Mason drove on autopilot, allowing Ramses to guide him out of the industrial district while his mind ran through what they’d learned. O’Leary had been able to provide a positive ID for one of the men in the picture, and possibly enough information about the man’s entourage to track them down, too, but he hadn’t been able to shine any light on the Scarecrow himself. If he were truly in his late forties or early fifties, he wouldn’t have been in the army at the same time as those men anyway. In fact, he might not even have been born yet, which meant he encountered those men after O’Leary took his leave, and presumably sometime during the era when the country was ramping down its production of chemical weapons and starting to actively dispose of them. So if he’d been a chemical engineer for Uncle Sam, his face should have been among those from the personnel files Layne had received, unless he’d deliberately altered it, which brought Mason to what Alejandra had said about his eyes.
The stars intrigued Mason. His first thought was that Alejandra had seen the reflection from the face shield of a gas mask, but it should have cast a single reflection, not two, which made him think of what the woman from across the hall had said about Nakamura wearing tinted glasses, presumably due to sensitivity to light, but lenses like that were made with scratchproof and antiglare coatings. While he couldn’t entirely exclude the use of eyeglasses, or even magnifying lenses like O’Leary had been wearing, what else could possibly look like metal reflecting from a man’s eyes?
Perhaps the Scarecrow wasn’t specifically of Japanese descent after all. It was always possible that something about the culture spoke to him. The kanji characters were one thing, but the mycotoxin from the Fusarium nivale mushroom, the saxitoxin derived from the puffer fish, and the venomous tentacles of the habu-kurage hadn’t been chosen at random. They were integral to the message he was trying to deliver. Either he viewed that culture as part of his identity or he’d taken on his identity in response to a cultural wrong. There probably weren’t many Japanese citizens who hadn’t at least considered the notion of avenging the deaths of the two hundred thousand people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but these men, specifically, were the Scarecrow’s targets, not their flag. Releasing a chemical weapon in a major city center would definitely qualify as a proportional, if belated, response, although that would be considered a personal motive, whereas the Scarecrow had been treating every aspect of the production and transport of the Novichok as a professional obligation.
And everywhere Mason turned, he found himself looking back in time at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and finding the Department of Homeland Security hurriedly setting up roadblocks all around it. The men in the pictures were the key. While that was where their association began, it wasn’t until some unknown number of years later that they crossed paths with the man who would become the Scarecrow.
They dropped Ramses off at a car-rental place near the Transit Authority and went around the corner to wait for him at a trendy café that was mercifully still serving coffee. They’d be able to cover twice as much ground with a second SUV, and suddenly Mason felt like heading south, away from the city. Lost in the accumulation of bodies were the two Israeli scientists, who now stood apart from the rest of the victims specifically for their lack of direct involvement with the U.S. military, and yet identifying them had been of great consequence to the DHS. He needed to figure out why, and it all started with Bern, their last known location before their staged deaths.
Layne ordered at the counter while Mason and Gunnar sat outside on the dark street. A bitterly cold breeze assailed them from the east. Tiny snowflakes accumulated on the umbrella above their table and tapped against the front window, through which he could barely see Layne in the line of the crowded, dimly lit coffeehouse. Photocopied handbills advertising concerts and protests were posted in the window beside a professional poster promising a sneak peek at the future of renewable green energy in Times Square.
“You were right,” Gunnar said. “Peter Cavanaugh is on this personnel list your partner got from the army.”
“Can you access his Official Military Personnel File?”
Layne backed out the front door with four mugs balanced on a wooden tray. She set them on the table and squeezed behind Mason to get to the chair next to him.
“His OMPF is long gone,” Gunnar said.
“Homeland probably made it disappear the moment we figured out who owned the trucks,” Mason said. “What do we have on him?”
“All I see here is his name on a list, which at least confirms what you already knew, I guess.”
“We need to know where he was stationed and when he was there,” Mason said.
“What about his health records?” Layne asked. “There should be a list of dates and treatment facilities we could use to establish a time line of his postings.”
“The military routinely filed the health records as part of the personnel files until ’92,” Gunnar said.
“What about his ex-wives?”
“Excellent idea. Assuming they were seen on the government’s dime, we ought to be able to figure out if he was ever stationed at the RMA.”
Mason’s phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. He grabbed it and checked the caller ID. The main line out of the Rocky Mountain Regional Forensic Laboratory. He made sure they were alone on the freezing street before putting the call on speaker so the others could hear.
“Mason.”
“SEAL,” Locker said.
“What?”
“It’s an acronym for sea, air, and land.”
