Viral (49 page)
Authors: James Lilliefors
He looked with his naked eye, saw nothing. Heard nothing.
Fourteen minutes later, the perimeter sensors chirped.
Il Macellaio
was leaving the site.
Fourteen minutes
.
Charlie carried the sniper rifle out the front door. He got in the Jeep and drove back toward the two-lane paved road. A quarter mile down the gravel drive he stopped. Surveyed the woods through his scope.
But he saw nothing.
He drove on, more slowly, scanning the woods with his eyes.
Another eighth of a mile and then he saw him, to the left in the woods.
Il Macellaio
, lying on his side, facing away from the drive.
Charlie stopped the truck. He cautiously stepped out, aiming his rifle at the predator. Stepped toward him, watching his hands, which were still gripping his rifle. Waiting for him to move. The wound was in his shoulder, he saw. Probably not fatal. Charlie stood behind him, waiting for Mehmet Hassan to lift up his torso. To take a final shot. But nothing happened. If Hassan was not dead then, he was a minute later.
THAT EVENING, JON MALLORY
posted the first installment, about alleged irregularities involving Champion Funds investments. The link with the criminal banking network was enough to start a chain reaction. It began with this paragraph:
“WASHINGTON—One of the world’s largest but most secretive private equity firms has quietly poured billions of dollars into unlikely corners of Africa and elsewhere in the developing world over the past eleven months through more than a dozen separate, but connected, corporations. These entities have purchased land and businesses and launched ambitious infrastructure and energy projects, in some cases working with unstable and corrupt regimes and a largely unregulated banking network controlled by developer Isaak Priest, according to sources familiar with the deals.”
Over the next several weeks, a succession of stories played out in newspapers and magazines, on television and websites internationally. When a good story gathered momentum, it became a kind of living organism, Jon Mallory had learned. But in this case, most of the big scoops came from
The Weekly American
.
The headlines cascaded into one another, as new revelations emerged on an almost daily basis:
Regulators Probe Champion Group
Gardner Foundation Linked to Isaak Priest Banking Network
Bio-Weapons Figure Ivan Vogel Tied to Gardner Project
How Landon Pine Became ‘Isaak Priest’
What is ‘Covenant Division’?
Perry Gardner’s Frightening Vision: A ‘New Paradigm’
‘Depopulation’: First Step in ‘New Paradigm’ Project
Gardner Accused of Orchestrating Sundiata Genocide
Mancala Was Focus of New Paradigm Project
‘New Paradigm’ Would Have Killed 8 Million Africans
CIA Reportedly Knew of Paradigm Project
Congress Shuts Down Covenant Division
Covenant Probe: Richard Franklin, Gus Hebron, Seven Others Indicted
Gardner Middleman Douglas Chase Commits Suicide
Perry Gardner Indicted on Eleven Counts
A.M
.
Jon Mallory sat on the porch of his rented waterfront home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Out back, the Patuxent River glittered with a cool morning sun and the dogwoods were in glorious bloom. Jon had decided to move away from the city at the beginning of March, to find a respite on the water where he could write his story and enjoy the changing season. The story had transformed Jon Mallory in many ways, not only the obvious ones. He had won accolades for his reporting and a lucrative book contract. But the attention seemed largely frivolous, a distraction from the things that mattered. For weeks he had found himself savoring the subtleties of his life, embracing feelings of gratitude that had no clear point of origin, noticing the nuances of nature as he hadn’t since childhood.
By late March, the international shock caused by the revelations about Perry Gardner and the “New Paradigm” were wearing off. The public had been riveted by the story through the winter, but attention spans were short and people seemed anxious for other news. Jon’s latest story, which began on the cover of
The Weekly American
, was a people story, about Sandra Oku and her return to Sundiata with her son and her fiancé. Roger had titled it: “Journey Home: A Sundiata Story of Faith.” Sandra was working to help Sundiata recover, but also to make the world aware of how and why the devastation in her country had occurred.
Jon Mallory was watching the reflection of the dogwood trees rippling on the river when his cell phone rang.
Roger Church.
“Hi, Roger.”
“I think he got off easy,” he said
“What?”
“Didn’t you hear?”
“No.”
“Gardner.”
Jon slid open the screen door. He clicked on the television. Saw the “Breaking News” banner on CNN. Switched to Fox and saw the same.
“What happened?”
“Self-inflicted gunshot.”
“Really.”
“Well, that’s what they’re saying.”
Two days earlier, Gardner had been allowed to bail himself out of prison on the condition that he surrender his passport and wear an ankle monitor. He had been found at an office in the New Technologies Wing at the Gardner Foundation in Oregon, dead of a gunshot to the head.
Twelve minutes later, Melanie Cross called. It had been a couple of months since he’d heard from her, and he was surprised, and pleased, to see her number on the caller ID.
“Hello?”
