Viral

by James Lilliefors

  He had published two installments of the story in The Weekly American. The more recent story, about the two impoverished West African nations, had, for reasons he didn’t understand, elicited denials from some prominent philanthropists. It had also prompted an anonymous, mean-spirited e-mail campaign to Roger Church, Jon Mallory’s editor at The Weekly American. All of which had made him suspect that he was on to something he didn’t yet understand.

  NINE

  Thursday, September 17

  CHARLES MALLORY PARKED HIS rented Peugeot 406 a block and a half from Promenade des Anglais, locked it, and walked along the sidewalk toward the water. It was a brisk, bright afternoon in the South of France, normally his favorite time of year in this city. He was dressed in khaki slacks, loafers, and a navy blue polo shirt.

  He turned onto the Promenade and walked east, passing the Hotel Negresco, the familiar markets and cafes, coming finally to the building marked 32 1/2, the five-story apartment house where Frederick Collins lived.

  He walked around to the back, pressed a six-digit combination on the entry gate pad, and pushed his way in. Took the steps, not the elevator, to an apartment on the fifth floor. Used his key, locked the door behind him. The room was clean, modest, and sparsely furnished. He checked the computerized entry monitor just inside the foyer closet, which recorded each time the door had opened and closed. No activity since he had left, September 12, 1328 hours. No one had been in the apartment.

  Charlie walked across the living room and unlocked the French doors, which opened onto a shallow terrace. He stepped out and stood against the railing, breathing the cool Mediterranean breeze for several long moments, watching the turquoise sparkles of the Bay of Angels across the road and the beach. And, briefly, Charlie allowed himself to remember something he had blocked from his thoughts. An evening that had begun a little like this, that wasn’t supposed to have happened. An evening when Frederick Collins was still safe in this city, free to come and go as he pleased.

  But he had to turn away from those thoughts, he knew. There was only one direction now, one appointment to keep. Everything in his life had coalesced into one objective. One moment. He locked the doors again and pulled the curtains. In the bedroom, he slid open a drawer and found Collins’s Glock 17 9mm handgun, loaded with hollow-point bullets. He slid the weapon into the front of his pants, covering it with his polo shirt, and went out again. Down the stairs to the street, north several blocks, then east. He made a turn into an alley flanked by storage bays and warehouses, certain that they had picked him up on satellite-mounted cameras by now. He had provided them ample opportunity. If they had been able to track Frederick Collins to Kampala, they would know to track him here. He had made that easier for them, using Collins’s credit card at the airport and walking through several outdoor public spaces without wearing a cap or a hat.

  He stopped in front of a metal door numbered 127 and used his key, jiggled it in the lock and entered. The four-room space smelled of sawdust and paint thinner. He’d converted this apartment into a woodworker’s shop. Cabinet-making was the part-time job that Frederick Collins did when he was here in Nice.

  Charlie lowered the blinds of the front window and twisted the wand so the slats were just past horizontal. In the pantry closet was a lifelike partial mannequin and two pillows. He carried them to the old easy chair in the main room and stretched a blanket over them. He set up the room, then, exactly as he had planned in his head during the Air France flight north from Africa. When he was done, he sat at the table in the tiny windowless kitchen and placed the weapon in front of him, gripping the trigger-hold. What followed would be the most difficult part. But it was necessary.

  Eventually they would have to come after him; he was certain of that. If he kept moving, they would keep following, to see where he would lead them. If he stayed here, though, if he waited, they would have no choice; sooner or later they would have to come for him. And when they did, he would find out what he needed to know. He would learn the missing piece and, he hoped, understand what had gone wrong.

  He sat in the kitchen as the breeze shivered the metal slats in the main room and the shadows lengthened and he listened. Waited.

