ViraVax (11 page)

Shadows clarified the open spaces between the sacrificial ball court and the scrub jungle skirting the compound. A few stragglers walked the ball court below. Every word they spoke rang true to Rico four hundred meters away. Every grunt and cry of the ball players must have been heard by all. This ceremonial game performed a great prayer to cheer on the restoration of happiness and plenty.

Rico toyed with the ring in his right pants pocket. Marrying Rachel would be respectable, and not at all what anyone would expect.

Especially Grace,
he thought.

Another buzzard circled twice, then trailed out of sight somewhere towards Costa Brava. The scrub jungle around the temples reminded him of his first meeting with Red Bartlett, inside the border of what had once been Guatemala, and, before that, Belize, British Honduras, the Mosquito Coast. The young Red came down to please his wife and to hone his broken Spanish. Like Rico, he had stayed, seduced by the ultimate opiate of doing what he loved. That was a lifetime ago.

Bartlett’s lifetime.

Rachel and the other couple waited on the veranda of the temple, but Rico stood inside, watching them and shooting pictures through the archway.

“What’s the matter?” Rachel asked with a childlike shrug. “Can you see through my dress?”

Rico had been staring from the shadows. She stood in the doorway of the temple, her body backlit by sunset and a glorious rising moon that just fit its shoulders into the frame of the entrance around her. A sharpness in the setting of the ring in his pocket bit at an infected hangnail on his finger.

“Nothing’s the matter,” he said, “just daydreaming. Yes, I can see through your dress.”

They stood inside a stone doorway atop the Sorcerer’s Pyramid, a doorway that framed tonight’s moonrise over sunset perfectly. This room had been the Magician’s personal quarters. Bats chittered from the beam holes. Outside, crickets and cicadas quieted with the rising of the moon. When it came time to give her the ring, Rico didn’t know why he asked her what he did.

“I thought we were going to drop it,” she said. Those soft lips thinned into a hard gray line. Her freckles stood out in the rising moonlight, distinct in a dead sort of way, like bruised scales.

“I can’t drop it.”

“What do you need to know for, anyway?”

“Because you don’t want to tell me.”

Rico’s heart was slamming along pretty fast, and he had the shakes a little bit. Hunting used to make him feel that way. Slipping around in a war at night made him feel that way.

The shadow of the hooked arm of their driver snaked across the temple wall behind Rico like a great plumed serpent, encircling Rachel’s head and shoulders. Only an illusion of shadow, but in an eyeblink it boosted Rico’s heartbeat even more.

“We must go now,” Carlos announced. “They are locking up, there will be trouble and a fine.”

Rico thanked him. Rachel took Rico’s hand and they called the others. When the going got rough, Rachel picked her way ahead of him. He got two great shots of her silhouette against the moonlit stones. Her pale dress fanned out like wings in the breeze, the red splash of her hair the only real color left against the gray.

They met Carlos on the path, and two muttering guards locked the gates behind them.

“Do you know how you’re going to get back in?” Rico asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “What about the others?”

“I haven’t asked them. Everyone is hungry and thirsty, no? Let’s go to the mission that we passed. After dinner I will ask.”

“For this, for the rest of the night, you are the guests of me and my car.”

Rico thanked him, as though he had a choice, but courtesy demanded it.

“There are snakes,” Carlos warned.
“Serpientes.”

He repeated the word for Rachel’s sake, but to her credit she didn’t flinch.

“There are
cenotes,
wells. They drop out from under you in this earth here. It falls in sometimes and swallows you up.”

“When was the last time?”

Carlos shrugged. “I don’t know. People just say.”

Village women glided in with the unsubtle dusk. Their arms resembled great wings, draped as they were with embroidery. Green- and blue-bordered sashes trailed them like fragile tail feathers. They held the dresses to Rachel and smoothed them out, sweeping her blaze of hair where they wanted it for effect in the dim light,
just so.
Their eyes reflected coffee and candlelight.

