ViraVax (19 page)

Chapter 25

Rico Toledo sketched out pathways of embassy data, and one of the techs fed them into El Indio’s buffers, providing the guerrillas with everything he could muster that related to Harry and Sonja. Electronics was not his forte, but he had picked up a few tricks over the years. Riding piggyback on someone else’s message was one of them. He scribbled clumsily, his rage held at simmer, and he cursed the alcohol monster that squeezed his temples and belly. The rage was tinged with lust, now that Yolanda had reentered the room.

“Well,” Rico told her, “so far they have nothing. It appears I am the red herring.”

He pointed out a memo to his replacement captured from the embassy screen: “Find Toledo and you’ll find the kids.”

He had said
“arenque rojo”
for “red herring,” and she corrected him.

“Arenque ahumado,”
she said.

The Colonel’s senses picked up every nuance of her presence— the scent of her powder mingled with the volatile plastic scent of her old-fashioned eyeglasses that perched in her hair. Yolanda’s presence was so powerful that he could not meet her gaze right away. While she stood beside him, scanning some paperwork, he sat, staring at his console, waiting for what she had to say. His consciousness focused on her slim pelvis mere centimeters from his cheek.

“One of our subscribers bled this one off the webs,” Yolanda said, dangling a sheet of paper by one corner.

“Both your ex-wife and Mrs. Bartlett filed formally through the Archbishop’s office with the Mothers of Assassinated and Disappeared,” she said. “A representative from the Organization of American States Human Rights Commission is flying in to talk with them and with Garcia.”

“It’ll get some press back home, that’s all,” Rico said. “The OAS is noble, but powerless.”

“Powerful enough to stop the humanitarian aid Garcia receives from the Mexicans,” she said. “That will not improve our image.”

“Great!” Rico said. “Somebody’s on our side, after all. I just wish it was a bigger somebody than some clerk with the OAS Human Rights Commission. . . .”

The Colonel’s fist hit the desktop, and the entire room was silent except for the cocking of a weapon near the doorway, the growl of overhead fans, the shuffling of feet and paper, a cough.

Rico felt the flush of embarrassment on his cheeks. He could not bring himself to look up.

“I am glad that your ex-wife is all right,” Yolanda said. “She was good to me and to my children. Do not feel alone. Everyone in this room has felt what you are feeling right now. Everyone here has lost someone to the death squads. Tío was taken himself, and lived.”

Rico felt El Indio’s hand on his shoulder.

“Now, truly, you are one of us,” El Indio said.

“We have to think of the children now,” Yolanda said. “They want the children alive, nothing else makes sense. So we know we still have a chance.”

Yolanda was crying, but Rico could conjure nothing but numbness.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m very tired.”

Rico gestured at the roomful of equipment around them.

“You’ve got pretty good stuff here,” he said. “But no one gets into ViraVax uninvited, and I’m sure that’s where we’ll find those kids. It’s not the tightest security south of the Pentagon, but it’s tough enough.”

Now everyone was talking at once and Rico wasn’t listening.

The guerrillas preferred to think that Garcia was behind everything, because it suited their goals. And Garcia saw the Archbishop’s shadow everywhere. Rico had himself to blame; he’d spent years reinforcing this feud under orders. This would not be a tangle he could unravel in a few minutes.

For a moment his mind flashed on Grace, pacing an embassy carpet, agonizing over the disappearance of their son. She would believe what they told her—that Rico did it, that he’d turned double agent. He had brought her only pain for the past few years. Somehow, Rico had thought he could make things up to Grace, that in time he would become someone she could respect, as she had in the beginning. He felt the pump of anger filling his veins.

It’s Casey,
he thought.
Playing Garcia, the embassy, the Agency, the guerrillas, me!

He was trembling again, with the cold sweats and the lusts for Yolanda.

What’s happening to me?

Taking up with Rachel had been his antidote for these barely controllable urges, but Rachel wasn’t here and he knew that he wasn’t really in the mood for sex. His body, his chemistry, all of his drinking had brought this on and he had to tough it out, get clean and clear, find Harry and Sonja and get them back.

