Viral

PROLOGUECloud shadows carpeted the African countryside as a privatelyowned matatu rattled along the dusty lorry route toward the capital.Four passengers had been on board as it rolled out of Kyotera just pastdaybreak. Now, as the bus neared Kampala, every seat was taken,with nine men standing, gripping the overhead straps. Several transistorradios played incongruously—gospel, raga, soca—their signalsbecoming clearer as the city loomed. The passengers were villagersand farmers, many of them carrying goods to sell at the open-air marketsof the city: Nile perch and tilapia, tomatoes and maize, basketware,gourds, kikoy cloth.In a worn wicker seat at the rear of the bus, a wizened bananafarmer clutched a bark-cloth package and gazed through the sweatingbodies at a spout of rain in the distant terraced hillside. The manwore a vacant expression, although occasionally he stole glances atthe other passengers: at the young bearded man who nipped from aflask; at the toothless woman seated in front of him, who kept fallingasleep against the window; at the burly, bare-chested man—theonly one facing backwards—who held a panting dog in his arms; atthe tall, handsome woman with the lovely profile on the aisle. Theman was careful not to make eye contact with them, though, or togive any of the passengers reason to notice him. He had been paidto make a delivery in Kampala, and the only thing on his mind thismorning was the cold bottle of pombe—fermented banana beer—andthe plate of mkate mayai that he would enjoy once he returned home.He did not think about what he was delivering, or why it might beimportant to someone. That was not part of his job.The farmer closed his eyes as they came to another makeshift village,where women were washing clothes in a creek beside the road.When he looked out again, he saw cane and cassava fields and thena gathering of people by a banana grove, dressed up as if for church.Two of the men, he saw, before averting his eyes, were leaning onshovels. It was the fourth funeral they had passed since leavingKyotera.The road took them past a roadhouse, where sunken-cheekedwomen watched blankly from under a cloth awning, and into asprawling neighborhood of ramshackle apartments and merchantstands, where the air was smoky from roasting meats. As downtowncame into view, the farmer remembered traveling here as a boy, inthe years before the dictators—the shouting merchants, the bleatinghorns, the pungent scent of spices from the food stands, the buses andboda-bodas, the chaotic excitement of so many people sharing spacepeacefully.The man got off the bus near Bombo Road and walked into theopen-air market, as he had been instructed, keeping his eyes on thecracked pavement. He breathed the beef and lamb smoke, the spicedvegetables, looking at no one until he found a booth far in the back,belonging to a fish merchant named Robinson. A nod, pre-arranged.The man spoke the sentence he had been instructed to repeat:“A fresh delivery for Mr. Robinson.” He was handed an envelopecontaining five hundred thousand Ugandan shillings—about twohundred dollars. No one else saw the exchange. Sweating in the midafternoonheat, the farmer walked back toward Bombo Road and thematatu that would take him home.ONEMonday, September 14, Kampala, UgandaCharles Mallory waited in a third-story room of the old colonial-style hotel on Kampala Road, studying the foot traffic below,watching for men traveling alone or for anything that didn’t fit.He liked the haphazardness of this neighborhood—a hodgepodgeof apartment houses, food markets, pavement stalls—and the coverit lent him. For the past eight months, Charles Mallory had beenworking on a single project—a puzzle that had become a labyrinthof unexpected turns, finally leading him here, to this busy street indowntown Kampala. A project his father had handed to him just daysbefore his death.From a paper cup he drank the last of the sweet tea he had boughtfrom a merchant down the street, listening to the chuk-chuk-chuk of theceiling fan in his room, alert for any unexpected sound or movement.Then he checked his watch: 12:46. Paul Bahdru was late.Mallory had invested seven days in arranging this meeting, communicatingwith Paul through encrypted messages and other, lessconventional, means. They had devised a system that was virtuallyimpenetrable—or so it had seemed: a series of short, cryptic communiqués,based on patterns and information that only the two of themcould know. It was Paul’s idea that the exchange take place here, ata café in the bustling neighborhood where he had once lived. Themeeting would be brief: Bahdru would arrive first, purchase a coffeeand take a seat. When Charles Mallory determined that Paul was notunder surveillance, he would go downstairs and enter the café. Paulwould pass him his message and an envelope; they would separate. Itwould be over in less than three minutes.Charles Mallory’s work as a private intelligence contractor oftenrequired him to deal with government power