NINETEEN
CHARLES MALLORY STUDIED THE airline departure screen and selected a city. The next available flights from San Francisco were to Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, leaving within forty-five minutes of one another. Miami was preferable because it was three thousand miles closer to his next appointment. But he was told at the ticket counter that the flight was full. Chicago would get him nineteen hundred miles closer. Two seats left. Not cheap. He purchased a ticket with a credit card issued to James Robert Dawson and walked to the gate, shouldering only his computer bag, which contained a single change of clothes and his laptop. The gun he had bought in Arizona was now in San Francisco Bay.
At O’Hare, Charlie checked in to Room 432 at the Hilton Airport, located on Terminal 2. The only hotel actually in the airport, convenient for people just passing through. Charlie needed time to think, to run Internet searches, and to wait for events to unfold. Large, well-insulated hotels were a good place to do those things, he’d found. Places where he could hang a “Do Not Disturb” sign outside and not encounter anyone if he didn’t want to.
Douglas Chase.
He knew he could go to Houston and find him. But that would be too obvious. Telegraphing what he knew. It made more sense to investigate him from a safe distance, to have Chidi Okoro, his communications director, run a data mining sweep on him.
He thought of words his father had said to him. Something devastating is planned for the fall. I need to back up this knowledge. I need a human memory stick.
And the single sheet of paper his father had left for him in a safe deposit box.
In his final months, Charles Mallory’s father had downsized his life, moving to a one-bedroom apartment in the city, and had become obsessed, connecting dots that sometimes didn’t seem to connect. After his father’s death, the government had accessed his computer, and they had unobtrusively sorted through his papers.
That was why Charles Mallory had missed the funeral: he knew they would be there, looking for him.
But his father must have anticipated that. He had left behind breadcrumbs for Charlie to discover.
Before dinner, Charles Mallory went for a swim and a forty-minute weight workout. He felt anxious again, but the exercise helped him focus. He returned to the room remembering things. Names. Phrases.
Isaak Priest. A name in his father’s note. That was where he had first seen it. Months before he had been summoned by Richard Franklin and commissioned to hunt Priest. Priest was a rogue, light-skinned black African businessman, a well-heeled deal-maker with construction contracts in half a dozen nations. A dangerous force. We need to stop him, Franklin had said. Not learn more about him, or his operation. No. Stop him.
Charles Mallory sorted through what he had learned since his father’s death. Puzzles within puzzles. But he reminded himself that his real job was not complicated; it was simple. He needed to answer three questions, and that was all. That’s what Paul Bahdru had said. Three questions: What is going to happen? When is it going to happen? And how am I going to stop it?
THE AN-3 CARGO plane lowered toward twin strips of green lights in a vast dusty valley of Sundiata, West Africa, bouncing twice as it landed on the unpaved runway. Jon Mallory was seated in the rear of the passenger section—a small cabin with four rows of three seats in front of the cargo hold. It had been a rough flight, the cabin unlit for the duration. He had slept sporadically, the events of the past two days replaying in his thoughts.
He was jolted awake now by the tires bouncing off the dirt landing strip. Through the oval window he saw the expanse of chalky night sky and the slightly darker shapes of mountains on the horizon. As the plane taxied, its lights caught a small cluster of white cinderblock buildings adjacent to the runway and the name on the side of one that he recognized: J.R. Cecil Enterprises. It was the name of the company on his travel visa. His reason for being here.
Jon sat in the darkened cabin and waited as the other four passengers, four men dressed in dark jumpsuits who hadn’t said a word the entire flight, unbuckled their belts and exited by the front door. He heard the cargo doors open below, heard transport vehicles arriving to empty the plane’s hold.
The air conditioning continued to run in the cabin. He looked at his watch: 5:24. He closed his eyes and tried again to sleep. He opened them several times, eventually saw an orange-silver light spreading over the distant hills. It was morning in Sundiata. Wednesday, September 23.
