“No one’s actually sure why the tunnels were built,” Gunnar said. He’d utilized his time while Mason was underground to do a little digging into the matter, in hopes of discovering something useful. Judging by the glint in his eye, he had, but he was certainly taking his sweet time getting to it. “That intersection specifically—Eighth Avenue and Seventh Street—was the center of commerce around the turn of the twentieth century. On one corner you had the grand Oasis Hotel, where people like Charles Lindbergh stayed. Across the street were the Jackson Opera House and the Chief Theater. Catty-corner to them was Farmer’s Supply and Machinery, which was pretty much the sole rancher’s supply store within a fifty-mile radius. The lot across from it, at one point or another, housed a hardware store, a sporting goods store, and half a dozen grocery and mercantile stores.”
This time, Mason did the driving, freeing Gunnar to work with his laptop on his thighs. They’d filled up the old gas-guzzler and grabbed some food and coffee while they were at it. He was starting to feel more like himself already. The truck idled in the parking lot of the old train station, now the Chamber of Commerce, while he finished off his first cup and started on the second.
“Most people believe the construction of the tunnels wasn’t initially meant to be secretive at all. The most benign explanation for their existence is that the buildings shared a common source of forced-air heating and the tunnels were used to distribute it from a central coal furnace. There are all sorts of rumors, too. Everything from theater actors sneaking under the street to rendezvous with groupies in the hotel to entire underground networks of gambling and bootlegging. People have found tunnels throughout this entire area—beneath houses, under the bank, in the middle of streets. But, for whatever reason, they just got closed up, and no one mentioned them again. They even found one right beneath where we are right now, which connected the train depot to the old Farmer’s Supply, presumably to move liquor from the arriving trains into the city. Tunnels have been discovered as far as five blocks away, including what some claim to be a whole network designed to evade hostile Indians.”
“So they already had an existing infrastructure of primitive tunnels to build upon.”
“More than that,” Gunnar said. “We’re not just talking about holes dug in the dirt with lanterns hanging from the old cribbing. These tunnels were constructed with brick and mortar. Real solid, arched numbers. My point being that they weren’t made by your average smugglers. Bootlegging was a serious business, but not one anybody thought would last forever. An enormous amount of money had to have been invested in the construction, right? You don’t hire crews and spend years creating an entire subterranean labyrinth when repealing Prohibition would immediately make it obsolete. You don’t throw down piles of cash just so some stage actor can shag a farmer’s daughter, either. And if you’re too cheap to heat your buildings individually, then you’re not going to blow exorbitant sums on the connecting tunnels, knowing full well they’re going to be covered with a foot of soot in no time flat. You have to take a step back, factor the equation down to its simplest financial components, and evaluate it in a historical context. Essentially what I do for a living, only in this case, it’s for companies that no longer exist, and using business models that were outdated a century ago.
“Bottom line. Why does anyone do anything? Sex, money, or power. It didn’t take a whole lot of money to buy sex back then, and even minimal power has always been enough to pretty much guarantee a steady stream of action. So we’re left with money and power. Who has them and who wants them? In a colony full of religious teetotalers and moral idealists, only one man stands out. Wesley Thornton. Your wife’s great-grandfather. By 1900, he’d snatched up nearly two-thirds of all of the active ranches in the area. He had the trade cornered. He’d expanded his kingdom as far as it could go. And anytime something like that happens, the only thing left to do is conquer another kingdom, which he did in the form of entering the railroad game. He bought controlling interest in the small Cache la Poudre Line, leveraged it to outright buy the depot behind us, as well as a dozen others along the line, and then sold his interests in the railroad itself to Thomas Elliot Richter, who eventually traded it to R. J. Mueller in a deal that allowed him to monopolize the oil trade.
“Superficially, not much there. Thornton cashed in on a commodity and increased his fortune. On the practical side, he now controlled access to the Rio Grande train line from just north of the Wyoming state line all the way down through Denver.”
“You said he sold the railroad.”
