ViraVax (14 page)

Chapter 20

Joshua Casey was a big-voiced little man with a swagger to match. This afternoon the voice was louder than usual, the swagger more subdued. Even the dullest of the Innocents who had been around him longest knew this to be a deadly combination. Joshua Casey was often angry, but this time his anger was white-hot, and the object of that anger was Dajaj Mishwe.

“I wanted subtle, Daj,” Casey growled. “Bombing is not subtle. Kidnapping, that’s not really very subtle, either.”

Casey paced, his fists tight as he ranted.

“I fear those who might discover our hard-won secrets,” he said. “You don’t understand that world out there, Daj, so
stay out of it!
We must never trust even our family or our dearest friends out there. They share the power of betrayal. We are wedded to these secrets, till death do us part, you and I and everyone here. This is
your
world,
your
family.”

Casey shook the tension out of his fingers and faced Mishwe.

“Now,” he said, “tell me your version of what happened outside, and your part in it. Convince me that it does not threaten us here as I believe. Answer to me, Daj, or before the Sabbath ends you will answer to the Master.”

Mishwe stood at the doorway to Casey’s topside office, his wide smile undiminished by the outburst. He knew how much Casey hated the comparative vulnerability of his topside offices. Forcing the meeting topside actually gave Mishwe the edge. Casey would be angry, this he knew. But fear would be the basis for this anger—fear that what Mishwe had done would be discovered, and the greater fear that a disaster would catch Casey topside, exposed, out of the safety of his bunkers.

Mishwe knew his own limitations in social intercourse, and he knew Casey’s moods. He would not leave the doorway until he was ordered inside or until he was sure that he wouldn’t need it. Dajaj Mishwe did not fear Joshua Casey personally—he knew he would snap the man like a pencil when the time came—but Mishwe always kept a back door open, even at Level Five. The discovery of that back door, and its secrets, became the death of Red Bartlett.

“Some valuables that belonged to us were in danger of being misplaced,” Mishwe said. “I brought them here for safekeeping.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Casey growled. “Don’t insult me. There are the matters of a rather messy
U.S. Embassy
bombing and a kidnapping of two children of high-level Americans, both with ties to
this facility!
”

“The bombing?” Mishwe shrugged, nonplussed. “It is blamed on the Colonel. He was a problem for us and now his own people will drive him out. The children? We want to assess our results with them, no? Take them to stage three? We have them here. We want the Colonel? He will come after them or his own people will drive him to us.”

Casey stepped closer and his breath bathed Mishwe in the odor of raw garlic. Casey ate whole cloves of garlic to combat his precipitous blood pressure. Judging from the flush on his face, he wasn’t having much luck.

Casey pointed a finger at him, and Mishwe resisted the urge to snap it off.

“And you used the Mongoose in an unauthorized operation,” Casey said. “You went over my head to use a highly visible tool that is not supposed to be in our hands. Now, the Colonel. The embassy lists him as missing. What will he do? Lie still? You don’t know this man.”

Casey’s neck began to tremble and he breathed deeply twice to calm himself. “I warned you after the Bartlett incident—stick to your lab rats and leave the strategy to me. Is that clear?”

Mishwe tightened, his smile faded. “But you don’t see—”
 

“—I see that you’ve endangered a dozen sensitive projects.” Casey’s fury sent droplets of spittle flying. “I see that you’ve endangered this very facility, our organization. The Master believes that you have endangered the Children of Eden as well.”

“But they are
mine’’
Mishwe said. He pointed his finger at Casey’s chest. “I
made
them, I have the
right
—”

“—This facility
arranged
those children,” Casey said, “the way a grandmother might arrange a marriage.
God
made them. Do not equate yourself with God, that is blasphemy. And I am this facility. If they
belong
to anyone, they belong to me. As you belong to me. You gave up your rights when you came here, barely a step ahead of the law. We work as a team here. I will not have you or anyone else making decisions that affect our security. The squad who operated for you has been transferred to your lab. I want everything you can get from them; make sure nothing is unturned. Then disappear every one of them down to the cellular level, clear?”

Mishwe offered no response. He had expected a reprimand, but he also had been sure that Casey would understand completely once he’d explained. These particular children were successful products of the first viral-assisted human conceptions. They were clones. To let them go unstudied would be scientific neglect of criminal proportions. And to people the Garden of Eden with anyone less than Adam and Eve would be the truest blasphemy. . . .

