Viral (20 page)

Yes
.

Charlie looked at the city buildings, then back at Franklin. “But what did I say? I said in case something happens to
me or someone els
e. I didn’t know this was going to happen to Russell Ott.”
I thought it was going to happen to me
. “I’m sorry it did. I don’t think Ott really knew what he was involved in.”

Franklin made a face, not satisfied with this explanation. He pressed his fingertips together. Charlie turned, saw the map of the world on the wall; his eyes were drawn to Kenya and then Sundiata. He felt a shot of uneasiness again, thinking about his brother, remembering what their father had once said to him.
Take care of Jon
.

“Richard,” he said finally, looking out the plate glass. “I’m going to need to know more about the project my father was working on before I go on with this.”
The Lifeboat Inquiry
. The last project his dad had overseen. “I need to see files on it.”

Franklin shook his head, half-smiling. Not seeming to comprehend.

“You
can
access that material, can’t you?” Charlie said.

“I don’t know. I mean, there would have to be a damn good reason. That was an unacknowledged SAP. An SCI project.”

Special Access Program. Sensitive Compartmentalized Information
. Projects that went beyond the security coverage of Top Secret level.

“And don’t you have SCI access?”

“I do. Under certain circumstances. But there would have to be a strong need-to-know here.”

“I thought I had carte blanche on this, Richard.”

“On
this
. What you’re working on. The Lifeboat Inquiry was something else entirely.”

What was so sensitive about his father’s inquiry that it went beyond Top Secret, anyway? Charlie wondered.

Franklin said, “I mean, I would have to show some sort of nexus.”

“Okay. And what if I gave you one?”

Franklin half shrugged. He took off his glasses. Mallory thought for a moment that his hand was shaking. “Okay, go ahead. Give me one.”

Charlie waited, though, thinking it through—the implications of what he was about to say to Franklin. Decided to tell him, anyway.

“My father died of a heart attack, as you know. He had suffered high blood pressure and heart disease for several years,” he said. “The autopsy report showed that there were traces of ouabain in his system. Not enough to kill him, supposedly. But there was no explanation for it, either. The pathologist discounted it.”

Discounted it, because Stephen Mallory had been considered a heart attack risk.

“He said it might have been something he ate,” he went on. “He had dinner at an Indian restaurant the night he died. I half accepted that for a while, although it was a lazy interpretation.”

Ott was overweight. Probably ate lots of fried food. Doughnuts. Didn’t have time to work out.

“Well, I mean, that’s interesting,” Franklin said, opening and closing his reading glasses. “But I don’t think we can make that sort of leap. Frankly, there’s still a residual feeling that your father was on something of a witch hunt with that project. You know that.”

“Director McCormack thought that.”

“Yes.”

Colonel Dale McCormack, the Director of National Intelligence, had shut down the Lifeboat Inquiry days before his father died, even though it was a CIA operation, set up to monitor the government’s biological weapons research. An investigation that McCormack thought unnecessary, a waste of money and manpower. McCormack had been at odds with Stephen Mallory, apparently, afraid he was going to become a whistleblower. That he would take his story to the media, drawing attention to problems created by the recent reorganization of the American intelligence community.

“Would this have to go through McCormack?”

“Because of his role, he would have to see it, sure.”

“Why would it be SCI, anyway?”

“It involved very sensitive details, Charlie. Genetic engineering research. Countermeasures to the remnants of Russia’s Biopreparat program. You know that.”

Yes
. The project Anna Vostrak had been working on.

“Well, I’ve got to have it, Richard.”

“I don’t know.” Charlie discerned a quick head-shake. “I don’t think so. I really don’t see how this is relevant to what you’re working on.”

Mallory stood, lifted his bag. “It is,” he said. “If you want me to help you any further, I’ll need that information. It’s as simple as that. I’m going to be back here tomorrow at 11:10. It can’t be any later; I have a flight scheduled. I need to leave town, if I’m going to do any good.”

“How are you going to work this, anyway? With Isaak Priest.”

“You said you didn’t need details until it was over. I told you I could find him.”

Franklin grimaced, wanting more. “Do you need help?”

“No, I have a great team. I just need the information on my father’s project.”

Charlie extended his hand and they shook. He stopped just before the door.

“By the way, did Russell Ott have family?”

“One sister. And his mother is still alive.”

He walked back toward the elevator, feeling sad for a moment about Russell Ott. Imagining who might have killed him, and how.

WHEN THE FIRST HINT
of light came up above the cracked earth and faraway trees, Jon Mallory was on a dirt road, walking in tire tracks, the straw hat shading his eyes. He kept pushing forward, all but numb to the pain, his feet blistered. No longer thinking about anything but survival, drawing on a deep core of desire he didn’t know he had—but still seeing the images: the open eyes of the bodies pulled from delivery trucks, the giant birds feasting on the decomposing corpses, the little bodies of the twin girls. The dirt road took him into a mud-hut village, this one inhabited, and then through a city of squat, sun-bleached buildings, tin-roofed homes, ramshackle wooden market stalls. People looking at him suspiciously. Men loading sisal onto donkey carts. A cocoa merchant, mounds of cocoa beans fermenting under plastic. On the other side, he came to a platform with plank benches. A train station. Jon checked the handwritten schedule tacked on a sheet of plywood. The next train to anywhere was in three hours and twenty-two minutes. It would do him good to rest, maybe catch a nap.

