Viral (22 page)

Charles Mallory watched her, realizing who the “mutual friend” was. She had been one of his father’s sources.

“The purpose of our project was to create a vaccine for a particularly virulent flu—developing mutated strains and recombinant vaccines.”

“For what end?”

“I don’t know. We weren’t told a lot about the larger objectives. Although the implication—the impression we had—was that we were developing defensive capabilities as a response to a specific or potential threat somewhere in the world. Possibly in Iraq. Here are some of the details about what I was working on.”

She wiped her hands and gave him an envelope, which he had thought she was using as a bookmark. Inside were two pages of handwritten notes, the writing small and precise.

Charlie had thanked her when they finished lunch and told her that he would look into it. That was before he knew much. Before he had communicated with Paul Bahdru. Long before he had made the deal with Richard Franklin.

“I just wonder how you were able to find me,” he said as they drank coffees.

“It wasn’t easy.” She smiled for the first time, a sly, knowing look. “Your company is off the map. You don’t even have a website.”

“I like to pick and choose assignments. I have a small Rolodex.”

“Where are you based?”

“I don’t talk about that. It’s not where you’d expect. I’m interested in places that people don’t look at. What about you?”

“I have another life now,” she said, straightening her napkin. “I don’t talk about it, either.”

“Fair enough. So was our mutual acquaintance my father?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was very sorry to hear the news.”

FOUR WEEKS LATER,
Charles Mallory had discovered the note from his father, and its mention of Ivan Vogel. The note had given new context to what Anna had told him, and he knew that he needed to go back to her. He felt the weight of an obligation he hadn’t imagined before.

But she had left no way of finding her. It was a “finite exchange,” she had said. She did not want to risk her “other life;” she only wanted to give him what she knew. But his father’s note had mentioned “AV” in Geneva. So he had gone there and, after several days,
found her. Taken the handful of clues she had revealed about her life and tried to piece them together. Eventually, through deduction and elimination, he did. Learned that she was a school instructor, teaching biology and science at a private school in Geneva.

He had surprised her as she sat on a bench across from the Flower Clock at the Jardin Anglais, a spot where she sometimes went to eat her lunch.

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember me.”

It took a moment. She seemed startled and vulnerable, and Charlie felt bad that he had done it this way. That was the moment things changed for him.

He had rented two rooms in the city, one where he was staying, the other where they could meet. He gave her the address and number and waited.

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to jeopardize things for you,” he said. “I’ve learned more, and I need to ask you some questions. They’re questions I couldn’t ask you before.”

“All right.”

“First, my father.” He saw her eyes moisten. “How did you know him?”

Anna Vostrak paced the room, her arms folded. She was wearing a tan pencil skirt and navy sweater set.

“He had begun to seek out the scientists who were involved in the Vogel project,” she said.

“Project Lifeboat.”

“Yes. Particularly those who had been hired away. No one was saying much, though. Or knew much. So I went to him. Even though I realized I was taking a risk.”

“I need to know more about that. The work you were doing. Genetically altered flu. Can you give me the CliffsNotes version? How it was supposed to work?”

She smiled, still a little wary, he could tell. “The basic objective with genetic engineering is to alter an existing virus—in this case, making it resistant to all known antibiotics and vaccines. Once a gene sequence has been determined, reverse genetics can, theoretically, be used to create a synthetic virus. The synthetic virus can then be mutated to become what is sometimes called a super virus.”

“And how difficult is it, to do that?”

“That’s something of a paradox,” she said. She sat on an armchair and regarded him for a moment. “The process is fairly complicated, but not particularly difficult. You can purchase the virus sequences from companies that make DNA, then add cellular components that mimic a human cell and create a perfect genetically altered virus. Any well-funded research lab could do that without difficulty.”

“What about the project you were working on with Vogel?”

“It was more specialized. It was known informally as the ‘Four-Hour Virus,’ because it was designed to have a four-hour lethality. Much more deadly than the 1918 strain.”

Yes. That’s what Paul had told him. A “four-hour lethality.”

“But you were working on the vaccine for this, not the virus.”

She looked off. Charlie looked too, saw the gray waters of the Rhone River five stories below. “That’s where the lines blur. According to the international treaty, developing anything that could be used offensively is prohibited. But to develop vaccines, you have to understand the virus. So we also created viral properties.”

“That was my father’s concern.”

“Yes, that it wasn’t regulated properly. And that private, non-governmental laboratories were becoming interested in the same thing. Labs well-funded by the pharmaceuticals industry. One in particular.”

“A company called VaxEze.”

“Yes.” She showed her smile. “How did you know?”

“I found the name in my father’s notes. But why?”

Their eyes locked, and neither looked away. She seemed to see him differently then, to maybe hear doors opening that she couldn’t open on her own. He began to think something else. Something he probably shouldn’t have been thinking. He was thinking how beautiful she looked.

