Viral

by James Lilliefors

  And then the Jeep ran out of gas.

  Jon got out. He stood listening to the wind for several minutes. There was nothing visible in any direction, just the murky shapes of far-away trees and mountains. No lights, besides those in the sky, and a dim sheen of moonlight on the red earth. He began to walk north, toward what he thought might be the direction of the capital. But he wasn’t sure. He picked out the Little Dipper and tried to remember what he had learned about celestial navigation and the equator. His heart beat rapidly. He stopped several times, shivering, to turn and take in the vast emptiness, the sea of stars—the sky much brighter and clearer than it had ever been in Washington—and more than once to pray that he would find a way out of this, and that Sandra Oku and the boy had been spared.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ON THURSDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 24, Charles Mallory woke in Room 432 at the Hilton Airport Hotel just after sunrise. He walked to the window and peered through the drapes at the half-dozen Delta and Northwest planes parked on Terminal 2 of O’Hare International Airport.

  It was a gray, drizzly morning, and he felt nervous, and a little guilty, about his brother. Had he been a witness? Had he gotten out?

  Charlie ate the breakfast room service had left in the hallway—fruit, toast, black coffee. Then he showered and dressed, thinking about where the day would take him. Out of Chicago, on a flight south. And then to Africa.

  He logged on to his computer before leaving the hotel, skimmed through his messages, and was surprised to see that there had been a communication overnight from Richard Franklin. Another coded message. Something not part of his agenda.

  Franklin wanted to see him again.

  Charlie had already decided that he wasn’t returning to Washington. Time was too critical now. He needed to block out everything else, to stay with the questions. When is it going to happen? Only one circumstance could draw him back to Washington—a detail that would change the nature of what he was chasing.

  He watched a plane taxiing on the shiny pavement, a Delta 747. Saw it begin to accelerate, roaring down the runway—zero to 170 in thirty seconds. The aerodynamics of airplane flight still fascinated Charlie. He watched as the movement of air across the two-hundred-foot wingspan created an upward force greater than the force of gravity keeping the plane on the ground. Saw the eight-hundred-thousand-pound machine lift off the runway and into the gray-blue sky, tucking in its landing gear.

  Charlie turned back to the room. He had played a hunch the last time he’d met with Richard Franklin; that was all. The odds, he knew, were against him.

  The message from Franklin consisted of six words. Number 6 was a meeting place in the city, not a safe house. An eight-story government-leased building downtown. A central location that housed offices for several of the various American intelligence branches, including the Special Activities Division of the CIA.

  This implied a more urgent summons than the others.

  But the rest was still up to him.

  THE FIRST MORNING flight from O’Hare to Reagan National arrived in the capital at 11:27. Charlie bought an aisle seat, carrying his only bag. He was traveling under a different name now, leaving James Robert Dawson behind in Chicago. He had three more names still. Only three more. From the airport, he rode the Orange Line Metro train to McPherson Square. Found the Prius parked on Q Street in an unmetered space, key under the passenger seat. He drove it through the busy afternoon traffic across Pennsylvania Avenue, and down into the garage on Twenty-Third Street. Allowed his eyes and right-hand fingerprints to be scanned. He parked by a private elevator and waited. A minute later, at 1 P.M., the doors slid open. Charlie pressed the button for the seventh floor. Franklin was in 702, what from the outside looked to be a conference room, door ajar. Charles Mallory knocked and entered, pulled the door closed.

  “Hello,” Franklin said, looking up from his laptop. He was seated at one end of the table, wearing reading glasses and an expensive-looking, slightly rumpled blue dress shirt. He seemed drawn, older-looking.

  “Richard. Surprised to hear from you again.”

  Franklin closed the computer, showing no expression. Through the picture windows Charlie saw other government buildings, the university law school, dormitories, a statue he recognized—of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. A small park where several students sat in the shade on benches. He saw the faint coating on the glass, knew that from the outside the window was mirrored.

