DECEMBER 30
“I found it,” Gunnar said.
Mason set aside his laptop, crossed the aisle, and sat on the opposite side of the table from his old friend. He’d ridden in private jets before, but Gunnar’s Cessna Citation XLS was unlike any he’d ever seen. It was only fifty-two feet long but had been customized to more closely resemble an apartment than an aircraft. The seats were bluish gray and upholstered with leather as soft as butter, the woodwork maple and polished to a reflective shine. The fore cabin featured a functional kitchen, and the aft cabin had been turned into a bedroom.
The flight from Republic Airport in East Farmingdale, New York, to Washington, D.C., was an hour and ten minutes, about half an hour less than it would take Ramses and Layne to drive from Brooklyn to the New Jersey State Police Headquarters in West Trenton. She’d insisted upon going with him to track down Maj. Delvin Roybal to make sure everything was handled the proper way, which was fine with Mason, because his was a task that needed to be conducted in person.
Gunnar spun around his laptop. The aerial photograph on the screen was in faded color and taken at such an angle as to suggest it had been snapped from a plane shortly after takeoff. A gray sky filled with clouds. The jagged blue line of the Rockies on the distant horizon. Brown prairie in between. A red-and-white-checkered water tower stood on tall striped legs maybe a hundred yards west of a row of buildings, including a warehouse with a radio tower, an industrial plant crowned with smokestacks, and a six-story building that looked like a parking garage, with exterior walkways and electrical works on the roof. And in front of them, at the point where the main road entered from the south, a plain white L-shaped building with a flat roof. If one were to gather a dozen uniformed men in front of it, a picture could be taken in such a way as to show the crown of the water tower above the roofline to the upper left and the massive structure to the right.
The caption had been scratched directly into the picture itself, scraping away the emulsion.
It read simply: RMA. North Plants. 1967.
“What are the odds, right?” Gunnar said.
Mason nodded. He grabbed his laptop, searched the Internet until he found detailed imagery of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal on a site devoted to Superfund’s various remediation projects, and set it up next to Gunnar’s so he could view both screens at the same time. The RMA had been built on a grid composed of twenty-five equal squares, each a mile to a side. The majority of the plants were clustered on the six in the center. The South Plants were separated from the North Plants by an open-air chemical evaporation basin and a series of disposal trenches. Apart from the occasional dirt road, the remainder of the site had been left undeveloped. There were dozens of outlying lakes to the east, most of which had been earmarked for sediment remediation, and a network of chemical sewers to the north and west more reminiscent of the roots of a tree than the standard right angles of military construction.
Gunnar leaned closer so he could see.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“I’m not sure, but something happened here that no one wants us to know about.”
Mason opened the file containing aerial photographs from the site survey during the early eighties, shots taken by a camera attached to the underside of an airplane, detailing each of the grids, one by one. Dirt roads stood apart from flatlands composed of yellow and brown weeds and grasses. Tree-lined streams and gullies. Natural lakes ringed with cattails and asphalt-lined evaporative basins shaped like diamonds. Both the North and South Plants were the size of small towns.
He tracked down the legend to see what had once been housed there. The North Plants, as O’Leary had described, featured buildings for chemical production, weapons assembly, and warehousing. The South Plants, on the other hand, formed a veritable city unto itself in the middle of the sprawling Rocky Mountain Arsenal complex, one that hadn’t belonged to the army at all, but, rather, to a private corporation, simultaneously allowing it to share the same facilities as a military regiment amassing the largest chemical arsenal the world had ever known and shielding it from regulatory oversight.
Mason had to read the name twice to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him.
Royal Nautilus Petroleum.
His head swirled with the implications. He thought about the chemical subsidiary from which the hydrogen fluoride had been diverted, the decomposition bacterium reminiscent of the kind oil companies used to consume spills, Charles Raymond with his bulging eyes and split tongue, and the picture Gunnar had found of Mosche and Chenhav—the two dead Israeli scientists—with Andreas Mikkelson, managing director of the very same company that had occupied the South Plants of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal while the twelve men with their eyes scratched out had been stationed there.
