“No. You have wrong information.”
Then Vogel made the mistake that Charlie had been waiting for. He lifted his right hand toward the inside of his jacket, and at the same time began to stand. Mallory lunged forward, grabbing his wrist as Vogel’s fingers prepared to grip his gun. He squeezed Vogel’s hand and bent it back. The gun fell to the bench. Vogel tried to resist. Charlie snapped his fingers with his right hand, breaking the smallest one at the joint.
Vogel screamed, a surprisingly high-pitched sound, and doubled over in pain. Fell to his knees.
“Sorry,” Charles Mallory said, catching his breath. “Please, stand up.” He retrieved the handgun, a German-made .22-caliber Arminius revolver. A decades-old gun, probably, in near-mint condition. “The good news is you’re going to live, Ivan, as long as you tell me what I want to know. Just sit there on the bench. I’m in something of a hurry.”
Vogel sat on one end of the bench, facing the river, whimpering. Mallory sat on the other end.
He kept the handgun out of sight, but ready.
“I need to know exactly what’s going to happen. Specifics.” Vogel started to speak, his eyes full of pain and protest, his arms shaking. But before he could say a word, Mallory stopped him. “You couldn’t have a business on the side if you didn’t know all the details, Ivan. What you’re doing now is what you did in Maryland and what you did in Russia: producing genetically altered viral microbes, processing them into aerosol delivery systems. I know all that. I just need to know the time frame.”
“How did you find me? I was told I was protected.”
“You weren’t. You were left very vulnerable. Answer my questions: Who is your boss? Who places the orders?”
“Mr. Priest,” he said, wincing in pain. “In Mancala.”
“Where in Mancala?”
“Mungaza.”
“Okay. Where is it going and what’s the time frame?”
“After it leaves here, it goes to an airfield. It’s flown to Africa.”
“Mungaza?”
“Nearby. Yes. A private airfield.”
“What’s the timetable?”
“It’s already there.”
“All of it?” He had a quick, sinking feeling.
“Yes,” Vogel said.
“What’s the time frame?”
“I don’t know. That isn’t my business.”
Mallory shoved the gun in his waisteband, stood, and grabbed Vogel’s left hand, applying pressure until he broke his other pinky finger at the joint. Vogel screamed, and then he buckled forward and flailed in the grass. Mallory waited for him to sit up again.
“I really don’t enjoy doing this,” Charlie said. “But just to let you know what’s going to happen: I’m going to go through your ten fingers and break them one by one until you answer. Okay? I don’t want to do that. And it wouldn’t be particularly strategic on your part if you let me. But that’s where we are.”
He crouched down and began to bend back the ring finger on Vogel’s right hand.
“Three days from now,” Vogel said. “It’s what I’m told. But I’m not involved in that end of it.”
Three days.
“Three days from now or three nights from now?”
“Nights.”
October 5.
Charlie stood. “What else do you know?”
“That it’s too late to do anything. It’s already in place.”
“The viral properties have all been sent?”
He nodded.
“How?”
When Vogel hesitated, Charlie repeated his question.
“Four-hundred-gallon tanks that attach to the planes.”
“Delivered when?”
“Five days ago.”
“Okay. Good. And what’s the target?”
“I don’t know that.”
“Yes, you do.”
Charles Mallory reached for the ring finger on his right hand. Vogel pulled away, spitting on Mallory’s hand.
“The country,” he said. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
The country.
“What do you mean?”
“The whole country.”
“The nation of Mancala.”
“Yes.”
Eight point something million people, in other words.
“How does it feel being involved in something like that, Ivan?”
“I’m not involved. I’m an independent contractor. A cog in a wheel. I don’t know anything. I hear things, just like you do.”
Charles Mallory nodded. “I need to get a plasmid Destabilization Propellant Gun in a hurry. If you can help me do that, I’ll walk away and let you live. Okay?”
Vogel blinked rapidly.
“Will you tell me where I can get one?”
“Yes.”
He did. Charlie surveyed the river path. No one was in sight. “Ivan?” Vogel looked up at him, his face wilting with pain. Charlie shot him in the lower right leg. That would put Ivan Vogel in a hospital, anyway. Make him easy to find. He didn’t want to risk him escaping again.
Walking away, Charlie made another call on his cell phone, pressing “144,” the number for emergency ambulance service. Then he tossed the phone into a trash can. Seven minutes later, paramedics discovered Ivan Vogel lying on the pavement beside the bench, moaning in a high voice, bleeding profusely from a wound to his right leg.
In his communications center at Building 67, the Administrator watched the six-foot high-definition monitor screens as the feed replayed from Sector R17-652. Basel, Switzerland. The room housed a cluster of quantum-encrypted supercomputers, developed by Ott and Hebron, and a private Internet network known as F-2, which monitored the forty-three individuals he had flagged as Level A “concerns”—tracking their activities through telephone and e-mail communications, credit card transactions, and satellite imaging surveillance.
“Intersection,” he said to himself. He enlarged the high-definition images on the bank of monitors—images relayed from satellites using parabolic lenses with facial recognition software. They had him. He further enlarged and focused the picture, and then “cleaned” it, erasing the lighting effects and moving the head into a known view. The three-dimensional face recognition algorithms then measured the geometry of the facial features and motion patterns to make certain.
The Administrator smiled to himself. They had allowed Vogel to survive for the same reason they had allowed Jon Mallory to survive: as bait. Hoping that eventually Charles Mallory would find him and step into a surveillance grid.
Now they had to act quickly, so that Mallory did not circumvent surveillance again. He would assign Mehmet Hassan to track him. He knew that for Charles Mallory, Mehmet Hassan would have a special motive. A personal one. Mallory was the man who had killed his little cousin, Ahmed, two weeks earlier in Nice.
But first, he had another assignment. One that Charles Mallory couldn’t have suspected.
FORTY
CHARLIE WALKED NORTH SEVERAL blocks under the awnings into Brandgasse, the city’s small red-light district. He ducked into a place called Club Elegance and waited for his eyes to adjust. Men were seated along the bar, women on two low sofas against the walls. Before he could see them clearly, one of the women asked if he wanted a date.
“Actually, I need an escort,” he said.
“How long?”
“Twenty, thirty minutes?” He showed her his money and she moved closer to him. She smelled of flowery perfume. “Walk with me to the cab stand two blocks down the street.” He handed her two twenty-franc notes.