ViraVax (4 page)

Chapter 7

Marte Chang knew that she would be observed, constantly and closely, and she tried not to resent it. Resentment would get in her way, and anything that got in her way meant she would have to stay that much longer. She would confront Casey when the time came. Meanwhile, she vowed to work day and night to get herself out of this box.

She watched the light on his Sidekick behind him, winking its collusion with her as it transmitted her first message to Mariposa. She would know within moments whether their system worked. If it didn’t, if Casey could detect her piggyback message, then she would be through, her project would be through, and there was an excellent chance she would be dead.

Marte anticipated the first morning of switchover, less than a month away, when the most superficial portion of topside operations would be transferred to her Sunspots for a test run. Marte would be honored in a brief ceremony, and Casey would likely admit her to his inner circle. She had hoped to be out of ViraVax long before her contract was up, but she was beginning to doubt it. Casey was paranoid beyond her imagination, no doubt due to regular proddings by Dajaj Mishwe. He protected his facility as she might protect it if it were her own, but not the same way, nor for the same reasons.

The lake above the dam above ViraVax appeared nightly in Marte Chang’s sleep. At first the tranquil, blue-green surface calmed her soul. Lately it became the stuff of nightmares, a pot of acid dissolving anything it touched. For her, living downstream in earthquake country, it was the dam of Damocles. The sooner she activated her new power source, the better she would feel. The only thing that scared her more than thousands of tons of water was Dajaj Mishwe, genovirologist.

Mishwe had been topside again and this caused quite a stir among the Innocents in Marte’s sector. The twins who cleaned her room, Rafaela and Renata, considered him some kind of angel.

“Why do you call him ‘Angel’?” Marte asked.

“ ‘Cause he guard the garden. He come topside and no burn up.”

“People come up and go down all the time,” Marte said. “Nobody dies just because they came from below.”

“We stay up here,” Rafaela explained, “they stay down there. If we go down, we die. If they come up, they die. Dajaj, the Angel, go anywhere.”

Marte thought this must be part of some fairy tale that they told the Innocents to keep them in their proper sectors.

“How do they die?” Marte asked. “Does security kill them?”

“All burn up,” Rafaela said.

“The sun,” Renata added, “it burn them all up.”

“No,” Rafaela contradicted, “the Lord burn them. Sword of the Lord.”

With the Innocents, Marte found it difficult to separate fact from fantasy. Much of the ViraVax control over them depended on teaching them fear.

“Have either of you actually
seen
anyone come topside and burn up like that?”

Both heads bobbed and their eyes glittered.

“Yes, yes. We saw. Right there. Right there.”

Renata pulled Marte’s sleeve and pointed to the open area between the supply warehouse and the B complex, where Marte had noted a scorched patch of earth, neglected in an otherwise well-raked compound. Obviously, none of the groundskeepers, all Innocents, cared to go near that spot. Even now, as she watched, a group of them laden down with garden tools shuffled aside so that no one had to walk on that place.

“Why not Dajaj?” she asked.

Renata shrugged.

“He is an angel,” she said. “Angels do not burn.”

“Do you like him?”

Again, the enthusiastic nods.

“He wash my feet. He give me the water, the bread.”

“He show me run the tires,” Renata said.

She high-stepped a demonstration, gripping the handle of her cart.

Marte Chang found that surprising.

Mishwe, of all people!

She’d never heard anyone at ViraVax treating the Innocents as anything but good-natured pack animals, and Mishwe was the last one she would have expected to care. And he washed their feet, which implied that he thought they had souls.

Who knows what Mishwe thinks?

The one time she’d seen him running the tires, she got the impression that it was not sweat running out of his pores, but evil itself.

It’s strange,
she thought.
He’s in great shape, got a great tan, yet it’s a four-hour decontamination cycle each way to Level Five.

“Does he run the tires with you often?” she asked.

“Every night,” Renata said.

“No, no,” Rafaela contradicted. “You don’t know nothing. You wait every night. Some nights he don’t come.”

Every night,
Marte thought.

