Viral (24 page)

“So what does it show?”

“The payload,” he said, enlarging a corner of the image on his monitor, “is here.” At first, the aerial image of the three townships in Pennsylvania just became a blur. Then as it grew larger and blurrier, he saw something begin to form within the blur. “There’s a file inside this file. It opens into a second map here. The text is all encrypted. Fairly sophisticated. But here you can see the outline of the secondary map.”

Okoro dialed the hidden map into focus. Charlie stared at the shapes on his screen. Maps encoded within the pixels of the larger map. Three shapes that appeared to be townships or counties. But no.
Not townships
. Each was the shape of a
country
. Three small, little-known nations in Africa: Sundiata, Buttata, and Mancala.

And when he studied the map of Mancala a little more, he noticed something that he hadn’t been able to find in Sundiata. Or anywhere else: a river shaped like a backward “S.” The clue that Paul Bahdru had given him. It was in Mancala, not Sundiata. A country that he hadn’t even looked at. A river that ran near the capital city of Mungaza.
The Green Monkey River, in Mancala
.

That’s where he needed to go.

“What is it?” Chaplin said, standing in the doorway again.

“Mancala,” he said. “That’s where I think Isaak Priest is.”

Okoro frowned at him, then at the map. They all stared at the computer monitor.

“Really?” Chaplin said.

“Really,” Mallory said.

“Is that where you’re going?”

“No,” he said. “That’s where
we’re
going.”

ON HIS FIRST MORNING
home, Jon Mallory received five calls from Melanie Cross between nine o’clock and ten o’clock. He was not answering his phone, though, and Melanie, of course, did not leave messages.

Jon was going through notes, trying to formulate a plan for the day. Something to get him away from the house and the ringing phone. His answering machine had been full when he returned the night before, loaded with calls from news organizations about his Sundiata blog. Jon didn’t want to talk about it. Not now. He wanted to keep moving. Maybe Roger Church could help him figure it out.

As Jon was preparing to leave for Foggy Bottom, Melanie called again. This time, he took it.

“Hello?”

“Jon.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe you finally answered,” she said. “It’s Melanie Cross.”

“Yes, I know.”

She sounded out of breath. He listened, picturing her face—the smooth, lightly freckled skin, the large blue eyes. “That was quite a story you filed.”

“Thanks. You ought to mention that on your blog.”

“It’s caused a little chatter, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Not everyone quite believes it.”

“That it’s true?”

“No. That it’s
you
. They think it’s a hoax. Someone using your name.”

“I haven’t heard that.”

“But it does sort of confirm something I was told.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“Well—” She managed to sigh and laugh almost simultaneously. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper. “I think I’d rather not talk about it over the phone. It might be better to talk in person.”

Vintage Melanie
, Jon thought. “You’re at your office?”

“No. Actually, I’m not. I’m visiting friends in Annapolis. If you have time for lunch I could meet you on the deck at Mike’s Crab House, in Riva. At, say, 11. I think it’d be worth your while.”

He looked at his watch. Fifty minutes from now. About how long it would take to drive there. “Okay,” he said. “See you then.”

HE FOUND MELANIE
sitting at the bar on the indoor deck, laughing in a loud, flirtatious manner with one of the bartenders. She was dressed in a low-cut blue sweater, straw hat, tight, faded jeans, and boots. Her hair was longer than he remembered, and somehow her face seemed younger. Men all gave her looks as they passed.

“Greetings,” he said.

“Well. Hello, stranger,” she said, standing to greet him. They kissed politely, on the cheek. “Have a seat. I ordered you a beer.”

She was a luminous woman with classical features and dark, cascading hair. When he was honest, Jon had to acknowledge that she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever met, although as far as he knew she had never had a substantial relationship with anyone. Jon glanced at the sailboats on the river, breathing the aroma of grilled burgers, fries, and seafood.

“That was quite a story.”

“Yes. You said that.”

Melanie slipped on her sunglasses so he could no longer see her eyes. “What was it like?”

“What was it like? Oh. Well. I mean … it was horrible, of course. But also surprisingly efficient. Not to mention well-coordinated.”