“Hello.” Her voice sounded unusually deep. “It’s Melanie Cross.”
“I know. Hi. How have you been?”
There was silence on the other end. Mallory strolled into the yard, waiting. Finally she said, “You’ve done a pretty good job of avoiding me over these past few months, haven’t you?”
“Pardon?”
“You heard what I said.”
“Avoiding you? No. No, I haven’t.”
“You haven’t called. Or answered
my
calls.”
“You didn’t leave any messages, did you?” Something was funny about her voice. “I’m sorry. I’ve thought about you a lot, actually,” he said.
He heard her breathing heavily. “You really kind of hurt me, you know that? You just kind of left me hanging there.”
The next thing he knew, she was crying. Jon Mallory shifted the phone to his other ear and then cleared his throat. Melanie was such a smart and competitive woman that he had forgotten how emotional she could become. “I guess you were never really interested in dating me, were you?”
“I
did
date you.”
Jon might have said
You broke it off
but didn’t. He felt a strong and deep affection for Melanie Cross all of a sudden.
“Would you like to meet?” he said.
“When?”
“I don’t know. Now?”
Melanie said nothing for what seemed like a very long time. Finally, she said, “All right.”
Jon Mallory smiled.
CHARLES MALLORY SAT IN
a lounge chair on the deck of his home in St. Kitts, drying in the sun from his late-morning swim.
Anna lay in a chaise under a coconut palm, paging through
The New York Times
as the still-rising sun spread gold light across the calm Caribbean waters. This was their vacation, the first he’d had in a while.
It couldn’t have started better
, he thought. Waking up on their first full day together and making love, followed by a leisurely breakfast and a swim.
Now Charlie was watching Anna. Seeing the sober clarity in her face that had always inspired him. And wondering what his father would have thought.
He would have approved
. Yes. He was pretty sure of that.
Anna turned. Her face seemed to open to him “You’re thinking about your father, aren’t you?”
“Am I? How did you know?”
She shrugged. “What were you thinking?”
“Wondering if I’ve wrapped this up to his satisfaction.”
“What do you think?”
“It’s complicated. You can’t feel good about something like this. Not with the people who died and suffered.”
“No.” She folded the newspaper section on her lap. “But maybe we can just enjoy ourselves for a couple of days.”
Yes.
What a nice idea
.
He was going back to work soon, but in a very different capacity. Back to Africa. His business would be based there for a while, in the nation of Mancala, and Anna was coming with him. They were going to oversee water projects, digging wells and irrigation latrines. Nadra Nkosi would run the operation. A project supported by an “anonymous donor.” They had close to $2 billion to spend on it. It was what Landon Pine had wished in his Last Will and Testament,
left behind among his hand-written papers. A small attempt, perhaps, to make up for what he had done.
It was a step, that was all. To help “replace a culture of poverty and hopelessness with a culture of achievement and opportunity,” as Pine had written. Charles Mallory knew it
could
be done, but that it came down to a commitment of will and resources. A nation that could send a spacecraft to measure the atmosphere of Jupiter had the ingenuity to fix the problems of Africa. It just wasn’t trying hard enough.
Charlie closed his eyes. His father’s story was over now.
But reality, he knew, was stingy with certainties. Charles Mallory had learned that long ago. He also knew that what had gotten inside of Perry Gardner had also spread to other very smart and ambitious people. Even if it lay dormant now, it was possible that one day it would find the perfect host. And then, perhaps, the wheel of history would turn.
Expectations. Begin with that. What if the accepted version of things has another story attached to it. Something not expected. A story on the other side, the side that people don’t see, because they don’t have any reason to turn it over. You understand that. An old story retold throughout history, in different ways. Innate urges to dominate and to control. The examples are sometimes so far from what we expect human nature to be that we cast the perpetrators as monsters. Madmen. Hitler’s dream of a new Reich; the Islamist fundamentalists’ dream of a new caliphate; Mussolini’s dream of a new Roman Empire. Before they were simply mad, though, they were dreams that seized people’s hopes and raised their expectations. For some people, they briefly provided a shared, heightened existence. Most mad dreams don’t become realities, or even become known. Most are more subtle. A story hidden behind another story, sometimes. Suppose you let the madman in to clean up and no one knows that he is the madman. Begin with that. Afterward, regardless of what happened, we would adjust again and create a different set of expectations, and assumptions. We would adapt if we had to, because that is our nature. That is what we do. And in retrospect, we might even have a better, more civilized world because of it. Just suppose
.
Nearly seven thousand three hundred miles away, Dr. Sandra Oku ended her day much as she had started it: she kneeled on the ground, clasped her hands together and she began to pray.
Special thanks to Laura Gross for her unflagging belief. Thanks to Juliet Grames and Bronwen Hruska at Soho Press for taking this on and for their invaluable help in shaping the final result. And thanks also to Janet, for being there.
