Viral (26 page)

“Then look ahead ten years. Compare what this region would be like if we
didn’t
enact this model—versus what it would be like if we did
.

“What is our moral obligation?

“Just suppose.”

Trent skimmed ahead several paragraphs, to the specific proposal to “reseed” portions of Africa, and came to the words that he knew had the potential to create a media firestorm. Two words in a five-thousand-word analysis: “humane depopulation.”

The words that
he
had used, on a drunken evening that should have been long forgotten. Now they were circulating across the Internet. Written in a style that sounded like
him
. That detailed an idea
he
had expressed, incautiously, once.
His
idea.
His
words. But it
wasn’t
him.

He stared for a time at the waves on the rocks below and thought again of Charles Mallory. Recalling what he had said, and what he hadn’t.

Why hadn’t he heard any more from Charles Mallory? Had something happened to him?

Remembering something else, then—a phone message he had picked up that morning—Thomas Trent went back to his computer and booked a flight to Washington, D.C.

M
EHMET
H
ASSAN WORE
a rumpled gray flannel suit and silver metal-frame glasses. He carried a laptop computer and a copy of the
Financial Times
as he rode the Metro to the Smithsonian station. He strode along the platform with the same detached, hurried pace as the other exiting professionals. A look that differentiated them from the tourists.

The name on his English driver’s license and passport was Mark Phillip Burns, although he was known to some by another name:
Il Macellaio
. “The Butcher.”

Hassan’s appearance was non-descript but studied. Anyone who gave him a second look would have pegged him as a businessman. Perhaps someone in financial services. But his actual calling was very different. He was in Washington to carry out two jobs for the man known as the Administrator. An assignment for which he was being paid very well. Well enough to live on for the rest of his life, if that was what he wanted.

IN THE MORNING
, J
ON
Mallory logged on to his computer and was startled to find that Melanie Cross had written about Thomas Trent and the TW Paper on her blog overnight. “Thomas Trent linked to ‘depopulation study,’ ” she tagged it. Instead of reporting it herself, though, she reported what
other people
were saying. “Several bloggers are connecting media billionaire Thomas Trent to a controversial report urging the ‘depopulation’ and ‘repopulation’ of parts of the Third World.” Melanie had hyperlinked to three of these bloggers. “This comes amid unconfirmed stories of a deadly flu virus spreading through remote regions of Africa. Although the connection appears tenuous at best, it is causing a little buzz among Internet conspiracy theorists. Excerpts of the so-called TW Paper have emerged on the Web over the past twenty-four hours, although its origins are uncertain. The author is listed as Stuart Thames Borholm, which, this reporter has learned, is an anagram for the economist Thomas Robert Malthus, one of Trent’s heroes.”

Jon Mallory felt a rush of anger. He was stupid to have told her about Malthus. But he also felt something else: a gut instinct that the story about the “TW Paper” was wrong.

HE TOOK THE
Red Line Metro train to the
Weekly American
offices in Foggy Bottom. Knocked on Roger Church’s partially opened door.

“Welcome back.”

“Thank you.”

“I was waiting for you to come in. Please.” Church gestured for him to have a seat. “I sense you have a lot more to tell.”

“I do.”

“Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

Church sat and tugged at one of his shirtsleeves, watching Jon. “Go ahead.”

Jon started to summarize what he’d seen in Africa but then interrupted himself. “I have a question to ask you.”

Church nodded.

“What do you know about Thomas Trent?”

“Thomas Trent. Well.” Church raked a hand through his mop of white hair. “Brilliant man. Grew up with something of an inferiority complex. His father was an immigrant from Eastern Europe, as you know. Something of a manic depressive. Trent overcompensated. A shameless self-promoter in his younger days. Dated a couple of movie stars. Why do you ask?”

“What’s his relationship with Perry Gardner?”

“Oh, I don’t think there is one.” Church frowned. “They apparently had a falling out some time ago. Two very driven men. Accusations on both sides—of defections, of stealing ideas the other had been developing. Neither of them talk about it.”

“Why? What do you think happened?”

