Mason hadn’t spent a lot of time in medical examiners’ offices, but this was definitely the smallest he’d been in. The pale light from the exposed halogen tubes made him instinctively squint. Everything was either gray or white, from the floor tiles to the countertops to the cabinets on the walls. One side of the room featured a work surface and an industrial sink, the other a lab station and a small desk with a computer. A portable X-ray machine stood in the corner beside a light box. A single stainless-steel table dominated the center of the room. Power tools were mounted to one end and what looked like a garbage disposal was attached to the drain.
The ME appeared to be in her early fifties. She was of solid build, and her hiking boots smelled of manure. Her face was florid and her dark hair was long and streaked with gray. She wore it in a thick braid that slithered down the back of her knee-length white lab coat, which hung open, revealing her buttoned cowboy top and jeans.
There was a single plastic container about the size of a dresser drawer on the autopsy table. Inside were ashes, soot, and bone chunks, collectively labeled JOHN DOE 02-0441. She wore a pair of examination gloves, which she used to extricate a bone fragment roughly three inches long.
“We could probably get a decent sample from this chunk of femur,” she said. “If we pulverized it and spun it up, we might be able to isolate just enough DNA to generate at least a partial profile.”
“None of the officers seemed to think there was enough left to do so,” Layne said. She hovered equidistant from every surface, as though not wanting to touch anything.
“Those guys don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“Then why haven’t you done so?” Mason asked.
“For a truck driver who, for all we know, was sitting dead in that truck for a decade before the fire? If he was smuggling drugs for one of the cartels, like everyone seems to think, he’s almost guaranteed to be an undocumented Mexican national anyway.”
“We only need you to do the physical legwork,” Layne said. “Sending the remains to another facility will cost us time we don’t have. If you can generate a preliminary DNA profile, our lab can take it from there.”
“This is a small county operation; we don’t have the resources you do,” the ME said. “Do you have any idea how much work you’ve already created for me? The state mandates that every victim of an officer-involved shooting be autopsied. That’s nearly four hours apiece right there. Plus the days spent writing reports and collating lab results—”
“I totally understand,” Mason said. “The FBI will reimburse you for your time and expertise.”
“Identifying him is that important?”
“Lives are at stake,” Layne said.
Dr. Quarrels looked from Mason to Layne and back again, as though in an attempt to discern the direness of the situation from their expressions. Mason hoped his conveyed the message that he’d be willing to force her to do it at gunpoint, if he had to.
“And you’ll arrange for transfer of custody of the physical remains?” the ME said.
“How quickly can you have it done?”
“Four hours?”
“You have three.”
The ME proffered her hand like a salesman closing a deal. Mason shook it and looked her directly in the eyes.
“You’re on the clock, Doctor.”
His phone vibrated in his pocket. He glanced at the number of the incoming call before answering.
“That was fast,” he said.
“I found what we were looking for, and you’re never going to believe it.”
Locker had his full attention. Mason covered the phone and spoke to the ME, who was already rummaging through the cupboards.
“Is there someplace I can take this call?”
“My office is at the end of the hall. Pass the entrance to the lobby and you’ll walk right into it.”
The ME returned her attention to the cupboard and removed a centrifuge and what looked like a miniature copy machine labeled FREEZER/MILL.
“Give me a few seconds, okay?” Mason said into the phone.
He hurried out of the autopsy room and down the hall to the ME’s office. Switched on the lights and waited for Layne to follow him inside before closing the door. Took the seat behind the desk. Propped the phone against a picture of Quarrels and her golden retriever.
“I’m going to put you on speaker, okay?” Mason said. “I want Layne to hear this, too.”
He hit the button and Locker’s voice erupted from the phone mid-sentence.
“… already dead.”
“Start over. I must have cut you off.”
“I said I ID’d the victims behind the wall at the end of the tunnel, and they were already dead.”
Layne took a seat in the vinyl chair on the other side of the desk and raised the question with her eyebrows.
“I don’t follow,” Mason said.
“The men behind the wall have been dead since November twenty-fourth, 2001.”
“You and I both saw the bodies, Locker. There’s no way they’ve been dead for two decades.”
“That’s the thing, Mason. The ME and I both independently worked time of death and came up with estimates within days of each other. Sometime between the end of June and the beginning of July. Six months ago.”
“But you just said they’d been dead since November of ’01,” Layne said.
“Precisely.”
“I’m going to need a translator.”
“Start at the beginning, Locker,” Mason said.
“Remember what we were talking about earlier? That started me thinking: Why would the identities of these men be so important to the DHS? I mean, there are potentially thousands of gallons of Novichok out there, but for some reason they’re more concerned with what I’m doing? It doesn’t make any sense until you boil it down to the most basic logic. These two men—for whatever reason—pose a threat to national security beyond their knowledge of or participation in plots against this country, both biological and chemical in nature. Homeland Security’s primary mission is to secure our borders and counteract threats from abroad. To protect us from terrorists. From rogue countries and violent ideologues. From criminals trying to smuggle weapons into the country. And therein lies the inherent flaw in my initial approach. It’s no wonder I hadn’t been able to identify them. I’d been looking in the wrong place the entire time. All of our missing persons databases are essentially exclusive to American citizens.”