Amid the babble, Yolanda leaned down and whispered, “ViraVax. We have someone inside. She is monitored and can only communicate through the burst. It won’t be long, and we will know for sure.”

She squeezed his shoulder and hurried back to play the satlinks.

Rico turned to El Indio.

“I want to get a message to the Speaker of the House, Nancy Bartlett’s father,” Rico said. “We’re going to need some cavalry.”

“Type your message here,” El Indio said, and handed him a set of gloves.

“I’m a keyboard man,” Rico said, “and I’ve barely got the hang of that.”

One of the techs cabled him an old warped keyboard and Rico typed an urgent summary to the Speaker’s personal Sidekick via his Agency green card. He sent a duplicate to Solaris in the DIA office in Mexico City.

Yolanda returned with news from a cornfield near the Double-Vee.

“Identities not confirmed,” Yolanda said. “But an old man says a big black plane pushed a little yellow plane into the ground near his
milpa.
People in spacesuits took away two figures in body bags. They flew towards ViraVax. This was less than two hours after they were reported missing.”

“Body bags?” the Colonel said, and stood.

Yolanda placed a palm on his chest to reassure him.

“They were struggling,” she said. “That was noted.”

“Casey, that sonofabitch!” Rico hissed in English. “What the hell could he be up to? Blowing up the embassy, taking two innocent teenagers, killing. . . killing. . . Red.”

El Indio’s hand was on his arm. “You know now what we have suspected for a time,” he said. “The bombing was a typical smokescreen, as you say. But the pattern has been this: keep your government, the Garcia government, and our people busy fighting amongst themselves, blaming each other for this and for that.”

“Yes,” Yolanda agreed. “This is an example. Many operations—diversions—the U.S. or the Garcia government blamed on us. We knew we didn’t do it and assumed that one of them did, to arrange blame. ViraVax, and those Children of Eden, kept us at each other’s throats so that we would not notice them using our people for their experiments.”

Rico flushed with anger and embarrassment. Had the Agency kept him in the field, had he not been so blinded by his drinking and his anger and his dalliance with Rachel, he would have seen how far this had gone long ago. The gall was made more bitter because he’d had his suspicions and he had shut them out of his mind.

None of my business,
he’d thought, petulant as a schoolboy left out of a game.

Now Harry and Sonja were paying for his petulance, while Red was dead and a lot of other people weren’t that lucky.

And how many sterilized?
he wondered.
How many Project Laborers given up for adoption?

“Colonel?”

El Indio had been speaking to him.

“Yes, sorry.”

“Tell us about their security.”

“They are missionaries on a two-year rotation,” he said. “Night School trained, well equipped, motivated by the fear of God. Most of their security are concentrated on the ground level and the level immediately below, with a detachment at the dam. No more than a hundred, altogether. But that hundred is very well armed, the perimeter booby-trapped, and if you’re thinking of sending your people in there, forget it. You can only get in or out by air, and they are always sealed off below Level Two as a precaution.”

“But then they are trapped, are they not?”

Rico smiled. El Indio saw everything in terms of victory.

“Depends,” Rico said. “Remember, people have worked the bottom levels without seeing daylight since that place was built. Fifteen years. They have three oxygen-generation systems, plenty of water, and at Level Three they produce enough protein and vegetable matter to feed the entire facility. The topside farming is just a cover. They don’t need it.”

“You say, then, that they can live down there
forever!”

“Basically, yes.”

Everyone was silent, and Rico visualized the facility again, trying to recall every stage of construction, trying to find a way in.
No problem
. He had protested the difference between the plan and the construction because it essentially negated security. The same problem irritated him with the U.S. Embassy, built by the same contractor.

He reviewed what he remembered out loud.

“First, we built the dam,” he said. “Easy. Narrow canyon, dry season, piece of cake. Next we cleared fifty hectares, which is the existing perimeter, and in the middle of that we dug the hole. Twenty-five hectares on the square, fifty meters deep. Each level is five meters thick, with five meters of fill separating each one. The foundation wall is not the real wall. . . .”

Here he sat upright and scrabbled for his keyboard under a shuffle of papers. He generated a rough 3-D of ViraVax on their central viewer.

