ViraVax (12 page)

Chapter 18

Ex-Colonel Rico Toledo prepared for the embassy’s afternoon party and tried not to be ashamed at the sight his bathroom mirror showed him.

Ten kilos overweight,
he thought.

Rico noted the circles and bags under his eyes, the hint of yellow around the blue irises, the flab at his throat that exaggerated his scissors scar. His T-shirt did not ride up on his belly anymore; at least his short vacation had cured
that
much.

Dropped about fifty kilos of girlfriend, too,
he thought.

He hadn’t been taking applications, either, and this would be another evening alone among the jet set. Besides, attending a formal function solo would make him look properly repentant.

Rico washed his face again, the water as hot as he could stand it. He had been invited to the embassy party for a reason, but so far no one would tell him that reason. His gut told him that he had better be on his best behavior, something that got harder for him every day. He tossed off the last of his Wild Turkey and rinsed with a mouthwash.

I’ll switch to beer,
he thought.
That smooths out my wrinkles pretty well.

A shudder chilled him to the quick in spite of Costa Brava’s heat and humidity.

The Colonel’s drinking had kept his socializing down, but it dampened the cycles of unreasonable lust that overwhelmed him lately. Alcohol had not kept down the terrible hot rage that also seized him at odd moments. In fact, the drinking took him to the edge of rage where the Colonel rode its crest like a champion surfer. Only his greatest effort reined this rage in. After the incident with Red Bartlett he had more to fear than his unbridled tantrums.

I get fevers,
he thought,
and night sweats. Fevers come with bugs, and I’ve been bodyguard to the bugmaster.

Rico had started charting his fevers, rages and lusts the way a woman might chart her ovulations. He wanted evidence undeniable, evidence that would prove his need for drink to be out of his control and not his fault. He wanted any responsibility except his own and, what was worse, he knew that.

His log revealed that his cycle was dictated by the cycle of whatever woman he was with. When he was with two women, when his affair with Rachel began and overlapped his marriage to Grace, his drinking and bullying became erratic. But the intensity was increasing, and he didn’t know how much more he could take.

Rico checked the mirror again, and his face looked better, flushed to color from the hot water. He saw the color, ignored the webwork of broken vessels that created it. He was struck, again, by the similarity of his son’s features to his own. Even dissolution and flab couldn’t hide that.

Harry looks so much like me that it scares me,
he admitted.

Rico thought that whatever had come between them had been a result of this mysterious rage. Staying away was the safer bet— Harry was right—but Rico felt cowardly staying away and he didn’t like that as much as he didn’t like the rage. He would have to do something about that. Meanwhile, he would put out new feelers on Casey’s operation, and the embassy party would be a good place to find out whether El Indio was still willing to work with him. His work had saved him before.

When?
he wondered.
When could they have slipped me a bug?

His military inoculations came long before Casey’s time. Casey’s people tampered with inoculations, IV solutions, even irrigation water these days, fully authorized from Rico’s command. The Colonel had been a good soldier, he had kept his mouth shut.

The hospital, then?

That was the likeliest time. Rico shuddered again to think how long he’d been in Casey’s grip. It had to be that time at the embassy hospital, after the beating he got at the gates. Now he questioned everything, even the coincidence of the beating.

What else did they do to me there? And who in the Agency knows about this?

He and Grace had been newlyweds when he had been drawn into the weekly ruckus by the taunting from some demonstrators. After what he’d been through in Guatemala, Rico didn’t take confrontation quietly. Grace had been in-country less than a year and he was already a hero, something he’d wanted her to see for herself.

Immediately following his hospitalization, Rico and Grace had a baby due. He’d wanted Harry born back home in Seattle, but Grace disagreed. She’d insisted on making the best political position possible in Costa Brava, and that had included a show of faith in local medicine. Besides, embassy personnel always had the ViraVax medical team available for emergencies.

It paid off,
he thought.
I’ll
give her that.

If it hadn’t paid off in a big way, Rico wouldn’t be heading to the embassy tonight. In spite of his recent indiscretions, and in spite of the turn of this government towards the evangelicals, Rico Toledo owned a lot of favors, thanks to Grace. He vowed to use those favors wisely.

