Viral (42 page)

Then his elbows came into something softer. Some kind of sludge covered the bottom of the pipe. He crawled through it, using his elbows to pivot himself forward, but he was getting less traction now. The pipe tilted slightly upward, making the crawl more difficult. His elbows slipped. He stopped. Tried again. Couldn’t move. He had come to an impasse. Couldn’t go forward any more. He was going to have to quit.

Charles Mallory closed his eyes. He breathed the damp, foul-smelling air, his thoughts shuffling—Franklin’s deception, his brother’s trust, the millions of people who might die tonight.

Improvise
. He gathered his strength and tried something different, jamming his hands against the sides of the pipe and using them to thrust his body forward. It got him another several inches. Again: the sides of the pipe were less slippery than the bottom. He went a third time, using his hands and legs to lever his body forward. Two inches, four inches. He kept it going for several minutes. Then his arms began to tire, and he collapsed, realizing he wasn’t going to make it much farther. He lay belly down in the sludge for a moment, breathing in and out heavily. Sweating in the dampness. He felt the pipe again through the sludge and tried to crawl. Jerked his elbows forward. One, and the other, his feet pushing off the sides of the pipe, his body advancing in tiny increments again, two or three inches each time. Resting, moving forward, resting. And then suddenly he felt air against his face and stopped. There was no more tunnel. His
hands felt a wall. He took a deep breath and looked up. Saw dim, abstract shapes above him. Something distinct from the darkness. A grate.

JON MALLORY HEARD
the footsteps again. Deliberate, dull. Shoe soles on stone. And a rumbling distant sound of an engine. He was less groggy now but could summon no clear recollection of what had happened, just confused images. Explosions. Men rushing in. A bright light. Someone pushing him to the floor.

Help!

He tried to scream the word again. But he couldn’t. He tried to speak, to just say the word. And then to say his name. But he couldn’t do that, either. His brain still wasn’t working right. He was unable to say anything. Unable to make a sound.

THE GRATE WAS
iron, circular, with a series of narrow slats where the water drained. Charles Mallory saw the dim outlines of other pipes above it, which fed water from the roof to the drain. He pushed his fingers up into the grate, felt it give, and let go. That was good. But he couldn’t get enough traction with his feet in the pipe to push it up and climb to the surface. He took a deep breath. Imagined going all the way back through the pipe, crawling a hundred and fifty feet backwards down to the entrance. Decided he didn’t like that option.

He lay in the pipe, gathering strength, listening. Thinking about Hassan. What they had done to Paul. Heard a distant rustling again, the feet of small animals on stone. Then nothing. But there were human
smells
here. He reached up and pushed again, felt the grate give. Then he jammed his fingers onto the edge of the opening and breathed in and out several times. Summoned all of his strength to pull himself up again. He slammed his elbow and shoulder into the grate so that it spun up from the casement, clattering onto the stone, the sound echoing for several seconds. He used both hands, then, to pull himself through, planting an elbow and lifting himself the rest of the way in. Tossing the flashlight ahead of him with his right hand.

He was in a narrow corridor, maybe three times the width of the pipe. It was dark, and he breathed the rank smell of standing water and urine, and something worse. He felt along the cold wall and came into a larger corridor. Pitch dark. He flicked on the flashlight
and moved it left and right, his eyes smarting from the sudden brightness. He was in a corridor that separated a procession of prison cells. Two levels, forty-five-square-foot cells, he guessed. Rusted iron bars, most of the doors ajar. The corridor continued in front of him for about sixty yards.

He heard human sounds, then, and froze. What seemed to be breathing. And moaning. From several sources, it seemed. More remotely: footsteps. Then the sounds stopped and he wondered if he had really heard anything.

CHARLES MALLORY WALKED SLOWLY
to the end of the corridor, shining his light into the cells on either side as he went. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Nearly identical cells, all of them empty. Based on the shape of the complex, he figured that there were two main corridors, linked by rung passages on each end, one to the east, the other to the west. He was in one of the main corridors, walking south toward the rear of the prison, he guessed.

