THERE WAS A HANDGUN on the table next to him. A Beretta M9, the make used by military and police officers. But Isaak Priest made no motion to reach for it. Charlie kicked the door closed. He scanned the room quickly for signs of a trap, sensed that there wasn’t one.
“What are you doing here?”
“I realized something, as you got closer,” Priest said, speaking in a familiar voice, a soldier’s voice. “You’re working for the government, aren’t you?
The government.
“They’re supporting you, anyway.”
Charlie remained silent, trying to process his words.
“You know that I’m the wrong target, though, don’t you? You must know that. I’m the target they gave you, aren’t I? You’ve been paid to take me out.”
Mallory just watched him.
“What you want is right there,” Priest said. “It’s right on the table.”
Charlie glanced at the table, kept his gun aimed at Isaak Priest.
“I’m a military man, Mallory. I still think more like a soldier than a businessman. I get drunk on an idea sometimes. But at my core, I’m a soldier. These guys are fighting different wars. Not real ones. War has to be about something fundamental. Theirs isn’t. Theirs is about money and prestige and power. I still have a chance to change that. To define it on my own terms. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
He calmly laced his fingers together.
Charlie realized something else then, something he hadn’t quite put together before. An easy puzzle.
“You didn’t have anything to do with my brother, did you? With the prison?”
He shook his head, once. Smiled. Then his smile turned dark. “There are some people you should never do business with. Do business with them once, and you lose something you never get back. Part of your soul. Worse than that. It’s the same as doing business with the devil.”
So he wasn’t controlling everything. Even his role was compartmentalized.
“What’s this about, then?”
“You’ll see when you look at what’s on the table. I’m just a soldier. I got in the belly of something and eventually saw that it wasn’t what I thought it was.”
“Is it still going to happen tonight?”
“No.”
“No?” Mallory saw a reassuring clarity in Priest’s dark eyes. “Why? Why not? It’s all operational, isn’t it?”
“It could have been. It should have been.”
“But it’s not.”
“No.”
Mallory lowered his gun.
“It’s not on the airfields?”
“No.”
Do business with them once, and you lose something you never get back. A soldier knows that. A businessman might not. Not in the same way.
“Hassan,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Hassan wanted this. To hijack it.”
“That’s right.”
“But not here,” Mallory said. No. Of course not. The Hassan Network couldn’t care less about controlling some obscure country in Africa.
“They want to sell it to al Qaeda. Spray it on New York City or Washington. Or anywhere. Let it loose. Use it as a terrorist weapon.”
“That’s right.”
The perfect weapon, as Anna had said.
“So what happened? What did you do?”
“I secured the storage facilities two days ago. It wasn’t delivered.”
“What’s in the tanks?”
“Water.”
“What?”
“Water,” Priest repeated, his voice neutral.
“BUT WHY? WHY did you go through all this?”
“Bringing in Hassan was an operational mistake from the beginning. In retrospect, it was a fatal flaw. I was part of something that wasn’t structured properly. I recognized that because I was on the ground. The person driving this didn’t see it. He did it all from a distance, to protect himself. He did it all by remote control. Like he was playing a giant video game. He saw this as ultimately being a humanitarian project. But he didn’t understand the mistakes he was making.”
“Why did he bring them in at all?”
“It was a model he wanted to understand. He’s a curious man who’s interested in the concept of power. The uses of power. The power they could give him was of a kind he didn’t have. All forms of power interest him. Obsess him. He saw an opportunity and he made a move. It was a mistake.”
“What’s happened to it? What was in the tanks.”
It seemed to take Priest a while to understand the question. “There’s an autoclaving converter facility north of Elam. I had it built for security purposes.”
“Autoclaving.”
“Heat sterilization. It’s how you neutralize biohazard materials. The viral containers are heated. It raises the temperature to 121 degrees. Sterilizes it. Kills the virus.”
“But you were on board in Sundiata.”
