Viral

Jon watched Hebron watching him. Jon’s father had suffered from heart disease for several years, but his death eight months earlier had been sudden, the circumstances still not settled in Jon’s mind.

Gus Hebron elaborately got up and took Jon’s half-empty beer. “I keep thinking this’ll be the year,” he said, coming back out, holding up two more cold ones.

“Pardon?”

“For the ’Skins. Been that way for some time now, hasn’t it?” He handed a Bud Light to Jon and rubbed his belly. “You know, you invest your energy into something each year and each year it doesn’t happen. Makes a man begin to lose his faith a little bit.”

“I guess.”

Hebron stared at his beer can, a bemused look in his eyes. Then he launched into a soliloquy about the Redskins. He seemed a little drunk all of a sudden. When Jon Mallory said he should be going, Hebron held up his hand.

“I’ll give you two tips about your brother,” he said. “All I can tell you. All I’m going to tell you.”

“All right.”

Jon stood and waited, wondering what was up.

“Do you know what D.M.A. stands for?”

“No. Never was able to find out.”

“You might try a little harder.”

He winked.

“Second?”

“Second, and more importantly: I know that your brother had done business with a company called Olduvai Charities. He mentioned it, anyway, during our last conversation. It’s based in East Africa but has some sort of connection in the States, and in China. Something about it bothered him.”

“Ol-du-vay?”

“Olduvai. As in Olduvai Gorge. Birthplace of mankind, supposedly. Okay? Now, you didn’t hear that from me. And if you say you did, I deny we ever had this conversation. All right? And I want you to call me as soon as you hear that he’s okay. You promise me that?”

“All right.” Gus Hebron walked him toward the door, grinning at something again, his arm going to Jon’s back several times. What is really going on here? he wondered.

“Anyway, good to see you, Jonny.”

“Sure.”

“I want you to find your brother.”

“I do, too.”

“Hey, you have a long ride back. You want to use the facilities, be my guest. Right in here.” He pushed open a door and flicked on the lights. Like the chandelier in the living room, they were a little too bright.

“Thanks.” Jon pulled the door closed. The bathroom was immaculate, other than a crumpled sixteen-ounce Bud Light can in the trash basket. It smelled of clean towels, hand-soap, and disinfectant. A full floor-to-ceiling mirror faced him as he urinated. There was another mirror on his right behind the sink. Jon glanced at himself in both; his eyes looked tired; he was in need of a shave. Then, preferring not to look, he turned his eyes away, focusing on what he was doing.

Afterward, he washed his hands and glanced at himself again. Dried his hands absently. Then he turned off the light and put on a cordial face to say goodbye.

GUS HEBRON WATCHED from a darkened bedroom window as Jon Mallory eased his sky-blue Camry out of the drive. His eyes followed the red taillights as they became more distant, turned right, and disappeared behind a row of large brick houses. He bolted the front door and turned off the porch light, walked to the utility room behind the bathroom and unlocked it.

In the house plans, this had been designated the laundry room, but Gus Hebron had put it to a different use. A long wooden collapsible work table was set up along the length of one wall. On it were three computer imaging monitors and processors. Cords snaked among them, connecting with the input processor on a smaller table nearby.

Hebron typed in a program sequence on the input processor. The processor had downloaded approximately ninety separate images of Jon Mallory’s face and head, captured by eight pinhole digital cameras—three behind the transparent full-length mirror, one behind the transparent sink mirror, and four concealed in the wallpaper design of the bathroom walls. The ceiling and sink lights had prevented him from noticing that the mirrors were transparent; all Jon Mallory had seen were the reflections of himself and the room.

Hebron had installed the full-length mirror facing the toilet, with the understanding of where, precisely, his subject would stand and how his head would be positioned. Jon Mallory stood just under five feet eleven. The eight cameras captured angled images that would be merged by computer algorithms to create a three-dimensional mesh of his head.

Outside, in the grass beside the sidewalk that led to the driveway, and mounted on either side of the front doorway, photographic sensors caught dozens of flash images of Jon Mallory’s walk as he returned to his car—an auto-sensor movement system that Hebron had engineered at his laboratory in nearby Dulles, Virginia. A technology not yet commercially available. The principle was simple: Everyone’s walk is as distinctive as his or her fingerprint or retinal pattern. Hebron’s division had developed a process for matching video prints of the rhythms and cadences of a person’s walk.

This project was finished now. Gus Hebron had spent three days outfitting the bathroom and front yard with cameras, sensors and imaging equipment and now would be able to assemble a reliable, three-dimensional image of Jon Mallory that could be added to his client’s data base. They would need it in the coming weeks.

SEVEN

EXPECTATIONS. BEGIN WITH THAT. Does the action play on expectations or against them? To what degree? Most people’s lives are paved by a series of routine expectations, patched together seamlessly. You expect when you wake in the morning that your spouse will be lying beside you. You expect that your car will be parked outside, in the garage or on the street. You expect that the sun will rise in the east, that your office will be open for business when you arrive and that nine hours later you will be back home. What happens when one of these paving stones is removed? You adjust; your expectations change; eventually they become a seamless path again.

Put another way: The public would never accept the details, but they would eventually accept the response, and the outcome. Begin with that.

Charles Mallory opened his eyes, saw the darkened aisle of the Air France Boeing 747-100. He gripped the glass of Scotch on his tray table and tried not to think about what had happened in Kampala, the miscalculation he had made. Charles Mallory was not a man who made mistakes, and Kampala had been a big one. He had gone to Africa on assignment for the United States government, to find a man named Isaak Priest. But he had been in Kampala for other reasons, for his father and for Paul Bahdru, two men who were now gone. Charlie sipped his Scotch and set it down, trying to focus on where he was going—the problem that lay ahead and the way that he was going to solve it. And the message he needed to send to his brother.

9:47 P.M.

Sitting at his work table, Jon Mallory logged on to the Fairfax County, Virginia, government website and clicked to the Property Assessment page. It took just a couple of keyboard strokes to find out who owns property in Fairfax County—a process that would once have required a drive down to the county courthouse and a half-hour search through file cabinets.

Jon typed in the street address for Gus Hebron’s house in Reston. Moments later, it came back; as he had expected, Hebron wasn’t listed as the owner. The house was owned by something called the Wendallman Corporation.