He rode the Red Line Metro train to Union Station. There he bought a ticket on the first Amtrak train to Richmond, Virginia. He was feeling better as the train picked up speed, rolling through the suburbs, away from D.C. Past housing projects, empty lots, graffiti-covered walls, abandoned buildings. From Richmond, he took a Greyhound bus south, to Charlotte, North Carolina, paying for his ticket with cash and finding a seat alone in the back. He used the time to think, and to study the files that Franklin had left for him.
The memorandums didn’t tell him much he didn’t know, just added a few details. One was a memo from his father to Intelligence Director Dale McCormack asking for additional resources to monitor the scientists working on Project Lifeboat. “This is a highly sensitive, and potentially dangerous, study without sufficient safeguards,” his father had written. The memo cited “a network of civilian research labs that have been permitted to explore bio-weapons technologies as a response to perceived threats from programs in other countries, including Russia, Iraq, and North Korea. Sources interviewed by this office indicate that some of this work is clearly in violation of the chemical weapons treaty of 1972.” The international treaty banning offensive biological weapons research. A treaty flagrantly violated for years by the Soviet Union.
Names were blacked out, including the research labs and the scientist who had headed up Project Lifeboat. But Charles Mallory already knew most of that information. Knew that Ivan Vogel, a former Soviet bio-weapons scientist with Biopreparat, had been the lead researcher. Other details had been redacted, too. The name of the pharmaceuticals company his father had identified, a firm known as VaxEze. All of the dates and locations.
The government had called this bio-weapons program Project Lifeboat because it was designed to create emergency responses in the event of a worst-case disaster—if the “superplague” that had been developed in Russia, and had been pursued in Iraq and elsewhere, were ever successfully implemented. Among other things, the program sought to develop defenses against a potentially vaccine-resistant, weaponized strain of flu. Some of the viral properties used for research came from the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, and some of the work was carried out there. But more than half of the research had been outsourced, to university and private labs.
Project Lifeboat was a response to reports that the huge, illegal Soviet bio-weapons program—which at one time employed thirty thousand scientists at eighteen facilities—had not in fact been shut down with the fall of the Soviet Union but continued in private military labs throughout Russia. It was also a response to the fact that some of the Biopreparat scientists who had lost their jobs in the former Soviet Union had been hired as consultants by Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. In the post-9/11 environment, Project Lifeboat was allowed to thrive in secret. But by the end of the decade, concerns were mounting about oversight and safety.
Stephen Mallory had opened his internal inquiry after two anonymous sources told him of various “irregularities” in the project: that deadly viral properties had been illegally transported to research labs; that scientists had become involved who were not registered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; that researchers charged with using simulants were in fact working with actual biological agents; and that half a dozen of the scientists working for the government had been recruited away by research labs connected with the pharmaceuticals industry. To Charlie’s father, these irregularities amounted to a very real concern, not a hypothetical one. But the government had already shut down Project Lifeboat by this point, and the director of intelligence, Colonel Dale McCormack, did not trust Stephen Mallory’s sources or his motives. He did not want the Lifeboat Inquiry to become a media story.
Charlie closed his eyes and pictured his father’s reassuring, watery-blue gaze. Heard the steady clarity of his voice.
If someone were to hijack this research, he could use it to ‘adjust’ the demographics of the world. A result that we would eventually have to accept.… Expectations. Begin with that.
AT THE CHARLOTTE Airport Enterprise lot, a chatty white-haired man dressed in a red plaid wool jacket asked Michael Chambers about his visit as he walked him out to select a car. The leaves were beginning to change, and there was a chill in the air. It was a great time to visit North Carolina, the man told him. “Gorgeous in the mountains right now,” he said three or four times.
Michael Chambers told him that he was staying with family at nearby Lake Norman. He acted cordial but said little else.
“Lake Norman. Oh, you’ll like it there,” he said. “Fishing?”
Michael Chambers nodded his head, gave the man a polite smile.
In fact, Charles Mallory was driving two hours northwest from Charlotte, to the mountain resort of Asheville, where Peter Quinn had retired ten months ago, weeks before Stephen Mallory died.
There was no directory listing for Peter Quinn in the area, but Charlie had found a property in the nearby village of Black Mountain owned by “R. Steen.” Robin Steen was Peter Quinn’s wife. Quinn had been part of his father’s Lifeboat Inquiry, but he had quit several months into it. His father had been bothered by that. It had bothered him very much. Charles Mallory wanted to find out why.
HE CHECKED IN at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville as Michael Chambers and was given Room 441. He studied the reports that night and then conjured up the message that his father had left for him, which he had memorized down to the smallest detail.
One thing Charlie liked about getting older was the way it expanded his frame of reference. Details that wouldn’t have held much meaning years earlier did now simply because he knew so much more. Isolated, disconnected words and phrases suddenly became parts of a puzzle, each making the picture clearer.
His father had left behind a sheet of note paper in a safe deposit box that he had wanted Charlie to find, if anything happened. It was still there. But there was also a copy in Charles Mallory’s head. He had studied it and memorized it. Photographed it in his mind, without trying to understand it.
In the quiet of the hotel room, he closed his eyes and called it up, forming an image of the single-page message. Rough outlines of an investigation:
At the top of the page, “Vogel” had been circled. The research scientist who had initially headed up Project Lifeboat.
With an arrow pointing to “Isaak Priest.”
Then, “VaxEze contract supported by slush fund. Find out who supplies the slush fund.”
VaxEze. The pharmaceuticals firm that had hired away Ivan Vogel.
Below that, “Disaster Relief Plan (Back-up to P.Q.) Find out more about this. Doug Chase a liaison to someone else. ‘The Administrator?’ ”
P.Q.: Peter Quinn.
“Tom Trent’s ideas. Not sure. Need to follow up with him. Does Isaak Priest have a partner? Is Black Eagle somehow involved? Trent thinks so.
“AV—Geneva. She knows more than anyone else. But be careful for her safety.”
Anna.
“ ‘Game Changer.’ ‘The World Series begins in early October.’ Sports phrases that seem to be codes to the ultimate plan, assuming there is one.”
“Trials and diversions. ‘Contain the “World Series” within a single country.’ ‘The wheel of history.’ Expectations: Play on that.”