Viral

“Landon Pine’s idea,” he said. “The paper was written to sound like me. I know that now.”

Landon Pine. The controversial private military contractor, whose Black Eagle Services had reaped a fortune from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“He’s the only one who could have done this,” Trent went on. “He’s the only one that knew about that conversation.”

Jon Mallory frowned. “But Landon Pine supposedly is out of commission. A paraplegic. A recluse,” he said, remembering what he had heard.

“Maybe,” Trent said. “But this came from him. I guarantee you. Stories for people to tell one another until they become taken as fact. How much does it cost to buy a news story? That was the question they asked. How much would it cost to buy a news story? To make it play for several weeks? Not much. A few million dollars if you spend it right. That’s what they said. I understand it now.”

“I don’t. Tell me what you’re talking about.”

Trent gestured with both hands, turning up his palms. “What does this so-called TW Paper talk about? It talks about creating infrastructure. It talks about ‘depopulation,’ in rather vague and sinister terms. What’s interesting is that it barely mentions medicine. That would be too goddamn close to the truth, wouldn’t it? That’s the idea. Don’t look too closely. Put my fingerprints on it, create a sensational story. Don’t you see, I understand this now.”

He didn’t speak again for a while.

“So deny it,” Jon said. “Why can’t you just deny it, put out the real story? Eventually, the truth will come out.”

“No. Look,” he said, and stopped again. “A couple weeks ago, you mentioned a company called VaxEze in your story. And you reported about villages in West Africa that were hit hard by this flu. It was all just a few sentences in your story.”

“Right. Three sentences.”

“But that was too close. Okay? That’s why these people reacted against it. You were making connections that they didn’t want anyone to make. Okay?” Tom Trent swore under his breath. Jon watched him, trying to understand. “People talk about growth in the tech fields—wireless, software, social media. But if there’s a world health crisis, and it’s possible to develop and distribute a vaccine, that suddenly becomes the most lucrative business in the world, doesn’t it? It changes the world economy.”

“And the world’s demographics, potentially.”

“Yes.” He glanced at Jon Mallory. “Yes, exactly. What they’re actually doing is remarkably simple, but no one can see it. That was their original idea. If they developed new technology and pooled it, used it in ways that hadn’t been used before—not for the commercial marketplace, and not to sell to the government, but to further their own agendas—then they could achieve almost anything. They could trump governments. And they could use the technology to make themselves virtually invisible. That was the idea.”

“Who’s they?”

“I have a good memory, Mallory. People underestimate me sometimes.” His eyes were scanning the Mall. “But I remember the conversation. This all came up years ago, everything that’s in that paper. Twelve years ago.”

“What conversation?”

“With Landon Pine. And Perry Gardner.”

Trent took a deep breath, looking at the museum buildings and the national monuments now as if they were bars in a cage.

“Gardner.”

He nodded, and a faraway look came into his face. “Yes. But I don’t think they’ll ever be able to get him. Pine’s different.”

“No one’s immune from accountability.”

“It’s not about accountability, it’s about opportunity. Opportunity trumps accountability. This kind of opportunity. People feel privileged to invest with him, to give him their money. Just to be in his presence. It’s an exclusive club. That’s the kind of power he has. Gardner told me once a long time ago that it was foolish to allow all of our technology to be prostituted in the marketplace. Going for the lowest common denominators—computer gadgets that every family buys for Christmas.” He rubbed his hands once on his jacket. “When what you’ve developed is potentially more effective than anything the government has, why not use it privately? To ‘do good,’ to make things right? That became Landon Pine’s idea. He saw it as his life’s mission. To make Gardner’s inventions operational, but on an exclusive basis.”

“For what? What would the purpose be?”

“A New Paradigm,” Trent said, his voice suddenly more sober.

Mallory repeated his words.

“A model nation. One hundred percent energy self-sufficient. A nation with no poverty, virtually no crime. A laboratory for new technologies. For medical research. That’s what they believed was possible. That’s what we believed was possible. That was the objective we discussed. And do it in the Third World, where a handful of little countries can almost literally be bought.”

A cool wind lingered in the trees. Jon felt a shot of adrenaline, finally beginning to understand what his brother was steering him toward. Trent pulled his leather jacket tight against himself, anxious to leave, it seemed, as if to get away from the demons that were eating at him. They began to walk again, under the old trees, in the direction of the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian Metro stop.

“You can quote me if you want,” he said. “Okay? I don’t have much to lose at this point. Get the truth out there. That’s what your brother wanted me to tell you, if we ever reached this point.”

“Which point?”

Trent didn’t respond. He looked quickly at a man in a rumpled gray suit, sitting on a bench by himself, holding a copy of the Financial Times, listening to an iPod, seemingly oblivious to them.

“Here’s another message from your brother, okay? A verbal one: go back to where you’ve already been. He said if I ever met you, to tell you that. Said you’d know what it means.”

Jon felt a tug in his stomach. “I don’t know if his confidence in me is warranted,” he said. “But thank you.” He extended his hand and they shook. A hard grip this time.

“I’ll be in touch,” Trent said. “Sooner rather than later.” He turned away, lowering his head and pulling his jacket into himself again. As he walked off, going east, toward the Hirshhorn, the meaning of his words hit Jon Mallory.

MEHMET HASSAN TURNED back in the direction of the Capitol dome, following his prey from a distance. Waiting. This would be entirely different from the other operation, and yet just as dramatic in its own way.

Hassan understood the visual language and the psychology of personal terrorism as well as anyone. He knew the impact that a single, carefully crafted visual could have, how it could infect a person’s consciousness, disrupting his life for weeks, months, or even permanently. He thought of what he did as akin to what an artist does—the objective being to create arresting, and lasting, images; images that stay in the mind’s eye and cause recurring damage, returning to the viewers’ consciousnesses enough that the images begin to incapacitate them. Images so abhorrent that they erode the foundations of the viewers’ sense of security. Americans especially were vulnerable to this, because of their insular, routine-based lives. Particularly when the images were personalized. When you took into account the victims’ habits: where they walked, where they sat, where they took their meals. Eventually, he would have the chance to do this with Charles Mallory. But first, he had these two other assignments. The reason he had come to Washington.

IN THE SHANTY town bordering Mungaza, Mancala, Sandra Oku had finished her work for the day and was making dinner for the boy. As she stirred maize porridge in a gallon pot, she watched him sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor in front of the twelve-inch-diameter cardboard globe, his face inches from its shiny surface, his eyes absorbing details, his finger tracing the borders of the continent again.

She still thought of Marcus sometimes as “the boy,” although to other people he had become her “son.” For many years, Dr. Oku had prayed that she would one day have a child, knowing that it was something that would