Viral (3 page)

He knew other things about his brother, though. Things that wouldn’t change over time—that he was a brilliant, headstrong man who harbored obsessions, one of which was punctuality. During the seven weeks that they had been in contact, Charlie had never missed an appointment. He had never been a minute late. If he hadn’t called this morning, something was wrong.

Still dressed in his pajamas, Jon Mallory breathed the cool morning air through the screen window of his rented house in Northwest Washington. He stared at the notes on his computer screen—records of previous conversations; encrypted e-mails; enigmatic instructions, seemingly unconnected phrases—combing through them for a telltale clue, some nuance that he might have missed.

It was one of those deliciously mild September mornings in Washington. Sixty-one degrees, 5 mph winds, 54 percent humidity. A perfect day for biking on the towpath or wandering among the museums and monuments of the National Mall.

This wasn’t a morning that inspired him to be outside, though. Something had happened overnight, something still outside his frame of reference. The answers that he had expected this morning
were not going to arrive. Instead, he had been given a new problem, and it would take him several days, maybe longer, to figure it out.

“Just remember what I say,” Charlie had told him. “I’m going to meet a witness. After that, I’ll give you details that you need to report.… Don’t lose contact with me.”

“I won’t. I just wish we could talk in person,” Jon had said.

“We can’t. Not yet.… If I don’t contact you this way, I’ll contact you another way.”

A different conversation, weeks earlier:

“False fingerprints. That’s going to be part of the deception. You need to be a witness to something that hasn’t happened yet.…”

“How will I know?”

“I told you.”

“By paying attention.”

“Yes. Information will come to you.”

Jon Mallory heard the scuffles of rubber soles on the basketball court down the street, the ping of the ball against the rim, and he thought of the long summer afternoons of his childhood in the suburbs seven or eight miles north of here: playing Horse and Around the World at the junior high playground with his brother, aiming at a rusted basket with a torn metal net.
Visualize it: leaving your hand, arching perfectly, going in
. The absence of Charlie in his life over the past decade had sometimes felt to Jon like a death in the family. They had been best friends, always finding ways to amuse and entertain each other, particularly during the years of their mother’s illness. Charlie had been a mentor and role model to his younger brother, becoming a star baseball and football player who never acted like a star. But it had all changed as they grew older. For a while, Jon had found himself intimidated by Charlie. His single-minded intensity, his obsession with subjects that were alien to Jon—statistics, ciphers, weapons, military history—had made his brother less and less accessible, and impatient with those who didn’t share his interests. In his late teens, Charlie had grown inward—called away, it seemed, from sports to places that he wouldn’t talk about; eventually, he came to live in those places, in rooms that Jon Mallory could never find, let alone enter. Like their father, he had become a statistician and a military analyst, then gone on to intelligence work, a vocation he
couldn’t
discuss. And then, ten years ago, he had seemed to simply disappear.

It had been a great surprise, then, when Charlie contacted him seven weeks ago out of the blue, saying that he wanted Jon to help him “tell a story.” The story, it became clear, was all that interested his brother. He did not want to know the circumstances of Jon’s life, and he wouldn’t talk about his own. His purpose in re-establishing contact was this story; a story that appeared to be about Africa, he said, but really wasn’t; a story that had to be told a certain way, and quickly.

Jon Mallory earned his living these days as contributing editor for a newsmagazine called
The Weekly American
, writing profiles and news features. He contributed a story every other month, working mostly at home. He’d developed a loyal readership and won a few awards. He had good people instincts, was able to draw out his subjects and figure out what motivated them. But his own brother remained a mystery.

Charlie’s tips had led him to write about the people of two African nations: a family of subsistence farmers, who got by without electricity or running water; an AIDS widow raising seven children by herself in a drought-plagued mud-hut farming village; two health-care workers who traveled on rusted bicycles over tire-track roads, distributing anti-malarial herbs; and the residents of a town nicknamed Starvation because it no longer had a source of food or water.

