They hurried arm in arm to the cab stand and climbed in back. “Train station,” Mallory said. The taxi took them through a winding maze of narrow streets, past gingerbread-style houses and tiny eateries, offbeat boutiques, galleries. Back toward the neighborhood where he’d had lunch. In the distance he heard sirens.
As they rounded a turn, Charlie looked up. Gus Hebron’s business was there: satellite imaging, telephone intercepts, transmitted somewhere else. It was all happening in the sky. That was how they operated. Intercept technology merged with a terrorism network. A potent hybrid.
If the surveillance was primarily satellite, it meant that he had a good head start on the ground, maybe an hour or two, probably more if he was smart enough to stay out of their grids. He knew they would send someone after him immediately, though, and suspected it might be Il Macellaio. Knew also that they would continue to monitor him by satellite, so he needed to stay indoors as much as possible. At the train station, he walked with his arm around the woman through a set of side street doors. “Okay,” he said, slipping another twenty-franc bill into her hand. He led her to a crowd near a sandwich shop. “Can you wait a little while? Have some lunch and then get a cab back across the river?”
She shrugged, stuck the money inside her bra. Charlie handed her one more twenty-franc note. Finally, she nodded.
He watched the woman walk into the eatery, not looking back. Good. At the ticket counter, he purchased a one-way fare to Paris on the TGV, using Michael Chambers’ Visa card. Then he walked three windows down and bought a ticket to Zurich, using a credit card that belonged to Eric Dantz. Michael Chambers’ card booked him a reservation in Paris, as well, at a small hotel on Rue du Bac where he had stayed before. Then he left the credit cards and I.D. belonging to Chambers on the pavement beside a bench. He hoped they would be found and used. That would only further confuse the predators.
Before boarding his train, Charlie sent an encrypted message to Chidi Okoro, to be forwarded to Sandra Oku. It was fitting, he thought, that Sandra would end up playing a role in their operation. Paul had recruited her as insurance in case something happened to him. Sandra had impressed Charlie with her fortitude and strength of mind.
He walked back to the tracks, boarded the Cisalpino to Zurich, intentionally limping slightly. Found his seat by the window, halfway up in the fourth car. He sat and shut his eyes. Removed his hat. A man and woman sat opposite him, speaking in German. He glanced quickly, then looked down the aisle. A moon-faced man seemed to be watching him. Late forties, probably, pock-marked skin, thick mustache. Mallory looked out at Basel and in the distance saw the edge of the Black Forest. Closed his eyes. Opened them. The man was still looking. Charlie checked his watch. Finally, the train began to move. He looked again and saw the man was engaged in a conversation with a young boy. It was okay.
The countryside flashed past, increasingly dark and featureless as the train distanced itself from Basel. Eventually, they would realize the ticket to Paris was a ruse. But it would take them a while to trace his new identity. Eric Dantz was a name that would have no reference in their databases. Still, he needed to be careful. Most people operated within predictable parameters—if they were trying to avoid detection, they bluffed, they set up diversions. A trait of human nature. The predators would be thinking that. They probably wouldn’t know his new name, but they would anticipate that he had one. They would have to figure it out in other ways, then. Charles Mallory had to counteract that somehow, to move in directions they wouldn’t expect him to move. He closed his eyes for several minutes. The train rolled deeper into the night.
Mehmet Hassan, Il Macellaio, logged on to the F-2 quantum-encrypted computer network to see if there were any additional details about the Charles Mallory assignment. Instead, he discovered a new assignment, from the same source. The Administrator had changed his mind. He wanted him to take care of the new job first. Jon Mallory. This one would be easier, because there was no hunting necessary. They knew where he was.
A prison nine kilometers southwest of Mungaza.
The victim would be waiting there for him when he arrived. Three days from now.
FORTY-ONE
THE TRAVEL TIME FROM Zurich Airport to Nairobi was fourteen hours and thirty minutes, including the changeover in Paris. From Nairobi, Eric Dantz flew to Amara, the second-largest city in the landlocked nation of Mancala. There he took a cab to a rail station in the suburbs and boarded the local to Mungaza, the capital city, where Joseph Chaplin and the rest of his team were already encamped.
Eric Dantz was Charles Mallory’s final identity and, he assumed, the last one he would need. Dantz would take him into Mungaza undetected. And in Mungaza, he would find Isaak Priest. Three assumptions that depended on good fortune. In truth, he was rolling dice.
The train rumbled through the open savannah of the northlands, a vast, sweeping landscape of rolling grasses rimmed by faraway mountains, which had always inspired Charles Mallory, as it did most Westerners—a landscape probably not unlike that where the human species had first emerged.
The train took them through ramshackle farm villages of stick and grass huts, where barefoot children stood in the fields beside the tracks and waved. Past tea plantations and fields of tobacco, sugarcane and sorghum, and giant dusty tracts of abandoned farmland, ruined by drought, erosion, and nutrient degradation.
Charlie watched a passing village, thinking how easy it would be to make all of this disappear. Mancala was a hundred thousand square kilometers, a little smaller than the state of Pennsylvania. There were two main urban centers: Amara, the city he had just left, and Mungaza, the city where he was going. Each had populations over eight hundred thousand. A single plane, making a few dozen passes with a four-hundred-gallon aerosol spray tank, could depopulate either city in a matter of hours. For the whole country, it could probably be done with ten or twelve planes in a single night.
He watched the villages through the train window as the capital neared, thinking about what he couldn’t see: demographics: The war of the future isn’t going to be about terrorism or oil or nuclear power. The real war is going to be about demographics. His father’s words.
Mancala was a fertile country, with green hills and wide, deep rivers that emptied into a huge freshwater lake. But it was a poor nation, with one of the lowest per-capita incomes in the world. Life expectancy at birth was about forty-one years, he had learned. The country’s once-explosive growth had leveled off in recent months, despite a birth rate of more than six and a half children per woman. The reasons were those Charlie had seen elsewhere on the continent: a deadly combination of malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS, along with insufficient medical care. Mancala had depended on aid from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but the IMF had stopped its aid disbursements two years ago because of concerns about corruption and individual donors had followed suit. In many of the smaller cities now, there was no social welfare or any kind of safety net. If people didn’t have money, they didn’t eat.
Those were problems that had repeated themselves for decades. But as the train approached the capital, Charlie began to notice other things, odd things that drew him out of his thoughts: clusters of cookie-cutter, single-story, manufactured bunkhouses; several dozen rows of towers topped by three-bladed propellors that he recognized as wind turbines; a chain-link, razor-wire fence encircling what seemed to be a giant, open-pit mine; and, several times, as they got closer, groups of four or five people lying in the fields, most of them young. All of them dead.