ViraVax (17 page)

Maybe that’s the sign,
he thought.
Maybe she’s the right one, after all.

Regarding other matters, Casey was confident that the security squad had covered their tracks too thoroughly for even the Agency to follow, much less a wet-behind-the-ears graduate.

He smiled his most winning smile.

“I appreciate that,” he said. “I am embarking on a new project that is most fascinating. I could use your expertise. How about discussing it over dinner?”

“It’s a dangerous policy to date the boss.”

He hung on to the smile.

“This isn’t a date,” he said. “It’s a meeting. Trust me.”

At last, the smile that he’d angled for crossed her lips.

“Promise it won’t be the cafeteria?”

He promised.

Chapter 23

Colonel Toledo rode inside a special compartment in the back of a refrigerated van, heading further into the Jaguar Mountains. Tio wrestled the wheel around the usual washouts, chuckholes and debris. Rico eavesdropped on Tio’s steady stream of innovative profanity through the earpiece connected to his Sidekick. Yolanda rode shotgun in the cab.

The Colonel wanted Yolanda and he wanted a drink, but he wanted to find Harry even more. He stuffed the unflattering cravings of his body as far down into the dark as he could, and concentrated only on those things that worked towards his son’s release.

Eight men had died when the drone dropped on their command center. The precision of the strike was rare in Costa Brava. It indicated that someone had good data, and the guerrillas speculated that that someone was higher-placed than the Garcia boys, perhaps someone in the embassy itself. Some said that they were striking at the guerrillas out of frustration, using product from Agency files compiled by Rico himself. Rico didn’t tell them about the Parasite, and he hoped that the unit he cracked was the only one they’d planted.

“They really don’t want you,” Yolanda had reminded him. “They only want what you can bring them. You are the bait for a great fish. Who would come to help you, Colonel, if you were trapped and alone? Who would be held hostage if you were held hostage?”

He had the dark ride in the truck to think it out, and he was sure she was wrong. They already had what they wanted—the kids.

Peace and Freedom is far bigger than anybody guessed,
he thought.
Even if I told everything I knew, it wouldn’t destroy them.

Within a half hour of the strike, guerrillas assembled new equipment at a rendezvous twenty klicks up the road. There seemed to be no end to their supply lines, and their equipment was the best. All brand names had been removed, but Rico recognized the satlink modules and Litespeeds as Japanese—superior to the embassy’s equipment, and the embassy had a trade embargo to blame for that.

Rico had no disagreement with the guerrillas. He had monitored them, infiltrated them and occasionally fought them over the past twenty years. Now stronger than ever, they clearly didn’t see him as a threat. The guerrilla movement that he had been fighting had been a sham, street theater set up to keep the Agency and its cousins busy while the real work went on uninterrupted.

Japan needed land, and obviously the Peace and Freedom people had struck a deal.

But Colonel Toledo’s secrets could fill many a grave and empty a lot of pockets. ViraVax, for sure, would go down. The Agency, like Peace and Freedom, would be nicked but not out. Different butts would polish different chairs in a few governments, but the Children of Eden would remain the wealthiest single entity in the world, with or without the two Caseys.

The Colonel reflected on Project Labor, the trisomy twenty-one project, and the fact that the process was a ViraVax patent that his protection made possible. He should have known that a paranoid like Casey would cover all bases. Everything kept coming back to Joshua Casey.

Those goddamned Gardeners are going to own the world!

Catholics believed unbelievers to be unsaved, but Children of Eden believed them to be un
human
. Cattle. Tools or chaff.

The Colonel, like many Agency personnel in Costa Brava, was a lip-service Catholic, in it for family and the network. Rico thought of himself as an Old Testament Catholic. The New Testament didn’t allow the flexibility of expression of the Old Testament. He empathized with someone who would turn water into wine at a party, but from a soldier’s point of view, eye for an eye made much more sense than turn the other cheek.

Good guys carried swords in the Old Testament
, he thought.

In the New Testament, only bad guys used their swords. Rico Toledo was not ready to offer up his sword upon anyone’s altar. The Colonel smiled. He was a good guy who carried a sword, like the archangels Gabriel and Michael, and it was high time he used it. Rico had a gut feeling that he would heft it against either El Presidente Rigoberto Garcia or Joshua Casey.