They were stories that had been told before, in other locales, human stories about dignity in the face of complicated social and political problems; about scarcity and disease and well-intentioned but short-sighted relief efforts.

What his brother had really steered him toward was something very different, though—a less visible human story, about large-scale aid and development projects in unlikely pockets of Africa. A story Jon hadn’t quite believed at first, which had drawn criticism and denials from two prominent American businessmen, both board members of the Gardner Foundation, one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations.

The rest is coming
. That was what Charlie had said. There was a source who knew “details.” Jon’s brother was going to meet with him and pass those details to him the next time they spoke.

That was supposed to have been this morning. Wednesday, September 16.

SANDRA OKU CUT HER
engine and stared numbly through the windshield of her truck at what lay on the north side of the road. Many of them were still breathing, making deep wheezing sounds in the bright, breezeless afternoon. An eerie, out-of-tune chorus. Soybean and cassava farmers. Field workers. Families. Children clinging to parents. Elderly men and women lying beside one another. Dozens of them. No, hundreds. On her long journey to the edge of the village, Dr. Oku had stopped frequently to tend to victims who lay in the fields and alongside the road. Most of their eyes were closed, but some watched as she neared and called to her in weak, raspy voices. “Help me, please.” All along the road, the same muted request: “Help me, please.” Too weak to sound urgent. Just a simple plea. It was no good, though, and Sandra Oku had finally stopped trying. She had stopped even looking at them because she knew there was nothing she could do.

So was this it?
she wondered again.
The “ill wind?”

Staring into the distance beyond the village huts and chicken pens, she noticed an occasional glimmer, which she began to recognize as sunlight reflecting off handlebars. A figure on a bicycle was riding toward her in the late-afternoon light. A boy.

“Miss Sandra, Miss Sandra!” the shirtless boy shouted as he reached the road, letting his bicycle go.

It was Marcus Bkobe, whose family lived alone, far off in the farm fields, and whose uncle was the village’s only minister. He must have recognized her truck.

“Help! Back there!” he said. “You have to help!”

“Yes, okay,” she said, mechanically now, watching his face, which was streaked with tears and sweat. A large wet spot had dried on the front of his shorts.
As if I could
, she thought.

“My father. He won’t wake up. My uncle—” The boy saw the bodies in the field across the road and his eyes widened, before going to
hers. “They can’t— They— They can’t make him get up, they can’t make him get up!”

“It’s okay,” she said, touching his head and turning him so he couldn’t see. She felt the moisture of his face on her belly.

“He told me to tell you.” He looked quickly at the field of bodies, then back at her. “It happened last night.”

“What did?”

“He heard it. My uncle. He heard the engines.”

“The engines.”

“Yes.”

Sandra Oku looked toward the sky, then at the gentle slopes of the western mountains where green forestland was being cleared by controlled fires. “What are you saying? What did your uncle mean?”

But the boy was too frightened, his eyes darting among the bodies, his face sweating. Instead of answering, he began to cry.

Dr. Oku reached into the back seat of her truck for a mask and the bottle of medicine. “Come on, let’s go see. Take this,” she said, giving him a pill. “Then I’m going to drive to the hospital and see what’s going on.”

The boy climbed in. She started the truck and shifted into gear. As they came to another group of farmer men crumpled beside the road, the boy, sitting on his knees to look, became hysterical. “No, no! They can’t! No, please, don’t! Help us!” he shouted, hitting his fists on the dashboard.

Sandra Oku drove faster along the two-lane road. Then slowed, seeing something in front of them. Accelerated, and slowed again. Ahead, what she had thought were optical illusions—late sunlight on the soil—were not tricks of the eye, after all. They were more people—farmers who had collapsed beside the road, trying to reach someone who could help. A winding ribbon of bodies.

“Shh,” she said, as the boy sobbed. “They’re just sleeping. Put your head down and don’t look. It’s going to be okay.”

