coming to our country now?”
Charlie didn’t say anything. The fan stirred the warm aroma of curry spices. She wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Something’s going to happen, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Charlie looked out, at the starry sky above the whitewashed walls and tin roofs. Wondered how many people thought that way. “What do you
“I don’t know.” She glanced behind her and said, quietly, “People are talking about medicines. People are selling it.”
“Are they? Where?”
“At the health clinics, in the country. Some on the street. They say we’re going to need them. That something bad is coming.”
“What do they think it is?”
“I don’t know. They say it’s much worse than AIDS. Everyone will get it and everyone will die.”
“I don’t think so,” Charlie said. She was trying to get him to agree with her, but he didn’t want to do that.
“You don’t?”
“No.”
After she walked away, Charles Mallory finished quickly. He left a hundred and twenty Mancalan shillings on the table and headed back out into the streets toward the rented apartment.
FORTY-THREE
IT WAS A SINGLE room in a musty two-story building with plaster lathe walls. Charlie washed in the sink and then lay on the bed, his feet and ankles extending over the edge. He listened to the sounds outside. Figuring the next day, October 4.
Finally, he closed his eyes and slept, for nearly seven hours. In the morning, he washed his face again, pulled on new clothes, and went out, taking his bag and the key to the next night’s apartment. Already the streets were busy, and he began seeing the security vehicles Chaplin had mentioned—pick-ups with recoilless rifles mounted on the back; Jeeps manned with machine guns. Occasionally, an APC—armored personnel carrier—with smoked-glass windows. Most of the contractors traveled in groups of two or more, Charlie noticed, meaning it probably wasn’t wise to be seen alone.
The Blue Star Cafe was a couple of blocks from the heart of the city center. Charlie picked out the angular features of Jason Wells’ face from the street. He was sitting against a side wall by a dirt-coated spinning fan. The air in the cafe smelled of fried dough from the
Wells wore a dark green, short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants. He was a solidly built man of medium height who rarely smiled, with wide cheeks, a broken nose, and great dark eyes that conveyed the calm of a deeply planted self-confidence. He was one of the smartest soldiers Mallory had ever known.
They shook hands and Charlie sat.
“Get in yesterday?”
“Late.”
“Fourth day,” Wells said. He touched the handle of his coffee cup.
“How did it go last night?”
“We got it. Propellant launcher, two aerosol spray tanks of plasmids. Stored with the vaccine. Sandra Oku laid everything out and we just walked in. It was clean.”
“So we’re in business.”
“If it works.”
Charlie studied him. Wells could be a bold strategist, but he was also a realist. He had grown up in the Midwest and served in Special Forces for nine years before joining DMA four years ago. “What’s the prognosis overall?”
“Hard to say,” he said. “We’re late to the party. At this point, psychology’s going to be a big part of it.”
The waitress came over and Charlie ordered coffee, black, and a raisin muffin. After it arrived, he asked Wells his plan.
“My recommendation is two operations. One precision, the other diversion. Do the diversion al Qaeda style. Hit half a dozen targets, simultaneously. Starting tonight. Maximum impact. Both strategically and psychologically. Go for targets that are actually part of their operation: train line, communications tower, air fields. I’ve got them mapped out.”
“Chaplin said you have a dozen explosives.”
“Fourteen. Nadra and I made six IEDs. Twenty-pound ammonium nitrate bombs. Nadra purchased a dozen blocks of M112 C-4 military issue explosives. Everything’s in the trunk of her car right now.”
Mallory nodded. Both he and Jason Wells had spent time in Afghanistan and knew how easy it was to make an ammonium nitrate fertilizer bomb—and the devastating damage it could cause. Ninety percent of the bombs that had exploded in Afghanistan since 2001 were made of fertilizer and fuel oil.
“Advantages? Disadvantages?”
“The weather is the big factor in our favor. They’re not going to go up unless the wind is blowing right. And not if it’s raining. And not, I, uh—”
Jason suddenly gestured strangely and laughed, thrusting his index finger at Charlie. “Just play along with me right now, okay? Don’t look,” he said. “Nod your head a couple of times and smile. Laugh if you can.”
Charles Mallory did.
“Okay?” he said. He continued to gesture animatedly, making karate chops in the air and urging Mallory to do so, too. “Just play along, okay? Okay. Now, look to your left.” Mallory did. “See that man? That’s John Ramesh. He was looking at us. At you, I think. He gets a wild hair when he sees contractors acting too serious. Makes him very nervous.”
“Okay. Good to know.” Charlie caught a glimpse of Ramesh again through the crowd at the front of the restaurant. Short, muscle-bound, with a gray ponytail, wearing a white, sleeveless T-shirt, green khaki pants. A pistol strapped to his belt.
“He’s kind of the enforcer here. Wild West kind of character. Isaak Priest’s main sentry. Be wary of him.”
“I will.” Mallory cradled his coffee cup. “Does he have anything to do with the outlaw contingent I was told about?”
Wells looked away. “No. That’s a whole other thing. We don’t quite understand that yet. Maybe Hassan Network.”
“Interesting.”
“Maybe. There’s an old abandoned prison down there, about nine kilometers southwest of the city. They have a barracks and what looks like a training camp. I don’t know that it has anything to do with what we’re working on. It’s an assessment we haven’t looked at closely. Not a priority.”
“Okay.” Mallory scanned the street for Ramesh again, didn’t see him. “What do you see when you go inside Isaak Priest’s head?” he asked. “How’s it going to happen?”
“Quickly.” Jason looked at him with his serious eyes. “One night.”
“Tomorrow, supposedly.”
“Yeah.”
“Then what?”
“Then they’re going to have to start burying people. That’s what all the contractors are here for. Millions of people.”
“Eight point six. How are they going to do that?”
“It’s our job not to find out.”
THERE WERE FIVE motels on Sycamore Street south of the city center. The Bombay was a three-story, concrete-block building with a small lobby and outside entrances to all of the rooms. Chaplin had rented one on the
