IT WAS A SINGLE room in a musty two-story building with plaster lathe walls. Charlie washed in the sink and then lay on the bed, his feet and ankles extending over the edge. He listened to the sounds outside. Figuring the next day, October 4.
Finally, he closed his eyes and slept, for nearly seven hours. In the morning, he washed his face again, pulled on new clothes, and went out, taking his bag and the key to the next night’s apartment. Already the streets were busy, and he began seeing the security vehicles Chaplin had mentioned—pick-ups with recoilless rifles mounted on the back; Jeeps manned with machine guns. Occasionally, an APC—armored personnel carrier—with smoked-glass windows. Most of the contractors traveled in groups of two or more, Charlie noticed, meaning it probably wasn’t wise to be seen alone.
The Blue Star Café was a couple of blocks from the heart of the city center. Charlie picked out the angular features of Jason Wells’ face from the street. He was sitting against a side wall by a dirt-coated spinning fan. The air in the café smelled of fried dough from the mandazis.
Wells wore a dark green, short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants. He was a solidly built man of medium height who rarely smiled, with wide cheeks, a broken nose, and great dark eyes that conveyed the calm of a deeply planted self-confidence. He was one of the smartest soldiers Mallory had ever known.
They shook hands and Charlie sat.
“Get in yesterday?”
“Late.”
“Fourth day,” Wells said. He touched the handle of his coffee cup.
“How did it go last night?”
“We got it. Propellant launcher, two aerosol spray tanks of plasmids. Stored with the vaccine. Sandra Oku laid everything out and we just walked in. It was clean.”
“So we’re in business.”
“If it works.”
Charlie studied him. Wells could be a bold strategist, but he was also a realist. He had grown up in the Midwest and served in Special Forces for nine years before joining DMA four years ago. “What’s the prognosis overall?”
“Hard to say,” he said. “We’re late to the party. At this point, psychology’s going to be a big part of it.”
The waitress came over and Charlie ordered coffee, black, and a raisin muffin. After it arrived, he asked Wells his plan.
“My recommendation is two operations. One precision, the other diversion. Do the diversion al Qaeda style. Hit half a dozen targets, simultaneously. Starting tonight. Maximum impact. Both strategically and psychologically. Go for targets that are actually part of their operation: train line, communications tower, air fields. I’ve got them mapped out.”
“Chaplin said you have a dozen explosives.”
“Fourteen. Nadra and I made six IEDs. Twenty-pound ammonium nitrate bombs. Nadra purchased a dozen blocks of M112 C-4 military issue explosives. Everything’s in the trunk of her car right now.”
Mallory nodded. Both he and Jason Wells had spent time in Afghanistan and knew how easy it was to make an ammonium nitrate fertilizer bomb—and the devastating damage it could cause. Ninety percent of the bombs that had exploded in Afghanistan since 2001 were made of fertilizer and fuel oil.
“Advantages? Disadvantages?”
“The weather is the big factor in our favor. They’re not going to go up unless the wind is blowing right. And not if it’s raining. And not, I, uh—”
Jason suddenly gestured strangely and laughed, thrusting his index finger at Charlie. “Just play along with me right now, okay? Don’t look,” he said. “Nod your head a couple of times and smile. Laugh if you can.”
Charles Mallory did.
“Okay?” he said. He continued to gesture animatedly, making karate chops in the air and urging Mallory to do so, too. “Just play along, okay? Okay. Now, look to your left.” Mallory did. “See that man? That’s John Ramesh. He was looking at us. At you, I think. He gets a wild hair when he sees contractors acting too serious. Makes him very nervous.”
“Okay. Good to know.” Charlie caught a glimpse of Ramesh again through the crowd at the front of the restaurant. Short, muscle-bound, with a gray ponytail, wearing a white, sleeveless T-shirt, green khaki pants. A pistol strapped to his belt.
“He’s kind of the enforcer here. Wild West kind of character. Isaak Priest’s main sentry. Be wary of him.”
“I will.” Mallory cradled his coffee cup. “Does he have anything to do with the outlaw contingent I was told about?”
Wells looked away. “No. That’s a whole other thing. We don’t quite understand that yet. Maybe Hassan Network.”
“Interesting.”
“Maybe. There’s an old abandoned prison down there, about nine kilometers southwest of the city. They have a barracks and what looks like a training camp. I don’t know that it has anything to do with what we’re working on. It’s an assessment we haven’t looked at closely. Not a priority.”
“Okay.” Mallory scanned the street for Ramesh again, didn’t see him. “What do you see when you go inside Isaak Priest’s head?” he asked. “How’s it going to happen?”
“Quickly.” Jason looked at him with his serious eyes. “One night.”
“Tomorrow, supposedly.”
“Yeah.”
“Then what?”
“Then they’re going to have to start burying people. That’s what all the contractors are here for. Millions of people.”
“Eight point six. How are they going to do that?”
“It’s our job not to find out.”
THERE WERE FIVE motels on Sycamore Street south of the city center. The Bombay was a three-story, concrete-block building with a small lobby and outside entrances to all of the rooms. Chaplin had rented one on the second floor and arranged for separate arrival times.