His eyes seemed to glisten for a moment as he looked out at the twilight. “The serious tactical mistakes were made since then,” he said. Since the murder of 200,000 innocent Sundiatans in a series of trials, Charlie thought, feeling a quick rage.
Priest looked up at Charles Mallory and unfolded his hands. “Go ahead and take me out if you’d like. Isn’t that your mission?”
“No,” Charlie said. “I’m not going to do that.” He wanted to spend a long time interrogating Isaak Priest.
Priest watched him. “And if I gave you no choice?”
Charlie felt an anxious tension. He sensed what Priest was about to do.
Isaak Priest lifted the Beretta from the table, and he pointed it at Charles Mallory. Charlie kept his weapon at his side, though. Waiting, holding his finger on the trigger. Breathing the night air, smelling the human decay on his clothes and his hands.
The soldier looked at him.
“Okay?”
Isaak Priest straightened his arm, pointing the gun.
Only it wasn’t Isaak Priest. Isaak Priest wasn’t real. His father had known that. This was Landon Pine, the American military contractor. The businessman whose Black Eagle Services had made billions of dollars off the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, before his overzealousness got him in trouble. Perry Gardner’s partner. Who had signed on to this without knowing what it would eventually become, or cost him. Who had gotten drunk on an idea. Perry Gardner’s idea of a New Paradigm in the developing world. Who had been paid enormous sums of money, most likely, to make it operational. Then found out that he was also going to end up taking a fall, unless he discovered another way out. A way that involved bringing down somebody bigger than he was.
Charlie kept his gun at his side, knowing what was going to happen.
Then Priest turned the Beretta so that the barrel was flush against the side of his head.
And he pulled the trigger.
IN THE PACKAGE on the table was a copy of the full emergency management plan. “Fork River Township, Pennsylvania.” The real TW Paper. Pine and Gardner’s plan for remaking three African nations, “solving” the problems of Third World poverty, disease, and corruption by simply eliminating them. There was also a memory stick, probably containing details about the operation, the dream that Landon Pine had devised with Perry Gardner, and talked about once with Thomas Trent. A plan that could have worked. That could have been implemented tonight. And there was something else. Another, smaller envelope, full of registered bonds made out in $100,000 denominations. Charlie checked the dates, counted the amount. Mature bearer bonds worth nearly $2 billion.
He gathered everything into the package, shoved it inside his jacket and walked away. There was nothing else to do there. He walked down the street for a couple of blocks and called the police from the first pay phone he saw. Told them, “Isaak Priest has just committed suicide,” gave the address and hung up.
He bought a change of clothes and then headed toward the heart of the capital, thinking about the set-up. What had happened and what hadn’t. Priest hadn’t paid the investors’ money to the Muake government. He must have known what was going to happen and tried to block it. He must have reneged on the deal.
Charlie found Okoro in Joseph Chaplin’s apartment, staring at a computer monitor. Chaplin was studying aerial photographs of the city.
“It’s over,” Mallory said. “Priest is dead.”
“What?” Chaplin said. “Did you kill him?”
“No. He killed himself.”
But Charlie was still thinking through puzzles. Knowing that it wasn’t over at all.
In a concrete and steel bunker sixty feet below the streets of Washington, D.C., five men and two women sat tensely around a rectangular rosewood conference table, three on each side, one at the head of the table. The bunker, located on parkland just over the Maryland border, had originally been built by the Army Corps of Engineers during the construction of the Washington subway system in the late 1970s. The half-acre bunker contained its own ventilation system, heating and lighting plants, forty-foot water wells, and an emergency communications network. With its outer layers of two-foot-thick reinforced concrete, ten-inch-thick steel-plated blast doors and angled entrance ramps with vibration isolators, the bunker was constructed to withstand the damage from a thirty-megaton bomb blast as well as the inevitable earthquake aftershocks. But its primary purpose was not as a fallout shelter. The bunker’s main function was to serve as the headquarters for the least-known arm of the government’s intelligence community, a presidential “liaison committee” known informally as the Covenant Division.
