ViraVax Page 20

  If the Gardeners were his parents, then Calvin Casey was Grandfather. The PR people explained to Mishwe that he had received a scholarship, directly from Calvin Casey. They said that the great man, the Master himself, had saved Mishwe from certain death in the streets. At age seven, it’s unlikely that Mishwe knew any better, but it was good bonding material.

  No one showed more devotion in his tenure at Eden Wood than Dajaj Mishwe. Besides tithes, the Gardeners gave the fruit of their mandatory recycling—paper, glass, plastic and metals. Once a week Mishwe reported to the sorthouse to bundle newspapers and magazines, and to prepare the glass and plastics for the weekly meltdown. Marte imagined that Dajaj loved this part, watching the pots of glass redden, twitch and liquefy. Before supper, he stacked the finished ingots for tally and shipping. Nothing was wasted, everything belonged to the Lord.

  In Mishwe’s first term at second-level, the dean of science informed the headmaster that an inordinate number of laboratory animals died at the hands of his prize student. When challenged, Mishwe defended himself by stating simply, “I study the physiology of life. To accomplish that, things must die.”

  The PR people hurried in to smooth things over, and Mishwe never made a public statement again.

  Before he was seventeen, Dajaj Mishwe wrote illuminating papers on the moment of death, already having dispatched thousands of animals in his thirst for data. Animal shelters provided most of his victims, abandoned dogs and cats. Humans came soon enough.

  He was questioned, in his ninth year at Eden Wood, over the death of a seventh-year female, but he was never arrested. Gel was found on the body, of a type for and on the sites of EKG and EEG electrodes. Puncture wounds were found, too, where core samples had been taken of right thigh muscle and tibia, and blood from the left femoral artery. One group of locals blamed the murder on alien scientists from a UFO scout ship. That was as close as they got to Dajaj Mishwe.

  On each of Mishwe’s three unsuccessful missions for the Church, bodies with similar wounds were found in the nearby communities. He was recalled by the Church, then assigned to serve out his two years as a missionary for the brand-new research component of ViraVax. Mission work became a standard recruiting practice for ViraVax. From the very beginning, ViraVax preferred brilliant, malleable loners from among their own ranks, young men who bonded with their mission team for life.

  No non-Gardener who accepted a ViraVax contract has ever been seen alive again, Marte recalled.

  Casey’s offer of permanent employment looked frightening, indeed.

  “Because of his high intellect,” the load revealed, “Mishwe has always selected environments and conditions that offered him privacy and a ready supply of animals. He’s the kind of psychotic who would walk into a feed store with a tennis racket under his arm and buy a bucket of baby chicks to go.”

  This last was live, but on a burst-delay and encrypted.

  Marte had no time to reply before the Agency briefing ended, their pathway severed behind it. The visual went blank for a moment, and the rainbow motif returned.

  Marte was shocked when Mishwe’s face filled her monitor. The camera pulled back, and he stood in the neutral zone between the transport station and her Level Two labs.

  Mishwe was no longer allowed to intimidate her in person, so he had to settle for electronic methods.

  “So now we are both confined to our areas,” he said. “There is much to be done in this lab, and you have curtailed my freedom to accomplish my projects. Your scurrying about and your tattling backfired on you, so now two of us are working under unnecessary limitations. This will not do.”

  “You frighten me,” she said, finding it easier to admit to his image than to his face. “I cannot work if I’m afraid to be alone with you, or to encounter you in the hallways. You would harm me, given the opportunity, wouldn’t you?”

  Mishwe did not laugh, but a dry wheeze escaped his throat and he shook his head.

  “Harm you?” Mishwe’s emphasis was on the “harm,” not the “you.”

  “You misrepresent me, Dr. Chang. I might study you to death, but to harm you . . . no, not harm for the sake of harm.”

  “You should be locked up.”

  Mishwe cracked the first genuine smile she’d seen from him.

  “You are seeing how I belong here,” Dajaj said. “We are fellow prisoners in the grasp of science.”

