Viral (34 page)

She shrugged, stuck the money inside her bra. Charlie handed her one more twenty-franc note. Finally, she nodded.

He watched the woman walk into the eatery, not looking back.
Good
. At the ticket counter, he purchased a one-way fare to Paris on the TGV, using Michael Chambers’ Visa card. Then he walked three windows down and bought a ticket to Zurich, using a credit card that belonged to Eric Dantz. Michael Chambers’ card booked him a reservation in Paris, as well, at a small hotel on Rue du Bac where he had stayed before. Then he left the credit cards and I.D. belonging to Chambers on the pavement beside a bench. He hoped they would be found and used. That would only further confuse the predators.

Before boarding his train, Charlie sent an encrypted message to Chidi Okoro, to be forwarded to Sandra Oku. It was fitting, he thought, that Sandra would end up playing a role in their operation. Paul had recruited her as insurance in case something happened to him. Sandra had impressed Charlie with her fortitude and strength of mind.

He walked back to the tracks, boarded the Cisalpino to Zurich, intentionally limping slightly. Found his seat by the window, halfway up in the fourth car. He sat and shut his eyes. Removed his hat. A man and woman sat opposite him, speaking in German. He glanced quickly, then looked down the aisle. A moon-faced man seemed to be watching him. Late forties, probably, pock-marked skin, thick mustache. Mallory looked out at Basel and in the distance saw the edge of the Black Forest. Closed his eyes. Opened them. The man was still looking. Charlie checked his watch. Finally, the train began to move. He looked again and saw the man was engaged in a conversation with a young boy. It was okay.

The countryside flashed past, increasingly dark and featureless as the train distanced itself from Basel. Eventually, they would realize the ticket to Paris was a ruse. But it would take them a while to trace his new identity. Eric Dantz was a name that would have no reference in their databases. Still, he needed to be careful. Most people operated within predictable parameters—if they were trying to avoid detection, they bluffed, they set up diversions. A trait of human nature. The predators would be thinking that. They probably wouldn’t know his new
name, but they would anticipate that he had one. They would have to figure it out in other ways, then. Charles Mallory had to counteract that somehow, to move in directions they wouldn’t expect him to move. He closed his eyes for several minutes. The train rolled deeper into the night.

Mehmet Hassan,
Il Macellaio
, logged on to the F-2 quantum-encrypted computer network to see if there were any additional details about the Charles Mallory assignment. Instead, he discovered a new assignment, from the same source. The Administrator had changed his mind. He wanted him to take care of the new job first.
Jon
Mallory. This one would be easier, because there was no hunting necessary. They knew where he was.

A prison nine kilometers southwest of Mungaza.

The victim would be waiting there for him when he arrived. Three days from now.

THE TRAVEL TIME FROM
Zurich Airport to Nairobi was fourteen hours and thirty minutes, including the changeover in Paris. From Nairobi, Eric Dantz flew to Amara, the second-largest city in the landlocked nation of Mancala. There he took a cab to a rail station in the suburbs and boarded the local to Mungaza, the capital city, where Joseph Chaplin and the rest of his team were already encamped.

Eric Dantz was Charles Mallory’s final identity and, he assumed, the last one he would need. Dantz would take him into Mungaza undetected. And in Mungaza, he would find Isaak Priest. Three assumptions that depended on good fortune. In truth, he was rolling dice.

The train rumbled through the open savannah of the northlands, a vast, sweeping landscape of rolling grasses rimmed by faraway mountains, which had always inspired Charles Mallory, as it did most Westerners—a landscape probably not unlike that where the human species had first emerged.

The train took them through ramshackle farm villages of stick and grass huts, where barefoot children stood in the fields beside the tracks and waved. Past tea plantations and fields of tobacco, sugarcane and sorghum, and giant dusty tracts of abandoned farmland, ruined by drought, erosion, and nutrient degradation.

