Viral

by James Lilliefors

  Charles Mallory understood this. And he knew other, more specific things about Russell Ott now, as well. He had spent two days in the Bay Area working surveillance. Following him. Learning his habits. Running database searches on him through his company. He knew Russell Ott’s habits, his strengths and weaknesses, his quirks.

  It was ironic, Charlie had found, that many people who were experts at surveillance structured their own lives in ways that made them easy to find. Ott was one of them.

  He had been born Radek Otradovec in the former Czechoslovakia, but he grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where his parents changed his name before he entered grade school. His mother was originally from Yemen, his father from Prague. His limp came from a badly broken leg that had ended his football career in the eleventh grade. For a while, Ott had served as a government intelligence agent, but he’d never been a good fit with the culture of Washington. What distinguished him were his contacts with rogue foreign operators, including alleged terrorists and arms merchants in the Middle East, including the Hassan Network.

  He was an unmarried man, obsessive, and secretive. In the Bay Area, where he had lived for the past two years, Ott stopped twice a week at the Wayside Grille and Donut Shoppe in Sunnyvale, a breakfast/lunch diner that made fresh-baked doughnuts every morning. It was less than two blocks from a software business known as G-Tech, which provided a front for Ott’s company. Every Monday and Wednesday, for some reason, he came in between 7:30 and 8 in the morning, waited in line, chatted inconsequentially with the manager, and ordered a half dozen doughnuts.

  Today was Monday.

  CHARLIE WAS SITTING in a booth against the window at 7:49 when Russell Ott pulled his BMW X-3 into the lot. Charlie wore a seven-day growth of beard, old jeans, a dark T-shirt, an Army jacket, and a beat-up hat he had found in a thrift shop. He’d been walking a little differently since arriving in the Bay Area, favoring his left leg. The satellite surveillance operations, which were based just blocks away, probably would not find him here. Not until after the fact. That’s what he was counting on. He had rehearsed this meeting in his head for several days, imagining various scenarios and outcomes. Normally, Charlie slept only five or six hours a night, but he had slept less than four for each of the last two nights.

  Before arriving in California—which had among the toughest gun laws in the United States—Charlie had stopped in Arizona, purchased a 9mm Taurus PT 92 for $375 at a gun shop. Arizona, which bordered California, had among the laxest gun laws in the United States.

  There were six other customers in the restaurant as Ott parked his SUV across from the entrance. An older couple in a booth against the wall, each reading a section of the newspaper. A man in a booth by himself, facing the front windows, diligently eating a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and pancakes. A woman facing the wall, texting, a cup of coffee and a three-quarter-eaten doughnut in front of her. And two professional women in a booth who had finished their breakfasts and were turned away from each other, both talking on cell phones. A scruffy-looking teenage couple came in just before Ott.

  Charlie watched Russell Ott: a big, slightly lumbering man in his mid-forties who conveyed a clumsy self-assurance. Large, pock-marked face; swarthy complexion; small, alert eyes; receding hair; severe expression; flat almost non-existent lips. He wore an expensive dark overcoat.

  The manager glanced over as Ott entered, and Charlie felt it again: an anxious flutter, an unfamiliar feeling. He heard the pitch of Paul Bahdru’s voice in his head, a sound he would never hear again.

  Russell Ott pulled out his cell phone as he waited, checking for messages. He took a quick scan of the restaurant, and his eyes stopped for a moment on Charles Mallory.

  Charlie had bought a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle from the box out front. The A section was open in front of him on the table. He’d told the manager that he was waiting for a friend named Russell. The manager was genial, young. He knew Russell. He’d talked with him a few times about football. Russell liked the 49ers, although his real allegiance was to the Eagles.

  It was possible, of course, that Charlie was wrong about Russell Ott. But the more he learned and thought about him, the more unlikely that seemed. If he was right, another question needed to be answered. Somehow Ott had been led to believe that Frederick Collins was a legitimate target. A bad guy. Who would have done that, and why?

  Charlie stood and slowly threaded through the tables, watching Ott’s eyes, his hands, his body language. Ott, shoving his cell phone in an outside pocket, turned his eyes away as Charlie approached.

  “Russell,” Mallory said.

  Ott frowned. Pretty much what Charlie had expected. In the next minute or two, he would learn several things about Russell Ott that would tell him how this was going to go: clean or messy.

  “You don’t remember me.”

  “Should I?”

  “Depends.”

  Charles Mallory placed his right hand on Ott’s left shoulder for a moment, confusing him. Both men were about the same height, a couple inches over six feet, but Ott had a pasty, out-of-shape appearance.

  Charlie nodded toward the table by the window. “Join me for a couple minutes?”

  Ott looked at the table. His eyes narrowed.

  First observation: It took Russell Ott a while to process things. He probably wasn’t used to physical confrontation. Couldn’t summon a natural response to a potential threat like this. Mallory’s assurance bewildered him.

  “I think you have a wrong person,” Ott said, forcing a smile.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A surveillance operation you ran in the South of France several days ago. I have some information about it that might interest you.”