Something clicked for her, the way it happened in the lab sometimes.

Even Casey had to cycle through decon to go below Level Two, which was why he spent most of his time topside conducting business and receiving the few necessary outsiders.

But Mishwe lived at Level Five. He was labmaster, second to none in sheer hours of work each day, and it was common for him to work days without sleep. He was legendary for this. So, how could he afford the eight-hour round trip to cycle topside and return?

He doesn’t.

Mishwe must have a private, direct access topside, probably a supply shaft or something left over from the original construction.

And he would have to have an agreement with someone on watch,
she thought.

She pegged Mishwe as someone who would keep his agreements to a minimum, who would not waste favors on a midnight exercise program. The bargain that he had struck was most likely a threat rather than an agreement, a threat that at least one security guard believed to be good.

If he could get in or out of the bunkers at will, so could any virus he carried. So could Marte Chang.

If I had the nerve.

Marte had one overriding reason for being at ViraVax. Not because they had bought her Sunspots—plenty of excellent offers found her, even though her papers and patents had not yet been made public. She was here because the Agency was convinced that something extraordinary was happening at this facility, something very dangerous that her expertise could identify. She had explicit instructions to take no action herself, and they didn’t have to worry about that. The only action Marte Chang wanted to take was a flight home.

“Why is he topside today?”

Marte had caught a glimpse of him just moments before the twins came inside, heading towards Casey’s office.

The sisters giggled and shrugged, hiding their mouths with their hands and making only a pretense at housework.

Marte’s lab setup was split between Levels One and Two and she had cycled into Level Three only once. What she had seen even at the upper levels had horrified her, and she’d included those findings in her first burst to Mariposa and the outside world.

She felt like a traitor.

Because I am one,
she thought.

A large series of donations to the Children of Eden coincided with Marte Chang’s scholarships to the University of Montangel. She had lived among the Children of Eden for six years, shared a dorm room with four other girls who had become her best friends.

Hers had been a hand-me-down favor: her parents died because of an Agency error, the State Department acted as go-between to get the tax burden of a church called Children of Eden eased by targeting select minority loners to bring the university’s population base up. Someone high up in the Agency owed this Mariposa a favor, and their interest in a share of Marte’s product was +3. Marte Chang was the equivalent of a space shot or an ICBM and the time had come to use her.

Such careers had been groomed since the existence of universities, monarchies, religions and other closed systems. What was unusual was how perfectly Marte Chang’s interests coincided with their own, and how bright she was.

She showed it right away at fourteen when she gave ten percent of her scholarships back to the Church as her tithe, a very nice touch. That kept most of the missionaries off her back, and the few who persisted were awash within moments in her enthusiasm for practical applications of genetics. This enthusiasm was genuine and passionate.

Trenton Solaris, the albino director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, bought in for a share in manpower and matching. Marte Chang received a donation of a new Litespeed so that she could cut her teeth on the technology. Her facility with hardware got her bids from the best: Genentech, Cold Springs Harbor, Three Wells and ViraVax itself. The Agency had its reasons for taking a clandestine peek inside ViraVax. Rico Toledo had made the original recommendations for action and requested a fully dedicated operative. Now that Bartlett was dead, Solaris had some personal reasons for getting an op inside ViraVax.

Red Bartlett’s death was one, personal safety was another. Any death at or implicating ViraVax demanded a “shoot first, ask questions later” posture of seizure, containment and quarantine. Extreme Precautions drills ran, on the average, once a week, never during Sabbath, sometimes standing down for as long as three weeks. Extreme Precautions protocols were initiated on the evening of Red Bartlett’s death. Those protocols ran their course in the field, in the news, at the embassy and inside the lab. As far as Marte Chang could determine, nothing had changed except Red Bartlett was dead, and she sat on the hot seat.

Chapter 8

Sonja Bartlett ignored the little kissing sounds from the sopheads lining the street and picked up her pace to keep their quick hands off her butt. She had spent all of her fifteen years in Costa Brava, but only this year had she managed to get into downtown La Libertad alone. Being female in Costa Brava had its price, and Sonja had no patience for it.