“But he kept the depots. Think of them as seaports and him as the harbormaster. He determined what got on and what got off and how much it cost for each item to do so. Now, in 1908 he entered into a partnership with a company called StockCo Holdings and bought a large plot of land in an area that came to be called Island Grove, seven blocks north-northwest of the train depot. A heavily wooded lot near the river. The stated mission of this partnership was to establish a hog farm that would revolutionize the industry and bring it in line with the standards and profitability of cattle production. This side venture was snakebit from the start, though. Dozens of hogs died the first month, as did two of their hired hands. By the spring of 1909, they’d lost more than two thousand head. And four employees. All from pneumonia. Or at least that’s what was reported. There’s even a picture here from the Colorado Historical Society.”
Gunnar turned his computer so that Alejandra and Mason could see. The image had obviously been scanned from a photograph that had seen better days. The emulsification was spiderwebbed with cracks, but Mason could still clearly see the subject: a broad expanse of mud partitioned into pens, riddled with bloated white carcasses. The picture had been taken from a distant vantage point, through trees that framed the corners with blurry leaves. The focus was the sheer amount of carnage, the dead pigs everywhere. Not necessarily the men picking their way through the remains in primitive gas masks and baggy white gowns.
He looked up at Gunnar, who smiled at the recognition in his eyes. He could see where his old friend was going with this line of thought, could practically hear the tumblers falling into place.
“With their hogs dead, AgrAmerica and StockCo were forced to cut their losses and abandon their shared venture. In exchange for the cleanup, the land was given to the city and the families of the deceased employees were compensated. But they weren’t the only ones. StockCo reimbursed AgrAmerica for its purchase of the now-dead livestock in the form of corporate shares, which, considering the colossal failure of the hog farm experiment, were worthless on paper. However, when StockCo’s parent company rolled it back and merged it with a more successful subsidiary, those shares carried over to the sister company and were suddenly valuable again. In fact, great-grandpa Wesley leveraged them into a seat on the board of the parent company, traded them in small amounts on the open market until their value peaked, and then cashed them in to the tune of forty-three million dollars. His initial investment in two thousand dead pigs was reimbursed at a rate of more than twenty thousand dollars a head at a time when a hog cost less than five bucks. Are you following me so far?”
Mason could only nod and stare at his coffee, which was growing cold in his hand.
“In 1912, construction workers discovered a tunnel beneath a property two blocks to the north-northwest when part of the site collapsed, revealing what they believed to be a section of this mythical ‘Indian tunnel,’ but if you look at the map, it falls right in line with the tunnel you were just in. The city paid for the ground to be closed up once more. One of the workers was quoted at the time as saying it smelled like something had died down there. Later that same year, Wesley began selling off all of his railroad depots.”
“Get to the part about the owner of StockCo,” Alejandra said.
“Right. StockCo was absorbed by its sister company, Western Agricultural Consortium, which, until 1908, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Mueller Steel, who sold it to Tectonic Shale & Oil, whose parent company was—duht-duh-duh-dahh—Great American Oil. Your in-laws shared a forty-three-million-dollar mess of dead pigs with Thomas Elliot Richter, the richest man in the country. And it gets better. The Richter Foundation—the charitable arm of the corporate juggernaut—was the largest contributor to the research that resulted in the formation of Unified Pharmacopeia, a joint venture between Mueller Steel and Great American Oil. Unified then bought all of Bayer AG’s patents and holdings, which were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1917. The act itself was repealed just long enough for those assets to be auctioned off, chief among them the patent to a revolutionary new drug called aspirin. Unified immediately commenced mass production of the most powerful medicine the world had ever known and amassed stockpiles large enough to treat the millions afflicted with the Spanish flu the following year. Unified made nearly a billion dollars in the process. And what did research scientists learn in 2009 when they exhumed several victims of the pandemic whose bodies had been frozen in the Alaskan ice? That the Spanish flu was a variation of the influenza A virus, H1N1 specifically, which began its life as an avian flu that was passed to humans with one slight detour in between. Care to wager a guess as to what?”
“Pigs,” Mason said.
