ViraVax (15 page)

We’re either on another planet, or I’m still rummy from the spray.

He focused on Sonja’s blue eyes. Finally, she smiled.

“ViraVax,” he said. “Chill.”

Sonja nodded.

“I was hoping maybe I was hallucinating.”

“My dad talked about their decon,” she said. “The first time it takes hours, and they do it in a pink room because pink calms people down.”

“Great,” Harry said. “The only facility in the world guarded by security developed by my father. That was before the Agency pulled out, and we can see they’ve gone downhill. All five levels underground can survive a direct hit by a nuke. This place has a private army better than most countries. Our odds of getting out of here are not good.”

A human figure filled the screen. The bald-headed dzee picked up as though they’d been in the middle of a conversation.

“You’ve been rattled,” Baldy said. “We’re keeping you here for observation.”

“I guess that’s right, since you did the rattling,” Harry said. “For how long? Twenty-four hours? Twenty-four years?”

“Until we have what we need,” he answered.

“You promised a console the next time you saw us,” Sonja said. “Where is it?”

Baldy blinked a couple of times, looked off camera and then back.

“Yes, that will be provided.”

“What about my mother, and Sonja’s mom?” Harry asked. “They were at the embassy. . . .”

“The embassy has them under protection,” Baldy said. “They are not harmed.”

The man’s voice was soft, modulated, accented from a region that Harry couldn’t place. His gaze was intense, chilling. Baldy didn’t budge, and neither did his smile. Harry cautioned himself to believe nothing, like the textbook said.

Consider everything a lie which is not an order,
Harry recalled.

He hoped, at the very least, that his mother was not here at the Double-Vee.

“And where are we?”

“You are not home.”

“Tell us something we don’t already know,” Sonja muttered.

“If I did that,” he said, “we wouldn’t have any fun at all, would we? I would tell you things, then you would tell me things, then we would just sit around, bored and crabby, picking on one another. We have all the time in the world, and this is much more interesting.”

Harry caught a glimpse of several wide, round faces staring at the camera from a white room behind Baldy. One of them pointed and laughed around a huge tongue. Right at the edge of his awareness, Harry perceived a very high, very faint mechanical whine.

“My name is Mishwe,” Baldy said. “You are under my supervision. Your health is excellent and will remain so. Any communication to or from the outside comes through me. A handset and console are provided for this purpose. This is a biological hazards area, so your door will remain locked for your own protection. ‘patrolled by guard virus,’ you might say. Exploration discouraged, should you find yourself outside.”

“What about our clothes?” Harry asked.

“For now, you’re wearing them. Think of yourselves as Adam and Eve for the moment, and be unashamed.”

The door
snicked
open and Harry jumped towards it. His vision flickered, winked, and he woke up in a heap on the floor, weak as water. Mishwe smiled at him from the peel.

“A test and a demonstration,” Mishwe said.

“Eat shit and die,” Harry mumbled through jaws locked tight in spasm.

The dzee appeared not to hear.

“Your bodies will not tolerate sudden moves,” Mishwe said. “Whatever you do, I suggest you do it slowly.”

The doorlock whisked shut. The whine deepened, then picked up with a noticeable lurch.

“They’re cycling us down another level,” Sonja said. “That’s two so far.”

The deeper they went, the worse their chances.

Sonja helped Harry onto his bed and pulled his sheet up for him. Uncontrollable trembling in his legs and arms rendered him helpless. She draped part of her sheet over his own and lay down beside him. She began a vigorous rubbing of his arms.

“I’m not cold,” he told her. “Whatever he did wiped out my muscle control. I’m not cold, I just can’t stop shaking.”

Even as he spoke, the shakes let up. Harry stretched each arm and leg carefully, then tried to rise. Sonja gently pushed him back down. Her lips brushed his ear.

“Don’t let them see how fast you recover,” she whispered.

Of course!
Harry thought.

