Viral

by James Lilliefors

  “The Butcher.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the other method?”

  “The other signature method is to kill the victim in a way that resembles either suicide, an accident or natural causes. It can involve an auto accident, lying on train tracks, jumping from a building, self-inflicted gunshot.” Jon grimaced. “In some cases, they use poison properties that aren’t generally known, that aren’t easily detected in autopsies.”

  “Who would have hired the Hassan Network, though?”

  “That’s what we need to figure out.” Church opened his desk drawer, extracted a key, and pushed it toward Jon Mallory. “Listen. I don’t think you’ll want to stay at home for a while. Why don’t you go out to our condo on the Eastern Shore. Spend a night or two there and get your bearings. Clear your head. Then let’s put this story together and run with it.”

  JON MALLORY WENT home and hastily packed a travel bag. It was eerie being in the house again, remembering the night before.

  He drove out into Maryland farm country thinking about his brother’s puzzle. He came to a gas mart, pulled off, and parked. Listened to the stillness. He opened the first sheet of paper and spread it on the seat. It was well-worn now at the folds. He studied the numbers again, knowing it had to be something simple—something that sophisticated surveillance might miss. Something that he had shared, once, with his brother.

  Focus. If the numbers were substitutions for letters, they came out as this: 14672224 = ADFGBBBD. Jon wrote them down, as he had earlier. It didn’t help, although something about the sequence looked familiar.

  He started the car and drove again, past cornfields, barns, occasional houses.

  Try again, he thought. Stick with those letters. Just consider them in a different way. Think smarter.

  Several miles ahead, he pulled over. A small country grocery. “Homemade Preserves,” a sign said. There were two pick-ups and three cars in the lot. Jon Mallory wrote the sequence out one more time: 14672224. Underneath, the corresponding letters: ADFGBBBD. Where had he seen those letters before? Somewhere, long ago. During his childhood, maybe. Codes that only the two of them would know. Let the information come to you.

  Then, as he was crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, something else occurred to him. In changing the numbers to letters, he had only considered single digits—one through nine. There was no reason to think that there wouldn’t be corresponding letters beyond the ninth letter in the alphabet. What if some of the numbers were paired? If 1 and 4 meant 14, say—the fourteenth letter of the alphabet: N—instead of A and D.

  On the Eastern Shore, he pulled over at a Sunoco station and scribbled out all of the possible configurations involving paired numbers. Most meant nothing. But something about the letters clicked in his memory.

  Then all at once he saw it. A combination that he recognized: if the final four numbers were two sets instead of four—22 and 24, instead of 2, 2, 2 and 4—then the sequence was one he knew: ADFGVX.

  Yes. A combination that his brother would know that he’d recognize. ADFGVX was a famous war cipher—the code used by the German military during World War I. Jon couldn’t remember all of the specifics, but as a kid he and his brother had used it to exchange secret messages. Charlie telling him in code that he had to go away for a few hours. Never saying where.

  Jon needed to find a wireless hot spot or an Internet café. He asked at the gas station. About five miles “that way,” the man said, was a public library. Jon pulled back into traffic and drove quickly down the two-lane roads to a small town called Stevensville. The library was on Main Street, as the man had said, across from the Stevensville Cemetery.

  Four computer monitors were lined up against a wall in the back, three of them in use. He logged on the free computer and Googled “ADFGVX”: 34,200 returns. He skimmed through the details of the cipher: It was first used in the spring of 1918, as German troops advanced on Paris, to transmit attack plans to commanders on the front lines. The Allies routinely intercepted German cables but were unable to crack this cipher; for a time, military leaders, on both sides, considered it unbreakable. Then on June 2, a French cryptanalyst managed to decipher an ADFGVX-encoded cable detailing plans for a German offensive in France. The Allies sent troops to the front lines, and the German Army was turned back.

