Viral (33 page)

Vogel stood like a robot. Mallory exited with him, keeping a hand on his arm. They emerged onto a busy street a couple of blocks from the river. Mallory guided them toward the first café he saw, taking
charge as if
he
had the weapon. He wanted to stay in the open until Vogel had told him what he needed to know.

“Right here. Have a seat, Ivan.”

They sat beside each other at a small round table. Charlie smiled. He was counting on Vogel wanting to avoid a scene. He stared at his strange red lower lip, making Vogel look away.

“My interest—our interest—is strictly business, Ivan. All I want is information. I presume that both the Russians and the Americans would like to find you at this point, wouldn’t they?”

Vogel watched him with hooded eyes, breathing heavily. “Look, I’m just consultant these days,” he said. “I have no big secrets to tell anybody.”

“You’re more than a consultant.”

“I run a small business.”

“Yes.”

“How did you find out about me?”

Charles Mallory shrugged.

“I’m research scientist, not politician,” he said, speaking suddenly with a more pronounced Russian accent. “I’m biologist. I do contract work. I don’t set policy.”

“Based on your curriculum vitae, I would venture a guess that you don’t keep particularly strong loyalties either, or use a great deal of discrimination in determining who you work for.”

“I work for myself.”

The waiter came and Charlie ordered them two Coca-Colas.

“You’ve also recruited scientists who were part of Biopreparat, haven’t you?”

He observed Mallory with a new interest. “Maybe,” he said. “Thousands of scientists lose jobs. Victims of program. What you expect them to do? Sell flowers?”

“Sounds like you’re trying to justify something.”

“I have nothing to justify. I don’t know what you think, but it’s wrong. I’m doing nothing.”

“You’ve been producing viral properties in your labs, haven’t you? Genetic engineering projects. Bad things.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. We were presented with flu. Virulent strain of flu. Asked to
produce vaccine and anti-virals. Medicines, for research projects.” He was acting defiant, but Mallory sensed, from the way his voice thickened, that he was scared, too.

“In huge volumes. Millions of doses, I understand.”

Vogel seemed momentarily surprised. “You misunderstand. We manufacture nothing here. This is research lab.”

“Maybe. Your lab has contracts with distributors, though, doesn’t it? You hold the license. It’s a tight circle.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You have contracts with half a dozen distributors, under different names. Your operation is deliberately non-descript, low key. But you’re being subsidized with enormous amounts of investment money. Not all of the deals, I suspect, are legal.”

“That is not true.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to blow your cover, Ivan, so long as you give me the information I ask for.”

“We’re an independent laboratory. I don’t reveal clients.”

Vogel’s eyes were nervous. He was considering his options, Mallory sensed, which weren’t very many at this point.

“The production of this vaccine suddenly increased dramatically over the past several months, I’m told.”

“That isn’t my business. I told you.”

“It
is
, though. You license the product. And you’ve also made it your
side
business, as well. Arnau Inc.? If your investors found out about that, you would be in trouble, I suspect.”

Now there was alarm in his eyes. So Keller had been correct.

“Your father did this, too,” Charlie said, keeping a conversational tone. “He worked for Vector. The largest illegal military bio-weapons operation in the Soviet Union. He was there when the anthrax leak occurred in 1979.”

“Yes,” Vogel said, and Mallory saw that he had hit a nerve. “I’m not a believer in the Soviet Union anymore. Or Russia. I won’t defend them.”

“Something like that’s about to happen in Africa now, though, on a much larger scale. Not accidentally.”

“I know nothing about what you say. I’m just a researcher and businessman.”

“You were recruited some time back by a pharmaceuticals research
lab in the United States, and from there you set up this business. You know exactly what’s going on, and you’re planning to benefit handsomely from it.”

“What do you want?”

Charles Mallory stood and motioned for them to go. He wanted to get away from people now, to see what Ivan Vogel would do when cornered. He was beginning to sense that Vogel was about to make a desperate move. That if they stayed at the table, Vogel would draw his weapon.

“Let’s go. I changed my mind about the sodas.”

They walked out into the street, Charlie steering Vogel by the arm. At the end of the block, they turned toward the river. It was breezy and cooler beside the water, and the air smelled of baking bread. They followed the concrete path above the bank to an empty wooden bench, where he nodded for Vogel to sit.

