Viral by James Lilliefors Page B

checked his watch. 3:40. The only time Roger Church actually answered his phone was between three o’clock and 3:35 in the afternoons. Jon had just missed him. But he called and left a message: “Roger, it’s Jon. FYI: I’m traveling overseas tonight, to Kenya. Research for the third story. Something’s waiting for me there. I’ll be in touch.”
    Minutes later, he found an open terminal at the Triangle Cyber Café. He swiped his credit card and logged in. There were seventeen e-mails in his inbox, and he scrolled through them quickly. The usual stuff—ads for weight loss, vitamin supplements, no-fee credit cards. One by one he deleted them. Just as his finger went to click “delete” on the one titled “Urgent Business Opportoonity,” though, Jon Mallory hesitated.
That was strange
. The sender was listed as: Mr. Gude 13914.
    Jon opened the message and skimmed through it. The letter-writer wanted to entrust him with $11 million—he would receive 25 percent of the fortune if he allowed the sender to transfer the money tohis bank in the States. The exchange would have to be carried out in “strick confidence.” This was an “opportoon time.”
    He clicked the “Details” button to find the e-mail’s place of origin. Lagos, Nigeria. A typical Nigerian 419 scam—named for the fraud section of the Nigerian code. With their deliberate lapses in language and promise that the recipient would become an instant millionaire, 419 scams played into the gullibility of the American mind-set. Those who responded were typically asked for payments to cover “handling” and “transfer” charges, all the while being promised a stake in the fortune.
    There were three unusual details in this letter, though: the number 13914 in the address; the words Dr. Marianna three times in the text—the name of the woman who had died, along with her husband, Daniel Ngage, in a plane crash; and Mr. David Gude, the letter-writer’s name.
    It was odd: three pieces of Jon Mallory’s childhood, right there in an e-mail from Nigeria.
    Dr. Marianna. 13914.
    Reverse the order and that had been the address, in the Montgomery County suburbs of Washington, D.C., where Jon grew up:
13914 Marianna Drive
.
    David Gude, too, was a name from his childhood, He had been the grade-school mathematics instructor who had taught both Jon and his brother geometry—a subject Charlie had always aced. Jon had come home with B’s.
    He read through the note again, more carefully, and then noticed something else. At the very bottom, below the name of the “executor,” in a smaller type, was a series of letters: htunoilerctt.
    Twelve letters that didn’t make any sense, forward or backward. He tried breaking them apart, scrambling the order to make words.
    Hut. Coil. Tern. With a “t” left over. No.
    Jon let the letters go and read the note again, recognizing as he did that this could not be a coincidence.
No, there had to be a message here
. One piece might have been coincidence, but not three. These were names and numbers that he and his brother would recognize instantly—but no one else.
    He printed out a copy of the e-mail, then deleted it from the mailbox.
    In the air above the Atlantic, he sipped a Jim Beam and Diet Coke and ate a veggie sandwich.
Time, distance, perspective
. In the dark and quiet of the cabin, Jon began to recognize what his brother’s message from Wednesday might have been.
He had just missed it, until now
. Of course. In trying to reach Charlie, he had gone about things all wrong. Now he understood that.
The information will come to you
. That was what had happened. Information encoded in silence. By not calling at the appointed time, Charlie was telling him something. He hadn’t called because their phone calls were being monitored; someone was on to him in ways he hadn’t suspected before. Something
had
gone wrong, and they needed to communicate now in different, less detectable ways. Which meant what? He could guess: that