Viral

“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 there.

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.