Charlie remained standing. He looked up and down the river, thinking for a moment about his father, holding back an anger roiling inside of him.

“Just pretend I’m a rival company,” he said. “Manufacturing a similar product. And say a small portion of our product was tampered with, holding up approval for distribution, and we suspect industrial espionage.”

“I would know nothing about it,” Vogel said, obviously confused.

“Maybe not. But we both know what’s going to happen in Africa. You do have a vulnerability, Vogel. I’m sure that’s occurred to you. You betrayed your country’s secrets to become involved with this thing. Not once, but twice. You have enemies who would like to see you go down. I suspect you see your side business as your ticket out of all that. Everyone has a dream. Right?”

“No. You have wrong information.”

Then Vogel made the mistake that Charlie had been waiting for. He lifted his right hand toward the inside of his jacket, and at the same time began to stand. Mallory lunged forward, grabbing his wrist as Vogel’s fingers prepared to grip his gun. He squeezed Vogel’s hand and bent it back. The gun fell to the bench. Vogel tried to resist. Charlie snapped his fingers with his right hand, breaking the smallest one at the joint.

Vogel screamed, a surprisingly high-pitched sound, and doubled over in pain. Fell to his knees.

“Sorry,” Charles Mallory said, catching his breath. “Please, stand up.” He retrieved the handgun, a German-made .22-caliber Arminius revolver. A decades-old gun, probably, in near-mint condition. “The good news is you’re going to live, Ivan, as long as you tell me what I want to know. Just sit there on the bench. I’m in something of a hurry.”

Vogel sat on one end of the bench, facing the river, whimpering. Mallory sat on the other end.

He kept the handgun out of sight, but ready.

“I need to know exactly what’s going to happen. Specifics.” Vogel started to speak, his eyes full of pain and protest, his arms shaking. But before he could say a word, Mallory stopped him. “You couldn’t have a business on the side if you didn’t know all the details, Ivan. What you’re doing now is what you did in Maryland and what you did in Russia: producing genetically altered viral microbes, processing them into aerosol delivery systems. I know all that. I just need to know the time frame.”

“How did you find me? I was told I was protected.”

“You weren’t. You were left very vulnerable. Answer my questions: Who is your boss? Who places the orders?”

“Mr. Priest,” he said, wincing in pain. “In Mancala.”

“Where in Mancala?”

“Mungaza.”

“Okay. Where is it going and what’s the time frame?”

“After it leaves here, it goes to an airfield. It’s flown to Africa.”

“Mungaza?”

“Nearby. Yes. A private airfield.”

“What’s the timetable?”

“It’s already there.”

“
All
of it?” He had a quick, sinking feeling.

“Yes,” Vogel said.

“What’s the time frame?”

“I don’t know. That isn’t my business.”

Mallory shoved the gun in his waisteband, stood, and grabbed Vogel’s left hand, applying pressure until he broke his other pinky
finger at the joint. Vogel screamed, and then he buckled forward and flailed in the grass. Mallory waited for him to sit up again.

“I really don’t enjoy doing this,” Charlie said. “But just to let you know what’s going to happen: I’m going to go through your ten fingers and break them one by one until you answer. Okay? I don’t want to do that. And it wouldn’t be particularly strategic on your part if you let me. But that’s where we are.”

He crouched down and began to bend back the ring finger on Vogel’s right hand.

“Three days from now,” Vogel said. “It’s what I’m told. But I’m not involved in that end of it.”

Three days
.

“Three days from now or three
nights
from now?”

“Nights.”

October 5.

Charlie stood. “What else do you know?”

“That it’s too late to do anything. It’s already in place.”

“The viral properties have all been sent?”

He nodded.

“How?”

When Vogel hesitated, Charlie repeated his question.

“Four-hundred-gallon tanks that attach to the planes.”

“Delivered when?”

“Five days ago.”

“Okay. Good. And what’s the target?”

“I don’t know that.”

“Yes, you do.”

Charles Mallory reached for the ring finger on his right hand. Vogel pulled away, spitting on Mallory’s hand.

