ViraVax (23 page)

Sabbath evening in Costa Brava,
he thought.

In spite of everything, he still believed he had much to be thankful for.

For a last chance at Joshua Casey, if nothing else.

His gray eyes, still sharp at fifty, inventoried the lab complex that sprawled in a park-like hollow about a thousand meters below. A plane traversing the steep hillside might manage a passing glimpse of the farm-like spread, but the “Severe Magnetic Disturbance” warnings on recent charts kept planes away.

ViraVax clumped at his feet, and somewhere inside lurked Joshua Casey, the man responsible for his nightmares, his failures, the enslavement of Harry and an unwitting humanity. Fear and ignorance had been the keys to the world’s cooperation. But Colonel Toledo was not ignorant, and now that he was back in the field he knew no fear.

Maybe I march to a greater fear,
he thought.

Rico Toledo had lost, given away or driven out everything that was dear to him. He believed that where there was nothing to lose there was nothing to fear.

The idea of his son melting in the wretched death that consumed Red Bartlett—that was his only fear. His greatest fear was seeing his son become one of Casey’s time bombs—an expendable device in his biogenetic arsenal.

If I can’t stop it here, at least I won’t be around to see it.

He tried to think of something that scared him more. Nothing came to mind; certainly not ViraVax, not Casey.

The Colonel readjusted the tool pouches at his waist. He knew he could penetrate ViraVax security, even though many of them had been trained by his own people in his own methods. He wanted to do this without killing anyone but Casey, if possible. Most of the shipping activity here was at night, so by day it would look like a sleepy highland ranch with a lot of barns and storage buildings. Casey himself preferred to work at night.

Toledo knew that the Agency would take the heat for Casey’s insanity when the time came. No one would believe that one of the world’s greatest benefactors would dupe the most sophisticated intelligence agency in the world. No, charges would be quite the contrary.

Bashing the Agency had been a journalistic tradition for four generations now. Colonel Toledo loved the Agency, loved the gathering and analyzing of information, loved the balance it had brought to the world. The inevitable disgrace whetted his hatred for Casey all the more.

Casey had information and the Agency had protection.

A match made in Hell,
the Colonel thought.

Casey’s brain was the most valuable brain in the world. He kept much of his work stored there, uncommitted to the vulnerability of wafers or Litespeeds. How inconvenient for Casey that his brain happened to reside in one of those vulnerable human bodies.

And how convenient for me.

In the old days, the Agency had been quick to take advantage of a few hijackings to get airport security systems installed worldwide. Drug trading gave them the excuse to install electronic strips inside currency to track the movements of cash. Epidemics, natural and man-made, were now an excuse to inoculate millions of people with a host of foreign agents. The Agency counted it an intelligence and operations opportunity. With a member of each inoculation team worldwide on the Agency payroll, the eyes and ears of America became acute.

At first, the Colonel had no idea of either the form or the scope of this advantage. Now he knew, and he could not let them cashier him out of the way. Rico suspected that three others in the Agency had known this secret. Leonard Stalker hanged himself from a stairwell in Alexandria, Virginia, just two months ago. Mitsui and St. John took off last month on a flight to the Philippines but never landed with the plane.

The embassy bombing must have been my turn.

Casey’s first tinkerings had been cheap, time-release viral agents that did their work a year or more after injection. Crude but effective, these organic blunderbusses mowed down four million people and effectively ended the messianic wars.

The Colonel had chosen this mountain hideaway himself, and it had served ViraVax well for nearly twenty years. The small dam that the Corps of Engineers had installed at the head of the valley provided the facility with more power than five sixths of the cities in the country.

The Colonel saw the pad lights flash around the simulated corral and he watched a supply chopper swoop in and out fast, black and nearly silent.

Designated “Agency training land”, the Colonel bought the property from Costa Brava with Agency funds and dubbed it “The Night School.” The Corps of Engineers designed the ViraVax compound and its bunker system, but a yellow-toothed, slick-haired contractor built it and Rico knew the importance of that difference.

