Viral (36 page)

“We think they’re looking at using four to six airfields throughout the country,” Jason Wells said. “Not all of them are of equal value, obviously—to them or to us. We assess that primarily in terms of population. The one nearest the capital is going to be responsible for Mungaza, which is one tenth of the total population of the country. So that’s target one. The aerials indicate that at least two tanks of what we suspect are viral properties are already in place. We have no photographic record of these four-hundred-gallon tanks at any other airfields. We start with what we know, and we neutralize it.”

Okoro, who had created the aerial models, watched Chaplin through his thick lenses. Wells said, “Most of the urban populations are in two cities. If we were able to immobilize this air strip, it would be a major set-back.”

“Wouldn’t they have some kind of back-up?” Nadra said.

“Possibly,” Wells said. “But that’s a secondary consideration. The primary objective is to neutralize the poison. If we can get to it one day ahead of time, we’re winning the game.”

Chaplin was frowning. “But even if this works tonight, can’t they go up using a different tank? Couldn’t they escalate, push it up a day, or a few hours?”

“They could,” Wells said. “But the thing is, I don’t think they’re going to go up in this weather. They’d lose effectiveness by thirty, thirty-five percent. Which they can’t afford. It’s the same as with crop-dusting. It’s all weather-dependent. The aerosol goes much farther and faster with a wind,” he said. The muscles in his neck flexed involuntarily. “But it has to be the right wind.

“So we have to go for maximum impact tonight. Neutralize the two tanks. And, if we do, and we’re lucky, some of them may crawl out of their holes and let us see what they look like.”

“Targets,” Mallory said.

“There’s a fuel tank on the airfield,” Wells said, pointing to it on his print-out. “Close enough to the fencing that Nadra or I can get an explosive in there. The actual damage may not be huge. But that will divert attention from the hangar, where the viral tanks are.”

Chaplin’s brow was furrowed again. “But is there any sort of collateral risk—the aerosol viral property blowing up and getting loose?”

“No. We’re pinpointing very specific targets. Primary objective: neutralize.”

“And what happens after the first night?”

“We won’t know until it happens.”

Charles Mallory smiled. He had been thinking about Jason Wells’s plan ever since leaving the Blue Star Cafe.

“How are
they
looking at this?” Nadra asked. “What’s in their heads?”

“They’re planning on it happening. The virus will spread within hours to the borders, where vaccine and anti-viral supplies are in place. Health centers on the border will form a buffer zone. Travel will be immediately shut down. Media outlets cut off. The damage will all happen after dark.”

Charlie nodded. It was a logical assumption that the planes would go up at night. They had done it that way during the trials in Sundiata. Nighttime would make the actual operation almost
invisible. Nothing would be seen by the light of day, except the aftermath.
Eight hundred thousand in Mungaza alone
.

“I think I saw part of the clean-up plan yesterday, coming in on the train,” Charlie said.

They all looked at him.

“Oh?” Jason said.

“There’s a huge open-pit copper mine northwest of the city,” he said. “Five or six miles. Chain-link fence around the perimeter. Train tracks leading in and out.”

“
Copper
mine?” Chaplin said.

“Yeah. Except I’m pretty sure that it’s not a copper mine.”

WITHIN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES,
they had agreed on the details of the first night’s mission. Mallory, Wells, Chaplin, and Nadra Nkosi would be the operations team. Okoro would monitor them from his rented room. The operations team would meet again at twelve minutes past ten. Night one objectives: Seven targets as diversions. And neutralize the two tanks.

Charlie walked to his designated apartment, another one-room affair, where he lay on a short, stiff mattress and closed his eyes for a few minutes. He thought about his brother and his father. Heard their voices. Saw their faces.

Then he went back to work, studying the aerial images. He recognized the surveillance apparatus around the airfield and on the edge of the woods: electronic towers equipped with long-range radar and high-definition cameras. Possibly linked to underground sensors—sensors and heat detectors that could pick up motion through the trees, sending an alert to lookouts who would then focus their cameras on the subjects’ locations. That was going to make it difficult for them coming at the airfield through the woods.