“You got it. The most deadly pandemic in the history of the world started as a cough in a duck and mutated into something far worse in a field full of dead hogs. And the company that profited most from it was an early pharmaceutical company selling aspirin, using a recipe it had ripped off—with the government’s help—from Bayer. A company half-owned by Great American Oil, the charitable foundation of which took a sudden interest in the treatment of those afflicted, as evidenced by—”
“The photograph from the Library of Congress. The one with the man with the blue eyes, a doctor with the Richter Foundation, treating casualties in a tent in France during World War One. The first known appearance of the Hoyl.”
“A century ago, Mace,” Gunnar said in little more than a whisper. “They’ve been doing this for so long, they’ve got it down to a science.”
“Then it is time someone stopped them,” Alejandra said.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Mason said. “Do me a favor, Gunnar. Extrapolate the course of the tunnel in both directions and compare the properties situated along its projected course to any of AgrAmerica’s or GABP’s current holdings. There has to be a match. Whatever lies at the far end of the tunnel is the key to understanding what’s happening now.”
Gunnar’s fingers flew across the keyboard, as though the computer were an extension of himself.
“Nothing here. At least nothing on a direct line.”
“Try properties that list the same corporate address as Fairacre.”
Mason felt the connection even as he said it. This was where everything came together. This was the reason his wife had been killed. He closed his eyes and saw Angie’s face, watched a smile form on her lips. He would have given anything to cling to that image forever.
“There it is. Steerman’s Meat Processing and Packing. Fifteen miles south-southeast of here. Nine miles north of Fort Lupton. Middle of freaking nowhere. Give me a second.” His fingers buzzed across the keys. “It was originally family-held, owned and operated by Angus T. Steerman. Seriously. That was his real name. It was in his family for three generations. Started by Delbert Chester Steerman in 1919, following his return from the war. Grew the business to a couple thousand head and made a comfortable living. Turned it over in 1953 to his three sons, who promptly converted it into a commercial slaughterhouse and purchased a fleet of semis with freezers to distribute their products. Made a killing through the mid-eighties. Grew complacent. Made some bad investments and even worse business decisions. Turned the company over to their combined eight children, who ran it into the ground in a matter of years. Angus bought out his two sisters and all five cousins in an attempt to make a go of it on his own. He lasted until 1994 before filing Chapter Seven and liquidating all of the assets in a fire sale. The freezer trucks went to Safeway for pennies on the dollar, the cattle sold by the head, and the physical property was obtained by a company named Mountain States Land Development. Now Mountain States, you’ll be surprised to learn, had only one other holding, a penthouse suite in a nonexistent office building in Commerce City, which it sold, along with the Steerman land, to an international agriculture consortium with offices in Switzerland. And who would you imagine sits on this Swiss company’s board?”
“My dear brother-in-law, Victor, who was there mere days ago.”
“It’s like you’re psychic.”
“Then this is where we must go,” Alejandra said. She knew even better than the rest of them what—or, more important, who—they were likely to find there.
“Without a doubt,” Mason said. “Can you get us the blueprints for that place, Gunnar?”
“Already on it.”
“What about satellite?”
“We don’t want to tip our hand. If I task a bird to that location, they’ll know it.”
“Then I’ll be going in blind.”
“Not necessarily.”
The left corner of Gunnar’s mouth curled upward into the hint of a smile.
His phone rang. The song was “Walk Like an Egyptian.” Mason had a pretty good idea to whom the ringtone had been assigned.
“It’s about time, Ramses. Are you certain this call isn’t being traced?” Gunnar rolled his eyes at the answer. “Yeah, yeah. I know.” A sigh. “Yes. He’s right here with me.” A pause. “Hang on a second. Just a sec— Hold on, for Christ’s sake. I can’t ask him if you don’t stop talking.… Okay, okay. Just a second. Mace, Ramses wants to know how you’re coming with that Hummer you owe him.”
“Tell him I’ve been kind of busy.”
“He said to tell you he’s been kind of— Fine. Hang on.” Gunnar put the call on speaker and set his phone on the dashboard. “There.”
