ViraVax Read online

  “You’re being awfully quiet,” Nancy said. “Are you all right?”

  “Just thinking.”

  “About your father?”

  Sonja nodded.

  “I was just thinking of him, too,” Nancy said. “I was surprised he remembered Valentine’s Day and brought us those chocolates.”

  “All melted.”

  “But they were real chocolate, straight from Belize.”

  “It’s not Belize anymore, Mom.”

  “I know. I know,” she said. “I just remember our vacations there when you were a baby. The locals still called it Belize and that’s how I remember it.”

  “Isn’t that where Colonel Toledo takes his girlfriends?”

  Nancy frowned, and sighed. She started to say something, stopped, then started again.

  “Time for a change of subject,” she said. “There is good news in the world, you know.”

  “Good news? Like what?”

  “I’ve found us a place. A real place.”

  “You mean all to ourselves? Out of the city?”

  “Exactly like we planned,” Nancy said, and raised the last of her wine for a toast.

  Sonja felt her pulse race with hope. She had shared the security apartment with her mother for ten years, and she hated it only slightly less than she hated the ViraVax compound. She attended college now on the webworks, like Harry did, rather than use one of her scholarships to a school in the States.

  Red’s death had shocked Sonja into the realization that she could not remember him as a live-in father, only as someone who visited her mother’s apartment on weekends and holidays. She did not want the same thing to happen between herself and her mother.

  “Chill, Mom! What zone is it in? Is it a real house . . . ?”

  Nancy laughed, and Sonja realized that it had been months since she’d seen her mother laugh.

  “Better than that. You know the place El Canada?”

  “You mean . . . El Canada the coffee finca with the little airstrip that I fly out of every Thursday?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Chill, are we going to rent the guesthouse?”

  “Better than that,” Nancy said. “I put a down payment on it yesterday. We’re buying it.”

  “You bought it? But how . . . ?”

  “We’re rich,” Nancy said. “Actually, the company bought it for us. Part of an insurance agreement. Your father always put his money back into the company and his research. I’ve cashed most of it in. I. . . I like this country, honey. It might be a mess, but it’s better here than in the States. I want to stay on here. I hope that doesn’t disappoint you.”

  Sonja was stunned. El Canada was one of her favorite places on earth. An elderly Canadian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Marcoe, owned it. They spoke an antiquated French between them. Mr. Marcoe taught flying until his eyes went bad, and Sonja had been his last pupil. Every Thursday for three years he had taken Sonja up in the little Student Prince biplane while her mother visited with Mrs. Marcoe, a hardworking woman with an exuberant sense of humor.

  “Mom, I just want to be with you. But it’s a big jump from the apartment to a coffee plantation. How will we do it?”

  “The Marcoes are staying,” Nancy said. “They’ll manage the place. This consultant job is something I’ve always wanted for myself, not for the money. I can telecommute from home, like you kids do.” She sipped her water and widened her smile. “There’s more.”

  “More? How could there be more?”

  Sonja was so excited that she could barely keep her seat.

  “I bought the plane, too,” she said. “Mariposa is yours.”

  Sonja’s plate slipped out of the waiter’s hands and crashed to the tiled floor, sending bits of blue porcelain skidding into the lobby. Sonja scooted her chair back and let him clean up. She noted that her mother still looked happy, really happy, not only for the first time since her father’s death but for the first time that Sonja could remember.

  Sonja conjured some happiness herself and smiled at her mother, wanting to savor their newfound closeness, wanting to perpetuate this sense of happiness and hope forever. But secretly she worried about their waiter: who he was, what he heard and who he heard it for.

  She would get to the bottom of her father’s death, even if it meant taking on Colonel Rico Toledo, or an alliance with the guerrilla underground. Sonja knew her strengths: she was patient, persistent and bright. Someone had attacked her family. Someone was going to pay.