He found a street market first and spent the last of his money on a bottle of water and a
moyin-moyin
—bean muffin. He returned to the train stop, sat on the bench in the shade. The air had turned warm and pleasant. When he finished eating, Jon opened his laptop and began to write a story to post to his blog. There was an unsettled feeling behind every sentence, but he kept going, pushing himself, recalling details, not quite understanding what anything meant. Remembering the last thing Kip had said to him:
Get this out there
.

THE TRAIN TOOK
Jon to the capital city of Nyamejye, where he washed the make-up from his face in an airport bathroom, although a dark vestige remained, resembling a five o’clock shadow. He withdrew most of the money in his checking account from an ATM. The transaction would be a flag, he knew, but at this point, he had no other option. For good measure, he also charged a train ticket back to the city he had just left—Chimwala.

It was several minutes after the plane to Nairobi reached a cruising altitude of thirty-seven thousand feet and the seatbelt signs came off that Jon noticed something in a pouch of his bag that had not been there before: a letter-size envelope, tucked among his clothes.

The last time he had opened the pouch had been outside Sandra Oku’s dugout home at Larkin Farm. It must have been placed there
by her. Or by Kip. Jon surveyed the passengers in the dimly lit cabin of the plane. He looked out at the clouds, and the savannah below. Then he got up, walked back to the rest room with the envelope. He pulled the door closed. Looked at himself in the mirror for a moment before opening it.

Inside was a sheet of lined notepaper. Handwritten at the top of the page in a barely legible scrawl was: “This fits with what you already possess.” Beneath it, near the bottom of the page, a series of numbers and letters in twelve point type: 7rg2kph5nOcxqmeuy43siaw8bjf1tdlvo6z9.

Beside them, the letter “v,” circled.

Another puzzle. Different and less clear than the earlier one. Jon Mallory studied it for a while, feeling the hum of the airplane engines. Then he folded the paper into eighths again, stuck it in his pants pocket, and made his way back to his seat.

From Nairobi, he would fly to London and from London back to Dulles. He would retrieve his car at the airport, drive to Washington, and spend the night in his own home. His own bed.

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But then other, less pleasant images filled his thoughts.

ISAAK PRIEST FELT
a chill of apprehension as he re-read the words that Jon Mallory had posted about Sundiata, knowing that they would upset the Administrator, who had already decided to implement his own contingency plan.

But he also knew that he could do something about it.

Priest lifted the receiver on his desk, pressed a speed dial button. The call was answered more than sixteen hundred miles away by the minister of information in the Republic of Sundiata. A man Isaak Priest knew, as he knew many government officials there. He had supported this particular office through millions of dollars in “loan” payments. Monies provided by the Champion Group private equity funds.

This time, his request was for “stronger denial,” with the promise of an additional payment.

An official statement went live on the Sundiata government website nineteen minutes later.

It was a message from Sundiata President Robert Bonigo, calling the report on the
Weekly American
website a “sick hoax,” engineered by opposition and rebel forces. “There have been several small outbreaks of routine flu in our nation, reported by rural health agencies. None of them have resulted in fatalities. The government has successfully implemented a vaccination program. We condemn this story, purportedly by an American journalist, as a vicious hoax engineered by opposition forces.”

AT
11:09,
CHARLES MALLORY
stood in front of the private elevator in the parking garage on Twenty-Third Street. He had spent the night at the Marriott fourteen blocks away. Except for an hour at the hotel gym lifting weights, he had not left his room until shortly before the eleven o’clock check-out. After this, he would be leaving Washington for good. He did not feel comfortable in the city and in particular entering a government building that he had also visited the day before.

He was thinking ahead now: On Saturday, he would meet again with Joseph Chaplin, his operations director, and Chidi Okoro, his director of communications, to begin planning the Isaak Priest operation. On Sunday, he would be on his way across the Atlantic. That was the itinerary, although Charlie had learned long ago not to trust itineraries. It was prudent to have them, foolish to be bound by them. Whatever happened tomorrow and today and in the next ten minutes, could make his itinerary obsolete.

The door opened at 11:10. He rode the elevator to the seventh floor. This time, the door to 702 was closed. Charlie knocked. No reply. He twisted the knob. The room was empty, lights off. He gazed through the mirrored glass at the windows across the street, the tops of bare trees in autumn sunlight. Then he saw a single file folder at the far end of the table. Charlie sat and opened it. Attached to the top sheet was a small Post-it note from Franklin: “The best I could do. RF.”

Beneath his note were several pages of memorandums about Project Lifeboat and the Lifeboat Inquiry, including Director McCormack’s memo that had shut the Inquiry down, four days before his father died. Charlie skimmed the pages quickly. Thirteen sheets in total. Much of the content had been redacted—black marker lines masking names, dates, phone numbers, addresses. In some cases, whole paragraphs were blacked out.

Charlie placed the folder in his bag and slung the bag over his shoulder. He closed the door and took the elevator to the garage, walked four blocks to the Foggy Bottom Metro station. He had three identities left. Three men who lived in very different parts of the world: one in Switzerland, one in Kenya, the other in St. Kitts. He was headed south now, but not to the Caribbean. Not right away.