The surveillance set-up was sophisticated, not dissimilar from the system created to guard the United States’ two-thousand-mile border with Mexico. A system that, in theory, was foolproof, although in practice highly flawed. The problem with next-generation stuff, Charlie knew, was that the kinks were never all worked out. The primary weakness with this type of set-up was weather, as the U.S. had found after spending billions of dollars on the Mexico project.
When it rained and the wind blew, the sensors became confused and the surveillance was worthless.

But this system was probably more effective. Weather-proofed, developed with an eye toward avoiding the troubles of the Mexican border surveillance. There was another, simple way to disable it if the weather didn’t, though—an idea he had thought about even before Jason Wells suggested it: well-placed sniper bullets could disable each of the five cameras. Charles Mallory finally lay back and allowed himself a brief nap, setting the alarm clock by the bed to nine o’clock.

From his office at the Gardner Foundation complex, Perry Gardner played a feed from the foundation’s weekly executive committee meeting that morning. Routine business. Status reports on projects from the various divisions: a proposal to establish two dozen polio clinics in Kenya and Somalia; partnerships with several East African governments that would teach villagers to filter waterborne parasites from drinking water; the ongoing initiative to find a vaccine for malaria; the distribution of underused vaccines to poor children in East Africa.

More and more, Gardner skipped these meetings, which were run very effectively by his wife, and most other foundation business. As he fast-forwarded through the presentations, he glanced at the clock again. Six minutes to go.

Finally, at 10:20, he clicked off the monitor and walked toward the most remote wing of the Gardner Institute, an underground compound known as Building 67, or the New Technologies Wing. A structure only eleven people were authorized to enter.

Scanners picked up Gardner’s full-body image as he approached, prompting vertical doors to slide open. On the lower level of the building, he entered a ten-foot-by-ten-foot chamber called a DTE, or Data Transfer Environment. The room resembled a steel cube: four walls, ceiling, floor, and the digital immersion unit. Gardner sat and stared straight ahead at the tiny D-I sensors, which scanned his face and irises, detected the vascular patterns in his neck and hands. Once the verification was complete, he gave his verbal cue and the DTE went dark.

Moments later, a smoky light began to drift into the room. The man known as the Administrator stood. As he walked forward into the coalescing light, he smelled the familiar warm evening scents of deep woods and river water on an African breeze.

Isaak Priest was waiting for him in a room at “the Palace” near Mungaza, a spacious old pine-walled lodge room with two wicker chairs and a large open window that afforded a view of moonlight in the eucalyptus trees, and on the swirling waters of the Green Monkey River.

The two men exchanged hellos as if they were in the same room, although in fact they were still 9,200 miles apart. Then they sat in the wicker chairs facing each other, seemingly six feet away. Gardner studied Isaak Priest’s face for a long time.

Eventually, the technology that enabled him to make this visit would be commercially available. The Gardner Foundation’s NTW, which had developed it in tandem with a half dozen other firms, was the only operator of what he called Digital Immersion Technology—a digitized, three-dimensional, holographic environment that realistically mimicked sights, sounds, and smells, allowing the participants to seemingly interact. Eventually, the technology would be used in offices, research labs, medical centers.

“Are you all right?” Gardner finally said.

“Of course. What do you mean?”

“I just want to know that everything’s on schedule.”

“Yes. As we discussed. The viral agents have all been delivered. The vaccines have been distributed. The initiatives, as you know, are proceeding ahead of schedule. One hundred and thirty-seven wind turbines are currently operational. Three solar farms under construction. Everything is set for the World Series.”

“And the first game.”

“On schedule. October 5, as you said. Tomorrow.”

Gardner continued to watch him. Something about his explanation sounded too pat. Almost scripted.

“The president is on board? The transaction completed?”

“Absolutely. As I reported.”

Gardner stood. He looked out the window through his smudged glasses, and he saw what wasn’t there yet: a New Paradigm. A model nation, created in the aftermath of a great tragedy. A nation with
no poverty, no crime. One hundred percent energy self-sufficient. A laboratory for new technologies. For medical research.

