The Blue Star Café was a couple of blocks from the heart of the city center. Charlie picked out the angular features of Jason Wells’ face from the street. He was sitting against a side wall by a dirt-coated spinning fan. The air in the café smelled of fried dough from the mandazis.
Wells wore a dark green, short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants. He was a solidly built man of medium height who rarely smiled, with wide cheeks, a broken nose, and great dark eyes that conveyed the calm of a deeply planted self-confidence. He was one of the smartest soldiers Mallory had ever known.
They shook hands and Charlie sat.
“Get in yesterday?”
“Late.”
“Fourth day,” Wells said. He touched the handle of his coffee cup.
“How did it go last night?”
“We got it. Propellant launcher, two aerosol spray tanks of plasmids. Stored with the vaccine. Sandra Oku laid everything out and we just walked in. It was clean.”
“So we’re in business.”
“If it works.”
Charlie studied him. Wells could be a bold strategist, but he was also a realist. He had grown up in the Midwest and served in Special Forces for nine years before joining DMA four years ago. “What’s the prognosis overall?”
“Hard to say,” he said. “We’re late to the party. At this point, psychology’s going to be a big part of it.”
The waitress came over and Charlie ordered coffee, black, and a raisin muffin. After it arrived, he asked Wells his plan.
“My recommendation is two operations. One precision, the other diversion. Do the diversion al Qaeda style. Hit half a dozen targets, simultaneously. Starting tonight. Maximum impact. Both strategically and psychologically. Go for targets that are actually part of their operation: train line, communications tower, air fields. I’ve got them mapped out.”
“Chaplin said you have a dozen explosives.”
“Fourteen. Nadra and I made six IEDs. Twenty-pound ammonium nitrate bombs. Nadra purchased a dozen blocks of M112 C-4 military issue explosives. Everything’s in the trunk of her car right now.”
Mallory nodded. Both he and Jason Wells had spent time in Afghanistan and knew how easy it was to make an ammonium nitrate fertilizer bomb—and the devastating damage it could cause. Ninety percent of the bombs that had exploded in Afghanistan since 2001 were made of fertilizer and fuel oil.
“Advantages? Disadvantages?”
“The weather is the big factor in our favor. They’re not going to go up unless the wind is blowing right. And not if it’s raining. And not, I, uh—”
Jason suddenly gestured strangely and laughed, thrusting his index finger at Charlie. “Just play along with me right now, okay? Don’t look,” he said. “Nod your head a couple of times and smile. Laugh if you can.”
Charles Mallory did.
“Okay?” he said. He continued to gesture animatedly, making karate chops in the air and urging Mallory to do so, too. “Just play along, okay? Okay. Now, look to your left.” Mallory did. “See that man? That’s John Ramesh. He was looking at us. At you, I think. He gets a wild hair when he sees contractors acting too serious. Makes him very nervous.”
“Okay. Good to know.” Charlie caught a glimpse of Ramesh again through the crowd at the front of the restaurant. Short, muscle-bound, with a gray ponytail, wearing a white, sleeveless T-shirt, green khaki pants. A pistol strapped to his belt.
“He’s kind of the enforcer here. Wild West kind of character. Isaak Priest’s main sentry. Be wary of him.”
“I will.” Mallory cradled his coffee cup. “Does he have anything to do with the outlaw contingent I was told about?”
Wells looked away. “No. That’s a whole other thing. We don’t quite understand that yet. Maybe Hassan Network.”
“Interesting.”
“Maybe. There’s an old abandoned prison down there, about nine kilometers southwest of the city. They have a barracks and what looks like a training camp. I don’t know that it has anything to do with what we’re working on. It’s an assessment we haven’t looked at closely. Not a priority.”
“Okay.” Mallory scanned the street for Ramesh again, didn’t see him. “What do you see when you go inside Isaak Priest’s head?” he asked. “How’s it going to happen?”
“Quickly.” Jason looked at him with his serious eyes. “One night.”
“Tomorrow, supposedly.”
“Yeah.”
“Then what?”
“Then they’re going to have to start burying people. That’s what all the contractors are here for. Millions of people.”
“Eight point six. How are they going to do that?”
“It’s our job not to find out.”
THERE WERE FIVE motels on Sycamore Street south of the city center. The Bombay was a three-story, concrete-block building with a small lobby and outside entrances to all of the rooms. Chaplin had rented one on the second floor and arranged for separate arrival times.
When Charles Mallory opened the door, the other four were already there: Chaplin was seated at a circular wooden table, along with Wells and Nadra Nkosi. Chidi Okoro was in a folding chair across the room. The shades were drawn.
Okoro was the anomaly in this group, conveying an aloof and slightly aristocratic presence. He had grown up in Nigeria, where his father was a banker, but had attended private schools in London. He was unsettlingly calm, a computer wizard who knew things Charlie would never understand.
Nadra was an ex-soldier, thirty years old, small but scrappy, dressed in her usual camouflage pants and tight black T-shirt, which showed a taut upper body and well-buffed arms. Nadra was the only one of his team who had grown up in Mancala. She’d served in the military here, then moved to the States where she studied at the Naval Academy and wound up as a State Department analyst on sub-Saharan African policy. But she didn’t like working behind a desk. Charlie understood that. Her first name meant “unusual” in Swahili, which seemed appropriate to him. These were the best four employees he could imagine. They reminded him sometimes of a championship sports team.
When Charlie came in, they were studying sets of aerial print-outs. The aerials had small numbers stamped on them: 1 through 10. Each number indicated a potential target, with No. 1 being the most valuable, Wells was explaining. Okoro handed a set to Charles Mallory, who sat on the plastic-cushioned sofa.
“We think they’re looking at using four to six airfields throughout the country,” Jason Wells said. “Not all of them are of equal value, obviously—to them or to us. We assess that primarily in terms of population. The one nearest the capital is going to be responsible for Mungaza, which is one tenth of the total population of the country. So that’s target one. The aerials indicate that at least two tanks of what we suspect are viral properties are already in place. We have no photographic record of these four-hundred-gallon tanks at any other airfields. We start with what we know, and we neutralize it.”
Okoro, who had created the aerial models, watched Chaplin through his thick lenses. Wells said, “Most of the urban populations are in two cities. If we were able to immobilize this air strip, it would be a major set-back.”
“Wouldn’t they have some kind of back-up?” Nadra said.
“Possibly,” Wells said. “But that’s a secondary consideration. The primary objective is to neutralize the poison. If we can get to it one day ahead of time, we’re winning the game.”
Chaplin was frowning. “But even if this works tonight, can’t they go up using a different tank? Couldn’t they escalate, push it up a day, or a few hours?”