Viral

photocopied, hard to make out. And a copy of the memorandum that had shut down his father’s Lifeboat Inquiry— the same memo that Franklin had given him in Foggy Bottom, although unlike the copy Franklin had provided, this one had not been censored. It was all there. Vogel. Concerns about an “emergency preparedness plan.” His father’s warning about VaxEze. The unregulated trials. All the things that he wasn’t supposed to see.

Charlie read this last memo more carefully. If the report from Franklin had included these details, would he have gotten here in Mancala two or three days earlier? Maybe. What was so sensitive that they didn’t want him to see? Not clear. Then he came to the bottom of the second page. Saw the name of the man who had shut down the Lifeboat Inquiry. Who had signed his name to the memo. A name redacted in the other version, even though he knew who it was.

Colonel Dale McCormack. National Intelligence Director.

The man who had closed down his father’s operation, just days before Stephen Mallory died. Who was “threatened by it,” as Anna Vostrak had surmised.

Except it wasn’t Dale McCormack’s name that had been typed and signed at the end of this memorandum.

Mallory looked again, staring in disbelief.

He held the paper up to the light of the flickering fluorescent ceiling bulb to make sure he was seeing the words correctly. No. It couldn’t be.

He pulled fifty Mancalan shillings from his pocket and left them on the table, then hurried back into the street. Began to run. I got all of this wrong. All of it!

He needed to find Nadra and Jason. To change up their plans. To find out what had really happened. Two blocks. Two and a half blocks. He stopped. Looked at the memo again, to make sure.

The man who had written the memo shutting down the Lifeboat Inquiry wasn’t Dale McCormack at all.

It was someone he had not even suspected. Couldn’t have suspected.

Someone who had helped create a new identity for his brother just a few days ago, and supplied a passport for that identity. Who had given Frederick Collins a back story and official documents.

How could I not have known?

He looked one more time, then began to run faster through the Mungaza streets.

The man who had shut down his father’s operation. Who had written the memorandum.

It wasn’t Dale McCormack.

It was Richard Franklin.

FORTY-EIGHT

AMONG HIS OTHER TASKS, Chidi Okoro ran the company’s “mobile communications command post,” as he called it, which meant he monitored communications and kept tabs on all members of the team. He had four monitors set up in his rented apartment on 3 Elms Road, a more secure-looking place than any of Mallory’s apartments.

Charlie, sweating in the cool air, his shirt wet, rapped on the door until he answered. Okoro reluctantly opened, looking at him warily through his thick glasses. He latched the door behind him.

Mallory recognized the image on one of the monitors. The chalet. He had already heard, then.

“What happened?”

“Raided. Yesterday morning.”

“Why didn’t we hear about it sooner?”

Okoro didn’t reply. Charlie asked again, his heart pounding.

“Wasn’t discovered until sometime after the fact.”

“What happened?”

“Armed gunmen.”

“Ben Wilson?”

“He was killed,” he said in an even voice.

Mallory winced, feeling overwhelmed. He’d made the worst mistake of his life trusting Franklin. First Paul Bahdru. Now his brother.

“Hassan.”

“Apparently.”

“Damn it!” he said. Then Okoro gave him the rest: The video feed had been knocked out first, so there was nothing recorded for them to see. Somehow, the perpetrators had rushed and killed both sentries, then Ben Wilson in his room. It had happened overnight, before they had made their strikes in Mungaza.

“And my brother? They got him?”

“Unaccounted for.”

“Can we track him?”

“Theoretically. I’ve not been able to pick up a signal, though.”

Wilson had injected a bio-chip under the skin of Jon Mallory’s right palm with a syringe, as Charlie had requested. The bio-chip was a GPS device about the size of a grain of rice. Okoro called up a locator map on the monitor, homed in on the map of Switzerland.

“Nothing,” he said. Charlie looked over his shoulder, his heart racing. “I can try the history trace.”

“Do it!”

He clicked several keys, paused, then clicked some more. Charlie saw the map shrink, and broaden, encompassing a larger region—surrounding countries, the Mediterranean, the Alps, all of Europe. Now there was a green trail, indicating satellite tracking, similar to a radar blip. The flashing arrow moved south, from Switzerland through France and Italy, showing date and time for each location.

“Plane route,” Okoro said. He enlarged the map further as the arrow dipped in a southeasterly direction, over the Mediterranean and then above the African continent. Over the Sudan, a corner of the Congo, Uganda, Tanzania. Stopping in Kenya. And then moving south. To Mancala.

To Mungaza.

Then the signal stopped moving. But it continued to blink.

“That’s it,” Okoro said, after a long time. “End of the road.”

Charlie looked at his impassive expression, the green light of the computer screen coloring his face, blinking on his lenses. “What? He’s here?”

“Evidently.”

But where? And why?

“Can we pinpoint it?”

“If it’s still operational. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to. Let me zoom in.” This was technology that Mallory’s company had developed and Okoro had been testing. It wasn’t foolproof yet.

The fact that his brother was here in Mungaza didn’t make him feel any better. But it didn’t make him feel any worse, either. On the plus side, it meant that he was probably still alive. The negative side he didn’t want to think about. They had moved him closer to Charles Mallory for a reason, as an end-game strategy.

He knew that, and he could imagine what they had brought him here for. If the Hassan Network was responsible, they were surely planning something terrible. A payback. But he wasn’t going to think about that.

“Okay. Let me match this,” Okoro said, at last. Charlie watched the monitor, trying to stay patient. “Here we go, then. It’s southwest of Mungaza. Looks like about nine kilometers.”

“What’s there?”

He didn’t answer at first. “Let me locate the exact coordinates.” He focused the map more tightly, called up a fix on the screen. Without any inflection in his voice, he said, “It’s the old prison grounds. Mungaza Prison site.”

The outlaws. What had Jason Wells said? I think it’s connected with the Hassan Network. It had to be. Maybe it was all coming together now. The compartmentalized operations were showing how they were connected, as he knew they eventually would. But it was not a reassuring