ViraVax (7 page)

Dajaj Mishwe had been a nocturnal animal long before his recruitment by Joshua Casey. Animals were easier caught at night, when they slept or drowsed or stalked, like he stalked.

Marte knew that the Agency had turned Mishwe down for their own ranks, years ago, but Casey hired him, anyway. No one knew the practical limitations of mammalian physiology like Dajaj Mishwe. Certain matters of physiology came only from experimentation on human beings, but human subjects were banned, even in Costa Brava. A lab associate like Mishwe could give a company a real jump on the competition.

Dajaj liked live animal studies because he got paid for tormenting and killing his subjects, something that was almost, but not quite, satisfying. His associates used cultures and tormented microscopic creatures. Mishwe stuffed his lab, and half of the transport bay, with cages. And one whole section of topside barn, the one nearest the landing pad, was closed off and silenced.

Here, in the security of Level Five, as well as in gallerias around the country, the Agency suspected Mishwe kept his special subjects, his live ones. Certain cold-storage houses held the dead.

Dajaj Mishwe was a strong man, and agile for someone who spent his life watching. He injected and watched. He peered at tissues, slides, electron-generated images of glands and brains. He watched.

ViraVax provided a complete gymnasium at its mountain facility, but Dajaj preferred the privacy of his tire yard. In a gravelly area behind Marte’s topside labs, he laid out a hundred brand-new tires in two parallel lines. He cleaned the tires before and after each use. Eventually the rubber whiskers formed in the tire-casting process wore off, and Mishwe bought new ones. He refused to run his agility drill through used tires.

Three or four times a week he came topside and sprinted through the tires, high-stepping into each one, sweat popping a shine over his bald head. Sometimes, on a difficult day, he ran the tires for an hour or more, stopping only when he could no longer keep his footing. Sometimes he carried weights, to build his upper body, or glasses of water. Sometimes he balanced the glasses on the backs of his hands.

When Mishwe came below after walking in the rain, dozens of the level-bound Innocents would crowd around him, touching his damp hair and skin and clothes and calling him “Angel.” This was as close to rain as they could get, though he permitted a select few the occasional night mission topside. Exposure to ultraviolet would trigger an autoimmune response coupled with a cell-proliferation order. They would melt down to a muck the consistency of an overripe mango. Of this, Marte Chang was sure.

Marte had solved the Red Bartlett mystery on her fifth day on the web. Today, when the Agency transmitted its daily report to Casey, Marte would fire a burst back. A helluvan explosion would rock certain diplomatic parlors back home as well as in Costa Brava.

Bartlett’s tissues and systems had attacked one another, while his body’s cells launched into a duplication frenzy. His tissues had fought out quite a battle, and within the hour his body was reduced to a seething mass of putrid organic matter and methane, which burst into flame and consumed itself.

Marte had found encrypted data files on six Level Five Innocents that documented the same phenomenon. These files also documented the source of the phenomenon: Dajaj Mishwe. That left her with two questions.

How many people did Mishwe infect? Was Red Bartlett’s death an accident or murder?

“Red Bartlett discovered the pilot gene,” Casey said, even though he knew that she knew it, “the one responsible for survival and self-replication. Dajaj designed a retroviral torpedo that unleashed millions of tiny sculptors inside the nuclei of a thousand rats.”

Casey gestured grandly, as though conducting a symphony, as he explained details to her in his loud, distracting voice. Marte Chang could scarcely believe that Joshua Casey was the son of the Reverend Calvin Casey, father of the Children of Eden. Calvin Casey was a far more charismatic man than his son, much better mannered and far better looking. Calvin was born to the airwaves, Joshua to the nooks and crannies of commercial labs.

“Keeps things interesting,” Casey concluded.

Marte had not heard much of what he said. Her mind took up its own protective stance and had stopped listening.

Casey was silent, finally. He seemed anxious to show her everything. She thought she’d better take advantage of the mood while she had the chance. She had a feeling that, should he ever judge her correctly, there was much that she would not be allowed to know.

