Viral

still for a moment, breathing deeply. The pipe was three and a half feet in diameter, as Jason had said. It smelled damp, an old and slightly unpleasant odor. Charlie began to crawl forward into the darkness, rocking from side to side, advancing his elbows several inches at a time. Within three or four minutes, he was engulfed in darkness. There was no light behind him anymore, none in front. He lay for a moment on his belly and listened. The sounds were faint and distant: what seemed to be a periodic scratching sound that might have been the footsteps of animals, or something catching in a breeze, and a persistent low buzzing that he couldn’t identify. He began to crawl again. Ten yards. Fifteen yards. Twenty yards. He stopped to rest. Started again. Estimating how far he had gone, picturing where the pipe would come out inside the prison building. Moving side to side, inches at a time.

Then his elbows came into something softer. Some kind of sludge covered the bottom of the pipe. He crawled through it, using his elbows to pivot himself forward, but he was getting less traction now. The pipe tilted slightly upward, making the crawl more difficult. His elbows slipped. He stopped. Tried again. Couldn’t move. He had come to an impasse. Couldn’t go forward any more. He was going to have to quit.

Charles Mallory closed his eyes. He breathed the damp, foul-smelling air, his thoughts shuffling—Franklin’s deception, his brother’s trust, the millions of people who might die tonight.

Improvise. He gathered his strength and tried something different, jamming his hands against the sides of the pipe and using them to thrust his body forward. It got him another several inches. Again: the sides of the pipe were less slippery than the bottom. He went a third time, using his hands and legs to lever his body forward. Two inches, four inches. He kept it going for several minutes. Then his arms began to tire, and he collapsed, realizing he wasn’t going to make it much farther. He lay belly down in the sludge for a moment, breathing in and out heavily. Sweating in the dampness. He felt the pipe again through the sludge and tried to crawl. Jerked his elbows forward. One, and the other, his feet pushing off the sides of the pipe, his body advancing in tiny increments again, two or three inches each time. Resting, moving forward, resting. And then suddenly he felt air against his face and stopped. There was no more tunnel. His hands felt a wall. He took a deep breath and looked up. Saw dim, abstract shapes above him. Something distinct from the darkness. A grate.

JON MALLORY HEARD the footsteps again. Deliberate, dull. Shoe soles on stone. And a rumbling distant sound of an engine. He was less groggy now but could summon no clear recollection of what had happened, just confused images. Explosions. Men rushing in. A bright light. Someone pushing him to the floor.

Help!

He tried to scream the word again. But he couldn’t. He tried to speak, to just say the word. And then to say his name. But he couldn’t do that, either. His brain still wasn’t working right. He was unable to say anything. Unable to make a sound.

THE GRATE WAS iron, circular, with a series of narrow slats where the water drained. Charles Mallory saw the dim outlines of other pipes above it, which fed water from the roof to the drain. He pushed his fingers up into the grate, felt it give, and let go. That was good. But he couldn’t get enough traction with his feet in the pipe to push it up and climb to the surface. He took a deep breath. Imagined going all the way back through the pipe, crawling a hundred and fifty feet backwards down to the entrance. Decided he didn’t like that option.

He lay in the pipe, gathering strength, listening. Thinking about Hassan. What they had done to Paul. Heard a distant rustling again, the feet of small animals on stone. Then nothing. But there were human smells here. He reached up and pushed again, felt the grate give. Then he jammed his fingers onto the edge of the opening and breathed in and out several times. Summoned all of his strength to pull himself up again. He slammed his elbow and shoulder into the grate so that it spun up from the casement, clattering onto the stone, the sound echoing for several seconds. He used both hands, then, to pull himself through, planting an elbow and lifting himself the rest of the way in. Tossing the flashlight ahead of him with his right hand.