“You’re confined to deep quarters,” Casey said. “I can’t trust you topside, and if there’s trouble I don’t want you available. You have some atonement ahead of you. Meditate on that, and ask God to show you the way.”

“You can’t. . . ”

Casey turned to his console and addressed his machine.

“Code Q, Suite 1-A. Code Q, Suite 1-A.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” Mishwe said.

He let his face show neither anger nor fear, only disappointment.

“You didn’t give me a choice,” Casey said.

Two security guards carrying Colt Bullpups appeared behind Mishwe with no more noise than fog over a riverbank. One placed a precautionary muzzle to Mishwe’s head, but Casey waved it away.

“I need your cooperation, Dajaj,” Casey said, his voice a growl. “I need your
voluntary
cooperation. But something of this magnitude cannot go unanswered. I suggest you spend this Sabbath in prayer and reflection. Only you can come up with the perfect atonement for this indiscretion.”

Casey nodded once, and the guards started Mishwe on the decontamination route to his lab.

“Dajaj!” Casey called after him. “Do those children no harm whatsoever or I will feed you to your rats myself.”

I
have the perfect atonement,
Mishwe thought, and smiled.

On his way to Level Five, he daydreamed of the Great Cleansing coming soon.

Chapter 21

Harry smelled the familiar burst of blood in his nose and thought for a moment that he was home. Something snapped his head back, and a facemask shoved itself into his field of vision. Blue eyes flicked a quick, assessing glance over him.

“Hey!” Harry yelled, releasing his harness. “What the hell. . . ?”

Someone popped a spray at his face, and someone else shouted at Sonja, but the helmet speaker was off, so it sounded like a child at the bottom of a well calling for its mother.

“Freeze!”

A spatter of blood brightened the cockpit’s leather liner, but he couldn’t move to find out where it came from. He had no sensation at all in his arms or legs. Blank spots swam across his vision, like great black amoebas, and time slowed way down. His pulse and respiration also slowed, and his body broke out in a profuse sweat.

Sonja moaned just a few meters away and Harry agonized because he could do nothing for her.

“Look at me!”

The spacebitch’s voice commanded, though muffled through the seals of her hazmat suit, and Harry’s body tried its best to obey. She, too, was sweating: the suit’s conditioner could barely keep her faceplate clear. He tried to focus, but all that came to him was the blur of her blue eyes. His eyes twitched uncontrollably from side to side. When he quit trying to control them, the spasms stopped.

He knew from the blue eyes and the bio suit that she was ViraVax security, Night School trained and equipped. No natives were allowed in the Night School or in ViraVax security, though the Colonel had admitted applicants from other nations as long as they became U.S. citizens. Precious few were willing to do that these days.

Harry was not surprised that his father didn’t trust the locals. Maybe that was part of why they took him off the Night School and stuck him in the embassy. The Colonel didn’t trust anyone, even his superiors, and he had made that clear. They saw it as paranoia aggravated by booze.

Spacebitch and her partner wrestled Harry out of the cockpit and dumped him unceremoniously onto the ground. The next time he saw those blue eyes in the bio suit look down on him, they spun down a long dark tunnel just out of reach, and Harry fell in after them.

Harry woke on his back, hot and under lights, bright lights. His musculature rippled with uncoordinated twitchings. He managed to get his legs and arms to work well enough to roll himself onto his belly. This way the glare didn’t pain his eyes quite so much. Harry’s mouth was very dry and sore and tasted like an old handkerchief.

“If you move too much you’ll get sick.”

The voice was Sonja’s, off to his left. The pulse in his ears was his own. He couldn’t focus on Sonja; the effort hurt his eyes and started them twitching again.

“Pull up your sheet,” she told him, “you’re naked.”

Harry scrabbled his hands against a pillow, mattress, bed frame. He found the corner of a sheet and pulled it over his shoulder. That was much too hot, so he shrugged it off to his waist. The tremors came and went. When they mostly went, his vision began to clear and the lights didn’t seem so bright. Sonja was asking him something over the loud rushing in his ears.

“. . . hear me? Harry?”

Sonja spoke to him from a bunk across the room. She had her sheet pulled up to her chin, and she sat upright against an institutional-pink wall. Wet blonde hair tangled around her face and shoulders, dampening her sheet. Harry’s own hair was wet, too, but not from sweat. He could not tell whether she’d been crying.

“Yes,” he answered, “I hear you.”

His voice squeaked a little in his dry throat.

