On Thursday morning, the stench of rotting human flesh filled an otherwise idyllic river valley, while hundreds of vultures circled overhead. Dozens of men and women, many of whom eke out a living as freelance farm workers, showed up at a work site shortly after sunrise. They had been hired by the central government of Sundiata to bury bodies.
Their task was quite literal. But it was also symbolic. Publicly, the government of Sundiata, which is overseeing the burials, has not acknowledged that this unprecedented epidemic has even occurred. The government website claims the cases of flu, which went virtually unreported in the American media, have been “contained” and that the death toll was “less than twenty, mostly people already suffering serious illness.” But reliable witnesses put the actual toll at closer to two hundred thousand.
Some health workers and local residents allege that the deadly flu is the inadvertent result of a government-sanctioned vaccine, distributed in government-sponsored clinics and other health centers.
Because of the lethal nature of this disease, few witnesses to its destructiveness have survived to tell their stories. But on September 23 and 24, I spent time with two of them, who had witnessed, recorded, and photographed the tragedies. One of them was murdered on September 24. The other went missing when government soldiers raided the shanty village where she lived.”
THE TRAIN TOOK Jon to the capital city of Nyamejye, where he washed the make-up from his face in an airport bathroom, although a dark vestige remained, resembling a five o’clock shadow. He withdrew most of the money in his checking account from an ATM. The transaction would be a flag, he knew, but at this point, he had no other option. For good measure, he also charged a train ticket back to the city he had just left—Chimwala.
It was several minutes after the plane to Nairobi reached a cruising altitude of thirty-seven thousand feet and the seatbelt signs came off that Jon noticed something in a pouch of his bag that had not been there before: a letter-size envelope, tucked among his clothes.
The last time he had opened the pouch had been outside Sandra Oku’s dugout home at Larkin Farm. It must have been placed there by her. Or by Kip. Jon surveyed the passengers in the dimly lit cabin of the plane. He looked out at the clouds, and the savannah below. Then he got up, walked back to the rest room with the envelope. He pulled the door closed. Looked at himself in the mirror for a moment before opening it.
Inside was a sheet of lined notepaper. Handwritten at the top of the page in a barely legible scrawl was: “This fits with what you already possess.” Beneath it, near the bottom of the page, a series of numbers and letters in twelve point type: 7rg2kph5nOcxqmeuy43siaw8bjf1tdlvo6z9.
Beside them, the letter “v,” circled.
Another puzzle. Different and less clear than the earlier one. Jon Mallory studied it for a while, feeling the hum of the airplane engines. Then he folded the paper into eighths again, stuck it in his pants pocket, and made his way back to his seat.
From Nairobi, he would fly to London and from London back to Dulles. He would retrieve his car at the airport, drive to Washington, and spend the night in his own home. His own bed.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But then other, less pleasant images filled his thoughts.
ISAAK PRIEST FELT a chill of apprehension as he re-read the words that Jon Mallory had posted about Sundiata, knowing that they would upset the Administrator, who had already decided to implement his own contingency plan.
But he also knew that he could do something about it.
Priest lifted the receiver on his desk, pressed a speed dial button. The call was answered more than sixteen hundred miles away by the minister of information in the Republic of Sundiata. A man Isaak Priest knew, as he knew many government officials there. He had supported this particular office through millions of dollars in “loan” payments. Monies provided by the Champion Group private equity funds.
This time, his request was for “stronger denial,” with the promise of an additional payment.
An official statement went live on the Sundiata government website nineteen minutes later.
It was a message from Sundiata President Robert Bonigo, calling the report on the
TWENTY-FOUR
AT 11:09, CHARLES MALLORY stood in front of the private elevator in the parking garage on Twenty-Third Street. He had spent the night at the Marriott fourteen blocks away. Except for an hour at the hotel gym lifting weights, he had not left his room until shortly before the eleven o’clock check-out. After this, he would be leaving Washington for good. He did not feel comfortable in the city and in particular entering a government building that he had also visited the day before.
He was thinking ahead now: On Saturday, he would meet again with Joseph Chaplin, his operations director, and Chidi Okoro, his director of communications, to begin planning the Isaak Priest operation. On Sunday, he would be on his way across the Atlantic. That was the itinerary, although Charlie had learned long ago not to trust itineraries. It was prudent to have them, foolish to be bound by them. Whatever happened tomorrow and today and in the next ten minutes, could make his itinerary obsolete.
The door opened at 11:10. He rode the elevator to the seventh floor. This time, the door to 702 was closed. Charlie knocked. No reply. He twisted the knob. The room was empty, lights off. He gazed through the mirrored glass at the windows across the street, the tops of bare trees in autumn sunlight. Then he saw a single file folder at the far end of the table. Charlie sat and opened it. Attached to the top sheet was a small Post-it note from Franklin: “The best I could do. RF.”
Beneath his note were several pages of memorandums about Project Lifeboat and the Lifeboat Inquiry, including Director McCormack’s memo that had shut the Inquiry down, four days before his father died. Charlie skimmed the pages quickly. Thirteen sheets in total. Much of the content had been redacted—black marker lines masking names, dates, phone numbers, addresses. In some cases, whole paragraphs were blacked out.
Charlie placed the folder in his bag and slung the bag over his shoulder. He closed the door and took the elevator to the garage, walked four blocks to the Foggy Bottom Metro station. He had three identities left. Three men who lived in very different parts of the world: one in Switzerland, one in Kenya, the other in St. Kitts. He was headed south now, but not to the Caribbean. Not right away.
He rode the Red Line Metro train to Union Station. There he bought a ticket on the first Amtrak train to Richmond, Virginia. He was feeling better as the train picked up speed, rolling through the suburbs, away from D.C. Past housing projects, empty lots, graffiti-covered walls, abandoned buildings. From Richmond, he took a Greyhound bus south, to Charlotte, North Carolina, paying for his ticket with cash and finding a seat alone in the back. He used the time to think, and to study the files that Franklin had left for him.
The memorandums didn’t tell him much he didn’t know, just added a few details. One was a memo from his father to Intelligence Director Dale McCormack asking for additional resources to monitor the scientists working on Project Lifeboat. “This is a highly sensitive, and potentially dangerous, study without sufficient safeguards,” his father had written. The memo cited “a network of civilian research labs that have been permitted to explore bio- weapons technologies as a response to perceived threats from programs in other countries, including Russia, Iraq, and North Korea. Sources interviewed by this office indicate that some of this work is clearly in violation of the chemical weapons treaty of 1972.” The international treaty banning offensive biological weapons research. A treaty flagrantly violated for years by the Soviet Union.
Names were blacked out, including the research labs and the scientist who had headed up Project Lifeboat. But Charles Mallory already knew most of that information. Knew that Ivan Vogel, a former Soviet bio-weapons scientist with Biopreparat, had been the lead researcher. Other details had been redacted, too. The name of the pharmaceuticals company his father had identified, a firm known as VaxEze. All of the dates and locations.
