Viral

but there was a remarkable coldness in his eyes and an off-putting self-assurance in the way he carried himself.

Charlie closed the laptop. “You want to talk? I’ll show you the rest if you’d like.”

For a moment, Gardner seemed to look for what wasn’t there: back-up, support, ways of escape. But then he smiled and his eyes focused, with an intensity Charlie recognized. They reminded him of eyes he had seen recently.

“No, thank you,” Gardner said, and he began to walk, as if he were by himself.

“Are you sure? Why don’t we go sit on a bench and I’ll show you some more.”

“No, thanks.”

Mallory walked beside him. He opened the laptop again and started the video feed. Punched up the volume. Gardner stopped, six feet away, and watched silently. After it ended, he showed a flat smile, staring at him. That’s when Charlie recalled where he had seen eyes like that before. In an alley in Nice. The eyes of Ahmed Hassan. Desperate, determined eyes.

“How did you get that?” Gardner said, with a false indifference.

“Does it matter? The press has it, too. The attorney general has it.”

“There’s nothing they can do with it.”

“No? Why not?”

“National security.”

“You think so.”

“A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing,” he said. “And that’s all you’ve got.”

“Well. We’ll see.” Mallory closed his computer again. “At any rate, I have some good news and bad news for you. First, the good news. Landon Pine destroyed the viral properties several days ago. It wasn’t going to happen anyway. You don’t have to worry about Hassan using it as a terrorist weapon. That should make you sleep a little easier.”

Gardner looked at Mallory through his smudged glasses and smiled. Something had infected him, Charlie thought. A virus had gotten inside him and stolen the emotional components from his make-up.

“According to our friend Franklin, you were the one who invented Isaak Priest. It wasn’t a bad plan,” Charlie said. “It might have worked. Your big mistake was bringing in the Hassan Network, and then giving them such power.”

“You know nothing about it.”

“That’s what your partner told me. He said it was your fatal mistake. It made Richard Franklin nervous, too, didn’t it?” Mallory knew Gardner didn’t have a weapon. He was pretty sure he’d never been in a fight before, and yet he carried himself as if he were invincible. “I assume you think I took out Landon Pine.”

“I know you did.”

“No. Actually, he took himself out. I was there. He thought the Hassan Network was going to hijack the operation. And he also thought you—or the government—were going to make him take the fall for whatever happened. For some reason, he had stopped trusting you. He didn’t know about Covenant Division.”

“Who hired you? Franklin?”

Mallory ignored his question. “You almost pulled this off, didn’t you?” he said. “Depopulating a nation in a single night. You assumed you could buy anything. Even a country. That’s what Landon Pine said.”

“Maybe I can.”

“You could even buy a news story for several million dollars.”

“Maybe I did.”

“Maybe you did. Indeed. And then you got the idea of hiring a terrorist network to be your enforcer. It never occurred to you that maybe you couldn’t trust them. That maybe they’d try to sabotage you, no matter how much you paid them.”

“Look, my friend.” He smiled deferentially, as if talking to a child. “There are reasons this story can never get out. What are you going to do with this?”

“I’m not your friend. And I don’t know yet. What’s it worth to you?”

Gardner stared at him, his eyes not blinking. “It’s for sale?”

“No.” Mallory laughed. “It’s not for sale.”

“Well, I’ve got to go, then. I’ll have someone contact you.” Gardner started to walk off.

Mallory was right with him, though. “Your other fatal flaw, Pine told me, was that you did it all by remote control. Didn’t bother yourself with the details. When you caused hundreds of thousands of people to die in Sundiata, you didn’t want to know the details. And you paid enough money to Pine that you didn’t have to.”

Gardner had stopped again. It was hard to tell, but he seemed angry.

“Now, for the bad news. You’re going to be indicted on a whole slew of charges. Beginning with the theft of nearly two billion dollars in investors’ money.”

Gardner looked at Charlie’s laptop, his eyes suddenly hard with anger.

“How’d you get that?”

Charlie reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, metallic circular object. He clicked a button on the side of the disk and held it in the air. Moments later, a moth-size device fluttered through the air and attached itself to it.

“You know what this is. It’s a nano-drone.” Gardner looked, frowning. “You know about that, don’t you? It’s something you’ve been working on. Not top priority, I guess, with everything else you have going.”

“What are you talking about?”

Charlie smiled. For several years, the U.S. government had been working with private industry to develop nano-drones—insect-sized surveillance cameras that could enter a room, video-record what went on inside, and come back out. DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. agency responsible for future weapons technology—had spent millions of dollars testing prototypes with mixed results. Charles Mallory’s company had agreed to test-drive one of the prototypes under development. So far, it had worked exceptionally well.

“Anyway. I guess I’ll see you in court, as they say.” He watched Gardner, and Gardner stared back. A staring contest. Charlie broke it by smashing his right knee into Gardner’s mid-section. Gardner went down immediately. Charlie walked away.

FIFTY-THREE

Washington, D.C., The Four Seasons Hotel

JON MALLORY LOOKED UP expectantly as Joseph Chaplin slowly opened the door of Room 607, gripping a handgun. He pulled the door toward him and stepped back, allowing Charles Mallory to enter the room.

The last time Jon had seen his brother had been on a dirt road in Mancala. Jon had just saved his life, and they had briefly bonded in a way that had seemed strange to both of them. But seeing him now, it felt to Jon as if the last episode had never happened. Something about Charlie made Jon feel slightly diminished again. It was an old paradox, dating to their teens: Charlie inspired him from a distance but intimidated him in person.

Chaplin locked the door and followed them into the hotel suite. Charlie’s face and arms were cut and bruised, Jon saw.

“Guys want a beer?” Chaplin said.

“Okay,” Jon said.

Charlie nodded, sat on the arm of a sofa.

As Chaplin left the room, Charlie took something from his shirt pocket and handed it to his brother: a computer memory stick.

“That’s for your story.”

“What is it?”

“It’s what Isaak Priest left for me in Mungaza. Isaak Priest, aka Landon Pine. Background for your story. The whole thing’s right there. I’ve got video feeds for you, too. It’s a big story, Jon, and it’s not over.”

“It’s not?”