He had been taught hostage protocols many times by the embassy and by his father, but his thinking was fuzzy. The glare was gone, replaced by a sweet-smelling something on the air. Even if these were their normal precautions, it wasn’t making Harry feel any more comfortable. ViraVax was the size of a small city underground. How would they ever find their way topside again?

Harry faked the shakes for as long as he could, but finally he had to stop out of exhaustion. Sonja draped his sheet over him as he lay, half-somnolent and sweating, able to whisper only “Thanks.”

Sonja paced, naked and silent, in front of the screen. The scene remained the same, with the same caption. Sonja continued to pace unselfconsciously with her arms folded under her breasts, head down, her tuft of blonde pubic hair backlit in waterfall silver.

Harry thought her incredibly gorgeous, and unwise to display herself that way—no telling what these people would do to them. He always believed, way down deep, that she was a lot braver than he was. Maybe it was the flying.

“Stop staring,” she said. “I can’t think.”

“I can’t think, either, with you marching around naked.”

“Work on it” was all she said.

Harry reviewed his dad’s hostage drill and computed their odds.

“Most casualties occur in the first few minutes of capture,” the embassy pamphlet said. “Under no circumstances should a hostage argue with or resist the captor, unless ordered to harm another hostage. Expect to be killed if you argue or resist.”

Harry’s breathing settled down. They’d made it through that stage, and it was supposed to be the toughest.

Dad’s right,
he thought,
I
have a lot more luck than smarts.

He hadn’t had a fond thought of his father in a long time. It felt good.

We’ve come this far
, he thought.

Though aware that he didn’t know how far “far” might be, Harry knew that hours, perhaps even a day, had passed and they were alive. That meant that they would probably stay alive, barring a mistake on his part, or an accident.

These people might want to know what else his dad taught him, what else he knew of his dad’s work with the embassy. He would have to watch for that.

Meanwhile, Sonja continued her back-and-forth prowl of their room. A squirt of adrenaline headed for his groin, and suddenly Harry had a bad feeling about why he and Sonja were locked in together.

They want us to get it on,
he thought.

Harry wondered whether the “Adam and Eve” remark meant that Mishwe had arranged this for the cameras, for his personal pleasure or for science.

Probably all three.

As if on signal, the whine stopped and their outer door
snicked
open. Mishwe stood in the glare, a bundle in his arms. His face was shadowed, unsmiling. Behind him, the unmistakable rattle and cry of monkeys in cages. Two more
deficiente
faces peeked around the door.

No more bare-chested stuff—Mishwe wore a white cotton shirt with long sleeves rolled back to the elbows. He placed his bundle on the floor at the foot of Harry’s bed.

“Clothing for you. I am to apologize for my treatment of you. Soon your accommodation will be made more suitable.”

“Suitable for what?” Sonja asked.

Mishwe paused, then went on without looking at her.

“A meal will be served in fifteen minutes. I have Nullfactor for that muscle tremor.” Mishwe held up a capsule and demonstrated for Harry. “Crush capsule, inhale.”

“What else does it have?” Sonja asked. “What else have you given us?”

Mishwe’s gaze never left Harry. His was an appraising gaze, as a father might look over a long-lost son.

“If you don’t take it,” Mishwe told him, “the tremors continue for days. Some people become more sensitive each time. For them, something as small as a heartbeat will set them off. Very unpleasant, sometimes fatal. One for each. Don’t swallow them.”

Mishwe placed a paper cup with two pink capsules atop the stack of clothes. He backed to the doorway and Harry stopped him.

“You didn’t apologize,” Harry said. “You said, ‘I am to apologize,’ but you never did.”

Harry’s throat was dry. He wanted to see how tight a leash Mishwe was on. The instructors always said, “Don’t antagonize your captors, particularly in front of their friends. They will kill you to maintain authority.”

Harry was gambling that authority was being maintained, and that included an authority over Mishwe.

Mishwe’s bare head flushed.

“I apologize.”

Harry was amazed. The claw in his belly relaxed a bit. Mishwe was on a tight leash. They would not be killed. At least, not immediately. They apparently had a high value that they were not aware of.