Sundiata was a troubled land, Jon knew. Rich in natural resources—copper, bauxite, diamonds. Once it had been at the center of a major trans-Saharan trade route. But its recent history was of corruption, poverty, illiteracy, and human rights abuses. Jon had spent a day and a half near the southern border, reporting on the subsistence farmers who eked out a living growing maize and peppers in the Kuseyo Valley. A region plagued by ethnic disputes, lack of drinking water, and disease—one of the most troubled pockets of the African continent. Since the military coup nine months ago, conditions had grown even worse. The country was now considered unsafe for travel and was virtually closed to visitors.
At last, the cabin door bolt unlatched. A man in a neatly pressed white military uniform entered the plane. He curtly checked Jon’s visa and handed it back. “Follow me, please,” he said, and led him down the boarding steps. Outside, a cool wind churned dust across the valley.
Jon followed the man to a waiting car, a dark 1980s Mercedes sedan with tinted windows, the engine chugging. “In back,” the man said. Jon got in. Another man, this one dressed in jeans and a wrinkled cotton T-shirt, was seated behind the wheel.
“Transport,” the man said. “J.R. Cecil Enterprises?”
“Yes.”
“To Larkin Farm,” he said. The driver was young, in his twenties. He chewed gum and occasionally whistled melodies Jon had never heard before. Jon tried to engage the man in conversation as he drove, asking about the country, the weather, the dust. Anything. But the man would not acknowledge him.
The road was newly paved for the first several kilometers; then the driver took an abrupt right turn onto a rough terrain. They passed a dozen or so villages on this bumpy road, all of which seemed abandoned. The doors to mud-brick houses hung open; bicycles and donkey carts lay abandoned beside the road; colorful clothes hung on lines in the breeze or were strewn in the dirt. But there was no sign of human life anywhere. At times, the air carried a stench of dead animals, and Jon had to hold his breath.
Eventually, the road took them into a forested hillside, where the abandoned villages were flanked by empty, gated cocoa farms. Rotting cocoa pods littered the roadway for several kilometers. The sun was high overhead by the time they finally arrived at their destination: an open chain-link fence gate. The slightly rolling, rocky hills behind it were covered, he saw, with lean-tos, corrugated iron shanties, mud houses, improvised cardboard tents. Smoke drifted over the hills from dozens of fires.
“What’s this?”
“Larkin Farm,” the driver said. He watched Jon, chewing gum. Waiting.
Jon got out and tipped the man. He began to walk up the narrow path toward the smoke, one bag over each shoulder.
He stopped and turned to watch the Mercedes disappear. Wondering about the road back—and if this might be some sort of a trap. A wave of anxiety washed through him. The land beyond the shanty town was hilly and forested; it looked nothing like a farm.
When he looked back to the path, he was surprised to see a boy, barefoot and shirtless, crouched slightly, holding out a long stick as if it were a sword.
“Hi,” Jon said, nodding. But the boy—he might have been six or seven—stood up and darted away, into a growth of bushes.
Jon began to walk after him. Where the boy had disappeared, he stopped, saw a woman coming up a narrower trail through the scrub bush. A tall, barefoot woman in a sleeveless lime-green cotton dress.
“Yes,” she said, in English. “Can I help you?”
“I’m not sure.” Jon looked out at the trees a
nd fields. Listened to the wind.
She watched him with clear, intelligent-looking eyes. A woman almost his height, slender, with the beginnings of gray in her thick, clasped hair. “You are looking for your brother,” she said softly.
“Yes. How do you know?”
“Okay. Please.”
Jon followed her down the winding trail among tropical bushes and wild banana trees to a mud-and-sisal home that had been built against a rocky hillside. His throat caught the spicy scent of a stew, which was simmering outside in a black pot braced on a triangle of wooden supports.
“Please. Come in.”
The woman gathered her dress and ducked into the archway. Jon went in behind her. A sweet, pleasant smell of rooibos tea filled the low-ceilinged, cave-like room. Three squat candles cast shadows on the walls.