brokers and morallyambiguous businessmen who spoke their own duplicitous languages.But Paul Bahdru was not like that—he was reliable and honorable,and one of the bravest men Charles knew. Over the past several weeks,Bahdru had learned details of a “high-stakes war,” as he called it, thatwasn’t yet visible. Some of the information he had already passed toCharles Mallory; today, he would give him the most important. Aspecific date. Locations. Along with photos and documentation.Mallory and Bahdru had first met in Nairobi in 1998, whenCharles Mallory was stationed in Kenya under State Departmentcover. Bahdru was a journalist then, a reporter for the Daily Nation,Kenya’s largest newspaper. Through a single source, he had learnedthe sketchy details of a plot against American embassies in Kenyaand Tanzania. Mallory had met with him early one morning in a coffeeshop on Radio Road, and afterward relayed what he was told toWashington—details too vague to be acted upon, although the plot,of course, had been carried out.Bahdru eventually left Nairobi, and journalism, but he continuedto write. His essays angered several high-level African politicians andquasi-intellectuals, who considered him a dissident and dismissedhis writings as Western-tainted propaganda—perpetuating the clichéof Africa as a continent sinking in corruption and ethnic strife.Not long after Paul resettled in the West African nation of Buttata,his wife was brutally raped and murdered during a supposed homerobbery—a crime never “solved”—and Paul himself was detained insolitary confinement for seven days for writings deemed “treasonous”by the government. But Bahdru’s travails had made him more determinedthan embittered; what he discovered had to be known; and,finally, it would be.Charles Mallory studied the sightlines between the café and thewindows of the adjacent buildings, attentive to anything unusual,recounting the tenuous threads that had led him here, comingtogether and, it seemed, now unraveling. Remembering details,phrases. “The ill wind that will come through . . . Witness to somethingthat hasn’t happened yet . . . the October project.”He had checked in at the hotel fifty-three minutes earlier,using the name on his passport and identification card—FrederickCollins—not the one on his driver’s license.12:51.Clearly, the meeting had been compromised. For whatever reason,Paul Bahdru was not going to show. The “why” would have tobe determined later. Now, he had to find safe passage out.He zipped up his bag and took a last look at the people walkingalong the wet, smoky pavement, seeing around the edges of thingsnow. This was Charles Mallory’s first visit to Kampala in many years.He had been pleased, after arriving from Nairobi on a Kenya Airwaysflight that morning, to find the city on its feet again, with functioningutilities, clean water, crowded restaurants. Although in manyways—some obvious, others not—it was still a city rebounding fromthe civil war that followed the 1979 overthrow of Idi Amin. As withmany African countries, Uganda was a patchwork of tribes and customs,its boundaries drawn by nineteenth-century British colonistswho had come here to mine the region’s wealth. It was a sad talethat he had seen replicated in different ways in a number of Africa’sfifty-three countries, many of which had become breeding groundsfor corruption and dictatorship.Charles Mallory heard a sound: A sudden rain exploded on the tinawning above the window. He froze. Moments later, another sound.He took a deliberate breath and reached for the telephone.“Yes.”“Mr. Collins.” He listened to the other man breathing. “Hello, sir.A package has arrived for you at the front desk. Just delivered,” theman said, speaking with a lilting Ugandan accent.Mallory felt his pulse quicken slightly. A package. Who could knowhe was here?“Sir?”“Yes. I’ll be right down.”He went out, down the creaky wooden steps and along the flagstonepath to the office. It was raining heavily now, thudding on thetin roofs and apartment awnings; scents of wet brick and dirt andtree bark mixed with car exhaust and the smells of meat roasting inthe sidewalk stalls. Merchants huddled under plastic wraps and trashbags. It was just an hour past midday but dark like evening.The clerk in the office was the same one who had checked himin. A thin-faced man with small, curious eyes and a slight twist tohis upper lip, which gave the impression that he was smiling whenhe wasn’t. The man reached under the counter and set a bark-clothpackage on top of the desk. A small, florist-sized envelope was tapedto it, with his name, “Frederick Collins.”“Who brought this?”The clerk watched him steadily, his brow furrowing. “I don’tknow.”Mallory turned. Through the wet, greasy side window he saw thecafé down the street, where he and Paul were to have met. Above it,laundry blowing on a line, battered now by the rain.“What did he look like?”The clerk lifted his shoulders, as if he didn’t understand. CharlesMallory fished fifty thousand Ugandan shillings from his pocket.