Maintain dignity to the best that your resources allow.

“No,” Harry said, “that’s the same thing. To apologize, you have to say you’re sorry.”

Mishwe sucked a deep breath and let it out slowly. His gaze met Harry’s. His voice did not hesitate or falter.

“I’m sorry,” Mishwe said, and he added a nod. “I treated both of you without dignity.”

He left without looking up.

“Well, what do you make of that?” Harry said.

“That you’re an idiot,” Sonja answered, “who’s bound and determined to get us killed.”

“I think he’s hurrying this ‘win over their trust’ phase just a little, don’t you?”

Sonja picked up a white pullover top and clutched it to her chest while she sorted through the clothes. They each got towels, pink blankets and a pajama-like top and bottom of white, baggy cotton. Harry laughed at Sonja, clutching the clothes to her chest.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“You,” he said. “Suddenly you’re Ms. Modesty.”

Sonja started towards the bathroom, then changed her mind and dropped the clothes on her bed with a sigh. Harry picked up his things while she stepped into the pants and pulled on her shirt.

The loose-fitting shirt and pants reminded Harry of the gi he wore during a hundred Saturdays in the gym with his father. For years, the two of them spent Saturday mornings kicking the mirrors, bags and each other to old rock and roll tunes. That had stopped a couple of years ago, when the Colonel’s anger and his drinking got out of hand.

The lights modulated in their room, slowly, and the glare from the peel dimmed to the same flat pink as the walls. A skinny young Matt and a very fat young Deborah wheeled in a cart that smelled of food. Both of them wore the same pajama-type clothing that he and Sonja wore. Matt and Deborah set up their meal quickly, placing everything meticulously on the table without so much as a gestural conversation between them. Harry noted that there were no knives or forks, only spoons.

“Do you two work here,” Harry asked them, “or are you prisoners, too?”

The young man worried his tongue in and out of his cheek and frowned deeply, as though he wanted to say something, but Deborah’s stern gaze kept him quiet.

“This stuff isn’t poison or anything, is it?”

Nothing.

The two left as they came, silent, the woman leading and the man pushing the cart. This time Harry pushed out the door behind them, but immediately he was shoved back inside by another guard dressed in a hazard suit.

“What do they think we have?” he wondered aloud. “Why do some of them have to wear those suits around us?”

“Maybe they’re protecting us from them,” Sonja said. “No telling what
they
have cooking inside.”

Harry was feeling a little better, a little more like he and Sonja might live through this, after all.

“Will you join me?” Harry asked, and offered her his arm.

“I’m not so sure,” Sonja said, her voice low.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“Aren’t you worried about something in the food?” Sonja whispered.

“No,” Harry said. “If there’s anything in there, it’s probably to kill whatever resident bugs we’ve got that they don’t want. So far, everything has had a reason and they haven’t really
hurt
us since we got here.”

“That comment about dignity,” she added. “It didn’t sound right, coming from him.”

“Are you saying that because you’ve known him so well for so long?”

“Stop it,” she hissed. “I’m not the enemy.”

“We’ve got plenty of them to choose from,” Harry whispered. “That Casey guy who runs this place, for instance. My dad hated him. I don’t know whether it was this place or the religion, but he hated him. And I got the impression that his assignment to ViraVax and away from the field work was some kind of punishment, some kind of lesson the Agency was teaching him.”

“Anyway,” Sonja said, “we’re still being recorded and studied and I’m positive that they will never allow us to leave here alive.”

Harry sat at the table and inhaled the fragrant steam from the food.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “the food’s probably safe. They’ll want to keep us in good shape during this experiment, or whatever. I’m not doing those, though.”

Harry indicated the two pink capsules in their paper cup.

“That’s transparent. If they want me to take their bogus antidote, they’ll have to give it to me the same way they gave me the original. I’m here, but I’m not helping.”

With that, he raised a middle finger to one of the lenses and dug into his bowl of hot milkrice and honey.