His original detachment of two hundred security in this twenty-kilometer-square section of mountains was out of the Agency’s own Special Operations Force. Now fewer than a hundred missionaries walked the beat, trained and rotated on a two-year basis just like the techs.

What kind of Christians need to train and outfit an army?

The Colonel’s past fifteen years had been hell. The ViraVax project had taxed his skills, commandeered his life and then cashed him out. He no longer wanted to get even. That, he knew, would not be possible. Casey had engineered a new world of slavery. The Colonel had been his muscle. He knew there was a trigger somewhere and he wanted to get Casey before he could trip it. The Colonel had become one of those most dangerous of men—unshakable, resourceful, on a personal mission with nothing to lose.

Jumping into the main ViraVax compound undetected was impossible. The gridwork of sensors would pick up his chute even if he could slip his body through one of the meter-square openings.

No, better to jump outside and have security come to get him. Rumor had it that a few hunters had disappeared over the years, invited all the way to Level Five. He would disable the security patrol, gain entry, send a signal, and ten minutes later all hell would break loose with the guerrillas up at the dam. Then it was a matter of gathering Harry, Sonja and Marte Chang and outrunning the inevitable shutdown.

The Colonel knew what the ultimate price would be long before he peered over the rim of the ridge and surveyed the complex below. He knew that he would die there and that the Agency would make further disgrace of his life to discredit him. But when the Colonel was done, it would not be so simple for anyone to enshackle the world again. In his fantasies, his last word, shouted in the face of death, was “Freedom!”

“You have a death wish, Toledo,” an army shrink once told him. “You just want somebody else to do it for you.”

He smiled again and enjoyed the feeling. It had been some time since he’d allowed himself the luxury. Such a beautiful moon over ViraVax. The night jungle sounds picked up and the day twitters died down. Colonel Toledo was glad that he got to breathe the thick jungle air on this, his last remaining day.

He yawned just as a troupe of howler monkeys cut loose in the treetops to his left. No matter how often he heard it, their sudden whoops always startled him and got his heart racing. This was their rallying call, probably triggered by the moon. Had they spotted him, they would be flinging monkey shit and urine on his head. He remained still until they finished their ritual and settled into nesting. They, too, had suffered at Casey’s hands when some recombined polio got loose, leaving three out of a hundred monkeys alive.

Inside the band of his hat Rico had woven a wire garrote, lockpicks and magnetic strips that the Agency used to override electronic security.

Casey had never been worried about someone slipping
into
the compound; he had wanted full protection against anyone getting
out.
As a military man, the Colonel had never liked this arrangement. Now it would make his mission much simpler, since he didn’t count on leaving alive, anyway.

Colonel Toledo had considered the Gardeners’ strict observance of their Sabbath ritual and their nepotism to be the weakest point in the ViraVax defense. Predictability was good in science, bad in war. This time it worked in the Colonel’s favor.

Missionaries and mucky-mucks would be at their worship in the amphitheater or watching from their habitats. No one outside of a skeleton security and life-support crews worked on the Sabbath. The handful of techs who were not of the faith could work in place of the Gardener counterparts, and were required to do so to get anything done. That’s why Red Bartlett never had a life.

He started to think,
And that’s why Sonja loves him: he was a mystery, not a father.

But Rico corrected himself, and apologized to his memory of Red, who, he had to admit, had been a good man.

Life support of lab animals was handled, as usual, by the Innocents, the retarded workers who went to their chores as though to a game. They also monitored the telltales that monitored the facility. He had broken into the Double-Vee five times during his tour, testing his own security, and he was confident of getting inside now.

Rico made his way easily downslope through the damp underbrush, each step smooth and deliberate. He was out of shape, but his old jungle habits had not abandoned him. The final fifty meters to the perimeter was open except for waist-high growth of greenery. He scanned the perimeter, the valley walls, the compound. Not a sentry in sight. Two men sat in the shade of an all-terrain vehicle in the doorway to the machine shop, over two hundred meters away.