  Franklin had papers and file folders neatly stacked in two piles on the table. He nodded for Charlie to sit.

  “How did you know?” he said.

  “You found something?”

  Charlie took a seat opposite Franklin, studying the CIA man’s alert hazel eyes.

  “Not conclusive. The San Francisco medical examiner said it appeared to be acute myocardial infarction.”

  “Heart attack.”

  “Mmm hmm. No final report yet. We had him sent to Womack Medical Center at Fort Bragg.”

  Charlie waited, not sure yet what Franklin was talking about.

  “What happened? Can you give me details?”

  “Not much.” He lifted a file folder and pushed it across the table. Charlie opened it, skimmed the page: an incident summary, compiled from other reports—from the San Francisco Police Department, the city medical examiner’s office, and the Womack Army Medical Center doctor who performed the autopsy in North Carolina.

  Details: Russell Ott had collapsed on a footpath while walking through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park at about 3:30 P.M. on Monday, September 21. A jogger named Elizabeth Tuley found him several minutes later, attempted to give assistance, then called 911 on her cell phone.

  Russell Ott was pronounced dead at San Francisco General Hospital at 4:27 P.M. on September 21.

  Eight hours and thirty minutes after Charlie had watched him walk away from a window booth at the Wayside Grille and Donut Shoppe in Sunnyvale, probably thinking he had just beaten death.

  “Not much to say. He was by himself in the park. Collapsed.” Franklin cleared his throat. He fixed Charlie with a look. “Were you involved in any way?”

  “No.”

  Other than the fact that I met him that morning.

  Franklin eyed him over his glasses. Finally, he nodded, letting it go.

  “They found traces of ouabain, then,” Charlie said.

  “Yes.” Ouabain. The word he had typed out on the Underwood typewriter at the house in Virginia and then handed to Franklin. “Traces. The Army doctor didn’t know what it was. He probably wouldn’t have identified it if you hadn’t said anything.”

  Charlie looked out the window, the implications beginning to sink in. Everything changes now, doesn’t it? This was confirmation of what had only been a theory before.

  He took a deliberate breath. “In a way, I was right about Ott,” he said. “He was hired to set up the surveillance on Frederick Collins. But I don’t think he really knew what was going on. Or even who he was working for. It’s highly compartmentalized.”

  That was its strength. And, maybe, its weakness.

  “And—?”

  “And?”

  “What do you think happened to him?”

  Charlie sighed, still pondering. “Not sure. I think maybe it’s what used to be called an NDBI.” Franklin watched him, showing nothing. “Something that was developed at Fort Detrick in the 1960s. Refined in the 1970s.”

  “The bio-warfare program?”

  “Yeah. Part of what came out in the Church Committee hearings, back in ’75.”

  Franklin brushed an imaginary crumb from his hand and nodded, urging him to go on. Both men knew the history. In 1975, then-CIA director William Colby had made headlines during the Church Committee congressional hearings with his revelations about clandestine weapons systems; it was the first time the public had learned of the CIA’s attempts to assassinate several world leaders, including Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Ngo Dinh Diem, and Rafael Trujillo.

  “Okay,” he said
. “And so what does that have to do with Russell Ott? I don’t know this one. NDB—?”

  “Non-discernible bio-inoculator, they called it. It’s just jargon. A biological dart, basically. In its earlier incarnation, it was dipped in toxin, fired using a pressurized air cartridge or an electric gun. The dart was so small, about the width of a hair, and so fine that it was able to penetrate clothing and skin and then dissolve, leaving no trace. It was developed at Fort Detrick with darts dipped in paralytic shellfish toxins. Tested on sheep. Killed them instantly. More recently, I suspect it’s being done with ouabain.”

  Franklin gazed at Mallory. “I looked up ouabain,” he said. “It’s a substance found in the ripe seeds of certain African plants.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Used on spears in tribal warfare in some places.”