“Are you there, Mace?” Ramses asked.
“Yeah,” Mason said. “But your Bronco didn’t make it.”
“You’re killing me, man. This is the reason why nobody helps each other anymore. Between you destroying all of my cars and your old man calling my clubs, I’m starting to think you’re trying to give me an aneurysm.”
“My old man? Why in the world would my dad be calling you?”
“That’s what people around here are starting to ask. There’s no good reason for a man in my position to be talking to a United States senator, especially one who sits on any number of subcommittees whose sole focus is the ruination of the majority of my business contacts.”
“Did he say what he wanted from you?”
“From me? You kidding? There’s nothing he wants from me, shy of my head mounted on his wall. He just wants to make sure his baby boy is okay, because Son of the Year isn’t returning any of his messages and no one seems to know where he is.”
The wind shifted direction and lifted the settled snow back into the air, momentarily obscuring the old depot.
“What did you tell him?”
“You’re not listening, are you? Nothing! The hell if I’m talking to him. He’s always had that way of seeing right through me. You know that. He’s your problem, man. Not mine.”
“Did those friends of yours have any useful information?”
“These things require some serious finesse. Everyone knows that Ramses doesn’t ask for favors, he grants them, so all kinds of red flags go up the moment he does. Ask the wrong person and next thing you know we’re all being fitted for toe tags.”
“You could have just said no.”
“You get some sort of perverse pleasure out of pushing my buttons, don’t you? Let’s just say it’s still a work in progress. I should have something by the time I catch up with you.”
“How do you know where—?”
“I ended up having a little chat, in a roundabout kind of way, with the personal assistant of an elderly gentleman, who, as it turns out, feels something of a kinship for you.”
The idea of Ramses having any sort of connection to Johan came from so far afield that it took Mason a second to catch up with the conversation.
“You talked to Mahler’s man?”
“He goes by Seraph, but his name’s actually Asher Ben-Menachem. Turns out we bumped elbows in Uzbekistan. He was a battalion commander in the Golani Brigade of the IDF back when I was playing G.I. Joe. I’m on my way up there right now to have a little powwow with him. Don’t start the fireworks without me.”
“Might want to push it a little harder, then. If I’m right about where we’re going and what we’re about to walk into, the show’s about to begin.”
“It’d be a whole lot easier if I still had my Mustang.”
“Point made.”
“Let me talk to Gunnar.”
“He’s sitting right here.”
“I mean in private.”
Gunnar killed the speaker and brought the phone to his ear. Mason watched him from the corner of his eye as he pulled out of the lot and headed back toward the highway. A few more cars had joined them on the road, but not many. The sand trucks were already out and about, plowing through the accumulation, gravel bouncing in their wake.
“Not yet,” Gunnar said. He instinctively peeked past Alejandra at Mason. “Now’s not the time, Ramses. I—”
Mason watched the road and tapped a tuneless rhythm on the steering wheel with his thumbs. Whatever the two of them were discussing made Gunnar uncomfortable in a way that recalled his more awkward youth.
“You know damn well I didn’t deliberately do any—” Gunnar lowered his voice. “Of course I want to make things right. You know every bit as well as I do that—”
“Do you think that monster will be waiting for us?” Alejandra asked.
“I’m counting on it,” Mason said. “It’s time to end this once and for all.”
Whether the Hoyl knew it or not, today was his last day on this earth.
“Fine, Ramses,” Gunnar said. “You know what? Ramses? Ramses. No, you … Just wait … Hold—hold up.… Check your email.… No, not that one. You know which one I’m talking about. You think I want this broadcast for the whole world to see? Are you even listening to me? Ramses. Ramses?”
Gunnar terminated the call and tapped some keys.
“Are you going to tell me about it or are we just going to pretend I didn’t hear any of that?” Mason said.
“Now’s not the time, Mace. Believe me.”
“How are we going to get into this place?” Alejandra asked. “We cannot just walk up and knock on the door.”
Mason thought about the bush beater Ramses had given him earlier. He figured it would probably work quite nicely as a door knocker, too.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”