ViraVax Page 11

  Harry’s father looked him up and down, then cleared his throat and spat.

  “Right, then,” his father said, and pursed his lips that way that always meant trouble. “All right.”

  The Colonel stared Harry straight in the eye for a moment, two moments. Those were the eyes that looked back at Harry from the mirror each morning. His father’s face had an alcohol bloat, a scraggle of beard, and his hair was thinning. Still, their resemblance was stunning.

  “Curfew?” his father asked.

  “I’ll make it.”

  Colonel Toledo then turned to his girlfriend’s door. He fumbled the latch twice before it opened, lit up a yellow rectangle of street, then he slammed the door behind him without a look back.

  Harry breathed so fast that he got dizzy. He listened at the door, but no one moved inside. Their television chattered in the background. The tremble in Harry’s body quit when his hands got a grip on the wheel. He raced the old cab the whole way across town, zigzagged back streets to avoid roadblocks and floored it when he hit the highway. The mist thinned out to nothing and by the time he got home he saw stars.

  Chapter 15

  Dajaj Mishwe washed Joshua Casey’s feet carefully in the large ceramic bowl and toweled them dry. This was a time of daily humility and reflection for all of the Children of Eden, a time when Mishwe felt closest to God. Still, he wished that Casey would do something about the suppurating ingrown nail on his left great toe. It distracted Mishwe from his meditations and further reminded him of the societal pus that he was committed to excising from the world.

  Mishwe hung up the small white towel and sat at his own low stool. He removed his shoes in the customary silence and accepted the cursory foot-washing that passed for Casey’s ritual. The son of the Master was not a patient man, not a holy man, but he was instrumental in the rightful restoration of the Garden of Eden.

  “Amen,” Casey muttered.

  He placed both towels into the laundry as Mishwe emptied the bowl and washed it out. This, too, was a meditation for him.

  “I’m worried about Toledo,” Casey said.

  “I’d put a hunt on him,” Mishwe said.

  Casey laughed as he pulled on his smelly black socks.

  “You are so eager, my friend,” Casey said. “This one got to you, did he?”

  Dajaj Mishwe bristled, not at the mention of the unmentionable Colonel, but at being called “friend” by a blasphemy of a powermonger like Joshua Casey.

  Beware the kiss, Mishwe warned himself.

  “It’s not a ‘he,’ it’s an ‘it,’” Mishwe said.

  “How unkind.”

  Casey massaged his scalp with his thumb and forefinger.

  “You grace your primates with gender, don’t you?” he asked.

  When Mishwe didn’t answer, Casey affected a shrug.

  “Call Toledo whatever you want,” he conceded, “but he presents us with a problem that his death would only complicate.”

  Mishwe disagreed, but he did not argue. He did not want to give his strongest reasons for the death of Colonel Toledo. The lives of Adam and Eve, their reinstatement in the Garden of Eden, depended on a close control of Colonel Toledo. His death could be made very useful.

  “What is this problem that a good death cannot solve?”

  “He’s well connected to us,” Casey warned, “as was Red Bartlett. You have set us into a trap, there. If Toledo dies, a second arrow on an Agency map points here. I will not be able to keep them off. Besides,” Casey added, “better the evil we know than a new one.”

  Mishwe was not really interested. What interested him most was the stimulating daydream of pushing all of Colonel Toledo’s buttons and launching him to the breaking point. Red Bartlett’s inoculation didn’t hit until he got topside, so Mishwe had revealed the Meltdown solution. But, thanks to his foresight years ago, Colonel Toledo was infinitely more susceptible to rage.

  “The Agency’s dropping it,” Casey said. He tugged on his favorite white tennis shoes and laced them up. “They suspended Toledo and sent him out of sight. His replacement shows no signs of interest in anything outside the embassy compound. It’s quiet, things are in our favor. I won’t tolerate any loss of this advantage.”

  Mishwe grunted his acknowledgment. He dwelt on the rage-and-aggression unit, one of several that he had added to Toledo’s little cocktail. This twist on the nausea bug he’d crafted years back—the “vomit virus”—disabled on demand. Once triggered, it produced beaucoup casualties.

