Viral

“We’re containing it. No losses. Greatest damage was an airport fuel tank. Looks worse than it is.”

“The product.”

“It’s all safe.”

“How did you let this happen?”

Ramesh didn’t respond.

“Can you get them?”

“We will.”

“How?”

“We’re pursuing.”

“Not good enough,” Priest said, and hung up.

He had been told that this wasn’t possible. It can’t be stopped now. Gardner had assured him he was protected. Maybe he already knew what Priest had done, what was really going to happen on October 5. Or maybe he suspected.

CHARLIE WOKE IN an unfamiliar apartment before sunrise, fully dressed except for his shoes. He felt grimy, smelled of smoke. He showered and shaved, then pulled on a new set of cheap clothing. Another day.

Except it wasn’t another day.

It was October 5. The World Series day. The day when Isaak Priest was supposed to take the planes up. To depopulate a nation.

As he walked toward downtown, Charlie smelled smoke and felt ash in the air, saw it all over the streets. He still heard Nadra’s and Jason’s voices in his head: It didn’t work. We failed. Crap! He felt the changed mood in town—there were armed contractors everywhere, patrolling alongside the eateries and shops, looking in, watching everyone. Mallory kept his head down, tried to stay out of sight. He had slept fitfully, thinking all night about contingencies.

He was looking forward to his 7:50 meeting with Nadra. To learning something about the Palace and how they might infiltrate it. How they might get to Isaak Priest before nightfall. That was his alternate plan.

He ordered a cup of coffee, black, and watched the street traffic—the armed security details, the bicycle taxis and rickshaws. Finally, he walked to the corner of Lester Avenue. Checked his watch. 7:49. Moments later, an old Camry stopped beside him. Charlie opened the front passenger door.

Nadra was wearing combat fatigues, sneakers, and her tight black T-shirt—but also something new, a camouflage ball cap. She drove them north, into the suburbs, leaning forward against the steering wheel, moving it with her elbows.

“Everything’s different today, isn’t it?” she said.

“Is it?”

“Yeah. I just keep thinking how we blew it.”

“Don’t,” he said. “We didn’t.”

She shot him a look. “No?”

“No. Don’t think that.”

“What can we do, though? The device didn’t work.”

“Different strategy,” Charlie said.

“How? What else can we do? We don’t have any other way of neutralizing it.”

“How about if we go after something else? Priest instead of the poison.”

Nadra didn’t say anything right away. She drove slowly through a neighborhood of sun-bleached, mud-brick homes, making seemingly haphazard turns, her eyes scanning the scenery attentively. Charlie liked being with her one on one. Sometimes she treated him like an older brother, opening up and showing him vulnerabilities that the other members of the team never saw, particularly Okoro, who rarely spoke with her.

“Besides,” Charlie said. “We may be able to buy a day or two with the weather. It’s supposed to rain tonight.”

“I just know we can’t let this happen.” Nadra tugged down on her hat brim. “I mean, crap! When I was crawling through the woods last night, I just realized this is my home, man. I mean, I’ve been everywhere in the world, but this is my home. All night, I thought what I should be doing. How I should be helping the people here.”

“What would you do?”

“What would I do? Teach them. Show them how to use what they have. How to irrigate, for one thing. Most of the farmland to the west of the capital is ruined. For miles and miles.”

“Why doesn’t the government teach them?”

“The government? Crap, the government shuts down any program like that when it starts to succeed.”

This was what Mallory had been wondering: why her country had been chosen for this. “Why would they do that?”

“They’re paid to. Contractors pay them to keep the problems the way they are. Progress interferes with their plans. Huge amounts of money are coming in, promoting a different agenda.”

The road northwest from the Green Monkey River was muddy from the night rains, winding through patchy sodden fields and past volcanic gorges.

“So Priest is down in the Palace, we think,” Charlie said. “Tell me about that. Can we get there this afternoon?”

“We could try. There’s really thick forest surrounding it. Supposedly it’s mined with booby traps. It used to be there were lots of trails in there, but it’s all overgrown now. I used to play in the river down there when I was a girl.”

“Why do they call it the Palace?”

“Just because it looks like one. It was built by a British businessman who owned mines here early in the last century. Then an American corporation bought it. Wanted to turn it into a hunting lodge or something.”

It was beginning to drizzle again. The air smelled clean and rich with wet soil. Occasionally, he smelled something else, though.

It reminded Charlie of what he had seen on his arrival. The images kept tugging at him, although he hadn’t said anything to anyone.

Finally, he asked Nadra about it. “There were dead bodies scattered all over the countryside outside the city. I saw them from the train. Most of them pretty young.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s going on?”

Nadra didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice was more measured.

“Some of the contractors go out shooting after dark,” she said. “From helicopters. ‘Night hunting,’ they call it. Some of them hunt from the ground, too, into the shanty towns and the farms. They get drunk first. Some of them put on night-vision sights and use the shanty towns as firing ranges.”

“And no one does anything about it?”

“Not really, no.”

They rode in silence, a long loop back toward the city, Mallory wondering why she’d asked to meet with him. Sensing it was just for the company, to talk before the meeting with Jason Wells and the whole team. Then he thought of the other thing that had been tugging at his thoughts.

“How long has that pit been there?” he asked.

“The copper mine? Since last year.”

“Who dug it?”

“A contractor from South Africa, supposedly. For a local mine interest.”

“How deep would you say it is?”

“How deep? I don’t know. More than a thousand feet, supposedly.”

Mallory thought about that. Deep enough to fit the Eiffel Tower. Almost two Washington Monuments. He had figured eight hundred feet the night before, lying in bed.

“You ever play one of those games where you try to guess how many jelly beans fit in a jar?” Mallory said.