The doorway of the Pan American slid open with a burst of conditioned air that teased her long legs underneath her cotton skirt. A waiter in traditional Mayan dress escorted her to her mother’s table near the fountain. She knew that the waiter was an embassy informer, and that her mother knew, but the noise of the fountain made eavesdropping difficult and they never talked about anything important, anyway.

“I’ve asked you a thousand times not to walk,” Nancy said. “People disappear here.”

“Hi, Mom,” Sonja said, and kissed the offered cheek. “I’m glad to see you, too. What’s this about you going to work for that raving dzee, Colonel Toledo?”

“For a genius, you certainly limit your vocabulary,” Nancy said. “Sit down to a civilized lunch and let me—”

“Explain? Convince? Bribe? I hate him. He put that place down here and it killed Daddy.”

“Sit down!” Nancy ordered.

Their waiter set a tray of sliced fruit between them, lingered for a moment and then scurried away at a flick of Nancy’s wrist. His slick-soled sandals
slap-slap-slapped
the marble.

“Rico Toledo did not put ‘that place’ here, the government did. And you know damned well it was a guerrilla who killed your daddy and . . . and . . . ”

Nancy Bartlett blinked back tears, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her right hand began a tremor that she controlled with her left. She looked more confused than hurt, and it took her a moment to get her bearings. Sonja saw once again how, except for the length of their blonde hair and the age now showing at her mother’s eyes, mother and daughter could be twins.

“I’m sorry, Mom, I was really out of line that time.” Sonja took her mother’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “But you know what I mean . . . they worked him and worked him and sometimes he didn’t leave that lab for two weeks, three weeks at a time.”

“They didn’t
do
anything to him,” Nancy interrupted. “He was a grown man. He didn’t have to work there. . . .”

Sonja squeezed again.

“Well, I still don’t see why you want to work for Toledo. He beats his son and chases women. . . .”

“How do you know he beats his son?”

“I see Harry at exams. He schools it through the webworks now, because he doesn’t like people to see him all beat up. It’s one of those things that everybody knows but nobody talks about.”

“How long has that been going on?”

“Just this year.” Sonja speared a slice of mango and nibbled off the end. “Harry doesn’t talk to people anymore. Spends all his time on the webs.”

“I’ll be working for the embassy, honey, not the Colonel.”

“Don’t you think it’s strange, Mom? There’s a civil war in this country between the Protestants and the Catholics. ViraVax is backed by the largest evangelical movement in the hemisphere, yet it was installed by the one U.S. colonel who’s a Catholic.”
 

“I asked you to stay out of the politics here,” Nancy hissed. “That kind of talk could get you killed. And stay out of the gossip, too.”

“I’m serious, Mom. What’s going on out there?”

“Sonja!”

Sonja sighed and pulled her napkin onto her lap. She didn’t trust Colonel Toledo before her dad’s death, but now, after spending a week at his house, she despised him. The Colonel was seldom home, but when home he was always drunk and belligerent. Within two days of the Colonel’s hospitality, Sonja realized that he was having an affair with a woman half his age, an embassy woman just a few years older than Sonja.

He did Mom a favor,
she thought.
Even if I despise his motives, I have to remember that.

In the aftermath of Red Bartlett’s shooting, the Colonel had released an official statement declaring that Red Bartlett, virologist, had been killed when he came home and surprised an intruder. The Colonel’s release made no mention of the assault on her mother, one that was evident in yellowing bruises even after a week in the hospital.

Maybe he wanted to spare her the embarrassment,
she thought.

If that were the case, she could respect him for that much.

But what if he’s covering something? Something that Mom can’t remember?

The intruder had been killed in a gun battle with security and that was the end of it.

Except nothing violent ever seems to end in this country. It only escalates.

News from the webs said the same thing about the United States these days.