“You see, we had to consider earthquakes and repairs,” he explained. “The building is actually a box inside a box, with room for maintenance crews to work between them. A latticework of steel members secures them, but there is still nearly two meters of space to move in workers and equipment.”

“And is the only access from the inside?” Yolanda asked.

Rico smiled. “That’s how it’s supposed to be,” he said. “But it was built by a very important local contractor who married into the Children of Eden. The same one who built the new embassy compound had married into his contract, built the facility for as little as possible and left a note saying simply, ‘Paris is worth a mass.’ None of the embassy elevators is secure. My son and I used to have lunch on top of the cars.”

Rico sketched out the two apartment-sized decontamination elevators at ViraVax and showed how the two dozen conventional elevators linked with an interior rail system.

“Casey got me out of there as soon as he could.” Rico shook his head. “He couldn’t bear the thought of an idolator on his grounds.”

Rico sketched in the dam above the Double-Vee.

“Constant minor damage from quakes. The Corps of Engineers blamed the water load behind the dam, the moon, everything but bad planning. Anyway, the conduit that carries the power lines from the dam to the facility enters that passageway. There are three places topside to enter that conduit at half-kilometer intervals. Other access shafts inside the buildings are covered with ten-ton concrete lids.”

He marked them in the graphic.

“So we could get a team inside,” someone said.

Rico shook his head.

“A team, never,” he said. “Their electronic surveillance is excellent—designed to detect unauthorized exit, not entry, but that’s beside the point.”

“So,” El Indio said, rubbing his uncharacteristic day-old stubble, “you say we can’t assault them, and we can’t put a team inside. What do we do, then?”

“We
can
assault them,” Rico said, and patted El Indio’s shoulder, “and we can put somebody inside. I’ve been there, I know the floor plan, I know the surveillance and I know how their security is trained. One person has a much better chance of getting inside than a team. But a team will assault the dam to draw them. We will also draw Garcia’s people.”

El Indio snorted a laugh and shook out his hand in the gesture that the Costa Bravans used for “Hot, very hot.”

“Then you will die in there,” El Indio said, “and we will accomplish nothing.”

“So,” Rico said, his chin out, “if I can’t do it, launch your assault.”

“What about diplomatic channels?” El Indio said. “We know the children are there. Can’t your government demand that ViraVax give them up?”

Yolanda laughed at that one.

“They would be fertilizer for beans by morning,” she said. “Or, worse yet, there would be a cursory inspection by one of the many in your embassy who are of the Children of Eden. Or Garcia himself, who is of their faith. They would look for nothing and find nothing. Your government would apologize; they have more pressing matters facing them at home. The children would remain. The infection of our people would continue. No, this is no place for diplomacy.”

“You always were a warrior,” El Indio said.

“And you the statesman,” she countered. “The Colonel is right. Someone has to get inside. Someone who knows the complex, someone who can fight. Our contact inside has neither of these advantages. In fact, she believes herself to be in danger as well, and she cannot get out.”

“How often can you contact her?” Rico asked.

“Twice a day, at the most,” she said.

“I’ll give you some questions for her. Any answers would be helpful. Meanwhile, I have a plan. And you, warrior woman, you will get your fight.”

Yolanda smiled, and the rest of the room lit up with smiles as well.

Yes,
he thought,
it’s what we know best.

Except for El Indio, who was one of the great negotiators of all time, they all preferred a good, tangible fight. But Rico well knew the diplomatic stalemate that inevitably occurred when negotiating with fundamentalist extremists of any stripe. They were right because their god said they were right, and there was no reasoning with that. This had been the lesson of the Crusades, westward expansion, the oil and messianic wars.

“Only one thing we can do,” he began. “It helps that sundown begins their Sabbath. . . .”

He felt good being a colonel again, even though he was briefing rebel forces. He indicated four positions on either side of the dam, and one in the center.

“Security shacks,” he said. “The dam is their weak point, and they keep their best people here. In fifteen years, no one has attacked them, presumably because a ground attack through that terrain and jungle would be easily detected by their sensors and inefficient without heavy weapons. And they know that your forces have never attacked by air. Do you have anyone who jumps?
Paracaidistas?”