Burn (3 page)

He won’t have to worry about the smoking getting him,
Hodge thought with a smirk.

“It’s ViraVax,” Mandell said. “I can’t give it all to you right now, but trust me, we’re on it. We’ve diverted a SEAL team to help out, we believe that Garcia is part of the problem, so we do
not
want his people to find either Rico or the kids before we do.”

“ViraVax? But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does if you think of unauthorized experiments on human beings.”

Nancy dropped heavily into a chair, her expression numb.

“Sonja tried to warn me about ViraVax,” she said. “If I had listened, she wouldn’t have gone out there on her own.”

“Nancy?”

Nancy Bartlett’s face betrayed a dizzying disorientation for a moment. She batted at something in front of her eyes, and Hodge knew what it was. The memory adjustment that he had arranged for her after die incident with her husband was coming unraveled. Right now he imagined that a flood of grotesque images, suppressed memories, crossed her vision—her husband, dead . . . a pistol in her hand . . . his body melting to sludge on the living-room carpet.

It doesn’t matter now,
he thought, and caught himself smiling. His part in Nancy Bartlett’s memory adjustment had been a pleasant one. Creative.

Nancy shook her head and cleared the tremble out of her voice.

“Sonja was convinced that ViraVax had something to do with Red’s death,” she said. “She’s been on a one-woman mission to prove it. But these kids are so high profile—American kids from embassy families. What would possess any sane person to take those particular kids to . . . to use as guinea pigs?”

“Nancy, there’s a lot I can’t say right now. But there are two unpleasant possibilities. They’re using the kids as bait to get to Rico, who knows about a few of their experiments—including at least one on your husband.”

“On
Red?
But he worked for them from the beginning, and it was a guerrilla who killed him. . . .”

“I
really
don’t want to get into that right now,” Mandell said. “That’s the official embassy line, created by Rico under orders as a cover. . . .”

“But I was
there.
I
remember. . . .
”

Major Hodge smiled at this testimony to his handiwork.

“Nancy,” the Secretary said, “there’s a lot that neither of us knows at this point, but believe me, Red was not killed by that man they executed. Now, the other possibility is that the kids have already been part of some study, and all this with Rico is to get him out of the way. If he’s killed in a fight, then they can claim he was the only one who knew the whereabouts of the kids, and the search is hopeless.”

Nancy felt sick to her stomach.

“Where is he now?” she whispered.

“He’s gone in after them. And I’m trying to get him some support. The Children of Eden are making any operations in that country very difficult. Garcia is fighting to save his presidency; he doesn’t give a hoot about the kids. I really wish you’d come home. None of this would’ve happened if you’d been here.”

Nancy pulled herself upright and looked her father’s image in the eye. Her voice was steel.

“Dad, that was the kind of low blow I didn’t expect from you. I don’t need a guilt trip right now.”

He sighed, and flicked at the tip of his bulbous nose, something Hodge noted that he always did when saving face.

“You’re right, honey, I apologize. Sonja . . . she’s your only child, but she’s also my only grandchild. With the both of you down there and your mother gone, I’m . . . well, I’m alone. And I don’t like it.” He glanced off-screen again, and sighed. “Listen, Ambassador Simpson is being briefed now, and I want you to stick with her until this is over. What about Grace Toledo? How’s she holding up?”

“She’s here. Worried sick about Harry, of course. Hating Rico even more than ever, if that’s possible. The best thing she ever did was divorce that sonofabitch.”

Her father leaned off-screen to confer with someone, then came back looking even more harried.

“We’ve got our share of problems here, too. Someone managed to burn up two Gardener compounds, in Milwaukee and Tennessee. The President’s sending the Vice-President out for an appearance and assessment. Nobody’s taking credit yet. Gardeners shut up tight for their Sabbath, so we hope they don’t go off half-cocked when they find out.

“I would like for you and Grace to come up here to give some testimony when this is over. Then I’d like to talk you into staying. I’m not getting any younger, you know, and I’d like some time with you and my granddaughter.”

Nancy started to interrupt, but the Secretary of State put up a hand to stop her.

“I’m sorry to cut this short,” he said, “but I have to go. This line will be open for you until this is resolved, okay? We’re mobilizing everything at our disposal to recover those kids.”

Nancy grasped her hands together to keep the trembling from showing.

“Okay,” she said, and sighed. “Thanks, Dad. I love you.”

But the peel was already blank.

Loud shouts from the other side of the room startled her, and Hodge’s screen showed a knot of aides crowded around a communications console. Nancy stood to see what was going on, but suddenly her legs were too wobbly to carry her the half-dozen meters across the room. The aides all talked at once into their headsets. The ambassador, looking hot and wilted, pulled her damp hair back with both hands, closed her eyes and walked away from the group.

“What is it?” Nancy asked. “What’s happening now?”

Ambassador Simpson pinched the bridge of her nose and kept her eyes closed while she answered in a hollow voice.

“Somebody blew the Jaguar Valley Dam,” she said. “ViraVax is gone.”

Hodge leaned into the snoopscreen, his heart pounding.

The final coup,
he thought.
The Angel carried it off!

