Viral (41 page)

Charlie read this last memo more carefully. If the report from Franklin had included these details, would he have gotten here in Mancala two or three days earlier?
Maybe
. What was so sensitive that they didn’t want him to see?
Not clear
. Then he came to the bottom of the second page. Saw the name of the man who had shut down the Lifeboat Inquiry. Who had signed his name to the memo. A name redacted in the other version, even though he knew who it was.

Colonel Dale McCormack. National Intelligence Director.

The man who had closed down his father’s operation, just days before Stephen Mallory died. Who was “threatened by it,” as Anna Vostrak had surmised.

Except it
wasn’t
Dale McCormack’s name that had been typed and signed at the end of this memorandum.

Mallory looked again, staring in disbelief.

He held the paper up to the light of the flickering fluorescent ceiling bulb to make sure he was seeing the words correctly. No.
It couldn’t be
.

He pulled fifty Mancalan shillings from his pocket and left them on the table, then hurried back into the street. Began to run.
I got all of this wrong. All of it!

He needed to find Nadra and Jason. To change up their plans. To find out what had really happened. Two blocks. Two and a half blocks. He stopped. Looked at the memo again, to make sure.

The man who had written the memo shutting down the Lifeboat Inquiry wasn’t Dale McCormack at all.

It was someone he had not even suspected.
Couldn’t
have suspected.

Someone who had helped create a new identity for his brother just a few days ago, and supplied a passport for that identity. Who had given Frederick Collins a back story and official documents.

How could I not have known?

He looked one more time, then began to run faster through the Mungaza streets.

The man who had shut down his father’s operation. Who had written the memorandum.

It wasn’t Dale McCormack.

It was Richard Franklin.

AMONG HIS OTHER TASKS,
Chidi Okoro ran the company’s “mobile communications command post,” as he called it, which meant he monitored communications and kept tabs on all members of the team. He had four monitors set up in his rented apartment on 3 Elms Road, a more secure-looking place than any of Mallory’s apartments.

Charlie, sweating in the cool air, his shirt wet, rapped on the door until he answered. Okoro reluctantly opened, looking at him warily through his thick glasses. He latched the door behind him.

Mallory recognized the image on one of the monitors. The chalet. He had already heard, then.

“What happened?”

“Raided. Yesterday morning.”

“Why didn’t we hear about it sooner?”

Okoro didn’t reply. Charlie asked again, his heart pounding.

“Wasn’t discovered until sometime after the fact.”

“What happened?”

“Armed gunmen.”

“Ben Wilson?”

“He was killed,” he said in an even voice.

Mallory winced, feeling overwhelmed. He’d made the worst mistake of his life trusting Franklin. First Paul Bahdru. Now his brother.

“Hassan.”

“Apparently.”

“
Damn
it!” he said. Then Okoro gave him the rest: The video feed had been knocked out first, so there was nothing recorded for them to see. Somehow, the perpetrators had rushed and killed both sentries, then Ben Wilson in his room. It had happened overnight, before they had made their strikes in Mungaza.

“And my brother? They got him?”

“Unaccounted for.”

“Can we track him?”

“Theoretically. I’ve not been able to pick up a signal, though.”

Wilson had injected a bio-chip under the skin of Jon Mallory’s right palm with a syringe, as Charlie had requested. The bio-chip was a GPS device about the size of a grain of rice. Okoro called up a locator map on the monitor, homed in on the map of Switzerland.

“Nothing,” he said. Charlie looked over his shoulder, his heart racing. “I can try the history trace.”

“Do it!”

He clicked several keys, paused, then clicked some more. Charlie saw the map shrink, and broaden, encompassing a larger region—surrounding countries, the Mediterranean, the Alps, all of Europe. Now there was a green trail, indicating satellite tracking, similar to a radar blip. The flashing arrow moved south, from Switzerland through France and Italy, showing date and time for each location.

“Plane route,” Okoro said. He enlarged the map further as the arrow dipped in a southeasterly direction, over the Mediterranean and then above the African continent. Over the Sudan, a corner of the Congo, Uganda, Tanzania. Stopping in Kenya. And then moving south. To Mancala.

To Mungaza.

Then the signal stopped moving. But it continued to blink.

“That’s it,” Okoro said, after a long time. “End of the road.”

Charlie looked at his impassive expression, the green light of the computer screen coloring his face, blinking on his lenses.
“What
? He’s
here?”

