ViraVax (13 page)

“That’s Adan’s carpentry shop,” she said, “and the gas station . . . there, the whole streamside up the valley is the farming and water-supply co-op. So you see, we are not really a political party,” Yolanda explained. “We are an economic confederation, like Costa Brava.”

“That’s El Indio’s touch,” he said to Yolanda. “A practical elegance.”

Yolanda’s gaze shifted at the mention of El Indio, and she stared past Rico towards the mountains.

“I, too, have never met him,” she said. “Only messages on the webs, and he leaves no footprints.”

“Good business,” Rico mumbled.

The housekeeper had put up plenty to eat, but the Colonel felt nauseated. The in-and-out hustle of people and equipment around him intensified that nausea. He excused himself to shower and change clothes. His face and head throbbed, swollen against the stitches. Soaking off the caked-on gauze was the hardest part.

The shower door slid open and Yolanda’s voice interrupted his soap cycle.

“Video news, we’re on!”

Rico pulled a towel around himself and followed her down the hallway. The soap drying in his scalp and the bristly stitches didn’t help the reawakening throb. Staring at a flickering TV without so much as a beer aggravated matters. Rico’s stomach flipped, but what they said at the last put everything on ice, including his belly.

Big news after Tuesday’s bombing and the convenient shooting of—now it was
four
—Irish assassins was the disappearance of a small plane with two teenagers aboard. They were Sonja Bartlett, granddaughter of the Speaker of the House of the United States, and Harry Toledo, son of ex-Colonel Rico Toledo, whose car was the source of Tuesday’s bomb at the embassy. Presidential sources speculated on whether father and son were involved in some wildcat political scheme, or whether the bombing was Rico’s personal vendetta against his ex-wife.

Preliminary reports said that both mothers were safe in an undisclosed location. Embassy security allowed no interviews, but implied that the women were being held at the embassy compound for their own protection.

A caller purporting to be from the Knights of Malta took credit for the kidnapping and for the bombing. The Archbishop’s office reported that the call was a hoax and charged the Garcia government with staging both the bombing and the kidnapping. Garcia predictably blamed the Peace and Freedom Party.

Colonel Toledo’s name came up in all three scenarios as the perpetrator. A lifetime of his personal and professional laundry flapped across the airways.

“I’ve got to go back,” he told Yolanda. “I have to find those kids.”

She placed her hand on his arm. Yolanda’s touch excited him and this weakness caused him to blush; he felt it prickle over his throat and cheeks. Since Rachel, Rico had slept with no one and had slept very little.

“Don’t go,” Yolanda said. “Casey’s people know you can’t stand by while your child is in danger. Your own fear becomes the bait that snares you. Those
cobardes
won’t come up here and look for themselves.”

Rico knew she was right, but this was his son, and the daughter of his dead best friend.
 

“I’m going.”

“They want
you,”
Yolanda said, gripping his arm. “You would warn me not to fall for it. . . .”

“You don’t fight like I do. . . .”

“Don’t underestimate me any more than you already have,” Yolanda said. “They want us fighting ourselves,” she reminded him. “They want you on your own, they want us to turn on you. All of this you know. You have used this technique yourself.”

Yes. He had used all of the techniques now arrayed against him. That was a plus, and it was why he felt like a good fight. This was familiar turf. With luck, Rico could narrow his field of fire to a single target.

Those monsters at ViraVax wouldn’t make things so simple.

Meanwhile, Rico’s worst fear, the worst fear of any parent, was also true. Someone had his child.

The two dead Irish nationals had already become four dead Irish nationals. Since the next figures in question were Harry and Sonja, the Colonel wanted to ensure no juggling.

Rico, headache in hand, used the rebels’ hardware to pry a few old debts off the webs. He triggered his coded distress burst to Solaris and requested Agency support. It was a long shot, but Solaris had known him from the start.

“Solaris, you better be with me,” Rico muttered.

“What was that?” Yolanda asked.

“Just thinking,” he muttered.

Then, when her eyebrow asked for more, he growled, “Anybody not with me is against me. Anybody against me in this one will not survive.”

Yolanda made an impatient snapping gesture with her hand.