  AND, FOR MOMENTS at a time, he thought again of Anna Vostrak. Her dark, reassuring eyes looking at his. The smell of curry spices from a Promenade restaurant reminded him of the last time she had come here—September 1—to visit Frederick Collins. They had sat in a café on Promenade des Anglais, drinking red wine as the night settled, the sea breeze cooled, the lights brightened in the hills above the harbor. They’d talked over a leisurely dinner about their shared project. About the contact she knew in Germany, the investigator who might be able to help him. To help them. A man named Gebhard Keller. And then they had let it go. Anna had looked lovely, her fine black hair lifting up occasionally off her bare shoulders in the breeze. Walking back, she had stopped, held his hand and kissed him. They walked with an expectant step after that, excited, it seemed, by the freedom they had given each other.

  Inside, they began to kiss, to take off clothes, as if they had to do it then or the chance would disappear forever. They had made love with a slow urgency, savoring the feelings, the shared need that would be temporarily satisfied. Afterward, as the curtains billowed in around the French doors and the street sounds returned, she had said, “This wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?”

  He had closed his eyes and tried not to answer.

  She had whispered, “It can’t happen again, can it? Until this business is over.”

  The memories were difficult, as she had warned him they would be. But they were also a way to pass time now, a trick that he sometimes used to stay alert—and a diversion, a safe harbor from thoughts of what had happened in Kampala. The more recent memories. Of Paul Bahdru. Of what had gone wrong.

  He sat at the table, listening to the sounds outside, his right hand holding the weapon. Waiting.

  “We shouldn’t have done this,” she had said, sitting up, turned away from him.

  “What’s the point of saying it, though? Or thinking it?”

  He leaned on an elbow, watching her.

  “Because it’s a distraction. We can’t afford distractions. Also, it’ll hurt when I have to go.” She looked at him, her sober eyes glinting with a faint glow of the streetlight. “And you know I don’t have any choice. I’ll have to go.”

  “But you’ll come back.” He turned away. “Or I’ll visit you.”

  “You know that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We can make whatever reality we want.”

  “Can we?”

  “Of course.”

  But he knew now that his words would never come to pass—not as he had intended. Because Frederick Collins was going to die today. There was no alternative. After “this business” was finished.

  This business.

  He remembered Paul Bahdru’s voice, then, the pleasant lilting pitch, a musical sound as distinctive as a fingerprint. A sound that he would never hear again. This feels like a calling now, Charles. It’s all passed along, to witnesses. They think if there are no witnesses, then no one can prove anything. Telling him things. Trusting him. If something goes wrong, you do what I would have done.

  A voice in his head. Words that only two people ever heard. That was the arrangement. Maybe they had been wrong about that, too.

  Soon, he would have answers. They were coming to him. Right here to this room.

  “Trains,” Paul had told him, speaking in Swahili. “There is a transportation infrastructure, connected with a copper mine. Very simple but effective. I don’t know where it is, but I’m told it’s not far from a river ‘named for a monkey,’ and the river is the shape of a backwards S.”

  “But you said there is a trick.”

  “Yes. The trick is they do not bring in outsiders. Who might see things they shouldn’t see.”

  “The work is all done by local people.”

  “Yes. During the first stages, they are
hired for several days at a time. It is the only work that is available, so they take it, naturally. Some of them are housed in employee barracks. The men work long hours for a few days. Then they are transferred, bused to another site. Sometimes they end up going to three or four sites. They are treated well. Or indifferently. But they must work.”

  “For how long?”

  “A week or two, at most.”

  “Then they get sick.”

  “Yes. There are two parts. None of them knows about the second part. That’s the trick. They’re part of a mechanism.”

  “And the mechanism is controlled by this man.”

  “That’s what I am told. A man called Isaak Priest.”

  It was well after midnight when Charles Mallory finally heard the footsteps that he had been waiting for. Purposefully quiet. A soft sound of rubber on asphalt that to untrained ears might have seemed to be the wind fluttering an awning or an animal’s steps. Except that it came and went with a regularity that he recognized: sneaker soles moving through the alley. Step step, step step. Stopping. Louder, closer, passing right by the open front window, but across the alley. The footsteps slowing briefly. Then moving faster again, becoming quieter as they reached the next block. Then nothing.

