THE TRAVEL TIME FROM Zurich Airport to Nairobi was fourteen hours and thirty minutes, including the changeover in Paris. From Nairobi, Eric Dantz flew to Amara, the second-largest city in the landlocked nation of Mancala. There he took a cab to a rail station in the suburbs and boarded the local to Mungaza, the capital city, where Joseph Chaplin and the rest of his team were already encamped.
Eric Dantz was Charles Mallory’s final identity and, he assumed, the last one he would need. Dantz would take him into Mungaza undetected. And in Mungaza, he would find Isaak Priest. Three assumptions that depended on good fortune. In truth, he was rolling dice.
The train rumbled through the open savannah of the northlands, a vast, sweeping landscape of rolling grasses rimmed by faraway mountains, which had always inspired Charles Mallory, as it did most Westerners—a landscape probably not unlike that where the human species had first emerged.
The train took them through ramshackle farm villages of stick and grass huts, where barefoot children stood in the fields beside the tracks and waved. Past tea plantations and fields of tobacco, sugarcane and sorghum, and giant dusty tracts of abandoned farmland, ruined by drought, erosion, and nutrient degradation.
Charlie watched a passing village, thinking how easy it would be to make all of this disappear. Mancala was a hundred thousand square kilometers, a little smaller than the state of Pennsylvania. There were two main urban centers: Amara, the city he had just left, and Mungaza, the city where he was going. Each had populations over eight hundred thousand. A single plane, making a few dozen passes with a four-hundred-gallon aerosol spray tank, could depopulate either city in a matter of hours. For the whole country, it could probably be done with ten or twelve planes in a single night.
He watched the villages through the train window as the capital neared, thinking about what he couldn’t see: demographics: The war of the future isn’t going to be about terrorism or oil or nuclear power. The real war is going to be about demographics. His father’s words.
Mancala was a fertile country, with green hills and wide, deep rivers that emptied into a huge freshwater lake. But it was a poor nation, with one of the lowest per-capita incomes in the world. Life expectancy at birth was about forty-one years, he had learned. The country’s once-explosive growth had leveled off in recent months, despite a birth rate of more than six and a half children per woman. The reasons were those Charlie had seen elsewhere on the continent: a deadly combination of malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS, along with insufficient medical care. Mancala had depended on aid from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but the IMF had stopped its aid disbursements two years ago because of concerns about corruption and individual donors had followed suit. In many of the smaller cities now, there was no social welfare or any kind of safety net. If people didn’t have money, they didn’t eat.
Those were problems that had repeated themselves for decades. But as the train approached the capital, Charlie began to notice other things, odd things that drew him out of his thoughts: clusters of cookie-cutter, single-story, manufactured bunkhouses; several dozen rows of towers topped by three-bladed propellors that he recognized as wind turbines; a chain-link, razor-wire fence encircling what seemed to be a giant, open-pit mine; and, several times, as they got closer, groups of four or five people lying in the fields, most of them young. All of them dead.
The train slowed through the bustling shanty towns of the suburbs. Young men ran alongside; some clung to the sides of the cars or climbed up onto the roofs. He heard their footsteps stamping overhead. Out the window was a sea of cardboard, mud-brick, and tin dwellings, mounds of trash, dozens of barefoot people watching. The sun was beginning to set. Another day ending. October 3.
Charlie thought back to his questions. What is going to happen? When is it going to happen? How could he stop it? He had answered the first two. Now he had only the third to work out.
The Administrator typed his message on the quantum-encrypted Internet network as the Lincoln limousine wound along a two-lane coast road to his office. “Request meeting. 10:30 A.M. PST tomorrow,” he wrote. Pressed “Send.”
Perry Gardner had traveled this route along the Oregon coast nearly every morning during his thirty years as CEO and founder of Gardner Systems, one of the world’s most lucrative corporations. Last December, he had yielded his CEO title to the company’s COO, so that he could focus his attentions on the Gardner Foundation, which he co-directed with his wife.
That was the story he had given out, a story that had been dutifully reported throughout the media. Since its founding six years ago, the Gardner Foundation had invested billions on projects in the Third World—health care, biotechnology, telecommunications, and the burgeoning field of telemedicine.
But the real reason he had stepped back was to live “a life of greater purpose,” as he had said to himself on a number of occasions, that would make the world his daughter’s generation inherited a better place. To oversee a humanitarian initiative that he had nicknamed the “World Series.” It was a project that would turn the wheel of history, a process that would eventually solve the ages-old, seemingly insoluble problems of the “developing” world.
Douglas Chase had made the transfer arrangements as requested. But Gardner wanted to meet with Isaak Priest one more time before the opening pitch. To look into his eyes. To receive his final assurance that everything was operational and on schedule. Priest’s written dispatches had taken on a strangely remote tone over the past week. Gardner wanted to see his partner face to face once more. Just to make sure he could trust him to carry this out. After the opening pitch, of course, it wouldn’t matter. Isaak Priest would then no longer be necessary.