Charlie watched a passing village, thinking how easy it would be to make all of this disappear. Mancala was a hundred thousand square kilometers, a little smaller than the state of Pennsylvania. There were two main urban centers: Amara, the city he had just left, and Mungaza, the city where he was going. Each had populations over eight hundred thousand. A single plane, making a few dozen passes with a four-hundred-gallon aerosol spray tank, could depopulate
either city in a matter of hours. For the whole country, it could probably be done with ten or twelve planes in a single night.

He watched the villages through the train window as the capital neared, thinking about what he couldn’t see: demographics:
The war of the future isn’t going to be about terrorism or oil or nuclear power. The real war is going to be about demographics
. His father’s words.

Mancala was a fertile country, with green hills and wide, deep rivers that emptied into a huge freshwater lake. But it was a poor nation, with one of the lowest per-capita incomes in the world. Life expectancy at birth was about forty-one years, he had learned. The country’s once-explosive growth had leveled off in recent months, despite a birth rate of more than six and a half children per woman. The reasons were those Charlie had seen elsewhere on the continent: a deadly combination of malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS, along with insufficient medical care. Mancala had depended on aid from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but the IMF had stopped its aid disbursements two years ago because of concerns about corruption and individual donors had followed suit. In many of the smaller cities now, there was no social welfare or any kind of safety net. If people didn’t have money, they didn’t eat.

Those were problems that had repeated themselves for decades. But as the train approached the capital, Charlie began to notice other things, odd things that drew him out of his thoughts: clusters of cookie-cutter, single-story, manufactured bunkhouses; several dozen rows of towers topped by three-bladed propellors that he recognized as wind turbines; a chain-link, razor-wire fence encircling what seemed to be a giant, open-pit mine; and, several times, as they got closer, groups of four or five people lying in the fields, most of them young. All of them dead.

The train slowed through the bustling shanty towns of the suburbs. Young men ran alongside; some clung to the sides of the cars or climbed up onto the roofs. He heard their footsteps stamping overhead. Out the window was a sea of cardboard, mud-brick, and tin dwellings, mounds of trash, dozens of barefoot people watching. The sun was beginning to set. Another day ending. October 3.

Charlie thought back to his questions.
What is going to happen? When is it going to happen? How could he stop it?
He had answered the first two. Now he had only the third to work out.

The Administrator typed his message on the quantum-encrypted Internet network as the Lincoln limousine wound along a two-lane coast road to his office. “Request meeting. 10:30
A.M
. PST tomorrow,” he wrote. Pressed “Send.”

Perry Gardner had traveled this route along the Oregon coast nearly every morning during his thirty years as CEO and founder of Gardner Systems, one of the world’s most lucrative corporations. Last December, he had yielded his CEO title to the company’s COO, so that he could focus his attentions on the Gardner Foundation, which he co-directed with his wife.

That was the story he had given out, a story that had been dutifully reported throughout the media. Since its founding six years ago, the Gardner Foundation had invested billions on projects in the Third World—health care, biotechnology, telecommunications, and the burgeoning field of telemedicine.

But the real reason he had stepped back was to live “a life of greater purpose,” as he had said to himself on a number of occasions, that would make the world his daughter’s generation inherited a better place. To oversee a humanitarian initiative that he had nicknamed the “World Series.” It was a project that would turn the wheel of history, a process that would eventually solve the ages-old, seemingly insoluble problems of the “developing” world.

Douglas Chase had made the transfer arrangements as requested. But Gardner wanted to meet with Isaak Priest one more time before the opening pitch. To look into his eyes. To receive his final assurance that everything was operational and on schedule. Priest’s written dispatches had taken on a strangely remote tone over the past week. Gardner wanted to see his partner face to face once more. Just to make sure he could trust him to carry this out. After the opening pitch, of course, it wouldn’t matter. Isaak Priest would then no longer be necessary.

