Viral (21 page)

He rode the Red Line Metro train to Union Station. There he bought a ticket on the first Amtrak train to Richmond, Virginia. He was feeling better as the train picked up speed, rolling through the suburbs, away from D.C. Past housing projects, empty lots, graffiti-covered walls, abandoned buildings. From Richmond, he took a Greyhound bus south, to Charlotte, North Carolina, paying for his ticket with cash and finding a seat alone in the back. He used the time to think, and to study the files that Franklin had left for him.

The memorandums didn’t tell him much he didn’t know, just added a few details. One was a memo from his father to Intelligence Director Dale McCormack asking for additional resources to monitor the scientists working on Project Lifeboat. “This is a highly sensitive, and potentially dangerous, study without sufficient safeguards,” his father had written. The memo cited “a network of civilian research labs that have been permitted to explore bio-weapons technologies as a response to perceived threats from programs in other countries, including Russia, Iraq, and North Korea. Sources interviewed by this office indicate that some of this work is clearly in violation of the chemical weapons treaty of 1972.” The international treaty banning offensive biological weapons research. A treaty flagrantly violated for years by the Soviet Union.

Names were blacked out, including the research labs and the scientist who had headed up Project Lifeboat. But Charles Mallory already knew most of that information. Knew that Ivan Vogel, a former Soviet bio-weapons scientist with Biopreparat, had been the lead researcher. Other details had been redacted, too. The name of the pharmaceuticals company his father had identified, a firm known as VaxEze. All of the dates and locations.

The government had called this bio-weapons program Project Lifeboat because it was designed to create emergency responses in the event of a worst-case disaster—if the “superplague” that had
been developed in Russia, and had been pursued in Iraq and elsewhere, were ever successfully implemented. Among other things, the program sought to develop defenses against a potentially vaccine-resistant, weaponized strain of flu. Some of the viral properties used for research came from the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, and some of the work was carried out there. But more than half of the research had been outsourced, to university and private labs.

Project Lifeboat was a response to reports that the huge, illegal Soviet bio-weapons program—which at one time employed thirty thousand scientists at eighteen facilities—had not in fact been shut down with the fall of the Soviet Union but continued in private military labs throughout Russia. It was also a response to the fact that some of the Biopreparat scientists who had lost their jobs in the former Soviet Union had been hired as consultants by Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. In the post-9/11 environment, Project Lifeboat was allowed to thrive in secret. But by the end of the decade, concerns were mounting about oversight and safety.

Stephen Mallory had opened his internal inquiry after two anonymous sources told him of various “irregularities” in the project: that deadly viral properties had been illegally transported to research labs; that scientists had become involved who were not registered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; that researchers charged with using simulants were in fact working with actual biological agents; and that half a dozen of the scientists working for the government had been recruited away by research labs connected with the pharmaceuticals industry. To Charlie’s father, these irregularities amounted to a very real concern, not a hypothetical one. But the government had already shut down Project Lifeboat by this point, and the director of intelligence, Colonel Dale McCormack, did not trust Stephen Mallory’s sources or his motives. He did not want the Lifeboat Inquiry to become a media story.

Charlie closed his eyes and pictured his father’s reassuring, watery-blue gaze. Heard the steady clarity of his voice.

If someone were to hijack this research, he could use it to ‘adjust’ the demographics of the world. A result that we would eventually have to accept.… Expectations. Begin with that
.

AT THE CHARLOTTE
Airport Enterprise lot, a chatty white-haired man dressed in a red plaid wool jacket asked Michael Chambers about his visit as he walked him out to select a car. The leaves were beginning to change, and there was a chill in the air. It was a great time to visit North Carolina, the man told him. “Gorgeous in the mountains right now,” he said three or four times.

Michael Chambers told him that he was staying with family at nearby Lake Norman. He acted cordial but said little else.

“Lake Norman. Oh, you’ll like it there,” he said. “Fishing?”

Michael Chambers nodded his head, gave the man a polite smile.

In fact, Charles Mallory was driving two hours northwest from Charlotte, to the mountain resort of Asheville, where Peter Quinn had retired ten months ago, weeks before Stephen Mallory died.

There was no directory listing for Peter Quinn in the area, but Charlie had found a property in the nearby village of Black Mountain owned by “R. Steen.” Robin Steen was Peter Quinn’s wife. Quinn had been part of his father’s Lifeboat Inquiry, but he had quit several months into it. His father had been bothered by that. It had bothered him very much. Charles Mallory wanted to find out why.

HE CHECKED IN
at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville as Michael Chambers and was given Room 441. He studied the reports that night and then conjured up the message that his father had left for him, which he had memorized down to the smallest detail.

One thing Charlie liked about getting older was the way it expanded his frame of reference. Details that wouldn’t have held much meaning years earlier did now simply because he knew so much more. Isolated, disconnected words and phrases suddenly became parts of a puzzle, each making the picture clearer.

His father had left behind a sheet of note paper in a safe deposit box that he had wanted Charlie to find, if anything happened. It was still there. But there was also a copy in Charles Mallory’s head. He had studied it and memorized it. Photographed it in his mind, without trying to understand it.

In the quiet of the hotel room, he closed his eyes and called it up,
forming an image of the single-page message. Rough outlines of an investigation:

At the top of the page, “Vogel” had been circled. The research scientist who had initially headed up Project Lifeboat.

With an arrow pointing to “Isaak Priest.”

Then, “VaxEze contract supported by slush fund. Find out who supplies the slush fund.”