“There’s the
yanqui
sense of justice,” she hissed. “Kill one hundred thousand people to rescue two hostages. What are we fighting for, if only to become
them?”

“Get off the high horse,” Rico said. “I’ve seen what you do when you have to do it. I will accept your support, but not your judgment. That’s a waste of time.”

Yolanda shrugged, a Costa Bravan gesture that Rico found particularly endearing at that moment. He shrugged back, and she giggled, the tension between them broken.

“My preliminary assessment of network support will be ready in a few minutes,” Yolanda said. She smiled at him and added, “We are not enemies, remember that.”

The Colonel knew by now that El Indio happened to be Yolanda’s original contact even before the confederation, and he was disappointed that she, too, had never seen his face or heard his voice. Rico’s identity had been double-covered with both of them as well, though now it didn’t matter.

El Indio had been Rico’s pioneer contact from the Peace and Freedom people, and his invisibility became a matter of principle. Rico got the diamonds on his Agency cuff links for being persistent, but this time persistence hadn’t paid off. Experience had taught him to survive by knowing what mattered before it mattered.

Slow, irregular, meticulous—the Colonel, Yolanda and El Indio were of the old school, though young enough, and these aliases within aliases were badges of honor. Like prisoners isolated in their holes, they lived for their communications, for the secret message. What armies it might stir didn’t matter much compared to the challenge of reliable product verified and reliably delivered. That is, until now. Now it was personal.

A conference had been scheduled in the dining room of the open-air restaurant. Yolanda and Colonel Toledo walked with impunity through the cobblestone plaza of this rebel village to their reserved seats. Bugs fluttered the few hot lights and buzzed in the thick night air. Rico was bleary-eyed after four hours in meetings, but he scanned everyone in the place and at no time did El Indio give him the sign.

The Colonel’s wounds itched in sweaty bandages, and standing all day had made him light-headed. The village barber did a pretty good job of trimming stitches and restructuring his hair to minimize the damage. Rico had just assessed himself in the rest room mirror. The face cuts couldn’t be helped, and his scissors scar throbbed a pink pulse into his collar.

Pretty,
he thought.

He returned to their table and began to sit when Yolanda tugged his sleeve and stopped him.

“Here’s Philip,” she said.

Yolanda’s ex-husband rose to greet them, displaying the strength and grace of a man of his station.

What hair Philip Rubia had was gray. Though just fifty, he looked considerably younger than the Colonel. His suit and tie cut him the figure of a chief executive officer, which, though
in absentia
from Costa Brava, he still was. His red-rimmed eyes never left Yolanda’s gaze, never met the Colonel’s.

The Colonel swept the room for a sign from El Indio, but saw only Philip Rubia’s bodyguards and a few political assistants busy with their own game.

Yolanda stepped aside. Philip Rubia gripped the Colonel’s hand tight and affirmed his determination to help with Harry and Sonja. Then Philip whispered to both of them, “I am the old friend you have been seeking.”

“You!”
Yolanda growled, a hand to her chest. “You mean that
you
are El Indio? All the time we were married, it was
you
. . . ?”

“Yes,” he said with sad eyes and a bow, “all that time. I couldn’t say anything, it was too dangerous. . . .”

“Think what we could have done
together,’’
she snapped.

“What? Get caught?” he asked. “Died? Look what we’ve accomplished this way. . . .”

Rico was surprised at Philip’s revelation, but not shocked, like Yolanda.

But I wasn’t married to him,
Rico thought.
I
didn’t divorce him for spending so much unexplained time away from the family.

Yolanda drew herself up, her brown eyes brimming, and took a deep breath before she spoke through her clenched teeth.

“There
was
another woman,” she said. “I was not mistaken about that.”

“No.” El Indio admitted, his sadness tight in his throat. “No, you were not mistaken.”

Yolanda’s face flushed and her eyes glittered with fight. Rico couldn’t tell whether it was anger or sadness, or both.

“Thank God you admit it,” Yolanda whispered. “It is better for both of us, for our work. . . .”

“That woman,” El Indio said, “she, too, was a matter of our work. . . .”

“Don’t insult me, or her, with that story. And don’t feel so bad, Philip. You are so much inside yourself, so intellectual, it is refreshing that you listened to your body at least once in your life.”