Rachel bought a white dress, a pretty one that immediately came unstitched, but it was that warm, happy time of evening just as the mosquitoes come out.

They downed a few beers at the mission bar, then dinner. Carlos stuck to Diet Coke and cigarettes that he snapped out of the pack to his lips in a graceful, one-handed flick. The others liked the idea, Rico knew they would.

Then Bob told them about the duct tape in his bag.

“For around the doors in the hotel in case there’s a fire,” he said. “But we could make a ball out of it and play on the court. That would be a trip.”

Rachel and Bernice laughed and toasted, “Yeah, let’s do it!”

They had two hours to kill. Carlos paced it off outside.

When Rico stepped outside for air, Carlos showed him the path. A power line strung out from the mission in a straight line to the temple grounds, for the tourist shop. Scrub brush came chest-high to Rico and wasn’t hard going except for the bugs.

Chiggers in the grass bit them up around the ankles. They were just drunk enough and the moon bright enough that they made it, still a little tipsy, sweating under the ivory disc of a moon. Bob’s duct-tape ball was a silver blur against the stones of the ball-court wall.

“Remember,” Bernice called out from some shadow to Rico’s right, “winning captain gets sacrificed.”

“Only on special occasions,” Rachel said.

She let go Rico’s hand and slapped the makeshift ball into the wall. It skidded, sparkling up along the stones in a long, smooth arc.

“You have to be quiet down there,” Carlos hissed. “The guards will hear.”

Rachel tugged Rico’s sleeve.

“Where are you going? Don’t you want to play?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I want to see the moon now from the top. Then I’ll come down and play.”

“You won’t,” she said. “You always say you will, but you won’t.”

The ringstone in his pocket irritated his right thigh with every step up the steep stairway of the temple. It felt heavier, colder.

“Play ball!” Bob said in a clear whisper.

Rico turned to watch Rachel run off to the game. He topped the temple stairs, conscious of the beer numbing his feet, toying with his balance. At the top, Carlos faced away from him, standing across a diagonal line of stone inlaid across the floor.

The doorsill at the tips of Rico’s feet dropped away down the rough stone face to the ball-court plaza. Now the moon polished the face of the stonework and lit up the countryside. All around them birdsongs started up, sleepy and confused at the light. The scent of allspice and bougainvillea hung in the humid stillness of the night.

The moon sighted down the diagonal between Rico’s feet. He did not feel a particular pull towards either side.

Bob scored below, his duct-tape ball
thwocketing
through the ancient stone goal. Because of the drinking and the excitement, Rico wasn’t surprised that Rachel called him by the wrong name. Rico had heard her use this very name by mistake instead of his own.

“Bob,”
she corrected herself, “I’m sorry. I meant ‘Yeah,
Bob,
nice shot!’”

Suddenly Rico stood awash in light. The shadow had swept aside while he was distracted, and now he heard other voices down below, speaking abrupt and agitated Spanish. Behind him, Carlos sighed and shuffled forward. He patted Rico’s back with his good arm.

“We’d better go down,” Carlos said. “Now we will all be fined. There is trouble. I hope you and your friends have money.”

Carlos flexed his left arm a couple of times before they started down.

“The arm,” Rico asked him, “will it work?”

Carlos shrugged in his way, intent on the footing. The moonlight’s angle dazzled them on their climb down, the way it reflected so brightly off the stone.

“Perhaps with exercise,” Carlos said.

When they were nearly down and the four guards approached with the others, Carlos asked, “And your woman? The girl?”

“It is lost,” he said. “Perhaps another time.”

The guards might have settled for a private sum and the whole matter could have been dropped right there. The chief of the guards delicately insisted that he and his men had standards. Bob indelicately shoved a wad of money under his nose before Rico could intervene. It became a long night.

The next morning in the city Rico sold his plane ticket and paid off the fine against Carlos and the station wagon.

