Viral

by James Lilliefors

  “Yes.”

  “Tom Trent, please.”

  “Okay, good. Good, I’m glad you called.” He sounded winded, and sort of weird. Jon wondered if it was him. “Can you meet me in half an hour?”

  “Okay. Where?”

  “I’m just off the Mall now. I can meet you by the merry-go-round in front of the Smithsonian castle in thirty minutes.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  THOMAS TRENT WAS SITTING on the end of a bench in the creeping shadows, staring blankly toward the giant Smithsonian museums across the Mall. He wore an old brown leather jacket, jeans, and scuffed cowboy boots. His collar was upturned, his hair mussed. At first, Jon didn’t recognize him and walked past.

  “Mallory!”

  It was only when Trent stood that he became recognizable: long-legged and limber, his jaw jutting forward slightly. A face he had seen on television countless times. He was older in person, his silver hair thinner, but the trademark pencil-thin mustache and restless blue eyes were unmistakable. He perfunctorily shook Jon Mallory’s hand, and they began to walk. Trent motioning the direction of the Capitol.

  “Your phone message said you wanted to ask me about this so-called TW Report,” he said. “And about Stuart Thames Borholm.”

  “Yes. What can you tell me about them?”

  “Nothing. That isn’t why I came here.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “No.” Trent’s eyes scanned the Mall as they walked—families strolling toward the museums and monuments, people sitting on benches, tossing Frisbees in the grass. “But it was curious that you called. I’ve been working with your brother. You know that, right?”

  “I don’t. No.”

  “Actually, I hired him to help me on something. I’ve since remembered a detail that I need to convey to him. Something he’d want to know. I need to get in touch with him. It’s quite important.”

  “I wish I could help you,” Jon said. “But I haven’t seen my brother in ten years.”

  Trent gestured impatiently with his left hand. “Could you get a message to him for me?”

  “I wish I could.”

  They walked in silence for about two dozen steps, their shoes crunching the gravel. Trent walked with an easy bounce, not the step of a man in his mid-sixties. Finally, he said, “You’ve seen these so-called excerpts of the report online, then, I suppose?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think about that?”

  “I don’t know. The whole thing doesn’t feel right to me.”

  “It’s not. Believe me.”

  “Why not? Tell me about it. Who did write it? For what purpose?”

  There was a tension in the silence, their footfalls crunching loudly. “I’m not sure how much I should say. Bottom line, someone’s setting me up here, okay? Very ingeniously. In fact, it may already be too late to do anything about it.”

  Jon Mallory remained silent.

  “This morning, a couple of reporters contacted my office. After you did. They’d received tips or inquiries about this so-called paper.” He said “paper” with an inflection of disdain. “Funny how the news business works, isn’t it? The day before, no one had even heard of this goddamn thing. Now, they’re demanding a comment from me.” They were walking east again, directly toward the Capitol. Trent waited for a jogger to pass on the crosswalk. “They had another lead, too. Something that didn’t exist a few days ago. It’s going to be the next story. It’s what the goddamn African wire services are reporting: that Olduvai Charities was funding vaccine trials that maybe were actually causing this flu. That’s the allegation. It’s all bullshit.”

  “I just heard about that. So? You’re no longer involved with Olduvai, are you?”

  “No, of course not. It’s bullshit. But I was involved in founding it, and that’s going to be used against me. These people are capable of almost anything. There’s evidence now. Manufactured evidence. And it’s going to be spread all over the Internet.”

  “Including that name,” Jon said.

  “What? What name?”

  “Stuart Thames Borholm.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He stopped walking. He looked directly at Jon Mallory for the first time. So he hadn’t seen Melanie’s blog. The familiar features of Thomas Trent’s face became unfamiliar. His skin seemed to tighten and age.

  “It’s an anagram,” Jon said. “For one of your heroes. For Thomas Robert Malthus.”