“But the kids . . . Sonja and Harry. My dad . . . Secretary Mandell said that’s where they’re being held. What about them?”

The ambassador shook her head.

“We don’t know,” she said. “The Agency office received the ViraVax emergency shutdown signal just before the blast, so this may involve contamination, as well. Garcia’s forces say they shot down a Mongoose trying to get out. We don’t know yet if there are survivors to tell us. . . .”

Nancy’s legs gave out and for the second time she dropped, stunned, into the chair. This time Hodge was sure that her memories were flooding back; shock often overtook his most meticulous work. He watched as her wide, dilated eyes played back horrible images of Red Bartlett’s shattered skull, along with the sensation of a hot pistol in her hand. Someone was screaming, then, and by the expression on her face Hodge saw Nancy realize that she was the screamer, but still she couldn’t stop.

Major Hodge wanted his own team to get to that Mongoose first. If Toledo was on it, he should have an accident as quickly as possible.

“Excuse me, Major,” his aide said. “Your scramble to McAllen is ready in booth A.”

“Thanks, Sergeant. Any news on Colonel Toledo?”

“None, sir. The dam and ViraVax are gone. One plane crash-landed outside the compound, but we have no word on survivors.”

“Get a team on the ground now!” he ordered. “Nobody leaves that crash alive until we’re clear on contamination.”

“Yes, Major.”

Hodge dismissed her with a wave of his hand and proceeded to the ultrasecure transmission booth. Hodge had one last deception to carry off, the perfect theatrical finale that would decapitate the Gardener leadership and infect the United States in one fell swoop. The Angel had done his job; it was time for Ezra the Invisible to give Flaming Sword some breathing room.

Chapter 4

I am the Lord’s trumpet, His plow and His sword.
You who have the ears to hear, know this: The Children of
Eden are sown, and it’s a mighty arm guards the seed.
Unbeliever, tread you not on the Garden of the Lord.

—Calvin Casey, Master, The Children of Eden

Major Rena Scholz watched the clock on the warehouse wall turn 20:00 as she pressed Quik-Bond onto the last sheet of Plexiglas. She and her crew had removed several interview chambers from the nearby women’s prison and converted them into makeshift quarantine isolettes on less than three hours’ notice. Each was three meters on a side, networked into a mainframe for communication and jiffy-plumbed by a drop team from the Corps of Engineers. The isolettes were double-walled, sealed atop a fiberglass holding tank salvaged from a freighter in the nearby harbor, and each contained a cot, sink and sea toilet from the same ship. The air was her biggest worry.

Sergeant Trethewey looked worried, too.

“I can see how the air gets in, Major,” he said, pointing to the compressor huffing away in the opposite corner. “But I’m more worried about the air that comes out.”

The sergeant helped her lift the last piece of Plexiglas into place, then tightened the corner-clamps and stepped back. Like the major, Trethewey was drenched in sweat.

Major Scholz pointed to a fire hose coupling Quik-Bonded to a hole in the glass.

“We’ll run hoses from here to the cold-storage facility next door,” she said. “We’ve got a dozen plastic water bladders in there from the airport fire crew, and more coming. The air fills them up, and the cold keeps the volume to a minimum. It’s the best we can do right now, and with luck we won’t need them for long. Frankly, I think it’s just one big cover-your-ass.”

“Who gets to seal them off and change the hoses when they’re full?”

Scholz wiped the sweat from her forehead and smiled for the first time in hours.

“Some grunt,” she said. “Presumably lower in grade than sergeant.”

“Which reminds me, Major. How did you draw this lowly shit detail?”

“I’ve known those kids nearly all of their lives,” she said. “If they’re going to be held in security isolation, even for twenty-four hours, I want familiar faces around. That’s why you’re here, too.”

“But I don’t. . . .”

“Yes you do, Sergeant,” she said. “You’ve sneaked Sonja into every flight trainer and cockpit we’ve got out here. You saved their lives, Sergeant.”

“I did?”

“Absolutely. Details forthcoming; you didn’t hear it from me.”

The teams setting up the other two isolettes worked in a sweaty silence, the air in the warehouse almost too thick to breathe.

“They’ve been together all through this, so why build separate chambers?”

“Orders,” she said.

Scholz had asked the same question herself, and got the same answer. The guerrillas, the chopper crew, the ambulance team—they all waited out their fate in the adjacent warehouse without the luxury of these isolettes. When she questioned this, the answer from her chief, Trenton Solaris, was, “We’re doing the best with what we have.”

The other question she had asked but received no answer to had to do with the Children of Eden hangar and warehouse directly across the airfield. They were locked up tight over there, presumably for their Sabbath. Still, she couldn’t help wonder how they could sit quietly by when a couple of thousand of their personnel just disappeared under a few million tons of water. In spite of Major Hodge’s hands-off attitude, Scholz put the place under surveillance, physical and electronic. If they tried to move anybody or anything out of there, she’d take action. Until then, it was easier for everybody if she let them sit tight.

Sergeant Trethewey dragged a couple of lengths of fire hose to their work area and dropped them at the major’s feet.

“Major, are you all right? I heard you were in the embassy when the bomb . . .”