Find out everything,
she thought.
Tomorrow may be too late.

Getting back to this level on her own wouldn’t be easy.

“What’s back here?”

“Histology,” he said, and relief showed in his smile. She had made the right choice. “We manufacture viruses, antibodies, vaccines,” Casey said with a wave of his hand. “We also develop and manufacture culture media. That’s Mishwe’s baby. You’ve seen his media catalog, I trust?”

“Of course,” she said. “But the company was not called ViraVax. And its shipping address was Basil, Switzerland.”

“Right. The usual precautions. No, Marte, Dajaj takes care of all of that right here. Quite a market.”

“Show me Histology.”

For the first time she saw Casey’s shield drop, and in that glimpse she tasted fear in his hesitation. Gone in a blink.

“Why not?” he said. “You’re here.”

Casey activated the double doorlock, and she followed him through. The doorway became a polished concrete corridor that slanted down thirty paces, then up again thirty. It opened up into one of the five huge bunkers that stretched for a half kilometer, more than a hundred meters underground.

“It’s like a little city down here,” she remarked.

“Another country,” Casey grunted.

She marveled at the deception, the simplicity of camouflage that hinted at none of this from the air. She had already noted that most flights came and went after dark. The landing pad was six levels up and a world away.

How handy for him.

Tiers of crates and shipping containers lined the walls and aisleways. Forklifts, cranes and electric tractors filled the air with a hum that bordered on whine. Marte noted the heady scent of ozone in the air. Casey pointed out refrigerated rooms and positive-pressure storage. Inspectors and shipping clerks, all missionaries, wore full gowns and foot coverings. Down syndrome helpers wore loose-fitting, pajama-like clothing. Like their counterparts topside, Level Five’s workers wore colored overalls to match their restricted pathways marked by lines in the floor and by colored lights in the walls.

Colored lines diverged under the glossy waxed floors to delineate different pathways. The wax made the floor squeak under Marte’s uncovered shoes. The inspector frowned when he heard it, started to gesture with his clipboard. Then he saw that she was a companion of Joshua Casey and nodded politely.

From somewhere farther back, high-pitched screams.

Marte’s flesh prickled.

Casey smiled. “Primates,” he explained. “You might as well see the menagerie.”

The menagerie took up most of a hundred-meter-long wing of the bunker. Racks, ramps and scaffolding formed a convoluted maze up to the rafters ten meters overhead. Within that maze lived thousands, tens of thousands, of animals.

“It takes twenty people each shift, around the clock, to handle it,” Casey said. “Still, they receive the Sabbath free, too. As you can see, the Plexiglas partitions are individual bioms. The animals are quite comfortable.”

“Sure,” Marte snapped, “if they like cages.”

“Like many humans in this life, they have no choice. They derive what comfort they can and deny the rest.”

Along the wall stood nine cubicles, three atop three atop three more. Each was fiberglass, about a meter square, with a small hole high in one side.

What could be in there?
she wondered.

An armed security guard stood at one end of the stack of cubicles.

“What’s in there?” she asked. “In those boxes.”

Casey frowned, but it was the frown that she had already learned to recognize as a mock seriousness, at a time when he would deliver a prepared statement.

“Hot chimps,” he said. “Their infection is stabilized and they’re awaiting . . . ”

“My God” was her involuntary comment.

“Do not blaspheme. They are chimps, after all, and will be destroyed when we’ve completed the necessary tests.”

Marte thought she heard a human voice cry out, but the guard silenced it with a stun butt to the side of the box. She regretted that the box was out of range of her Sidekick’s microscan adapter. She wanted to burst as much of this out as possible, but a single visual frame required as much transmission space as a hundred pages of text.

What if I never get in here again?
Marte wondered.

Casey must have noted her expression of shock, the direction of her gaze.