When Charles Mallory opened the door, the other four were already there: Chaplin was seated at a circular wooden table, along with Wells and Nadra Nkosi. Chidi Okoro was in a folding chair across the room. The shades were drawn.
Okoro was the anomaly in this group, conveying an aloof and slightly aristocratic presence. He had grown up in Nigeria, where his father was a banker, but had attended private schools in London. He was unsettlingly calm, a computer wizard who knew things Charlie would never understand.
Nadra was an ex-soldier, thirty years old, small but scrappy, dressed in her usual camouflage pants and tight black T-shirt, which showed a taut upper body and well-buffed arms. Nadra was the only one of his team who had grown up in Mancala. She’d served in the military here, then moved to the States where she studied at the Naval Academy and wound up as a State Department analyst on sub-Saharan African policy. But she didn’t like working behind a desk. Charlie understood that. Her first name meant “unusual” in Swahili, which seemed appropriate to him. These were the best four employees he could imagine. They reminded him sometimes of a championship sports team.
When Charlie came in, they were studying sets of aerial print-outs. The aerials had small numbers stamped on them: 1 through 10. Each number indicated a potential target, with No. 1 being the most valuable, Wells was explaining. Okoro handed a set to Charles Mallory, who sat on the plastic-cushioned sofa.
“We think they’re looking at using four to six airfields throughout the country,” Jason Wells said. “Not all of them are of equal value, obviously—to them or to us. We assess that primarily in terms of population. The one nearest the capital is going to be responsible for Mungaza, which is one tenth of the total population of the country. So that’s target one. The aerials indicate that at least two tanks of what we suspect are viral properties are already in place. We have no photographic record of these four-hundred-gallon tanks at any other airfields. We start with what we know, and we neutralize it.”
Okoro, who had created the aerial models, watched Chaplin through his thick lenses. Wells said, “Most of the urban populations are in two cities. If we were able to immobilize this air strip, it would be a major set-back.”
“Wouldn’t they have some kind of back-up?” Nadra said.
“Possibly,” Wells said. “But that’s a secondary consideration. The primary objective is to neutralize the poison. If we can get to it one day ahead of time, we’re winning the game.”
Chaplin was frowning. “But even if this works tonight, can’t they go up using a different tank? Couldn’t they escalate, push it up a day, or a few hours?”
“They could,” Wells said. “But the thing is, I don’t think they’re going to go up in this weather. They’d lose effectiveness by thirty, thirty-five percent. Which they can’t afford. It’s the same as with crop-dusting. It’s all weather-dependent. The aerosol goes much farther and faster with a wind,” he said. The muscles in his neck flexed involuntarily. “But it has to be the right wind.
“So we have to go for maximum impact tonight. Neutralize the two tanks. And, if we do, and we’re lucky, some of them may crawl out of their holes and let us see what they look like.”
“Targets,” Mallory said.
“There’s a fuel tank on the airfield,” Wells said, pointing to it on his print-out. “Close enough to the fencing that Nadra or I can get an explosive in there. The actual damage may not be huge. But that will divert attention from the hangar, where the viral tanks are.”
Chaplin’s brow was furrowed again. “But is there any sort of collateral risk—the aerosol viral property blowing up and getting loose?”
“No. We’re pinpointing very specific targets. Primary objective: neutralize.”
“And what happens after the first night?”
“We won’t know until it happens.”
Charles Mallory smiled. He had been thinking about Jason Wells’s plan ever since leaving the Blue Star Cafe.
“How are they looking at this?” Nadra asked. “What’s in their heads?”
“They’re planning on it happening. The virus will spread within hours to the borders, where vaccine and anti-viral supplies are in place. Health centers on the border will form a buffer zone. Travel will be immediately shut down. Media outlets cut off. The damage will all happen after dark.”
Charlie nodded. It was a logical assumption that the planes would go up at night. They had done it that way during the trials in Sundiata. Nighttime would make the actual operation almost invisible. Nothing would be seen by the light of day, except the aftermath. Eight hundred thousand in Mungaza alone.
“I think I saw part of the clean-up plan yesterday, coming in on the train,” Charlie said.
They all looked at him.
“Oh?” Jason said.
“There’s a huge open-pit copper mine northwest of the city,” he said. “Five or six miles. Chain-link fence around the perimeter. Train tracks leading in and out.”
“Copper mine?” Chaplin said.
“Yeah. Except I’m pretty sure that it’s not a copper mine.”
WITHIN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES, they had agreed on the details of the first night’s mission. Mallory, Wells, Chaplin, and Nadra Nkosi would be the operations team. Okoro would monitor them from his rented room. The operations team would meet again at twelve minutes past ten. Night one objectives: Seven targets as diversions. And neutralize the two tanks.
Charlie walked to his designated apartment, another one-room affair, where he lay on a short, stiff mattress and closed his eyes for a few minutes. He thought about his brother and his father. Heard their voices. Saw their faces.