  Chapter 9

  Chief Executive Officer Joshua Casey received his father, Calvin, in the mahogany-paneled suite that fewer than a dozen people had seen. Casey knew that his father disapproved of the luxurious appointments of this inner office, but Joshua insisted that it reminded him of quality, of excellence. Neither he nor his father would settle for less than that. Not for ViraVax, and certainly not for the Lord.

  Both father and son served the Lord in their fashion: Calvin Casey’s television ministry, The Eden Hour, brought the Word into a quarter of a billion homes each week; Joshua Casey’s ViraVax provided them the freedom from disease and the agricultural bounty that was befitting the Children of Eden.

  Joshua Casey helped to weed and prune the Garden, making the Children of Eden acceptable in the hard eyes of the Lord.

  Today the Master looked drawn, older than his sixty-five years, and Joshua Casey frowned his concern. He knew that his father, like himself, observed the strict dietary guidelines of their faith. Both men were vegetarians, and they augmented the benefits of their diet with daily hydrotherapy as outlined in the Handbook for Health written by his father nearly forty years before. Neither had missed a day of the Lord’s work in his lifetime.

  “Hello, Father,” Joshua said, extending his hand to the elder Casey. “What brings you back to Costa Brava?”

  “The Lord’s work, of course,” he said. “And yours.” His voice was gravelly, strained. “I decrypted your report on the Bartlett matter. It worries me.”

  “It’s unlike you to worry, Father,” Joshua said. “Please, have a seat.”

  Joshua patted the headrest of one of two leather recliners and, once his father was seated, he relaxed in the other. A silver serving table between them held a small loaf of bread, a pitcher of ice water and two glasses. Joshua poured each of them a glass and broke each of them a piece of bread, as was their custom. Calvin nibbled the bread, sipped the water, then set the glass down with a barely audible “Amen.”

  Each took out a handkerchief and brushed the other’s shoe—a ritual foot-washing.

  “Bartlett’s work helped us make great strides in controlling the Papist menace,” Calvin said. “I wanted to be sure that he hadn’t fallen prey to a Swiss Guard.”

  “I appreciate that, Father.” Joshua Casey shifted under the Master’s demanding gaze. “He did not fall to the Catholics. He fell prey to something more mundane—an artificial viral agent, presumably of his own design. It must have been a private project, there is no mention of it in his log.”

  “Then I presume the intruder story was provided by the Agency.”

  “Correct.”

  “Whatever possessed the man to experiment on himself?”

  Joshua Casey sipped his ice water, decided against lying.

  “He didn’t. It was an accident.”

  “Accident!” The older man rose out of his chair. “Well, then, what if the whole compound’s infected?”

  “Relax, Father. Sit, sit.”

  Calvin Casey sat, but he didn’t relax.

  “It was a simple influenza vector, designed to operate out of the DNA of the mitochondria rather than the cells themselves. . . . ”

  “In plain English, please,” Calvin said. “I’m a preacher, not a virologist.”

  Joshua Casey ran a hand through what was left of his hair.

  “Several things are set up to happen, based on different signals,” he said. “In this case, the body’s immune system was ordered to attack itself. The en
tire body became a raging, irreversible infection.”

  “You mean, he rotted alive?”

  Joshua Casey couldn’t meet his father’s gaze.

  “In a manner of speaking. The body digested itself and rejected itself at the same time.”

  His father’s face showed the expression of utter disgust that he usually reserved for Rome.

  “And how did he get it?” Calvin asked.

  “Mosquitoes,” Joshua said. “We thought it was impossible, at first. An enzyme in the mosquito’s stomach must have reorganized the virus instead of destroying it. It shows the delicate balance we operate under here.”

  Joshua Casey did not offer his father details of the ghoul that Red Bartlett had become in his final hour. Whatever raged inside him had demonstrated a tremendous drive to replicate. Joshua’s preliminary investigation pointed to an unauthorized study at Level Five, but Dajaj Mishwe was the principal investigator, not Red Bartlett.

  This one might lead us to the right one, Casey thought. Mishwe can add it to his candidates for the final scouring of the gene pool.