“Quite good at mimicry, aren’t they?” he said. “In the lab they find adopting human mannerisms often brings them extra attention and food from the Innocents. Shall we move along?”

As Casey took her elbow to escort her back to the decon lift to Level One, Marte Chang wondered, once again,
What in God’s name have I got myself into?

That night, half-asleep in her Level One quarters, she listened to fluctuations from her air conditioner and thought of those meter-square boxes. She imagined herself inside one of them, stooped, unable to either stand or sit. The dreamer Marte Chang listened through a feeding slot while the person in the box above her whispered, “Someone will get us out of this, you’ll see.”

Marte Chang tossed in a fitful sleep, convinced that, with no one behind her and nowhere to go, nobody could get her out of this. She could only make the best of things while she was here.

Time for a woman-to-woman talk with Shirley Good,
she thought.

Marte had learned to filter out the
scuff-scuff of
footsteps in the hallway, their inevitable pause at her door, the occasional touch of the latch or sniff on the air. The Innocents were curious, shy, good-natured. Now she sensed a pause at her door, a presence without footsteps. Not a breath. Not a shadow. Not an Innocent.

Mishwe!

Marte Chang’s heart rate got in the way of her breathing for a moment but she kept her respirations as steady as possible. Just as she had sensed he was there, she sensed his absence. The nighttime traffic of busy Innocents resumed.

Chapter 12

Colonel Rico Toledo closed the slats on his office blinds with a
snap,
shutting out the merciless sun and the weekly demonstration at the embassy gates across the way. These were not Costa Bravans venting spleen against the United States; these were U.S. citizens. North Americans who didn’t have the
huevos
to stand up to the White House gates at home shook their pale fists at this air-conditioned box fenced off from the diesel-grimed pesthole that the locals called a country.

The Colonel was in a bad mood because he was in a bad position. The muggy heat prickled the stitches under his dressing, and he nursed a hangover that would have registered a 7 on the Richter scale. Rico snorted unselfconsciously at the sight across the street. Those demonstrators thought that they displayed solidarity with the locals, but were seldom in-country long enough to discover that the locals disrespected anyone who spat on his own flag.

“They do that every week, you say?”

The voice behind the Colonel—a high, nasal voice bordering on whine—belonged to his new assistant, probably an eventual replacement, a fresh major by the name of Hodge. The Colonel was fresh himself, in a way. The Agency sent Solaris down to deliver the verdict: collect vacation, leave the country, possible court-martial. Rico was uninvited to Garcia’s celebration of his one-year anniversary as President without a coup. Then, in the morning, the mandatory debriefing, his personal ass-chewing for losing Red Bartlett and for the trouble with his wife. The blade fan overhead growled as it always did in low gear.

The Colonel growled a little himself.

“I thought you were in intelligence.”

When Colonel Toledo turned imaginary cross-hairs between Hodge’s eyes, he saw a flush wash over the major’s cheeks.

“Colonel, I appreciate what you’ve been through. I was just making conversation. You were injured in one of those demonstrations when you first came in-country, I heard.”

The Colonel felt a surge in the pulse at his neck, the rise of unreasonable anger. This curse of rage he recognized but he could not throw off. Drinking both triggered the rage and smothered it. The trick was in the timing, and bad timing had plagued him of late. It worried him because he’d lost control, lost some memory. It worried him because counseling meant talking, and talking would mean his job. Not talking now might also mean his job.

Rico needed the vacation, that was clear. He hadn’t taken time off in nearly five years. Grace made sure that she and Harry took several vacations a year, which the Colonel encouraged. He always came up with a lot of “product” when the family was out of reach.

Though he was a young forty-five, the Colonel knew that anger had already kicked his blood pressure into the danger zone. He reminded himself that this was something that was happening to him lately. It wasn’t Hodge’s fault. Hodge just happened to be handy.

“Conversation,” the Colonel hissed. “You mean small talk.”

