second floor and arranged for separate arrival times.
When Charles Mallory opened the door, the other four were already there: Chaplin was seated at a circular wooden table, along with Wells and Nadra Nkosi. Chidi Okoro was in a folding chair across the room. The shades were drawn.
Okoro was the anomaly in this group, conveying an aloof and slightly aristocratic presence. He had grown up in Nigeria, where his father was a banker, but had attended private schools in London. He was unsettlingly calm, a computer wizard who knew things Charlie would never understand.
Nadra was an ex-soldier, thirty years old, small but scrappy, dressed in her usual camouflage pants and tight black T-shirt, which showed a taut upper body and well-buffed arms. Nadra was the only one of his team who had grown up in Mancala. She’d served in the military here, then moved to the States where she studied at the Naval Academy and wound up as a State Department analyst on sub-Saharan African policy. But she didn’t like working behind a desk. Charlie understood that. Her first name meant “unusual” in Swahili, which seemed appropriate to him. These were the best four employees he could imagine. They reminded him sometimes of a championship sports team.
When Charlie came in, they were studying sets of aerial print-outs. The aerials had small numbers stamped on them: 1 through 10. Each number indicated a potential target, with No. 1 being the most valuable, Wells was explaining. Okoro handed a set to Charles Mallory, who sat on the plastic-cushioned sofa.
“We think they’re looking at using four to six airfields throughout the country,” Jason Wells said. “Not all of them are of equal value, obviously—to them or to us. We assess that primarily in terms of population. The one nearest the capital is going to be responsible for Mungaza, which is one tenth of the total population of the country. So that’s target one. The aerials indicate that at least two tanks of what we suspect are viral properties are already in place. We have no photographic record of these four-hundred-gallon tanks at any other airfields. We start with what we know, and we neutralize it.”
Okoro, who had created the aerial models, watched Chaplin through his thick lenses. Wells said, “Most of the urban populations are in two cities. If we were able to immobilize this air strip, it would be a major set-back.”
“Wouldn’t they have some kind of back-up?” Nadra said.
“Possibly,” Wells said. “But that’s a secondary consideration. The primary objective is to neutralize the poison. If we can get to it one day ahead of time, we’re winning the game.”
Chaplin was frowning. “But even if this works tonight, can’t they go up using a different tank? Couldn’t they escalate, push it up a day, or a few hours?”
“They could,” Wells said. “But the thing is, I don’t think they’re going to go up in this weather. They’d lose effectiveness by thirty, thirty-five percent. Which they can’t afford. It’s the same as with crop-dusting. It’s all weather-dependent. The aerosol goes much farther and faster with a wind,” he said. The muscles in his neck flexed involuntarily. “But it has to be the right wind.
“So we have to go for maximum impact tonight. Neutralize the two tanks. And, if we do, and we’re lucky, some of them may crawl out of their holes and let us see what they look like.”
“Targets,” Mallory said.
“There’s a fuel tank on the airfield,” Wells said, pointing to it on his print-out. “Close enough to the fencing that Nadra or I can get an explosive in there. The actual damage may not be huge. But that will divert attention from the hangar, where the viral tanks are.”
Chaplin’s brow was furrowed again. “But is there any sort of collateral risk—the aerosol viral property blowing up and getting loose?”
“No. We’re pinpointing very specific targets. Primary objective: neutralize.”
“And what happens after the first night?”
“We won’t know until it happens.”
Charles Mallory smiled. He had been thinking about Jason Wells’s plan ever since leaving the Blue Star Cafe.
“How are
“They’re planning on it happening. The virus will spread within hours to the borders, where vaccine and anti- viral supplies are in place. Health centers on the border will form a buffer zone. Travel will be immediately shut down. Media outlets cut off. The damage will all happen after dark.”
Charlie nodded. It was a logical assumption that the planes would go up at night. They had done it that way during the trials in Sundiata. Nighttime would make the actual operation almost invisible. Nothing would be seen by the light of day, except the aftermath.
“I think I saw part of the clean-up plan yesterday, coming in on the train,” Charlie said.
They all looked at him.
“Oh?” Jason said.
“There’s a huge open-pit copper mine northwest of the city,” he said. “Five or six miles. Chain-link fence around the perimeter. Train tracks leading in and out.”
“
“Yeah. Except I’m pretty sure that it’s not a copper mine.”
WITHIN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES, they had agreed on the details of the first night’s mission. Mallory, Wells, Chaplin, and Nadra Nkosi would be the operations team. Okoro would monitor them from his rented room. The operations team would meet again at twelve minutes past ten. Night one objectives: Seven targets as diversions. And neutralize the two tanks.
Charlie walked to his designated apartment, another one-room affair, where he lay on a short, stiff mattress and closed his eyes for a few minutes. He thought about his brother and his father. Heard their voices. Saw their faces.
Then he went back to work, studying the aerial images. He recognized the surveillance apparatus around the airfield and on the edge of the woods: electronic towers equipped with long-range radar and high-definition cameras. Possibly linked to underground sensors—sensors and heat detectors that could pick up motion through the trees, sending an alert to lookouts who would then focus their cameras on the subjects’ locations. That was going to make it difficult for them coming at the airfield through the woods.
The surveillance set-up was sophisticated, not dissimilar from the system created to guard the United States’ two-thousand-mile border with Mexico. A system that, in theory, was foolproof, although in practice highly flawed. The problem with next-generation stuff, Charlie knew, was that the kinks were never all worked out. The primary weakness with this type of set-up was weather, as the U.S. had found after spending billions of dollars on the Mexico project. When it rained and the wind blew, the sensors became confused and the surveillance was worthless.
But this system was probably more effective. Weather-proofed, developed with an eye toward avoiding the troubles of the Mexican border surveillance. There was another, simple way to disable it if the weather didn’t, though—an idea he had thought about even before Jason Wells suggested it: well-placed sniper bullets could disable each of the five cameras. Charles Mallory finally lay back and allowed himself a brief nap, setting the alarm clock by the bed to nine o’clock.
From his office at the Gardner Foundation complex, Perry Gardner played a feed from the foundation’s weekly executive committee meeting that morning. Routine business. Status reports on projects from the various divisions: a proposal to establish two dozen polio clinics in Kenya and Somalia; partnerships with several East African governments that would teach villagers to filter waterborne parasites from drinking water; the ongoing initiative to find a vaccine for malaria; the distribution of underused vaccines to poor children in East Africa.
More and more, Gardner skipped these meetings, which were run very effectively by his wife, and most other foundation business. As he fast-forwarded through the presentations, he glanced at the clock again. Six minutes to go.
Finally, at 10:20, he clicked off the monitor and walked toward the most remote wing of the Gardner Institute, an underground compound known as Building 67, or the New Technologies Wing. A structure only eleven people were authorized to enter.
Scanners picked up Gardner’s full-body image as he approached, prompting vertical doors to slide open. On the lower level of the building, he entered a ten-foot-by-ten-foot chamber called a DTE, or Data Transfer
