THE CALL FROM CHARLES Mallory had been scheduled for 8:30 A.M. Eastern Time. Fourteen minutes ago. For many people, fourteen minutes didn’t mean much; for Charles Mallory, it did. The missed connection could only be a message. That much, at least, was clear.
Jon Mallory knew very little about his older brother these days. Didn’t have an address; didn’t know if he was married or had children; couldn’t reach him if he needed to. He knew only that for the past several years, Charlie had operated an intelligence contracting firm known as D.M.A. Associates, and that it was based somewhere in Saudi Arabia.
He knew other things about his brother, though. Things that wouldn’t change over time—that he was a brilliant, headstrong man who harbored obsessions, one of which was punctuality. During the seven weeks that they had been in contact, Charlie had never missed an appointment. He had never been a minute late. If he hadn’t called this morning, something was wrong.
Still dressed in his pajamas, Jon Mallory breathed the cool morning air through the screen window of his rented house in Northwest Washington. He stared at the notes on his computer screen—records of previous conversations; encrypted e-mails; enigmatic instructions, seemingly unconnected phrases—combing through them for a telltale clue, some nuance that he might have missed.
It was one of those deliciously mild September mornings in Washington. Sixty-one degrees, 5 mph winds, 54 percent humidity. A perfect day for biking on the towpath or wandering among the museums and monuments of the National Mall.
This wasn’t a morning that inspired him to be outside, though. Something had happened overnight, something still outside his frame of reference. The answers that he had expected this morning were not going to arrive. Instead, he had been given a new problem, and it would take him several days, maybe longer, to figure it out.
“Just remember what I say,” Charlie had told him. “I’m going to meet a witness. After that, I’ll give you details that you need to report.… Don’t lose contact with me.”
“I won’t. I just wish we could talk in person,” Jon had said.
“We can’t. Not yet.… If I don’t contact you this way, I’ll contact you another way.”
A different conversation, weeks earlier:
“False fingerprints. That’s going to be part of the deception. You need to be a witness to something that hasn’t happened yet.…”
“How will I know?”
“I told you.”
“By paying attention.”
“Yes. Information will come to you.”
Jon Mallory heard the scuffles of rubber soles on the basketball court down the street, the ping of the ball against the rim, and he thought of the long summer afternoons of his childhood in the suburbs seven or eight miles north of here: playing Horse and Around the World at the junior high playground with his brother, aiming at a rusted basket with a torn metal net. Visualize it: leaving your hand, arching perfectly, going in. The absence of Charlie in his life over the past decade had sometimes felt to Jon like a death in the family. They had been best friends, always finding ways to amuse and entertain each other, particularly during the years of their mother’s illness. Charlie had been a mentor and role model to his younger brother, becoming a star baseball and football player who never acted like a star. But it had all changed as they grew older. For a while, Jon had found himself intimidated by Charlie. His single-minded intensity, his obsession with subjects that were alien to Jon—statistics, ciphers, weapons, military history—had made his brother less and less accessible, and impatient with those who didn’t share his interests. In his late teens, Charlie had grown inward—called away, it seemed, from sports to places that he wouldn’t talk about; eventually, he came to live in those places, in rooms that Jon Mallory could never find, let alone enter. Like their father, he had become a statistician and a military analyst, then gone on to intelligence work, a vocation he couldn’t discuss. And then, ten years ago, he had seemed to simply disappear.
It had been a great surprise, then, when Charlie contacted him seven weeks ago out of the blue, saying that he wanted Jon to help him “tell a story.” The story, it became clear, was all that interested his brother. He did not want to know the circumstances of Jon’s life, and he wouldn’t talk about his own. His purpose in re-establishing contact was this story; a story that appeared to be about Africa, he said, but really wasn’t; a story that had to be told a certain way, and quickly.
Jon Mallory earned his living these days as contributing editor for a newsmagazine called The Weekly American, writing profiles and news features. He contributed a story every other month, working mostly at home. He’d developed a loyal readership and won a few awards. He had good people instincts, was able to draw out his subjects and figure out what motivated them. But his own brother remained a mystery.
Charlie’s tips had led him to write about the people of two African nations: a family of subsistence farmers, who got by without electricity or running water; an AIDS widow raising seven children by herself in a drought-plagued mud-hut farming village; two health-care workers who traveled on rusted bicycles over tire-track roads, distributing anti-malarial herbs; and the residents of a town nicknamed Starvation because it no longer had a source of food or water.
They were stories that had been told before, in other locales, human stories about dignity in the face of complicated social and political problems; about scarcity and disease and well-intentioned but short-sighted relief efforts.
What his brother had really steered him toward was something very different, though—a less visible human story, about large-scale aid and development projects in unlikely pockets of Africa. A story Jon hadn’t quite believed at first, which had drawn criticism and denials from two prominent American businessmen, both board members of the Gardner Foundation, one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations.
The rest is coming. That was what Charlie had said. There was a source who knew “details.” Jon’s brother was going to meet with him and pass those details to him the next time they spoke.
That was supposed to have been this morning. Wednesday, September 16.