  Very messy, Mishwe thought. Very messy, indeed.

  Casey was enamored of viral solutions. Mishwe was a virologist but he was also a practical man. He believed that many problems responded best to some old-fashioned solutions.

  “Another problem,” Mishwe announced. “The Bartlett woman.

  “She’s wiped,” Casey said. “Not a problem.”

  “She’s not wiped, she’s conditioned,” Mishwe said. “Conditioning breaks down, and we can’t afford—”

  “Do you want me to throw you a bone?” Casey snapped.

  He jabbed his forefinger into Mishwe’s chest.

  “You want somebody to kill and you won’t leave it alone until you get one, is that right?”

  Mishwe pushed the finger away. He did not blink.

  “You know I’m right,” Mishwe said. “Just like 1 was right that the Toledo woman would take her kid out there. We have both kids in reach, no feathers ruffled. That’s an advantage that we don’t want to lose.”

  “So, if the Bartlett woman is killed, they’ll move the daughter back to the States. The daughter’s family will send for her and the Toledo woman will lose her last tie here and she’ll pull up stakes. . . .”

  “They’re too smart for that,” Mishwe said. “Nobody who plucks the webs would go back to the States right now. There are only two sides, in Costa Brava, and our side owns the President and his Cabinet. Besides,” he added, “she and Toledo are the only outsiders to leave here alive. We need to tidy up.”

  Mishwe had already begun his own edge-trimming, but he chose to continue to keep quiet about it.

  “Do you see any alternatives other than those you have suggested?” Casey asked.

  Mishwe paused, accepted a deep, cleansing breath.

  “Yes,” he said. “Bring the children here, to Level Five.”

  “That kind of thing gets messy. It has a way of getting out.”

  “Nothing gets out of Level Five,” Mishwe said.

  “You get out,” Casey snapped. “Bartlett got out.”

  “Bartlett wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place,” Mishwe hissed. “You assured me. . . .”

  Casey waved the argument moot. He sat at his desk and addressed his console.

  “Intercom, Shirley.”

  “Connecting,” it replied.

  Shirley clicked on the line.

  “Sir?”

  “Get Mishwe all that we have on the Toledos,” he ordered, “particularly any upcoming appointments we’ve intercepted. He’s vacationing somewhere—let’s make sure it’s not in our backyard.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The Bartlett woman, too,” he added.

  “Their network accesses, too?” she asked. “I could route all traceable entries directly into his console.”

  Mishwe nodded his approval.

  “Fine,” Casey said. “Thank you—”

  “One other thing, sir,” she interrupted.

  “Yes?”

  “Marte Chang. I think we should have a talk about her.”

  Casey scratched his head, pursed his lips, and Mishwe caught the hint of a flush rise out of Casey’s collar.

  Well, well, he thought. The boss is human, after all.

  Mishwe knew as well as everyone else at ViraVax that Joshua Casey and Shirley Good met for a private lunch and hydrotherapy twenty-one days out of every month. It was not the kind of thing one called to the boss’s attention, nor was it the kind of thing one ignored.

 
“Very well,” Casey said, “we can talk at lunch.”

  “I suggest we talk sooner,” she said. “Chang’s on the webs with an agent of the Catholic underground, and somehow she’s accessed some Level Five logs. She asked Files for records on all lab fires, and recharge schedules for all fire suppressors. She might be on to Meltdown.”

  Good move, Mishwe thought, with genuine respect.

  Mishwe’s labs, both at Level Five and topside, used more fire-suppressant than the entire facility. Still, anyone inoculated with Meltdown presented serious problems during routine lab studies. A simple blood draw could be spectacular. Mishwe had infected many of his coworkers as part of his personal fail-safe measures. He’d caught Red Bartlett entering Level Five by his own secret tunnel. Red Bartlett hadn’t had time to be an experiment, he was a simple elimination.

  “I see,” Casey said. His complexion went from blush to white. “My office, ten minutes. Off, now.”

  The line went dead. Casey turned to Mishwe and his big voice got bigger.

