Viral by James Lilliefors

harbor. They’d talked over a leisurely dinner about their shared project. About the contact she knew in Germany, the investigator who might be able to help him. To help them. A man named Gebhard Keller. And then they had let it go. Anna had looked lovely, her fine black hair lifting up occasionally off her bare shoulders in the breeze. Walking back, she had stopped, held his hand and kissed him. They walked with an expectant step after that, excited, it seemed, by the freedom they had given each other.
    Inside, they began to kiss, to take off clothes, as if they had to do it then or the chance would disappear forever. They had made love with a slow urgency, savoring the feelings, the shared need that would be temporarily satisfied. Afterward, as the curtains billowed in around the French doors and the street sounds returned, she had said, “This wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?”
    He had closed his eyes and tried not to answer.
    She had whispered, “It can’t happen again, can it? Until this business is over.”
    The memories were difficult, as she had warned him they would be. But they were also a way to pass time now, a trick that he sometimes used to stay alert—and a diversion, a safe harbor from thoughts of what had happened in Kampala. The more recent memories. Of Paul Bahdru. Of what had gone wrong.
    He sat at the table, listening to the sounds outside, his right hand holding the weapon. Waiting.
    “We shouldn’t have done this,” she had said, sitting up, turned away from him
.
    “What’s the point of saying it, though? Or thinking it?”
    He leaned on an elbow, watching her
.
    “Because it’s a distraction. We can’t afford distractions. Also, it’ll hurt when I have to go.” She looked at him, her sober eyes glinting with a faint glow of the streetlight. “And you know I don’t have any choice. I’ll have to go.”
    “But you’ll come back.” He turned away. “Or I’ll visit you.”
    “You know that?”
    “Yes,” he said. “We can make whatever reality we want.”
    “Can we?”
    “Of course.”
    But he knew now that his words would never come to pass—not as he had intended. Because Frederick Collins was going to die today. There was no alternative. After “this business” was finished.
    This business
.
    He remembered Paul Bahdru’s voice, then, the pleasant lilting pitch, a musical sound as distinctive as a fingerprint. A sound that he would never hear again.
This feels like a calling now, Charles. It’s all passed along, to witnesses. They think if there are no witnesses, then no one can prove anything
. Telling him things. Trusting him.
If something goes wrong, you do what I would have done
.
    A voice in his head. Words that only two people ever heard. That was the arrangement. Maybe they had been wrong about that, too.
    Soon, he would have answers. They were coming to him. Right here to this room.
    “Trains,” Paul had told him, speaking in Swahili. “There is a transportation infrastructure, connected with a copper mine. Very simple but effective. I don’t know where it is, but I’m told it’s not far from a river ‘named for a monkey,’ and the river is the shape of a backwards S.”
    “But you said there is a trick.”
    “Yes. The trick is they do not bring in outsiders. Who might see things they shouldn’t see.”
    “The work is all done by local people.”
    “Yes. During the first stages, they are hired for several days at a time. It is the only work that is available, so they take it, naturally. Some of them are housed in employee barracks. The men work long hours for a few days. Then they are transferred, bused to another site. Sometimes they end up going to three or four sites. They are treated well. Or indifferently. But they must work.”
    “For how long?”
    “A week or two, at most.”
    “Then they get sick.”
    “Yes. There are two parts. None of them knows about the second part. That’s the trick. They’re part of a mechanism.”
    “And the