“Evidently.”

But where? And
why?

“Can we pinpoint it?”

“If it’s still operational. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to. Let me zoom in.” This was technology that Mallory’s company had developed and Okoro had been testing. It wasn’t foolproof yet.

The fact that his brother was here in Mungaza didn’t make him feel any better. But it didn’t make him feel any worse, either. On the plus side, it meant that he was probably still alive. The negative side he didn’t want to think about. They had moved him closer to Charles Mallory for a reason, as an end-game strategy.

He knew that, and he could imagine what they had brought him here for. If the Hassan Network was responsible, they were surely
planning something terrible. A payback. But he wasn’t going to think about that.

“Okay. Let me match this,” Okoro said, at last. Charlie watched the monitor, trying to stay patient. “Here we go, then. It’s southwest of Mungaza. Looks like about nine kilometers.”

“What’s there?”

He didn’t answer at first. “Let me locate the exact coordinates.” He focused the map more tightly, called up a fix on the screen. Without any inflection in his voice, he said, “It’s the old prison grounds. Mungaza Prison site.”

The outlaws
. What had Jason Wells said?
I think it’s connected with the Hassan Network
. It had to be. Maybe it was all coming together now. The compartmentalized operations were showing how they were connected, as he knew they eventually would. But it was not a reassuring discovery.

BY
2:17, O
KORO
had downloaded the satellite feeds and printed out five sets of aerials. Twenty-one minutes later, the five of them were gathered in a fifth-floor room at the Oasis Hotel, studying them.

Charlie sat with Wells at a round maple-toned dining table. Nadra Nkosi was on one end of the sleeper sofa, leaning forward, watching them intently. Chaplin was at the other end, Okoro sitting on a tub chair. The room smelled of dirty carpet.

Chaplin seemed uneasy with the new development. Charlie was feeling that way, too, but for different reasons. Something about the meeting didn’t feel right to him. Didn’t feel right at all.

“Recommendation,” Jason said. “Four of us in, one out.”

“I’m in,” Nadra said.

“No,” Charlie said. He sighed, thinking about what was planned for this evening.

All four stared at him, waiting.

“No, why?” Jason Wells said.

“We can’t risk this. We can’t do it this way.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“We can’t all be involved in this.”

There was a long silence.

“We
are
involved,” Nadra said.

“No. This is not our mission, it’s not why we’re here. This is where
I have to draw a line.” Mallory stood. He imagined for a moment things going very wrong. Worse than they had gone already. They hadn’t come this far to suddenly risk everything. This was
his
mistake. He would have to deal with it. “I’m going to go in by myself. I screwed up. The rest of you have to stay with the primary mission.”

Only Okoro seemed neutral about that.

“I’m with Nadra,” Wells said. “We were supposed to protect your brother. We didn’t.
We
screwed up.”

“No.” Mallory closed his eyes for a moment.
Focus. Work this out
. He heard the ticking of the clock in his head. “No one screwed up. They surprised us. But this is my responsibility. I’m going to go in alone.”

“What if you’re outvoted?” Nadra said. She was standing now.

Charlie knew he was in a gray area. Even though he was technically in charge of this group, his policy had always been to run the business like a democracy, and his employees had for the most part held him to that.

“Look at it another way,” Wells said. “They took out Ben Wilson. One sixth of our team. And two other men. That deserves a response.”

Nadra nodded. “It
is
a team. No one goes off alone.”

“Then we wait until the primary mission is accomplished,” Charlie said.

“I don’t think we can afford that,” Wells said.

No. Of course not
.

“It’s all part of the same mission, anyway,” Chaplin said, sighing his assent. “Your brother’s role is to get the story out there, isn’t it? If we don’t do everything we can to save him, we’re jeopardizing the story. Which is at the heart of the operation.”

Mallory looked at Chidi Okoro, who always agreed with Chaplin. But his expression was blank, his eyes giant behind the glasses. Charlie thought of his father’s eyes, steady, urging him forward.

Jason Wells said, “Anyway, it’s only three twenty-five. Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t we do this and come back and go after Priest?”

“That’s assuming a lot, isn’t it?” Mallory said.

“No. All it’s assuming is that we can do this,” Nadra said. “Which we can.”

Mallory exchanged a look with Jason.
It’s assuming my brother’s still alive
,
too
, he thought, but didn’t say.