  “You don’t belong anywhere.” Marte’s voice was a bare whisper, a rasp on stone in the dark. “And I’ve got a contract, I’m no prisoner.”

  “No?” Dajaj smiled, and shook his head. “Try to leave. Especially now, after your. . . revelations to Dr. Casey. You don’t belong anywhere. I belong here. I’m perfect here. I can live forever here.”

  The sickness in her stomach did not come from the danger, from Mishwe’s perfect smile. It came from the truth. She belonged nowhere, to no one, and Dajaj Mishwe did. If she stayed here, even to fight him, she might become him. She had nowhere to go; he had only to bide his time. Mishwe, Casey, Shirley . . . none of them expected her to leave ViraVax alive.

  They would channel her where they wanted, take what she put out, milk her for more, then sell her to the slaughterhouse where Dajaj Mishwe was chief butcher. They had known all along that, one way or another, she would be here forever.

  I cannot look away from his eyes, she thought. I must not be seen to run.

  She smiled, though her stomach churned again, then smiled wider.

  “I may not belong anywhere, but I’m where I belong because I’m here,” she said.

  “Zen shit,” he said. “Chill.”

  Mishwe’s calm, contemplative exterior contrasted greatly to his usual frenetic self. Marte thought that he looked like one of his iguanas in the wet morning grass, cooled down enough to slow even an eyeblink to languor.

  Yet Mishwe was no reptile. He stood, solid and quiet and unbowed, with his back to one of the positive-pressure intakes for the lab’s air supply. The slight breeze fanned the air nearly to flame around him. She imagined the heat from his body to be unbearable, and the passageway narrow.

  Twice before in their encounters in the passageways he had thrown off a transitory, tangible heat that forced her back a step. Just as quickly, it had died. Now Mishwe rubbed his arms as though to warm them and stepped out of the viewer without so much as a nod. He was more subdued than she’d ever seen him.

  Somebody tossed some water on his campfire, she thought.

  She shuddered to think what Mishwe could have done, in the light of what the load revealed, that made him this contrite, penitent and subdued. Then she sighed, screwed up her courage and started her plan—find her way out of “lab arrest,” determine what had the facility in such an uproar and get the hell out of ViraVax any way she could.

  Chapter 25

  Rico Toledo sketched out pathways of embassy data, and one of the techs fed them into El Indio’s buffers, providing the guerrillas with everything he could muster that related to Harry and Sonja. Electronics was not his forte, but he had picked up a few tricks over the years. Riding piggyback on someone else’s message was one of them. He scribbled clumsily, his rage held at simmer, and he cursed the alcohol monster that squeezed his temples and belly. The rage was tinged with lust, now that Yolanda had reentered the room.

  “Well,” Rico told her, “so far they have nothing. It appears I am the red herring.”

  He pointed out a memo to his replacement captured from the embassy screen: “Find Toledo and you’ll find the kids.”

  He had said “arenque rojo” for “red herring,” and she corrected him.

  “Arenque ahumado,” she said.

  The Colonel’s senses picked up every nuance of her presence— the scent of her powder mingled with the volatile plastic scent of her old-fashioned eyeglasses that perched in her hair. Yolanda’s presence was so powerful that he could not meet her gaze right away. While she stood beside him, scanning some paperwork, he sat, staring at his console, waiting for what
she had to say. His consciousness focused on her slim pelvis mere centimeters from his cheek.

  “One of our subscribers bled this one off the webs,” Yolanda said, dangling a sheet of paper by one corner.

  “Both your ex-wife and Mrs. Bartlett filed formally through the Archbishop’s office with the Mothers of Assassinated and Disappeared,” she said. “A representative from the Organization of American States Human Rights Commission is flying in to talk with them and with Garcia.”

  “It’ll get some press back home, that’s all,” Rico said. “The OAS is noble, but powerless.”

  “Powerful enough to stop the humanitarian aid Garcia receives from the Mexicans,” she said. “That will not improve our image.”

