WHEN THE FIRST HINT of light came up above the cracked earth and faraway trees, Jon Mallory was on a dirt road, walking in tire tracks, the straw hat shading his eyes. He kept pushing forward, all but numb to the pain, his feet blistered. No longer thinking about anything but survival, drawing on a deep core of desire he didn’t know he had—but still seeing the images: the open eyes of the bodies pulled from delivery trucks, the giant birds feasting on the decomposing corpses, the little bodies of the twin girls. The dirt road took him into a mud-hut village, this one inhabited, and then through a city of squat, sun-bleached buildings, tin-roofed homes, ramshackle wooden market stalls. People looking at him suspiciously. Men loading sisal onto donkey carts. A cocoa merchant, mounds of cocoa beans fermenting under plastic. On the other side, he came to a platform with plank benches. A train station. Jon checked the handwritten schedule tacked on a sheet of plywood. The next train to anywhere was in three hours and twenty-two minutes. It would do him good to rest, maybe catch a nap.
He found a street market first and spent the last of his money on a bottle of water and a moyin-moyin—bean muffin. He returned to the train stop, sat on the bench in the shade. The air had turned warm and pleasant. When he finished eating, Jon opened his laptop and began to write a story to post to his blog. There was an unsettled feeling behind every sentence, but he kept going, pushing himself, recalling details, not quite understanding what anything meant. Remembering the last thing Kip had said to him: Get this out there.
SUNDIATA—In the northern regions of this impoverished, famine-stricken African nation, dozens of villages have been devastated by a deadly, fast-acting flu virus that may already have killed more than a hundred thousand people.
On Thursday morning, the stench of rotting human flesh filled an otherwise idyllic river valley, while hundreds of vultures circled overhead. Dozens of men and women, many of whom eke out a living as freelance farm workers, showed up at a work site shortly after sunrise. They had been hired by the central government of Sundiata to bury bodies.
Their task was quite literal. But it was also symbolic. Publicly, the government of Sundiata, which is overseeing the burials, has not acknowledged that this unprecedented epidemic has even occurred. The government website claims the cases of flu, which went virtually unreported in the American media, have been “contained” and that the death toll was “less than twenty, mostly people already suffering serious illness.” But reliable witnesses put the actual toll at closer to two hundred thousand.
Some health workers and local residents allege that the deadly flu is the inadvertent result of a government-sanctioned vaccine, distributed in government-sponsored clinics and other health centers.
Because of the lethal nature of this disease, few witnesses to its destructiveness have survived to tell their stories. But on September 23 and 24, I spent time with two of them, who had witnessed, recorded, and photographed the tragedies. One of them was murdered on September 24. The other went missing when government soldiers raided the shanty village where she lived.”
THE TRAIN TOOK Jon to the capital city of Nyamejye, where he washed the make-up from his face in an airport bathroom, although a dark vestige remained, resembling a five o’clock shadow. He withdrew most of the money in his checking account from an ATM. The transaction would be a flag, he knew, but at this point, he had no other option. For good measure, he also charged a train ticket back to the city he had just left—Chimwala.
It was several minutes after the plane to Nairobi reached a cruising altitude of thirty-seven thousand feet and the seatbelt signs came off that Jon noticed something in a pouch of his bag that had not been there before: a letter-size envelope, tucked among his clothes.
The last time he had opened the pouch had been outside Sandra Oku’s dugout home at Larkin Farm. It must have been placed there by her. Or by Kip. Jon surveyed the passengers in the dimly lit cabin of the plane. He looked out at the clouds, and the savannah below. Then he got up, walked back to the rest room with the envelope. He pulled the door closed. Looked at himself in the mirror for a moment before opening it.
Inside was a sheet of lined notepaper. Handwritten at the top of the page in a barely legible scrawl was: “This fits with what you already possess.” Beneath it, near the bottom of the page, a series of numbers and letters in twelve point type: 7rg2kph5nOcxqmeuy43siaw8bjf1tdlvo6z9.
Beside them, the letter “v,” circled.
Another puzzle. Different and less clear than the earlier one. Jon Mallory studied it for a while, feeling the hum of the airplane engines. Then he folded the paper into eighths again, stuck it in his pants pocket, and made his way back to his seat.
From Nairobi, he would fly to London and from London back to Dulles. He would retrieve his car at the airport, drive to Washington, and spend the night in his own home. His own bed.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. But then other, less pleasant images filled his thoughts.
ISAAK PRIEST FELT a chill of apprehension as he re-read the words that Jon Mallory had posted about Sundiata, knowing that they would upset the Administrator, who had already decided to implement his own contingency plan.
But he also knew that he could do something about it.
Priest lifted the receiver on his desk, pressed a speed dial button. The call was answered more than sixteen hundred miles away by the minister of information in the Republic of Sundiata. A man Isaak Priest knew, as he knew many government officials there. He had supported this particular office through millions of dollars in “loan” payments. Monies provided by the Champion Group private equity funds.
This time, his request was for “stronger denial,” with the promise of an additional payment.
An official statement went live on the Sundiata government website nineteen minutes later.
It was a message from Sundiata President Robert Bonigo, calling the report on the Weekly American website a “sick hoax,” engineered by opposition and rebel forces. “There have been several small outbreaks of routine flu in our nation, reported by rural health agencies. None of them have resulted in fatalities. The government has successfully implemented a vaccination program. We condemn this story, purportedly by an American journalist, as a vicious hoax engineered by opposition forces.”