  Joshua Casey did better than prepare for Armageddon—he scripted the plan. Dajaj Mishwe carried it out.

  “Any other casualties?” his father asked.

  “Everything was contained and sterilized,” Joshua said. “Nothing else got out. You heard the official statement.”

  “Yes.”

  The Master, Calvin Casey, pursed his lips so that his little gray mustache looked like the edge of a blade under his ample nose.

  “Is there anyone here who would have wanted him dead?”

  “No, Father, it was nothing like that. . . .”

  “I want you to get rid of that Colonel Toledo.”

  “Get rid of. . . but why?” Joshua protested. “The Agency keeps him on a short leash at the embassy. Since his people trained our security and turned it over to us, he’s stayed out of our hair. He’s provided the ultimate security and cover—even the AMA believes we’re in Puerto Rico. Why get rid of a good thing?”

  “He has not provided the ultimate security,” Calvin said. “If he had, that madman’s wife would never have been permitted to live outside this compound. His daughter would have been schooled here, like the rest. He’s a Catholic. I want this incident to disappear. Call in a favor from the Agency, if you have to.”

  Joshua Casey wrung his hands and felt the sweat on his upper lip betray his fear.

  “Father, it’s not that easy. First, the widow is the daughter of the Speaker of the House. We have bought her a house and property nearby as a gesture of goodwill. She will stay. Second, no one goes to the Agency, the Agency comes to you. Now, the Colonel’s news release was accepted by all parties as the truth. . . .”

  “The wife shot him, you say. How long before she develops a very inconvenient recurring nightmare and tells someone?”

  “One of our best people conditioned her during her hospital stay,” Joshua countered. “We backed up her conditioning with the usual hypnotic and one of our new AVAs that permitted her to ‘remember’ more correctly. I assure you, she and the child are not a problem. His work with us was well worth—”

  “The Colonel himself, then,” Calvin interrupted. “How long before his intelligence organization informs him of your experiments on his fellow idolators? What will you do when he turns on you with all of the resources at his disposal? It is better to take care of this now.”

  Joshua Casey smiled. It was not often that he acted in anticipation of his father’s wishes, but each time he had, it had served to bond them closer. Pleasing his father was like pleasing the Lord, something that was a supreme satisfaction in and of itself.

  “The Colonel has been one of our subjects on several occasions,” Joshua said. “He was one of the first sperm vectors. Dajaj used him for a successful genetic duplication trial the year we opened here, almost seventeen years ago. We had the opportunity to reinoculate three years later and successfully sterilized his wife through the AVA delivered in his sperm. As you know, the embassy physician is our man, so we have had good follow-up on her. . . .”

  “Can you predict exactly what this Colonel will do at any moment?” his father asked.

  Joshua Casey was stung into silence. He waited in respectful silence to hear his father’s suggestions on the matter. Apparently, there would be none.

  “Then get rid of him.”

  Calvin Casey worried about his son. While Costa Brava was the perfect proving ground for the armory of the Lord, it was still a bastion of the idolators, the Catholics, and they did not take challenges to their centuries of power lying down. And his son’s company built viruses, artificial viral agents. This made Calvin Casey uneasy. He had designed the perfectly healthy regimen for the Children of Eden, a regimen that was touted as exemplary by none less than the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization. He did not relish the idea of some Catholic or some laboratory spill wiping out all that he had wrought in his forty-five years of service to the Lord.

  “Father? Are you all right?”

  Calvin Casey forced himself back to reality.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all. And worried about you, of course. No need to press this subject further, you know how I stand. As for the lab, I presume that you are taking proper precautions and caring for yourself. Your mother would be proud, bless her soul. But there is one thing that would worry her.”

  Joshua Casey smiled. “I know, Father. You want me married.”

  “It’s not that I want you. . . well, perhaps it is. Your mother and I were one organism, if I may speak your language for a moment. I know that now, because I am half a being without her. It is something that I can’t explain, because you’ve never had the experience.”

