Viral

Accelerated, and slowed again. Ahead, what she had thought were optical illusions—late sunlight on the soil—were not tricks of the eye, after all. They were more people—farmers who had collapsed beside the road, trying to reach someone who could help. A winding ribbon of bodies.

“Shh,” she said, as the boy sobbed. “They’re just sleeping. Put your head down and don’t look. It’s going to be okay.”

But it wasn’t. This was like nothing she had ever seen. Too quick, too efficient, to outrun. Dr. Oku drove two-tenths of a kilometer farther and braked again, and she thought of the dream she had gone to sleep with the night before. Michael, the man she had planned to visit. What will he think when he hears of this?

Five people—a family—lay across the road in front of them, blocking the way. Two of the children were curled in fetal positions, another had been clinging to her mother, who was the only one still breathing. It was the Ndukas, a family of sorghum farmers who came to the clinic every few weeks for check-ups and antibiotics. She parked and stepped out of the truck. Looked back in the direction they had come, listening to the eerie sound of people struggling for breath, a sound that reminded her of crickets—a ragged chorus of death rasps across the sprawl of farm fields.

What was this? Superficially, at least, she knew: The symptoms resembled acute pulmonary edema—airborne viral particles had entered the victims’ bodies through their respiratory tracts, lodged in the lungs, and multiplied rapidly in the moist tissues there, filling their lungs with fluid until the victims literally drowned. The only frame of reference she had for it was the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, which spread mysteriously around the world for a year and a half, killing some forty million people, probably more, most of them within four or five days of catching the virus.

But this was different. These people had gone to bed with no symptoms. Could a much deadlier mutation have somehow occurred? It was possible, she knew, though hardly likely—most viruses were well-adapted to their environments and didn’t suddenly change milieus like this.

Sandra Oku walked back to her truck, where the boy was sleeping now, his head against the passenger door. She climbed into the driver’s seat and sat there, listening to the strange chorus of death rattles, stroking the boy’s moist head and looking toward the verdant western mountains, wondering, How far? How far has this gone?

And then, watching the sky, she began to think something else, as if her thoughts had turned away from all of this to a different reality: her cousin, Paul Bahdru, and the message he had left for her. She was starting at last to recognize what he meant. Paul had come to visit her six days earlier, on a pleasant, rain-cooled afternoon. They had sat on the deck behind her clinic, talking, drinking rooibos tea. He was traveling under an assumed name, he said. Driving a twelve-year-old car that he had just bought in the capital. En route to the airport and a meeting in another city. His story sounded a little fantastic to her, although many things about her cousin had seemed that way, particularly since his wife’s murder. He was investigating a network of business and investment interests in Sundiata, he said, in particular a well-funded, government-sanctioned medical research project. He was going to meet with a man called Frederick Collins. He didn’t say much about that, but as they drank their tea on the porch, watching giant black birds perched in the trees, he had told her other things. Things that he seemed to want her to remember—and which she did, now, with a sudden clarity: “There is a deadly force trying to push this way, and then north, like an ill wind. If it happens, it will happen very quickly. I hope that it doesn’t, but I will warn you when I know the details. If it does, you should be prepared to leave this village.”

“But how could I?” she had said and smiled at him, thinking of her patients and of Michael and their plans for after the rainy season. “These people depend on me.”

There was a reason he couldn’t tell her more just then. But he had said he would contact her again and send her a message. Three days ago, it had happened. She had received his instructions and the box of medicine. She stared now through the wiper-streaked windshield and stroked the boy’s head again. Is this what Paul meant? How could he have known?

Dr. Oku closed her eyes. Death could be very peaceful, she realized, listening to the ragged rasp of human breaths, the sound of death on a cool late afternoon in West Africa.

FIVE

SEVERAL MINUTES BEFORE TEN, Jon Mallory dressed in jeans, a polo shirt and running shoes, pulled on his father’s old B-2 Air Force jacket and went out for a walk. He needed a change of scenery, and to make a mental list of people who might help him find his brother.

He improvised a circuitous route, heading up Yuma Street to Spring Valley, along the edge of American University, then to Wisconsin Avenue and the Tenleytown Metro Station, letting his thoughts wander as he tread through the quiet old residential neighborhoods. Remembering names, faces, pieces of conversations. People his brother had known or might have known.

Images from his father’s funeral flashed through his thoughts. Men gathered at a cemetery on a wet, frigid morning last January, heads down, collars upturned. Thick snow slanting white in a charcoal gray sky. Bare trees. The wind spraying the snow against their faces.

People he recognized, though some only vaguely. Important men, some of them, from the world his father had inhabited. One conspicuously absent. Oddly, inexplicably.

He focused his thoughts on the faces he had seen, the men and women he could name and those he couldn’t name.

A former CIA director.

A heavy-set man who had once been his father’s student.

A woman he had seen on talking heads television shows, but couldn’t name.

Someone from the State Department.

One face not there. The one that should have been.

JON TOOK THE Metro from Tenleytown station two stops to Bethesda, rode the escalator to Wisconsin Avenue, and walked seven blocks to Tidwell’s, the organic restaurant where he often ate breakfast. He was greeted by the familiar aroma of potato and vegetable frittatas, the signature morning dish, a delicious concoction that included Roma tomatoes, asparagus, Irish porter cheddar cheese, and mushrooms.

He was sort of hoping to see Melanie Cross, his former girlfriend and current journalism competitor. For a while, they had met here each weekday before work. But that had been several years ago. In a different life.

He took a window booth, pulled out a pen, and began to scribble names on the napkin. People who might help him find his brother: a couple of long-ago business clients; three men his brother had probably worked with at the National Security Agency; one at the CIA. A woman named Angelina whom Charlie had dated years earlier, in college—the only romantic link Jon had ever known about. He was struck again by how little he knew his brother.

He took the same approximate route home, then spent the morning and early afternoon running searches on the Internet, making calls and sending e-mails. Two of the eleven names came off the list quickly. Charlie’s old Princeton professor had died six years ago. One of the NSA contacts, too, was dead.

He was able to reach three people—two men and a woman—who still worked for the government, but none of them had heard from Charlie in years. He called his brother’s old college roommate, Mark Fuller, an engineer with Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California. But he, too, had lost touch with Charles Mallory long ago.

Then Jon remembered a name that went with a face. Herbert Pincher. One of the faces at his father’s funeral, a former CIA analyst. A compact, stolid-faced man with squinty eyes and an impish smile who had seemed to be watching him through the snow last January. Jon did an online search and found that Pincher was now deputy assistant secretary of state for political affairs. He was fairly certain Pincher had worked with Charlie at one time.

He called the number listed on the State Department website. He waited on hold, expecting one of Pincher’s aides to come back and tell him that he was in a meeting or away from the office.