“Holy shit,” Gunnar said.
Mason’s phone vibrated. He recognized Layne’s number and answered on speaker.
“I was just about to call you,” he said.
“My contact from the army finally got back to me about the guy we found in Central Park,” she said. “Turns out Charles Raymond was never actually in the military, but he was registered as a civilian contractor from 1968 to 1992, which makes his records just recent enough to have been uploaded to the modern system. And you’ll never guess where he was assigned.”
“The Rocky Mountain Arsenal.”
“You really know how to take all the fun out of this, don’t you?”
“We only just learned that Royal Nautilus Petroleum owned a large portion of the South Plants.”
“Which presumably puts Raymond in the same place at the same time as the rest of the Scarecrow’s victims.”
“Did your guy know the nature of the arrangement between the army and Royal Nautilus?” Mason asked.
“No, but he was able to confirm that Raymond’s credentials listed him as Research and Development,” Layne said.
“The presence of an R and D contingent suggests a relationship beyond the simple manufacture of precursor chemicals.”
“Precisely,” Gunnar said. He toggled between windows as he read from the trove of information he’d amassed in a matter of minutes. “Nautilus Chemical Company, a division of Royal Nautilus Petroleum, purchased on-site operations in 1952 and used them for the manufacture of herbicides and pesticides. Among the chemicals it produced were dichlor—an integral component of sarin—and aldrin, dieldrin, and malathion, all of which have since been banned. They discharged millions of gallons of liquid waste into natural depressions in the ground and buried solid waste in unlined holes. Accidental spills in the range of hundreds of thousands of gallons precipitated a plan to inject chemical waste into a twelve-thousand-foot-deep well, which caused earthquakes throughout the Denver area. They discontinued on-site operations in 1982.”
“Raymond was long gone by then,” Layne said. “He was at a similar facility called the Edgewood Arsenal from 1972 to 1978.”
“Where was that?” Mason asked.
“Where are you by now?”
“Probably somewhere over Maryland. Why?”
“Look down.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“It’s just outside of Baltimore, on Chesapeake Bay,” she said. “It’s now called the U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center and is considered the principal research and development resource for nonmedical chemical and biological defense. We’re talking gas masks, personal protective gear, detection devices, whatnot.”
“So one manufactures the weapons, the other the defense against them.” Mason paused and considered the implications. “That’s why they needed an R and D team. They had to test their products.”
“According to the Department of Defense,” Gunnar said, “the U.S. Army Chemical Corps conducted classified medical experiments at the Edgewood Arsenal from 1955 to 1975 with the stated mission of testing protective clothing and pharmaceuticals and studying the impact of low-dose chemical warfare agents on military personnel. Roughly seven thousand soldiers were exposed to upward of two hundred different chemicals, among them anticholinesterase nerve agents like GB and VX, mustard gas, irritants and riot-control agents, and psychoactive drugs like LSD and PCP.”
“You see why I don’t want anything to do with these assholes?” Ramses said. “They were experimenting on their own people, for Christ’s sake.”
“Where did they get their test subjects?” Mason asked.
“They were solicited through the Medical Research Volunteer Program,” Gunnar said. “Primarily from Baker Company.”
“Later renamed Bravo Company, or Company B,” Ramses said. “These were your standard enlisted infantrymen. Foot soldiers. Grist for the mill. Expendables.”
“If the woman who lived across the hall from the apartment the Scarecrow maintained in Mayfair Towers was right about his age,” Mason said, “he couldn’t have been much more than a child during the time Raymond was participating in the experimentation.”
“Which makes him unlikely to have been affected on a personal level,” Layne said.
“Unless they experimented on his parents,” Ramses said.
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves here,” Mason said. “We need to figure out if any of the other victims were at Edgewood. Can your contact get us a list of the men stationed there?”
“It’s a work in progress,” Layne said. “Hopefully, someone’s pulling the records from the National Archives as we speak.”
“What about the volunteers?”
“Long-term follow-up was practically nonexistent,” Gunnar said. “By the early eighties, the National Academy of Sciences could only track down about sixty percent of them. There was a class action lawsuit filed in the early nineties, though. I could probably get a list of those who participated without much difficulty.”