Within an hour of the Colonel’s arrival, a condo four-plex outside a sleepy highland village became Command Central, a duplicate of their bombed-out quarters down-valley. Reports of the kidnappings varied wildly, and for the first time Colonel Rico Toledo felt blind, deaf and dumb in the heart of a crisis. Yolanda and El Indio brought in twenty people and a vanful of electronics. So far all the Colonel had been able to muster was a whopping headache.

The government hadn’t bothered to send troops to mop up after the drone. That told Rico that they were confident of their strike or scared shitless of a face-to-face with the guerrillas. His money was on the latter.

El Indio assured him that all of their new equipment was shielded and transmissions double-scrambled, but some hungry villager could pop them for a favor or a job.

“Still, you do not understand how black their hearts are,” El Indio lectured him, as though Rico were a greenhorn. “You are like me, more interested in the network, the information, the game. I respected you, your work. I respect you now. I do not respect your government’s complicity in my country’s misery.”

The four techs who were setting up were very good, and very fast. Rico and El Indio stood in the middle of a living room snarled with cables, gloveware, terminals, printers, satboxes and Litespeeds.

“Blaming the bombing on me, that’s to be expected,” Rico said. “I’m suspended, a wild man, so even the U.S. can speculate on this one and come out a winner. But the kids . . . I don’t get the connection.”

“Perhaps there is no connection,” Yolanda said. “Maybe whoever did the bombing didn’t know about the kidnapping plan. Somebody saw the opportunity to get some press out of linking the two, perhaps even a third party. You have made such deliberate misconnections to the press yourself in the past, no?”

Rico nodded, and felt his shoulders sag in spite of himself.

“Yes,” he sighed, “more than once. But we usually
knew
the reality even if what we released was fiction. Somebody, somewhere, knows what’s going on. I sure wish I had access to the Agency.”

“We’re getting our eyes and ears connected now,” Yolanda said. “This place is secure, but we will jump all of our electronics through at least three steps as a precaution. . . .”

A lot of good it did last time,
he thought, but he kept it to himself.

A young woman waved at Yolanda from across the room and gave her the thumbs-up sign.

“Satellite’s hot,” Yolanda said. “I’ll have a report for you in just a few minutes.”

“Thanks,” Rico said. “I feel so . . . useless. . . .”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “There will be too much to do very soon. You could rest. . . .”

“No, I couldn’t,” he said. “Not until I get my boy.”

She hugged him in silence, and left. The smell of the sweat in her hair lingered after her, and Rico felt a rush of desire. Just as suddenly, he felt the upswelling of rage.

“My son is snatched, my ex-wife unaccounted for, I’m blamed for an embassy bombing and there is
nothing
I can
do
about it. . . .”

The Colonel caught himself pounding on the desk. El Indio, the technicians in the room, their two teenage guards, all stared at him, stock-still. To most of these people he had been one of the enemy for years, and an Agency man, at that. He was a Catholic in name only and he had installed the Children of Eden in this region and in this government. Only El Indio knew how many times he had acted on behalf of the Peace and Freedom Party.

“I’m sorry,” Rico said, breaking the tension. “I’m sorry, but I have to do
something.”

El Indio shook his head. “It’s better that you don’t,” he said. “We don’t want anyone out there on your trail to find us here. Don’t worry, we have everything here, everything. You have underestimated us all along, as was our desire, but now you will see what we can really do.”

Rico Toledo settled in to wait, but he had never waited well and didn’t intend to start now. He was angry and hyper so he had a few rum and sugars. Then he wanted Yolanda. He tried to write it off to their bonding under fire, to cabin fever, but his body wouldn’t listen. He concentrated on the important things.

Why weren’t there any reports about Grace, or Nancy Bartlett?
he wondered.
Not a word about them from the press or the network.

Rico well knew the penchant the press had for interviewing grieving family members at uncomfortable times.

The bomb was really in my car,
he thought.
Who was the target? Who wanted everybody to think it was me?

Rico couldn’t think of any time that his car had been out of range of his Watchdog, the alarm adjunct to his Sidekick. Whoever had got to him had been good, or simply inside.

The corporal,
he thought.
The one who parked my car. . . .

So far, the only pronouncements coming across the newslines were from the Garcia government, and they clearly used the incident to discredit him. Anyone up-and-coming in the Garcia government was going to do it through the military. Anyone up-and-coming in the military would be a Gardener, trained in the Night School, founded by Colonel Rico Toledo.

The U.S. wasn’t talking and the Agency was out of touch. Rico couldn’t be completely sure about the Peace and Freedom people except that they saved his skin, and were now amassing their resources to help him find Harry and Sonja.

