James Lilliefors - Viral

Wilson had injected a bio-chip under the skin of Jon Mallory’s right palm with a syringe, as Charlie had requested. The bio-chip was a GPS device about the size of a grain of rice. Okoro called up a locator map on the monitor, homed in on the map of Switzerland.

“Nothing,” he said. Charlie looked over his shoulder, his heart racing. “I can try the history trace.”

“Do it!”

He clicked several keys, paused, then clicked some more. Charlie saw the map shrink, and broaden, encompassing a larger region—surrounding countries, the Mediterranean, the Alps, all of Europe. Now there was a green trail, indicating satellite tracking, similar to a radar blip. The flashing arrow moved south, from Switzerland through France and Italy, showing date and time for each location.

“Plane route,” Okoro said. He enlarged the map further as the arrow dipped in a southeasterly direction, over the Mediterranean and then above the African continent. Over the Sudan, a corner of the Congo, Uganda, Tanzania. Stopping in Kenya. And then moving south. To Mancala.

To Mungaza.

Then the signal stopped moving. But it continued to blink.

“That’s it,” Okoro said, after a long time. “End of the road.”

Charlie looked at his impassive expression, the green light of the computer screen coloring his face, blinking on his lenses. “What ? He’s here?”

“Evidently.”

But where? And why?

“Can we pinpoint it?”

“If it’s still operational. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to. Let me zoom in.” This was technology that Mallory’s company had developed and Okoro had been testing. It wasn’t foolproof yet.

The fact that his brother was here in Mungaza didn’t make him feel any better. But it didn’t make him feel any worse, either. On the plus side, it meant that he was probably still alive. The negative side he didn’t want to think about. They had moved him closer to Charles Mallory for a reason, as an end-game strategy.

He knew that, and he could imagine what they had brought him here for. If the Hassan Network was responsible, they were surely planning something terrible. A payback. But he wasn’t going to think about that.

“Okay. Let me match this,” Okoro said, at last. Charlie watched the monitor, trying to stay patient. “Here we go, then. It’s southwest of Mungaza. Looks like about nine kilometers.”

“What’s there?”

He didn’t answer at first. “Let me locate the exact coordinates.” He focused the map more tightly, called up a fix on the screen. Without any inflection in his voice, he said, “It’s the old prison grounds. Mungaza Prison site.”

The outlaws . What had Jason Wells said? I think it’s connected with the Hassan Network . It had to be. Maybe it was all coming together now. The compartmentalized operations were showing how they were connected, as he knew they eventually would. But it was not a reassuring discovery.

BY 2:17, OKORO had downloaded the satellite feeds and printed out five sets of aerials. Twenty-one minutes later, the five of them were gathered in a fifth-floor room at the Oasis Hotel, studying them.

Charlie sat with Wells at a round maple-toned dining table. Nadra Nkosi was on one end of the sleeper sofa, leaning forward, watching them intently. Chaplin was at the other end, Okoro sitting on a tub chair. The room smelled of dirty carpet.

Chaplin seemed uneasy with the new development. Charlie was feeling that way, too, but for different reasons. Something about the meeting didn’t feel right to him. Didn’t feel right at all.

“Recommendation,” Jason said. “Four of us in, one out.”

“I’m in,” Nadra said.

“No,” Charlie said. He sighed, thinking about what was planned for this evening.

All four stared at him, waiting.

“No, why?” Jason Wells said.

“We can’t risk this. We can’t do it this way.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“We can’t all be involved in this.”

There was a long silence.

“We are involved,” Nadra said.

“No. This is not our mission, it’s not why we’re here. This is where I have to draw a line.” Mallory stood. He imagined for a moment things going very wrong. Worse than they had gone already. They hadn’t come this far to suddenly risk everything. This was his mistake. He would have to deal with it. “I’m going to go in by myself. I screwed up. The rest of you have to stay with the primary mission.”

Only Okoro seemed neutral about that.

“I’m with Nadra,” Wells said. “We were supposed to protect your brother. We didn’t. We screwed up.”

“No.” Mallory closed his eyes for a moment. Focus. Work this out . He heard the ticking of the clock in his head. “No one screwed up. They surprised us. But this is my responsibility. I’m going to go in alone.”

“What if you’re outvoted?” Nadra said. She was standing now.

Charlie knew he was in a gray area. Even though he was technically in charge of this group, his policy had always been to run the business like a democracy, and his employees had for the most part held him to that.

“Look at it another way,” Wells said. “They took out Ben Wilson. One sixth of our team. And two other men. That deserves a response.”

Nadra nodded. “It is a team. No one goes off alone.”

“Then we wait until the primary mission is accomplished,” Charlie said.

“I don’t think we can afford that,” Wells said.

No. Of course not .

“It’s all part of the same mission, anyway,” Chaplin said, sighing his assent. “Your brother’s role is to get the story out there, isn’t it? If we don’t do everything we can to save him, we’re jeopardizing the story. Which is at the heart of the operation.”

Mallory looked at Chidi Okoro, who always agreed with Chaplin. But his expression was blank, his eyes giant behind the glasses. Charlie thought of his father’s eyes, steady, urging him forward.

Jason Wells said, “Anyway, it’s only three twenty-five. Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t we do this and come back and go after Priest?”

“That’s assuming a lot, isn’t it?” Mallory said.

“No. All it’s assuming is that we can do this,” Nadra said. “Which we can.”

Mallory exchanged a look with Jason. It’s assuming my brother’s still alive , too , he thought, but didn’t say.

“Okay. We’re a team, but I’m still the one going in. You can be back-up.”

BY 3:46, JASON Wells had established tactics. It would, again, be a three-person operation, with Chaplin and Okoro staying behind. The prison compound was about twenty acres in total, Wells figured, and roughly rectangular-shaped, surrounded on all sides by a ten-foot mud-brick wall topped with concertina wire. The old stone prison building itself took up about four acres of that, a rectangle within the larger rectangle, with a courtyard at its center. Also on site was a stone chaplain’s house and a recently built row of barracks with maybe two dozen rooms.

“I don’t see any towers. Security cameras,” Nadra said.

“No. I don’t think there are any,” Jason said.

That was odd—completely different from Priest’s set-ups, as if the two were unrelated. Charlie studied the aerials some more. There were two entrances to the compound: the front gate and a side delivery entrance, where trucks went in after dark with people kidnapped from the streets.

It had been Nadra’s suggestion to try going in on a truck. But Wells thought it was too dangerous. “None of the people who go in on those trucks come back out. Who knows what happens in there? I think we should take advantage of the lack of sophisticated security. Because there aren’t any cameras, we could probably climb over the wall.”