The Colonel glanced around the bare office: fan, desk, three windows with blinds, the inevitable mold that bled through a fresh coat of government-issue pastel lime; two olive-drab file cabinets, one cabinet of electronic wizardry capped with two telephones. It was just as he had entered it nearly twenty years ago, except for the holos, the Litespeeds and Sidekicks. He couldn’t bring himself to focus on Hodge.

“Conversation. . . okay.” The Colonel glanced at his watch. “Conversation.”

Easily said, not so easily begun.

Another glance at the embassy and he felt his testicles sucked towards his abdomen—he had nearly lost them out there, seventeen years ago. They took over a month to heal and still gave him trouble. And every Wednesday that they kept him in this office overlooking the embassy, he had remembered. Even though it was a punishment assignment, Rico knew he would feel better facing the weekly demonstrators from the front.

“Adhesions,” the embassy physician had told him. “Take a week off so that you can just lie around and we’ll take care of that for you. If you wait, it’s just going to get worse.”

Maybe that’s my problem,
he thought.

The Colonel preferred to think that his problem was anything but pressure. If it were pressure, he’d have to retire, just when his organization was in place and its position in this country secure.

The Colonel had taken some licks in his time, but that series of kicks to the groin had been so quick and so hard that he couldn’t remember it. He remembered gagging on his own vomit, and a crushing, stunning pain that even morphine didn’t cure.

Then, in the hospital, he got infected with some tropical bug that didn’t even have a name and he nearly sweat to death.

“Fever of Unknown Origin,” he said.

“Colonel?”

“What I had, in the hospital. Fever of Unknown Origin.”

Rico saw the shade of fear cross the assistant’s eyes. There was a vaccine against almost everything these days, but plenty of things left that a vaccine couldn’t help.

Plenty of things new.

AIDS had been the first breakthrough, a real money-maker. Now everyone got a multivax the same way the Colonel got one of the last smallpox scratches as a child.

The Colonel had worked with ViraVax, the developer of the multivax, setting up their compound only a half hour away from the capital by chopper. No one had yet come up with a cure for everything. But someone had come up with a few other viruses, every bit as nasty.

Of course, there were always a few who succumbed to the vaccine itself.

The Colonel had been immersed in the world of viruses and vaccines for years now, much against his will. ViraVax had been his cover job here while he infiltrated the local rebels. Then the Colonel had been plucked out of field intelligence just when his networks were humming and his sources secure.

Maybe they know my opinion of which side we’re taking,
he mused.

He thought it unlikely. Colonel Toledo shared his opinions with no one, not even Rachel.

He had some scores to settle in the intelligence community, and now his government was making that impossible. He had been around too long to think that it was an accident, a toss of the die.

In Costa Brava bullets outnumbered beans by three to one, and the most valuable commodity was information. Colonel Rico Toledo’s boss in the Agency back home called it “the product.” Costa Bravans, living closer to poetry, spoke of a “little sigh,” or “the whisper,” but very few real whispers bent hairs in real ears.

Lots of high-tech tricks had sprung up in the last twenty years. By the time Colonel Toledo had engineered the Costa Brava confederation in 1998, modems and faxes winked their tireless semaphore from pocket Sidekick to satellite to desktop. Colonel Rico Toledo was as old-fashioned as his posture—when it came to information, he preferred to stick with lips.

Real names were as rare as prime rib in the information business, but they were particularly rare in the Central American republics. Colonel Toledo’s last assistant had had three informants feeding him reliable product for a year.

“Messy execution will get you a messy execution,” Spook had warned in the academy.

As usual, he’d been right.

Now Bartlett and another contact were dead and the three informants had turned out to be one person, also dead. Hodge, the greenhorn, cooled the hot seat and the Colonel was fielding a backhand slap.

The Colonel saw no streetwise, predatory luster in Hodge’s clear, blue eyes, just the vapid gaze of a bored statistician.

He won’t make it,
the Colonel thought,
but he’ll probably outrank me in a year.

