“He has. Some. I think so.”
Franklin’s cell phone rang. He checked the number, stood. “Excuse me for a minute, Charlie,” he said. He walked back to the kitchen, talking in a low voice.
Charlie stepped into the den. He looked out the side windows and saw the fencing, the faraway camera towers. Underground sensors probably. Bare trees, rolling hills in the distance. On an antique tavern table was an old wooden globe. Charlie spun it round to Africa, looked at a remote region where he maintained an office that even Richard Franklin didn’t know about. On the desk was a manual typewriter, a cast-iron Underwood No. 5. Next to it, a stack of typing paper. Maybe fifty sheets. Charlie gazed at the yard and thought about his brother. And other autumn afternoons. He remembered hurling a baseball with his father in the back yard as dusk soaked the air. Trying to throw the perfect pitch. And other evenings with his brother. Football. Jon running patterns but missing catches, not able to keep his eye on the ball.
Then he thought of something less pleasant, something that was maybe his fault. He tucked a sheet of paper into the typewriter, twisted it through several notches. Sat at the desk and pecked out a single word. Seven letters. Looked at it. Pulled out the sheet. Folded it into eighths and slipped it into his shirt pocket.
“So, how’s your family been?” he asked, as Franklin returned.
“Fine. Big get-together planned for Thanksgiving this year. All of us up in Michigan. You?”
Charlie shrugged. He thought of Anna Vostrak. The sober clarity of her face, her dark eyes watching his. “Nothing, really.”
Franklin coughed. “Does this change the favor you asked me for last week? Your brother?”
“Should it?”
“No. Everything’s good. You can trust me, Charlie.”
Mallory breathed in deeply and exhaled. Then he nodded. “Okay.”
Forty-nine minutes later, Richard Franklin stopped in the parking garage at another suburban shopping complex, this one in Rockville, Maryland. He was driving the Jeep Liberty now; the Cadillac sat under the carport at the Virginia safe house. They had answered each other’s questions, but neither seemed fully satisfied with the results.
Charlie shook Franklin’s hand and opened the door, stepped out. Then, almost as an afterthought, he leaned in the passenger window. “One other thing, Richard. If something were to happen—to me or to anyone else in the next few days—see if you can isolate it. Okay? Don’t let the local pathologist keep it. Have it sent to an Army lab.”
Franklin squinted at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just listen to me, okay?”
“Okay. But why?”
“Just in case someone wants to ensure a pre-determined outcome. All right? Hypothetically.”
“And what would we be looking for?”
Charlie pulled the folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket and handed it to him. Franklin opened it, looked at the single word that Charles Mallory had typed out at the house in the Virginia countryside. Seven letters. “Ouabain.”
“What is it?”
Genuinely confused, Mallory thought.
“Probably nothing. But just make sure the pathologist is aware of it, okay? It’s just a hunch. I’m probably wrong. I hope I am.”
Charlie stepped back, closed the door, nodded, and walked away. He took the escalator down fifty-seven feet to the Metro train platform, walking among the tourists, not expecting to see Richard Franklin again for a long time. He was anxious to be away from Washington. Contingencies. He needed to eliminate the possible scenarios in order to get closer to the real one. That was all. Now he could move on to the next step. Although he needed to take care of one other matter first. He needed to send a message to his brother. To give him a new direction.
THIRTEEN
THE TRIP FROM WASHINGTON to Nairobi would take about nineteen hours, including a three-hour layover at Heathrow. The first available seat to London was on a flight that left in five hours, though, meaning it would be a full day before Jon Mallory set foot in Kenya.
Dressed in jeans, an untucked lime-green polo shirt and Nikes, he wandered the airport corridors, browsing shop windows, drinking coffee, searching for an Internet café. He carried only his laptop and a gym bag. He was tired but energized, a junkie for the buzz of airports, the brief intersections of so many diverse lives.
As he came to a bank of GTE pay phones, Jon checked his watch. 3:40. The only time Roger Church actually answered his phone was between three o’clock and 3:35 in the afternoons. Jon had just missed him. But he called and left a message: “Roger, it’s Jon. FYI: I’m traveling overseas tonight, to Kenya. Research for the third story. Something’s waiting for me there. I’ll be in touch.”
Minutes later, he found an open terminal at the Triangle Cyber Café. He swiped his credit card and logged in. There were seventeen e-mails in his inbox, and he scrolled through them quickly. The usual stuff—ads for weight loss, vitamin supplements, no-fee credit cards. One by one he deleted them. Just as his finger went to click “delete” on the one titled “Urgent Business Opportoonity,” though, Jon Mallory hesitated. That was strange. The sender was listed as: Mr. Gude 13914.
Jon opened the message and skimmed through it. The letter-writer wanted to entrust him with $11 million—he would receive 25 percent of the fortune if he allowed the sender to transfer the money to his bank in the States. The exchange would have to be carried out in “strick confidence.” This was an “opportoon time.”
He clicked the “Details” button to find the e-mail’s place of origin. Lagos, Nigeria. A typical Nigerian 419 scam—named for the fraud section of the Nigerian code. With their deliberate lapses in language and promise that the recipient would become an instant millionaire, 419 scams played into the gullibility of the American mind-set. Those who responded were typically asked for payments to cover “handling” and “transfer” charges, all the while being promised a stake in the fortune.
There were three unusual details in this letter, though: the number 13914 in the address; the words Dr. Marianna three times in the text—the name of the woman who had died, along with her husband, Daniel Ngage, in a plane crash; and Mr. David Gude, the letter-writer’s name.
It was odd: three pieces of Jon Mallory’s childhood, right there in an e-mail from Nigeria.
Dr. Marianna. 13914.
Reverse the order and that had been the address, in the Montgomery County suburbs of Washington, D.C., where Jon grew up: 13914 Marianna Drive.
David Gude, too, was a name from his childhood, He had been the grade-school mathematics instructor who had taught both Jon and his brother geometry—a subject Charlie had always aced. Jon had come home with B’s.
He read through the note again, more carefully, and then noticed something else. At the very bottom, below the name of the “executor,” in a smaller type, was a series of letters: htunoilerctt.
Twelve letters that didn’t make any sense, forward or backward. He tried breaking them apart, scrambling the order to make words.
Hut. Coil. Tern. With a “t” left over. No.
Jon let the letters go and read the note again, recognizing as he did that this could not be a coincidence. No, there had to be a message here. One piece might have been coincidence, but not three. These were names and numbers that he and his brother would recognize instantly—but no one else.
He printed out a copy of the e-mail, then deleted it from the mailbox.
In the air above the Atlantic, he sipped a Jim Beam and Diet Coke and ate a veggie sandwich. Time, distance, perspective. In the dark and quiet of the cabin, Jon began to recognize what his brother’s message from Wednesday might have been. He had just missed it, until now. Of course. In trying to reach Charlie, he had gone about things all wrong. Now he understood that. The information will come to you. That was what had happened. Information encoded in silence. By not calling at the appointed time, Charlie was telling him something. He hadn’t called because their phone calls were being monitored; someone was on to him in ways he hadn’t suspected before. Something had gone wrong, and they needed to communicate now in different, less detectable ways. Which meant what? He could guess: that the people who were threatened by Jon Mallory’s stories had sophisticated technology and surveillance capabilities; that they were engaged in something with very high stakes; and that somewhere in his stories he had touched on something they didn’t want known.