The seven members of the Covenant Division had been scheduled to meet that afternoon for a briefing on Mancala, on the operation they had authorized nearly ten months earlier. A project known as the “New Paradigm.”
But the operation in Mancala had not unfolded as expected. There had been a serious setback. That was the news that the group’s chairman had just relayed to the other six members. He was the same man who had first brought the project to them and convinced them to become part of it.
The seven men and women gathered in the room were among the most brilliant and powerful people in the country, including representatives from the fields of finance, the military, technology, and energy. They were also people who understood and supported their organization’s unique mission. The group chose its members very carefully.
This meeting, though, was an anomaly. There was an unfamiliar tension in the room, a mood of anger, resentment, and disappointment struggling to find a proper outlet.
“So we have had a setback. Something impossible to predict,” Perry Gardner said, in another attempt at summary. “The mission aborted hours before it was to become operational.”
“Priest aborted the mission,” said a former Joint Chiefs of Staff member and secretary of defense, interrupting him. “But we don’t know why.”
“No.” The chairman sighed. “A great deal of stress, presumably. Maybe guilt. We don’t know all of the reasons yet. It might be a while before we get a complete picture. As I say, we know that he took his own life and sabotaged some elements of the plan. I take full responsibility for that. But the plan will go forward,” Gardner said, looking quickly to his left. “My estimate—and I will prepare a more thorough analysis, of course—is that we can re-activate this again within three to four weeks.”
“But what about the status of the viral properties?” said a tall white-haired man, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist. “Isn’t there an enormous risk factor there?”
“No. As I said, we have built-in safeguards, which have rendered the mechanism inoperable. I will be traveling there today for a more complete analysis.”
One man in the room knew more than the others. Perry Gardner could feel it, and he avoided that man’s eyes. For nearly a year, the people in this room had been infected with Gardner’s idea, with a humanitarian mission that could have turned the wheel of history. Now, each in his or her own way, they were beginning to reject it.
“Self-inflicted gunshot wound was also how Thomas Trent died,” the man to his left said. “And it’s one of the signature methods used by the Hassan Network.”
Gardner did not respond or look at the other man, hoping that his remark would pass without comment. “Again, I want to stress that this is a setback. A battle, not a war. We still control the resources, technology, and opportunity. The objective of creating a New Paradigm, a high-tech, productive model for the so-called Third World, is still very much alive.”
“I don’t know how this could have happened, based on everything Mr. Gardner has told us,” said Richard Franklin, the man to Gardner’s left. “I, too, want to be sure that this setback hasn’t inadvertently created an unspeakable crisis. I want to make certain that the Hassan Network hasn’t gotten hold of any of this and is planning to use it as a terrorist weapon. That to me is very troubling.”
Again, no one commented. But the others were skeptical now; Gardner could sense it. There had been misgivings all along about his involvement with the Hassan Network. And it was a concern, but one that he couldn’t afford to admit. Not in this company.
Within ten minutes, the frustration and anger in the room had found a form. They had agreed to continue moving forward with the project but to strip Perry Gardner of his chairmanship. A former secretary of state was named the new chairman.
Gardner sat stone-faced, saying nothing.
“There’s another issue,” said one of the two women, a onetime chairman of the Federal Reserve. “The president of Mancala has been a silent partner on this project. He has just sent us an accounting, though, for one point nine billion dollars.”
“What?” said Richard Franklin. “How could that be?”
“The third payment was never made, he claims.”
“That’s not possible,” Gardner said, calmly. “The money went to Priest four days ago.”
“What sort of transaction was it?” asked one of the world’s most successful investors.
Gardner almost choked as he said the words: “Bearer bonds.”
“So two billion dollars in investor money is missing? And it was paid in bearer bonds?”
“I’m certain it will be accounted for,” the man known as the Administrator said.
Gardner looked to his left, making eye contact for the first time with Richard Franklin, letting him know what he knew: that the real betrayal had involved men who were right here in this room.