Viral

by James Lilliefors

  Vogel screamed, a surprisingly high-pitched sound, and doubled over in pain. Fell to his knees.

  “Sorry,” Charles Mallory said, catching his breath. “Please, stand up.” He retrieved the handgun, a German-made .22-caliber Arminius revolver. A decades-old gun, probably, in near-mint condition. “The good news is you’re going to live, Ivan, as long as you tell me what I want to know. Just sit there on the bench. I’m in something of a hurry.”

  Vogel sat on one end of the bench, facing the river, whimpering. Mallory sat on the other end.

  He kept the handgun out of sight, but ready.

  “I need to know exactly what’s going to happen. Specifics.” Vogel started to speak, his eyes full of pain and protest, his arms shaking. But before he could say a word, Mallory stopped him. “You couldn’t have a business on the side if you didn’t know all the details, Ivan. What you’re doing now is what you did in Maryland and what you did in Russia: producing genetically altered viral microbes, processing them into aerosol delivery systems. I know all that. I just need to know the time frame.”

  “How did you find me? I was told I was protected.”

  “You weren’t. You were left very vulnerable. Answer my questions: Who is your boss? Who places the orders?”

  “Mr. Priest,” he said, wincing in pain. “In Mancala.”

  “Where in Mancala?”

  “Mungaza.”

  “Okay. Where is it going and what’s the time frame?”

  “After it leaves here, it goes to an airfield. It’s flown to Africa.”

  “Mungaza?”

  “Nearby. Yes. A private airfield.”

  “What’s the timetable?”

  “It’s already there.”

  “All of it?” He had a quick, sinking feeling.

  “Yes,” Vogel said.

  “What’s the time frame?”

  “I don’t know. That isn’t my business.”

  Mallory shoved the gun in his waisteband, stood, and grabbed Vogel’s left hand, applying pressure until he broke his other pinky finger at the joint. Vogel screamed, and then he buckled forward and flailed in the grass. Mallory waited for him to sit up again.

  “I really don’t enjoy doing this,” Charlie said. “But just to let you know what’s going to happen: I’m going to go through your ten fingers and break them one by one until you answer. Okay? I don’t want to do that. And it wouldn’t be particularly strategic on your part if you let me. But that’s where we are.”

  He crouched down and began to bend back the ring finger on Vogel’s right hand.

  “Three days from now,” Vogel said. “It’s what I’m told. But I’m not involved in that end of it.”

  Three days.

  “Three days from now or three nights from now?”

  “Nights.”

  October 5.

  Charlie stood. “What else do you know?”

  “That it’s too late to do anything. It’s already in place.”

  “The viral properties have all been sent?”

  He nodded.

  “How?”

  When Vogel hesitated, Charlie repeated his question.

  “Four-hundred-gallon tanks that attach to the planes.”

  “Delivered when?”

  “Five days ago.”

  “Okay. Good. And what’s the target?”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Charles Mallory reached for the ring finger on his right hand. Vogel pulled away, spitting on Mallory’s hand.

  “The country,” he said. “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  The country.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The whole country.”

  “The nation of Mancala.”

  “Yes.”

  Eight point something million people, in other words.

  “How does it feel being involved in something like that, Ivan?”

  “I’m not involved. I’m an independent contractor. A cog in a wheel. I don’t know anything. I hear things, just like you do.”

  Charles Mallory nodded. “I need to get a plasmid Destabilization Propellant Gun in a hurry. If you can help me do that, I’ll walk away and let you live. Okay?”

  Vogel blinked rapidly.

  “Will you tell me where I can get one?”

  “Yes.”

  He did. Charlie surveyed the river path. No one was in sight. “Ivan?” Vogel looked up at him, his face wilting with pain. Charlie shot him in the lower right leg. That would put Ivan Vogel in a hospital, anyway. Make him easy to find. He didn’t want to risk him escaping again.

  Walking away, Charlie made another call on his cell phone, pressing “144,” the number for emergency ambulance service. Then he tossed the phone into a trash can. Seven minutes later, paramedics discovered Ivan Vogel lying on the pavement beside the bench, moaning in a high voice, bleeding profusely from a wound to his right leg.

  Summer’s Cove, Oregon

  In his communications center at Building 67, the Administrator watched the six-foot high-definition monitor screens as the feed replayed from Sector R17-652. Basel, Switzerland. The room housed a cluster of quantum-encrypted supercomputers, developed by Ott and Hebron, and a private Internet network known as F-2, which monitored the forty-three individuals he had flagged as Level A “concerns”—tracking their activities through telephone and e-mail communications, credit card transactions, and satellite imaging surveillance.

  “Intersection,” he said to himself. He enlarged the high-definition images on the bank of monitors—images relayed from satellites using parabolic lenses with facial recognition software. They had him. He further enlarged and focused the picture, and then “cleaned” it, erasing the lighting effects and moving the head into a known view. The three-dimensional face recognition algorithms then measured the geometry of the facial features and motion patterns to make certain.

  The Administrator smiled to himself. They had allowed Vogel to survive for the same reason they had allowed Jon Mallory to survive: as bait. Hoping that eventually Charles Mallory would find him and step into a surveillance grid.

  Now they had to act quickly, so that Mallory did not circumvent surveillance again. He would assign Mehmet Hassan to track him. He knew that for Charles Mallory, Mehmet Hassan would have a special motive. A personal one. Mallory was the man who had killed his little cousin, Ahmed, two weeks earlier in Nice.

  But first, he had another assignment. One that Charles Mallory couldn’t have suspected.

  FORTY

  CHARLIE WALKED NORTH SEVERAL blocks under the awnings into Brandgasse, the city’s small red-light district. He ducked into a place called Club Elegance and waited for his eyes to adjust. Men were seated along the bar, women on two low sofas against the walls. Before he could see them clearly, one of the women asked if he wanted a date.

  “Actually, I need an escort,” he said.

  “How long?”

  “Twenty, thirty minutes?” He showed her his money and she moved closer to him. She smelled of flowery perfume. “Walk with me to the cab stand two blocks down the street.” He handed her two twenty-franc notes.

  They hurried arm in arm to the cab stand and climbed in back. “Train station,” Mallory said. The taxi took them through a winding maze of narrow streets, past gingerbread-style houses and tiny eateries, offbeat boutiques, galleries. Back toward the neighborhood where he’d had lunch. In the distance he heard sirens.

  As they rounded a turn, Charlie looked up. Gus Hebron’s business was there: satellite imaging, telephone intercepts, transmitted somewhere else. It was all happening in the sky. That was how they operated. Intercept technology merged with a terrorism network. A potent hybrid.

  If the surveillance was primarily satellite, it meant that he had a good head start on the ground, maybe an hour or two, probably more if he was smart enough to stay out of their grids. He knew they would send someone after him immediately, though, and suspected it might be Il Macellaio. Knew als
o that they would continue to monitor him by satellite, so he needed to stay indoors as much as possible. At the train station, he walked with his arm around the woman through a set of side street doors. “Okay,” he said, slipping another twenty-franc bill into her hand. He led her to a crowd near a sandwich shop. “Can you wait a little while? Have some lunch and then get a cab back across the river?”

  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.

  London, 10:26 P.M.

  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.

  FORTY-ONE

  Saturday, October 3

  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.

  Summer’s Cove, Oregon

  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. Sin
ce 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.

  FORTY-TWO

  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.