Viral

by James Lilliefors

  At 12:50, Jon was on his way back downtown, to Green Street, walking among the crowded lunch stalls and merchant stands, staying among people, when he felt a hard object press against the center of his back, then fingers tightening around his left arm.

  He looked, simultaneously trying to pull his arm away: a bulky dark-skinned man wearing a shiny olive suit and white shirt, about Jon’s height but much stockier.

  “Excuse me, sir. Just keep walking.” Deftly, then, he took the gym bag from Jon’s left shoulder and slipped it over his own left shoulder. “Keep walking. Look straight ahead, please.”

  The man’s grip remained steady, becoming tighter only when Jon resisted. He stayed slightly behind, so that oncoming pedestrians would not notice he was holding Jon’s arm, guiding him forward through the crowds. Jon stole glances, saw that the man appeared to be smiling slightly—but it was a detached smile, as if he were remembering something pleasant. A device to make him seem on his own, not connected to Jon Mallory.

  They came to an intersection and waited together at the curb. Traffic roared back and forth over the potholed street, spewing fumes: mini-buses, motorbikes, trucks, cars. On the other side, a group of schoolchildren waited to cross. Behind them, fruit and produce stands and a crowded marketplace.

  The light changed, but several bus drivers sped brazenly through the intersection, honking horns. The men began to walk, part of the mass of pedestrians. Bicycle taxis rode through them, bells ringing. A mini-taxi inched along, trying to force the pedestrians to part around it. Four elderly women pushed together with their heads down, walking right into them. Jon felt the man tug at his arm again, pulling left. On the next block, the walking space narrowed; cars were parked at the curb; a lamppost interrupted the pedestrian flow, causing a bottleneck. Jon felt a growing panic. But he also sensed that something about the other man didn’t fit; he seemed too polished to be doing this. The sidewalk became more congested, and for a moment they stopped moving. Again, he felt the man’s fingers tightening on his arm, forcing him around people. The sun was blocked by the tall buildings here, the air cool and stagnant. He felt the fingers gripping, steering him left, creating a passing lane. Then the man loosened his grip. That was the pattern.

  He tightened his fingers when they came to another stop, this time at an intersection, standing on the curb. Then the traffic passed and they moved into the street again, and the grip loosened.

  Only this time, in the instant that he let go, Jon jerked his arm away and spun in a circle. As the man tried to grab him, Jon barreled back into the crowd, the way they had just come, smashed through a clutch of people and kept running. As he had expected, the man turned and for an instant hesitated. It was all he needed. Jon Mallory was gone, making his way along the sides of the buildings, pushing through the stream of people, seeing an opening and breaking to his right, into an alley. He ran clear through the dark shadows to an adjacent street, then half a block to another alley. There he stopped, to catch his breath, crouching beside a dumpster, breathing the scents of garbage and urine and fresh pastries, listening for footsteps. But nothing came—nothing he could see or hear. He had a few minutes to make the right moves now, to find a taxi and keep his appointment. My brother’s appointment.

  Jon stood. Gazed down the alley the way he had come; then the other direction. Nothing. He listened closely: restaurant sounds, silverware clinking, traffic in the next block, voices. What now? He had lost his bag. But he still had his laptop and the envelope from his brother. The carry-on wasn’t important. Just clothes and toiletries. He could buy more of those. He walked deeper into the alley, still catching his breath. A series of doors, he saw, opened into shops and restaurants. Delivery entrances, some latched, some not. Pick one. Jon opened a screen door and stood for a moment in the storage area at the back of a restaurant. Boxes of vegetables, shelves of cans and jars. He passed through the kitchen, smelled basil and spices, walked by a cubby office where a woman looked up, startled, but didn’t say a word, and into the public area without acknowledging anyone. Exiting out the front onto a busy street, he saw a cab stand in the next block. There. He jogged along the sidewalk toward the intersection, staying under the storefront awnings, head down, maneuvering through people, keeping an eye on the cab stand. He checked his watch: 1:08. He could still get a cab to the address on time. If he missed this appointment, what would happen?