Chapter 22

Joshua Casey waited in his Spartan outer office and monitored the arrival of his father at the lift pad. As usual, the facility’s work stood still while staff and Innocents alike turned out for a glimpse of the Master in the flesh.

“Look there,” Casey said.

He zoomed the monitor to focus on a large dark stain under the chopper’s left-hand skid.

“Is that what I think it is?” Shirley asked.

Casey grunted acknowledgment.

“Another Meltdown,” he said, and glanced at the time on his screen. “The Sabbath starts in three hours and no one out there is working!”

“The Master always lifts morale,” Shirley reminded him. “Next week’s production will make up for it.”

“The sooner he’s secured in here, the better,” Casey said. “If there’s a Meltdown while he’s here, the whole world will know about it.”

Casey tapped the peel to indicate the Master’s entourage— personal secretary, bodyguard and historian. Everything he did or said was documented for his next book or film or sermon. Documentation, for Joshua Casey, was the enemy. No one in this entourage, including his father, had been permitted below Level One. Only the Master knew that the facility went deeper than Level Two, and even he did not know details of what transpired there.

“See the others to their quarters,” Casey said. “Have the Master brought directly to me.”

“Yes, Joshua.”

Casey refocused on his father’s craggy face, its lean lines belying his thick thatch of gray hair. That face of authority and wisdom had imprinted forever into the awareness of nearly three quarters of the population of the globe through the webs. No pang of conscience, no guilt at all, shadowed that face or those clear, blue eyes.

It’s because I do the dirty work and keep it to myself,
Casey thought.

Keeping the children to himself, keeping the Meltdowns to himself, would be nearly impossible. His best bet was quickly sequestering his father for a briefing.

The customary bowl and towels were laid out on the side table for foot-washing, and a beaker of fresh ice water stood ready on the serving tray. The Master would stay over for the entire Sabbath, which was an honor and a joy for the ViraVax staff, but a source of great apprehension for Joshua Casey.

Calvin Casey was a tough act to follow, and Joshua had been following him all his life. Calvin started in Christian industry with JIL—the “Jesus Is Lord Gas Station and Mini-Mart” chain—in the mid-1980s. By the turn of the millennium his Children of Eden had put a leash on the oil companies through their distribution bottleneck. Other gas stations burned in a decade of civil embroilments, but the Jesus Is Lord Gas Stations and Mini-Marts stood firmly in the grip of the faithful, who subsidized their protection and low prices with their tithes.

Joshua Casey grew up with faith healers, vegetarianism and high colonics. His long-simmering scorn for traditional medicine had not been tempered in the least by his experiences in the bio-engineering field. He delighted not a whit when they accepted the products of his research. Medicine was always behind research, tugging at its coattails, bogging it down. Joshua Casey was ahead of the best and he intended to stay ahead. He knew what his assistants whispered about him, he knew everything that transpired around him. Information was his forte, whether gossip or codons.

Now there was this matter of Dajaj Mishwe, and an international political disruption that threatened to turn the spotlight on ViraVax, the Children of Eden, on Joshua Casey himself.

These incidents must be made to disappear.

What Mishwe had done to create these two children was nothing more than a genetic midwifery, and Mishwe flirted with blasphemy when he indicated otherwise. Indiscretion was forgivable, blasphemy was not.

Mishwe’s passions, such that they were, needed to be redirected into his work.

His
assigned
work.

Dajaj Mishwe still had great value to Casey, to ViraVax and to the Children of Eden, in spite of what he’d done. Removing him altogether would not be an irreparable loss, but without a ready replacement it would cause a major inconvenience. And Joshua Casey suspected that removing Mishwe might leave certain experimental programs undirected, programs like Meltdown, which was dangerously close to going rogue.

I
have been distracted lately,
Casey admitted.
I
was careless to let Mishwe act on his own.

Marte Chang was Casey’s distraction. He had restricted her to offices and quarters on Level One, and to the lab/production facilities allotted to her on Level Two. Still, there was the chance of an accidental encounter with the children or with Mishwe’s other handiwork, and that would ruin everything.