But it wasn’t. This was like nothing she had ever seen. Too quick, too efficient, to outrun. Dr. Oku drove two-tenths of a kilometer farther and braked again, and she thought of the dream she had gone to sleep with the night before. Michael, the man she had planned to visit.
What will he think when he hears of this?

Five people—a family—lay across the road in front of them,
blocking the way. Two of the children were curled in fetal positions, another had been clinging to her mother, who was the only one still breathing. It was the Ndukas, a family of sorghum farmers who came to the clinic every few weeks for check-ups and antibiotics. She parked and stepped out of the truck. Looked back in the direction they had come, listening to the eerie sound of people struggling for breath, a sound that reminded her of crickets—a ragged chorus of death rasps across the sprawl of farm fields.

What
was
this? Superficially, at least, she knew: The symptoms resembled acute pulmonary edema—airborne viral particles had entered the victims’ bodies through their respiratory tracts, lodged in the lungs, and multiplied rapidly in the moist tissues there, filling their lungs with fluid until the victims literally drowned. The only frame of reference she had for it was the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, which spread mysteriously around the world for a year and a half, killing some forty million people, probably more, most of them within four or five days of catching the virus.

But this was different. These people had gone to bed with no symptoms. Could a much deadlier mutation have somehow occurred? It was possible, she knew, though hardly likely—most viruses were well-adapted to their environments and didn’t suddenly change milieus like this.

Sandra Oku walked back to her truck, where the boy was sleeping now, his head against the passenger door. She climbed into the driver’s seat and sat there, listening to the strange chorus of death rattles, stroking the boy’s moist head and looking toward the verdant western mountains, wondering,
How far? How far has this gone?

And then, watching the sky, she began to think something else, as if her thoughts had turned away from all of this to a different reality: her cousin, Paul Bahdru, and the message he had left for her. She was starting at last to recognize what he meant. Paul had come to visit her six days earlier, on a pleasant, rain-cooled afternoon. They had sat on the deck behind her clinic, talking, drinking rooibos tea. He was traveling under an assumed name, he said. Driving a twelve-year-old car that he had just bought in the capital. En route to the airport and a meeting in another city. His story sounded a little fantastic to her, although many things about her cousin had seemed that way, particularly since his wife’s murder. He was investigating a network of
business and investment interests in Sundiata, he said, in particular a well-funded, government-sanctioned medical research project. He was going to meet with a man called Frederick Collins. He didn’t say much about that, but as they drank their tea on the porch, watching giant black birds perched in the trees, he had told her other things. Things that he seemed to want her to remember—and which she did, now, with a sudden clarity: “There is a deadly force trying to push this way, and then north, like an ill wind. If it happens, it will happen very quickly. I hope that it doesn’t, but I will warn you when I know the details. If it does, you should be prepared to leave this village.”

“But how could I?” she had said and smiled at him, thinking of her patients and of Michael and their plans for after the rainy season. “These people depend on me.”

There was a reason he couldn’t tell her more just then. But he had said he would contact her again and send her a message. Three days ago, it had happened. She had received his instructions and the box of medicine. She stared now through the wiper-streaked windshield and stroked the boy’s head again.
Is this what Paul meant? How could he have known?

Dr. Oku closed her eyes. Death could be very peaceful, she realized, listening to the ragged rasp of human breaths, the sound of death on a cool late afternoon in West Africa.

SEVERAL MINUTES BEFORE TEN,
Jon Mallory dressed in jeans, a polo shirt and running shoes, pulled on his father’s old B-2 Air Force jacket and went out for a walk. He needed a change of scenery, and to make a mental list of people who might help him find his brother.

He improvised a circuitous route, heading up Yuma Street to Spring Valley, along the edge of American University, then to Wisconsin Avenue and the Tenleytown Metro Station, letting his thoughts wander as he tread through the quiet old residential neighborhoods. Remembering names, faces, pieces of conversations. People his brother had known or might have known.