  Jon reached the corner and waited to cross. Two crossings and he would be there. A car horn bleated. Across the street, a man was shouting in Swahili. Two crossings. Jon stood at the front of a group of people. He stepped off the curb. The light changed, but the traffic kept coming. Pedestrians pushed forward around him, tentatively, into the intersection, forcing the buses to stop. Across the street, and then another wait. One more crossing. The traffic thinned and he decided to cross against the signal. 1:10.

  He jogged out into the intersection but stopped as a speeding mini-bus hurtled by. For a moment, the sunlight blinded him. Just thirty steps and I’m in the cab.

  But then something else got in his way—a vendor, a street merchant in an ankle-length robe, cutting across the road, toward him. What is this?

  “Watch it!” someone shouted from the sidewalk.

  A mini-bus horn blared. He heard the man shouting in Swahili, someone else in the background chanting “Safari! Safari!” Jon looked to his left, saw another car gunning at him from the glare of sunlight. He looked for the cab stand, stepped off. Another car coming at him, screeching its brakes. The cab he had been eyeing pulled from the curb. Jon turned in a half circle, and he saw the husky man in the olive-colored suit standing on the crowded sidewalk behind the cab stand. Watching.

  Too late! He turned to cross back the other way, but the chaos of traffic was coming at him again. He was stranded on the island between lanes. No: a car in the curb lane stopped, and the driver seemed to be motioning him across. But the other two lanes of traffic were still coming, and a cacophony of car horns began to sound behind the stopped car. He stepped down, looked for an opening and suddenly felt something holding him—a hand hard against his face, pushing him down. A hand against his mouth. He smelled perspiration and something else, unfamiliar; he heard a car accelerate violently, a screech of tires. Saw another man’s large, dark eyes, looking down at him. Then nothing.

  HE WOKE, FEELING nauseated, in a dark, humid, earthy space. His thoughts tried to catch up as his eyes began to discern shapes in the room. Two folding chairs. A ladder. Shovels.

  He lit the face of his watch: 2:55. He had been unconscious for less than two hours, then. They had given him something fast-acting and short-term, an inhaled anesthetic, probably.

  Why? Jon tried to piece together what had happened—the cab stand, the stocky man in the olive suit, the stopped car, the hand on his face. The man must have come up behind him and placed a cloth over his mouth. Was that what Sam Sullivan had meant by the gangs for hire? His mind flashed to images of hostages lined up in terrorism videos.

  Minutes passed. He heard a crunch of car tires outside, the sound of an engine idling. The metal door slid open, and a bright light filled the room. Metal walls, a peaked roof. He was in an old tool shed, in a heavily wooded area.

  “Are you awake? Time to go,” a voice said with a trace of a British accent.

  Jon Mallory stood, trying to focus on the man who had spoken. A trim, dark-skinned man with fine facial features, wearing black clothing. He turned and let Mallory pass, then closed the door. The sun glared through the trees; the air was full of gnats. A Dodge van idled on a tire-track road, smelling of burning diesel fuel, side panel door open.

  “Let’s go. Get in,” the man said.

  Jon climbed in the back seat and the man slid the panel closed. His captor sat in the passenger seat, in front of him, and closed the door. The van began to slowly rock forward over the rutted road, which cut a narrow tunnel through the trees. The driver, he realized, was the man who had abducted him on the street—the stocky man in
the olive suit.

  “What’s happening?”

  After a long silence, the man in front of him, resting his arm on the seat-back, said, “We’re getting you out of here. Are you all right? You look like you’ve been in a brawl.”

  “I’m all right,” Jon said.

  “You walked by Green Street early. Gave yourself away. Then you went back a second time,” he said. “We didn’t want you going past a third or fourth time. All right? This is for your protection. Just sit back and relax.” He sighed. “We have about a forty-minute drive to the airport.”

  “Kenyatta?”

  “No. We’re going to a cargo field to the north. We just got the clearance.”

  Let the information come to you.