  The ingenuity of the ADFGVX cipher, Jon read, was that it mixed substitution and transposition. It was made up of a simple six-by-six grid, randomly filled with 26 letters and 10 numbers, beginning with zero. It was only useful when the receiver knew the sequence of the numbers and letters.

  Jon opened the sheet of paper with the letters and numbers and counted again. Yes: 36.

  That was the easy part. Draw a grid, fill it with numbers and letters. He’d been given the correct number: 36. There were two possible ways of doing it: lay the numbers in vertically or lay them in horizontally.

  Two grids. Then he understood: “V” circled. A directive. V for vertical. It had to be.

  The rest of it, though, he wasn’t so sure about. Jon went back to the explanation on the Internet: “In its first, substitution, phase, the ADFGVX cipher could be broken by frequency analysis, so it was further scrambled by transposition, meaning the use of a seven-letter word.”

  So he had the cipher, but nothing to use it with. Or was he missing something? Something obvious. The cipher required something else. A coded message to use on it—in a way that was simple but would be detected only by them. Invisible to others. This message was being conveyed in three parts, Jon realized, each useless without the other two.

  He thought about Thomas Trent. The way his eyes had scanned the Mall. And the last thing he had said to him. Go back to where you’ve already been. You’ll know what that means. A method they had used before to transfer information.

  Jon wondered if he should go back through the e-mails on his laptop, looking for familiar words, numbers, phrases. Or was it something else? It had to be simple, something he’d already figured out. His brother would have made it deliberately easy. Go back where he had already been.

  His fingers rested on the keypad. Then it came to him. He tried a Web address he’d used before: Horticult.net.

  It took him less than five minutes to find it, in a message board under an entry from D. Gude—their grade-school mathematics instructor. In a long message titled “Rampaging weeds”—what to do when wild violet or Bermuda grass takes root in your lawn, and how, through a “careful strategy of rooting, spacing, and mulching”—D. Gude was able to win “the war over rampaging weeds.” Two-thirds of the way through, he found the combination of numbers he was looking for. “My personal weeding cycles, by days of the month,” it said, then: 1,4,6,6,7,4,6,6,1,4,24,4,7,7,22,22,7,6,24,6,4,6,24,7,24,

  1,7,7,1,22,6,6,7,4,22,22,24,4,7,6,24,1,24,1,7,7,

  1,4,7,4,7,4,7,22,22,6,1,4, 7,6,22,24,7,7,6,22.

  That had to be it.

  The largest number was 24, so that would work as days of the month. The numbers all less than the number of days in a month.

  But it would also work with letters in the alphabet.

  If this was the coded message, it would have to be translated into letters, though. The commas made it easier, so that 22 would be V, not BB. Jon Mallory went through the numbers and jotted the corresponding letters underneath:ADFFGDFFADXDGGVVGFXFDFXGXAGGAVFFGD

  VVXDGFXAXAGGADGDGDGVVFADGFVXGGFV

  That was only half of the ADFGVX code, though. It also involved a transposition of letters. He called up the explanation of the cipher again on the computer. But it was a little like putting together a complicated toy or piece of furniture. Maybe he was making it too difficult for himself.

  His brother would have made it easy.

  If he had found the coded message, there was no point in coding it further through transposition. Charlie would have kept it simple, giving him a key and a code, from two different sources. Jon just had to put them together. Let the information come to you.

  To decipher t
he code, then, he went back to the ADFGVX grid. At its simplest, the code used pairs of letters to form corresponding letters or numbers. There were 35 in all in this message.

  So where A crossed with D on the grid was the letter R. FF became E. GD was S.

  Eleven minutes later, he had it. The message in its entirety read as follows:

  “Reservation. 6 Lake St, Villars, SW. Friday.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  FROM THERE, JON MALLORY worked backward. But he didn’t want to do it on the same computer, remembering his brother’s warnings. He drove to a Holiday Inn at Easton. Found a monitor where he could access Google without logging in.