  Mallory moved his hand slightly, toward the opening in his jacket, just to see how Russell Ott would react. He saw something flash in his eyes. It could have become a game of chicken, then. But it didn’t. Second observation: Ott was not carrying a gun.

  “What are you talking about? What sort of information?”

  “Why it went wrong.”

  Ott’s eyes turned to the doorway, then to Mallory’s hands.

  “Let’s go sit down. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  After a brief hesitation, Russell Ott let Mallory follow him to the table by the window. Charlie waited until he was all the way in, then slid across from him. It was a plastic booth with a dark wooden tabletop. Two paper placemats, silverware. Outside, rush-hour traffic stopped and started.

  Ott pushed the knife and fork to the side, then tried to line them up. “Okay,” he said, taking a new tone. “What’s this about? What would you know about a surveillance operation in France?”

  “More than you, I suspect.”

  Ott’s eyes became uncertain again. His right hand was fidgeting with the fork.

  “Here’s the thing,” Charlie said. “I don’t want to hurt you, I want to help you. But I need to ask you a few questions, and I need you to answer them. Okay? If you do, everything will be all right. You can leave and you won’t have to ever see me again. If you don’t want to.”

  Charlie knew that Ott might have been weighing some wild options at this point—bolting, attacking, shouting for someone to call 911—but that he was too paralyzed to actually act.

  A waitress came over, smiled. Charlie waved her away.

  “It was connected with a project in Kampala, Uganda,” he said. “You may know that. But I don’t think you know that it was connected to a larger project. In other words, I don’t think you really know what you’re working on. Or where the information you’re gathering is ultimately going.”

  Ott looked quickly at Mallory’s hands.

  “You were hired to monitor the surveillance of Frederick Collins. You arranged for the relay with Albert Hahn. Ahmed Hassan.”

  Charles Mallory saw the recognition sweep across his face.

  “But despite your surveillance, you couldn’t get him. You still
can’t. Even when Collins is sitting right across from you.”

  Charlie smiled and leaned forward slightly. He pulled the handgun from the front of his jeans and let Russell Ott see it. That was enough. Charlie had long ago found that showing a gun to someone unexpectedly was a most effective way of learning about that person’s character.

  Third observation: This was a man who would give up information before he would risk his life. A man of deception in his work, perhaps, but not when faced with a pointed gun.

  He sensed something else, too, which was surprising: Ott did not know him as Charles Mallory. He knew him as Frederick Collins, and that was all. That was the project he had been hired to work on. Tracking Frederick Collins. It was that compartmentalized.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know who your employer is. And I want to know how you’re able to make contact with the Hassan Network.”

  Ott closed his eyes and breathed heavily. His left eye began to twitch, his forehead appeared to be dampening. He opened his eyes and looked straight at Charlie. He wasn’t reacting well to this. “I can’t say.”

  “All right.” Charlie nodded, genially, as if he had just said something agreeable. He took a quick scan of the restaurant and lifted the gun in his right hand. “And what if the stakes were raised, what if it became a matter of life and death?”

  The lies that he had been told about Frederick Collins would only make him more fearful, Charles Mallory knew. For a moment, he played out the scenario that couldn’t happen: if Ott refused to talk, he would have to shoot. Once he did, he would probably be able to walk out the front door and just disappear. It was unlikely anyone in the restaurant would try to become involved. They would be too stunned to react immediately.

  But that was not how this was going to happen. Eliminate that possibility.

  “Let me just clarify the situation,” he said. “One more time. You answer my questions and you can walk out of here. You don’t, and you can’t. Okay? That seems pretty straightforward to me. So, again: I want to know who your employer is. And how you communicate with the Hassan Network. How you reach them, how they reach you.”

  Charlie was smiling slightly, his expression conveying a different impression than his words, so that someone glancing over might think they were having a friendly conversation. But his heart was racing.

  Ott hunched forward and straightened the knife, then the fork, his body language indicating that he was about to give in. “I don’t communicate with them,” he said, in almost a whisper. “I do surveillance contracting. Okay? The other’s not my part of the deal.”

  “Even if that were true, though, you worked with Hassan in the past. But let’s not take these questions out of order. Start with the first. Who were you working for when you made your mistake in Nice?”

  “Mistake.”

  “Yes.”

  Ott’s eyes kept going to the gun, which Mallory held in view just below the tabletop. “What mistake?”

  “You coordinated a surveillance operation designed to take out a bad guy—a guy named Frederick Collins. The problem is, Frederick Collins was not a bad guy. So someone must’ve given you incorrect information. You trusted this person enough that you didn’t bother to properly check out what you were told. That alone tells me a great deal about your client. And it almost makes me think it has something to do with the government.”

  “No.” Again he saw a change in Ott’s eyes, some vague confusion clouding his thinking. “What are you going to do with this information?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “I don’t know who the client is.”

  Charlie adjusted the gun.

  “There’s a middleman,” Ott said. “Someone who represents the client. The client is larger than what happened in Nice. It’s a much larger project.”

  “I know that. Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You wouldn’t be doing this if you didn’t know that you have a trustworthy client.”

  “It’s a military contractor. URW Industries. It’s based in Texas.”