He was in a narrow corridor, maybe three times the width of the pipe. It was dark, and he breathed the rank smell of standing water and urine, and something worse. He felt along the cold wall and came into a larger corridor. Pitch dark. He flicked on the flashlight and moved it left and right, his eyes smarting from the sudden brightness. He was in a corridor that separated a procession of prison cells. Two levels, forty-five-square-foot cells, he guessed. Rusted iron bars, most of the doors ajar. The corridor continued in front of him for about sixty yards.

He heard human sounds, then, and froze. What seemed to be breathing. And moaning. From several sources, it seemed. More remotely: footsteps. Then the sounds stopped and he wondered if he had really heard anything.

FORTY-NINE

CHARLES MALLORY WALKED SLOWLY to the end of the corridor, shining his light into the cells on either side as he went. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Nearly identical cells, all of them empty. Based on the shape of the complex, he figured that there were two main corridors, linked by rung passages on each end, one to the east, the other to the west. He was in one of the main corridors, walking south toward the rear of the prison, he guessed.

He heard a sharp sound. Stopped. Breathed a sweet, sickly odor. A faint but steady hissing became louder as he stepped forward. Charlie felt a cobweb on his face, broke it with his left forearm. He clicked the light on. Pointed it into the cell he was standing in front of, to his left, and saw a giant cluster of flies. He let the light go off and then pressed it on again. The flies were crawling over a decomposing human shape in a corner. He searched the rest of the cell and saw two others, both covered with flies. He pulled against the bars of the door. Locked.

He moved on, examined the next cell, and the next. Both empty. Kept walking. He heard it again. The buzzing of flies. He trained the light into the cell on his right. A pile of naked bodies, six or seven of them, some dead for days, others longer. He saw the patches of black discoloration on the limbs, the missing flesh on the faces, and wondered for a moment if one of them could be his brother. No. Charlie turned away and walked on. At the end of the corridor he heard a faint, intermittent scratching sound, like tiny footsteps on stone. He swung his light on the cell doors, stopping at the only one that was closed. Inside, shapes scurried over the floor, casting long shadows across the walls. Rats. In the center of the cell lay the remains of a boy, maybe six or seven, his arms, face, and genitals partly eaten away. Mallory angled the flashlight beam lower, saw that something seemed to be moving inside the boy—his belly appeared to contract and then rise as if he were still breathing. Charlie turned the light off and blinked at the darkness, knowing what it was: one of the rats had gotten inside the boy and was gnawing its way out. He walked deeper into the darkness, his footsteps softly crunching on the stone. The air turned cooler and he heard a new sort of scuffling. Mallory stopped, listening. He touched the rough stone wall, turned left, into a cooler darkness: the rung passageway linking the main corridors. He was in the rear of the prison now, he sensed.

As soon as he made the turn, his light, sweeping the stone surfaces, caught something that stopped him: to the left was a stone pit filled with human bodies. Charlie looked quickly: Some of them were skeletons, others recent deaths. Dozens, it seemed. He switched off the light and tried to walk past the pit. But he couldn’t. Couldn’t go more than three steps. What he had seen seemed an illusion. It had to have been. So he swung back and clicked the light on. Saw it again, the same thing, its after-image burning inside his eyelids when the light went out, the odor clinging to his nostrils. All the bodies in the pit had been decapitated.

He continued to shuffle through the rung tunnel, passing another open pit, also to his left, wondering what the proprietors of this prison could have been thinking. Was this some sort of gruesome training facility for the Hassan network? This time he didn’t linger. He came to the other corridor. Turned left. At the end of this one was a faint dusting of light from what seemed to be a series of openings, but the rest of the corridor was in darkness.

“Jon,” he said, speaking softly. “Can you hear me?”

His own voice echoed back at him. Then silence.

He shined the light along the upper level. All of the cell doors there seemed to be open. Then along the lower level. Several times he heard the hiss of flies as he moved past cells. Come on, Jon. Be alive, damn it. Charlie held his breath, pointed the light into the cell on his left. This image, too, stuck in his mind