BY THE THIRD
meeting, Charles Mallory had talked with Paul Bahdru and had learned more about the elusive African businessman named Isaak Priest, who supposedly was funding terror groups and supporting corrupt regimes.

But why had that name been in his father’s note, as well? Did Isaak Priest have an interest in bio-weapons? Was he the one who had hired away Ivan Vogel? Who wanted to privatize the bio-weapons research?

They were questions Anna Vostrak had been unable to answer.

They met again in Paris, and over a day and a half became more comfortable with each other, spending time walking through Luxembourg Gardens, Anna talking in greater detail about the projects she had worked on, walking with her arms folded, her right hand occasionally chopping the air to make a point. That was when she told him about the man who had worked with his father on the Lifeboat Inquiry. A man named Peter Quinn, who had “become scared” and quit. She didn’t know why.

Charlie had again admired her sober intelligence. And the sly contradiction of her smile. They had hugged when they said goodbye, a formal hug. But he had imagined what it would be like to give her a real hug. And to kiss her.

THE FOURTH MEETING
was in summer. By then, scattered outbreaks of deadly virus had spread through West Africa. Charles Mallory had witnessed one of them after the fact, a small valley of death in southern Sundiata, where two dozen people had perished overnight. He had gone there because of Paul Bahdru, who had also told him about the “ill wind” and the “October project.”

“I keep coming back to another idea,” she said, sitting beside him on a park bench in an Italian garden. “This was what concerned your father. If this virus could be engineered and controlled, it would be the perfect weapon because once it began to spread, there would be no way of ever determining, scientifically, whether it was naturally occurring or man-made. And without conclusive evidence that it was man-made, no one could make that leap. Not definitively.”

Anna brushed at the back of her left hand, her thoughts turning inward for a moment. Wind fluttered through the leaves above them, making patterns on the lake.

“In simplest terms,” she said, “you need only three elements: an agent, a method of delivery, and a vaccine. I don’t know that the public has really thought much in those terms. But if you have those three things, you have, potentially, the most formidable weapon in the world.”

Charlie watched a couple strolling toward them on the tree-lined walkway of the Lake Garden, letting the implications of what Anna had said sink in.

“It would, by all appearances, be a naturally occurring agent,” she said, “and its spread would begin in regions of the world where health care is very poor or in some cases non-existent. Where infectious disease is already epidemic.”

“Couldn’t it spread outside of these regions, too, even if there were a vaccine?”

“Sure, it’s possible. We still don’t understand viruses very well. We can’t accurately predict which ones will survive, which ones will die out. We just don’t know.”

Anna stood first, as if sensing danger, and they began to walk, past the flowerbeds and tufa rockeries and cast-iron pergola, toward the exit.

Charlie had made the same arrangements as before, but with three rooms this time: one for her to spend the night, one for him to spend the night, and a third for them to meet. But two of the rooms he’d rented went unused. In the morning, she had told him it was wrong, and he had not agreed. It was a conversation they would have again.

T
HE LAST TWO
meetings had been with “Frederick Collins,” in Nice. They had a system then. A way of communicating. By the last meeting, several communities had been decimated in Sundiata, and both of them knew that it was real, even if the international media was largely missing the story. But there were still too many things they didn’t know. “I can’t answer all the questions, but I think we should find someone who can help us,” Anna said.

“Who?”

“All of the large multi-national pharmaceutical firms have intelligence branches these days.”

“As do many of the smaller ones,” Charlie said.

Anna nodded. “Yes. There’s too much at stake not to have them. It’s become a trillion-dollar industry, and there’s a huge amount of industrial espionage. We need someone who can go inside the industry and find anomalies. And answer our questions.”

“But if we go to someone who’s any good, wouldn’t we set off alarms?”

She smiled quickly. “I thought you would say that. I know someone, who’s not in the business anymore. Someone they probably wouldn’t look at right away. Maybe you can check him out before I make contact.”

She gave him the name.

“What would you ask him?”

“The four or five most important questions that we can’t answer ourselves. The ones you asked me.”

“Okay.”

“The only problem is it wouldn’t be cheap.”

Charlie shrugged. The government was paying his company big money to go after Isaak Priest and not requiring itemized expense reports. “I think I can swing it,” he said. “Let’s decide on the questions.”

They did, over dinner on Promenade des Anglais. The incongruity of their topic and the beauty of the Mediterranean wasn’t lost on them. The gravity and secrecy of the project had become an aphrodisiac, the way war could be an aphrodisiac. They made love slowly that night and shared stories in the dark about their lives. In the morning, Charles Mallory looked at the calendar. He picked the date and the place where they would meet next. With someone who could answer the questions they couldn’t answer themselves.

But he felt a deep longing when she left, knowing that he had to go forward but at the same time yearning for something else, something that felt akin to a “normal” life.

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?”