The first time he had seen her, he had been on a mountain train in the village of Villars, Switzerland. She had contacted him at his hotel and asked to meet. An hour later, she was sitting across from him at the front of a train car, saying his name as if she knew him.
A dark-haired woman in a blue wool coat and designer jeans, slim, late thirties. Striking dark eyes, faintly Asian features. She spoke his name with a French accent as she turned a page in her book, pretending to be reading.
“How did you find me?” Charlie asked. He was there on vacation, after all, and not as Charles Mallory.
“I think we have a mutual friend.”
“I doubt it.” He watched her slender wrist as she slid her forefinger along a page of the book. “My friends are my friends because they respect my privacy.”
“I can’t explain everything right now,” she said. “This has to do with your father. He had found something. Something people didn’t want him to know. I can give you some names, and information. Some of what your father knew.”
At first, Charlie had just watched her and listened. He had seen all manner of deception in his life. One of the most common—and, to him, least persuasive—was the earnest and attractive stranger working a con. The more time he spent with this woman, though, the more he saw something that was very difficult to fake: the weight of real hurt and loss, a hurt that had been transformed into sober urgency. She looked at him with sincere, unhesitant eyes, and he began to trust her and, to like her.
“But what do you expect me to do with it? Do you want to hire me for something?” he said.
“No. I don’t have the resources for that. I just thought you would want to know. Then you can decide.”
She turned a page. He listened to the clack-clack rhythm of the train as they came to a vista of chalets, lifts, and snow-topped mountains. The first stop was a small alpine-style restaurant with plastic tables and chairs set up on a terrace. Behind it, hiking trails tunneled up into the woods. This was where he had planned to have lunch, alone.
He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the sunlight on his face.
“Join me for lunch?”
“All right.”
They drank mineral water and ordered delice aux champignons—mushroom sandwiches—and she told him sketchy details about her past. That she was a molecular biologist whose lab had done contract work for the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
“I worked for the military research wing. They had a number of in-house projects, as you probably know,” she said, “complemented by a contract liaison program with universities and research institutes. Over the course of about two years, I worked on three related projects. One involved a process known as reverse genetics. The objective was to develop a vaccine for a particularly virulent form of flu. The scientist heading up the project was a Russian who had done similar work in the Soviet Union. He was later recruited to work for a private research lab. Something about that arrangement didn’t seem right. It came to bother me more and more.”
She set down her fork and looked at Charlie. The clarity in her face held him. Her gaze was direct but nuanced, expressing subtleties beyond what she was saying.
“This scientist’s name was Ivan Vogel,” she said. “A very duplicitous man. He had helped to develop germ warfare projects for the Soviet regime, years earlier. He knew that his knowledge could be very valuable.”
Charles Mallory watched her, realizing who the “mutual friend” was. She had been one of his father’s sources.
“The purpose of our project was to create a vaccine for a particularly virulent flu—developing mutated strains and recombinant vaccines.”
“For what end?”
“I don’t know. We weren’t told a lot about the larger objectives. Although the implication—the impression we had—was that we were developing defensive capabilities as a response to a specific or potential threat somewhere in the world. Possibly in Iraq. Here are some of the details about what I was working on.”
She wiped her hands and gave him an envelope, which he had thought she was using as a bookmark. Inside were two pages of handwritten notes, the writing small and precise.
Charlie had thanked her when they finished lunch and told her that he would look into it. That was before he knew much. Before he had communicated with Paul Bahdru. Long before he had made the deal with Richard Franklin.
“I just wonder how you were able to find me,” he said as they drank coffees.
“It wasn’t easy.” She smiled for the first time, a sly, knowing look. “Your company is off the map. You don’t even have a website.”
“I like to pick and choose assignments. I have a small Rolodex.”
“Where are you based?”
“I don’t talk about that. It’s not where you’d expect. I’m interested in places that people don’t look at. What about you?”
“I have another life now,” she said, straightening her napkin. “I don’t talk about it, either.”
“Fair enough. So was our mutual acquaintance my father?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was very sorry to hear the news.”
FOUR WEEKS LATER, Charles Mallory had discovered the note from his father, and its mention of Ivan Vogel. The note had given new context to what Anna had told him, and he knew that he needed to go back to her. He felt the weight of an obligation he hadn’t imagined before.
But she had left no way of finding her. It was a “finite exchange,” she had said. She did not want to risk her “other life;” she only wanted to give him what she knew. But his father’s note had mentioned “AV” in Geneva. So he had gone there and, after several days, found her. Taken the handful of clues she had revealed about her life and tried to piece them together. Eventually, through deduction and elimination, he did. Learned that she was a school instructor, teaching biology and science at a private school in Geneva.
He had surprised her as she sat on a bench across from the Flower Clock at the Jardin Anglais, a spot where she sometimes went to eat her lunch.
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember me.”
It took a moment. She seemed startled and vulnerable, and Charlie felt bad that he had done it this way. That was the moment things changed for him.
He had rented two rooms in the city, one where he was staying, the other where they could meet. He gave her the address and number and waited.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to jeopardize things for you,” he said. “I’ve learned more, and I need to ask you some questions. They’re questions I couldn’t ask you before.”
“All right.”
“First, my father.” He saw her eyes moisten. “How did you know him?”
Anna Vostrak paced the room, her arms folded. She was wearing a tan pencil skirt and navy sweater set.
“He had begun to seek out the scientists who were involved in the Vogel project,” she said.
“Project Lifeboat.”
“Yes. Particularly those who had been hired away. No one was saying much, though. Or knew much. So I went to him. Even though I realized I was taking a risk.”
“I need to know more about that. The work you were doing. Genetically altered flu. Can you give me the CliffsNotes version? How it was supposed to work?”
She smiled, still a little wary, he could tell. “The basic objective with genetic engineering is to alter an existing virus—in this case, making it resistant to all known antibiotics and vaccines. Once a gene sequence has been determined, reverse genetics can, theoretically, be used to create a synthetic virus. The synthetic virus can then be mutated to become what is sometimes called a super virus.”
“And how difficult is it, to do that?”
“That’s something of a paradox,” she said. She sat on an armchair and regarded him for a moment. “The process is fairly complicated, but not particularly difficult. You can purchase the virus sequences from companies that make DNA, then add cellular components that mimic a human cell and create a perfect genetically altered