Carlos drove Rachel and the others to the airport while Rico sold his ring to a thin, unhappy-looking jeweler above the courthouse. It came to quite a pile of pesos. By the time Carlos pulled in with his radiator steaming Rico had already moved into the spare room, the small one out on the porch with all the light.

Solaris walked in a week later, claiming a personal call. The remarkable albino left behind everything there was to know about Red Bartlett, or anyone who showed interest in Red Bartlett. Solaris implied that Rico could be back in the saddle soon. Meanwhile, they both had some whispers to drop and personal markers to call in, and it would start back in Costa Brava with a party at the embassy. Solaris even bought him a suit, a white one like the old boys wore in Guatemala, when there had been a Guatemala.

Rico was unofficially employed. He sweetened a rum to celebrate.

Chapter 17

La Libertad oozed like a great brown sore from the crusty foothills of the Jaguar Mountains to the sea. Sonja banked
Mariposa
around as gently as possible to give Harry an all-points view. Harry was getting better about flying, but he still white-knuckled it the whole way.

Industry met the sea at La Libertad, fouling the lucrative bathing beaches and the mandatory air alike with its thick, brown scum. Pollution was the Satan that President Garcia had sworn to smite when the Children of Eden won him his office. Fouled air framed the elegant, emerald islands of plenty in a sea of despair. The private grounds of the haciendas of the wealthy had long ago sucked the surrounding beauty dry.

No wonder the Gardeners are winning over the rich,
Sonja thought.
Greening the earth is noble. Feeding the poor is a threat.

The Gardeners promised the poor more food. While there was no more food, there
were
fewer people, so it worked out much the same.

Birthrate down to zero in some neighborhoods,
she thought.
But never a word on the news
—
the
Gardener
news.

Two large buildings that were not private stood out from the rest: the National Palace, home of President Garcia; and the United States Embassy. Sonja’s mother would be attending a reception at the embassy this afternoon and that made Sonja nervous. The reception would end after curfew, and her mother would have to spend the night.

I
don’t know what’s worse,
she thought.
Curfew roadblocks or drunk politicians.

In the past couple of years she’d had a few bad experiences with the drunk politicians, their backhand brushes against a breast, a bump against her butt. Sonja thought she’d take her chances with the roadblocks.

The palatial and embassy compounds were made more green, more beautiful, by the scabby contrast of the surrounding poverty that they fed upon.

Sonja watched the guns of the outdated Phalanx system on the embassy rooftop tracking her little biplane. The Phalanx was outdated, but blow-by alone would disintegrate her Student Prince. If she continued her course for a few more moments, a red flare would warn her off. If she did not change course within thirty seconds of the flare, she and Harry and her little biplane would be confetti.

Sonja throttled up and banked towards the Park of Justice and Mercy, and as they lost altitude she heard clearly the horns of morning traffic blare over Harry’s groan and the clatter of her engine.

La Libertad was not a peaceful city, even from the air.

A Holy Week procession intersected a political march, and between icons Sonja could read signs like: “Alphabets not Bullets,” “Beans and Liberty,” “Arrest the Death Merchants.” She wasn’t quite low enough to recognize faces. Sonja was sure that both she and Harry knew some of the demonstrators. Students all over Costa Brava chose this spring vacation to march the streets with their signs and masks.

Three truckloads of soldiers positioned themselves ahead of the marchers and to either side. One soldier pointed up at Sonja’s plane, and another spoke into his Sidekick. A Mongoose vertical takeoff jump jet had been hovering near the crowd; now it turned on axis and rose to Sonja’s altitude. She changed course again, heading back home via the long loop up the valley.

“What’s going on?” Harry asked, pointing towards the crowd.

His voice sounded distant over the FM headset, though he was only an arm’s reach in front of her.

“Peace and Freedom Party march,” she said. “Mostly high school kids. Death squads executed three teachers yesterday.”

“I didn’t hear about that.”

It wasn’t in the papers,
Sonja thought.

