Viral

This wasn’t a morning that inspired him to be outside, though. Something had happened overnight, something still outside his frame of reference. The answers that he had expected this morning were not going to arrive. Instead, he had been given a new problem, and it would take him several days, maybe longer, to figure it out.

“Just remember what I say,” Charlie had told him. “I’m going to meet a witness. After that, I’ll give you details that you need to report.… Don’t lose contact with me.”

“I won’t. I just wish we could talk in person,” Jon had said.

“We can’t. Not yet.… If I don’t contact you this way, I’ll contact you another way.”

A different conversation, weeks earlier:

“False fingerprints. That’s going to be part of the deception. You need to be a witness to something that hasn’t happened yet.…”

“How will I know?”

“I told you.”

“By paying attention.”

“Yes. Information will come to you.”

Jon Mallory heard the scuffles of rubber soles on the basketball court down the street, the ping of the ball against the rim, and he thought of the long summer afternoons of his childhood in the suburbs seven or eight miles north of here: playing Horse and Around the World at the junior high playground with his brother, aiming at a rusted basket with a torn metal net. Visualize it: leaving your hand, arching perfectly, going in. The absence of Charlie in his life over the past decade had sometimes felt to Jon like a death in the family. They had been best friends, always finding ways to amuse and entertain each other, particularly during the years of their mother’s illness. Charlie had been a mentor and role model to his younger brother, becoming a star baseball and football player who never acted like a star. But it had all changed as they grew older. For a while, Jon had found himself intimidated by Charlie. His single-minded intensity, his obsession with subjects that were alien to Jon— statistics, ciphers, weapons, military history—had made his brother less and less accessible, and impatient with those who didn’t share his interests. In his late teens, Charlie had grown inward—called away, it seemed, from sports to places that he wouldn’t talk about; eventually, he came to live in those places, in rooms that Jon Mallory could never find, let alone enter. Like their father, he had become a statistician and a military analyst, then gone on to intelligence work, a vocation he couldn’t discuss. And then, ten years ago, he had seemed to simply disappear.

It had been a great surprise, then, when Charlie contacted him seven weeks ago out of the blue, saying that he wanted Jon to help him “tell a story.” The story, it became clear, was all that interested his brother. He did not want to know the circumstances of Jon’s life, and he wouldn’t talk about his own. His purpose in re-establishing contact was this story; a story that appeared to be about Africa, he said, but really wasn’t; a story that had to be told a certain way, and quickly.

Jon Mallory earned his living these days as contributing editor for a newsmagazine called The Weekly American, writing profiles and news features. He contributed a story every other month, working mostly at home. He’d developed a loyal readership and won a few awards. He had good people instincts, was able to draw out his subjects and figure out what motivated them. But his own brother remained a mystery.

Charlie’s tips had led him to write about the people of two African nations: a family of subsistence farmers, who got by without electricity or running water; an AIDS widow raising seven children by herself in a drought- plagued mud-hut farming village; two health-care workers who traveled on rusted bicycles over tire-track roads, distributing anti-malarial herbs; and the residents of a town nicknamed Starvation because it no longer had a source of food or water.

They were stories that had been told before, in other locales, human stories about dignity in the face of complicated social and political problems; about scarcity and disease and well-intentioned but short-sighted relief efforts.

What his brother had really steered him toward was something very different, though—a less visible human story, about large-scale aid and development projects in unlikely pockets of Africa. A story Jon hadn’t quite believed at first, which had drawn criticism and denials from two prominent American businessmen, both board members of the Gardner Foundation, one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations.

The rest is coming. That was what Charlie had said. There was a source who knew “details.” Jon’s brother was going to meet with him and pass those details to him the next time they spoke.

That was supposed to have been this morning. Wednesday, September 16.

FOUR

SANDRA OKU CUT HER engine and stared numbly through the windshield of her truck at what lay on the north side of the road. Many of them were still breathing, making deep wheezing sounds in the bright, breezeless afternoon. An eerie, out-of-tune chorus. Soybean and cassava farmers. Field workers. Families. Children clinging to parents. Elderly men and women lying beside one another. Dozens of them. No, hundreds. On her long journey to the edge of the village, Dr. Oku had stopped frequently to tend to victims who lay in the fields and alongside the road. Most of their eyes were closed, but some watched as she neared and called to her in weak, raspy voices. “Help me, please.” All along the road, the same muted request: “Help me, please.” Too weak to sound urgent. Just a simple plea. It was no good, though, and Sandra Oku had finally stopped trying. She had stopped even looking at them because she knew there was nothing she could do.

So was this it? she wondered again. The “ill wind?”

Staring into the distance beyond the village huts and chicken pens, she noticed an occasional glimmer, which she began to recognize as sunlight reflecting off handlebars. A figure on a bicycle was riding toward her in the late-afternoon light. A boy.

“Miss Sandra, Miss Sandra!” the shirtless boy shouted as he reached the road, letting his bicycle go.

It was Marcus Bkobe, whose family lived alone, far off in the farm fields, and whose uncle was the village’s only minister. He must have recognized her truck.

“Help! Back there!” he said. “You have to help!”

“Yes, okay,” she said, mechanically now, watching his face, which was streaked with tears and sweat. A large wet spot had dried on the front of his shorts. As if I could, she thought.

“My father. He won’t wake up. My uncle—” The boy saw the bodies in the field across the road and his eyes widened, before going to hers. “They can’t— They— They can’t make him get up, they can’t make him get up!”

“It’s okay,” she said, touching his head and turning him so he couldn’t see. She felt the moisture of his face on her belly.

“He told me to tell you.” He looked quickly at the field of bodies, then back at her. “It happened last night.”

“What did?”

“He heard it. My uncle. He heard the engines.”

“The engines.”

“Yes.”

Sandra Oku looked toward the sky, then at the gentle slopes of the western mountains where green forestland was being cleared by controlled fires. “What are you saying? What did your uncle mean?”

But the boy was too frightened, his eyes darting among the bodies, his face sweating. Instead of answering, he began to cry.

Dr. Oku reached into the back seat of her truck for a mask and the bottle of medicine. “Come on, let’s go see. Take this,” she said, giving him a pill. “Then I’m going to drive to the hospital and see what’s going on.”

The boy climbed in. She started the truck and shifted into gear. As they came to another group of farmer men crumpled beside the road, the boy, sitting on his knees to look, became hysterical. “No, no! They can’t! No, please, don’t! Help us!” he shouted, hitting his fists on the dashboard.

Sandra Oku drove faster along the two-lane road. Then slowed, seeing something in front of them.