Mason finally caught up with the conversation.
“So you tried INTERPOL,” he said.
The global MPUB—Missing Persons and Unidentified Bodies—database was conceived as part of the FASTID Project, which was an attempt to do for the rest of the world what the Next Generation Identification System did for the United States by pooling the resources of all of the participating countries assembled under the banner of the European Commission.
“Exactly. And once I uploaded the DNA profiles, incomplete though they were, I hit the jackpot. Our victims matched samples submitted by family members with loved ones on El Al Flight 1086 from Bern to Tel Aviv. The plane crashed in the forest just a couple miles from the runway and went up in a ball of flames. The majority of the victims were dismembered and burned to such an extent that investigators couldn’t even confirm that the number of dead matched the flight manifest, let alone positively identify more than a handful of the deceased. One hundred and eighteen ticketed passengers and the entire flight crew were legally declared dead, and yet seventy-three families held out hope and sent DNA samples to INTERPOL, among them the families of Nitzan Chenhav and Yossi Mosche, who reappeared two decades later, entombed with about a million spiders.”
“How did two men who died halfway around the world end up walled beneath a building used for experimenting with biological and chemical weapons?” Mason asked.
“That’s not even the most interesting part. Ask me what they did for a living?”
“Just tell us already.”
“You’re trying to spoil my moment of triumph, aren’t you?”
“Locker.”
“Chenhav was a microbiologist specializing in hematology and genetic disorders of the blood. He was one of the leading research scientists at Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv and a pioneer of the development of both natural and synthetic anticoagulants. Mosche was a medical biochemist whose primary focus was neuromuscular regeneration. In addition to a professorship at Sackler School of Medicine, he served as a consultant to several major pharmaceutical conglomerates and—get this—the World Health Organization’s Department of Bioterrorism Preparedness.”
“Both were Israeli nationals?” Layne asked.
“You got it.”
“And both were on the same flight from Switzerland to Israel.”
“What are the odds, right?”
“What were they doing in Bern at the same time?” Mason asked.
“Definitely a question worth answering.”
“Which one left the numeric message for us to find?”
“The biochemist. Mosche.”
“You realize Homeland’s about to descend upon you and shut you out of the case.”
“They can try.”
“Why are you in such a good mood?” Layne asked.
“Because we have an actual lead.”
“That went up in flames two decades ago,” Mason said.
“That’s a problem for the investigative team,” Locker said. “I did my part. The rest is up to you.”
“Email me everything you have, okay?”
Mason terminated the call and stared out the window through the gap between the blinds while he organized his thoughts. Chenhav and Mosche obviously weren’t random victims, nor could it possibly be mere coincidence that the bodies of a microbiologist and biochemist were discovered beneath a facility responsible for the production and testing of an engineered flu virus and a chemical weapon of mass destruction. Where had these men been since 2001 and what sequence of events had drawn them into the orbit of the Hoyl and the UNSUB, and, by extension, the Thirteen? What was the significance of the numbers the biochemist scrawled in his own blood?
And then there was Bern. The last person to mention the Swiss capital to Mason was his brother-in-law, Victor Thornton, who’d claimed in the days before his death to have recently been there to help establish an Eastern European presence for his newest venture, Global Allied Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals. Mason didn’t have the slightest idea what Victor might have done while he was there or what acquisitions he might have made to penetrate the biotech market, but it wouldn’t be too terribly difficult to figure out. He knew someone who had all of the records he could ever hope to find.
“It’s impossible to totally drop off the grid for any length of time,” Layne said. “You can’t go anywhere without being caught in a web of surveillance cameras.”
Mason’s phone vibrated to notify him that he’d received the file from Locker. He forwarded it to Layne, whose device chimed from inside her jacket.
“Call Algren,” Mason said. “Tell her we need to move up our briefing. And see what you can do about summarizing Locker’s report.”
“My laptop’s in the car.”
He pulled the keys from his pocket and tossed them to her. She caught them and rushed toward the door. She grabbed the knob, paused, and glanced back at him.
“What are you going to do?”
“Try to get some background on Chenhav and Mosche before Homeland learns their identities and information becomes scarce.”
Layne nodded and exited the office. The whirring sound of the centrifuge carried down the hall from the lab. The door slowly closed and once again there was silence.
Mason grabbed his phone, forwarded the information Locker had just sent him to both of the encrypted clouds, and called Gunnar on his stealth phone.
“I just sent you a link to a secure video chat room,” Gunnar said. “Once you log in, the other party will be notified and receive an invitation to join you. Trust me when I say that our old friend’s curiosity is suitably piqued.”
“He’s going to have to wait until I can break away,” Mason said. “In the meantime, I need another favor. I just uploaded a file to the cloud. Find out everything you can about the subjects. And I mean right now. I have a feeling that whatever information exists is about to go away.”
“I should warn you, Mace. There aren’t many ways to make things vanish permanently and even fewer people capable of doing so. They’re also the kind who’ll be able to follow our footprints right back to us if they so much as catch a whiff of our scent anywhere it shouldn’t be.”
“Then you’d better do it fast, because they’re going to be coming up behind you in a hurry.”