  A subsidiary of Black Eagle Services, the largest military contractor in the United States. Mallory didn’t let on anything.

  “Okay. And who’s your contact there?”

  “There’s no contact. It’s handled through an attorney. A middleman, as I say.”

  He sighed and seemed to wince. And then he gave Charlie what he wanted, a name: Douglas Chase.

  “Okay. How do you reach him?” Mallory lifted the weapon slightly, knowing that if anyone in the restaurant saw the gun, there was a chance he or she would call 911. He needed to get this over with.

  “Chase is an attorney. He has a private practice in Houston.”

  “And who is his boss?”

  “I don’t know. Someone nicknamed ‘the Administrator.’ I know nothing about him.”

  The Administrator. He had heard that before. Where?

  “Okay. Now tell me about the Hassan Network.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You were able to reach Albert Hahn, though. How?”

  He was pushing the fork to a new position on the placemat. “The same.”

  “The same?”

  “Doug Chase. He has a client who’s able to reach them.”

  “Okay. So your client isn’t Isaak Priest?”

  “Who?” Ott stared back at him, his thin lips forming an O. “No. I don’t know who that is. It’s this other person.”

  “The Administrator.”

  “That’s right.”

  Mallory studied his face. Believed him. “Okay.” Good. “Now. Final question: Who’s working for you?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Satellite imaging. You’re outsourcing, developing systems with subcontractors. There are very few corporations capable of doing that, at the level you’re working at. Give me a name.”

  “Sky Glass Industries.”

  “Okay.” Good again. Gus Hebron’s company, in Virginia.

  “Thank you.” Ott exhaled. Mallory nodded, and Ott got to his feet.

  He kept a grip on the handle of the gun as Russell Ott lumbered away, pushed against the door and walk-limped into the parking lot. Charlie was ready in case he decided to retrieve a handgun and come back in, or to fire at him through the plate glass. But he didn’t. He unlocked the SUV, sat behind the wheel for a moment and then pulled out wildly, almost hitting an oncoming car.

  Charles Mallory looked toward the counter and saw the young manager frowning at him, his face a question mark. The manager held up Russell Ott’s box of fresh doughnuts. Charlie just shrugged and lifted his palms, as if to say, What can you do?

  But he was thinking about other things: the seven-letter message he had typed out and left with Richard Franklin. And what Ott would do next.

  EIGHTEEN

  JON MALLORY LAID THE contents of the envelope on the table by the television. He sipped his drink and examined them closely again, considering the roles each would play in his life over the next several days.

  The envelope contained three items: a paper voucher for a Nairobi auto transport service with a date and reservation time stamped on the back—tomorrow afternoon at 1:15, the location in downtown Nairobi, on Green Street; a blank rectangular ID badge with a magnetic stripe enforcer, no other identifying characteristics; and a travel visa with his photo, allowing him entrance to the Republic of Sundiata in West Africa. The photo was from his driver’s license.

  Why had his brother made him go through hoops to find this package? Was it because he wanted him to know for sure that it was him? Perhaps. Or could it be some sort of set-up? There was no way of knowing. If it was his brother, he was also warning him to be careful, Jon realized. The surveillance was more sophisticated than the man in the Renault, he was saying. The Renault was a diversion, probably, to make him careless. Or nervous. Or both. It was probably someone hired by the police, the same people who had raided Charlie’s office. Who
had been told that Jon would lead them to Charles. The real threat was more sophisticated. His brother had been ambushed, he sensed, and didn’t want it to happen again.

  There was also another message in these items, Jon suspected, as he continued to examine them. Something he had considered before, several times, but had set aside with the directive to Kenya: His first story had focused on projects in two East African nations. It was only when he had reported on West Africa, and the tiny nations of Sundiata and Buttata in particular, that his stories had drawn fire. Now, Mallory’s brother appeared to actually be sending him there, to Sundiata. So it had been a valid connection. The October project, “the ill wind,” would happen in West Africa, not in East Africa. Coming here, to Kenya, then, was also a diversion. But could he possibly leave without being noticed?

  IN THE MORNING, Jon zipped up his bag and walked out into the hallway. He took the stairs to the ground level and found a side entrance. Walked through the alley for several blocks, emerging at an intersection where he hailed a cab for downtown. He found the address on Green Street: a narrow lane of non-descript brick office buildings. But the designated address wasn’t an auto transport service, he saw, as he passed by several minutes before 9. It was a legal services firm. Jon peered in through the glass at the dusty office space, saw four desks in the center of the room, a separate office on one side. He walked up the street and bought a cup of coffee at a vendor’s stall. Drank it standing on the corner, soaking in the morning. When he finished, Jon walked past the address once more. This time the office was lit by a fluorescent ceiling light. He looked in, saw two women through the window, one sitting on the edge of a desk, the other seated.

  At the next intersection, he hired a taxi-cab to Yaya Centre—a huge, American-style shopping mall with a hundred shops and offices. He had a leisurely brunch of tea and almond croissants at the French bakery there, then sat out front on a ledge and typed some notes on his laptop. Twice, the Renault passed, its driver pretending not to notice him.