Harry sat up and looked the room over. Not much to see: Windows at the far end, very bright light, lots of plants outside; refrigerator, cupboards, sink, door. Sonja’s bunk, a foldout type, nearly touched his in the center of a room empty of embellishment or inspiration. Another door, table with two chairs. Back to the windows.

“Are you okay?” he rasped. “Is the plane okay? She was hit. . . ?”

“I’m okay. Sore and sick.
Mariposa
wasn’t hit, but the crash definitely killed her.”

Sonja spoke in a monotone, her knees pulled to her chin and her lips buried in her sheet.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Harry said.

He wanted to reach out and touch her but he didn’t trust his trembling muscles. He blinked his eyes rapidly but his vision didn’t clear any faster.

“Did they bring anyone else here?”

“No,” she said. “Just you and me.”

“What’s behind the doors?”

“We’re monitored,” she cautioned, and lifted her gaze to a thumb-sized wide-angle bubble overhead.

“We don’t want them to know what we know,” she said. “It’s in the handbook under ‘Don’t let them know what you know.’ “

Harry’s stomach untightened a little in relief at her wry humor.

Her monotone must have been for the camera’s sake.

Harry chilled suddenly, and when the chill passed he felt more in control of his arms and legs.

“Where are we?” he asked, indicating the foliage outside their window.

It looked like Mosquito Coast country around Monkey Boy Creek.

“Decontamination,” Sonja said.

She answered the question in his gaze.

“It’s not a window,” she said.

At that, the scene shifted and reshifted to become the cinder-ridden tree line of the volcano Izalco.

Harry tested his legs, then stood up, clutching his sheet like a lifeline.

“Is one of these doors a bathroom?” he asked. “I’m sure that’s not a national security question.”

Sonja raised her voice and nodded at the door. “The end of my bed.” She moved to the foot of her bed so that she could whisper as he walked by: “I saw shadows moving behind the mirror. Two of them.”

Harry pulled his sheet into the bathroom with him, regarded himself in the mirror and used the toilet. The room was small with just a basin, shower and toilet. Walls and floor were made entirely of one piece of porcelain with a large drain in the middle of the shower area.

Not large enough to get through,
he thought.

His father had taken him through a warehouse drain once, as part of one of Harry’s hostage-escape lessons. Harry showered four or five times a day for weeks afterward, and he was glad for the excuse not to go that way.

Little packages of soap, shampoo and conditioner sat out on the counter just like in the hotels. Someone had already scrubbed him clean, but they hadn’t bothered to dry him off very well.

Harry tried to position himself so that his back was to the mirror. He had to lean against the wall that the mirror was on, directly across from the door. He knew that they probably had a wide-angle that would pick him up, anyway, but he tried not to think about it.

He turned, adjusting his sheet, and studied the mirror from an angle.

There!

A sliver of light on, then off, as someone slipped through a door in a darkened room. Sonja was right. When he relaxed his gaze, he saw dim features on the other side of the glass, two faces reflecting the red wash from their controls.

“Of course it’s the Double-Vee,” Sonja went on, loud enough for him to hear through the door. “Who else would allow that idiot pilot in anything but a bad suit? You call that flying?”

He faked a dizziness and leaned against the mirror. It was good old glass, not metal or petroleum. Through his palm and forehead he detected a flurry of activity behind the mirror, then a high-pitched machinery whine.

This time the dizziness was real, and his stomach lurched towards his throat. Like anyone reared in Costa Brava, Harry had experienced his share of earthquakes. This movement was not the characteristic jolt-and-roll of the local temblors, but a prolonged sinking. . . .

Decontamination,
Harry thought.
We’re starting down.

He didn’t know much about what happened in the bowels of ViraVax, but he had heard a lot of stories. The sinking feeling in his stomach wasn’t all the fault of their elevator.

He opened the bathroom door and stood under its frame, anyway. Harry didn’t feel so nauseated standing up, and he got a better view of their room. The peel-and-peek that he had mistaken for a window now hosted a clean-cut young Gardener, pointer in hand, explaining decontamination precautions.

Sonja was not paying attention to the canned spiel coming from the viewscreen, even though she had the volume as high as Harry could stand it. Both she and Harry pretended interest in the safety instructions, though Harry knew that they didn’t have to worry about that. Clearly, wherever they went would be under escort.

Harry leaned over and whispered, “They’ll split us up, sooner or later. They probably only had the one decon elevator available. If you get the chance to run, don’t think about me, just
go
.”

Sonja laughed. “Where to?” she asked. “Even the Pentagon isn’t as secure as this place, you told me that yourself.”

