ViraVax (5 page)

She would get to the bottom of her father’s death, even if it meant taking on Colonel Rico Toledo, or an alliance with the guerrilla underground. Sonja knew her strengths: she was patient, persistent and bright. Someone had attacked her family. Someone was going to pay.

Chapter 9

Chief Executive Officer Joshua Casey received his father, Calvin, in the mahogany-paneled suite that fewer than a dozen people had seen. Casey knew that his father disapproved of the luxurious appointments of this inner office, but Joshua insisted that it reminded him of quality, of excellence. Neither he nor his father would settle for less than that. Not for ViraVax, and certainly not for the Lord.

Both father and son served the Lord in their fashion: Calvin Casey’s television ministry,
The Eden Hour,
brought the Word into a quarter of a billion homes each week; Joshua Casey’s ViraVax provided them the freedom from disease and the agricultural bounty that was befitting the Children of Eden.

Joshua Casey helped to weed and prune the Garden, making the Children of Eden acceptable in the hard eyes of the Lord.

Today the Master looked drawn, older than his sixty-five years, and Joshua Casey frowned his concern. He knew that his father, like himself, observed the strict dietary guidelines of their faith. Both men were vegetarians, and they augmented the benefits of their diet with daily hydrotherapy as outlined in the
Handbook for Health
written by his father nearly forty years before. Neither had missed a day of the Lord’s work in his lifetime.

“Hello, Father,” Joshua said, extending his hand to the elder Casey. “What brings you back to Costa Brava?”

“The Lord’s work, of course,” he said. “And yours.” His voice was gravelly, strained. “I decrypted your report on the Bartlett matter. It worries me.”

“It’s unlike you to worry, Father,” Joshua said. “Please, have a seat.”

Joshua patted the headrest of one of two leather recliners and, once his father was seated, he relaxed in the other. A silver serving table between them held a small loaf of bread, a pitcher of ice water and two glasses. Joshua poured each of them a glass and broke each of them a piece of bread, as was their custom. Calvin nibbled the bread, sipped the water, then set the glass down with a barely audible “Amen.”

Each took out a handkerchief and brushed the other’s shoe—a ritual foot-washing.

“Bartlett’s work helped us make great strides in controlling the Papist menace,” Calvin said. “I wanted to be sure that he hadn’t fallen prey to a Swiss Guard.”

“I appreciate that, Father.” Joshua Casey shifted under the Master’s demanding gaze. “He did not fall to the Catholics. He fell prey to something more mundane—an artificial viral agent, presumably of his own design. It must have been a private project, there is no mention of it in his log.”

“Then I presume the intruder story was provided by the Agency.”

“Correct.”

“Whatever possessed the man to experiment on himself?”

Joshua Casey sipped his ice water, decided against lying.

“He didn’t. It was an accident.”

“Accident!” The older man rose out of his chair. “Well, then, what if the whole compound’s infected?”

“Relax, Father. Sit, sit.”

Calvin Casey sat, but he didn’t relax.

“It was a simple influenza vector, designed to operate out of the DNA of the mitochondria rather than the cells themselves. . . . ”

“In plain English, please,” Calvin said. “I’m a preacher, not a virologist.”

Joshua Casey ran a hand through what was left of his hair.

“Several things are set up to happen, based on different signals,” he said. “In this case, the body’s immune system was ordered to attack itself. The entire body became a raging, irreversible infection.”

“You mean, he rotted alive?”

Joshua Casey couldn’t meet his father’s gaze.

“In a manner of speaking. The body digested itself and rejected itself at the same time.”

His father’s face showed the expression of utter disgust that he usually reserved for Rome.

“And how did he get it?” Calvin asked.

“Mosquitoes,” Joshua said. “We thought it was impossible, at first. An enzyme in the mosquito’s stomach must have reorganized the virus instead of destroying it. It shows the delicate balance we operate under here.”

Joshua Casey did not offer his father details of the ghoul that Red Bartlett had become in his final hour. Whatever raged inside him had demonstrated a tremendous drive to replicate. Joshua’s preliminary investigation pointed to an unauthorized study at Level Five, but Dajaj Mishwe was the principal investigator, not Red Bartlett.