“Not a man,” he said. “A woman. Car stopped outside. A womandelivered it and walked out.” He looked to the window and, for amoment, may have grinned.“A prostitute?”The desk clerk gazed back at him, as if a question hadn’t beenasked.Mallory took the package and walked quickly across the terrace,ducked against the rain, and took the stairs two and three at a timeback to the room. He closed the door and twisted the deadbolt. 1:04.Okay. He looked back at the street, at the windows of the otherbuildings, searching for a set of eyes that might be watching him,a curtain pulled back. Nothing. Then he sat on the bed and slicedopen the envelope, careful not to leave fingerprints. The envelopecontained a single business card, with a name on it, in block letters:Paul Bahdru. “With Regrets” was scrawled in smeared black inkbelow it.Using a dry washrag, Charles Mallory placed the card and tapeback in the envelope and tucked it inside a plastic wrapper in his bag.He sat on the edge of the bed under the chuk-chuk-chuk of the fanand began to pick apart the tightly wound bark cloth. It was rectangular,narrower than manuscript pages or a photo book. He stoppedfor a moment to listen to the rain, to make sure it was only that—rain, beating the tin roof. Down below, tires skidded. Horns sounded.What had gone wrong? Had someone followed? Or perhaps PaulBahdru was watching now, from another window, wanting to makesure no one saw them together. Questions to be answered later.Suddenly, Mallory jerked upright.He clawed faster at the edges of the bark cloth, pulling theStyrofoam stuffing from the box.“No! God dammit!”The contents of the package stared back at him. It was PaulBahdru—his head. The open eyes looked right at him through a thin,soiled plastic—the corners of his mouth upturned slightly, as if smilingat some final ambiguity.TWOWednesday, September 16Twenty-six hundred and seventy-three miles away, in theRepublic of Sundiata, Dr. Sandra Oku gazed numbly through herdusty windshield at the late afternoon light in the baobab trees, thefields of bell peppers and potatoes and cassava, and the devastationthat had come to her village overnight.Dr. Oku was the only health-care worker in the tiny village ofKaarta, in the Kuseyo Valley. Designated a “district medical officer,”she provided antiretroviral drugs to the farmers and villagerswhen they became available and tried to help anyone else whowalked through her door—mothers and children, mostly, sufferingfrom chronic diarrhea or skin infections or malnutrition. Many shecouldn’t help, and sent to the hospital in Tihka.She was a long-limbed, graceful woman, with large, perceptive eyesand thick hair she braided and clasped back every morning. Until thatday, she had been living her life in Kaarta with a dream—the sort ofdream that most of the villagers could not afford. After the rainy season,she had planned to travel nearly a thousand miles to visit a manshe had not seen in months—seven months next week, to be precise.A man she had met in medical school, and with whom she expectedeventually to share her life. But there was no room in her thoughtsanymore for dreams; real life had suddenly closed in.Dr. Oku’s most important work wasn’t distributing medicines;it was teaching preventive methods so the villagers wouldn’t needthem. Some afternoons, she closed the clinic and drove her oldpick-up into town to counsel the laborers and subsistence farm workers,and to distribute condoms to the nomadic women who workedthe roadhouse along the lorry route. The women turned their backswhen they saw her approaching, because they did not want to beeducated, or even noticed. They wanted something else, somethingshe couldn’t give them. Nearly 20 percent of the villagers were HIV positive,Sandra Oku estimated, and many of them gathered at thetruck stop whenever the faith healers showed up to hawk their healingpotions. Over the past year, conditions had worsened in Kaarta.Water was scarce, and some residents had taken to fetching it fromstreams contaminated with untreated excrement. Since the revolutionlast year—when the Sundiata military chief had taken over thegovernment of Maurice Kasuva—the central government’s healthministry had made it more difficult for the rural pharmacies andhealth clinics to get medicines.Hers was a tiny clinic with just four beds. Twelve-volt automobilebatteries powered the electrical equipment; the lights were run bykerosene. Scalpel blades, syringes and needles were more often sterilizedand reused than replaced. She had to make do with what she hadand send the serious cases on to Tihka.Dr. Oku awoke just before sunrise each morning, walked out back,kneeled in the dirt and prayed for the people of her village. Some ofthem had come to depend on her, although they tried not to botherher after the clinic closed at sundown, because the clinic buildingwas also where Sandra Oku lived. Some mornings, several of themwould be sitting in the grass out front, waiting for her to unlatch thescreen door.This day, though, had been different. Something strange hadarrived in Kaarta overnight. Something she had never seen before inher thirty-seven years. It began, for her, before dawn, when she hadbeen awakened by an urgent knocking on the clinic’s back door.