  “Yes. Including Sundiata. In the right concentration, the effects can mimic those of a heart attack.”

  “Mmm,” Franklin said. “So I don’t get it.”

  “What don’t you get?”

  “I don’t get how you could have known this was going to happen, if you had no involvement. You typed out that word three days before it happened.”

  Yes.

  Charlie looked at the city buildings, then back at Franklin. “But what did I say? I said in case something happens to me or someone else. I didn’t know this was going to happen to Russell Ott.” I thought it was going to happen to me. “I’m sorry it did. I don’t think Ott really knew what he was involved in.”

  Franklin made a face, not satisfied with this explanation. He pressed his fingertips together. Charlie turned, saw the map of the world on the wall; his eyes were drawn to Kenya and then Sundiata. He felt a shot of uneasiness again, thinking about his brother, remembering what their father had once said to him. Take care of Jon.

  “Richard,” he said finally, looking out the plate glass. “I’m going to need to know more about the project my father was working on before I go on with this.” The Lifeboat Inquiry. The last project his dad had overseen. “I need to see files on it.”

  Franklin shook his head, half-smiling. Not seeming to comprehend.

  “You can access that material, can’t you?” Charlie said.

  “I don’t know. I mean, there would have to be a damn good reason. That was an unacknowledged SAP. An SCI project.”

  Special Access Program. Sensitive Compartmentalized Information. Projects that went beyond the security coverage of Top Secret level.

  “And don’t you have SCI access?”

  “I do. Under certain circumstances. But there would have to be a strong need-to-know here.”

  “I thought I had carte blanche on this, Richard.”

  “On this. What you’re working on. The Lifeboat Inquiry was something else entirely.”

  What was so sensitive about his father’s inquiry that it went beyond Top Secret, anyway? Charlie wondered.

  Franklin said, “I mean, I would have to show some sort of nexus.”

  “Okay. And what if I gave you one?”

  Franklin half shrugged. He took off his glasses. Mallory thought for a moment that his hand was shaking. “Okay, go ahead. Give me one.”

  Charlie waited, though, thinking it through—the implications of what he was about to say to Franklin. Decided to tell him, anyway.

  “My father died of a heart attack, as you know. He had suffered high blood pressure and heart disease for several years,” he said. “The autopsy report showed that there were traces of ouabain in his system. Not enough to kill him, supposedly. But there was no explanation for it, either. The pathologist discounted it.”

  Discounted it, because Stephen Mallory had been considered a heart attack risk.

  “He said it might have been something he ate,” he went on. “He had dinner at an Indian restaurant the night he died. I half accepted that for a while, although it was a lazy interpretation.”

  Ott was overweight. Probably ate lots of fried food. Doughnuts. Didn’t have time to work out.

  “Well, I mean, that’s interesting,” Franklin said, opening and closing his reading glasses. “But I don’t think we can make that sort of leap. Frankly, there’s still a residual feeling that your father was on something of a witch hunt with that project. You know that.”

  “Director McCormack thought that.”

  “Yes.”

  Colonel Dale McCormack, the Director of National Intelligence, had shut down the Lifeboat Inquiry days before his father died, even though it was a CIA operation, set up to monitor the government’s biological weapons research. An investigation that McCormack thought unnecessary, a waste of money and manpower. McCormack had been at odds with Stephen Mallory, apparently, afraid he was going to become a whistleblower. That he would take his story to the media, drawing attention to problems created by the recent reorganization of the American intelligence community.

  “Would this have to go through McCormack?”

  “Because of his role, he would have to see it, sure.”

  “Why would it be SCI, anyway?”

  “It involved very sensitive details, Charlie. Genetic engineering research. Countermeasures to the remnants of Russia’s Biopreparat program. You know that.”

  Yes. The project Anna Vostrak had been working on.

  “Well, I’ve got to have it, Richard.”

  “I don’t know.” Charlie discerned a quick head-shake. “I don’t think so. I really don’t see how this is relevant to what you’re working on.”