His thoughts flashed on Red Bartlett, on the real story that even Nancy Bartlett hadn’t been allowed to remember. Another shudder iced his spine and he shook it off.

I
s
some of my memory altered, too?
he wondered.
Am I going to end up like Red?

The Colonel had played the superspy game for nearly twenty years. All that he knew for sure about that time was that Harry was his son. That much he could see for himself.

The little shit’s got balls, I’ll give him that,
he thought.
He looks so damned much like me, I can’t believe it.

The Colonel’s sour stomach churned and his palms leaked a constant, clammy sweat.

If they did give me something, I sure hope it wasn’t passed on to Harry.

Something horrible inside Rico fought to get out, and alcohol would spring it loose. He rinsed out his glass and downed a few swallows of water. This embassy party would be the acid test.

Rico had some scores to settle, and he needed some help. He would go right to the top, to El Indio, the one man Rico had never seen, whose voice he had never heard. All communication with El Indio was by whisper or on the webs. Rico resented the webs and considered anything electronic compromised, but he would resort to electrons to find El Indio.

Rico would need something to trade. Right now, he didn’t have much of anything but an attitude and a bad reputation.

His drive from his rooming house to the embassy was interrupted twice when army patrols blocked traffic and dragged people from their cars. This had become so much a part of his life that it was nearly invisible to him now, except that he was becoming conscious of his new vulnerability as a civilian.

At one traffic light a skinny
indio
washed his windows and offered to sell him a roll of toilet paper. The sun over the boy’s shoulder was blocked by the evening flight of hundreds of green, shrieking parrots. The boy wore a dozen rolls of toilet paper strung on a rope necklace, and warned Rico that the shortage would only get worse. Rico bought two rolls and tipped the boy two darios for the windows.

Four marines passed the Colonel through the gate, and a Costa Bravan corporal parked his car for him. When he exited Search and Sniff, Rico saw the divorced woman Yolanda Rubia talking with Major Scholz. Señora Rubia had been his neighbor in Colonia Escalón, and the neighborhood’s only divorcee. Her ex-husband, Philip, was one of the coffee cartel’s richest merchants. A family feud with the Garcias kept him out of the country most of the time.

Rico had rescued one of their daughters from a death squad years ago, the operation clandestine, quick and lucky. Yolanda’s family disowned her when she divorced, but her children stuck by her. The Colonel stepped in one time when soldiers came to the house. The Colonel’s position with the Agency made things easier but still they were far from easy. One sister kept touch by whisper through the Colonel until her husband got the black roses at work.

Having someone killed was not a problem in Costa Brava, but a divorce reflected poorly on the system. The remaining Catholic aristocracy meted out punishments for the sins of its own in costs which had little to do with money. Rico had experienced these hidden costs himself. He had a hunch about Yolanda, a hunch he still carried, and a debt that he now wanted to collect.

In the language of the pamphleteers of the left, Costa Brava’s coffee
fincas
rooted themselves in the pungency of the poor. Above the root line it was orchids, toucans, parrots and coffee. When the world wore dust and tattered cotton, Yolanda’s family wore silk.

The Colonel reached out to shake her hand and suddenly her silk was spattered with blood—the Colonel’s blood.

The Colonel woke up under a table, against the wall, with Yolanda Rubia pushing herself out from under his legs. Somebody had bombed the reception, and Rico stood between Yolanda and the bomb. The unfortunate Lady Piedras had shielded the Colonel from the blast. His legs didn’t work and he tumbled Yolanda to the floor again in a heap. That, too, was lucky. Someone started shooting at someone else outside and several bursts of rifle fire stitched the wall just centimeters above their heads.

“Come!”

Yolanda helped him up by the armpits, then he crawled across broken glass behind her through the reception pantry to the alleyway. The wounded started to scream and the Colonel’s ears throbbed to an invisible beat. Yolanda pulled him along with her, displaying a physical strength that he never imagined her to have.

He was ashamed, later, that he had not thought to look for Grace or Nancy Bartlett. The Colonel’s thinking was scrambled by the blast, and it was a few hours before he recovered.