Church was trying to put things together, Jon could tell, to figure why he was asking about Trent. “What happened was that Trent decided to get into software for a while and decided to go after Gardner. Trent had the idea he could create a global computer network that wouldn’t depend on Gardner’s quickly outdated software products. It represented a big threat, which Gardner took very seriously. Supposedly, he hired a security firm to pose as cleaning people and root through his trash.”

“I saw some references to that.”

“Never proven.” Church blinked twice. “Interesting blog from Melanie Cross, I noticed.”

“Yeah. I inadvertently helped her. I figured the anagram for her. There’s something wrong with her story, though.”

“Which part of it?”

“Trent. The whole thing, actually.”

“Well, it’s good timing on her part. The African wire services are moving a story right now about Olduvai Charities. Alleging that Olduvai is providing a flu vaccine that may, in fact, be causing a potentially deadly mutation of the virus in two East African countries.”

“
What?
”

“It just came across.”

“According to whom?”

“It quotes health officials in Kenya and Somalia. I have a feeling it’s probably going to be a full-blown news story within a few days. Or hours.”

“Is that what they’re saying: ‘May be causing?’ ”

“Yes.” He lifted a printout from a corner of his desk and handed it to Jon. “The Ministry of Health in Kenya is investigating the allegations. The government has stopped distribution of this vaccine pending the outcome.”

Jon read part of it, then looked up. “This says that Olduvai Charities was started by Trent.”

“Yes.”

“Was it?”

“Sort of. He cut his ties some time ago. He has nothing to do with the operations of it anymore.” Church sighed elaborately. “Frankly, Jon? I don’t quite believe this story, either.”

“Then what is it? What’s going on?”

Jon watched his editor think. A man who managed to see intricate scenarios others didn’t imagine. “Put it this way,” Church said. “Say this was some kind of elaborate diversion, which is what you’re thinking. That would be telling us something fairly significant, wouldn’t it?” Jon frowned. “In magic tricks, you create a misdirection when you want people to look away, right? So they don’t see what’s really happening.”

“Right.”

“So?”

“So this is telling us that they want us to look away right now? At something else.”

Church nodded.

“Meaning it’s imminent.”

“Yes.”

“Whatever’s going to really happen is imminent.”

“Exactly.”

THE COURIER FROM
South Africa arrived in Mancala on a charter Learjet 35, which landed at a concrete airfield twenty-two miles from
the capital city of Mungaza. The man’s name was George Adisa, and he was escorted from the plane by two armed guards to a Mercedes limousine. The car carried him four and a half kilometers to a fenced-in military-style compound. There, Isaak Priest was waiting in a small cinderblock office, seated behind a heavy metal desk.

Adisa placed the briefcase on the desk, then dabbed the sweat from his face with a handkerchief.

Priest nodded for him to open it.
A forty-three-year-old man in a cheap dark suit, white dress shirt stained with sweat
. Adisa had heard the stories about him, Isaak Priest knew. That working for Priest was like playing Russian roulette, although the rewards could be very lucrative. Priest had helped to spread those stories himself.

There were considerable risks in dealing with bearer bonds, and Priest had hired a man he could trust. A man with few personal ties. Who could disappear afterward, if necessary. He had sent a private plane and two security men to South Africa for him, to accompany him each step of the way.

In the briefcase were bearer bonds worth nearly $2 billion, delivered from a private bank office in Johannesburg. Unlike registered bonds, bearer bonds were cash certificates with no registered owner. They were owned by whoever held them. And unlike cash—which, at this amount, would have required more than thirty suitcases filled with hundred-dollar bills—bearer bonds worth millions or billions of dollars could be contained on a few slips of paper in a small briefcase.

Bearer bonds had been illegal in the United States since 1982 because they’d become the refuge of money launderers and tax evaders. But in several other parts of the world, they were still legal; still used by wealthy men who, for various reasons, desired to maintain anonymity. Whoever showed up at the end of the chain collected the money. That’s how they worked. There was no other record of ownership.

