In his communications center at Building 67, the Administrator watched the six-foot high-definition monitor screens as the feed replayed from Sector R17-652. Basel, Switzerland. The room housed a cluster of quantum- encrypted supercomputers, developed by Ott and Hebron, and a private Internet network known as F-2, which monitored the forty-three individuals he had flagged as Level A “concerns”—tracking their activities through telephone and e-mail communications, credit card transactions, and satellite imaging surveillance.
“Intersection,” he said to himself. He enlarged the high-definition images on the bank of monitors—images relayed from satellites using parabolic lenses with facial recognition software. They had him. He further enlarged and focused the picture, and then “cleaned” it, erasing the lighting effects and moving the head into a known view. The three-dimensional face recognition algorithms then measured the geometry of the facial features and motion patterns to make certain.
The Administrator smiled to himself. They had allowed Vogel to survive for the same reason they had allowed Jon Mallory to survive: as bait. Hoping that eventually Charles Mallory would find him and step into a surveillance grid.
Now they had to act quickly, so that Mallory did not circumvent surveillance again. He would assign Mehmet Hassan to track him. He knew that for Charles Mallory, Mehmet Hassan would have a special motive. A personal one. Mallory was the man who had killed his little cousin, Ahmed, two weeks earlier in Nice.
But first, he had another assignment. One that Charles Mallory couldn’t have suspected.
FORTY
CHARLIE WALKED NORTH SEVERAL blocks under the awnings into Brandgasse, the city’s small red-light district. He ducked into a place called Club Elegance and waited for his eyes to adjust. Men were seated along the bar, women on two low sofas against the walls. Before he could see them clearly, one of the women asked if he wanted a date.
“Actually, I need an escort,” he said.
“How long?”
“Twenty, thirty minutes?” He showed her his money and she moved closer to him. She smelled of flowery perfume. “Walk with me to the cab stand two blocks down the street.” He handed her two twenty-franc notes.
They hurried arm in arm to the cab stand and climbed in back. “Train station,” Mallory said. The taxi took them through a winding maze of narrow streets, past gingerbread-style houses and tiny eateries, offbeat boutiques, galleries. Back toward the neighborhood where he’d had lunch. In the distance he heard sirens.
As they rounded a turn, Charlie looked up. Gus Hebron’s business was there: satellite imaging, telephone intercepts, transmitted somewhere else. It was all happening in the sky. That was how they operated. Intercept technology merged with a terrorism network. A potent hybrid.
If the surveillance was primarily satellite, it meant that he had a good head start on the ground, maybe an hour or two, probably more if he was smart enough to stay out of their grids. He knew they would send someone after him immediately, though, and suspected it might be
She shrugged, stuck the money inside her bra. Charlie handed her one more twenty-franc note. Finally, she nodded.
He watched the woman walk into the eatery, not looking back.
Before boarding his train, Charlie sent an encrypted message to Chidi Okoro, to be forwarded to Sandra Oku. It was fitting, he thought, that Sandra would end up playing a role in their operation. Paul had recruited her as insurance in case something happened to him. Sandra had impressed Charlie with her fortitude and strength of mind.
He walked back to the tracks, boarded the Cisalpino to Zurich, intentionally limping slightly. Found his seat by the window, halfway up in the fourth car. He sat and shut his eyes. Removed his hat. A man and woman sat opposite him, speaking in German. He glanced quickly, then looked down the aisle. A moon-faced man seemed to be watching him. Late forties, probably, pock-marked skin, thick mustache. Mallory looked out at Basel and in the distance saw the edge of the Black Forest. Closed his eyes. Opened them. The man was still looking. Charlie checked his watch. Finally, the train began to move. He looked again and saw the man was engaged in a conversation with a young boy. It was okay.
The countryside flashed past, increasingly dark and featureless as the train distanced itself from Basel. Eventually, they would realize the ticket to Paris was a ruse. But it would take them a while to trace his new identity. Eric Dantz was a name that would have no reference in their databases. Still, he needed to be careful. Most people operated within predictable parameters—if they were trying to avoid detection, they bluffed, they set up diversions. A trait of human nature. The predators would be thinking that. They probably wouldn’t know his new name, but they would anticipate that he had one. They would have to figure it out in other ways, then. Charles Mallory had to counteract that somehow, to move in directions they wouldn’t expect him to move. He closed his eyes for several minutes. The train rolled deeper into the night.
Mehmet Hassan,
A prison nine kilometers southwest of Mungaza.
The victim would be waiting there for him when he arrived. Three days from now.
FORTY-ONE
THE TRAVEL TIME FROM Zurich Airport to Nairobi was fourteen hours and thirty minutes, including the changeover in Paris. From Nairobi, Eric Dantz flew to Amara, the second-largest city in the landlocked nation of Mancala. There he took a cab to a rail station in the suburbs and boarded the local to Mungaza, the capital city, where Joseph Chaplin and the rest of his team were already encamped.
Eric Dantz was Charles Mallory’s final identity and, he assumed, the last one he would need. Dantz would take him into Mungaza undetected. And in Mungaza, he would find Isaak Priest. Three assumptions that depended on good fortune. In truth, he was rolling dice.
The train rumbled through the open savannah of the northlands, a vast, sweeping landscape of rolling grasses rimmed by faraway mountains, which had always inspired Charles Mallory, as it did most Westerners—a landscape probably not unlike that where the human species had first emerged.
The train took them through ramshackle farm villages of stick and grass huts, where barefoot children stood in the fields beside the tracks and waved. Past tea plantations and fields of tobacco, sugarcane and sorghum, and giant dusty tracts of abandoned farmland, ruined by drought, erosion, and nutrient degradation.
Charlie watched a passing village, thinking how easy it would be to make all of this disappear. Mancala was a hundred thousand square kilometers, a little smaller than the state of Pennsylvania. There were two main urban
