Viral

man wearing a dashiki, with short-cropped, curly hair.

“Hi, Mallory,” the man finally said, in a surprisingly calm, flat voice. His accent was from the American South.

Then Charles Mallory realized who it was.

“Don’t worry. I came alone,” Isaak Priest said.

FIFTY

THERE WAS A HANDGUN on the table next to him. A Beretta M9, the make used by military and police officers. But Isaak Priest made no motion to reach for it. Charlie kicked the door closed. He scanned the room quickly for signs of a trap, sensed that there wasn’t one.

“What are you doing here?”

“I realized something, as you got closer,” Priest said, speaking in a familiar voice, a soldier’s voice. “You’re working for the government, aren’t you?

The government.

“They’re supporting you, anyway.”

Charlie remained silent, trying to process his words.

“You know that I’m the wrong target, though, don’t you? You must know that. I’m the target they gave you, aren’t I? You’ve been paid to take me out.”

Mallory just watched him.

“What you want is right there,” Priest said. “It’s right on the table.”

Charlie glanced at the table, kept his gun aimed at Isaak Priest.

“I’m a military man, Mallory. I still think more like a soldier than a businessman. I get drunk on an idea sometimes. But at my core, I’m a soldier. These guys are fighting different wars. Not real ones. War has to be about something fundamental. Theirs isn’t. Theirs is about money and prestige and power. I still have a chance to change that. To define it on my own terms. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

He calmly laced his fingers together.

Charlie realized something else then, something he hadn’t quite put together before. An easy puzzle.

“You didn’t have anything to do with my brother, did you? With the prison?”

He shook his head, once. Smiled. Then his smile turned dark. “There are some people you should never do business with. Do business with them once, and you lose something you never get back. Part of your soul. Worse than that. It’s the same as doing business with the devil.”

So he wasn’t controlling everything. Even his role was compartmentalized.

“What’s this about, then?”

“You’ll see when you look at what’s on the table. I’m just a soldier. I got in the belly of something and eventually saw that it wasn’t what I thought it was.”

“Is it still going to happen tonight?”

“No.”

“No?” Mallory saw a reassuring clarity in Priest’s dark eyes. “Why? Why not? It’s all operational, isn’t it?”

“It could have been. It should have been.”

“But it’s not.”

“No.”

Mallory lowered his gun.

“It’s not on the airfields?”

“No.”

Do business with them once, and you lose something you never get back. A soldier knows that. A businessman might not. Not in the same way.

“Hassan,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Hassan wanted this. To hijack it.”

“That’s right.”

“But not here,” Mallory said. No. Of course not. The Hassan Network couldn’t care less about controlling some obscure country in Africa.

“They want to sell it to al Qaeda. Spray it on New York City or Washington. Or anywhere. Let it loose. Use it as a terrorist weapon.”

“That’s right.”

The perfect weapon, as Anna had said.

“So what happened? What did you do?”

“I secured the storage facilities two days ago. It wasn’t delivered.”

“What’s in the tanks?”

“Water.”

“What?”

“Water,” Priest repeated, his voice neutral.

“BUT WHY? WHY did you go through all this?”

“Bringing in Hassan was an operational mistake from the beginning. In retrospect, it was a fatal flaw. I was part of something that wasn’t structured properly. I recognized that because I was on the ground. The person driving this didn’t see it. He did it all from a distance, to protect himself. He did it all by remote control. Like he was playing a giant video game. He saw this as ultimately being a humanitarian project. But he didn’t understand the mistakes he was making.”

“Why did he bring them in at all?”

“It was a model he wanted to understand. He’s a curious man who’s interested in the concept of power. The uses of power. The power they could give him was of a kind he didn’t have. All forms of power interest him. Obsess him. He saw an opportunity and he made a move. It was a mistake.”

“What’s happened to it? What was in the tanks.”

It seemed to take Priest a while to understand the question. “There’s an autoclaving converter facility north of Elam. I had it built for security purposes.”

“Autoclaving.”

“Heat sterilization. It’s how you neutralize biohazard materials. The viral containers are heated. It raises the temperature to 121 degrees. Sterilizes it. Kills the virus.”

“But you were on board in Sundiata.”

His eyes seemed to glisten for a moment as he looked out at the twilight. “The serious tactical mistakes were made since then,” he said. Since the murder of 200,000 innocent Sundiatans in a series of trials, Charlie thought, feeling a quick rage.

Priest looked up at Charles Mallory and unfolded his hands. “Go ahead and take me out if you’d like. Isn’t that your mission?”

“No,” Charlie said. “I’m not going to do that.” He wanted to spend a long time interrogating Isaak Priest.

Priest watched him. “And if I gave you no choice?”

Charlie felt an anxious tension. He sensed what Priest was about to do.

Isaak Priest lifted the Beretta from the table, and he pointed it at Charles Mallory. Charlie kept his weapon at his side, though. Waiting, holding his finger on the trigger. Breathing the night air, smelling the human decay on his clothes and his hands.

The soldier looked at him.

“Okay?”