EXPECTATIONS. BEGIN WITH THAT. Does the action play on expectations or against them? To what degree? Most people’s lives are paved by a series of routine expectations, patched together seamlessly. You expect when you wake in the morning that your spouse will be lying beside you. You expect that your car will be parked outside, in the garage or on the street. You expect that the sun will rise in the east, that your office will be open for business when you arrive and that nine hours later you will be back home. What happens when one of these paving stones is removed? You adjust; your expectations change; eventually they become a seamless path again.
Put another way: The public would never accept the details, but they would eventually accept the response, and the outcome. Begin with that.
Charles Mallory opened his eyes, saw the darkened aisle of the Air France Boeing 747-100. He gripped the glass of Scotch on his tray table and tried not to think about what had happened in Kampala, the miscalculation he had made. Charles Mallory was not a man who made mistakes, and Kampala had been a big one. He had gone to Africa on assignment for the United States government, to find a man named Isaak Priest. But he had been in Kampala for other reasons, for his father and for Paul Bahdru, two men who were now gone. Charlie sipped his Scotch and set it down, trying to focus on where he was going—the problem that lay ahead and the way that he was going to solve it. And the message he needed to send to his brother.
Sitting at his work table, Jon Mallory logged on to the Fairfax County, Virginia, government website and clicked to the Property Assessment page. It took just a couple of keyboard strokes to find out who owns property in Fairfax County—a process that would once have required a drive down to the county courthouse and a half-hour search through file cabinets.
Jon typed in the street address for Gus Hebron’s house in Reston. Moments later, it came back; as he had expected, Hebron wasn’t listed as the owner. The house was owned by something called the Wendallman Corporation.
He ran a search, found no listings.
Next, he tried Olduvai Charities and came up with 167 hits. It was a nine-year-old charity organization based in Nairobi, Kenya, which operated health clinics in eleven African nations, partnered with hospitals on medical research projects, sponsored social programs, and distributed free medicines and condoms throughout Africa. He found nothing controversial or unusual about it.
Jon again studied his list of contacts. Of the eleven names, eight were now crossed off. Two of those he had left messages with earlier had called while he was gone. Neither of them knew anything about Charlie Mallory. That left only one name.
He lamely tried to compose an opening for his Weekly American blog, which he usually posted on Sunday and Wednesday nights, but he wasn’t inspired tonight. He couldn’t focus on anything except what had happened to his brother.
Don’t lose contact with me. Jon watched tree branches stirring in the night breeze, imagined his brother, his silver-blue eyes cutting through everything. Too smart for this world, he used to think. Saying, Come on. You can do it. Just try a little harder.
No. What was it he had told him last week? It was the opposite.
Don’t try too hard. Information will come to you.
Don’t try too hard.
On the top shelf of his bookcase, next to a framed picture of their parents, both now deceased, sat a small photo of the two brothers. It was one of the few ever taken of them as adults: Charlie three inches taller, in a white T-shirt, with crew-cut blond hair, broad shoulders, angular facial features, a slightly puckish look; Jon darker-complected, smiling a little, strands of brown hair curling over his shirt collar. He had imagined that the renewed contact might mean a renewal of friendship, but it hadn’t. It was the way of his father, too—as if they had taught themselves not to get too close to anyone, even family members.
He thought about Africa, remembering the precise, pungent smell of the wind one night as he lay in a sleeping bag in an open field, breathing the scents of nomads’ camps—dung, sweat, smoke, porridge, fried kapenta—and the rotting carcasses from a faraway abattoir. In his last blog entry, Jon had written that he expected to have “new details” this week pertaining to his Africa stories—probably not a prudent move, in retrospect. It had all hinged on the call from his brother.
Across town, he knew, Melanie Cross was writing her blog, which she updated almost every night, usually just before midnight. The chances were good that she would make some barbed reference to Jon and his failure to provide “new details.” Like him, she assumed two identities as a journalist, in her case as a technology reporter for the Wall Street Review—where her stories were filtered through editors and fact-checkers—and as a freewheeling blogger, whose voice was smart, pithy, and sometimes recklessly provocative. Melanie Cross was an ambitious, well-traveled reporter who had a knack for tapping unlikely sources. They had been contributors to the same paper for about a year and briefly dated (“on a trial basis,” he told people). Despite her beguiling beauty, Melanie was wildly insecure and could become competitive about nearly anything. Lately she had been running entries in her blog every couple of days challenging Jon’s reporting on Africa, taking the sides of the high-profile aid donors and philanthropists he had written about.
Jon checked his caller I.D. and saw to his surprise that Melanie Cross had called him twice. Odd coincidences like that often seemed to happen with them. She hadn’t left a message, but her number showed up in the missed call record. Even when they’d been dating, she would not leave voicemails. Then he checked his e-mails and saw that Honi Gandera had written him back.
The eleventh and final name on his list. A last hope for reaching his brother.