Viral

by James Lilliefors

  He nodded, wouldn’t say “yes.”

  But what was really going to happen? Wasn’t the infrastructure all in place to do what they were planning to do? What Isaak Priest had set up. Would the government shut it down, or simply take over and operate it, spreading the idea, the Covenant, to a new continent? Was that the perfect deception? Was that why they didn’t want any of this publicized?

  Questions he knew he would answer later, or let his brother answer. There was no point in asking them here, now. Because the questions would be perceived as challenges.

  Charlie tucked the gun in his pants. “Okay,” he said. He turned, ready to walk away from Richard Franklin and the Watergate. Knowing that killing him wouldn’t fix anything. And, besides, he had just video-recorded their entire conversation.

  “Anyway, it’s over now,” Franklin said.

  “Yes. It is.”

  Charlie nodded, extended his hand. Franklin stood. The two men shook.

  “What are you going to do, Charlie? You ought to take some time off. Think about things.”

  “Probably will, yes. Learn to relax a little.”

  “Take care.”

  “I will.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  CHARLIE HAILED A YELLOW Cab two blocks from the Watergate, asking the driver to take him to 950 Pennsylvania Avenue. As they rode through the afternoon shadows of the federal buildings, he wondered how long the relay would take: Franklin contacting Gardner. Gardner contacting Hassan. Hassan making arrangements to find him.

  The cab stopped in front of the Justice Department building. Mallory got out, tipped the driver generously.

  The attorney general worked from a suite of offices on the fifth floor. Charlie had never been here, but he had thought many times about the current A.G. Had pictured her arriving by limousine from her sprawling home in the Virginia suburbs each morning. Being led by a prompt, efficient security detail to the elevator and then emerging on the fifth floor carrying her executive briefcase.

  He had thought about visiting her, too, but the timing had never seemed right. Until now.

  “I’m here to see the attorney general,” he said to the middle-aged security guard at the visitor’s desk. The man just gave him a look, suppressing a smile. “Tell her it’s Charlie Mallory. We’re old friends.”

  “Okay. And do you have an appointment?”

  “Sort of. She’ll see me.”

  Nineteen minutes later, she did.

  Angelina Moore’s eyes momentarily sparkled with recognition. Then she opened her arms and they hugged, clumsily. She looked pretty good, Charlie thought. Older, a little heavier, perhaps, but better. More polished and confident. But still vulnerable, in a way he had never really picked up from her television appearances. The same look he’d known when they were at Princeton together.

  She quickly recovered, though, becoming the attorney general, a role she played very convincingly.

  “Well. Please. Come in,” she said, ushering him into her office.

  It was huge. Too posh to be functional, it seemed. Charles Mallory just stood inside the entranceway at first, taking it in. Behind the desk were photos of her husband and children—her second husband—and one with the president of the United States. She had spent a good portion of her career at the Justice Department, he knew, as a federal prosecutor, as U.S. prosecutor for the District of Columbia, and as deputy attorney general.

  “Congratulations,” he finally said.

  She was watching him, trying to contain her smile. “For what?”

  “I mean, you know. You’ve done okay for yourself, I’d say. Kind of like I figured you would.”

  “I guess I have.” She shifted to a more businesslike demeanor again. Looked at her watch. It was funny to him, the way a part of her old self was still visible. “Anyway, this is good timing. You caught me between meetings. What brings you here, Charlie?”

  “I’ve wanted to visit,” he said, “although I’m here on business today, actually. I have a case for you. A fairly big one. I’m going to leave some evidence with you. Do you know how to make a copy of a memory stick?”

  She laughed. “Not me, personally. I’m terrible with computers.”

  “Can you ask someone to do it? We can catch up while we wait.”

  “Well, I only have five minutes but … okay, sure.” She pressed a button on her phone, signaled an assistant. Charlie sat in front of the giant mahogany desk. As they waited, he told her an abridged version of the story, all that he had time for—not his story, but the story of Perry Gardner and Isaak Priest and the Covenant Group.

