“I look forward to next time, then.” The president grinning. “The final transaction.”
“Yes,” Priest had said. But he knew differently. Even then, he knew there would be no next time.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
