Viral

The address was two buildings from a corner. The streetlight opposite the building flickered, off, then quickly on, then off again. The building’s windows were dark. When Jon Mallory approached, he saw a shape shift in the shadows: a huge man rising in front of the building, shining a flashlight in his eyes for a moment.

“Hello,” Jon said, shielding his eyes. The flashlight was still on, but pointed at the ground. The man wore some sort of security guard uniform. The rattling sound had been his breathing. This was not going to be easy.

Jon nodded toward the apartment, his pulse racing. “What happened?”

“Pilipili iko mtini yakuwashia nini,” the man said, speaking in Swahili.

None of your business.

Jon reached in his pockets and pulled out several shilling notes. The man took them and stuffed them in his pocket. “All closed now,” he said. “Crime scene.”

Okay. Jon took a deliberate breath and let a few moments pass. “I think I know someone living here. I was supposed to meet him.”

“Not anymore.”

“Why? What happened?”

The big man shrugged and shined his flashlight through the window. Held it there. The place seemed to have been ransacked. File cabinets hung open. A bookshelf overturned, a desk on its side. “Police. Raided it.”

The man nodded down the street. Another man, sitting behind the wheel of a dark-colored Fiat, appeared to be watching them.

Jon stepped back, taking a mental picture of the building—three stories, brick, worn wood-frame window casings—and then he walked away, back toward the Norfolk. So he was too late.

Several blocks up Radio Road, he saw the Renault pull out of a parking space and into traffic. A mini-bus followed, blaring hip-hop.

He walked to the edge of Central Park, found an open bench and sat, watching the traffic. What now? Let the information come to you. He gazed up the street, at the office buildings, the slanting shadows, the layers of the city, with the breeze blowing the smells of night—curry spices, fried foods, car exhaust. If this was the neighborhood where his brother had been, what would he have done here? Where would he have eaten and shopped? Who would have seen him and talked with him?

He stood and crossed the park, enjoying the enclosing darkness of the trees, the warm air. On the other side, he sat on a bench again, at University Way this time. Watched the passing cabs and buses, the shop lights and electric signs brightening in the evening air. Down the street, a business sign caught his eye: FOOD MARKET, it read—the words spelled out vertically, because there wasn’t enough frontage space to do it horizontally, the “A” burned out:

F

M

O

O

R

D

K

E

T

He stared at the sign, then above it at the darkening sky and the nearly full moon. But his attention was drawn back to those letters. Why? They reminded him of something. Something that Jon hadn’t thought about in many years. A game, a simple code—a secret shared among a small cadre of friends on the leafy street where he had grown up, in the D.C. suburbs. When they were children, Jon Mallory and his brother would send messages to each other through a simple cipher system known as a double or triple rail split. Their father had taught it to them; it had probably been his brother’s introduction to the world of ciphers, a world that had come to fascinate and obsess him.

Could that be what those letters mean? Jon Mallory pulled the paper from his shirt pocket and studied the letters again: htunoilerctt. Yes. Twelve letters. It could be either a two-line rail split or a three-line. He wrote out the first four letters: HTUN. Then, below it, the next series: OILE. Below that, the last four: RCTT. Three rows of letters:

HTUN

OILE

RCTT

Reading from top to bottom, carrying over to the next column, Jon wrote out what the letters spelled—if, in fact, this was a code: HORTICULTNET. He said the word out loud, sounding each syllable, separating them, searching for a pattern that might mean something.

Horticultnet.

Net could mean dot-net, as in a website. Jon folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket. He looked for the Renault again. Not seeing it, he walked back through the park toward the Hilton. Across the street from the hotel was the largest cyber cafe in the city, Browse Internet Access Ltd. Jon took an open terminal several spaces from the nearest customer, fed it shilling notes, and typed in the web address: Horticult.net. An image of a bed of roses came into slow focus, morphing into what seemed to be a small cluster of tomato plants. It was a gardening site, full of links, categories, posts. “Welcome to the Rich and Rewarding World of Gardening!” was the home page greeting.

Okay, he thought. Now what? Had he actually been directed here? Or was this just some strange new coincidence?

He surfed the site for several minutes, orienting himself, but nothing seemed to stick. When he clicked the button for Posts, a long series of topics appeared; he scrolled through them for six minutes, growing frustrated. Nothing.

Until he came to one titled “Planting Tomatoes: An Opportoon Time.”

Jon stared at it, his pulse quickening. Opportoon. The word used in the e-mail from his brother. There were twenty-three entries here, an assortment of odd, badly spelled and punctuated accounts of cultivating tomatoes. He called up the list of “posters” and scrolled through them; twelve names. One of them stopped him. Again: Marianna. Jon clicked on it, read through a lengthy series of tips for avoiding “blossom end rot”—when tomatoes looked normal on top but contained a large black spot on the blossom end. It was caused by a lack of calcium, he read, and also by a lack of regular mulching. The poster had found success using “red mulch.”

He skimmed through the rest of the text, through references to verticillium wilt, catfacing, fruit rot, sunscald, organic fertilizers. And then, midway through the text, he found what he was looking for: a series of seemingly haphazard letters in the midst of the article, which might have had something to do with blossom end rot but which he was pretty sure didn’t: gheaeoorcrnategdrd.

Jon copied down the eighteen letters. He then scrolled back through the posts to see if there was anything he had missed and logged off. He crossed the street to the Hilton. In the lobby, he picked up a copy of The Daily Standard from the concierge’s desk and entered the bar. He sat at a table and ordered a bottle of Tusker and a plate of almonds. On the newspaper, he began to figure out the message.

Three levels again:

GHEAEO

ORCRNA

TEGDRD

Go 3C Garden Road.

A direction, an address.