ALL NIGHT IT RAINED. Charlie woke and listened to the rainwater cascading in the mountain trees, thinking about the succession of events that had brought him to this room. About his father and about Anna Vostrak.
The first time he had seen her, he had been on a mountain train in the village of Villars, Switzerland. She had contacted him at his hotel and asked to meet. An hour later, she was sitting across from him at the front of a train car, saying his name as if she knew him.
A dark-haired woman in a blue wool coat and designer jeans, slim, late thirties. Striking dark eyes, faintly Asian features. She spoke his name with a French accent as she turned a page in her book, pretending to be reading.
“How did you find me?” Charlie asked. He was there on vacation, after all, and not as Charles Mallory.
“I think we have a mutual friend.”
“I doubt it.” He watched her slender wrist as she slid her forefinger along a page of the book. “My friends are my friends because they respect my privacy.”
“I can’t explain everything right now,” she said. “This has to do with your father. He had found something. Something people didn’t want him to know. I can give you some names, and information. Some of what your father knew.”
At first, Charlie had just watched her and listened. He had seen all manner of deception in his life. One of the most common—and, to him, least persuasive—was the earnest and attractive stranger working a con. The more time he spent with this woman, though, the more he saw something that was very difficult to fake: the weight of real hurt and loss, a hurt that had been transformed into sober urgency. She looked at him with sincere, unhesitant eyes, and he began to trust her and, to like her.
“But what do you expect me to do with it? Do you want to hire me for something?” he said.
“No. I don’t have the resources for that. I just thought you would want to know. Then you can decide.”
She turned a page. He listened to the clack-clack rhythm of the train as they came to a vista of chalets, lifts, and snow-topped mountains. The first stop was a small alpine-style restaurant with plastic tables and chairs set up on a terrace. Behind it, hiking trails tunneled up into the woods. This was where he had planned to have lunch, alone.
He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the sunlight on his face.
“Join me for lunch?”
“All right.”
They drank mineral water and ordered délice aux champignons—mushroom sandwiches—and she told him sketchy details about her past. That she was a molecular biologist whose lab had done contract work for the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
“I worked for the military research wing. They had a number of in-house projects, as you probably know,” she said, “complemented by a contract liaison program with universities and research institutes. Over the course of about two years, I worked on three related projects. One involved a process known as reverse genetics. The objective was to develop a vaccine for a particularly virulent form of flu. The scientist heading up the project was a Russian who had done similar work in the Soviet Union. He was later recruited to work for a private research lab. Something about that arrangement didn’t seem right. It came to bother me more and more.”
She set down her fork and looked at Charlie. The clarity in her face held him. Her gaze was direct but nuanced, expressing subtleties beyond what she was saying.
“This scientist’s name was Ivan Vogel,” she said. “A very duplicitous man. He had helped to develop germ warfare projects for the Soviet regime, years earlier. He knew that his knowledge could be very valuable.”
Charles Mallory watched her, realizing who the “mutual friend” was. She had been one of his father’s sources.
“The purpose of our project was to create a vaccine for a particularly virulent flu—developing mutated strains and recombinant vaccines.”
“For what end?”
“I don’t know. We weren’t told a lot about the larger objectives. Although the implication—the impression we had—was that we were developing defensive capabilities as a response to a specific or potential threat somewhere in the world. Possibly in Iraq. Here are some of the details about what I was working on.”
She wiped her hands and gave him an envelope, which he had thought she was using as a bookmark. Inside were two pages of handwritten notes, the writing small and precise.
Charlie had thanked her when they finished lunch and told her that he would look into it. That was before he knew much. Before he had communicated with Paul Bahdru. Long before he had made the deal with Richard Franklin.
“I just wonder how you were able to find me,” he said as they drank coffees.
“It wasn’t easy.” She smiled for the first time, a sly, knowing look. “Your company is off the map. You don’t even have a website.”
“I like to pick and choose assignments. I have a small Rolodex.”
“Where are you based?”
“I don’t talk about that. It’s not where you’d expect. I’m interested in places that people don’t look at. What about you?”
“I have another life now,” she said, straightening her napkin. “I don’t talk about it, either.”