  Jon took a deep breath and stared through the windshield. “What was it you gave me?”

  The driver turned this time. “Sevoflurane,” he said. “Not so bad, is it?”

  “Well, um.…”

  “Sometimes used for women in childbirth,” the driver said. “Doesn’t get deep into the bloodstream. No side effects, other than nausea.”

  Jon Mallory watched the sunlight flickering through the trees as the van bounced along the rutted road. The air conditioning was set a little too high, blowing into his face from the center console.

  “My name’s Chaplin, by the way,” the other man said. “Joseph Chaplin.”

  “Okay.” Chaplin reached back to shake his hand. His grip was surprisingly soft, as if he were handing him an object to feel.

  “This is Ben Wilson,” he said. The driver turned and nodded.

  As he sat back again, Jon felt something on the seat beside him and saw that it was his bag. They hadn’t intended to steal it, after all. Maybe the man in the olive suit had just taken it so Jon wouldn’t try to fight him—so he could whisk him out of there without attracting attention.

  “You know my brother, then?”

  Joseph Chaplin made an affirmative sound.

  “You work with him.”

  “Yes.” He half-turned to face Mallory. “I do. I run operations for him.”

  Jon rubbed the bruise on his face. “I’m going to Sundiata?”

  “Yes. Your questions will be answered once you get there. He wanted you to know that.”

  “My brother did.”

  “Yes.”

  “So he set this up.”

  “Mmm.”

  “It isn’t based in Kenya at all, then, is it?”

  “He wants you to write about what you see when you get to Sundiata. All right? But he wants you to be careful.”

  “Meaning? …”

  “You’ll learn more when you arrive, as I say. But just understand there’s an urgency to this. And also understand their armor. Understand that they are armored in ways that no one else is. So be careful.”

  Jon watched the twisting road, waiting. “In what ways?”

  Chaplin said, “Do you know what quantum encryption is?”

  “Sort of,” Jon said. “It’s.… Isn’t it a theoretically unbreakable encryption communication system, based on the laws of quantum mechanics?”

  “It’s the process of sending data by photons. The smallest unit of light,” Chaplin said. “The photons become polarized, and the messages they carry are impenetrable. It isn’t just theoretical, though. It’s been developed by your own government, but only over short distances—from the White House to the Pentagon, for instance. Someone in the private sector has developed it over somewhat longer distances. This network pooled its resources and, we believe, has managed to merge it with fiber optics and satellite communications. They’re operating it now in Africa. That’s how they’re bypassing us.”

  “That’s the armor.”

  He didn’t answer; he didn’t need to. The forest was thinning, Jon saw; ahead were rolling hills and fields of tall yellow grasses.

  “And where is my brother? Why isn’t he telling me this himself?”

  Chaplin exhaled dramatically. “I don’t know. I saw him two days before he disappeared,” he said, making eye contact again. “On Saturday. He disappeared last Monday. His office was raided on Friday.”

  Friday. Two days after he was supposed to call. The day after Jon Mallory talked with Honi.

  “My brother had a meeting with someone last week. Right before he disappeared.”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened? Who was he planning to meet?”

  Chaplin looked to the road. Jon sensed that he was a cautious man who picked his words carefully. Finally, he said, “Paul Bahdru was his name.”

  Bahdru. A name Jon recognized. The Ugandan journalist and political activist.

  Chaplin was studying Jon Mallory now. “You know him.”

  “I know of him. So that’s who was going to give him the ‘details?’ And the last you heard from my brother was two days before this meeting?”

  “No.” Chaplin was facing forward again. In the distance, Jon saw rows of low trees that might be a tea plantation. “I said that was the last I saw him. I heard from him in the early afternoon. On Monday. The day he disappeared.”

  “And? …”

  Jon watched the back of Chaplin’s head, the taut muscles of his neck twitching as he scanned the road. “He told me that you were going to come to Kenya in a few days, he would see to that, and that he was going to need me to help you, to get you out of the country.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he wants you to go there and be a witness. He wants you to tell this story. Okay? To Sundiata. It’s a tragic, almost invisible story, and it needs to be told. He needs you to be a professional witness. Are you up for that?”