  “Great!” Rico said. “Somebody’s on our side, after all. I just wish it was a bigger somebody than some clerk with the OAS Human Rights Commission. . . .”

  The Colonel’s fist hit the desktop, and the entire room was silent except for the cocking of a weapon near the doorway, the growl of overhead fans, the shuffling of feet and paper, a cough.

  Rico felt the flush of embarrassment on his cheeks. He could not bring himself to look up.

  “I am glad that your ex-wife is all right,” Yolanda said. “She was good to me and to my children. Do not feel alone. Everyone in this room has felt what you are feeling right now. Everyone here has lost someone to the death squads. Tío was taken himself, and lived.”

  Rico felt El Indio’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Now, truly, you are one of us,” El Indio said.

  “We have to think of the children now,” Yolanda said. “They want the children alive, nothing else makes sense. So we know we still have a chance.”

  Yolanda was crying, but Rico could conjure nothing but numbness.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m very tired.”

  Rico gestured at the roomful of equipment around them.

  “You’ve got pretty good stuff here,” he said. “But no one gets into ViraVax uninvited, and I’m sure that’s where we’ll find those kids. It’s not the tightest security south of the Pentagon, but it’s tough enough.”

  Now everyone was talking at once and Rico wasn’t listening.

  The guerrillas preferred to think that Garcia was behind everything, because it suited their goals. And Garcia saw the Archbishop’s shadow everywhere. Rico had himself to blame; he’d spent years reinforcing this feud under orders. This would not be a tangle he could unravel in a few minutes.

  For a moment his mind flashed on Grace, pacing an embassy carpet, agonizing over the disappearance of their son. She would believe what they told her—that Rico did it, that he’d turned double agent. He had brought her only pain for the past few years. Somehow, Rico had thought he could make things up to Grace, that in time he would become someone she could respect, as she had in the beginning. He felt the pump of anger filling his veins.

  It’s Casey, he thought. Playing Garcia, the embassy, the Agency, the guerrillas, me!

  He was trembling again, with the cold sweats and the lusts for Yolanda.

  What’s happening to me?

  Taking up with Rachel had been his antidote for these barely controllable urges, but Rachel wasn’t here and he knew that he wasn’t really in the mood for sex. His body, his chemistry, all of his drinking had brought this on and he had to tough it out, get clean and clear, find Harry and Sonja and get them back.

  Amid the babble, Yolanda leaned down and whispered, “ViraVax. We have someone inside. She is monitored and can only communicate through the burst. It won’t be long, and we will know for sure.”

  She squeezed his shoulder and hurried back to play the satlinks.

  Rico turned to El Indio.

  “I want to get a message to the Speaker of the House, Nancy Bartlett’s father,” Rico said. “We’re going to need some cavalry.”

  “Type your message here,” El Indio said, and handed him a set of gloves.

  “I’m a keyboard man,” Rico said, “and I’ve barely got the hang of that.”

  One of the techs cabled him an old warped keyboard and Rico typed an urgent summary to the Speaker’s personal Sidekick via his Agency green card. He sent a duplicate to Solaris in the DIA office in Mexico City.

  Yolanda returned with news from a cornfield near the Double-Vee.

  “Identities not confirmed,” Yolanda said. “But an old man says a big black plane pushed a little yellow plane into the ground near his milpa. People in spacesuits took away two figures in body bags. They flew towards ViraVax. This was less than two hours after they were reported missing.”

  “Body bags?” the Colonel said, and stood.

  Yolanda placed a palm on his chest to reassure him.

  “They were struggling,” she said. “That was noted.”

  “Casey, that sonofabitch!” Rico hissed in English. “What the hell could he be up to? Blowing up the embassy, taking two innocent teenagers, killing. . . killing. . . Red.”

  El Indio’s hand was on his arm. “You know now what we have suspected for a time,” he said. “The bombing was a typical smokescreen, as you say. But the pattern has been this: keep your government, the Garcia government, and our people busy fighting amongst themselves, blaming each other for this and for that.”