  “It’s unlikely that I’ll meet the perfect woman here, Father.” Casey smiled again. “Isolation is a must, you know that. I’m married to my work. . . .”

  “Hogwash. Besides, you’re the sole surviving Casey. Do you want everything that we’ve worked for to fall into the hands of strangers?”

  “I’ll work on it, Father. I promise.”

  “Commit to it,” his father ordered. “Your assistant, Shirley Good, has demonstrated promise, I believe, and uncommon loyalty. There has been talk. You, of all people, must be above talk. Take care of it.”

  “We’ll see,” Joshua Casey said, reassuring his father with his best smile. “We’ll soon see.”

  Joshua Casey excused himself, then returned to his overcluttered study and the complicated problem of Red Bartlett’s death.

  Mosquito bites.

  That had been in the report. Mosquito bites, scratched up and still inflamed, probably five or six days old. Red Bartlett hadn’t been topside in nearly two weeks, so he had to get them inside the facility, somewhere between his labs at Level Two and Mishwe’s supply labs at Level Five.

  Now, how could a mosquito get in here? Casey wondered.

  Everyone below the topside level was fumigated, stripped, cleansed, clothed in sterile jumpsuits. Every molecule of air and water was filtered, cleansed and sterilized in a four-hour ritual. The lab complex was just that, complex, and most of it lay underground, bunkered against an uncasual glance or a neutron bomb.

  Now Casey held the histology report on what was left of Red Bartlett: “Tissue rejection reaction/purulence; complete cellular breakdown.”

  Bartlett had never had a transplant of any kind, nor transfusion, yet his body had disintegrated, burned with a blue flame, just like several Innocents from Mishwe’s section. Red Bartlett melted and stank and so did the whole damned scene.

  If a mosquito transmitted this from one of Mishwe’s experimental subjects to Bartlett, then all of us could be in danger.

  The only other answer was equally frightening—Bartlett had been deliberately infected with an experimental AVA, one with which Mishwe had taken other liberties, of late.

  If Red had worked at the brassiere factory in La Libertad, Major
Scholz would be content to read about it tomorrow on the web. But Bartlett was her boss’s best friend, and he worked for ViraVax, and Casey knew that she knew that spontaneous human combustion was impossible no matter what the tabloids said.

  Rico Toledo’s situation was another reason for Agency involvement. Falling so swiftly on the Colonel’s sudden decline, his best friend’s suspicious death would look even more suspicious.

  As it looks now to me, Casey thought.

  Suspension, suspicion and more drinking took Rico Toledo down. . . or did it? The Agency chief, Solaris, claimed Toledo was better than that, and the albino was never wrong.

  Toledo’s conduct towards his family had been unconscionable, and a formal censure had been in the works for a month when Grace Toledo cut him. Catholics were such barbarians. Something like this would be unthinkable in a Gardener family.

  It worked out quite to Casey’s satisfaction, however. Now Toledo would be far too busy with his personal battles to snoop into corners at ViraVax.

  Too bad she didn’t kill him, he thought.

  Casey took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  That’s the way Mishwe thinks.

  In truth, it was a strong reason for keeping Mishwe on. A lot of Casey’s wishes became fulfilled because of his right-hand man’s ability to intuit them, get them done without a lot of aggravating questions, ethical decisions or publicity.

  Suddenly, a lot of nasty arrows pointed to Mishwe. He had always been the facility’s most valuable player, even though he chose to play alone. With Bartlett gone, Casey was free of the only Roman Catholic on his staff, but he was seriously short-handed, as well.

  Maybe Marte Chang will work into something permanent, he thought. That is, willingly work into something permanent.

  Meanwhile, there was the matter of Mishwe. Casey decided it was time to put a leash on the man, but it would have to wait until Marte Chang’s project was finished. Then she would either be one of them or gone, and that would determine what kind of leash to put on Mishwe, and how short.

  Chapter 10