  He had had a thing for Angelina Moore back when they were in college and she had had a thing for him. But their frames of reference were much narrower then, their lives too unformed. It wasn’t the kind of relationship that would have worked well. That was obvious now, even if it hadn’t been then. He had sort of hoped that they might bond again in some way, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen. Before leaving, he had planned to ask her about the tattoos they’d each had inked onto their ankles, but as she told him about her children and her husband, and then segued into the challenges of combating homegrown terrorism, he had a change of heart. The past was the past, and that was okay, too.

  She had two copies made of the memory stick, and he left one with her. Then they hugged clumsily again and he left. She was looking at her watch when he turned back.

  HIS NEXT STOP was Georgetown. Perry Gardner. Charles Mallory had known for some time that he was going to have to confront Gardner, so he had asked Chidi Okoro to mine everything he could find on Gardner’s habits and personal life. He’d known it would be a challenge. Gardner was a fanatically guarded man who kept layers of protection between himself and the public. He’d installed the world’s most sophisticated security system at his homes and offices in Oregon. When he traveled, a small entourage went with him, including at least one armed guard. When he stepped out for a jog, employees ran on either side, as if he were the President of the United States. Mallory wondered if he asked assistants to join him in the shower.

  But Okoro had been able to find chinks that Charlie could use. One of the secrets to Perry Gardner was that in some ways he had never fully grown up. Much of what he had accomplished were the things he had dreamed about as a kid. He was a visionary genius, whose imagination and ambition hadn’t been reined in the way most people’s were. He still indulged his childhood interests in science fiction, comic books, and 1960s television because they had allowed him to dream. And he still dined on hamburgers, French fries, and strawberry milkshakes even though he could afford caviar and Dom Pérignon.

  Gardner was a man inspired by large-scale historical Americans, chief among them Lincoln. When he visited Washington, there was one thing he never seemed to do with an entourage. It was to climb the steps to the Lincoln Memorial after dark, where he would read Lincoln’s words on the walls and spend some minutes communing with the giant nineteen-foot-tall statue of the sixteenth president, as if it were a religious icon.

  When he traveled to Washington on business, Gardner always stayed in the Presidential Suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across the street from the White House. But this business was different. More surreptitious. Okoro had learned that Gardner also occasionally stayed at one of two three-story townhouses in Georgetown. Townhouses that, according to D.C. property records, were owned by Eliza Parker and the H. Hamlin Group, respectively. Eliza Parker had been the name of Mary Todd Lincoln’s mother. Hannibal Hamlin had been Lincoln’s first vice president.

  It was at the H. Hamlin townhouse on Q Street that Charles Mallory spotted a figure walking in front of a light behind the shade of a second-story window as dusk settled on the autumn streets.

  Charlie returned to the small park three blocks away and sat on a bench. He plugged the video feed of Richard Franklin into his laptop computer. Watched it once all the way through. Cued it up, then returned to the street in front of the Hamlin townhouse. Sat on a stoop in the next block a
nd waited, pretending to be reading text on his computer screen. Several minutes later, he saw movement again.

  There was no Metro station in Georgetown, so if Gardner wanted to travel in the city, he would probably call a cab or a driver. A cab would be less conspicuous. It was fully dark by the time an Empire cab pulled up at the corner.

  Mallory walked up to M street and hailed a cab, too. Had it deliver him to a dark stretch of Constitution Avenue near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He walked among the trees, through the night shadows, and sat on a bench across from the Lincoln Memorial. Watched Gardner’s shadow emerge at the top of the steps in front of the giant figure of Lincoln. Gardner turning, looking up, then standing beside a pillar, facing the Reflecting Pool and Washington Monument. Moving with a strange grace, as if he were performing.

