Viral

discovery.

BY 2:17, OKORO had downloaded the satellite feeds and printed out five sets of aerials. Twenty-one minutes later, the five of them were gathered in a fifth-floor room at the Oasis Hotel, studying them.

Charlie sat with Wells at a round maple-toned dining table. Nadra Nkosi was on one end of the sleeper sofa, leaning forward, watching them intently. Chaplin was at the other end, Okoro sitting on a tub chair. The room smelled of dirty carpet.

Chaplin seemed uneasy with the new development. Charlie was feeling that way, too, but for different reasons. Something about the meeting didn’t feel right to him. Didn’t feel right at all.

“Recommendation,” Jason said. “Four of us in, one out.”

“I’m in,” Nadra said.

“No,” Charlie said. He sighed, thinking about what was planned for this evening.

All four stared at him, waiting.

“No, why?” Jason Wells said.

“We can’t risk this. We can’t do it this way.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“We can’t all be involved in this.”

There was a long silence.

“We are involved,” Nadra said.

“No. This is not our mission, it’s not why we’re here. This is where I have to draw a line.” Mallory stood. He imagined for a moment things going very wrong. Worse than they had gone already. They hadn’t come this far to suddenly risk everything. This was his mistake. He would have to deal with it. “I’m going to go in by myself. I screwed up. The rest of you have to stay with the primary mission.”

Only Okoro seemed neutral about that.

“I’m with Nadra,” Wells said. “We were supposed to protect your brother. We didn’t. We screwed up.”

“No.” Mallory closed his eyes for a moment. Focus. Work this out. He heard the ticking of the clock in his head. “No one screwed up. They surprised us. But this is my responsibility. I’m going to go in alone.”

“What if you’re outvoted?” Nadra said. She was standing now.

Charlie knew he was in a gray area. Even though he was technically in charge of this group, his policy had always been to run the business like a democracy, and his employees had for the most part held him to that.

“Look at it another way,” Wells said. “They took out Ben Wilson. One sixth of our team. And two other men. That deserves a response.”

Nadra nodded. “It is a team. No one goes off alone.”

“Then we wait until the primary mission is accomplished,” Charlie said.

“I don’t think we can afford that,” Wells said.

No. Of course not.

“It’s all part of the same mission, anyway,” Chaplin said, sighing his assent. “Your brother’s role is to get the story out there, isn’t it? If we don’t do everything we can to save him, we’re jeopardizing the story. Which is at the heart of the operation.”

Mallory looked at Chidi Okoro, who always agreed with Chaplin. But his expression was blank, his eyes giant behind the glasses. Charlie thought of his father’s eyes, steady, urging him forward.

Jason Wells said, “Anyway, it’s only three twenty-five. Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t we do this and come back and go after Priest?”

“That’s assuming a lot, isn’t it?” Mallory said.

“No. All it’s assuming is that we can do this,” Nadra said. “Which we can.”

Mallory exchanged a look with Jason. It’s assuming my brother’s still alive, too, he thought, but didn’t say.

“Okay. We’re a team, but I’m still the one going in. You can be back-up.”

BY 3:46, JASON Wells had established tactics. It would, again, be a three-person operation, with Chaplin and Okoro staying behind. The prison compound was about twenty acres in total, Wells figured, and roughly rectangular-shaped, surrounded on all sides by a ten-foot mud-brick wall topped with concertina wire. The old stone prison building itself took up about four acres of that, a rectangle within the larger rectangle, with a courtyard at its center. Also on site was a stone chaplain’s house and a recently built row of barracks with maybe two dozen rooms.

“I don’t see any towers. Security cameras,” Nadra said.

“No. I don’t think there are any,” Jason said.

That was odd—completely different from Priest’s set-ups, as if the two were unrelated. Charlie studied the aerials some more. There were two entrances to the compound: the front gate and a side delivery entrance, where trucks went in after dark with people kidnapped from the streets.

It had been Nadra’s suggestion to try going in on a truck. But Wells thought it was too dangerous. “None of the people who go in on those trucks come back out. Who knows what happens in there? I think we should take advantage of the lack of sophisticated security. Because there aren’t any cameras, we could probably climb over the wall.”

“What about the razor?” Charlie said.

“That’s a problem. Make it Plan C. Plan B would be blowing a hole in the wall. It’s mud brick; we could easily blast a hole in it with one of the remaining explosives.”

“But we’d be announcing our arrival,” Nadra said.

“Yes. That’s why it’s Plan B.”

“What’s Plan A?” Charlie asked.

“Going in through the storm drainage pipe.”

He pointed to the aerial, to the corner where the pipe protruded from the outer wall. “It appears to be about three and a half feet in diameter. Wide enough to crawl through. Drains storm-water out into the river. There’s probably a grate inside. Whether it’s secured or not, we don’t know. It’s not a sure thing by any measure. But it would be the least obvious.”

Mallory nodded. “Why is it a three-man operation?” he asked.

“Nadra and I will create the diversion once you get in.”

“How?”

“Explosives at the front. Plan B.”

AT 4:39, CHARLES Mallory came out of the woods and walked across the shallow river through the speckles of afternoon sunlight. He moved in a crouch along the opposite bank, looking for sensors or cameras, anything they might have missed from the aerials. But he saw nothing.

He was dressed in jeans and a dark sweatshirt, wearing cotton gloves, carrying a flashlight in his right hand and the 9mm handgun in the right pocket of his sweatshirt. The first problem he had noticed from across the river: The pipe did not end at river level as it seemed to in aerials. The opposite bank had eroded, and the pipe was a good five feet above the ground, maybe more. He wouldn’t just be able to crawl into it.

Charlie came to a spot directly below the opening of the drain pipe and looked both ways along the rust- colored mud-brick wall. Nothing. He stood and reached, closing his fingers on the bottom of the pipe entrance, the flashlight still in his right hand. Felt the gritty, rusted iron. He lifted himself up like he was doing a pull-up, raising his head above the bottom lip of the pipe: pure darkness, no light at the other end. He tossed in the flashlight, then pulled himself as high as he could and jammed his right elbow up into the pipe. Held on, used it as a lever to yank his left elbow in. Tried to move from side to side, pulling himself up and in. It almost worked.

Then his right elbow lost traction and he fell back, felt his left forearm scrape across the rusted edge of the pipe opening, and he was out, the metal tearing a cut through the sleeve of the sweatshirt.

He tried again, pulling himself up. Planting his right elbow and pivoting his left arm into the pipe. Using his elbows to lift himself in. Moving in tiny increments this time, until his center of gravity was up inside the pipe. He lay