This one might lead us to the right one,
Casey thought.
Mishwe can add it to his candidates for the final scouring of the gene pool.

Joshua Casey did better than prepare for Armageddon—he scripted the plan. Dajaj Mishwe carried it out.

“Any other casualties?” his father asked.

“Everything was contained and sterilized,” Joshua said. “Nothing else got out. You heard the official statement.”

“Yes.”

The Master, Calvin Casey, pursed his lips so that his little gray mustache looked like the edge of a blade under his ample nose.

“Is there anyone here who would have wanted him dead?”

“No, Father, it was nothing like that. . . .”

“I want you to get rid of that Colonel Toledo.”

“Get rid of. . . but why?” Joshua protested. “The Agency keeps him on a short leash at the embassy. Since his people trained our security and turned it over to us, he’s stayed out of our hair. He’s provided the ultimate security and cover—even the AMA believes we’re in Puerto Rico. Why get rid of a good thing?”

“He has not provided the ultimate security,” Calvin said. “If he had, that madman’s wife would never have been permitted to live outside this compound. His daughter would have been schooled here, like the rest. He’s a Catholic. I want this incident to disappear. Call in a favor from the Agency, if you have to.”

Joshua Casey wrung his hands and felt the sweat on his upper lip betray his fear.

“Father, it’s not that easy. First, the widow is the daughter of the Speaker of the House. We have bought her a house and property nearby as a gesture of goodwill. She will stay. Second, no one goes to the Agency, the Agency comes to you. Now, the Colonel’s news release was accepted by all parties as the truth. . . .”

“The wife shot him, you say. How long before she develops a very inconvenient recurring nightmare and tells someone?”

“One of our best people conditioned her during her hospital stay,” Joshua countered. “We backed up her conditioning with the usual hypnotic and one of our new AVAs that permitted her to ‘remember’ more correctly. I assure you, she and the child are not a problem. His work with us was well worth—”

“The Colonel himself, then,” Calvin interrupted. “How long before his intelligence organization informs him of your experiments on his fellow idolators? What will you do when he turns on you with all of the resources at his disposal? It is better to take care of this now.”

Joshua Casey smiled. It was not often that he acted in anticipation of his father’s wishes, but each time he had, it had served to bond them closer. Pleasing his father was like pleasing the Lord, something that was a supreme satisfaction in and of itself.

“The Colonel has been one of our subjects on several occasions,” Joshua said. “He was one of the first sperm vectors. Dajaj used him for a successful genetic duplication trial the year we opened here, almost seventeen years ago. We had the opportunity to reinoculate three years later and successfully sterilized his wife through the AVA delivered in his sperm. As you know, the embassy physician is our man, so we have had good follow-up on her. . . .”

“Can you predict exactly what this Colonel will do at any moment?” his father asked.

Joshua Casey was stung into silence. He waited in respectful silence to hear his father’s suggestions on the matter. Apparently, there would be none.

“Then get rid of him.”

Calvin Casey worried about his son. While Costa Brava was the perfect proving ground for the armory of the Lord, it was still a bastion of the idolators, the Catholics, and they did not take challenges to their centuries of power lying down. And his son’s company built viruses, artificial viral agents. This made Calvin Casey uneasy. He had designed the perfectly healthy regimen for the Children of Eden, a regimen that was touted as exemplary by none less than the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization. He did not relish the idea of some Catholic or some laboratory spill wiping out all that he had wrought in his forty-five years of service to the Lord.

“Father? Are you all right?”

Calvin Casey forced himself back to reality.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all. And worried about you, of course. No need to press this subject further, you know how I stand. As for the lab, I presume that you are taking proper precautions and caring for yourself. Your mother would be proud, bless her soul. But there is one thing that would worry her.”

Joshua Casey smiled. “I know, Father. You want me married.”

“It’s not that I want you. . . well, perhaps it is. Your mother and I were one organism, if I may speak your language for a moment. I know that now, because I am half a being without her. It is something that I can’t explain, because you’ve never had the experience.”

“It’s unlikely that I’ll meet the perfect woman here, Father.” Casey smiled again. “Isolation is a must, you know that. I’m married to my work. . . .”

“Hogwash. Besides, you’re the sole surviving Casey. Do you want everything that we’ve worked for to fall into the hands of strangers?”

“I’ll work on it, Father. I promise.”

“Commit to it,” his father ordered. “Your assistant, Shirley Good, has demonstrated promise, I believe, and uncommon loyalty. There has been talk. You, of all people, must be above talk. Take care of it.”

“We’ll see,” Joshua Casey said, reassuring his father with his best smile. “We’ll soon see.”

Joshua Casey excused himself, then returned to his overcluttered study and the complicated problem of Red Bartlett’s death.

Mosquito bites.

That had been in the report. Mosquito bites, scratched up and still inflamed, probably five or six days old. Red Bartlett hadn’t been topside in nearly two weeks, so he had to get them inside the facility, somewhere between his labs at Level Two and Mishwe’s supply labs at Level Five.

Now, how could a mosquito get in here?
Casey wondered.

Everyone below the topside level was fumigated, stripped, cleansed, clothed in sterile jumpsuits. Every molecule of air and water was filtered, cleansed and sterilized in a four-hour ritual. The lab complex was just that, complex, and most of it lay underground, bunkered against an uncasual glance or a neutron bomb.

Now Casey held the histology report on what was left of Red Bartlett: “Tissue rejection reaction/purulence; complete cellular breakdown.”

Bartlett had never had a transplant of any kind, nor transfusion, yet his body had disintegrated, burned with a blue flame, just like several Innocents from Mishwe’s section. Red Bartlett melted and stank and so did the whole damned scene.

If
a mosquito transmitted this from one of Mishwe’s experimental subjects to Bartlett, then all of us could be in danger.

The only other answer was equally frightening—Bartlett had been deliberately infected with an experimental AVA, one with which Mishwe had taken other liberties, of late.

If Red had worked at the brassiere factory in La Libertad, Major Scholz would be content to read about it tomorrow on the web. But Bartlett was her boss’s best friend, and he worked for ViraVax, and Casey knew that she knew that spontaneous human combustion was impossible no matter what the tabloids said.

Rico Toledo’s situation was another reason for Agency involvement. Falling so swiftly on the Colonel’s sudden decline, his best friend’s suspicious death would look even more suspicious.

As it looks now to me,
Casey thought.

Suspension, suspicion and more drinking took Rico Toledo down. . . or did it? The Agency chief, Solaris, claimed Toledo was better than that, and the albino was never wrong.

Toledo’s conduct towards his family had been unconscionable, and a formal censure had been in the works for a month when Grace Toledo cut him. Catholics were such barbarians. Something like this would be unthinkable in a Gardener family.

It worked out quite to Casey’s satisfaction, however. Now Toledo would be far too busy with his personal battles to snoop into corners at ViraVax.

Too bad she didn’t kill him,
he thought.

Casey took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

That’s the way Mishwe thinks.

In truth, it was a strong reason for keeping Mishwe on. A lot of Casey’s wishes became fulfilled because of his right-hand man’s ability to intuit them, get them done without a lot of aggravating questions, ethical decisions or publicity.

Suddenly, a lot of nasty arrows pointed to Mishwe. He had always been the facility’s most valuable player, even though he chose to play alone. With Bartlett gone, Casey was free of the only Roman Catholic on his staff, but he was seriously short-handed, as well.

Maybe Marte Chang will work into something permanent,
he thought.
That is,
willingly
work into something permanent.

Meanwhile, there was the matter of Mishwe. Casey decided it was time to put a leash on the man, but it would have to wait until Marte Chang’s project was finished. Then she would either be one of them or gone, and that would determine what kind of leash to put on Mishwe, and how short.

Chapter 10

Harry Toledo clearly remembered the bright lights of his birth at the turn of the millennium fifteen years ago, he remembered the blood-stink and the noise. The blessing of his extraordinary memory had turned on him as often as it had given him comfort. The stink came back to him now as he nursed his broken nose. The lights and the noise had been with him all along.

“Your father used to hate to fight.”

Grace Toledo raised her voice loud enough so that Harry could hear her over the running water.

He always did a good job of it,
Harry thought.

Grace Toledo was washing her hands for the fourth time in an hour. Harry studied his battered face in the hallway mirror and didn’t say anything. If it weren’t for the cuts, bruising and the swelling, he would be a dead ringer for the Colonel at fifteen. They shared the same gray eyes, dark hair, high cheekbones, full lips. The Colonel wore his hair short and crisp; Harry’s curled over the back of his shirt collar.

We sure as hell don’t share attitude,
Harry thought.

He listened to the
whirr
of his terminal down the hall as it copied his personal network and files into his Sidekick for travel.

Harry saw that he would resemble his father, too, in the break that pushed his nose just a hair to the left.

Great,
he thought.
Another tender reminder of paternal affection.

Harry hadn’t been shaving long enough to tell what kind of beard he might have. At fifteen, he hoped that it would fill out more. Nothing much in Harry Toledo’s life was normal. He was an information junkie who finished high school three years early from his home station. For the last year he showed up at American School only to take his exams and fill out paperwork. He didn’t miss having to explain his constant bruising.

The water stopped.

“Do you think he’ll die?”

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “They had to strap him down to get him out of here. . . .”

Now that he and his mother were alone, they could consider such things. The house Watchdog system had notified security and the embassy, who responded with their own people. The Costa Bravans would be brought in first thing in the morning.

That will not be pretty,
Harry thought.

Costa Brava’s Hacienda Police would not bother themselves over a coffee worker’s wife who stabbed her husband, even if he died. But when the stabbed husband is a famous North American colonel, someone’s head must roll. Harry looked at his watch.

Five-twenty.

He keyed the Watchdog scanner for the departure of the last of the embassy’s investigators.

05:04:58.

Harry’s mother didn’t have much time.

It doesn’t pay to be famous,
he thought.

Some of the time it paid. Being a liaison for the new Confederation of Costa Brava had brought Colonel Toledo and his family this mansion in the Colonia Escalon neighborhood, one of the most exclusive in all of Central America. It came with a full security system, including guards, who might be good at defending against outside attack, but so far they had not saved Harry from his father’s wrath inside.

“Are you sure I’m clean?” Grace asked.

Harry looked at her outstretched hands, red from their scrubbing.

“Yes,” he sighed, “they’re clean. Have you read
Macbeth
lately?”

“Humor me,” she said. “I just wanted him to stop. He would have killed you this time. I didn’t expect. . . There was so much blood.”

She patted his shoulder and checked the Watchdog.

“How many did they finally leave?”

“Two out front,” he said, “and two behind. And the binoculars in the apartment beside the power station.”

The security contingency for their protection also meant they were prisoners. His terminal ceased its telltale hum. He pocketed his Sidekick, then ran a large magnet over the drive section of his terminal. He pressed “format,” gave its warm top a pat, and turned back to the mirror and the antiseptic.

His mother turned on the faucet again.

“We can’t wait,” she whispered. “I don’t trust any of them. I’ll tell you what we’ll have to do.”

Harry listened with the detachment that comes with fatigue and an adrenaline letdown. He and his mother had been up all night while the Agency reviewed its protocols on “extreme domestic incidents involving Agency personnel while in-country.” People who had sat at Grace Toledo’s table for dinner now debated whether she would be arrested, deported or dragged back to Washington for an inquiry.

Harry felt a little giddy from no sleep and from the beating his father had given him. His nose stopped bleeding before daybreak but his right eye kept swelling until it puffed shut. This time, antihistamines didn’t help. Every time he sat down he got up slower.

Harry couldn’t remember what he’d said that set his father off. His parents had started off arguing about vaccinations. It turned to Harry and his time spent at the terminal and on the webs.

“It’s the only way he can get privacy,” his mother had argued. “He’s bright, he’s doing fine.”

“He’s
not
doing fine,” his father shouted. “It’s not
normal
for a boy to stay inside, alone, at a terminal.”

“He’s not normal”
Grace shouted back. “He grew up here and this country’s not normal.
We’re
not normal. It’s not
his
fault that you don’t do anything with him anymore.”

“Oh, I suppose it’s
my
fault.”

Harry had interrupted, but he couldn’t remember what he had said. It hadn’t been the first time, but he was sure that it would be the last. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror and pried open his right eyelid. No wonder his mother avoided looking at him: his iris was a gray cameo framed in blood.

“Raw-hamburger sandwich,” he muttered.

That was what his eye looked like, one of his father’s raw-hamburger sandwiches on white bread.

Grace Toledo was still on the phone to Washington, so when the intruder alarm sounded, Harry hurried down the hall to check the screens. It was their neighbor, Yolanda Rubia, and not the Hacienda Police. She was actually no longer their neighbor, since her recent divorce, but her family still held the property, along with the largest coffee plantation in the country.

Nobody stopped her at the gate,
he thought.

Neither guard was in sight.

Yolanda was one of the “embassy wives” that he and his mother both liked. She had a three-year-old boy with Down syndrome and three teenage daughters who attended private Catholic school. Harry had nursed a terrible crush on the oldest, Elena, who was two years his senior. Since the divorce and Yolanda’s subsequent employment at the Archbishop’s office, they had seen very little of her or the children.

Her driver, a black, middle-aged North American, mopped his balding head with a huge white handkerchief. All the drivers carried big white handkerchiefs in case of cross fire. At fifteen, even Harry knew that this war had no etiquette.

The security scan verified that it was this Gilbert Williams who had driven Harry and his father, the Colonel, from the airport one night.

Colonel Toledo,
Harry thought.
He’s not my father anymore. He’s just Colonel Toledo.

If rumor proved true, he wouldn’t be a colonel much longer, either. If the Colonel survived the scissors slash that had saved Harry’s life, he would be very lucky to stay out of jail. A fearful nausea washed over Harry at the thought of his father, so he swept that thought aside.

Harry pressed the bolt release himself and opened the front door. Francesca hadn’t shown up for work but Harry had taught himself the security drills. He had seen Williams only the one time, three months ago, and he’d looked so much younger.

“Jesus, kid!” was all Williams said.

Grace Toledo met them at the door and Yolanda Rubia handed her a plain envelope, the kind that might hold an invitation to one of the embassy parties.

“The Colonel, he did this?” Yolanda asked, nodding at Harry.

Neither Harry nor his mother answered. Grace Toledo glanced around the courtyard as she pocketed the envelope.

“The men?” Grace asked.

Her blue eyes indicated the unlocked gate behind the Archbishop’s car. Harry saw no sign of either of their guards, and neither did his mother. His part of the plan had worked. The kids that Harry had signaled were shooting off firecrackers down the block, and Williams wiped at his sweat as his quick brown eyes sought snipers on the rooftops.

Later, Harry would remember this as the day no roosters crowed, the day the crippled parrot in the mango tree did not bark at the cats, the day the cats and Francesca and even the fruit flies disappeared. He could never be sure about the truth, but that’s the way he would remember that last sunrise in Colonia Escalon with his mother.

Two concussions shook the house. Harry recognized the
whap-WHUMP
of
“un tigre,”
an antipersonnel mine that the army set up around power transformers, substations and relay towers. Harry flinched, though he’d been practicing not to. Gilbert Williams flinched, too. Harry’s mother didn’t, and neither did Yolanda.

“The gate was open,” Williams said. “I didn’t see anybody.”

“They’re throwing us to the wolves, the bastards.”

“There is much that you do not understand,” Yolanda said. “Whatever happens, I am with you. You must hurry. I will be in touch.”

Yolanda hugged Grace Toledo and kissed her cheeks, then shook Harry’s hand.

“Ciao,” she said, and hurried down the drive to disappear around the wall.

Williams had the door open for Harry; Grace was already inside. Harry limped quickly over to the car and slid into the back seat beside his mother.

She has a plan, and it doesn’t include the law.

Harry felt better already.

Another
tigre
blew on the block behind them. Neighborhood children taught Harry to find where they were buried. They lobbed water balloons made from the government’s free condoms to set them off. The substation behind them had been taken out three times this month by guerrillas. This time they did it as a favor to him.

“What about the kid?” Williams asked. “Nobody said anything about a kid.”

Harry suppressed a smile. Williams was getting very exasperated. Transporting the Colonel’s wife after she’d cut up the Colonel was not the most secure duty of the day.

“You’re a driver,” his mother said. “Drive.”

Harry said nothing and looked straight ahead. His mouth tasted like pennies and he could barely control his breathing. He concentrated on not touching his eye, which throbbed deeply with his pulse.

Someone would have to pay. The embassy had distanced itself from them overnight, the usual political precautions. Harry was surprised that his mother had a plan, and not one of the embassy’s contingency plans, but one of her own. The darkened windows of the Archbishop’s car helped Harry to relax.

His mother removed the envelope from her pocket and read the first line, and smiled.

“Do you have an address, Mrs. Toledo?”

Harry saw the hint of a smile twitch the corner of Grace’s mouth, something that Gil probably would not notice. Harry did not know what to feel, but he knew he didn’t feel like smiling. Besides, it would probably hurt his eye and his split lip.

“Show us the guesthouse.”

Harry watched Gil’s eyes reflected in the rearview mirror. They widened in disbelief, then Gil turned to protest.

“Guesthouse,” his mother repeated.

There were a lot of code words in Costa Brava, this Harry well knew. He knew several for use with security or the embassy and they all carried standing orders that did not require confirmation. Their driver might not like whatever Grace just told him, but he wouldn’t dare take a chance and disobey.

Before turning back to the wheel, Gil gave Harry’s mother a long, appraising look. Then he grunted, punctuating some personal decision, and drove. He kept his white handkerchief on the seat beside him, draped over a pistol. He attempted conversation only once.

“Mrs. Toledo . . . ”

“Call me Grace.”

“Yes. Well, I had something personal to say and now it looks like there won’t be time.”

“Tell me now.”

“I don’t want to disturb the boy.”

“Harry knows everything.”

“I see.”

Harry saw a tic of disapproval in Gil’s cheek reflected in the rearview mirror.

They were leaving the posh suburb of Colonia Escalon and entering the first of several shantytowns that lined the roadway circumnavigating the capital. Skinny pigs dozed in potholes, veiled in the blue smoke of a thousand charcoal fires. The scent of fresh tortillas breached the car’s air-conditioning. Williams cleared his throat and continued.

“I wanted you to know that a lot of us know what you went through with your husb—with Colonel Toledo. You did what had to be done.”

Harry watched a barefoot boy and girl his own age pushing a cartful of broken metal towards the city. The curbside tire wobbled under the weight and made the going tougher. A piece of chrome trim nailed to the side said “Mitsubishi.” A makeshift cage with two scraggly chickens teetered atop the load. The dark boy bent to his traces, his bare back a study in tendon and bone. Two Down kids,
deficientes,
followed behind, holding hands and the tail end of a rope.

The swell-breasted girl glanced up from her chore and their gazes met. Harry waved and she flashed a smile and waved back. The brother never looked up. The Down kids compared tongues and laughed at some unspoken joke.

“Yes,” his mother said to Williams, “thank you.”

Her voice sounded weak, detached, unlike her.

Harry had not seen much of his father during the last few years, and what he had seen he did not like. His father didn’t take him to the gym for karate on Saturdays anymore, and Harry was too old to play hostage-and-escape. Harry’s father had spent most of his military career in Central America, first as an advisor and then as chief of intelligence. Costa Brava was a new country, rising out of the ashes of four old ones. Colonel Toledo had made that happen, at the expense of his family.