“The country,” he said. “That’s what I’ve heard.”

The country
.

“What do you mean?”

“The whole country.”

“The nation of Mancala.”

“Yes.”

Eight point something million people, in other words
.

“How does it feel being involved in something like that, Ivan?”

“I’m not involved. I’m an independent contractor. A cog in a wheel. I don’t know anything. I hear things, just like you do.”

Charles Mallory nodded. “I need to get a plasmid Destabilization Propellant Gun in a hurry. If you can help me do that, I’ll walk away and let you live. Okay?”

Vogel blinked rapidly.

“Will you tell me where I can get one?”

“Yes.”

He did. Charlie surveyed the river path. No one was in sight. “Ivan?” Vogel looked up at him, his face wilting with pain. Charlie shot him in the lower right leg. That would put Ivan Vogel in a hospital, anyway. Make him easy to find. He didn’t want to risk him escaping again.

Walking away, Charlie made another call on his cell phone, pressing “144,” the number for emergency ambulance service. Then he tossed the phone into a trash can. Seven minutes later, paramedics discovered Ivan Vogel lying on the pavement beside the bench, moaning in a high voice, bleeding profusely from a wound to his right leg.

In his communications center at Building 67, the Administrator watched the six-foot high-definition monitor screens as the feed replayed from Sector R17-652. Basel, Switzerland. The room housed a cluster of quantum-encrypted supercomputers, developed by Ott and Hebron, and a private Internet network known as F-2, which monitored the forty-three individuals he had flagged as Level A “concerns”—tracking their activities through telephone and e-mail communications, credit card transactions, and satellite imaging surveillance.

“Intersection,” he said to himself. He enlarged the high-definition images on the bank of monitors—images relayed from satellites using parabolic lenses with facial recognition software. They had him. He further enlarged and focused the picture, and then “cleaned” it, erasing the lighting effects and moving the head into a known view. The three-dimensional face recognition algorithms then measured the geometry of the facial features and motion patterns to make certain.

The Administrator smiled to himself. They had allowed Vogel to survive for the same reason they had allowed Jon Mallory to survive: as bait. Hoping that eventually Charles Mallory would find him and step into a surveillance grid.

Now they had to act quickly, so that Mallory did not circumvent surveillance again. He would assign Mehmet Hassan to track him. He knew that for Charles Mallory, Mehmet Hassan would have a special motive. A personal one. Mallory was the man who had killed his little cousin, Ahmed, two weeks earlier in Nice.

But first, he had another assignment. One that Charles Mallory couldn’t have suspected.

CHARLIE WALKED NORTH SEVERAL
blocks under the awnings into Brandgasse, the city’s small red-light district. He ducked into a place called Club Elegance and waited for his eyes to adjust. Men were seated along the bar, women on two low sofas against the walls. Before he could see them clearly, one of the women asked if he wanted a date.

“Actually, I need an escort,” he said.

“How long?”

“Twenty, thirty minutes?” He showed her his money and she moved closer to him. She smelled of flowery perfume. “Walk with me to the cab stand two blocks down the street.” He handed her two twenty-franc notes.

They hurried arm in arm to the cab stand and climbed in back. “Train station,” Mallory said. The taxi took them through a winding maze of narrow streets, past gingerbread-style houses and tiny eateries, offbeat boutiques, galleries. Back toward the neighborhood where he’d had lunch. In the distance he heard sirens.

As they rounded a turn, Charlie looked up. Gus Hebron’s business was there: satellite imaging, telephone intercepts, transmitted somewhere else. It was all happening in the sky. That was how they operated. Intercept technology merged with a terrorism network. A potent hybrid.

If the surveillance was primarily satellite, it meant that he had a good head start on the ground, maybe an hour or two, probably more if he was smart enough to stay out of their grids. He knew they would send someone after him immediately, though, and suspected it might be
Il Macellaio
. Knew also that they would continue to monitor him by satellite, so he needed to stay indoors as much as possible. At the train station, he walked with his arm around the woman through a set of side street doors. “Okay,” he said, slipping another twenty-franc bill into her hand. He led her to a crowd near a sandwich shop. “Can
you wait a little while? Have some lunch and then get a cab back across the river?”