“I go by Kaya,” she said, extending her hand. “Come in. Have a seat.”
The barefoot woman, crouching, slowly poured out cups of tea from a copper pot. They sat on two old foam chair cushions on the dirt floor, facing each other, not saying anything at first. The tea’s nutty flavor was delicious, the first thing he’d had to eat or drink since the day before.
“Did you come through the village?”
“Through several, actually.”
“Do you think you were followed?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Everything seemed abandoned, all the way in.”
“Yes.” Her eyes lowered. “You can stay here tonight. One night only. That’s Marcus,” she said, when the little boy appeared momentarily in the doorway.
“Your son.”
“No.” Her eyes moistened for a moment but stayed on his. “He has become my son, yes. Since several days ago.”
Jon sipped his tea, letting his eyes adjust. He felt grimy, unshaven and unclean. The woman who called herself Kaya watched him, holding her cup above the saucer. Her steadiness intrigued him, made him feel drawn to her. She was probably in her late thirties, he guessed, although at certain angles her face seemed much younger.
The room smelled earthy, musty, human. Against one wall was a single shelf stacked with tins of food and a small, generator-powered refrigerator. A large wooden crucifix rested on an empty fruit crate between two of the candles.
“There’s some nice country out there,” he said, to make conversation.
She grimaced slightly. “Not so nice anymore. Have you been to Sundiata before?”
“In the south. Briefly. The border area. Below Kuseyo Valley.”
She nodded. “I lived in the south. For seven years, I ran a clinic in the village of Kaarta.”
“Southwest of the valley?”
“Yes. It was.”
“ ‘Was.’ ”
“Yes.”
“How do you mean?”
“The village is gone now. Everyone died, in a single day.” Jon saw something change in her face, her eyes glistening but no less firm. “Marc’s parents died, his brothers and his sisters. His grandparents.” She lowered her voice and looked to the slant of light in the entranceway. “He still goes out some mornings, thinking he will find them. He still talks to them sometimes. He calls their names in his sleep. Everyone died. There aren’t even any graves for them.”
“But you didn’t. You survived.”
“Yes, I survived. But more than that. I witnessed it. There were not supposed to be any witnesses.” Her eyes, unblinking, seemed wise to him, and Jon felt a flare of curiosity.
“I still see them at night when I can’t sleep,” she said. “I remember people I knew, looking at me.” Her eyes, reflecting the candlelight, seemed to retreat for a moment. “As I say, there weren’t supposed to be any witnesses. But now you have one. Three, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“Three reliable witnesses. At least three. Isn’t that enough for you to tell a story?”
Jon studied her face, trying to grasp what she was telling him. Wondering if this was the information—the details—his brother had promised. Witnesses. Yes, that was what he had said. Be a witness to things that haven’t happened yet.
“Witnesses to what, exactly?”
She looked toward the arched mud doorway where the boy had been. A corner of her mouth twitched. “Witness to the elimination of more than a hundred thousand people, maybe a lot more, in a single morning. Quite an accomplishment.”
“What?” The woman sipped her tea, the shadows mimicking her motion on the mud walls. She returned the cup to its saucer, her eyes leaving his for only a moment. Hands steady. “How?”
“How did I survive? Because I had warning. What happened was a trial. One of several that have already occurred. The next wave, we think, will be for real. Much worse. We think it will be in early October.”
“The next wave.”
“Yes. That’s what we think.”
“The flu?”
“It is called something else, though,” she said. “Something that has a different meaning. That changes it from bad to good. They are calling it a vaccine now, the ‘aerial vaccine.’ They’re spraying ‘vaccine’ to ‘contain’ it, along with pyrethroids to eradicate mosquitoes and tsetse flies.”
Jon set his teacup back in the saucer.
“You know my brother, then.”
