ViraVax Page 8

  “He is a magician with genes, particularly the access to genes. Besides, all culture media are provided by his people at Level Five, and your project requires more medium than the rest put together, does it not? You will find Mishwe an invaluable tool when it comes to implementation. . . .”

  “No,” Marte said, her lips pressed into a firm, pale line. “I do not want that man near me, or near my work.”

  “Well, my dear, that’s simply unnecessary. Dajaj despises people, especially women, and bears our infrequent encounters under great duress. The Innocents adore him, however, and what patience he has, he has for them. If you stay away from his little playground back there, then you will likely never run into him by chance. I promise you, he will not seek you out. He seeks out no one.”

  “He scares me,” she said, and dropped uninvited into Casey’s easy chair. “Eccentric is one thing, abuse is another. He assaulted me. . . .

  “We are different people here, different from the outside world,” Casey said. He swept a hand about him in a gesture that Marte was sure he considered dramatic. “Here in our isolation we must develop a tolerance that surpasses what we find on the outside. It is in our best interests. May I show you some of his work?”

  “I’m not sure I have the stomach for it,” she snapped.

  “Calm down,” Casey said. It was as close as he had come to giving her an order. “You are not leaving, you have too much at stake. He is not leaving. You share the same roof. You don’t have to get along, so you must coexist. He will not harm you, that is not allowed. With information comes understanding, so you need more information.”

  Marte rubbed her face with the towel, an opportunity to escape Casey’s blue-eyed gaze. Something in her body screamed at her to leave, to run, to get as far away from their shared roof as money could get her. But her intellect reminded her that this was not practical. She would find the tools to practice her intricate, expensive art nowhere else in the world, so she must make do here. Hers was the dilemma of the composer/conductor whose instrument is a symphony orchestra.

  And there was the matter of the Agency.

  “Okay,” she said, “show me.”

  “It’s a long cycle through decontamination,” Casey said. “Several hours down to Level Five, several hours back. We could do it another time. . . ?”

  Marte chilled at the thought of seeing Dajaj Mishwe again, but she could not expect too many offers for a look at Level Five, so she accepted, with what she hoped was a convincing eagerness.

  Casey led her to a large apartment.

  “It’s an elevator,” he explained. “Everything cycles automatically, illustrated for you by the orientation materials. We are most fussy about procedure on your first cycle. You may nap if you like, or access your system through the console provided. I’ll take an express later. You may be thinking, ‘Rank has its privilege,’ and you would be right. However, I assure you I still have to submit to the basic unpleasantries.”

  The apartment was boring, the orientation’s talking head was boring, so, in spite of her nervousness, Marte Chang napped through the three-hour cycle to Level Five.

  Dajaj Mishwe’s lab was meticulously kept. To Marte’s relief, Casey had called ahead, and Mishwe was gone. Marte was sure that he watched them from behind one of the two-way mirrors that separated each lab from its living quarters and electronics studio. Three thick ropes hung from the high ceiling, about five meters apart. Free wall space was studded with tiny pieces of rock— movable rock.

  “Dajaj likes to climb,” Casey said. “It relieves his tension, like the tires. We all have our releases, correct? These are more innocuous than many.”

  Marte answered with a grunt as she took in the detail of Mishwe’s workspace.

  Like her temporary setup topside, it was as spacious as a well-lit barn. The decontamination/suit-up room and refrigeration facility were identical to her own. There the resemblance ended. Marte’s experiments focused on the placement of metals within retroviral structures during replication. She seldom worked with anything larger than single-cell cultures, but Dajaj Mishwe obviously preferred larger animals, animals of all types. There was no doubt that his favorite was the standard white rat.

  Thousands of rat cubicles formed a great rat city around the lab. Hundreds of other rodents were confined to expensive isolettes.

  Like Mishwe, she thought.

  Dozens of white-suited trisomy helpers shuffled the byways, feeding and watering and cleaning the animals.

  “Lab rats,” Casey mused. “He does love them, doesn’t he?”

  Marte understood that Casey meant the trisomies as well. She found it difficult to imagine Mishwe loving anything, so she kept quiet.

  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 man
y 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 anyon
e 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.”