He heard a sharp sound. Stopped. Breathed a sweet, sickly odor. A faint but steady hissing became louder as he stepped forward. Charlie felt a cobweb on his face, broke it with his left forearm. He clicked the light on. Pointed it into the cell he was standing in front of, to his left, and saw a giant cluster of flies. He let the light go off and then pressed it on again. The flies were crawling over a decomposing human shape in a corner. He searched the rest of the cell and saw two others, both covered with flies. He pulled against the bars of the door. Locked.

He moved on, examined the next cell, and the next. Both empty. Kept walking. He heard it again. The buzzing of flies. He trained the light into the cell on his right. A pile of naked bodies, six or seven of them, some dead for days, others longer. He saw the patches of black discoloration on the limbs, the missing flesh on the faces, and wondered for a moment if one of them could be his brother.
No
. Charlie turned away and walked on. At the end of the corridor he heard a faint, intermittent scratching sound, like tiny footsteps on stone. He swung his light on the cell doors, stopping at the only one that was closed. Inside, shapes scurried over the floor, casting long shadows across the walls. Rats. In the center of the cell lay the remains of a boy, maybe six or seven, his arms, face, and genitals partly eaten away. Mallory angled the flashlight beam lower, saw that something seemed to be moving inside the boy—his belly appeared to contract and then rise as if he were still breathing. Charlie turned the light off
and blinked at the darkness, knowing what it was: one of the rats had gotten inside the boy and was gnawing its way out. He walked deeper into the darkness, his footsteps softly crunching on the stone. The air turned cooler and he heard a new sort of scuffling. Mallory stopped, listening. He touched the rough stone wall, turned left, into a cooler darkness: the rung passageway linking the main corridors. He was in the rear of the prison now, he sensed.

As soon as he made the turn, his light, sweeping the stone surfaces, caught something that stopped him: to the left was a stone pit filled with human bodies. Charlie looked quickly: Some of them were skeletons, others recent deaths. Dozens, it seemed. He switched off the light and tried to walk past the pit. But he couldn’t. Couldn’t go more than three steps. What he had seen seemed an illusion.
It had to have been
. So he swung back and clicked the light on. Saw it again, the same thing, its after-image burning inside his eyelids when the light went out, the odor clinging to his nostrils. All the bodies in the pit had been decapitated.

He continued to shuffle through the rung tunnel, passing another open pit, also to his left, wondering what the proprietors of this prison could have been thinking. Was this some sort of gruesome training facility for the Hassan network? This time he didn’t linger. He came to the other corridor. Turned left. At the end of this one was a faint dusting of light from what seemed to be a series of openings, but the rest of the corridor was in darkness.

“Jon,” he said, speaking softly. “Can you hear me?”

His own voice echoed back at him. Then silence.

He shined the light along the upper level. All of the cell doors there seemed to be open. Then along the lower level. Several times he heard the hiss of flies as he moved past cells.
Come on, Jon. Be alive, damn it
. Charlie held his breath, pointed the light into the cell on his left. This image, too, stuck in his mind after the darkness returned, and he stood there for several moments looking at it. Body parts from maybe thirty or forty people, scattered across a small rectangle of stone floor: expressions of horror, frozen on the faces of dozens of decapitated heads.

He trained his light up the corridor, checking the doors of each cell for any that were closed. Hearing it again: a nasal breathing sound.

A sudden blaze of lights blinded him. Charlie froze. Coming at
him from the front of the prison was a throaty roar of engines, a pair of headlights. Louder, brighter. He turned and hurried back through the corridor the way he had come, toward the connecting tunnel. But it was too late. A burst of gunfire shattered the stone ahead of him, and another ricocheted off the prison cell bars. Then another. Charlie sprinted toward darkness as the vehicle roared closer, diving right out of the corridor and crouching down next to the first pit, catching his breath.

Where were the diversions? Nadra and Wells? Had something gone wrong?

He listened, breathing heavily. Making a decision. The lights of the vehicle were jerking wildly, coming closer. Men shouted in Arabic. Then, a roaring of another engine from the other corridor, a pair of lights on stone. Armed guards converging on the rear of the prison.