She had read it on her console, one in a string of mysterious messages that appeared under the signature “Mariposa.”

What do they want from me?
she wondered.

The Peace and Freedom Party was Costa Brava’s legal arm of the guerrilla underground, and they had to know that she was watched constantly. Anyone with an aircraft, even an old biplane, was monitored. Her flight log could be faked, but the rationed gasoline could not. Her hours of flight per liter of gas had to match her logbook entries precisely, or the Garcia goons would simply cut out her gas card. Worse yet, they could impound her plane and shoot her.

Of course, I could just use gas from the car,
she thought.
That’s the beauty of an old machine. But it’s a hassle.

And they would catch her, anyway. Precious few airplanes in Costa Brava did
not
belong to the young officer corps, and the last Student Prince in Latin America was particularly visible.

Harry pointed off to their right.

“Company,” he said.

An old Dragonfly had taken watch over the crowd. The black Mongoose remained behind them, though far enough back to be nearly invisible against the sun.

One klick back? Or three?

Then Sonja realized that it didn’t matter. The jump jet could be on top of her in a blink, either way.

“I saw one paleface in the jump seat,” Harry said. “Couldn’t tell about the pilot because of the helmet.”

The gunship was too far away for her to make out detail now.

“What do you suppose they want?” he asked.

“Careful,” Sonja warned him. “This FM’s good for almost a kilometer.”

She flew on in silence, skirting the Jaguar Mountains to take advantage of the lift. This route took her to the edge of the protected airspace around the ViraVax facility. She skirted that edge in a semicircle to get a better look.

From the air the compound looked like any other large, successful farming operation. All the barns and sheds were immaculately kept and lined up in order. The main complex looked like a simple packing plant, though she knew from what her father told her that it took up several stories underground.

On close inspection she noted the subtleties of the chopper pad, gardens atop camouflaged bunkers, the three separate perimeters of razor wire.

Dad worked there longer than I’ve been alive,
she thought,
and I still don’t know what he did for them, or why.

Her mom said that some levels in that compound even
he
couldn’t access.

It seemed strange to Sonja to know so little of the place that took up so much of her father’s life. She felt resentful that he chose to spend his life there instead of with her, and doubly resentful that no one from ViraVax ever called to see how they were doing.

A group of
deficientes,
dressed in blues and reds and browns, turned their faces skyward and shielded their eyes from the sun.

He spent nearly twenty years there,
she thought,
and now it’s like he never existed.

Sonja’s reverie was shattered by the flyby roar and back draft from the Mongoose. The biplane lifted as though by the hand of God, then nosed over. Sonja yanked the throttle, dropped the nose even more to gain speed, then leveled out at about ten meters from the treetops.

“Jesus Christ!” Harry yelled. “They tried to kill us!”

The Mongoose wallowed to a stop, turned slowly on its column of air and closed the gap once again. Sonja tried lifting the nose but that just sucked her further into the turbulence of the jet wash and battered her eighty-three-year-old plane nearly apart.

This time Sonja didn’t have the altitude to spare and she nearly clipped the treetops. The hillside below dropped into a canyon and Sonja dropped with it. Maybe she could save them, after all.

Sonja’s attention came back to Harry, who kept repeating “Shit!” over and over behind her.

An officious-sounding male voice drowned him out on the FM.

“Shut up,” the voice said. “Land on that pad to your northeast.”

The voice spoke unaccented English. The pad he indicated was in the middle of the ViraVax compound, and the Mongoose hovered between them and freedom. She didn’t know who these people were, but if they wanted her they were going to have to earn her.

Sonja pulled her FM off, leaned up in the cockpit and yelled at Harry.

“Hold on!”

Sonja wasn’t going to put down at ViraVax. She wanted to get as far away as possible before they forced her down, hopefully far enough from ViraVax that someone would see what was happening. The Mongoose came in from her left and fired a cannon burst across her bow. Sonja opened her throttle wide and headed straight down-valley.