  Mallory stood, lifted his bag. “It is,” he said. “If you want me to help you any further, I’ll need that information. It’s as simple as that. I’m going to be back here tomorrow at 11:10. It can’t be any later; I have a flight scheduled. I need to leave town, if I’m going to do any good.”

  “How are you going to work this, anyway? With Isaak Priest.”

  “You said you didn’t need details until it was over. I told you I could find him.”

  Franklin grimaced, wanting more. “Do you need help?”

  “No, I have a great team. I just need the information on my father’s project.”

  Charlie extended his hand and they shook. He stopped just before the door.

  “By the way, did Russell Ott have family?”

  “One sister. And his mother is still alive.”

  He walked back toward the elevator, feeling sad for a moment about Russell Ott. Imagining who might have killed him, and how.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Friday, September 25

  WHEN THE FIRST HINT of light came up above the cracked earth and faraway trees, Jon Mallory was on a dirt road, walking in tire tracks, the straw hat shading his eyes. He kept pushing forward, all but numb to the pain, his feet blistered. No longer thinking about anything but survival, drawing on a deep core of desire he didn’t know he had—but still seeing the images: the open eyes of the bodies pulled from delivery trucks, the giant birds feasting on the decomposing corpses, the little bodies of the twin girls. The dirt road took him into a mud-hut village, this one inhabited, and then through a city of squat, sun-bleached buildings, tin-roofed homes, ramshackle wooden market stalls. People looking at him suspiciously. Men loading sisal onto donkey carts. A cocoa merchant, mounds of cocoa beans fermenting under plastic. On the other side, he came to a platform with plank benches. A train station. Jon checked the handwritten schedule tacked on a sheet of plywood. The next train to anywhere was in three hours and twenty-two minutes. It would do him good to rest, maybe catch a nap.

  He found a street market first and spent the last of his money on a bottle of water and a moyin-moyin—bean muffin. He returned to the train stop, sat on the bench in the shade. The air had turned warm and pleasant. When he finished eating, Jon opened his laptop and began to write a story to post to his blog. There was an unsettled feeling behind every sentence, but he kept going, pushing himself, recalling details, not quite understanding what anything meant. Remembering the last thing Kip had said to him: Get this out t
here.

  SUNDIATA—In the northern regions of this impoverished, famine-stricken African nation, dozens of villages have been devastated by a deadly, fast-acting flu virus that may already have killed more than a hundred thousand people.

  On Thursday morning, the stench of rotting human flesh filled an otherwise idyllic river valley, while hundreds of vultures circled overhead. Dozens of men and women, many of whom eke out a living as freelance farm workers, showed up at a work site shortly after sunrise. They had been hired by the central government of Sundiata to bury bodies.

  Their task was quite literal. But it was also symbolic. Publicly, the government of Sundiata, which is overseeing the burials, has not acknowledged that this unprecedented epidemic has even occurred. The government website claims the cases of flu, which went virtually unreported in the American media, have been “contained” and that the death toll was “less than twenty, mostly people already suffering serious illness.” But reliable witnesses put the actual toll at closer to two hundred thousand.

  Some health workers and local residents allege that the deadly flu is the inadvertent result of a government-sanctioned vaccine, distributed in government-sponsored clinics and other health centers.

  Because of the lethal nature of this disease, few witnesses to its destructiveness have survived to tell their stories. But on September 23 and 24, I spent time with two of them, who had witnessed, recorded, and photographed the tragedies. One of them was murdered on September 24. The other went missing when government soldiers raided the shanty village where she lived.”

  THE TRAIN TOOK Jon to the capital city of Nyamejye, where he washed the make-up from his face in an airport bathroom, although a dark vestige remained, resembling a five o’clock shadow. He withdrew most of the money in his checking account from an ATM. The transaction would be a flag, he knew, but at this point, he had no other option. For good measure, he also charged a train ticket back to the city he had just left—Chimwala.