Free Viral by James Lilliefors Page B

one.”
    “The victim’s name was Ahmed Hassan,” Charlie said.
    Franklin’s mouth seemed to tighten.
    “You know who he is.”
    “Yes.”
    “And you know why he was there.”
    “No. I don’t. Tell me.”
    “He was there to eliminate Frederick Collins.” There was a long pause. Charlie noticed the tension under his eyes. “How did it happen, Richard?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “No one was supposed to know about Frederick Collins. That was the arrangement. No one was supposed to know he existed. No one was supposed to know who he was or where he was.”
    Franklin’s eyebrows arched very slightly. Both men knew that Collins’s identity, his passport, credit cards, and recent history, had been invented by the U.S. government. “It’s airtight, Charlie. No one has access to that information. It’s off the books, the whole thing. That was the arrangement. A single point of contact. You contact me when you want, I contact you. Your job is to hunt down Isaak Priest. Period. It’s
your
operation. We leave you alone.”
    “And it’s not possible that the arrangement was compromised. At any level?”
    “Not possible, no.” Franklin watched him. “Not from this end.”
    Not from this end
. Charlie understood the implication. From
his
end, maybe.
Anna
. Anna knew about Collins. She had visited him in Nice, to talk about his father, and the project he had overseen. The parts of the Isaak Priest operation he hadn’t wanted Franklin to know about. But he didn’t want to think that.
Wouldn’t
think that. Because he knew it wasn’t true.
    Franklin said, “We also have a report that Collins may have been in Kampala recently. Which was surprising because there’s no indication Priest has any connection there.”
    Charles Mallory didn’t let on his surprise.
    “As you say, it’s my operation.”
    “Yes. It is. But, frankly, Charlie, I’m afraid we may be at something of an impasse.”
    “How so?”
    He sighed. “I mean, Collins is useless now. And I’m having a hard time justifying this—”
    “Give me ten days,” Mallory said.
    “Ten days.”
    “Yes.”
    After a lengthy silence, Franklin lowered his eyes, nodding once.
    “All right.”
    “But there are two things I’m going to need to know, Richard. Before I leave here.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “First: I need to know what happened to Operation Tribal Eyes.”
    Franklin showed nothing. He seemed to be waiting for the next question.
    Tribal Eyes
. A heavily funded signals intelligence project that Charles Mallory had worked on as a consultant, because of his experience in tracking targets in mountainous terrain. The technical coordinator had been Russell Ott, a smarmy, well-connected military contractor who spoke fluent Arabic. Ott had worked with several bad actors in the Middle East and Africa, people the government needed to know about. Charlie had never met Ott, but he’d heard things about him over the years; not good things.
    The objective of Tribal Eyes had been two-fold: to aggressively develop and then implement satellite imaging technology more advanced than anything on the market—capable of seeing through a window and reading a note that someone was writing inside a house. In 2009, the government had managed to capture several video images of Osama bin Laden walking from a Mercedes sedan to what seemed to be a French-made armored transport vehicle on a low mountain road in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. But aswith several of the government’s other efforts to capture Bin Laden prior to May 1, 2011, this one had failed to produce the prize. They had monitored the location for several weeks and found nothing more, determining that Bin Laden had moved on, almost as if he had known what was happening.
    “Why?” Richard Franklin said, finally. Charlie answered with silence, feeling something stir deep within himself, a yearning he couldn’t articulate.
    The things he was chasing were different from what Franklin’s branch was