Charlie slid himself into the pit, burrowing his legs into the pile of bodies, holding them above his head with his elbows. Breathing the putrid smell of decay, as leaking fluids seeped down his arms. Concentrating so that he wouldn’t vomit, Charlie drew the gun from his sweatshirt and waited as the vehicle brakes pumped at the end of the corridor. He heard it skid around the corner and turn, saw its lights bouncing on the stone. It stopped just past the pit. Charlie listened to the men breathing, speaking urgently in Arabic, words he couldn’t quite make out. One of them carried a light and turned its beam up and down the tunnel. The light moved across the pit, shining for a second into Charlie’s eyes. He waited, trying not to breath. Got a fix on the men as they turned away. As soon as the vehicle began to move again, he lifted his gun, aimed carefully through the corpses and shot the driver in the back of the head. The vehicle slammed into the wall and crashed onto its side. The other man jumped and shouted, having no idea where the shot had come from. He began to fire his pistol wildly without seeing the prey. Three, four times. The noise was deafening, bullets ricocheting off the walls and ceiling, thundering and echoing through the prison corridors. The man shouted at him in Arabic, to come out and show himself. Mallory took careful aim as the man turned in circles, and he hit him with a clean shot in the chest.

More voices. Another cart was coming from the west corridor.
Charlie crouched and waited. As soon as it slowed to enter the tunnel, he fired. One, two, three. Two down. The second golf cart slammed against the stone wall, one of its headlights shattering. Then there was nothing. Just silence and echoes.

Four guards head into the rear of the prison. None of them returns. That should spook them a little bit
.

But who were they? Charlie checked their clothes, removed one of their handguns. All four carried keys. ID badges. Money. He took all of it, then got behind the wheel of the first golf cart and drove back into the east corridor, the direction he had been walking.

He stopped a third of the way up and killed the engine. Listened. He heard what sounded like breathing again and got out to walk, his senses sharpening with each step.

“Jon. Can you hear me?” He stopped. Heard breathing ahead to his right. His own and someone else’s, a nasal raspy sound. “Jon!” he called again.

That was when the building shook, as if it were being rocked by a powerful earthquake. Charlie instinctively crouched, gun raised. He felt the reverberations again, like an aftershock.
That was it
. Jason and Nadra at the gate.
The diversion
. He heard sounds from outside. Men screaming. Gunfire. A steady report of automatic machine gun fire. Bullets slamming stone.

Keep going. Keep moving
.

He came back to where he had been: the cell with the decapitated heads. He didn’t look this time, instead turned to his right. Another closed cell door. He clicked on the flashlight and scanned the stone floor. Found a man. Sitting against the back cell wall. Torn clothes. A dirty face. But breathing. Looking back at him, probably only seeing the light. It was a face he hadn’t seen for years.

“Jonny,” he whispered, turning the light to the side.

Jon Mallory watched, half-sitting, half-lying on the concrete.

Charlie tried the keys. The first didn’t fit. The second didn’t fit. He tried a third and felt it slide in. He twisted to his right. The lock turned, its gears opening the door.

“Come on, Jonny!” he said. He helped lift up his brother and walked him out into the corridor. Felt Jon holding him. “Let’s get out of here.”

THEN HE HEARD
the second explosion. The floor rumbled, and his legs buckled. Then another. Distant shouts in Arabic. More gunfire.

Charlie tried to find his brother’s eyes in the dark. “Are you all right, Jonny? Can you hear me?”

“Where are we?” Jon said.

“We’re in a prison in Mancala. But we’re getting out of here. Can you walk?”

“I think.”

“Try.”

“I am.”

Charlie retrieved one of the guards’ 9mm pistols from his waistband. “Here,” he said. “Take this. It’s ready to fire. Just in case.” He pressed the gun into his brother’s right hand, sensing that Jon had probably never held a gun before. Feeling a weight of guilt as he let go. What really mattered now was getting Jon out of here alive. Even if he didn’t make it himself. “All right?”

“All right.” Jon shuffled behind him toward the faint light at the front of the prison building, a hand on Charlie’s back.

“Keep going, Jonny. We’re getting you out of here, okay?”

Jon grunted affirmatively. At the end of the corridor, light showed through narrow slats in a tall iron gate. Daylight.
The light he had seen from the other end
. Charlie pushed through it, and they came into an oval-shaped entry chamber with another light source: a two-foot-wide circular hole in the ceiling, a halo of afternoon sky. He looked at his brother, saw his expressionless face, the eyes watching him like the eyes of an animal.