Last line: “What is Covenant?”
CHARLIE OPENED HIS eyes and focused on the patterns of plaster on the ceiling. What is Covenant? The line that made the least sense to him. He sat up and read again through the pages that Franklin had provided. The most recent memorandum was dated four days before his father died. The memo shutting down the Lifeboat Inquiry: “In summary, this office deems that the investigation is too speculative and open-ended to be of further value. Project Lifeboat itself has been discontinued, and the questions raised by this inquiry are no longer pertinent. Furthermore, concerns about the operation have been addressed internally independent of this inquiry. An evaluation of the Lifeboat Inquiry to date shows duplication of efforts and wasteful use of government expenses and manpower. Therefore, recommend that this inquiry be discontinued immediately.”
Charlie looked out at the shapes of the mountains and the moonlit mist that hung in the trees and thought about his father. Hurling the baseball back and forth in the shadows of their yard. His father crouching, playing catcher to him. “Throw me the perfect pitch,” he used to say when Charlie was still in grade school. He had wanted him to become a pitcher, and Charlie had done that. He had become a good one in high school, one of the best in the state. Charlie liked the exactitude of throwing fast balls. There was a trick to that, a kind of pitch that batters couldn’t fathom; that came at them so fast, so perfectly, that they couldn’t even swing at it. His father had showed him that.
He pictured Stephen Mallory—tall, gray-haired and gray-bearded, determined, but with a surprising humility in his blue eyes. The moral compass in Charlie’s life for years. A good man. Disciplined. Sharp. But, somehow, in the end, his father had become a loser. In those final months, someone had thrown the fast ball past him, and he hadn’t seen it coming. Something about his work had put him at odds with the government. Something he couldn’t overcome. Charles Mallory needed to know what that was.
TWENTY-FIVE
ALL NIGHT IT RAINED. Charlie woke and listened to the rainwater cascading in the mountain trees, thinking about the succession of events that had brought him to this room. About his father and about Anna Vostrak.
The first time he had seen her, he had been on a mountain train in the village of Villars, Switzerland. She had contacted him at his hotel and asked to meet. An hour later, she was sitting across from him at the front of a train car, saying his name as if she knew him.
A dark-haired woman in a blue wool coat and designer jeans, slim, late thirties. Striking dark eyes, faintly Asian features. She spoke his name with a French accent as she turned a page in her book, pretending to be reading.
“How did you find me?” Charlie asked. He was there on vacation, after all, and not as Charles Mallory.
“I think we have a mutual friend.”
“I doubt it.” He watched her slender wrist as she slid her forefinger along a page of the book. “My friends are my friends because they respect my privacy.”
“I can’t explain everything right now,” she said. “This has to do with your father. He had found something. Something people didn’t want him to know. I can give you some names, and information. Some of what your father knew.”
At first, Charlie had just watched her and listened. He had seen all manner of deception in his life. One of the most common—and, to him, least persuasive—was the earnest and attractive stranger working a con. The more time he spent with this woman, though, the more he saw something that was very difficult to fake: the weight of real hurt and loss, a hurt that had been transformed into sober urgency. She looked at him with sincere, unhesitant eyes, and he began to trust her and, to like her.
“But what do you expect me to do with it? Do you want to hire me for something?” he said.
“No. I don’t have the resources for that. I just thought you would want to know. Then you can decide.”
She turned a page. He listened to the clack-clack rhythm of the train as they came to a vista of chalets, lifts, and snow-topped mountains. The first stop was a small alpine-style restaurant with plastic tables and chairs set up on a terrace. Behind it, hiking trails tunneled up into the woods. This was where he had planned to have lunch, alone.
He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the sunlight on his face.
“Join me for lunch?”
“All right.”
They drank mineral water and ordered délice aux champignons—mushroom sandwiches—and she told him sketchy details about her past. That she was a molecular biologist whose lab had done contract work for the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
“I worked for the military research wing. They had a number of in-house projects, as you probably know,” she said, “complemented by a contract liaison program with universities and research institutes. Over the course of about two years, I worked on three related projects. One involved a process known as reverse genetics. The objective was to develop a vaccine for a particularly virulent form of flu. The scientist heading up the project was a Russian who had done similar work in the Soviet Union. He was later recruited to work for a private research lab. Something about that arrangement didn’t seem right. It came to bother me more and more.”
She set down her fork and looked at Charlie. The clarity in her face held him. Her gaze was direct but nuanced, expressing subtleties beyond what she was saying.
“This scientist’s name was Ivan Vogel,” she said. “A very duplicitous man. He had helped to develop germ warfare projects for the Soviet regime, years earlier. He knew that his knowledge could be very valuable.”
Charles Mallory watched her, realizing who the “mutual friend” was. She had been one of his father’s sources.
“The purpose of our project was to create a vaccine for a particularly virulent flu—developing mutated strains and recombinant vaccines.”
“For what end?”
“I don’t know. We weren’t told a lot about the larger objectives. Although the implication—the impression we had—was that we were developing defensive capabilities as a response to a specific or potential threat somewhere in the world. Possibly in Iraq. Here are some of the details about what I was working on.”
She wiped her hands and gave him an envelope, which he had thought she was using as a bookmark. Inside were two pages of handwritten notes, the writing small and precise.
Charlie had thanked her when they finished lunch and told her that he would look into it. That was before he knew much. Before he had communicated with Paul Bahdru. Long before he had made the deal with Richard Franklin.
“I just wonder how you were able to find me,” he said as they drank coffees.
“It wasn’t easy.” She smiled for the first time, a sly, knowing look. “Your company is off the map. You don’t even have a website.”
“I like to pick and choose assignments. I have a small Rolodex.”
“Where are you based?”
“I don’t talk about that. It’s not where you’d expect. I’m interested in places that people don’t look at. What about you?”
“I have another life now,” she said, straightening her napkin. “I don’t talk about it, either.”
“Fair enough. So was our mutual acquaintance my father?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was very sorry to hear the news.”
FOUR WEEKS LATER, Charles Mallory had discovered the note from his father, and its mention of Ivan Vogel. The note had given new context to what Anna had told him, and he knew that he needed to go back to her. He felt the weight of an obligation he hadn’t imagined before.