  “Yes,” Yolanda agreed. “This is an example. Many operations—diversions—the U.S. or the Garcia government blamed on us. We knew we didn’t do it and assumed that one of them did, to arrange blame. ViraVax, and those Children of Eden, kept us at each other’s throats so that we would not notice them using our people for their experiments.”

  Rico flushed with anger and embarrassment. Had the Agency kept him in the field, had he not been so blinded by his drinking and his anger and his dalliance with Rachel, he would have seen how far this had gone long ago. The gall was made more bitter because he’d had his suspicions and he had shut them out of his mind.

  None of my business, he’d thought, petulant as a schoolboy left out of a game.

  Now Harry and Sonja were paying for his petulance, while Red was dead and a lot of other people weren’t that lucky.

  And how many sterilized? he wondered. How many Project Laborers given up for adoption?

  “Colonel?”

  El Indio had been speaking to him.

  “Yes, sorry.”

  “Tell us about their security.”

  “They are missionaries on a two-year rotation,” he said. “Night School trained, well equipped, motivated by the fear of God. Most of their security are concentrated on the ground level and the level immediately below, with a detachment at the dam. No more than a hundred, altogether. But that hundred is very well armed, the perimeter booby-trapped, and if you’re thinking of sending your people in there, forget it. You can only get in or out by air, and they are always sealed off below Level Two as a precaution.”

  “But then they are trapped, are they not?”

  Rico smiled. El Indio saw everything in terms of victory.

  “Depends,” Rico said. “Remember, people have worked the bottom levels without seeing daylight since that place was built. Fifteen years. They have three oxygen-generation systems, plenty of water, and at Level Three they produce enough protein and vegetable matter to feed the entire facility. The topside farming is just a cover. They don’t need it.”

  “You say, then, that they can live down there forever!”

  “Basically, yes.”

  Everyone was silent, and Rico visualized the facility again, trying to recall every stage of construction, trying to find a way in. No problem. He had protested the difference between the plan and the construction because it essentially negated security. The same problem irritated him with the U.S. Embassy, built by the same contractor.

  He reviewed what he remembered out loud.

  “First, we built the dam,” he said. “Easy. Narrow canyon, dry season, piece of cake. Next we cleared fifty hectares, which is the existing perimeter, and in the middle of that we dug the hole. Twenty
-five hectares on the square, fifty meters deep. Each level is five meters thick, with five meters of fill separating each one. The foundation wall is not the real wall. . . .”

  Here he sat upright and scrabbled for his keyboard under a shuffle of papers. He generated a rough 3-D of ViraVax on their central viewer.

  “You see, we had to consider earthquakes and repairs,” he explained. “The building is actually a box inside a box, with room for maintenance crews to work between them. A latticework of steel members secures them, but there is still nearly two meters of space to move in workers and equipment.”

  “And is the only access from the inside?” Yolanda asked.

  Rico smiled. “That’s how it’s supposed to be,” he said. “But it was built by a very important local contractor who married into the Children of Eden. The same one who built the new embassy compound had married into his contract, built the facility for as little as possible and left a note saying simply, ‘Paris is worth a mass.’ None of the embassy elevators is secure. My son and I used to have lunch on top of the cars.”

  Rico sketched out the two apartment-sized decontamination elevators at ViraVax and showed how the two dozen conventional elevators linked with an interior rail system.

  “Casey got me out of there as soon as he could.” Rico shook his head. “He couldn’t bear the thought of an idolator on his grounds.”

  Rico sketched in the dam above the Double-Vee.

  “Constant minor damage from quakes. The Corps of Engineers blamed the water load behind the dam, the moon, everything but bad planning. Anyway, the conduit that carries the power lines from the dam to the facility enters that passageway. There are three places topside to enter that conduit at half-kilometer intervals. Other access shafts inside the buildings are covered with ten-ton concrete lids.”

  He marked them in the graphic.

  “So we could get a team inside,” someone said.

  Rico shook his head.

  “A team, never,” he said. “Their electronic surveillance is excellent—designed to detect unauthorized exit, not entry, but that’s beside the point.”