“Please, please, will you come see?” A woman’s voice, speakingbreathlessly, in Swahili. “Dr. Sandra! Can you come help? Please. Ican’t wake him.”Sandra Oku pulled on a sleeveless night dress and unlatched thedoor, pointing her flashlight at the ground. The eyes of Mrs. Makere,a farmer’s wife who lived across the dirt fields to the southeast, methers with pleading urgency. Dew still glistened on the ground and inthe baobab trees in the moonlight.“What is it?”“He won’t wake up. Nothing will wake him.”“Your husband?”“Yes. Please.”“Okay. Let’s go see.”Dr. Oku grabbed her bag and walked barefoot into the cool morningto her pick-up truck. It turned over after a reluctant whir-whir-whirsound. They rode together in silence, nearly a kilometer across theopen plain to a cluster of mud homes where the Makeres and otherfarm workers lived—the route Nancy Makere must have just walked.Like the others, theirs was a small, square-ish, mud-brick house,reinforced with sticks and cardboard and plastic bags. A pink lighthung in the sky above the rusted tin roof as they arrived. The breezesmelled of wood smoke.Joseph Makere, a large, gray-bearded man known to work ten oreleven hours a day harvesting soybeans this time of year, was asleepon a mattress in a corner room, as his wife had said. An open windowfaced the lorry route and the small produce stand Nancy Makere ran.“There,” she said.The two women watched him, inhaling and exhaling beneath awhite sheet, as if struggling for air, his eyes closed. It was an eeriesound, one Sandra Oku had heard once years before—the sound of aman about to drown in his own lung fluids.Dr. Oku pulled a surgical mask over her face. She knelt andtouched his chest, and then felt his pulse, noticed a small, driedtrickle of blood extending from each nostril. Hearing a cough, sheturned; one of the Makeres’ four children was standing beside Nancynow, her face glistening with a thin film of sweat.“Where are the others?”Nancy Makere’s eyes pointed. “In there,” she said.Dr. Oku followed her into the other bedroom. She set down herbag. The three boys were sleeping, unclothed, on a thin mattress, twoon their backs, the other on his right side, breathing with the samedeep raspy sound as their father.She knelt beside them and gently shook the shoulders of one, andanother. She opened the lids of the oldest boy and saw that his eyeswere bright with fever.“Have they been ill?” Dr. Oku asked, taking the boy’s pulse. “Whatsort of symptoms have they had?”“None. Last night, when they went to sleep, they were fine. We’vebeen trying to wake them for—” She looked at the battery clock on ashelf by her bed. “More than fifty minutes.”“Okay. Help me carry them to the truck. I’ll need to bring theminto the clinic. They’re contagious and are going to need to bequarantined.”“Quarantined,” she repeated, a frightened look flickering in hereyes. Nancy Makere stood still, watching Dr. Oku. “And then what?”“Then we’ll see. I don’t know yet. We’ll give them oxygen andantibiotics and see what we can do. Help me now, please.”The two women bundled Joseph Makere in the sheet and draggedhim to the back of the truck. One at a time, then, they carried theboys, laying them on the threadbare mattress that Dr. Oku kept inthe truck-bed for transporting patients. As they rode silently acrossthe field back to the clinic, the first crescent of sun appeared abovethe familiar distant mountains, silhouetting random trees on theplain.At the clinic, Sandra Oku lay the four patients on cots and beganto administer oxygen to them one at a time, monitoring their vitalsigns. It quickly became clear that there was nothing she could do towake them. At 7:22, Joseph Makere stopped breathing. The youngestboy died twenty-three minutes later.About an hour before the third boy stopped breathing, a stationwagon arrived from the south village fields with seven passengers,four men and three women. Normally they would be in the maizeand cassava fields by now. But Sally Kantanga, who owned the farm,could not wake them this morning.“Not any of them. What’s the matter with them?” she asked. Dr.Oku saw that she was sweating profusely, even though the morningair was still cool.“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m going to call Tihka Hospital on theradio.”By ten o’clock, forty-three people had died at the clinic and inthe still-moist grasses outside. Many others were lined up or lying inthe dirt, waiting to see her. Sandra Oku had run out of blankets andsheets to cover the victims, and eleven of the bodies lay uncovered.Sixteen others, including Nancy Makere, her daughter, and SallyKantanga, were sleeping deeply in what she had called the RecoveryRoom. No one was going to recover this morning.