“Do it,” Mason said. “What about our dead Israeli scientists? Chenhav and Mosche, the biochemist who left the message in blood. Can we connect either of them to the RMA or Edgewood?”
“At the time of the plane crash, both men were in their late thirties, which means they would have been teenagers during the time frame in question,” Gunnar said. “I did find something interesting while looking into them, though. Another plane went down near the Russian border six weeks earlier, on October fourth. Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 was shot down by the Ukrainian Air Force en route from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk, Russia. Everyone on board was killed, including thirty-eight Russians and forty Israelis, among them five microbiologists, three of whom worked in advanced medical research.”
“What do you mean, ‘shot down’?” Layne said.
“According to Ukrainian officials, it was inadvertently hit by an antiaircraft missile during testing. Supposedly, the main fuselage is on the bottom of the Black Sea at a depth of more than three thousand feet, too deep for divers to retrieve the black box, so no one can dispute their account.”
“That’s convenient.”
“What were they all doing on the same plane?” Mason asked.
“There’s no way of knowing for sure,” Gunnar said. “What I can tell you, though, is that Novosibirsk is considered the scientific capital of Siberia. It boasts more than fifty research facilities and thirteen full universities in a city the size of metro Denver.”
“That’s seven dead Israeli scientists in a two-month span.”
“Immediately following the terrorist attack on nine/eleven.”
They were onto something of critical importance. Mason could positively feel it.
“What would five Israeli microbiologists do in the scientific capital of Siberia?” he asked.
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” Gunnar said. “Let’s look at it from a historical perspective. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and left the country a shambles. The world’s largest state-controlled economy suddenly had to transition to a market-oriented model, which nearly collapsed the central bank and caused double-digit inflation. They had to slash their Cold War military budget, eliminate their social-welfare systems, and run up the national debt just to remain afloat. Fortunately, they had a massive arsenal of weapons and trade partners willing to pay exorbitant prices, especially Iran.”
“Which posed a credible threat to Israel’s national security.”
“Exactly, so if you were Israel, what would you do?”
“I’d make sure I not only possessed the same weaponry as my enemies but any possible advantage I could gain.”
He was suddenly reminded of what Johan had said about America bringing the German scientists into the fold after the war to help ramp up its military for the seemingly inevitable conflict with the Soviet Union. Was it so hard to believe that with their geographical proximity, the Soviets had simply taken the technology itself?
“The Russian military became a clearinghouse,” Mason said. “Proprietary assault rifles, machine guns, and pistols were popping up all over the world in the hands of people who shouldn’t have had them. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’d been willing to part with some of the nastier aspects of their arsenal, too. For the right price.”
“You think the Israeli scientists were buying biological or chemical weapons?” Layne asked.
“I think they’d already bought whatever it was. You don’t send microbiologists to negotiate a deal. You send them to train on technology or verify the authenticity of a sample. You send them because they’re the only ones who know how to safely handle whatever they’re bringing back.”
“What do you think that was?”
“I don’t know,” Mason said. “But someone didn’t want them taking it back with them.”
“And the following month,” Layne said, “two more scientists allegedly died on the return trip from Bern—which we now know not to be the case—only to magically reappear two decades later beneath a building used to manufacture biological and chemical weapons.”
“If someone deliberately crashed their plane, they could have just as easily downed it on the way to Bern, instead of on the way back,” Gunnar said. “They wanted Chenhav and Mosche to reach Switzerland before they made them disappear. More than a hundred people were killed so that no one would ever find out what they’d bought or what they intended to do with it.”
“We need to know why they were there,” Mason said.
He recognized the magnitude of the statement the moment it crossed his lips.
Bern was where the trails of both the Scarecrow and the Hoyl converged, mass murderers specializing in chemical and biological weapons, respectively. And if Mason was right, there was only one person who possessed that knowledge, whether he knew it or not: the new owner of AgrInitiative, formerly AgrAmerica, and almost Global Allied Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals.
The Honorable J. R. Mason III.
His father.