CHARLES MALLORY STEPPED OFF
the train one stop before the Mungaza Central station. He slung his bag over his right shoulder and walked out into the cool, crowded street, keeping his head down. If they had been anticipating his arrival, they would’ve had surveillance at the airport and the main rail station. The air in the Mungaza suburb was smoky from cooking meats and rank with human odors. Hundreds of people loitered in front of the station—children, beggars, hucksters, homeless men and women, onlookers from the nearby shanty towns. Shadow cities, built on dreams, by people who had come to the capital in search of better lives. Almost 90 percent of the urban population of Mancala lived in slums, he had heard—same as in Ethiopia, Malawi, Uganda, and elsewhere.

Wearing a work shirt, beige cotton pants, and rubber shoes, he strode toward a pair of beat-up Subaru taxis. Got in the back seat of one. The driver was smoking a clove cigarette, listening to Afro-pop music. He looked as if he hadn’t had a fare in weeks.

“City center,” Charles Mallory said.

The driver seemed tired. His eyes were red. He pulled the cab from the curb, tapping his horn several times to clear the mob, then turned right, aiming them toward the city. After several minutes, the driver turned down the music. They were on a rough dirt road in a neighborhood of crumbling mud brick apartments.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“Canada. Toronto.”

“What do you do?”

“Water projects. How are things in the city these days?”

“Okay.” Mallory saw the driver’s red-rimmed eyes watching him in the rear-view mirror. “ ‘Okay’?”

“Some people wouldn’t say that. Some people are scared.”

“Why would people be scared?”

He shrugged, still looking at him. “Don’t you know what’s going on?”

“No. Do you?”

The driver didn’t respond. His eyes went back to the road. A minute later, he turned the music up. The sun was spreading its final light behind the tin-roofed houses. Soon the streets took on a pleasant, familiar chaos: a wild jumble of traffic—buses, cars, bicycles, donkey carts, rickshaws; a din of voices; smells of roasting meats. The sidewalks were full of vendors, their produce and crafts spread out on mats. Children hawking bananas, bottled water, cell phone cards.

“This is fine here,” Charlie said, when traffic reached a standstill. He stopped to buy a bottle of water from a sidewalk vendor, a boy of seven or eight, and drank it as he made his way toward Ayah Street.

Downtown, he saw more and more white men. Heard British and Australian accents. Men sitting in café fronts, drinking beer. Contractors, presumably, waiting for something to begin.

The first meeting was at an apartment on Ayah Street, in a lower-middle-class residential neighborhood. Chaplin, Mallory’s chief of operations, had rented a dozen houses and apartments, and purchased four vehicles. He had also helped arrange for Charles Mallory’s cover, as a relief worker with an organization called Omega Aqua Inc., which treated drinking water to prevent the spread of cholera and established water committees to monitor and maintain wells.

Chaplin had also made arrangements for the other members of the team. There were three of them: Nadra Nkosi, a former military intelligence officer, who had been raised in Mancala; Chidi Okoro, his communications and information specialist; and Jason Wells, the only other American, a former Special Forces officer and military strategist, and the only other light-skinned member of the team. For Mallory, five was the perfect number to carry out an operation like this. But only if it was
this
five.

Jason also had access to a couple of dozen “per service” contractors who could help, if necessary. But Charlie didn’t want to use them. Every outsider was a risk.
There was weakness in numbers
, he often thought.

He scanned the street and windows as he made his way to the rented apartment. Walked past it once first. Then stood outside Room 207, and he looked at his watch: 7:19. He twisted the knob.
Locked the door behind him. It was a cheap, three-room apartment, sparsely furnished. He glanced in the bedroom as he walked toward the kitchen, saw a bare mattress and small suitcase on the floor.

“Greetings,” Chaplin said. The two men shook hands. Charlie sat, and Chaplin poured him a cup of tea from a kettle on the stove. He was a careful, methodical man, the most organized person Charles Mallory knew.

On the table was a file folder. Charlie opened it. Inside was their meeting itinerary for the next three days and several maps of the city and surrounding country.

“Update. Your brother arrived in Switzerland. He’s safe. Writing.”

“Good.”

“Chidi passed your message on to Sandra Oku. The plasmids are stored with the vaccines, as you said. She identified the location. Wells is down on the border right now with Nadra, trying to infiltrate. We’ll know by morning.”

“All right. Good.”