Saturday, September 26
CHARLES MALLORY DROVE HIS rented Chevy Blazer into the winding autumn hills around Asheville, toward the home of “R. Steen.”
The house was set back in the woods on the side of a mountain. A narrow gravel drive wound down from the house. Mallory drove past the driveway and turned around, finding a pull-off spot in the pinewoods, a private drive to someone else’s house. He was about a half mile from the “Steen” house, thirty yards from the main road. He eyed the place with binoculars, waiting. Wanting Quinn alone. The air was still and smelled of wood smoke. He heard squirrels scrambling in the trees, branches creaking, leaves rustling, occasional voices from the open windows of a nearby house.
After about fifty minutes, an elegant-looking white-haired woman walked across the yard, carrying something. Mallory watched as she filled a bird feeder. Robin Steen, probably.
Twenty-three minutes later, he heard the garage door engage. An SUV emerged and slowly negotiated the gravel drive to the road.
Charlie waited until the SUV whooshed past, and then he shifted into gear and began to follow at a distance. The other vehicle—a silver Ford of some kind—picked up speed on the winding two-lane road, headed toward town, then braked and turned into a Home Depot lot. Charlie parked and watched from across the lot as the driver got out. A slight, balding man, probably sixty-five or seventy, who walked quickly with an energetic shuffle. There was nothing unusual or striking about him. Charlie turned off his engine. He found Quinn standing in an aisle of window and door sealants, looking at the instructions on a package of acrylic caulking.
He didn’t seem to notice as Mallory stood beside him.
“Peter Quinn?”
The man’s face brightened, as people’s faces do when someone says their name in a certain tone. But there was no recognition in his eyes.
“It’s Charles Mallory,” he said, and waited. “You worked with my father. Stephen Mallory.”
“Oh!” He was surprised. Not displeased, but guarded. “Well,” he said. “And what brings you here?”
Charlie shrugged. Quinn finally extended his hand.
“You look a little like your father,” he said, trying on a grin.
“I wanted to talk with you for a couple of minutes. About my dad. Are you free right now?”
“Oh. Well.” He smiled uneasily. “I suppose I am. Just need to buy a couple of things for the house.” He pointed at something on the shelf. “We’ve had a problem with leaky windows this year. Lots of rain this fall. Makes the leaves turn earlier than usual.” Charlie watched him. He was stalling, he could tell, making his decision as he talked. “What did you have in mind?”
“Go for a drive?”
“Oh. Okay.” He frowned. “But can you give me a half hour? I’ve got something in the car, some seafood my wife is waiting on. I’d like to get that home first. I’ll tell her I forgot something and have to come back into town.”
Charlie shrugged.
As they walked toward the register, Peter Quinn said, speaking softly, “Did you come here just to talk with me?”
“I did.”
“Why? What’s it about?”
“My father. I’ll tell you when you return. How about if I meet you outside, in front of the McDonald’s in half an hour.”
Quinn looked at his watch. “Okay.” He nodded. “Okay. Sure.”
Charlie walked out of the store. Sat in his rental and waited. He watched Peter Quinn emerge, his eyes scanning the lot but not finding him. Then he saw Quinn drive away among the shedding trees, back toward his house on the mountainside, and wondered if he would return.
PETER QUINN’S ESCAPE showed up nine minutes late. Charlie walked across the parking lot, opened the passenger door, and climbed in.
“This is a bit of a surprise,” Quinn said. He cleared his throat and coughed unnecessarily. “Nothing funny going on here, I hope.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, this isn’t some kind of set-up or anything, is it?”
“What are you talking about? What kind of set-up?”
“Any kind.”
Charlie saw that his hands were nervous. There was a large worn padded envelope on the seat between them. “No,” he said. “I’m just trying to gather some information.”
“Mmm hmm.” Quinn shifted gears. They drove for a while in silence, Charlie surveying the sidewalks and the woods. “Why now? What’s the occasion?”
“I’ve been thinking about my father’s death,” Charlie said. “And the project he was working on.” Quinn was silent. “The Lifeboat Inquiry.”
“Mmm,” he said. “What’s your interest?”
“Personal, mostly. I think what my father was looking at threatened some people. Caused some to want to silence him.”
“Mmm hmm.” Quinn cleared his throat.
“And I think maybe he was killed because of it.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Charlie watched the scenery, letting that settle. “He was concerned in particular that so much of Project Lifeboat was being outsourced. And that some of the people involved had been recruited by pharmaceuticals researchers, for a separate project.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
Quinn was gripping the wheel with both hands.
“Why would a pharmaceuticals company be interested in genetic engineering of the flu virus, do you think?”