  Charlie felt his senses sharpen, acclimating now to this threat. He listened more acutely, gripping the butt of the Glock, shutting out everything else—the distant voices, the occasional sound of car engines on the Promenade—picturing the man walking in shadows to the next block, turning south. Circling the building, making certain there was no other entrance.

  It was four and a half minutes later when he heard the sound again. Rubber soles on asphalt, coming back through the alley shadows toward the carpenter shop. From the same direction as before.

  Charlie was outside now. He had hurried across the alley and was standing in a sunken entranceway, opposite the shop. Picturing what the predator would have seen if he had looked through the window with binoculars or a gun sight: a man seated beneath a blanket in an easy chair against the far wall. The man would appear to be wearing headphones and a ball cap. Leaning forward. The only light in the room was from the dial of an old stereo on an end table by the chair.

  He knew that there were only a handful of people capable of tracing him so quickly, of accessing the satellite technology that could locate and identify him. He would know in three or four minutes if his guess was correct.

  The man would have to decide; or more likely, he already had. There was only one entrance and only one window. The man knew that now. He had already considered his options, assessed the risks.

  All but one of the other alley windows were dark. The exception was a second-story loft four doors down, where someone was playing heavy-metal music.

  Charlie pressed into the wall, as the shadow of the figure moved closer. Listening to the barely audible scrape of the rubber. Step, step. Stop. Step, step. As the man came closer, Charlie began to recognize him. A small, wiry man, wearing a dark jacket, black pants, a knit cap. A man who went by the name Albert Hahn, although his real name was Ahmed Hassan. He was one of the “cousins,” an operative Charles Mallory had learned about some seventeen months ago. A “specialist.” Hired as a consultant for a CIA/NSA operation called Tribal Eyes, a surveillance project aimed at finding terrorists in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  Charles Mallory watched him.

  The man had several options, but only one good one. He could try to enter the building first and do his work cleanly inside. But that would be risky; Mallory could be waiting for him. For the same reason, he also probably wouldn’t chance walking or standing in front of the window. A safer scenario would be to wait until his target came out, but Mallory suspected that they wanted this done quickly. This evening. Using an explosive or incendiary device lacked precision; more importantly, it wasn’t Ahmed Hassan’s M.O. More likely, he would find a spot in the deepest shadows along the west side of the alley, where he could have a clear shot at the figure in the chair through the window.

  Maybe afterward he would retrieve a “souvenir” and send it to Charlie’s liaison in Washington. Maybe. First, though, he would stand at a spot in the alley and home in on the figure through a telescopic rifle sight.

  Charlie had already determined where that spot would be: a recess along the west wall of the alley at a diagonal, at approximately a fifty-degree angle to the shop. He was standing four feet from it now, waiting.

  The man slid sideways along the wall of the alley, nearer to where Charlie stood. He was carrying something flush against the right side of his body. Step, step.

  He was less than ten feet away when he suddenly stopped and turned, looking behind him. Charles Mallory held his breath. A small shadow moved along the base of a building. A cat, perhaps.

  The man resumed his motion—not quite walking—along the shuttered back of a warehouse, taking short, deliberate sideways steps. Approaching the spot. Mallory knew what he was feeling. Understood how focused he was on accomplishing the thing he had come here to do. The man stopped tight against the wall, sized up the arrangement. He lifted a rifle. He was close enough now that Charlie could smell the damp wool of his jacket and see the details of his gun—an M24 military rifle, the kind used by American Army snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Hassan moved sideways a step, then another, slightly shorter, step. Charlie saw his dark, cold eyes, concentrating on the window. His eyelashes dropping and rising. He saw him lift the gun again and aim. Sighting his prey. He lowered it, moved another step. Focused, insanely focused. Charlie held his breath again. When the man moved once more, he raised his right hand and fired the Glock, seven inches from Hassan’s left temple.