“How’d you find out about it?”

“Well. Long story.” Jon looked at his reflection in her sunglasses. He smiled. “You aren’t asking me to reveal my sources, are you?”

He said it in a joking tone, but Melanie laughed defensively. “Of course not. I’m just curious. It’s interesting. I was told pretty much the same thing, but in a different context. Who knows, we might even be able to help each other.”

“You think so?”

“It’s possible.”

“I don’t know, I tend to be pretty much of a solo act.”

The beers arrived, followed by crab cake sandwiches. The crab cakes were good, with chunks of back-fin lump crab meat, served on toasted hamburger buns. Her enthusiasms ran down a little as they ate and caught up on their lives. She seemed to become edgier.

“Anyway, the reason I called you,” she said, “was I thought maybe I could help you with your story.” She lifted her eyebrows and smiled beguilingly. “Your next story.”

“How would you do that?” he said. “And why?”

“The fact is, I wanted to write about some of this, too. Several weeks ago. But my editors wouldn’t touch it. Mostly because of the people involved. Also, it’s not really my beat.” She paused, wiping her hands. “I think I may have learned something you’d be interested in, though. Something that I suspect is sort of the key to the whole thing.”

“Oh? And what’s that?”

“Okay.” She sighed, pushed aside her plate and wiped her hands again. “Let me start at the beginning, okay? For me, this started six, seven weeks ago. With a tip. Which turned out to be the tip of an iceberg. Okay? The tip had to do with a group called the Champion Funds Venture Partnership, or the Champion Group.”

Jon nodded. He had written about the Champion Group, an international private equity investment firm based in Washington, months ago. Its directors and advisers included several heavyweight Washington political figures. Recently it had expanded its portfolio into several African nations.

“Last winter,” she said, “it funded, or helped to fund, a seven-hundred-million-dollar medical research initiative in the developing world known as Project Open Borders.”

Jon nodded. “I know. I’m familiar with it.”

“Okay? Which in itself seems a little bit odd, doesn’t it?”

“Not really. Health care is a part of their portfolio.”

“Anyway. Here’s the key part. I’m not going to tell you where I heard this,” she said. “Who my source was.”

“Okay.” Jon waited, watching his face in her sunglasses.

“Two sources, really. One a contractor, one an investor.” She
screwed up her face. “I probably shouldn’t have just said that.” She smiled quickly. “Anyway. Both very reliable. And both told me essentially the same thing: There is actually a written plan describing all of this. What’s apparently going on in Africa right now was written out in a report that was only seen by a handful of people, including, possibly, one or two people with this investment group and maybe someone with the government. I don’t know. It’s called the TW Report or the TW Paper.”

“T.W. for Third World?”

“Right. Very good. The TW Paper proposed an aggressive political, social, and economic remaking of the Third World, beginning with Africa—before its problems begin to overwhelm the so-called first and second worlds. Okay? Or before China invests too heavily and annexes the entire continent.” She tossed back her hair. “More than that. It laid out a specific plan for accomplishing this within three to five years.”

“Ambitious plan.”

“Well, yes. That was the idea. The premise behind the report, as I understand it, is that much of the Third World is unmanageable. Mired in poverty, corruption, ethnic conflict, yada yada. But it also has the fastest-growing segment of the world population. Dealing with the problems of Africa and the Third World in the public sphere has become too political, and not very effective.”

“So the report proposes, what—a form of quiet pre-emption, in effect?”

“Of a sort, yes. And, apparently, it’s going to happen quite soon.”

“Does your source have a copy of this paper?”

“No. I don’t think so. But I understand excerpts are starting to show up on several Internet sites—or will soon. The paper was written by a consultant named Stuart Thames Borholm. Or by someone using that name. I have no idea who that is. My source knows but won’t say.”

She lifted up her glasses again and gave him a long look.

“Stuart—?”

She wrote out the name on a sheet of notepaper, tore it off, and handed it to him. Why was she telling him this?

“Strange name,” Jon said, studying it. “Thames—as in England. Isn’t Borholm a city in Denmark?”