“Vaccine research always interests them. Anticipating the next diseases, I guess. It’s obscene the way that industry has grown. The biggest growth going forward, of course, will be in emerging nations. Where it’s going to be easier to sell illegal drugs and cut corners on regulation.”
Mallory noticed Quinn’s right eye twitch.
“He was concerned about that, wasn’t he?”
“Mmm hmm. Demographics. That’s going to be the next war, he used to say.”
“Yes. And you thought my father’s concern was valid?”
“I did, yes. Maybe he pushed it too much on occasion. I don’t know. I decided long ago not to play too long in games you can’t win. But that’s me.” He cleared his throat and slid his right hand along the side of the steering wheel. “It’s very difficult to be a whistleblower in the position he was in. The CIA has its own internal rules on the release of classified information, as you know. But to go to the Inspector General with a complaint, you first have to get approval from the CIA brass. Which sort of defeats the whole purpose of whistleblowing. That’s how it seemed to me, anyway.”
“This was something you thought you couldn’t win.”
“That’s what I thought.” He gestured resignedly. “I have to be honest, I feel a little guilty that I jumped ship. I think about that a lot. I saw your brother’s story recently, by the way.” He slowed down, coasted and then pulled off into a gravel clearing beside the road. “The reason I asked you to give me a half hour wasn’t because of my wife’s seafood.” He smiled, showing crooked teeth. He lowered his window. Mallory heard the sound of water trickling over stones in the woods. “I wanted to get something. Make copies for you.”
“Okay.”
He lifted the envelope and handed it to Charles Mallory.
“That’s yours. Several things in there might interest you.” He took a deliberate breath. Mallory saw the vapor as he exhaled. “Right before they shut the Lifeboat Inquiry down, your father wrote a memo about a disaster preparedness plan. I don’t know how he found out about it. It was something that a consulting firm in Houston, Texas, had done, apparently for this pharmaceuticals firm. A plan that basically looked at various disaster scenarios, one of which was for a runaway flu virus.”
“Where? In Africa?”
“No. Three counties in Pennsylvania.”
“What? Why would a disaster plan for Pennsylvania interest him?”
“No idea, but it did. He gave me a copy of part of it—all he had. It’s in there.”
Mallory breathed the cold mountain air, thinking of the other questions his father had passed along to him.
“Did he ever mention someone named Isaak Priest?”
“Yeah. Of course.” He waited as a truck whooshed by from the other direction. “He was one of the main conduits into Africa, supposedly. A lot of money went through him.” He added, “Your father had a funny feeling about that, though.”
“How do you mean?”
“He wondered if Isaak Priest was a real person. He thought maybe he didn’t actually exist.”
“What?”
“He thought it was an invention.”
“But he has a past. You can Google his name and get newspaper stories. Going back ten, fifteen years.”
“I know. But that’s assuming you believe what you get on the Internet is real.” He half-smiled at Charlie. “Your father questioned the integrity of those records. Sure, you could go online and find a story about Isaak Priest from The Washington Post from ten years ago. It might even show up on the Post archives if you go to their website. But if you actually went back and found the physical newspaper for that date, you’d find that the story wasn’t there.”
“Why did he think that?”
“He didn’t think it, he knew it. He went back and found hard copy of the newspapers for two specific stories. And those stories were never in the paper. They didn’t exist. They were created after the fact.” He nodded to the envelope. “It’s in there, too. For what it’s worth. Take it with you. There’s more,” he said. “I couldn’t find everything in twenty minutes. Some of it’s boxed up. I can get it for you in another day or two if you’re going to be around.”
“No, I’m not. But I’ll give you an address, where you can send it.”
“Okay.” He sighed and looked up at the mountains, his breath dispersing in the cold air. His eyes seemed to twinkle for a second. “You know what, between you and me? I’m sort of glad you found me. I really am.”
IT WAS EARLY evening alongside the Green Monkey River. The circle of the sun had already dropped from sight, but its light burned reddish-orange across the tops of the western mountains and above the deserted coffee plantations and squatter farms. The hardwood room with the western picture windows was sparsely furnished—a large redwood desk, wicker sitting chairs, two simple lamps, file cabinets, Mancala dragon rugs.
Isaak Priest went back to the computer monitor and studied the electronic map of the nation. Sites where they had purchased land, set up businesses. Many already operating: wind and solar farms, supply routes. A pattern no one had noticed yet.
Then he saw that there had been another encrypted message from the Administrator. The man in Oregon. The last deal had been completed. The payment transferred. Finally: there was nothing now that could stop the operation from going forward. It was nine days until the “World Series” began. October 5.