“Fair enough. So was our mutual acquaintance my father?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was very sorry to hear the news.”
FOUR WEEKS LATER, Charles Mallory had discovered the note from his father, and its mention of Ivan Vogel. The note had given new context to what Anna had told him, and he knew that he needed to go back to her. He felt the weight of an obligation he hadn’t imagined before.
But she had left no way of finding her. It was a “finite exchange,” she had said. She did not want to risk her “other life;” she only wanted to give him what she knew. But his father’s note had mentioned “AV” in Geneva. So he had gone there and, after several days, found her. Taken the handful of clues she had revealed about her life and tried to piece them together. Eventually, through deduction and elimination, he did. Learned that she was a school instructor, teaching biology and science at a private school in Geneva.
He had surprised her as she sat on a bench across from the Flower Clock at the Jardin Anglais, a spot where she sometimes went to eat her lunch.
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember me.”
It took a moment. She seemed startled and vulnerable, and Charlie felt bad that he had done it this way. That was the moment things changed for him.
He had rented two rooms in the city, one where he was staying, the other where they could meet. He gave her the address and number and waited.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to jeopardize things for you,” he said. “I’ve learned more, and I need to ask you some questions. They’re questions I couldn’t ask you before.”
“All right.”
“First, my father.” He saw her eyes moisten. “How did you know him?”
Anna Vostrak paced the room, her arms folded. She was wearing a tan pencil skirt and navy sweater set.
“He had begun to seek out the scientists who were involved in the Vogel project,” she said.
“Project Lifeboat.”
“Yes. Particularly those who had been hired away. No one was saying much, though. Or knew much. So I went to him. Even though I realized I was taking a risk.”
“I need to know more about that. The work you were doing. Genetically altered flu. Can you give me the CliffsNotes version? How it was supposed to work?”
She smiled, still a little wary, he could tell. “The basic objective with genetic engineering is to alter an existing virus—in this case, making it resistant to all known antibiotics and vaccines. Once a gene sequence has been determined, reverse genetics can, theoretically, be used to create a synthetic virus. The synthetic virus can then be mutated to become what is sometimes called a super virus.”
“And how difficult is it, to do that?”
“That’s something of a paradox,” she said. She sat on an armchair and regarded him for a moment. “The process is fairly complicated, but not particularly difficult. You can purchase the virus sequences from companies that make DNA, then add cellular components that mimic a human cell and create a perfect genetically altered virus. Any well-funded research lab could do that without difficulty.”
“What about the project you were working on with Vogel?”
“It was more specialized. It was known informally as the ‘Four-Hour Virus,’ because it was designed to have a four-hour lethality. Much more deadly than the 1918 strain.”
Yes. That’s what Paul had told him. A “four-hour lethality.”
“But you were working on the vaccine for this, not the virus.”
She looked off. Charlie looked too, saw the gray waters of the Rhone River five stories below. “That’s where the lines blur. According to the international treaty, developing anything that could be used offensively is prohibited. But to develop vaccines, you have to understand the virus. So we also created viral properties.”
“That was my father’s concern.”
“Yes, that it wasn’t regulated properly. And that private, non-governmental laboratories were becoming interested in the same thing. Labs well-funded by the pharmaceuticals industry. One in particular.”
“A company called VaxEze.”
“Yes.” She showed her smile. “How did you know?”
“I found the name in my father’s notes. But why?”
Their eyes locked, and neither looked away. She seemed to see him differently then, to maybe hear doors opening that she couldn’t open on her own. He began to think something else. Something he probably shouldn’t have been thinking. He was thinking how beautiful she looked.
BY THE THIRD meeting, Charles Mallory had talked with Paul Bahdru and had learned more about the elusive African businessman named Isaak Priest, who supposedly was funding terror groups and supporting corrupt regimes.
But why had that name been in his father’s note, as well? Did Isaak Priest have an interest in bio-weapons? Was he the one who had hired away Ivan Vogel? Who wanted to privatize the bio-weapons research?
They were questions Anna Vostrak had been unable to answer.