  The rifle fell to the asphalt first, then Hassan on top of it.

  Charlie quickly checked the man’s pockets for a wallet, a cell phone, cash, anything at all. Nothing. His pockets were empty. He left him there and hurried through the alley to the north street end, then a block and a half to the Peugeot. He drove through the busy night streets toward the harbor.

  They had surprised him in Kampala. This time, he had won. But Frederick Collins was going to have to disappear now. For good. And, for a while at least, Charles Mallory would have to disappear, too.

  TEN

  THE WEEKLY AMERICAN OFFICES were in the Foggy Bottom section of Northwest Washington, a few blocks from the State Department and about a half mile from the National Mall. The magazine occupied the first three floors of a small 1960s office building: advertising and circulation on the first floor, editorial on the second, executive offices on the third.

  Jon Mallory kept a cubbyhole office on the second floor, which he shared with another writer. Jon visited the offices once or twice a week, mostly to talk with Roger Church, his editor. Offices made him uneasy.

  Once he finished going through his e-mails, he knocked twice on Church’s office door, which was always one-third open. Church was a rangy, soft-spoken Brit with a mop of silvery hair, once an almost legendary international reporter who seemed trapped now in an editor’s job.

  He looked up from his computer and motioned for Jon to come in and close the door. As was customary, his tie had been loosened three or four inches, his shirt sleeves rolled up below his elbows.

  “Busy?”

  “No. Please.”

  Church, who always seemed willing to engage in conversation, had the restless energy of a twenty-five-year-old and the weathered, lined face of an old man. Jon Mallory admired him.

  “A lot of e-mails about your blog this morning.”

  “Or lack of it.”

  “Yeah. People were expecting something.”

  “I know, sorry. I hit a snag yesterday. Maybe I was a little premature in writing what I did.”

  “No need to be sorry. As I said the other day, I’m with you on this. Nothing I’ve heard has changed that.”

  Jon looked at him. “Okay,” he said. “What’ve you heard?”

  Church showed
a rare smile and shifted in his chair. “One of our board members weighed in,” he said. “Same concerns you’ve already heard. We’re creating ‘misleading impressions.’ Raising unnecessary questions.”

  Jon could guess who: Kenneth Luskin. Billionaire investor. Executive board member of the Gardner Foundation. Colleague of Perry Gardner.

  “People aren’t reading the whole story, he says,” Church went on. “They’re just seeing what the blogs and wire services pick up.”

  “I hope that’s not true.”

  “Some are, some aren’t.” Church stroked the sides of his chin. “I understand it, Jon. It goes with the territory. Any foundation that’s as large and influential as they are is going to be the subject of controversy from time to time. And considering all the good they do, they’re naturally going to be defensive. That’s business, and this is journalism.”

  “Okay.”

  “What I like about your stories is they don’t take a point of view. You’re writing about people. These larger issues are background. Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with letting people know a little about how philanthropies operate. How charitable foundations invest their money. I’d like to see a third story.”

  “Good. I would, too.”

  Church looked out toward the State Department building rising above the university offices and a parking garage. “You know, Jon, there was a man I used to know called Arthur Caswell. A great reporter who once worked for British intelligence in Africa.” He absently tugged at his shirt sleeve. “One of his pet theories was that over the past several decades, the West—America in particular—has become overwhelmed by what he called moral laziness. He characterized it as an epidemic that worsened proportionally as the world’s problems worsened. He had this idea about active endorsement versus passive endorsement, and how we’ve increasingly come to passively endorse some very terrible things. He’d give the example of what happened at the end of World War II—the fire-bombings and the nuclear annihilation of Japanese cities, which killed tens of thousands of civilians—as active endorsement.”