They’ve cut back,
he thought.
They haven’t had trouble here in so long that they’re overconfident.

Rico Toledo got down on his belly to wriggle his way through when he felt the stings on his hands and face.

Nettles!

They weren’t nettles. The leaves on these plants were smooth and blade-like, not palm-sized and fuzzy. He almost had time to laugh at his bad luck when something switched off his entire musculature. His brain, however, remained clear.

Shit!
he thought.
I
should’ve known it would be something like this!

His head was downslope, and the Colonel hoped that lying downhill would make it possible for him to breathe. The undersides of the leaves dripped white and sappy, and smelled like licorice.

Casey, you bastard!

Rico Toledo remembered those wasps that stung caterpillars, then laid their eggs on the living, disconnected flesh. Ex-Colonel Toledo’s mind remained wide awake, while his disconnected body ground to a halt around him.

Rico woke inside the perimeter wire of ViraVax with neither tactile sensation nor motor control. Someone worked a bag-mask over his face and pumped oxygen into his lungs. He was numb, paralyzed, and could only see what crossed his vision as two people grunted and hefted him for the carry into the compound. Both wore protective gear that included gloves and taped cuffs at ankles and wrists. They tossed him onto a wooden workbench like a sack of coffee, and lightning shot through his head.

He revived again to a booming headache.

I’m awake and alive,
he thought.

Neither was necessarily good news. Not even his eyelids moved. Curiously enough, he found himself calmer than he remembered being since . . . since . . .
 

Since Grace and I split.

He pushed that aside now and immersed himself in this feeling of calm, this sense of being right and doing right in spite of his circumstances. He had been a fighter all his life, son of a prizefighter, and he had not realized until this moment what a burden that had been.

The Colonel’s thoughts turned briefly to the two fail-safe devices that he had installed in his plan. With one, he could kill himself. To manage that, he needed a little more muscular control. The second was a coded message transmitted upon cessation of his heartbeat. This message triggered a series of relays on several networks. One went to Yolanda, one to El Indio and one to his son, Harry. Two were business, one was personal. Neither of his fail-safes was available to him now.

“Tape his eyes shut,” one of the men ordered in English.

“What for, he’s not going to—”

“I said tape them shut, Corporal. Don’t be a dumb shit. He can’t blink, his eyes will dry out. We don’t want to deliver damaged goods. And
don’t
make me explain an order to you again, understand?”

“Yes, Sergeant. Thank you, Sergeant.”

What’s a veteran like him doing walking perimeter?
Rico wondered.

The answer came almost as quickly as the question:
Because he likes it.

The corporal who taped the Colonel’s eyes shut looked barely older than the Colonel’s fifteen-year-old son. He was sweating profusely, his hazard suit amplifying the Costa Bravan heat and humidity., The Colonel could hear, but not well. A large, loud bank of fans drowned out nearly everything. But the fans gave him his bearings.

The heat exchangers
, he thought.
I’m in the barn north of cultivation and east of the supply pad.

That put him about fifty meters from the nearest set of elevators, and that fifty meters was across open ground. These heat exchanger shafts dropped to Level Two before they filtered for the first time. Two of the huge ducts blew hot air and two blew cold— either way it would be a miserable, possibly fatal trip. Those little Colts that security wore made the open a miserable, possibly fatal trip even if he were in the best of shape.

Two bad choices.

It looked like he had plenty of time to make them. Once he hit the elevator and transport system he could move quickly, riding the roofs of their cars. He hoped that the toxin wore off before the Sabbath ended.

Not even the residents knew this complex as well as Colonel Toledo. Casey’s biological perimeter defense was new, and had trapped him, but the concrete-and-steel layout of the compound was as familiar to him as his car.

I
should have anticipated that,
he thought.

He remembered hearing insects, so the toxin didn’t harm everything.

I’ll bet those howlers that died out there didn’t have polio, either.