Harry shrugged. “Something might come up,” he said. “Just be sure you’re ready for it when it does.”

Harry tried to think of a few somethings that might come up, but his thinking was mushy, like running in molasses.

“. . . at first I thought they were after your dad,” Sonja was saying.

“What?” Harry snapped his attention into focus. “What about my dad?”

She reached up and squeezed his hand.

“Something blew up at the embassy,” she said, her voice still noncommittal. “They say your dad did it. I didn’t hear anything about. . . about anyone else, except that no Americans were killed.”

Grace was at the embassy. Nancy Bartlett was there, too.

He wouldn’t be that crazy.
. . .

Harry wouldn’t bet his Litespeed on it.

“Where did you hear this?”

“On board the Mongoose, when they were bringing us in. It was on the radio.”

“The sonofabitch.”

Sonja squeezed Harry’s hand again, twice, and he remembered they were being watched. The Gardener on-screen directed them to several faithlines that they could access via satlink.

Harry changed the subject.

“What do you mean ‘at first’?” he asked. “Who do you think they’re after now?”

“They’re after us,” she said. “Your dad’s just icing on the cake. Doesn’t the book say they usually separate prisoners?”

Harry shuffled from the bathroom, careful to close the door behind him. They were undoubtedly observed in either room, but it made him feel like he’d shut out something noxious. He paused to examine the second door at the foot of his own bunk before answering.

Solid. No latch on the inside.

“Maybe we aren’t prisoners.”

“What else would we be, then, locked up here like this?”

Harry didn’t even have to think about that one.

“The other’s over the peel.”

Harry felt like he was smothering, for a moment, then his ears popped and he felt the
whish
of conditioned air.

“They exchange and sterilize the air completely at every level,” she said with a nod at the screen. “The dzee on the peel just explained it.”

Through the sweaty sheets, Sonja’s naked hip touched his own. He had dreamed of her touch more than once, but never this way. Still, he did not lean away. Neither did she.

“So,” he said. “They’re probably not holding us hostage. That would be stupid, even for them. We could describe the Mongoose, this place—’course, they could send us out of here with completely new memories.”

“They can do that?” Sonja asked.

Her pale face paled even more.

Harry shrugged. “It was part of a study the army did out here,” he said. “My dad objected to having a civilian company involved. ViraVax claimed that he was a Catholic and prejudiced against the Children of Eden. I never heard of anyone actually
using
what they developed here. . . .”

“They brought my mother here after my father was killed,” Sonja said. “It was much closer to get her to the hospital at La Libertad but they said this was more secure. . . .”

Once again they struck a silence between them. Harry half listened to the missionary explaining the timesaving features of their cubicle. His attention pricked up when the dzee said, “When this orientation is complete, a console will be provided to maximize your time here in the bosom of God’s plenty. Praise Jesus, for He is the Vine and we are the branches. . . .”

A console!

“Did you see the spacesuits they wore?” Sonja asked. “They were afraid to touch us until they got us in here.”

“Maybe they did something to your dad and to my dad, and now they want to see what it’s done to us.”

“That’s the way the guards talked.”

Harry felt chilled again.

What if I get like my dad?

That thought scared him as much as his capture.

“Mariposa warned me, too,” Sonja said.

“The mysterious woman of the webs,” Harry said.

His mouth still didn’t work right and it came out like mush.

“Mariposa could be a man or a woman, or several people,” Sonja said. “But I have the sense that she’s a she, and one person, and she’s trying to help.”

“A key would be nice.”

The peel-and-peek washed itself clean with a sweep of intense white light. A dark-skinned, bald-headed man came into focus, naked to the waist. He bowed and grinned at them through the backlight glare.

“Welcome,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”

The camera pulled back and the bald-headed dzee gestured two
deficientes
into view.

“Matt and Deborah will assist you through decon,” he said. “Please do not hinder them or confuse them in their duties. They become anxious when things don’t go as planned.”

Baldy patted each of them on the shoulder, and the couple, who looked to be about Harry’s age, smiled broadly.

“What
is
your plan?” Harry blurted.

“Your console will be available shortly. I will speak with you again at that time.”

The screen blanked, then displayed a rain-forest waterfall with the caption “Another piece of our Garden won back!”

Harry couldn’t sit still. He had to pace the tiny room in a jerky stumble, trailing his sheet behind him. He noticed that not just their walls, but the ceilings, bunks, and doors were all shades of pink.