“I’m fine,” she said. Then she shook her head and laughed. “A fluke. I hate to say it, but Hodge saved my skin. He called me out of the reception area back to snoop and sniff, clear on the other side of the building, just before it blew. By the time I got back through all the debris, Colonel Toledo was gone.”

She shot some Quik-Bond into the threads and screwed them into the coupling in the Plexiglas.

“They say it was a suicide mission,” Trethewey said. “That he did it to get his ex-wife.”

“More complicated than that,” Scholz said. “Believe me, he didn’t do it. And he didn’t blow the dam at ViraVax, either. The guerrillas verified that when they brought the kids in. Quik-Bond all these couplings until the bonding seeps out. We don’t want any air leaks.”

“The kids . . . they’re still okay?” Trethewey asked.

Scholz patted her Sidekick.

“As okay as could be expected under the circumstances. They’re in an ambulance out back—which we’ve been ordered to bury in concrete as soon as they’re moved in here.”

“Those goddamn guerrillas. . . .”

“It wasn’t them,” the major interrupted. “They discovered the charges when they went to help the Colonel get the kids. They’re the ones who rescued the kids, and that woman virologist. She’s the sole survivor out there, it looks like. Garcia’s people shot them down—
our
standing orders—and would have killed them all if they’d found them first.”

“What happened with the team that Major Hodge sent out?”

“It was a faceoff,” she said. “The guerrillas refused to hand the kids over. Things were tense until Harry used a Sidekick and Colonel Toledo’s authorization code to get through to the Chief in Mexico City. Solaris called off Hodge and let the guerrillas bring in the kids.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” Scholz said. “Shit. By the way, I understand you have a personal interest in the Bartlett
girl,
Sergeant. Isn’t sixteen a little young for you?”

Trethewey shrugged.

“She’s a genius who finished school at fourteen and flies planes at sixteen,” he said. “I never think about her age and I’ve never . . . you know, done anything. Besides, when I’m forty she’ll be thirty-four, and nobody sees anything wrong with that.”

“Sounds like you have long-term motives.”

The major held one coupling while Trethewey shot the glue to it and screwed it in. She hung it over a sawhorse so it wouldn’t bond to the concrete floor. Trethewey dragged over a couple more.

“I might not be a genius, Major, but I’m not a jerk, either. Besides, she and the Toledo boy are inseparable. How’s he doing?”

“Pretty shook up physically, but nothing broken. Recovering from a heavy trank that the Colonel slapped him with. But Harry had the presence of mind to grab a data drop that Red Bartlett made before he died. The sooner we get this stuff together, the sooner we find out what’s on it.”

“Can’t you just run it through one of the machines at the office?”

“Not likely, Sergeant. The medicos don’t want anybody touching it, and the spooks don’t want it duplicated. Contamination risk, remember? I think we have enough hose on this one to reach.”

She dragged another length of hose to the next isolette, and Trethewey followed with three more.

“Harry’s a very smart boy,” she said. “He’s pretty upset about leaving his dad behind just before the dam blew. . . .”

Here Major Scholz choked back her own feelings for Colonel Toledo—feelings which, until this nightmare hit, she’d hidden even from herself.

He was a bastard,
she thought.
But under there somewhere was a good man once, trying to find his way out again.

“Are you okay, Major?”

The voice behind her was that annoying and insistent nasal whine of Colonel Toledo’s replacement in Costa Brava’s DIA office, Major Ezra Hodge. Scholz had been in-country for years, but the Agency had put this greasy tenderfoot in charge of Operations. That did not sit well with Major Scholz, but she was accustomed to doing an excellent job for the occasional bastard, and this would be no exception. She put on the appropriate face.

“Just tired, Major,” she said. “What’s the latest?”

“We need another isolette,” he said, “on the double. And not with these three. I want it in the next building. Get a complete intensive-care setup from Merced Hospital and install it inside. Accommodations for two—a patient and caregiver. And communications. I want it ready within the hour.”

Major Scholz felt the blaze of anger flash from her collar to her cheeks, and noted the theatrical rolling of the eyes from Sergeant Trethewey, who stood behind Hodge. Trethewey followed the eye-rolling with a quick jab of an up lifted middle finger, and, at a nod from Scholz, hurried out to start work next door.

“Who’s our new guest, Major?” she asked.

“Toledo,” he said, and the name spat from his tongue like a foul taste. “Our SEAL team picked him up. He’s alive, barely. The corpsman who’s treating him will have to stay with him, you understand. And post sentries. He’ll be under arrest.”

“Arrest?” Scholz was incredulous. “What for?”

Major Hodge was clearly agitated, rare for such a self-controlled little maggot.

“For the embassy bombing, of course. For kidnapping the kids. And for blowing the dam that killed who knows how many people. Including, it would seem, Calvin Casey, the Master of the Children of Eden. A little like dusting the Pope in the Vatican, wouldn’t you say? Well, Major? Come on, let’s hop to it!”

Major Scholz ignored Major Hodge’s insulting tone and concentrated on getting her breathing under control.

Rico’s alive!
she thought.

Then she shook off her exhaustion and set to work with a vengeance to see that he stayed that way.