Mason rubbed his temples with his thumb and middle finger.
“Start at the beginning, okay?”
“Your guy’s in the navy,” Locker said. “Or at least he was anyway. I ran the DNA sample I received from the Cumberland County ME through the Combined DNA Index System and got a hit pretty much right away, only it was for a six-year-old child in San Diego.”
“They incinerated a kid?”
Gunnar and Layne both stopped drinking and looked directly at Mason.
“You’re not listening. You know how CODIS includes pretty much every DNA sample ever uploaded, right? Well, in this case, a sample from a newborn was submitted as part of a paternity suit. This sample matched one belonging to an enlisted seaman, only when I attempted to access the corresponding data, there was nothing there. I mean gone. Poof. Totally missing. Someone with a serious clearance level had to physically go into the database and remove it. But since the kid’s sample was there, I was able to jump through a few hoops and get a peek at his birth certificate. That’s why it took so long to call you. I mean, jeez, you’d think I was trying to get a peek at the First Lady’s gynecological records—”
“Locker.”
“Major Ashley Marshall Saddler. Male. Thirty-four years old. Or at least he was. He was part of the SEAL team stationed in Damascus during the 2013 sarin attack, and I only know that much because it’s part of the Congressional Record. His trail ends in 2017, when he resigned his commission.”
“Where’s he been since then?”
“Sounds like a question worth answering.”
“Does Homeland know about this?”
“I don’t think so. The whole team packed up and left yesterday afternoon. My cheeks are starting to hurt from smiling so much.”
“Where did they go?”
“Let’s see. Where did they leave that note? It’s got to be around here somewhere.”
“Funny. Did they take everything with them?”
“Are you looking for something in particular?”
“The bodies of the Scarecrow’s victims.”
“Are you kidding me? They never even arrived.”
“Do you still have the pictures you guys took of them?”
“Of course. Even if they cleaned out my system on their way out the door, I utilize off-site backup to routinely save all data every hour. With as much evidence as we deal with here for open investigations and pending trials, we’d have to be the world’s biggest idiots to keep it all under one roof with a big old bull’s-eye on it.”
“Can you send them to me? Just the faces, okay?”
“What good can they possibly do you at this point? I heard you got the rug ripped out from under you, too.”
“We’re technically on standby for operational support.”
“Sounds like a paid vacation to me,” Locker said. “But you’re not letting this one go, are you?”
“Are you?”
Locker chuckled and hung up.
Gunnar jumped in the moment he was certain the call had ended.
“Major Ashley Saddler entered the private sector as a security consultant for a company called Kenward, whose stated mission is to ‘provide professional and efficient turnkey support services for commercial enterprises and developing governments.’ It specializes in risk management solutions and security services for government agencies and commercial industries from construction and mining to oil and gas.”
“It’s a private defense contractor,” Layne said.
“With a focus on the energy sector…”
Gunnar’s words trailed off and his eyes became distant.
“You said something earlier about a surge in energy futures trading,” Mason said.
“That can’t be a coincidence, but how did a private contractor end up as ashes inside a truck used to haul chemical weapons?”
Mason’s phone vibrated to alert him to the arrival of an email. Five of them, actually. Each labeled by victim number. He opened them and flipped through the attached pictures. Five men in varying stages of decomposition, photographed from several different angles. With and without their hats. Their flesh ravaged by birds, their eyes pecked out. Even had they still been there, they wouldn’t have done him any good, considering those of the men in the picture against which he compared them had been scratched out. Only one man stood apart, thanks to a prominent gold incisor tooth.
This was a long shot and he knew it. Even if the Scarecrow’s goal had been to hunt down eight of the twelve men in the picture and deliver his message to the remainder, the odds of the one man Mason hoped to find among the dead were at best less than fifty-fifty, but, for once, luck was on his side.
The man he was looking for was victim number two.
Mason had stood right in front of him and never known. The desiccated remains of the dead man’s musculature and tissues distorted the shape of his face and his skull to such a degree that he hardly looked human. Fortunately, all Mason needed was the teeth.
“What are you smiling about?” Layne asked.
He tilted the screen so she could see it, then passed the phone across the table to Gunnar.
“Hello, Mr. Ed,” she said.
“Second Lieutenant Vance Edwards,” Gunnar said. “In the flesh. Or what’s left of it anyway.”
They might have closed the book on his story, but perhaps men named Danvers and Milton Bradley were still out there somewhere. And there was one place where they knew all three men had been stationed at the same time, the same place where all of the various threads of the investigation appeared to converge.
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal.