ViraVax (2 page)

Chapter 3

Two hours after Red Bartlett’s death, his teenage daughter, Sonja, was committed to a landing of the new Bushwhacker jungle fighter. The Bushwhacker, the enemy and the jungle were simulations but her glove and helmet controls were not. Just as she rolled under enemy fire to rocket their bridge, her visuals blacked out of her visor display, the pitch and yaw of her seat returned to straight-and-level and Sergeant Trethewey’s voice echoed in her helmet receiver.

“You have company,” he said.

His voice was flat, cold, nothing like his usual self.

“Who?” she asked.

Sonja’s stomach went cold. She had her private pilot’s license already at fifteen, but she had no authorization to be in this simulator seat, nor inside the military half of the airfield, for that matter.

Before the sergeant could answer, a harsh voice asked, “Are you Sonja Bartlett?”

Maybe it was the sudden change in Trethewey’s usually jovial demeanor, but she had a bad feeling about this one. She caught a glimpse of herself reflected on the blank screen of her visor: disheveled blonde hair coming out of its braid; sweat that her suit couldn’t keep up with stung her blue eyes. A red impression from her helmet’s visor seal would frame her freckled face.

Not very presentable,
she thought.

Sonja lifted her visor and caught a glimpse of two armed figures dressed in black entering the sergeant’s control booth in the north wall. Her stomach lurched again.

Sonja had been well educated in the hostage-taking politics of Costa Brava. The embassy held workshops on hostage survival on a monthly basis, and Sonja’s parents saw to it that she attended. Her friend Harry Toledo was also a regular.

At their first session, Harry had joked, “Rule number one: Don’t put yourself in a situation where you’d make a desirable hostage.”

Then Harry had nodded at the children of ambassadors and bankers and high-level military surrounding them in the auditorium.

“This is exactly the kind of situation they tell us to avoid,” he said. “We’re supposed to hang out with invisible people,
normal
people.”

“Normal?”
she’d joked back. “What’s that?”

Tonight, two men in black fatigues filled up the control booth and four more strode into the simulator room with their hard breathing and their stubby rifles. None of them pointed their weapons at her. She framed each one in turn as though they were inside the targeting square of her visor. At least one of them was a woman. Sergeant Trethewey, who had garnered her the simulator time, was gone.

“It’s an EP drill, isn’t it?” she asked.

No one answered.

Always before, during one of ViraVax’s Extreme Precautions drills, they never actually contacted her. This part of their drill, securing personnel and dependents, was always simulated, mainly because she and her mother were the only dependents living away from the facility. For several years, they had been the only dependents, period. These days, ViraVax didn’t hire anyone encumbered by family or friends. Usually they simply called her mother to tell her the result and issue the “all-clear.”

This time was very different; the men’s presence and their down-to-business eyes told her that.

“Yes, I am Sonja Bartlett,” she admitted with an exasperated wave. “Is this a drill?”

She pulled off her helmet and looked the leader in the eyes. They were light blue, like her own, and their gaze, ice-cold.

“No,” he said. “This is not a drill. We are here to account for your presence and to hold you until further notice, nothing more.”

Sonja secured her helmet and control gloves to the console, and stepped down from the simulator.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you that,” the leader said.

The second, a woman, came up to stand beside him. Her gaze was all inspection and concern.

“Well, then, who?” Sonja asked. “If you can’t tell me what, at least tell me who. Is it my father?”

She had always been afraid of this moment, knowing even what little she did of her father’s work and the kind of place that employed him. This she got aplenty from Harry, since his father had been chief of security, and from the web. The guerrillas fed plenty of stuff into the web for her to pluck off, and it wasn’t all propaganda.

The leader glanced at his second, then back at Sonja.

It was the second who spoke.

“Yes,” she said, “it involves your father. Your mother is safe.”

“It’s serious, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

They showed no sign of escorting her to another room, so Sonja sat on the simulator step, her body edging close to panic.

He must be dead,
she thought.
They wouldn’t be so close-mouthed if he was alive.

She thought of her mother, alone in her apartment, and of her grandfather, who had fought to keep them out of Costa Brava.

“You can’t raise a family there,” he had said. “It’s a stinkhole of a country, even if it is new. I should know, I see the reports.”

That was a smoke screen, Sonja knew. Her grandfather was Speaker of the House back in the U.S., and he saw their unwillingness to relocate in America as a cowardice.

“Everybody wants out!” he’d shouted over the speaker at Christmas. “The good people of this country can’t just bail out and leave it to the goddamn criminals. . . .”

But they hadn’t fled America. Nancy Bartlett was a Latin America specialist who had followed her love and her dream. She’d married the virologist Red Bartlett, who also followed his dream, and they had converged on Costa Brava. Sonja knew no other place and, like her closest friend, Harry Toledo, she called Costa Brava home.

A squawk on the leader’s Sidekick indicated an incoming message. He glanced at the screen, then nodded at Sonja.

“We’re authorized to move you now. We’ll be taking you to Colonel Toledo’s. He will inform you of the situation. Do you have anything here that has to go with you?”

Sonja pulled her flight log out of the rack beside the simulator.

“Just this,” she said, hoping she didn’t show any of the fear that shimmied in her knees and bladder. “Let’s go.”

Chapter 4

Marte Chang’s black hair whipped her face as she stepped onto the gangway and into the downdraft of the unmarked Mongoose’s huge twin rotors. The exhaust stink was worth it; the rotor wash cut the smothering humidity trapped with her on the valley floor. Marte shaded her eyes with one hand and shifted her underwear with the other. ViraVax spread out before her, nothing like she had expected.

No roads,
she thought, and suppressed a shudder.

The only way into the remote facility was by air, and air travel was not her strong suit. From her vantage point atop the lift pad, Marte noted the triple fencing tipped inward around the perimeter, the precipitous valley walls, the tangle of lush jungle. Occasionally, over the exhaust smell, she caught a sweet whiff of floral perfume. She didn’t see a lot of people topside, but the few she saw seemed very busy and spoke very little.

A crew of red-clad workers unloaded supplies from the Mongoose while another crew refueled. They
whirrrrred
along in little carts with fat tires and followed dotted lines painted into the concrete. Marte Chang’s eyes became accustomed to the glare, and she saw that all of the workers displayed the moon-faced, close-eyed, thick-tongued features of Down syndrome.

“Innocents,” she said.

No one could hear her over the noise of the rotors, and it wouldn’t matter if they did. That was what the Children of Eden called them, “Innocents.”

Because they don’t have souls,
she thought.

This she had heard often during her undergraduate days at the Universidad de Montangel, the high-tech school in Mexico owned by the Children of Eden. They had no souls because, according to the Children of Eden, these people weren’t truly human.

Trisomy twenty-one.
 

Her genetics instructor at Montangel called them “Triples,” “Trips” and, because he was a recovering gambler, “Blackjacks.” Genetic analysis identified the dominant type as having three sets of chromosome twenty-one instead of two.

You would think they would get
more
of something.

What they did get were more heart surgeries and abdominal surgeries, more openness, more need for reassurance and touch. The Children of Eden made up the world’s leading experts on Down syndrome, and funded hundreds of foster homes for them in Costa Brava alone. The Latinos called them
deficientes.

Their medical students get a lot of surgical practice,
Marte thought.

ViraVax housed a complete surgical suite, clinic and emergency room staffed by missionaries on their two-year rotation. This was one of the things that Joshua Casey’s preliminary briefing had not told her, but her briefing from the Agency had. Marte Chang turned back towards the black hulk of a plane, hoping for a reflection that would help her tidy up. The only glass in the top of the doorway sucked up light and threw back a distorted image, one that gave her a fat jaw and a pin head. She had instructions from Dr. Casey to wait atop the gangway until someone came for her. All of these
deficientes
hurried about their business, but none of their business seemed to have anything to do with her. She presumed that it was Joshua Casey’s way of putting her in her place.

A couple of missionaries, identifiable by their white baseball caps, directed the lift pad crews and, in the fields below, brown-suited crews tended the agriculture. Every available surface yielded to the tillers. The tops of all of the ViraVax building—
bunkers, really,
she noted—teemed with fruits and squashes and blossoms. The fenced-in farmlands surrounding these bunkers made up more than 350 square kilometers of cultivated soil.

They feed their entire facility, plus the foster homes and outlying missions.

ViraVax could be wealthy from its fruit production alone.

Artificial viral agents made the difference. Compressed and packed inside a retroviral shell, AVAs entered a target organism and carried out certain engineering tasks there—usually insertion or deletion of a single protein, a single amino acid, or a regrouping of chains within the nuclei of the cells. Crops flourished, diseases fell to the microsword.

Even the microsword has two edges.

If the Agency was right, ViraVax engineered a series of famines in Moslem nations and was experimenting on its Down syndrome charges, proving that any top has its bottom.

“Doctor Chang!”

Her name was a mouthful for the red-haired young man who waved to her from one of the carts. He carried all of the characteristic trisomy features behind a huge smile, and expertly swung the cart around to meet her at the bottom of the step.

He flapped his stubby fingers at her in the Latin gesture that meant “hurry along.” Her two bags already lay in the back.

“I’m David,” he said, and offered a hand as she stepped in.

“Thanks,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Hold the bar,” David said, indicating a handhold on the dashboard.

Her understanding of what he said was a beat or two behind his saying it. He waited until she had a grip, then wheeled her towards the flight-deck elevators. They rolled aboard, cart and all, and rolled off at ground level. Colored lines in the pavement guided crews between barracks and work.

Marte noted that worker jumpsuits and overalls were color-coded to match the lines on the pavement.

They passed about a dozen
deficientes
watching a bald-headed man run an obstacle course built entirely of rubber tires. The young people laughed, and clapped, and several mimicked his performance as best they could. Nothing here pointed towards the danger she felt, a distinct pressure between her shoulder blades like a warning finger or a gun muzzle.

“We’ll see Dr. Casey now,” David said.

He pointed towards a huge bunker overgrown with banana trees. A welcoming party of two awaited her behind the foyer doors, a tall, blonde woman and a balding young man.

“I’m Shirley Good,” the blonde said, “and this is our attorney, Noah Wheeler.”

Marte shook hands and the others did not waste time with small talk. They escorted her inside the facility proper. She glanced over her shoulder just before the hatch swung closed, and saw David waving at her. She waved back, the hatch closed and Marte had the terrible feeling that she had just seen the outside world for the last time.

This mission would accomplish three things for Marte Chang. It would pay back her education expenses and her obligation to the Defense Intelligence Agency, guarantee the production of her revolutionary new power plants worldwide, and it would make her a very wealthy young woman. Marte Chang was a scientist, not a spy, and she was eager to prove her science, even in the heart of the enemy.

The enemy, to Marte Chang, was anyone who practiced bad science, or excellent science to bad ends. The Agency had positioned her to find out firsthand how bad the science and the ends might be at ViraVax. They suspected the worst.

Marte was surprised at the sudden and complete sadness that washed over her. She flicked a tear out of the corner of her eye and took a deep breath.

Poor, poor, pitiful me.

Her parents had met in the United States while on student visas from China. Both had been hunted down and killed in the streets of Seattle by Chinese death squads when she was four. This vendetta was carried out as a reprisal for their part in the civil war which bloodied the Chinese streets and led to the ongoing, expensive conflict with the U.S.-Russian-Japanese alliance. She was no stranger to betrayal and fear.

The U.S.-Russian-Japanese alliance had just accomplished a Middle East “police action” that turned into a Pyrrhic victory at best. The alliance gained control of the surviving oil fields, but they had perpetrated a genocide that brought Marte to the verge of renouncing her citizenship and led her to look for work outside the United States.

Marte wanted to crush these agents of death, wherever their headquarters. They gave science a bad name, and she didn’t like that. Marte had never suspected that her search would lead her to the threshold of her benefactor, the Children of Eden. Like the old friend who had betrayed her parents, the Church blasted a big hole in her fabric of trust.

She had uncovered the source of “warfare by drought and pestilence,” a charge leveled at the United States by over a hundred nations. That source was ViraVax, under the umbrella of the Children of Eden.

ViraVax PR experts helped the government dismiss these charges as paranoia, group hysteria, irrational rantings of a heathen elite.

Marte Chang would trust herself now, and no one else.

Casey and another half dozen of his staff awaited her in the Thinktank, Casey’s brainstorming parlor complete with a scale-model topo of the entire valley asprawl in the center of the room. At the top of the topo, three kilometers north of ViraVax, a dam blocked the tiny Rio Jaguar and tapped it for power.

“Marte Chang’s work, the Sunspots, will make this dam obsolete,” Casey began. “It frees the rest of the valley for agriculture and removes a dangling sword from over our heads. Her viral agents form sheets of intricate microcircuits, and this discovery may win her the Nobel Prize. Meanwhile, she is ours. Please welcome Doctor Marte Chang.”

The applause and enthusiasm were genuine. Casey’s loud-voiced introduction had put her off at first, but now she felt excitement taking over where fear left off. She brushed aside her initial disorientation.

“Thank you,” she said. “I look forward to working with all of you. I did not expect to start quite so immediately. . . .”

“This is the Litespeed age,” Casey boomed. “Your data arrived on the network and preliminaries were completed two days ago. We’ve discussed everything, drawn up agreements. . . .” He nodded towards the folder in Noah Wheeler’s hands. “We’ve been waiting for your body to complete the journey. Perhaps someone will engineer us a teletransporter one day, who knows?”

Marte smiled politely to reflect the polite laughter in the room and thought that, with all this preparation, she could have spent less time out there on the lift pad under Costa Brava’s merciless sun.

Joshua Casey introduced her around, confirmed assignments, and they all shared a pitcher of ice water to cinch the deal. It was a custom of the Children of Eden, like their foot-washing custom. She hoped that they wouldn’t have to go into that here.

Joshua Casey’s little eyes glittered as he tolled the lab’s virtues.

“Fire fighters, security, all medical-technical, lab-technical or shop apprentices are missionaries on a two-year rotation, practicing to be mayors, generals, farmers,” he reported.

Marte would sum up later for her own report—to the Agency— through a network drop known only as “Mariposa.” She needed to establish contact immediately through the facility’s satellite burst system, something she had had a dry run on only once back in the States. She had much more confidence in her skills as a virogenetic engineer than in her abilities as a spy.

I wish I’d been able to clean up,
Marte thought, between smiles and nods.

She presumed that Casey was proving a point about his work ethic—freshening up was not nearly so important as a lesson in control.

A tall blonde, the only other woman in the group, received a hushed message from a frightened-looking young man at the door. By the time the blonde reached Casey to relay the message, everyone had fallen silent, the weight of her burden apparent in the grim set of her mouth. What she told Casey ended Marte Chang’s orientation for the day.

“Let us pray,” Casey intoned, and all except Marte closed their eyes and bowed heads. The rest was a few moments in coming.

“Our brother, Red Bartlett, has been murdered at his home,” Casey said. His voice held the tight, low quality that Marte associated with anger, and it quivered. “He was struck down in his own home by forces of the idolators, by the betrayers of Christ, and his wife was gravely injured. Lord”—Casey lifted his hands—“we pray for her complete recovery, and solace from her terror.”

A pause.

“Aren’t Bartlett and his wife Catholic?”

The voice came from behind her and Marte was shocked at the audacity of the question. Casey, however, registered what she would describe as pleasant surprise. He let the question hang in the air like humidity, unanswered.

“Shirley,” Casey said, his voice measured, in full control, “show Dr. Chang her quarters. I want Mishwe in my office.” He turned to address the group. He never glanced her way. “The rest of you, reflect on the consequences of living among the gentiles. Had Red Bartlett made his home among us, he would have had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Chang today. That is all.”

That night, before sleep, Marte Chang summed up her observations, orientation and her briefing. Once she mastered sending messages out on burst, she wanted plenty to send. Marte wanted to be sure that her Agency obligation terminated here, once and for all. Keeping a lab notebook was second nature to her. She tried to think of this that way—observations of an experiment jotted into a log.

“Personnel here go through physical conditioning as well as their scripture study,” she wrote. “They share food preparation and housing chores, and those who stay on for an additional tour come out with a degree in hotel management or public management or personnel management. This is the Children of Eden’s practical university and the degree means you know how to run at least part of a world. A Gardener world.

“They manage the model village above the ViraVax labs— health care, farm operation, shipping/receiving, transport. The Innocents are called domestics or laborers, but to the Gardeners they’re just biomechanical servants, slaves and spare parts. There is a pair of missionaries for every dozen Innocents, and the Innocents are closely bonded with them. The missionaries are all males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. They are devoted, enthusiastic and horny. Half of the Innocents are female. The problems inherent in that arrangement conflict mightily with the strict sanctions imposed by their religion. The sergeant-at-arms for these sanctions is someone I haven’t met. He’s in charge of the mysterious Level Five labs that will be providing the medium for my Sunspots—Dajaj Mishwe.”