Maybe they planted the bomb so that they could get me here, get me on their side.

He didn’t think that was likely. Bombs were too nonspecific, too messy. Their own people would have been at risk.

If not Garcia, and not Peace and Freedom, then who?

One of the guerrillas brought a pot of coffee and set it between El Indio and Rico on the desk. He was the truck driver, Tío, about Rico’s age, potbellied. His jeans rode low in the back, and his T-shirt said: “So What If That Horse Was Blessed by the Pope. Can He Plow?”

Out of the back pocket of the jeans Tío pulled an envelope, folded many times. He nodded at Rico, his eyes cold, then unfolded the envelope and handed it to El Indio. He passed the list of numbers over reverently, clearly honored to be in the presence of such a legendary pair as the Colonel and El Indio.

Rico tossed back his rum and sugar. El Indio’s attention was wrapped up in the headphones he wore and the peel he studied.

“Jabalí,” Tío said with a respectful nod. “Jabalí.”

Rico’s skin cooled at the sound of that name, the one he hadn’t heard except in his sleep for the past twenty years. Yes, he had been Jabalí, Wild Boar, but that was two decades ago in a country that, like so many, no longer existed.

Again, he looked the fuzzy-haired guerrilla over and tried to place him.

“Belice?” he asked.

“No, señor, not so far as the ghost of Belice. The networks. I followed your strategies on the webs. We have used them here, as you know.”

“I know,” Rico said. “You’ve used them against me.”

Tío covered his mouth when he laughed, a custom of the mountain folk.

“Not until now did I know that you were also the North American Colonel Toledo. But you know, we used your strategies against your government, not against your esteemed self.”

“I was representing my government, and it was my butt out there getting itself kicked and looking bad.”

Rico tried to calm himself down. He was looking for a fight, he could feel that now, and this man was not.

This man is not the enemy,
Rico reminded himself.
Back off.

Tío straightened, his expression hardened.

“Yes, your country was distracted then, as it is now,” Tío said. “They forgot you down here. That was when you learned to live here, and quit coming after us.”

Rico did not want trouble with this man, or these people. He fought the unreasonable urge to rip Tío’s throat out. He practiced being casual and measured out his voice.

“What do you do here?” Rico asked him.

“I break codes and access the webs,” Tío said. “Getting us onto the networks is easy. Covering the trail is another matter. Tell me, señor, why did you not go back to your country?”

“I’ve lived here most of my life, I know this country,” Rico muttered. “I don’t know the United States anymore. It’s a jungle.”

“A jungle, yes,” Tío said. “They are animals up there, it is true. And in Costa Brava, of course, we are civilized.”

Both men laughed.

“Welcome,” Tío offered, and shook Rico’s hand. “I have five children myself, and three grandchildren. We will find your son.”

Tío stepped back, snapped a half-salute towards El Indio and left.

Rico’s hands shook just a bit.

Booze?
he wondered.

Hubbub in the room picked up once again as everyone turned to their chores.

“Have you heard of Project Labor?” El Indio asked.

He twisted one of the earphones aside so he could hear Rico’s answer.

“I have,” Rico said. “It’s no longer viable.”

“What is it?”

Rico sighed, then said, “I can’t tell you.”

“You won’t tell me, you mean. Remember, you yourself taught me the subtleties between ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t’ in English.”

“Why can’t you be grateful for all of the things I did tell you, instead of harping on what I didn’t?”

The Colonel’s dander was up again, and his head throbbed.

“Grateful?” El Indio’s face flushed, and he stood. “Grateful?”

“Yes,” Rico said. “That’s been our relationship. Grateful for what we got, no pressure elsewhere. It was not an Agency operation. It was Costa Brava, direct from Minister of the Interior. Where did you hear the term?”

“Something from the networks,” El Indio said. “Mariposa and Tío got us into a Night School system. I have a memo here that says you registered a protest over Project Labor. I gather that it was implemented behind your back, and that it was something vital. Your embassy job began the next week. You never mentioned it.”

Well, El Indio’s people were better than he thought if they could crack even one box on the Night School web. True, with Project Labor they had gone around him. Also true, he had elected to keep quiet once he found out. The inoculation had been done with an appropriate sense of blasphemy—through communion wafers. The outcry, even now if it became public, might turn ViraVax, the Costa Bravan government, the United States government and the Children of Eden into political rubble.