Sonja sighed, and focused on the sound of the fountain to calm herself. This fountain
smelled
like water and sprinkled her sandaled feet, no Gardener hologram with a fractal sound track could match it. In Costa Brava, everything was a sign or signal. This waste of a resource subtly assured the clientele that the proprietors were Catholic, not Gardener.

Their waiter brought the chicken smothered in green mole that Nancy always ordered, and two coffees. This time he did not attempt to linger.

Sonja reached for the coffee, and the end of her thick blonde braid plunked onto her plate. She wiped it off with her napkin and flipped it over her shoulder.

“I wish you’d get that cut,” her mother said. “I don’t see how you can stand it so long in this heat.”

“The Maya women do just fine.”

“I know that you’re fascinated with them, dear, but no matter how hard you try you cannot be a Maya Indian. It’s a simple matter of birth.”

“You mean genetics, don’t you?” Sonja asked. “Daddy could have made me a Maya if he’d wanted to. He did things that were harder than that.”

Sonja studied her mother for her reaction. She had never known how much her mother knew about her father’s work, and until this past year, Sonja had not bothered to wonder herself. This year she had heard rumors, and after her father’s death strange messages interrupted her research on the webworks. These messages linked ViraVax with the dramatic plunge in Costa Brava’s birthrate.

Nancy’s pale complexion paled even further, and a fire kindled in her blue eyes. Her full lips, so much like Sonja’s, drew tight. She spoke with an intensity that Sonja had not often seen from her mother.

“ViraVax invented the AIDS vaccine,” Nancy said. “It won Joshua Casey the Nobel Prize. You think of all that as ancient history because you weren’t born yet.”

“Mother, I’m not saying . . . I know important things happened there, and I know that Dad’s AVAs, or whatever he called them, have fed a lot of people. But he changed. I saw it myself, and you’ve known him longer. . . .”

“He didn’t change,” Nancy interrupted. “They changed him.”

“That’s what I’m saying. . . . That’s why I don’t want you to go to work for that Colonel Toledo.”

“It’s
not
Colonel Toledo,” Nancy insisted. “They took him off ViraVax two years ago. I’m not even working for the embassy this time. I’m a private consultant. Essentially, I’m getting paid for going to dinner with interesting people.”

Nancy’s face took on a hardness that her daughter had not seen since her mother’s release from the hospital.

“Who, then?” Sonja whispered. “I don’t believe the guerrilla story, it’s too easy. Who did this to him?”

Nancy twisted her napkin around her fist, untwisted it, twisted it again. Her pale right hand resumed its tremor and her left hand held it prisoner under the napkin.

“The Colonel doesn’t know everything that happens at ViraVax,” she said, her voice hoarse and strained. “He doesn’t know half of what Casey is doing up there. His job was to keep the compound secure, and nothing more. They took that away from him when the Children of Eden started training their own security. He’s the one who got you all of your flight simulator time, by the way.”

Sonja’s mind was racing. She was surprised that the Colonel had helped her, that was true. But the mysterious messages coded to her drop on the webs had told her about the changes in ViraVax security, and more.

How much does Mom know?
she wondered.
How much torment has she lived with all these years?

The messages were signed “Mariposa,” which shocked her at first because Sonja had learned to fly nearby in a biplane that the owner called
Mariposa.
She wondered how much the underground knew about her life. She suspected that it was quite a bit, if they could access her on the webworks without leaving a footprint of any kind. Harry had tried tracing them for her, but got nowhere. If Harry couldn’t find them, they were good.

Mariposa accused ViraVax of a multitude of sins, one of them being the plummeting birthrate in Costa Brava and the extremely high incidence of Down syndrome babies born in the last five years.

Costa Brava is your government’s testing ground,
one message said.
They are breeding a robot work force for the future. That is why ViraVax has higher security than the Galil weapons plant across the ridge
—
its weapons are infinitely more powerful, more insidious.

Two years ago, Sonja would have dismissed the messages as a propaganda ploy by the guerrilla underground. They saw the news of her father’s death and wanted to recruit her. They knew she was vulnerable and they were famous for capitalizing on vulnerability. But Sonja had already formed her suspicions about ViraVax and the Children of Eden before the first stark letters marched across her display.