Priest examined the documents carefully. Then he nodded at the man, closed the briefcase, and handed him an envelope. The Administrator had come through. The final payment had been delivered.

George Adisa was escorted out by the two armed guards who had brought him here. Priest watched through the window blinds as the men walked in darkness back to the car across the gravel lot. He saw the chauffeur stoop as if to tie a shoelace. Then stand again, his hand
now holding a handgun. Isaak Priest turned away from the window. It wasn’t necessary to see everything. As he lifted the attaché case, he heard the gunshots. Three of them, fired from a police revolver in rapid succession. George Adisa would not be returning to South Africa. And his two escorts would not be returning to their bunkhouses. What they knew made them too risky. A rule of warfare.

Outside, the man who had posed as Adisa’s chauffeur—Priest’s lieutenant, a man named John Ramesh—sat behind the wheel of the Mercedes and waited for his boss.

THIS FITS WITH
something you already possess
.

The words played in Jon Mallory’s head as he drove in an aimless northeasterly loop around the Washington Capital Beltway. Words scribbled on a sheet of paper above a row of numbers and letters.

Possess
.

Not
have
or
know
.

Possess
. A very specific verb. An unusual one. Implying something tangible. Something physical that he owned. That, maybe, he had forgotten about. But what?

He thought of other things. His brother’s footsteps gaining on him as they raced the length of their childhood street. His father’s gentle blue eyes, watching him. Shifting. A summer afternoon when his brother had tried to teach him to throw a fastball—to throw “the perfect pitch.” Something Jon could never do. That was when it came to him.

He hit his turn signal, cut across two lanes, and got off at the next exit.

The phone number that Joseph Chaplin had written down for him at the airfield in Kenya.

He had never called it.

If you make it home, you may call this number
.

Of course.

Jon Mallory reversed direction on the Beltway, heading back toward the city, switching lanes, speeding around the slower traffic. He got off at River Road and anxiously drove toward his house. Parked on the street in front, ran across the lawn and up the steps. The slip of paper that Chaplin had given him was in the upper drawer of his desk with other ephemera from his trip: airline and bus
tickets, napkins, coins, fliers, a steno pad, and a couple of newspaper sections. After retrieving it, he drove to the mini-mart on Wisconsin Avenue, inserted two quarters in the pay phone, and used his international calling card.

011 44 20.

44 the country code for the United Kingdom, 20 the city code for London.

Three rings.

A recorded voice came on, an eerie mechanized sound. It repeated the number that Jon Mallory had just called, then said, “Please refer to 14672224.” Each number was painstakingly enunciated. Then the line went dead.

14672224.

Jon jotted it on the sheet of paper Joseph Chaplin had given him. He stood on the sidewalk, in the shadow of an office building, looking at it as traffic went back and forth.

467-2224 could be a phone number.

He dug two quarters out of his car and tried. Not a working number.

He drove a circuitous route through the Maryland suburbs for a while, thinking. Took Old Georgetown Road past Tidwell’s in Bethesda. He sat in an empty parking lot in the next block, took out the sheet of paper with the numbers and letters, and studied it some more.

Thirty-six numbers and letters in twelve-point type: 7rg2kph5nOcxqmeuy43siaw8bjf1tdlvo6z9. Beside that, the “V” circled.

Still, it made no sense. And yet the newer numbers looked vaguely familiar to him: 14672224.

Somehow they all went together. But knowing that didn’t really help him much.
Start with the one that seems familiar, then
, he thought.
Figure out why
.

What if the numbers corresponded with letters? He jotted the corresponding letters under each number: A D F G B B B D.

Think a little smarter
. Something his brother used to say. Pushing him. He knew it had to be simple, though. Something that only the two of them would know. Restless, Jon pulled out his cell phone. No messages. He called his office phone. Waited. Pressed in his code.

He heard, “You have one new message.” He punched in his four-digit code. Listened. The recorded voice of the caller immediately
sent a chill through him. It was a voice he had heard many times over the years, but never addressing him. A man he had seen on television often—and watched repeatedly on YouTube the day before.