Casey placed himself at stalemate: he needed Mishwe, he wanted Chang and he was stuck with two kidnapped teenagers.

He closed out the lift pad monitor and rotated holographics of a half dozen likely viral structures at his desktop workstation. This helped him think out more than one solution at once. He marked out linkage points and coded in the proteins that he wanted placed there. He sought a viral construct that would reverse the Meltdown response once it was initiated. Nothing here looked especially promising, but Mishwe could try them out on that squad that picked up the children. There would have to be an explanation, of course, but he had time for that.

So soon after the Bartlett case, too,
he thought.
This will require considerable thought.

Red Bartlett had been careless, therefore a great waste. Casey did not want to throw good money after bad.

He caught himself scratching at his scalp.

Somebody could coax a virus into tinkering a gene to regenerate hair,
he thought.

He visualized three simple solutions to try, noted the sequences in his Sidekick and vowed to give them to one of the techs as a bonus one day. On a slow day, it might even get the Agency off his back.

But Joshua Casey would not tease it out himself. He had bigger fish to fry than engineering a living line of cosmetics. Even if it were ready today, he would never allow himself to receive any inoculation, knowing what he himself had perpetrated on the unwitting laboratory of the world.

He shook his head, trying to rid it of distraction. Those two children quartered in decon posed the greatest threat ViraVax ever faced, thanks to Mishwe.

He just couldn’t wait,
Casey thought.

He knew, as Mishwe knew, that they had already waited plenty long enough.

This was not the way!

They could have gathered the materials they needed a thousand other ways, then raised a covey of fetuses in the privacy of Level Five, in the wombs of the Innocents, and no one would be the wiser.

But Mishwe had never wanted this to be a lab procedure. He’d wanted to see how the children would fare in the real world. He wondered whether their offspring would be viable. Offspring of the first AVA-initiated clones would be stage three of the process begun years ago with a viral infection that significantly altered Colonel Toledo’s and Red Bartlett’s spermatic structures.

Casey had to admit that his heart rate rose significantly at the prospect of stage three. He could imagine the kids now, drugged and naked in their quarters, under the voyeuristic electronic eye of Dajaj Mishwe. That must be changed immediately, of course.

Joshua Casey tried not to scratch at his scalp.

Primitive,
he thought.
Disgustingly primitive.

His recent hair transplant represented to him all of the inelegant butchery of modern medicine, the pompous witchcraft that had tried to charm him into its fold. The baldness represented something that was out of his control, and Casey needed control. This matter with the teenagers was proof enough of that.

These particular adolescents were clones, products of only one “parent” via the machinations of artificial viral agents. Therefore, it was possible that, like the Innocents, they had no souls and whatever became of them required no pang of conscience.

But the storm over their disappearance demanded an intricate defense.

Casey’s attention shifted to the cool, sensuous image of Marte Chang. She would be here forever, he was sure of that now. So much the better if it were voluntary, and enthusiastic. Anything less would bring the Agency down on him, and he was not yet far enough along in his plan to risk that.

Shirley Good would have to be dealt with in time, he could see that, too. She belonged to ViraVax and her accommodation would be simple. Shirley was one of the saved, however, and that made Casey squirm a little.

The answer will come, in time,
he thought.

If things didn’t work out with Chang, he would give her to Mishwe as his “special assistant.” Special assistants did not last long in Mishwe’s care, but they inevitably proved an invaluable source of hard data.

Casey turned his thoughts to Mishwe and his young subjects. Dajaj Mishwe had been, unquestionably, the most valuable tool in the ViraVax facility. In the beginning, when Casey had the idea of ideas, Mishwe had been the technician to make it happen. Casey had marveled then at his father’s foresight in seeking out and training intelligent loners and orphans.

Everything that Joshua Casey had wanted to accomplish in bio-engineering depended on one thing—reliable and repeated access to the body, an immune system override.

Or a disguise.