  Villars, it turned out, was a mountain village in western Switzerland. The nearest major city was Geneva. There were no direct flights from Washington, but nine flights left each day from JFK or Newark.

  He read the message again, and he finally realized what he was missing—the first word: “Reservation.”

  He began to call up websites for the airlines that flew directly from the New York area to Geneva. There were four: Delta, Qatar Airways, United, and Continental. He used the name on his passport, Martin Grant, to check on reservations. Hit it on the fourth one: Continental. A flight the following day, leaving Newark at 5:55 in the afternoon, arriving in Geneva at 7:45 A.M. A shuttle from Geneva to Villars. But was it his brother or someone using his brother’s M.O., wanting to keep him out of the picture for a few days?

  HE CALLED MELANIE Cross three times that evening but got no answer. He wanted to confirm a hunch about what she had told him.

  At four minutes past 9, he drove by her apartment in Falls Church and saw that her second-story lights were on. Had he really spent the night there? He parked across the street, climbed the stairs to her apartment, and knocked. No answer, although he could hear the television inside. Jon turned and looked up the street. He listened to the wind in the trees. Then he walked back to his car and sat for a few minutes, breathing the night air. He saw a light go on—her bathroom. A few minutes later, it went dark. He took out his cell phone and punched in her number. She answered on the fifth ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. It’s Jon. I just stopped by your place.”

  “That was you?”

  “Who did you think it was?”

  “No idea.”

  “Can we meet for a few minutes?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Out front.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  “What, are you stalking me now?”

  “No, I’m just sitting here.”

  He saw Melanie’s face pressing against the glass. “Jesus,” she said.

  “Can you come out for a minute?”

  She clicked off. Nine minutes later, her apartment door opened and Melanie came striding out. She looked angry, dressed in a bathrobe over jeans and flip-flops.

  Jon pushed open the door and Melanie got in.

  “Hi,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “I just wanted to talk with you for a second. About something that’s been bothering me.”

  “Oh?” She looked different without her make-up, but still alluring, he thought.

  “This story you were told. About Olduvai Charities and the TW Paper? I just wonder if your sources might have had an agenda.”

  “What?”

  “Because I think it’s the wrong story. I’m pretty sure, and I’m wondering where it came from.”

  She laughed loudly. “What are you talking about?”

  “I just wonder if it’s possible you’re being set up, for some reason.”

  She laughed again, even louder. A one syllable laugh: “Ha! Who would be setting me up?”

  “It’s what I’m wondering. That’s what I thought maybe you could tell me.”

  “What makes you think it’s the wrong story?”

  “I met with Tom Trent last night,” he said.

  She twisted sideways in the seat and opened her mouth, staring at him. He smelled her shampoo and a freshly sprayed light cologne. “You met with him?”

  “Yes. Within a stone’s throw of where he died. Probably a few hours before he was killed. He told me all about it.”

  “Was killed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you believed what he said?”

  “I did. Trent was self-absorbed and maybe a little kooky. But this isn’t something he’d be involved in. I’m sure.”

  Melanie smirked. “Well, I mean, I’m not going to tell you my sources, if that’s what you’re after.”

  “No. Although you already told me one’s an investor and one’s a contractor.”

  Her brow furrowed. “I said that?”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  “Well, I shouldn’t have.”

  “The investor is involved with the Champion Group, presumably.”

  “I’m not giving you a name, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Okay.” Jon sighed. “But I’m going to take a guess about the other source. The contractor.”

  She made a scoffing sound. “I’m not going to tell you anything. And I’m not playing games.”

  “I’m going to guess.”

  “Whatever.”

  She looked back toward her apartment building, gripped the door handle in her right hand, and started to pull.

  “Your contractor source’s name is Gus Hebron,” Jon said.

  Her face seemed to turn three different colors. Then the color drained away.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Thursday, October 1

  CHARLES MALLORY KNOCKED TWICE on Room 503 of the Swissôtel in the Kurfürstendamm district of Berlin. He waited. Knocked four times again. Anna Vostrak opened, smiling.