Nobody had ever pulled in more product than Rico Toledo, though there had been some cost, some personal cost. The Colonel’s marriage, for years exemplary in embassy circles, imploded. He had always been a reasonable man, but lately an unreasonable violence and an unreasonable lust had overtaken him.

Midlife crisis,
he told himself.

But in the back of his mind the final report on Red Bartlett nagged at him and betrayed the monster that Red had become.

I
knew him longer than I’ve known my son,
he thought.
We had Thanksgiving dinner last year with his family.

Rico tried not to think about how he’d spoiled the day by getting drunk before dinner, then he’d hurried out for a hot-sheet date with Rachel. And it had been nearly impossible for Red to get away from the Double-Vee for the day—the Gardeners didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, only their Sabbath, which started each Friday at sundown.

The Colonel thought perhaps he’d seen just one too many bodies, an opportunity that Costa Brava presented every morning to anyone who drove the streets. And in twenty years he had done a lot more than just drive the streets. Confederation was supposed to change all that—eliminate the death squads, distribute land and wealth more satisfactorily—but all it had accomplished was arrested development, and a few palms greased with a lot more money.

Recent reports of the plummeting birthrate had been received with relief, at first. Even Catholics agreed that overpopulation was a fundamental problem, so when it began to solve itself there was talk of a miracle, even in the evangelical President’s palace. If there were no starving masses, there would be no need for revolution. But if there were no starving masses, who would cook, clean, kill and die for the rich?

Every miracle has its curse.

But in recent months some troubling figures had come across the Colonel’s desk. Very few children had been born this year, fewer than the record few of the year before and, of course, the year before that. It was true. But other figures were also true: nearly fifty percent of these births were Down syndrome, trisomy twenty-one. Rico had made himself familiar with terms like “mongolism,” “trisomy” and “chromosome 21.” With very few exceptions, these were births to Catholic families.

The Colonel had done his research. Down syndrome used to be called mongolism. One form of Down was a congenital condition related to the twenty-first chromosome. Genetic aberrations brought one thing to Rico Toledo’s mind, and that was ViraVax.

The Colonel did not like being duped, especially by the likes of that sweaty-palm Casey. He did not want to be pulled out of the field and off this project before he had a chance to complete his own investigation.

“This ViraVax thing is the chance of a lifetime,” he’d told his wife, Grace, when they were young and beginning the foreign service life. “It’s embassy placement, a government corporation with profit sharing—we get the best of both worlds.”

Rico had nurtured a monster, and now it threatened to swallow him whole.

The Colonel had cultivated a lot of rebel contacts through a number of aliases and gathered more viable product than any Agency operative in Central America. He thought it was time to call in some favors.

Hodge rearranged his desktop for the third time in ten minutes. He’d been briefed on Colonel Toledo and probably thought it was dangerous to listen. The Colonel would have to straighten him out, because if somebody didn’t tell this maggot how things really were, he wasn’t going to be worth the toilet paper it would take to keep him here.

“You told me you could imagine how it will be, but you can’t,” the Colonel told Hodge. “You saw what they did to that girl Sheffield was seeing in Quezaltenango, I hear. . . and what, a few others? If you stay at this desk—
if you
stay one
week
I will promise you that you’ll know
your
limit. . . .”

The Colonel caught himself fisting the desktop, took a deep breath and let it out with a slow whistle.

What’s happening to me?

Hodge had scooted his chair back to get some running room.

A rabbit,
the Colonel thought.
A goddamn chickenshit.

Another slow, deep breath.

“Sorry, Major,” the Colonel said, and tugged at his jacket. He wouldn’t have to wear his monkey suit for a few months, that would be a relief. “I really don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“I appreciate that, sir.”

“You’re checking your watch, Hodge, how very polite. Well, I won’t make you listen to my story. Your briefings are set up for your Sidekick, review them at your leisure. Call me anytime, if you can find me. The desk is yours. The rest is product, and you won’t find
that
in the files.”