  “I guess.”

  But Jon felt his heartbeat accelerate. He imagined the size of all he didn’t know. Then he saw Chaplin’s shoulders tense. His head hunched forward and looked up through the glass. Ben Wilson turned off the air conditioning, took his foot off the accelerator. Jon heard it now, too: the rotors of a helicopter. Becoming louder and then lifting, turning fainter.

  “It’s okay,” Chaplin said. Several minutes later, the driver steered onto a rough gravel road; he followed it alongside a dry creek bed for another kilometer or so, stopping in the shade beneath a canopy of mangroves. “The airfield is across the creek there. You’ll have to travel the rest of the way on foot,” Chaplin said. “Go to the middle terminal. There’s a hangar there, an office marked Hangar H-6. Show them your work visa, and you’ll be taken care of. If you make it home, you may call this number.” He handed Jon a folded scrap of paper. “Okay?”

  Jon was speechless. He opened the door. Smelled burning oil in the breeze, heard the revving of an airplane engine preparing for takeoff. He stood in the shadows, about to ask another question, but saw that Chaplin was shaking his head. “Go on, we need to get back.”

  Jon Mallory glanced at the number jotted on the scrap of paper, recognized the British country code. He closed the door and tried to wave thanks through the front window, but the van was already moving away, making a hard U-turn in the dirt, heading back the way they had come. Jon turned and, feeling a wave of nausea, made for the small terminal across the creek-bed.

  If you make it home.

  ISAAK PRIEST GAZED out at the setting sun through the birch and eucalyptus trees along the Green Monkey River, struck again by how smoothly things had gone. Everything was operational now. The land and airfields had all been secured. The vaccines delivered on trucks and trains, in hundreds of separate containers, to clinics along the perimeter. Already, 137 wind turbines had been installed in the countryside, the start of what would eventually be the world’s largest wind farm. President Muake had been surprisingly easy to work with.

  Priest had long since earned a reputation in several African nations as a brilliant, behind-the-scenes “dealmaker.” In unregulated countries, deal-making was an art form. He had been good at it in his own country, until he ran up against too many rules. Unnatural, often arbitrary rules. Other people’s rules. Here, he didn’t
have that problem. Here, he could speak freely, in languages that he and his clients understood.

  For the right price, anything can be purchased. Even nations. He had said that to the Administrator once, before he had fully believed it. Before he had gotten to know President Muake. He felt humbled now by what they had done. By what they were capable of doing on October 5. He became gripped by a sudden nostalgic joy over the simple power of nature, the indifferent majesty of the fading light in the trees.

  During the past seven months, Priest had literally purchased more than a third of this country from Muake. The president was expecting another payment within a week. The final transaction, he had called it.

  Priest gazed out at the reflection of sunlight on the fast-flowing river, the wind rippling patterns in the water, and he recalled the last visit. Five armed guards surrounding him as he came through the doors of the Esquire Hotel, riding the elevator with him to the penthouse. For years, the Esquire had been the capital’s only “luxury” hotel, tended by uniformed servants, bellmen, and maitre d’s. But most of the shops in the neighborhood were shuttered now and the streets patrolled by government police. The Esquire had been taken over by members of the Muake Military Command and several cabinet members.

  The president had met him in his private penthouse suite, where he often did business until early in the morning. He was an enormous man, dressed in a highly decorated military uniform, who smiled and slowly rose from his plush leather executive’s chair to shake hands with his new friend, smelling of musk cologne and rum and body odor. Priest set the briefcase on the desk and opened it. The transaction was quick, a foregone conclusion. Muake handed Priest a folder of deeds. A formality. Then they talked about soccer and hunting, as they drank Mancala rum from crystal goblets.

  “I look forward to next time, then.” The president grinning. “The final transaction.”

  “Yes,” Priest had said. But he knew differently. Even then, he knew there would be no next time.