VaxEze. The pharmaceuticals firm that had hired away Ivan Vogel.

Below that, “Disaster Relief Plan (Back-up to P.Q.) Find out more about this. Doug Chase a liaison to someone else. ‘The Administrator?’ ”

P.Q.: Peter Quinn.

“Tom Trent’s ideas. Not sure. Need to follow up with him. Does Isaak Priest have a partner? Is Black Eagle somehow involved? Trent thinks so.

“AV—Geneva. She knows more than anyone else. But be careful for her safety.”

Anna.

“ ‘Game Changer.’ ‘The World Series begins in early October.’ Sports phrases that seem to be codes to the ultimate plan, assuming there is one.”

“Trials and diversions. ‘Contain the “World Series” within a single country.’ ‘The wheel of history.’ Expectations: Play on that.”

Last line: “What is Covenant?”

CHARLIE OPENED HIS
eyes and focused on the patterns of plaster on the ceiling.
What is Covenant?
The line that made the least sense to him. He sat up and read again through the pages that Franklin had provided. The most recent memorandum was dated four days before his father died. The memo shutting down the Lifeboat Inquiry: “In summary, this office deems that the investigation is too speculative and open-ended to be of further value. Project Lifeboat itself has been discontinued, and the questions raised by this inquiry are no longer pertinent. Furthermore, concerns about the operation have been addressed internally independent of this inquiry. An evaluation of the Lifeboat Inquiry to date shows duplication of efforts and wasteful use of government expenses and manpower. Therefore, recommend that this inquiry be discontinued immediately.”

Charlie looked out at the shapes of the mountains and the moonlit mist that hung in the trees and thought about his father. Hurling the baseball back and forth in the shadows of their yard. His father crouching, playing catcher to him. “Throw me the perfect pitch,” he used to say when Charlie was still in grade school. He had wanted him to become a pitcher, and Charlie had done that. He had become a good one in high school, one of the best in the state. Charlie liked the exactitude of throwing fast balls. There was a trick to that, a kind of pitch that batters couldn’t fathom; that came at them so fast, so perfectly, that they couldn’t even swing at it. His father had showed him that.

He pictured Stephen Mallory—tall, gray-haired and gray-bearded, determined, but with a surprising humility in his blue eyes. The moral compass in Charlie’s life for years. A good man. Disciplined. Sharp. But, somehow, in the end, his father had become a loser. In those final months, someone had thrown the fast ball past him, and he hadn’t seen it coming. Something about his work had put him at odds with the government. Something he couldn’t overcome. Charles Mallory needed to know what that was.

ALL NIGHT IT RAINED.
Charlie woke and listened to the rainwater cascading in the mountain trees, thinking about the succession of events that had brought him to this room. About his father and about Anna Vostrak.

The first time he had seen her, he had been on a mountain train in the village of Villars, Switzerland. She had contacted him at his hotel and asked to meet. An hour later, she was sitting across from him at the front of a train car, saying his name as if she knew him.

A dark-haired woman in a blue wool coat and designer jeans, slim, late thirties. Striking dark eyes, faintly Asian features. She spoke his name with a French accent as she turned a page in her book, pretending to be reading.

“How did you find me?” Charlie asked. He was there on vacation, after all, and not as Charles Mallory.

“I think we have a mutual friend.”

“I doubt it.” He watched her slender wrist as she slid her forefinger along a page of the book. “My friends are my friends because they respect my privacy.”

“I can’t explain everything right now,” she said. “This has to do with your father. He had found something. Something people didn’t want him to know. I can give you some names, and information. Some of what your father knew.”

At first, Charlie had just watched her and listened. He had seen all manner of deception in his life. One of the most common—and, to him, least persuasive—was the earnest and attractive stranger working a con. The more time he spent with this woman, though, the more he saw something that was very difficult to fake: the weight of real hurt and loss, a hurt that had been transformed into sober urgency. She looked at him with sincere, unhesitant eyes, and he began to trust her and, to like her.

“But what do you expect me to do with it? Do you want to hire me for something?” he said.

“No. I don’t have the resources for that. I just thought you would want to know. Then you can decide.”

She turned a page. He listened to the clack-clack rhythm of the train as they came to a vista of chalets, lifts, and snow-topped mountains. The first stop was a small alpine-style restaurant with plastic tables and chairs set up on a terrace. Behind it, hiking trails tunneled up into the woods. This was where he had planned to have lunch, alone.

He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the sunlight on his face.

“Join me for lunch?”

“All right.”

They drank mineral water and ordered délice aux champignons—mushroom sandwiches—and she told him sketchy details about her past. That she was a molecular biologist whose lab had done contract work for the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

“I worked for the military research wing. They had a number of in-house projects, as you probably know,” she said, “complemented by a contract liaison program with universities and research institutes. Over the course of about two years, I worked on three related projects. One involved a process known as reverse genetics. The objective was to develop a vaccine for a particularly virulent form of flu. The scientist heading up the project was a Russian who had done similar work in the Soviet Union. He was later recruited to work for a private research lab. Something about that arrangement didn’t seem right. It came to bother me more and more.”

She set down her fork and looked at Charlie. The clarity in her face held him. Her gaze was direct but nuanced, expressing subtleties beyond what she was saying.

“This scientist’s name was Ivan Vogel,” she said. “A very duplicitous man. He had helped to develop germ warfare projects for the Soviet regime, years earlier. He knew that his knowledge could be very valuable.”