  Trent’s eyes went to the tree-tops. “Jesus,” he muttered. He turned toward the Air and Space Museum, then the other way, facing the Washington Monument. “Son of a bitch! I never imagined that,” he said, his eyes refusing to meet Mallory’s. He smiled for an instant. “Goddamn son of a bitch! So that’s what they’re going to do. That’s how they’re going to do it.”

  “Who? Who’s ‘they’?”

  “It’s a complete ruse, Mallory. Okay? But only in the last day or so am I beginning to understand it. I’m afraid I’m going to have to defend myself publicly now. In any way I can. Son of a bitch!” He took a deep breath. His voice had turned quivery. “The Olduvai Foundation was set up with a goal of quote unquote uniting Africa, okay? Creating business opportunities, improving health care, developing infrastructure and technology.”

  “Not exactly the scenario outlined in the TW Paper.”

  “No.”

  “Explain it to me. What’s going on?”

  “It’s obvious to me now,” Trent said. He motioned again and began to walk, directing them back toward the merry-go-round and the bench where they had met. “You have to understand. This was all done to leave false fingerprints. That’s all it is. It’s a goddamn ruse. A very clever ruse. My own idea coming back to bite me.”

  Jon Mallory felt a chill of recognition. False fingerprints. The words his brother had used.

  “Whose phrase is that?”

  “What?”

  “ ‘False fingerprints.’ Whose phrase is that?”

  “The person who started this,” he said, laughing bitterly. “I should have remembered that. Jesus Christ! That was part of the idea. One of the safeguards. Create a false story. Pour millions of dollars into making it seem real. Feed it to the media, they’ll eat out of your hands. Pick and choose who to release it to. People will repeat it and eventually believe it. Meanwhile, they entirely miss the real story.”

  “Whose idea?”

  “Landon Pine’s idea,” he said. “The paper was written to sound like me. I know that now.”

  Landon Pine. The controversial private military contractor, whose Black Eagle Services had reaped a fortune from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  “He’s the only one who could have done this,” Trent went on. “He’s the only one that knew about that conversation.”

  Jon Mallory frowned. “But Landon Pine supposedly is out of commission. A paraplegic. A recluse,” he said, remembering what he had heard.

  “Maybe,” Trent said. “But this came from him. I guarantee you. Stories for people to tell one another until they become taken as fact. How much does it cost to buy a news story? That was the question they asked. How much would it cost to buy a news story? To make it play for several weeks? Not much. A few million dollars if you spend it right. That’s what they said. I understand it now.”

  “I don’t. Tell me what you’re talking about.”

  Trent gestured with both hands, turning up his palms. “What does this so-called TW Paper talk about? It talks about creating infrastructure. It talks about ‘depopulation,’ in rather vague and sinister terms. What’s interesting is that it barely mentions medicine. That would be too goddamn close to the truth, wouldn’t it? That’s the idea. Don’t look too closely. Put my fingerprints on it, create a sensational story. Don’t you see, I understand this now.”

  He didn’t speak again for a while.

  “So deny it,” Jon said. “Why can’t you just deny it, put out the real story? Eventually, the truth will come out.”

  “No. Loo
k,” he said, and stopped again. “A couple weeks ago, you mentioned a company called VaxEze in your story. And you reported about villages in West Africa that were hit hard by this flu. It was all just a few sentences in your story.”

  “Right. Three sentences.”

  “But that was too close. Okay? That’s why these people reacted against it. You were making connections that they didn’t want anyone to make. Okay?” Tom Trent swore under his breath. Jon watched him, trying to understand. “People talk about growth in the tech fields—wireless, software, social media. But if there’s a world health crisis, and it’s possible to develop and distribute a vaccine, that suddenly becomes the most lucrative business in the world, doesn’t it? It changes the world economy.”

  “And the world’s demographics, potentially.”

