an avatar, the physical manifestation of a belief, and as such cannot be killed.”

  “I know all about your bloodline,” Mason said. “You Fischers may have plagued the world for more than a century, but you’re not immortal. I’ve seen proof of that with my own eyes.”

  “No individual is immortal, but the Hoyl is. He is the living embodiment of an ideology to which each of us has devoted his life.”

  “His lineage is one of inbred psychopaths who sell their services to men who’d exterminate their entire race to turn a profit.”

  “He’s the only hope for saving mankind from itself.”

  “By murdering countless innocent people?”

  “Consider them sacrifices for the greater good.”

  “And how much will the men ‘wielding’ you make from their ‘sacrifices’?”

  “Enough talk,” Victor said. “Finish this.”

  “Perhaps you would care to do the honors, Mr. Thornton,” the Hoyl said. “Or is getting your hands dirty not on today’s agenda?”

  “Don’t forget that this is my agenda, Hoyl.”

  “Ah, yes. Your agenda. The one in which your enraged brother-in-law, the federal agent who’s been stripped of his badge and blames his father-in-law for his wife’s death, brings the venerable Mr. Thornton out here and murders him in cold blood…”

  To Paul’s credit, his face showed no indication of surprise. He was already lowering his head and closing his eyes when Dietrich swung Mason’s Sigma toward him and pulled the trigger. A spray of blood and gray matter erupted from his temple. He toppled sideways and crumpled to the ground in a lifeless heap.

  The Hoyl’s eyes glittered with amusement. Mason suddenly realized why the woman was wearing gloves. He’d recently fired the pistol, which meant that not only had it discharged residue onto the back of his hand, his fingerprints were all over it.

  “Congratulations, Victor. Your coup d’état went off without a hitch. You are now officially the president and chief executive officer of Global Allied Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals. Huzzah.”

  Mason turned his fury on Victor.

  “You orchestrated this whole thing? You had your own sister and father murdered? And for what? Money?”

  “You don’t understand, Jim. This is about more than money; it’s about power. About taking my rightful place at the table.” He flashed that smug, practiced smile. “The world is changing, whether you like it or not. And only those of us who are brave enough to embrace the vision of a new world order—”

  “You’re a monster, Victor. No … worse than that. You’re stupid.”

  “Just shoot him and get it over with,” Victor said.

  “Don’t you get it? Here’s how this plays out: Your crazy brother-in-law shoots both you and your father before being gunned down by security. Or maybe he’s merely wounded and his arrest is used to destroy the reputation of his father, the senator. Meanwhile, the men you’ve chosen to get in bed with—the same men who helped your great-grandfather breed the Spanish flu a century ago—will take complete control of your company and make billions—”

  “And you call me stupid?”

  “—off of the cure you’ve developed for a disease of your own design.”

  “I’ve already told you. This has nothing to do with money.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” the Hoyl said.

  “Are you blind, Victor?” Mason said. “You’re just a pawn. Did you ever really think you were in control, especially of someone like the Hoyl? Like the men for w
hom his bloodline has been creating pandemics for generations? You’re nothing, Victor. In the big picture, you’re less than nothing. They’re using you, just like they did your great-grandfather. What did he get for his part of the pig farm? Forty-three million dollars? They made billions off a man they considered a stupid farmer. Billions, Victor. And now they’ve gone back to the trough again to find another stupid farmer—”

  “I am not a stupid farmer! I am now one of the Thirteen—”

  A deafening crack of gunfire.

  Victor was still smirking when his head jerked violently to the side. The bullet lifted him from his feet and sent him sprawling. He hit the ground and slid through a wash of his own blood.

  Dietrich lowered the smoldering barrel of Mason’s Sigma and tucked it into the pocket of her leather jacket.

  The Hoyl made a sweeping motion with his hand.

  The blond woman took both Victor and Paul by a wrist and dragged them off into the darkness, the clicking of her heels echoing throughout the great room.

  “So you have everything figured out, do you?” There was no mistaking the mirth in the Hoyl’s eyes. “If that’s the case, then why are you still alive?”

  Twenty feet separated them. Mason could cover that distance in six running strides. Less than two seconds. The man to his left would get off a shot. As would the one behind him. The sudden movement might affect their reaction time and possibly their aim, but he had to plan on being hit at least once.

  “A better question would be, why are you?”

  He tensed to make the sprint. He’d tear the Hoyl apart with his bare hands, no matter how many times he was shot.

  “Don’t even think about it,” the man behind him said.

  Mason recognized the voice immediately. It lived in his subconscious. In his dreams.