“Okay. We’re a team, but I’m still the one going in. You can be back-up.”

BY
3:46,
JASON
Wells had established tactics. It would, again, be a three-person operation, with Chaplin and Okoro staying behind. The prison compound was about twenty acres in total, Wells figured, and roughly rectangular-shaped, surrounded on all sides by a ten-foot mud-brick wall topped with concertina wire. The old stone prison building itself took up about four acres of that, a rectangle within the larger rectangle, with a courtyard at its center. Also on site was a stone chaplain’s house and a recently built row of barracks with maybe two dozen rooms.

“I don’t see any towers. Security cameras,” Nadra said.

“No. I don’t think there are any,” Jason said.

That was odd—completely different from Priest’s set-ups, as if the two were unrelated. Charlie studied the aerials some more. There were two entrances to the compound: the front gate and a side delivery entrance, where trucks went in after dark with people kidnapped from the streets.

It had been Nadra’s suggestion to try going in on a truck. But Wells thought it was too dangerous. “None of the people who go in on those trucks come back out. Who knows what happens in there? I think we should take advantage of the lack of sophisticated security. Because there aren’t any cameras, we could probably climb over the wall.”

“What about the razor?” Charlie said.

“That’s a problem. Make it Plan C. Plan B would be blowing a hole in the wall. It’s mud brick; we could easily blast a hole in it with one of the remaining explosives.”

“But we’d be announcing our arrival,” Nadra said.

“Yes. That’s why it’s Plan B.”

“What’s Plan A?” Charlie asked.

“Going in through the storm drainage pipe.”

He pointed to the aerial, to the corner where the pipe protruded from the outer wall. “It appears to be about three and a half feet in
diameter. Wide enough to crawl through. Drains storm-water out into the river. There’s probably a grate inside. Whether it’s secured or not, we don’t know. It’s not a sure thing by any measure. But it would be the least obvious.”

Mallory nodded. “Why is it a three-man operation?” he asked.

“Nadra and I will create the diversion once you get in.”

“How?”

“Explosives at the front. Plan B.”

AT
4:39
, CHARLES
Mallory came out of the woods and walked across the shallow river through the speckles of afternoon sunlight. He moved in a crouch along the opposite bank, looking for sensors or cameras, anything they might have missed from the aerials. But he saw nothing.

He was dressed in jeans and a dark sweatshirt, wearing cotton gloves, carrying a flashlight in his right hand and the 9mm handgun in the right pocket of his sweatshirt. The first problem he had noticed from across the river: The pipe did not end at river level as it seemed to in aerials. The opposite bank had eroded, and the pipe was a good five feet above the ground, maybe more. He wouldn’t just be able to crawl into it.

Charlie came to a spot directly below the opening of the drain pipe and looked both ways along the rust-colored mud-brick wall. Nothing. He stood and reached, closing his fingers on the bottom of the pipe entrance, the flashlight still in his right hand. Felt the gritty, rusted iron. He lifted himself up like he was doing a pull-up, raising his head above the bottom lip of the pipe: pure darkness, no light at the other end. He tossed in the flashlight, then pulled himself as high as he could and jammed his right elbow up into the pipe. Held on, used it as a lever to yank his left elbow in. Tried to move from side to side, pulling himself up and in. It almost worked.

Then his right elbow lost traction and he fell back, felt his left forearm scrape across the rusted edge of the pipe opening, and he was out, the metal tearing a cut through the sleeve of the sweatshirt.

He tried again, pulling himself up. Planting his right elbow and pivoting his left arm into the pipe. Using his elbows to lift himself in. Moving in tiny increments this time, until his center of gravity was up inside the pipe. He lay still for a moment, breathing
deeply. The pipe was three and a half feet in diameter, as Jason had said. It smelled damp, an old and slightly unpleasant odor. Charlie began to crawl forward into the darkness, rocking from side to side, advancing his elbows several inches at a time. Within three or four minutes, he was engulfed in darkness. There was no light behind him anymore, none in front. He lay for a moment on his belly and listened. The sounds were faint and distant: what seemed to be a periodic scratching sound that might have been the footsteps of animals, or something catching in a breeze, and a persistent low buzzing that he couldn’t identify. He began to crawl again. Ten yards. Fifteen yards. Twenty yards. He stopped to rest. Started again. Estimating how far he had gone, picturing where the pipe would come out inside the prison building. Moving side to side, inches at a time.