She nodded once but looked away. “We had been waiting for you,” she said. “It’s almost too late now. This region may be taken in a few days, maybe sooner. We’re in the path here. We need to get out right away. But he wants you to be a witness, too.”
“My brother does.”
“Yes.”
“Is he here?”
“No.”
Her eyes shifted. Jon felt his heart racing, and he thought again about logistics—how would they get back to the airport, out of this country? Don’t try too hard. “Is that what he told you? Is that who gave you the warning?”
“No,” she said. “My cousin did.”
“Your cousin.”
“Yes. He came to visit me shortly before it happened, and he told me what might be coming. His name is Paul. Paul Bahdru.”
“Paul Bahdru!”
“Yes.” Her eyes went to the entranceway, as they seemed to do instinctively every few moments, as if she were keeping sentinel. “My real name is Sandra Oku,” she said, speaking more softly. “I survived because my cousin gave me warning, and because he provided me with medicine. Now I have a great responsibility, something that is very humbling and requires a great deal of faith every day. My own needs are not important anymore.” The candlelight flickered on her face. “We have a colleague, a very organized and resourceful man who is an engineer. He arranged to get you here.”
“Chaplin.”
“Yes. Joseph.”
“Tell me about Paul. What he told you. What happened.”
The calm steeliness in her eyes was arresting. “We don’t know,” she said. “We know that Paul had gotten inside. He had been hired by the government, for the Ministry of Health for its new research institute. The institute is carrying out these vaccine programs. They’re funded largely through Western investors and are being implemented by so-called humanitarian organizations. He made arrangements for me to come here some time ago. He wanted me to be a witness, in case the worst happened. A back-up.”
“A human memory stick.”
“Yes.” She smiled at him, quickly.
“Why here?”
“Proximity. Temporary safety. There is a river on the other side of the next hill.” She pointed. “And past that there are dozens of cocoa farms. These people work in the fields when they can. When there’s work. But many of the farms have closed down. It’s moving this way.”
“I know about your cousin,” Jon said. “My brother was supposed to meet with him last week, wasn’t he?”
She looked outside again. “Paul had begun to find out who was stealing this country. He wanted to do something about it. But I’m afraid he didn’t make it.”
“I’m sorry.”
&nb
sp; “No,” she said, gesturing dismissively with her right hand. “There’s no need any more for polite sentiments.” She took a breath. “For a time, they thought they might be able to stop it. But they came to see that it isn’t so simple. So they decided to expose it instead. To maybe let opinion stop it. But that isn’t so easy, either. At least not so far. They have advantages that are difficult to overcome.”
“What did you mean when you said what happened was just a trial?”
“To gauge the potency. And the reaction. It’s been going on for a while, a few weeks at least, on a small scale, and then contained. A half dozen or so small trials, we think. At a cost of maybe two hundred thousand lives. In regions where it won’t get attention. Where no one keeps track. In countries many Westerners have not even heard of. Occasionally, it’s been reported. But the government always denies it. And it’s not something the Western media particularly care about—even if they believed it. The one in October, we think, will be different. A Game Changer, Paul said.”
Yes. A term his brother had used.
“How do you know this?”
“From the three people who were inside and managed to come back out. Who have seen the preparations. One of them is here now.”
Jon watched her eyes, the candlelight on her face. “And you think this area is ‘in the path.’ Why?”
“We’ve seen it. A little west of here is jungle. Several miles into the jungle is an airstrip. From the top of the hill behind us, with binoculars, you can see the planes land when it’s clear. That’s where the vaccine came in.”
“Who owns it? Who’s doing this?”
She shrugged, as if the questions were unimportant. “Intermediaries dealing with the government. The land was purchased on the condition that the tenants would be gone before the purchaser actually took possession. Something to that effect. There have been all sorts of land buys and leases in the past year. Many of them are supposedly facilitated by a businessman named Isaak Priest. But that is just hearsay. We don’t really know.”
“Where is it coming from?” Jon asked, making a mental note of that name.
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