  “Nothing fancy here,” he said, “like your trick in La Libertad with those communion wafers. Whatever you do, see to it that the idolator guerrillas get the credit.”

  “My pleasure,” Mishwe said, exiting with a bow, and he meant it.

  Chapter 16

  Colonel Toledo received his divorce judgment the morning the stitches in his fists came out. His hands were stiff and tender from their fury against Grace’s cabinets, so his fingers fumbled at the wire seal on the messenger’s packet. Inside, Rico found the validation paper and a personal note in Grace’s calligraphic hand:

  “. . . really loving someone” (the yearning brushed the edge of agony) “means you are willing to admit the person you love is not what you first fell in love with, not the image you first had; and you must be able to like them still for being as close to that image as they are, and avoid disliking them for being so far away.” —Samuel R. Delany, “The Star Pit.”

  I can’t avoid disliking you anymore.—G.

  Rico crumpled it, smashed it, tossed it out the open window and into the rest of the garbage strewn in the street. He made a quick call, two quick sugared rums, and paced off the dingy cubicle of his life.

  Twenty minutes later Rachel picked him up in her black Flicker and settled a bottle of Wild Turkey between his thighs.

  “This looks like a ticket to trouble,” he said.

  “Then you’re looking at it all wrong, as usual,” she snapped.

  She’d said this before, after she’d called him by somebody else’s name. Considering they were making love at the time, he hadn’t yet found a right way to look at it. She white-knuckled the handgrips and did the smoky-tire all the way home. Then she handed him the pouch with the official DIA seal.

  “Two in one day,” Rico muttered, “a goddamn big shot.”

  Inside he found his official suspension on Defense Intelligence Agency letterhead, clipped to his severance paycheck. That, in itself, was a clear message that he was through. Solaris’s meticulous left-handed signature smudged in the middle of the “o.” The smudge looked genuine but that didn’t mean squat. Something as simple as a smudge gave a document legitimacy. A smudge said, “This is personal. See, I touched it myself.”

  ComBase, the DIA brain, employed software that altered each electronic signature of every tight-ass bureaucrat with combinations of over a hundred smudges, squiggles, skips and runs. That permitted a volume business with a personal touch. Rico’s graduation project at the academy made the Agency millions and he got a commendation.

  He tore the bank draft loose from the notice and stuffed it into his back pocket. For the second time in as many hours Rico crumpled a fistful of paperwork into a ball, smashed it flat with his fist and sailed it out the window.

  After Rachel’s Wild Turkey came hard sex in the bedroom, more sugared rums. With the rum came rage, remorse and a wild Flicker ride to the airport. The two of them stumbled aboard a flight to somewhere before Rico passed out.

  Ex-Colonel Rico Toledo woke up tangled in Rachel’s arms and legs, their tropical sweat prickling at him where they pulled apart. A muggy heat smothered everything but the familiar aroma of their sex. White sheets contrasted their skins—his, dark and brush-scratched; hers, schoolgirl pale. He sat up against the headboard, another hangover hammering his temples.

  The Yucatan dawn made a white glow of his pants where he’d slung them across a chair at the bedside. Rico had stitched a ring into the right-hand pocket of those pants for safekeeping. Such a treasure should not be flashed among men of the children of the large, wormy bellies. Even with his connections, the stone took more of his severance pay than the IRS. Only Rico knew how much went into that. He liked the feel of it when he slipped on his pants. Its cool gold never warmed up.

  The Agency left him enough to scrape by on for six months, if he stayed in Mexico.

  A year, in the States.

  But then he would be in the States and that was no picnic right now. He had set out to prove something by flying to the heart of the Yucatan. After at least two days of nonstop drinking, it was time he found out what.

  Rachel Lear was half his age, with red hair and freckles the Latins called pecas. She had a prodigious thirst for men, and that remained more of a problem between them than their ages.

  Unlike the pinch-nosed embassy crowd, the campesinos understood that it was not an unnatural thing for a man to love a younger woman. Many campesinos had been cut by their women, as well, and all of them drank when the bottle passed around. Colonel Toledo, the chameleon, had held a role so long that he had become like an insect in amber.