The Palace, where they were now meeting, would one day become a research laboratory, where technologies that were being developed in Oregon would be implemented—wireless sensors that could determine cardiovascular health, brain signals, body temperature, blood pressure; implanted chips that would, daily, do the job of an annual physical exam, measuring cardio levels, blood and liver functions, even detecting cancer.

“This was our dream, wasn’t it?” Gardner said, still testing him.

“Yes. The New Paradigm.”

“You seem nervous.”

“No. I’m not.”

“Are you afraid you’re going to fuck up again?”

“Of course not.”

Gardner showed him his thin smile. “Good,” he said. He turned and walked back through the doorway where he had entered the room. Closed it. He stepped out of the DTE and walked to his private office in Building 67. No, it was not likely that Priest would fuck up at this stage. But if he did, there was another man inside who would carry this out. The man named John Ramesh.

JASON WELLS’
H
ONDA
A
CCORD
turned onto Amadi Drive at two minutes before ten, proceeded about fifty yards along the empty street and pulled to the curb in the shadows of a banyan tree. Charlie stepped out from beneath an awning, opened the back door, and slid in. On the floor behind the seat, he saw, were two 7.62 bolt-action Remington M24s with fixed 10-power scopes and another weapon that resembled a stovepipe M-1 rocket-propelled anti-tank gun, only its barrel was narrower. The DPG, Destabilization Propellant Gun. There were also two spray tanks that appeared to be eight or ten gallons apiece.

Wells drove another twenty minutes through the potholed suburbs, making frequent turns and switchbacks, his eyes scanning the roads to make sure no one was following. Finally, he pulled to the curb on a block of 78th Avenue and cut the headlights. Lowered the windows and waited. Power lines buzzed above them. The shadow of a stray dog moved across the street. They were in a neighborhood of small clapboard houses and shady trees. Mallory could see people in the houses. Two minutes after Jason parked, a vehicle pulled from the curb two blocks ahead.

Nadra
.

THE FIRST TWO
plants were easy, as Jason Wells had predicted. They followed Nadra’s dark, late-model Jetta along an increasingly rural dirt road until they came to the scrubby farmland that bordered the northern suburbs. Nadra turned off her lights, then, and she drove by moonlight for another mile, shifting finally to neutral and letting the car drift to a stop under a canopy of trees, avoiding the use of her brakes. Wells did the same, about a quarter mile behind. Mallory and Wells covered Nadra as she ran through a field of weeds and wild grasses, dressed in black, moving in a crouch, two C-4 plastic explosives cradled in her hands.

Charlie knelt in front of the car. Wells crouched fifty yards away to the north, watching her through the scope of his sniper rifle. Triangular alignment, connected by cell phones. Charlie saw Nadra scurry into a field of withering maize stalks, moving toward the tracks south of the train station.

The station had closed at nine, but it was patrolled overnight by a foot guard. It was also possible that there were cameras around the platform or above the tracks, but they hadn’t seen any in Okoro’s aerials. The security post was at the front of the station, and Nadra was approaching from the rear. If the guard began a patrol, Charlie would dial her number and the cell phone would vibrate, warning her. That was their arrangement.

The night air was cool and scented with honeysuckle, the sky full of stars. Lightning bugs glowed in the trees. He watched her scuttle out to the tracks and step over two sets of passenger rails, passing a pair of detached freight cars, and then coming to the unused train line that led to the pit.

Charlie listened: He heard Nadra shifting rocks from the center of the track, working in the shadows, then using a rock to scrape a hole in the dirt underneath. The sound stopped and started, seeming unnaturally loud in the silence. Moments later, he heard the rocks again. Nadra covering the C-4 explosive.

Mallory looked at Jason Wells, who was watching her through his scope. When Wells caught his eye, he heard something else, a clicking sound. Faint, but steady. Becoming louder. Charlie froze. Footsteps on the boardwalk platform were moving toward Nadra.

Jason, crouched on the edge of the maize field, raised his left hand. Charlie reached for the cell phone and pressed Nadra’s number. Seconds later, he heard a scrambling sound. Feet sliding in rocks.