As Yolanda recalled later: “It was fortunate for the Colonel that Lady Piedras was of a size.”

The Colonel remembered very well the pavement litter, the aftersmell of tropical rain, the urgency. He followed because of the hypnotic quality of Yolanda’s large brown eyes.

Rico realized soon enough that she hadn’t been staring longingly into his eyes. It was all the blood from his scalp and face. The Colonel understood, finally, that he had been hit. He thought that the pain gods were sporting for putting the message off as long as they did.

A yellow Mercedes sedan pulled up where the alley opened onto the Avenue of Liberty or Death. Yolanda pulled the Colonel down in the back seat while her driver zigzagged through the city and past the coffee
fincas
a few kilometers south. The pain intensified to the percussion of back road chuckholes.

“I am ‘Elena,’ “ Yolanda confessed simply as she helped him out of his bloody shirt.

The Colonel was too stunned from his wounds to respond. That she was Elena, his contact with the guerrilla underground, seemed logical to him. This had been his hunch, and this hunch had let him intervene in her country’s machinations against her. Presidents had died on this soil for less.

Two impressions stayed with the Colonel as he tied his shirt tight to his scalp: the rich smell of new leather upholstery and Yolanda’s thick perfume.

“What do you call it?” he asked her. “The perfume?”

“ ‘Poison.’ “

Fitting, no?
the Colonel thought.

His man, El Indio, got them into cover that night at a country retreat of the French Embassy. A French physician stitched him up while Yolanda worked the angles. Three hours later, they headed for the mountains on Irish papers. When they got to the mountains the news came through that two Irish nationals had been killed attempting to bomb the Archbishop’s office.

“The government says they were hired by the Peace and Freedom Party to make it look like a piece of government work,” Yolanda informed him, “and the bomb was identical to the one that hit us at the embassy.”

“So, they’re saying that your people bombed the embassy
and
the Archbishop, and that you tried to pin it on Garcia?”

“Yes.”

“Somebody wants you, me, the Archbishop, the embassy
and
Garcia.”

“Who would see all of us as the enemy?” she asked. “Those who hate the Archbishop side with Garcia.”

“Unless Garcia’s a sacrifice,” Rico said.

“On whose altar?”

“On the altar of the Children of Eden.”

El Indio’s contact at the French Embassy had filled them in via a network scramble that smelled strongly of Agency work. High-level Agency work.

“Somebody else to blame,” Rico said. “Casey is stirring up all the hornets. Trouble is, mad bees sting everybody, Republicans
and
Democrats.”

“Israeli agents captured two Irish nationals in New York,” the report said. “Britain had paper out on them, but the Israelis were persuaded to make delivery to a clandestine jail in the Confederation of Costa Brava for ‘a big whisper.’ “

The two Irish were dead; the Colonel and Yolanda held their passports.

Everybody’s getting into the act,
Rico thought.

He scanned the rest of the Frenchman’s briefing.

“Costa Bravan authorities fingered the dead Irish for the embassy job, claiming they were assisted by two agents of the Peace and Freedom’s guerrilla arm: Rico Toledo and Yolanda Rubia.”

The government came out smelling like
plumeria,
he and Yolanda didn’t. It was too pat. No mention yet of Grace or Nancy.

Company waited for them in the mountains.

El Indio didn’t meet them in the highlands, but he had covered everything. A Korean doctor checked out the Frenchman’s work on the Colonel’s head and face. Rico had hoped to meet El Indio face-to-face, but he was vain enough to be thankful it wasn’t today. For twenty years he’d had contact with El Indio, very indirect contact which always traced back to thin air. He knew that El Indio had to be rich, because of a quality, a classy touch, to everything he did that the Colonel couldn’t quite explain.

El Indio sent a woman who traded their Irish passports straight across for Canadian paper, the best anyone could make of a truly smelly scene, and it turned into one of those impromptu alliances that paid off on all fronts, against the odds.

The odds started churning again.

Their hideout in the highlands was a four-bedroom town house, with complete office and satlink consoles set out like the mints on their pillows. The rebels operated a restaurant two blocks towards the lake, across the highway from the mechanic’s shop, which they also owned. Yolanda pointed out more.