  Rico marveled over his turn of luck as he sat naked in the lounge chair. He watched Rachel sprawl facedown to fill his hollow in the bed, her right hand tucked under her cheek, her right leg cocked to her waist. A tuft of red hair glowed between her legs.

  The Yucatan was truly a place of magic, a place of ripples in the drapery of time. This was Latin America, but not a war zone. Not even a war country. Rico had fled here twice. In 1998 he tried forgetting a war. In 2010 he brought Harry and Grace to see the heart of the Maya empire, and to avoid some ugly but necessary steps that the Agency was taking all over Costa Brava in his absence. Grace had got histoplasmosis from exploring a Maya cave and Rico had spent most of that vacation in a hospital, but, like it or not, it made an excellent alibi when he returned to Costa Brava, and to the political fallout.

  Now Rico tried to forget Grace, and that wasn’t working. He and Rachel had argued all night. It started . . . well, he pushed it out of mind. That would not discourage him now from enjoying the dawn of the day that everything would change.

  A bone-white sunlight seared anything that was not stone, adding counterpoint to his headache. Rico pulled on his rumpled clothes and turned the window fan on high. The bearings howled and ragged blades shrieked against the frame. Not much of a breeze kicked up, and Rachel didn’t stir.

  Rachel spoke Spanish, but she was shy because she’d learned it in school and most of the embassy staff enveloped themselves in English. She refused to speak it except between them, so Rico did most of the talking. She attracted people, men and women, so Rico talked a lot, but talking came pretty natural to Rico, in either language.

  It’s sure a plus when you’re outspooking spooks, he thought.

  Rico Toledo, on the retirement track with the Defense Intelligence Agency, made a helluva tour guide.

  Didn’t talk much at home.

  Bob or Bernice, friends of Rachel’s from the beachside bar, flushed the toilet across the hall. They were Rachel’s age and on their spring break from college. Neither of them spoke Spanish and they didn’t have much time left. Consular flunkies and federal reps checked their registry at the guesthouse twice a day. Lots of good Americans jumped in the last few days, they’d learned that much. Rachel’s friends were pretty boring, but Rico had tried to deliver them some culture, anyway.

  Rico gulped down the warm, flat beer he’d b
een saving, then poured himself a dark rum. He added sugar and lemon, then carried it to the veranda to sip with the parrot, who asked him his name over and over and over. By the time Rico finished his drink he was restless again and needed to move.

  “Get up,” he said to Rachel. “Your friends are up and the car’s here.”

  “Don’t order me around.”

  She spoke into her pillow and he could barely understand her.

  “Try this, okay? Okay?” she said. “Just tell me that the car’s here.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Try it.”

  Rico poured himself another Flor de Caña, mixed in the sugar and the lemon slowly, then set the spoon on the glass tabletop.

  “Okay, okay,” she said.

  She sat up cross-legged on the bed, her red blaze of pubic hair challenging his attention.

  “If you’d said, ‘Rachel, the car’s here and your friends are up,’ I could’ve—”

  “Can it,” Rico said.

  He tossed back his sweet, dark rum and left for a coffee with their driver.

  Rico and Rachel argued mostly in Spanish. They affected a conversational tone, so her friends wouldn’t catch on. Of course, their driver knew everything and became more nervous by the kilometer.

  Their driver, Carlos, didn’t speak English. His left arm had been withered by polio and his car overheated crossing the tiny range of sierras between Merida and Uxmal. He topped off the radiator with water from a wine bottle. Carlos was a smooth, cautious driver.

  When the argument with Rachel got more personal than Carlos could bear, he interrupted with a passionate assessment of the American football playoffs. At one point, with all but Carlos and Rico sleeping, a huge buzzard rose from the shoulder of the road and gyred once around the car, its black eye fixed on Rico the whole time. Rachel slept tucked up against him. Her long red hair whipped their faces in the wind.

  Carlos launched into the old tale about the Soothsayer’s Temple and the sacrificial ball court.

  “The man was birthed from a feathered serpent’s egg,” he said, “and became a man in one night. In one night he built the Pyramid of the Magician, Temple of the Sorcerer. You will see, it is a night’s work.”