  Charlie had made up his mind that they should only kiss briefly and then get to business. But she wouldn’t let him stop. And then he didn’t want to.

  “That’s nice,” he said. “I think we still need some practice, though.”

  “Agreed.”

  “How about after the meeting?”

  “All right.”

  She turned away and took a seat by the window. She looked smart, dressed in a dark skirt, beige dress shirt, and jacket.

  Charlie had arrived twenty-five minutes early for a reason, and not just to kiss her. He wanted to bring her up to date. To tell her about the past seventy-two hours: his meeting with Russell Ott and Ott’s subsequent murder; Peter Quinn; the emergency plan; Mancala; and his brother, Jon. Anna was Charles Mallory’s memory stick—the one person not connected with the mission who would know everything about it.

  They were talking about his father’s message in the safe deposit box when he heard a rapping at the door and stopped. Anna answered.

  A thin, medium-built man dressed in an expensive dark suit entered. Gebhard Keller. A young-looking sixty-seven, with sharp features, black eyes, and fine silver-white hair. Keller carried a dark leather briefcase. He seemed to Charles Mallory like an upscale salesman, except he didn’t smile.

  Charlie had asked Chidi Okoro to run a background check on Keller. He had found an impressive, and apparently clean, record. Keller retired early from German intelligence nine years ago and started his own pharmaceuticals intelligence firm. He’d contracted with most of the majors: Bayer, Pfizer, Roche and, prior to their merger, Glaxo and Wellcome. As with other pharma spy firms, the majority of his work involved patent violations. Nineteen months ago, he had sold his company, and he wasn’t really in the business anymore, although he had taken on at least two independent projects since then. Three, including this one. Charlie supposed his continued freelancing was like a prizefighter going back for one more bout. Once it was in your blood, nothing else provided the same charge. He understood that.

  Keller sat at the table and slid the latches to open his briefcase. “I’m going to lay this out for you in general terms first, if there’s no objection. I will provide answers to your five questi
ons, along with supplementary documentation. Then, I will try to answer any additional questions you might have.”

  Anna nodded. Watching her, Charlie felt a longing again, a complicated feeling he wanted to simplify.

  “If you show me that you have brought the second payment, we can proceed.”

  Charlie handed him an envelope. Thank goodness for the United States government, he thought.

  Keller examined it quickly and tucked it in a pocket of his briefcase.

  “Did you do everything yourself?” Charlie asked.

  “Everything myself. That’s correct.” His face creased into a weak facsimile of a smile. “I made some inquiries, as you can imagine, but discreetly. You have nothing to worry about.” He spoke with a slight German accent. “Yours is an unusual investigation. Most of what my company did was patent infringement. Not that that’s a small thing, of course.” He pulled sheets and clasped stacks of paper from the briefcase, organizing them on the table top. “Nearly ten percent of all drugs sold today are counterfeit, you understand. A successful drug these days, it’s a billion-dollar-a-year product. Fifteen years ago, a successful drug was one-tenth that. So, not surprisingly, there is a great deal of corruption in the industry.”

  They waited. Keller fidgeted with a gold pen, then set it aside.

  “You asked me five questions,” he said. “Here are my answers. Number one, you asked if there had been any dramatic increases in the production of flu vaccine or the flow of flu vaccine to Africa over the past six months. The answer is yes.

  “The second part of your question assumed that answer. Where in Africa is this vaccine being shipped and what company or companies are handling the distribution?”

  His eyes went back and forth from Anna to Charlie.

  “The distribution mechanism is not one company. It’s at least seven different firms.” He rotated a list of names, in eighteen-point type, and slid it across the table. Two copies, one for each of them. “Sort of like a prescription drug addict going to seven different doctors to get his prescription. Hoping no one will catch on.”