ViraVax already killed Daddy,
she thought.
I’m not going to let them get their hands on Mom.

Sonja thought that Colonel Toledo might be the answer, after all. His new offices would be in the embassy, not at the Double-Vee compound. Her mother would remain free of that place, and Sonja would have the opportunity to find out exactly what they were up to.

I
wonder what their hospital did to her out there?

Nancy pushed her plate aside and signaled the waiter for her customary glass of wine.

“You’re being awfully quiet,” Nancy said. “Are you all right?”

“Just thinking.”

“About your father?”

Sonja nodded.

“I was just thinking of him, too,” Nancy said. “I was surprised he remembered Valentine’s Day and brought us those chocolates.”

“All melted.”

“But they were real chocolate, straight from Belize.”

“It’s not Belize anymore, Mom.”

“I know. I know,” she said. “I just remember our vacations there when you were a baby. The locals still called it Belize and that’s how I remember it.”

“Isn’t that where Colonel Toledo takes his girlfriends?”

Nancy frowned, and sighed. She started to say something, stopped, then started again.

“Time for a change of subject,” she said. “There
is
good news in the world, you know.”

“Good news? Like what?”

“I’ve found us a place. A real place.”

“You mean all to ourselves? Out of the city?”

“Exactly like we planned,” Nancy said, and raised the last of her wine for a toast.

Sonja felt her pulse race with hope. She had shared the security apartment with her mother for ten years, and she hated it only slightly less than she hated the ViraVax compound. She attended college now on the webworks, like Harry did, rather than use one of her scholarships to a school in the States.

Red’s death had shocked Sonja into the realization that she could not remember him as a live-in father, only as someone who visited her mother’s apartment on weekends and holidays. She did not want the same thing to happen between herself and her mother.

“Chill, Mom! What zone is it in? Is it a real house . . . ?”

Nancy laughed, and Sonja realized that it had been months since she’d seen her mother laugh.

“Better than that. You know the place El Canada?”

“You mean . . . El Canada the coffee
finca
with the little airstrip that I fly out of every Thursday?”

“That’s the one.”

“Chill, are we going to rent the guesthouse?”

“Better than that,” Nancy said. “I put a down payment on it yesterday. We’re buying it.”

“You
bought
it? But how . . . ?”

“We’re rich,” Nancy said. “Actually, the company bought it for us. Part of an insurance agreement. Your father always put his money back into the company and his research. I’ve cashed most of it in. I. . . I like this country, honey. It might be a mess, but it’s better here than in the States. I want to stay on here. I hope that doesn’t disappoint you.”

Sonja was stunned. El Canada was one of her favorite places on earth. An elderly Canadian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Marcoe, owned it. They spoke an antiquated French between them. Mr. Marcoe taught flying until his eyes went bad, and Sonja had been his last pupil. Every Thursday for three years he had taken Sonja up in the little Student Prince biplane while her mother visited with Mrs. Marcoe, a hardworking woman with an exuberant sense of humor.

“Mom, I just want to be with you. But it’s a big jump from the apartment to a coffee plantation. How will we do it?”

“The Marcoes are staying,” Nancy said. “They’ll manage the place. This consultant job is something I’ve always wanted for myself, not for the money. I can telecommute from home, like you kids do.” She sipped her water and widened her smile. “There’s more.”

“More? How could there be more?”

Sonja was so excited that she could barely keep her seat.

“I bought the plane, too,” she said.
“Mariposa
is yours.”

Sonja’s plate slipped out of the waiter’s hands and crashed to the tiled floor, sending bits of blue porcelain skidding into the lobby. Sonja scooted her chair back and let him clean up. She noted that her mother still looked happy, really happy, not only for the first time since her father’s death but for the first time that Sonja could remember.

Sonja conjured some happiness herself and smiled at her mother, wanting to savor their newfound closeness, wanting to perpetuate this sense of happiness and hope forever. But secretly she worried about their waiter: who he was, what he heard and who he heard it for.