  “Yes.” He glanced at Jon Mallory. “Yes, exactly. What they’re actually doing is remarkably simple, but no one can see it. That was their original idea. If they developed new technology and pooled it, used it in ways that hadn’t been used before—not for the commercial marketplace, and not to sell to the government, but to further their own agendas—then they could achieve almost anything. They could trump governments. And they could use the technology to make themselves virtually invisible. That was the idea.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “I have a good memory, Mallory. People underestimate me sometimes.” His eyes were scanning the Mall. “But I remember the conversation. This all came up years ago, everything that’s in that paper. Twelve years ago.”

  “What conversation?”

  “With Landon Pine. And Perry Gardner.”

  Trent took a deep breath, looking at the museum buildings and the national monuments now as if they were bars in a cage.

  “Gardner.”

  He nodded, and a faraway look came into his face. “Yes. But I don’t think they’ll ever be able to get him. Pine’s different.”

  “No one’s immune from accountability.”

  “It’s not about accountability, it’s about opportunity. Opportunity trumps accountability. This kind of opportunity. People feel privileged to invest with him, to give him their money. Just to be in his presence. It’s an exclusive club. That’s the kind of power he has. Gardner told me once a long time ago that it was foolish to allow all of our technology to be prostituted in the marketplace. Going for the lowest common denominators—computer gadgets that every family buys for Christmas.” He rubbed his hands once on his jacket. “When what you’ve developed is potentially more effective than anything the government has, why not use it privately? To ‘do good,’ to make things right? That became Landon Pine’s idea. He saw it as his life’s mission. To make Gardner’s inventions operational, but on an exclusive basis.”

  “For what? What would the purpose be?”

  “A New Paradigm,” Trent said, his voice suddenly more sober.

  Mallory repeated his words.

  “A model nation. One hundred percent energy self-sufficient. A nation with no poverty, virtually no crime. A laboratory for new technologies. For medical research. That’s what they believed was possible. That’s what we believed was possible. That was the objective we discussed. And do it in the Third World, where a handful of little countries can almost literally be bought.”

  A cool wind lingered in the trees. Jon felt a shot of adrenaline, finally beginning to understand what his brother was steering him toward. Trent pulled his leather jacket tight against himself, anxious to leave, it seemed, as if to get away from the demons that were eating at him. They began to walk again, under the old trees, in the direction of the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian Metro stop.

  “You can quote me if you want,” he said. “Okay? I don’t have much to lose at this point. Get the truth out there. That’s what your brother wanted me to tell you, if we ever reached this point.”

  “Which point?”

  Trent didn’t respond. He looked quickly at a man in a rumpled gray suit, sitting on a bench by himself, holding a copy of the Financial Times, listening to an iPod, seemingly oblivious to them.

  “Here’s another message from your brother, okay? A verbal one: go back to where you’ve already been. He said if I ever met you, to tell you that. Said you’d know what it means.”

  Jon felt a tug in his stomach. “I don’t know if his confidence in me is warranted,” he said. “But thank you.” He extended his hand and they shook. A hard grip this time.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Trent said. “Sooner rather than later.” He turned away, lowering his head and pulling his jacket into himself again. As he walked off, going east, toward the Hirshhorn, the meaning of his words hit Jon Mallory.

  MEHMET HASSAN TURNED back in the direction of the Capitol dome, following his prey from a distance. Waiting. This would be entirely different from the other operation, and yet just as dramatic in its own way.

  Hassan understood the visual language and the psychology of personal terrorism as well as anyone. He knew the impact that a single, carefully crafted visual could have, how it could infect a person’s consciousness, disrupting his life for weeks, months, or even permanently. He thought of what he did as akin to what an artist does—the objective being to create arresting, and lasting, images; images that stay in the mind’s eye and cause recurring damage, returning to the viewers’ consciousnesses enough that the images begin to incapacitate them. Images so abhorrent that they erode the foundations of the viewers’ sense of security. Americans especially were vulnerable to this, because of their insular, routine-based lives. Particularly when the images were personalized. When you took into account the victims’ habits: where they walked, where they sat, where they took their meals. Eventually, he would have the chance to do this with Charles Mallory. But first, he had these two other assignments. The reason he had come to Washington.