  Mallory began to walk steadily toward the base of the steps. Lincoln seemed to look down at him. Charlie climbed the marble stairs, but off to the left side. Two-thirds of the way up, he stopped and sat.

  He opened his laptop and waited, gazing out toward the Korean War Memorial, the World War II Memorial, the Washington Monument.

  The evening air was cool and breezy, refreshing. Traffic was sparse. When he finally heard Gardner’s heels, lightly thunking on the steps above him, Charlie stood. Climbed the steps, moving in a diagonal toward him.

  “Mr. Gardner!” he called.

  Perry Gardner stopped. Charlie stepped up into his shadow. He clicked the “Start” button on his laptop. Held it out, letting Gardner see the video feed.

  The image on the screen was Richard Franklin. He was saying, “Don’t you understand? Perry Gardner’s firm is a threat. Because technology is a threat. The technology his company has developed could make the United States technologically obsolete if we let it. So we chose to bring him in, rather than bring him down. That’s our mission.”

  Gardner, standing seven feet away, showed no expression. He was an ordinary-looking man in some ways, but there was a remarkable coldness in his eyes and an off-putting self-assurance in the way he carried himself.

  Charlie closed the laptop. “You want to talk? I’ll show you the rest if you’d like.”

  For a moment, Gardner seemed to look for what wasn’t there: back-up, support, ways of escape. But then he smiled and his eyes focused, with an intensity Charlie recognized. They reminded him of eyes he had seen recently.

  “No, thank you,” Gardner said, and he began to walk, as if he were by himself.

  “Are you sure? Why don’t we go sit on a bench and I’ll show you some more.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Mallory walked beside him. He opened the laptop again and started the video feed. Punched up the volume. Gardner stopped, six feet away, and watched silently. After it ended, he showed a flat smile, staring at him. That’s when Charlie recalled where he had seen eyes like that before. In an alley in Nice. The eyes of Ahmed Hassan. Desperate, determined eyes.

  “How did you get that?” Gardner said, with a false indifference.

  “Does it matter? The press has it, too. The attorney general has it.”

  “There’s nothing they can do with it.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “National security.”

  “You think so.”

  “A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing,” he said. “And that’s all you’ve got.”

  “Well. We’ll see.” Mallory closed his computer again. “At any rate, I have some good news and bad news for you. First, the good news. Landon Pine destroyed the viral properties several days ago. It wasn’t going to happen anyway. You don’t have to worry about Hassan using it as a terrorist weapon. That should make you sleep a little easier.”

  Gardner looked at Mallory through his smudged glasses and smiled. Something had infected him, Charlie thought. A virus had gotten inside him and stolen the emotional components from his make-up.

  “According to our friend Franklin, you were the one who invented Isaak Priest. It wasn’t a bad plan,” Charlie said. “It might have worked. Your big mistake was bringing in the Hassan Network, and then giving them such power.”

  “You know nothing about it.”

  “That’s what your partner told me. He said it was your fatal mistake. It made Richard Franklin nervous, too, didn’t it?” Mallory knew Gardner didn’t have a weapon. He was pretty sure he’d never been in a fight before, and yet he carried himself as if he were invincible. “I assume you think I took out Landon Pine.”

  “I know you did.”

  “No. Actually, he took himself out. I was there. He thought the Hassan Network was going to hijack the operation. And he also thought you—or the government—were going to make him take the fall for whatever happened. For some reason, he had stopped trusting you. He didn’t know about Covenant Division.”

  “Who hired you? Franklin?”

  Mallory ignored his question. “You almost pulled this off, didn’t you?” he said. “Depopulating a nation in a single night. You assumed you could buy anything. Even a country. That’s what Landon Pine said.”

  “Maybe I can.”

  “You could even buy a news story for several million dollars.”

  “Maybe I did.”

  “Maybe you did. Indeed. And then you got the idea of hiring a terrorist network to be your enforcer. It never occurred to you that maybe you couldn’t trust them. That maybe they’d try to sabotage you, no matter how much you paid them.”