Casey needed something set up inside, something resident in the body itself, undetected by the immune system and ready to be called into action at his bidding.

That crude kernel of an idea was formulated at a time when big-money grants focused on immune disorders. Casey had been ahead of them all along in theory, but when his father delivered him the virogeneticist, Dajaj Mishwe, idea became substance.

Hackers,
Casey recalled.
It all started with hackers.

He’d known what he had wanted to do for the world long before he knew how to do it. He’d wanted to engineer a humanity that was worthy of repopulating the Garden of Eden, and on the way to that goal he wanted a humanity that would either work to restore Eden or get out of his way. To do that, he needed a key to the body’s various mechanisms without triggering its immune system. Then he needed the right pair of hands to carry it off. Mishwe had those hands.

In those days Casey thought of himself as a hacker—not a computer hacker, but a gene hacker. The most important thing to a hacker was “getting in,” gaining entrance to a system. Casey was smart enough to conceptualize a viral sequence, an artificial viral agent, he called it, that could be introduced into a body through common procedures—flu shots, communion wafers, childhood inoculations. Casey called this stage formatting.

The Formatting AVA prepared the body to receive any further materials that Casey might prepare for it. He was a man who thought ahead. He and Mishwe invented the rest at leisure, knowing that his gateway was clear and his security perfect.

Casey acknowledged that pride was one of the more dangerous sins. Nevertheless, he allowed himself pride in knowing more about virology and gene-shifting than most professional virologists, and as a chief executive officer he had a lot more power. Money, filtered through the Children of Eden, was no object.

Casey was the first to consider monoclonal antibodies as stepping-stones rather than stumbling blocks. By engineering the proper hybridomas that produced the proper antibodies, he came up with a multistage biological lockpick that could also become a time bomb, at his whim.

And now Mishwe had surprised him, just when things were moving so smoothly that he’d thought surprise impossible. Mishwe’s experiment with the teenagers had never been authorized, had been a whim, albeit a successful one, and Casey knew now that he should have ended it fifteen years ago.

Casey spoke to his console.

“Shirley.”

“Here,” she answered. “What is it?”

“Get me the status of the two packages that Mishwe brought in, please.”

“On-screen or in person?”

There would be plenty of data in the system soon enough. He knew that the Agency did its share of eavesdropping, and he wanted to be sure that everything within the system was secure, even from them.

“Better bring it here,” he said. “Priority.”

“Will do,” she said. “And, Joshua, there’s something else.”

Shirley never called him Joshua except in their most intimate moments. He scratched his scalp again.

“What?”

“The Chang woman. She’s very unhappy, and she spends all of her spare time running search programs on our system.”

“She’s young, bright, bored and lonely,” Casey said. “We have to prove to her that we’re her family now. Her Sunspots will be up and running soon, then she’ll be gone. We’ve been over this—”

“Why are you so quick to take her side?” Shirley interrupted. “I’m telling you that my flags are up. We don’t know what she’ll find. Bartlett’s log is somewhere in the system, and we haven’t been able to find it ourselves. . . .”

“You’re right,” he said, more to shut her off than out of conviction. “I’ll watch it. Meanwhile, tag everything that her system finds.”

“I already have,” she said, her voice a little too smug to suit him.

His Sidekick beeped and his daily report from the Agency began its scroll down his viewscreen. He routed it to the mainframe in his inner office for review later. He preferred to tackle the Agency’s prose at night, when he tried to wind down for sleep. Casey did not take medicines, chemicals or inoculations of any kind, but he had found that the Agency’s doublespeak experts could lull him to sleep in moments.

Two Innocents shuffled through his doorway, Daniel and Louisa. They pushed their small cart over the threshold and nodded. He acknowledged them but did not speak—it merely encouraged their chatter and distracted them from their chores.

Mishwe spoke with them often. Indeed, the little emotion that Mishwe squandered on the world went out to these soulless ones. Mishwe was their “Angel”, and Casey had to admit that he got good work out of them.