  IN THE SHANTY town bordering Mungaza, Mancala, Sandra Oku had finished her work for the day and was making dinner for the boy. As she stirred maize porridge in a gallon pot, she watched him sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor in front of the twelve-inch-diameter cardboard globe, his face inches from its shiny surface, his eyes absorbing details, his finger tracing the borders of the continent again.

  She still thought of Marcus sometimes as “the boy,” although to other people he had become her “son.” For many years, Dr. Oku had prayed that she would one day have a child, knowing that it was something that would have to wait, until she was able to leave Sundiata and live with Michael. But things had changed overnight, as they often did, in ways she hadn’t anticipated or been able to control, and now Marc was hers. Her son.

  He was learning to distinguish places on the map, to identify countries by name; it was not anything she needed to teach him. “This is the largest country in the world,” he kept telling her, as if it were something she couldn’t see. She had explained to him that Africa was not a country, it was a continent. But the distinction didn’t seem to register. Why was the United States a country, and China was a country, and India was a country, but not Africa? he had asked her once. He liked the idea that it was so large. Larger even than the United States.

  Joseph Chaplin had arranged their passage from Sundiata, and Michael had found her employment at a health clinic near the border, where the vaccines had been shipping for almost a month. Dr. Oku officially worked there three days a week now, although the need was always greater. The job she’d been hired for was to replenish first-aid kits in the region’s schools. But the real demands went far beyond that. Most of the children suffered chronic malnutrition and skin disease and much worse. The shanty dwellers couldn’t afford to buy water, so they drew contaminated water from streams. There was a plethora of orphans here, too, who needed to be fed and cared for.

  Sandra Oku was primarily here as a witness, though. She knew that and accepted it. She was here to observe the flow of vaccines and anti-virals, which had been shipped in by train and on trucks in generic-looking unmarked boxes. A spray medicine for w
hat was coming, in large numbers, just weeks from now. Charles Mallory didn’t want to involve her beyond being a witness. And that was okay. She had a faith that had carried her this far, that was stronger than any other force in Africa. A faith that was not going to be beaten back by anything else, not even the “ill wind.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  JON MALLORY SLEPT FITFULLY that night, waking up several times and hearing sounds—the wind in the trees, warm air in the ducts, the roof creaking, and other noises that he couldn’t identify, some of them inside, some outside. He kept thinking of Tom Trent’s face, his restless eyes. And the message from his brother that he couldn’t decipher.

  He turned over repeatedly. Opened his eyes and stared into the darkness. Slept for a few minutes and woke. Shortly after three, he clicked on the bed lamp. For several minutes he studied the sequence of letters and numbers again. Something that he should have figured out by now. A next step, one he should have already taken.

  He closed his eyes and tried to sleep again. Couldn’t. He got up and walked into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of water. Stood by the kitchen window, gazing out at the yard. Sipped, looking at the night shadows in back. Sipped again. The mist moving from fence to fence and across the lawn. The brick backs of other houses. Windows all dark. People asleep.

  And then he thought of something that hadn’t occurred to him before: thirty-six letters and numbers.

  Six rows of six lines. A grid.

  He caught his own reflection in the glass at a certain angle—his hair disheveled, his expression severe—and thought of Thomas Trent’s familiar-unfamiliar face. The way his eyes had scanned the Mall as if expecting to see someone he recognized. Jon moved slightly so that his own face disappeared and he saw only the back yard—the long sweep of scrubby lawn stretching back to the dark area around the oak tree. It was then that he began to sense something wasn’t quite right: the shadows. The shadows were wrong: beneath the oak tree, an oblong shape extended sideways and forward from the stone bench.