  “Look, my friend.” He smiled deferentially, as if talking to a child. “There are reasons this story can never get out. What are you going to do with this?”

  “I’m not your friend. And I don’t know yet. What’s it worth to you?”

  Gardner stared at him, his eyes not blinking. “It’s for sale?”

  “No.” Mallory laughed. “It’s not for sale.”

  “Well, I’ve got to go, then. I’ll have someone contact you.” Gardner started to walk off.

  Mallory was right with him, though. “Your other fatal flaw, Pine told me, was that you did it all by remote control. Didn’t bother yourself with the details. When you caused hundreds of thousands of people to die in Sundiata, you didn’t want to know the details. And you paid enough money to Pine that you didn’t have to.”

  Gardner had stopped again. It was hard to tell, but he seemed angry.

  “Now, for the bad news. You’re going to be indicted on a whole slew of charges. Beginning with the theft of nearly two billion dollars in investors’ money.”

  Gardner looked at Charlie’s laptop, his eyes suddenly hard with anger.

  “How’d you get that?”

  Charlie reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, metallic circular object. He clicked a button on the side of the disk and held it in the air. Moments later, a moth-size device fluttered through the air and attached itself to it.

  “You know what this is. It’s a nano-drone.” Gardner looked, frowning. “You know about that, don’t you? It’s something you’ve been working on. Not top priority, I guess, with everything else you have going.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Charlie smiled. For several years, the U.S. government had been working with private industry to develop nano-drones—insect-sized surveillance cameras that could enter a room, video-record what went on inside, and come back out. DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. agency responsible for future weapons technology—had spent millions of dollars testing prototypes with mixed results. Charles Mallory’s company had agreed to test-drive one of the prototypes under development. So far, it had worked exceptionally well.

  “Anyway. I guess I’ll see you in court, as they say.” He watched Gardner, and Gardner stared back. A staring contest. Charlie broke it by smashing his right knee into Gardner’s mid-section. Gardner went down immediately. Charlie walked away.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Washington, D.C., The Four Seasons Hotel

  JON MALLORY LOOKED UP expectantly as Joseph Chaplin s
lowly opened the door of Room 607, gripping a handgun. He pulled the door toward him and stepped back, allowing Charles Mallory to enter the room.

  The last time Jon had seen his brother had been on a dirt road in Mancala. Jon had just saved his life, and they had briefly bonded in a way that had seemed strange to both of them. But seeing him now, it felt to Jon as if the last episode had never happened. Something about Charlie made Jon feel slightly diminished again. It was an old paradox, dating to their teens: Charlie inspired him from a distance but intimidated him in person.

  Chaplin locked the door and followed them into the hotel suite. Charlie’s face and arms were cut and bruised, Jon saw.

  “Guys want a beer?” Chaplin said.

  “Okay,” Jon said.

  Charlie nodded, sat on the arm of a sofa.

  As Chaplin left the room, Charlie took something from his shirt pocket and handed it to his brother: a computer memory stick.

  “That’s for your story.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s what Isaak Priest left for me in Mungaza. Isaak Priest, aka Landon Pine. Background for your story. The whole thing’s right there. I’ve got video feeds for you, too. It’s a big story, Jon, and it’s not over.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. The only thing that can shut it down is the truth. You have that now. All you have to do is put it together and tell it.”

  “Are you going to be a part of it?”

  “I am a part of it. It’s our story, Jonny. Okay?”

  Jon felt a welling of emotions. He had been writing the story for two days now, working with Roger Church, and his feelings of anger and revulsion over what he had seen in Sundiata and what had happened to him in Mancala had receded. The story gave all that a purpose. He had been a witness.

  “You saved my life, Jon. I don’t know what to say.” Charlie sighed, and shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. “I thought you were someone who kept your head down and just waited for things to pass. The way most people are. But you’re not.”