“That’s Bornholm,” she said, making a snorting sound. “Anyway, I feel sort of like I’m in a game of chess and I can’t make a move. You know? But I also feel I
have
to make a move or we lose. How can you get anyone interested in something so distant and so complicated, though, in such a short period of time? I mean, to get the U.N. or NATO on board would take months.”

“Or years.”

“Yeah.”

“Is Perry Gardner involved?”

She gave him a sharp, defensive look. Melanie had a fondness for Gardner, the software pioneer turned philanthropist, one of the wealthiest men in the world. Gardner had at least a tangential connection with the Champion Group, he knew. “No,” she said. “But my source thinks this Borholm might be someone who
knew
Gardner and had a falling out with him. That’s as much as he’d say. He
or she
, I should say. Anyway, I’m going to be back in Washington tonight. How about if I stop by your place at lunchtime tomorrow. Okay? You can tell me then what you’ve decided.”

“Decided? About what?”

“This story.”

“What’s to decide?”

She shook her head at him and went back to her beer.

AS JON MALLORY
drove back toward Washington, his thoughts were on separate tracks—still trying to figure out his brother’s last message to him while also compiling a mental list of people who might have “had a falling out” with Perry Gardner—former partners, business associates, colleagues.

There were several possibilities: ambitious men from Silicon Valley and elsewhere who had made their fortunes in the 1980s and ’90s in the tech world. Some had become philanthropists. Some had bought major league ball clubs. Some had become outrageously conspicuous consumers; one or two had found religion.

By six o’clock, there were five names on Jon Mallory’s list. Business captains. Silicon Valley pioneers. Military and intelligence contractors. But there was a problem: none of them really seemed to have the motivation to write this TW Paper. With one possible exception:
Thomas Trent. The more Jon read about Trent, the more likely he seemed to fit the bill.

Trent was a self-made billionaire, with a penchant for exaggerating and embellishing his own life story. Quirky but charismatic, a man of outsize ambitions and accomplishments whose cable communications companies had connected much of the world before the Internet. A man who had risen from a lower-middle-class upbringing to launch a groundbreaking media conglomerate, then branched out to computer systems and software. He was a bold and ambitious thinker who had recently proposed “shock therapy” solutions to the economic crises in the developing world, including disease eradication programs and the creation of new “infrastructure models.”

Jon combed the Internet for stories about Trent and learned more: Two years ago, he had spoken at a conference in Geneva on world population, making an impassioned speech that had been carried on C-SPAN and had made news pages and websites around the world. Jon watched a YouTube clip of the speech. Trent holding a crooked finger in the air, as if he were God reaching to Adam:
“And I return again to a fact that bears repeating: Every forty-five minutes, enough of the sun’s energy hits the Earth’s surface to meet our planet’s entire electrical power needs for a year. A year!”
he said, raising a fist.
“We can redo the existing energy infrastructure in this country within the next decade. But to do it requires a commitment. We need to pledge ourselves to this goal the same way we pledged in 1961 that we would send a man to the moon before the end of the decade.”

Since losing controlling interest in his media corporation, Trent had become involved in a bevy of environmental and humanitarian causes and created what he told reporters was his “life’s most important work,” the International Environmental Trust. The IET claimed membership throughout the world, although it sometimes seemed a platform for Trent’s zealous, idealistic political and environmental views.

He enjoyed media attention, but Trent was actually something of a recluse, who moved among half a dozen properties he owned in the U.S., Europe, and Africa. If any place qualified as “home,” it would be his ranch in Wyoming, where Trent spent weeks at a time hunting and fly-fishing, or else his futuristic, energy self-sufficient seaside
home in California, built into the bluffs near Santa Cruz. His third wife, a veteran cable news anchor who once hosted a weekly entertainment magazine show, had divorced him two and a half years ago, and he apparently lived alone now.

Trent often quoted 18th-century British economist Thomas Malthus, whom Jon Mallory had studied in college.

At twelve minutes past eight, Jon stopped reading. He pulled out a pen and steno pad from his drawer and wrote out a name. Then he began to rearrange the letters, pleasantly surprised how they all fit together.
Bingo
. At quarter past eight, he knew who Stuart Thames Borholm was.