They met again in Paris, and over a day and a half became more comfortable with each other, spending time walking through Luxembourg Gardens, Anna talking in greater detail about the projects she had worked on, walking with her arms folded, her right hand occasionally chopping the air to make a point. That was when she told him about the man who had worked with his father on the Lifeboat Inquiry. A man named Peter Quinn, who had “become scared” and quit. She didn’t know why.
Charlie had again admired her sober intelligence. And the sly contradiction of her smile. They had hugged when they said goodbye, a formal hug. But he had imagined what it would be like to give her a real hug. And to kiss her.
THE FOURTH MEETING was in summer. By then, scattered outbreaks of deadly virus had spread through West Africa. Charles Mallory had witnessed one of them after the fact, a small valley of death in southern Sundiata, where two dozen people had perished overnight. He had gone there because of Paul Bahdru, who had also told him about the “ill wind” and the “October project.”
“I keep coming back to another idea,” she said, sitting beside him on a park bench in an Italian garden. “This was what concerned your father. If this virus could be engineered and controlled, it would be the perfect weapon because once it began to spread, there would be no way of ever determining, scientifically, whether it was naturally occurring or man-made. And without conclusive evidence that it was man-made, no one could make that leap. Not definitively.”
Anna brushed at the back of her left hand, her thoughts turning inward for a moment. Wind fluttered through the leaves above them, making patterns on the lake.
“In simplest terms,” she said, “you need only three elements: an agent, a method of delivery, and a vaccine. I don’t know that the public has really thought much in those terms. But if you have those three things, you have, potentially, the most formidable weapon in the world.”
Charlie watched a couple strolling toward them on the tree-lined walkway of the Lake Garden, letting the implications of what Anna had said sink in.
“It would, by all appearances, be a naturally occurring agent,” she said, “and its spread would begin in regions of the world where health care is very poor or in some cases non-existent. Where infectious disease is already epidemic.”
“Couldn’t it spread outside of these regions, too, even if there were a vaccine?”
“Sure, it’s possible. We still don’t understand viruses very well. We can’t accurately predict which ones will survive, which ones will die out. We just don’t know.”
Anna stood first, as if sensing danger, and they began to walk, past the flowerbeds and tufa rockeries and cast-iron pergola, toward the exit.
Charlie had made the same arrangements as before, but with three rooms this time: one for her to spend the night, one for him to spend the night, and a third for them to meet. But two of the rooms he’d rented went unused. In the morning, she had told him it was wrong, and he had not agreed. It was a conversation they would have again.
THE LAST TWO meetings had been with “Frederick Collins,” in Nice. They had a system then. A way of communicating. By the last meeting, several communities had been decimated in Sundiata, and both of them knew that it was real, even if the international media was largely missing the story. But there were still too many things they didn’t know. “I can’t answer all the questions, but I think we should find someone who can help us,” Anna said.
“Who?”
“All of the large multi-national pharmaceutical firms have intelligence branches these days.”
“As do many of the smaller ones,” Charlie said.
Anna nodded. “Yes. There’s too much at stake not to have them. It’s become a trillion-dollar industry, and there’s a huge amount of industrial espionage. We need someone who can go inside the industry and find anomalies. And answer our questions.”
“But if we go to someone who’s any good, wouldn’t we set off alarms?”
She smiled quickly. “I thought you would say that. I know someone, who’s not in the business anymore. Someone they probably wouldn’t look at right away. Maybe you can check him out before I make contact.”
She gave him the name.
“What would you ask him?”
“The four or five most important questions that we can’t answer ourselves. The ones you asked me.”
“Okay.”
“The only problem is it wouldn’t be cheap.”
Charlie shrugged. The government was paying his company big money to go after Isaak Priest and not requiring itemized expense reports. “I think I can swing it,” he said. “Let’s decide on the questions.”
They did, over dinner on Promenade des Anglais. The incongruity of their topic and the beauty of the Mediterranean wasn’t lost on them. The gravity and secrecy of the project had become an aphrodisiac, the way war could be an aphrodisiac. They made love slowly that night and shared stories in the dark about their lives. In the morning, Charles Mallory looked at the calendar. He picked the date and the place where they would meet next. With someone who could answer the questions they couldn’t answer themselves.
But he felt a deep longing when she left, knowing that he had to go forward but at the same time yearning for something else, something that felt akin to a “normal” life.