Then he went back to work, studying the aerial images. He recognized the surveillance apparatus around the airfield and on the edge of the woods: electronic towers equipped with long-range radar and high-definition cameras. Possibly linked to underground sensors—sensors and heat detectors that could pick up motion through the trees, sending an alert to lookouts who would then focus their cameras on the subjects’ locations. That was going to make it difficult for them coming at the airfield through the woods.
The surveillance set-up was sophisticated, not dissimilar from the system created to guard the United States’ two-thousand-mile border with Mexico. A system that, in theory, was foolproof, although in practice highly flawed. The problem with next-generation stuff, Charlie knew, was that the kinks were never all worked out. The primary weakness with this type of set-up was weather, as the U.S. had found after spending billions of dollars on the Mexico project. When it rained and the wind blew, the sensors became confused and the surveillance was worthless.
But this system was probably more effective. Weather-proofed, developed with an eye toward avoiding the troubles of the Mexican border surveillance. There was another, simple way to disable it if the weather didn’t, though—an idea he had thought about even before Jason Wells suggested it: well-placed sniper bullets could disable each of the five cameras. Charles Mallory finally lay back and allowed himself a brief nap, setting the alarm clock by the bed to nine o’clock.
From his office at the Gardner Foundation complex, Perry Gardner played a feed from the foundation’s weekly executive committee meeting that morning. Routine business. Status reports on projects from the various divisions: a proposal to establish two dozen polio clinics in Kenya and Somalia; partnerships with several East African governments that would teach villagers to filter waterborne parasites from drinking water; the ongoing initiative to find a vaccine for malaria; the distribution of underused vaccines to poor children in East Africa.
More and more, Gardner skipped these meetings, which were run very effectively by his wife, and most other foundation business. As he fast-forwarded through the presentations, he glanced at the clock again. Six minutes to go.
Finally, at 10:20, he clicked off the monitor and walked toward the most remote wing of the Gardner Institute, an underground compound known as Building 67, or the New Technologies Wing. A structure only eleven people were authorized to enter.
Scanners picked up Gardner’s full-body image as he approached, prompting vertical doors to slide open. On the lower level of the building, he entered a ten-foot-by-ten-foot chamber called a DTE, or Data Transfer Environment. The room resembled a steel cube: four walls, ceiling, floor, and the digital immersion unit. Gardner sat and stared straight ahead at the tiny D-I sensors, which scanned his face and irises, detected the vascular patterns in his neck and hands. Once the verification was complete, he gave his verbal cue and the DTE went dark.
Moments later, a smoky light began to drift into the room. The man known as the Administrator stood. As he walked forward into the coalescing light, he smelled the familiar warm evening scents of deep woods and river water on an African breeze.
Isaak Priest was waiting for him in a room at “the Palace” near Mungaza, a spacious old pine-walled lodge room with two wicker chairs and a large open window that afforded a view of moonlight in the eucalyptus trees, and on the swirling waters of the Green Monkey River.
The two men exchanged hellos as if they were in the same room, although in fact they were still 9,200 miles apart. Then they sat in the wicker chairs facing each other, seemingly six feet away. Gardner studied Isaak Priest’s face for a long time.
Eventually, the technology that enabled him to make this visit would be commercially available. The Gardner Foundation’s NTW, which had developed it in tandem with a half dozen other firms, was the only operator of what he called Digital Immersion Technology—a digitized, three-dimensional, holographic environment that realistically mimicked sights, sounds, and smells, allowing the participants to seemingly interact. Eventually, the technology would be used in offices, research labs, medical centers.
“Are you all right?” Gardner finally said.
“Of course. What do you mean?”
“I just want to know that everything’s on schedule.”
“Yes. As we discussed. The viral agents have all been delivered. The vaccines have been distributed. The initiatives, as you know, are proceeding ahead of schedule. One hundred and thirty-seven wind turbines are currently operational. Three solar farms under construction. Everything is set for the World Series.”
“And the first game.”
“On schedule. October 5, as you said. Tomorrow.”
Gardner continued to watch him. Something about his explanation sounded too pat. Almost scripted.
“The president is on board? The transaction completed?”
“Absolutely. As I reported.”
Gardner stood. He looked out the window through his smudged glasses, and he saw what wasn’t there yet: a New Paradigm. A model nation, created in the aftermath of a great tragedy. A nation with no poverty, no crime. One hundred percent energy self-sufficient. A laboratory for new technologies. For medical research.
The Palace, where they were now meeting, would one day become a research laboratory, where technologies that were being developed in Oregon would be implemented—wireless sensors that could determine cardiovascular health, brain signals, body temperature, blood pressure; implanted chips that would, daily, do the job of an annual physical exam, measuring cardio levels, blood and liver functions, even detecting cancer.
“This was our dream, wasn’t it?” Gardner said, still testing him.
“Yes. The New Paradigm.”
“You seem nervous.”
“No. I’m not.”
“Are you afraid you’re going to fuck up again?”
“Of course not.”
Gardner showed him his thin smile. “Good,” he said. He turned and walked back through the doorway where he had entered the room. Closed it. He stepped out of the DTE and walked to his private office in Building 67. No, it was not likely that Priest would fuck up at this stage. But if he did, there was another man inside who would carry this out. The man named John Ramesh.