At that, Yolanda and Philip became aware of the silence around them. This silence dissolved in a couple of coughs, the squeak of a chair, a question from one waiter to another across the room: “Do you think Reyes will play in the World Cup?”

Rico sensed, more than heard, the incoming drones. This time it was he who saved Yolanda with a shove.

“Down!” he yelled.

A fireball challenged the sun, and the concussion stripped the thatch from the restaurant roof.

“Look!”

El Indio pointed out a roiling column of black smoke about three blocks away. Another round exploded in the street and peppered the fleeing patrons with shards of hot spring steel.

“It’s the town house!” Yolanda shouted as Rico pushed her down.

“How did they know?” Philip asked.

His gaze that met Rico’s was cold, accusatory.

Garcia’s boys had found them, after all, and the guerrillas’ mountain stronghold was not nearly as secure as they wanted to believe. This had to be an Agency tip-off.

But how?

Rico’s hand went instinctively to the scissors scar on his neck, and then it became clear: how the albino had found him so easily in Mexico, how Garcia’s inept army suddenly gained a new efficiency.

They’d implanted him with a Parasite, a transmitter that used the body’s own electrolytes as a battery. Rico felt along the scar and found the tiny lump that he’d thought was a little cyst or an undissolved stitch. He squeezed it between the nails of his thumb and forefinger as hard as he could bear. Finesse would have to wait.

“Come on!” he growled, and grabbed Yolanda’s hand.

Once again, they stumbled through smoking debris and the screaming wounded, Philip and his men providing cover and following close on their heels.

Chapter 19

Sonja Bartlett woke up naked, bound and gagged inside a hot plastic bag. Hot gravel outside the bag scorched her left cheek and shoulder. She squirmed in her own sweat, slick as a fish in the bottom of a boat, and tried to free her feet and her thumbs where they were bound behind her back. The air inside the bag was so hot and thick she could barely stay conscious no matter how hard she gulped it in.

It’s a body bag,
she thought.
They think I’m dead and they’re going to bury me!

A slug of adrenaline threw her back into her struggles, then her muscles spasmed until she was helpless. She concentrated on slowing her breathing. Gradually, the colored lights faded and her vision focused on black. When she got control of her breathing, her mind cleared.

If they thought I was dead, they wouldn’t need to tie me up,
she reasoned.

Her muscles twitched all over her body, little ripples of random electricity. She felt well-bruised, but not broken.

She was a prisoner, then.

Whose?

Sonja remembered lying in her bed, drifting towards sleep. Her Knuckleheads poster, a peel-and-peek holo, shimmered down on her from the wall. Dimly, other images materialized. She remembered flying
Mariposa,
shots, the Mongoose. . . .

Hacienda Police,
she thought,
or one of Garcia’s death squads.

Clearly not guerrillas. They flew ultralights on suicide missions, crude-framed kites powered by lawn-mower engines stolen from the rich. A Mongoose meant money, and money meant a government, or ViraVax.

ViraVax!

That place scared her more than any government could. They probably wouldn’t kill her, but that thought scared her, too.

Sonja was soaked from the unbearable heat inside the bag, and her lungs could not gulp enough stale air through her gag to keep her from suffocation. A large zipper cut her nose when she twisted her face and worked at the gag. She strained upward to get her nose closer to the zipper and managed to suck a little air through its teeth. Someone pinched her nose through the plastic, and when she jerked away in breathless panic she heard a muffled laugh.

Sonja lay still for a hundred heartbeats, listening, but heard nothing except her own desperate gasps for air. The pressure at her temples and the tingling in her fingers let up. The gravel hurt her spine and shoulder blades, but she worked the thick plastic against it, trying to abrade herself a breathing hole.

A muffled command barked from nearby. A flurry of kicks and blows pelted her body, but they did not seem enthusiastic and she was somewhat protected by the thick plastic around her. Sonja stopped fighting when those agonizing spasms clutched at her muscles. She ran out of air, and once again the darkness inside the bag met the white light behind her eyes.

Sonja woke to her butt dragging along the ground. Someone carried her under the armpits, someone else grunted at her knees. The one at her shoulders had his arms far enough under her armpits so that his hands gripped her breasts. Sonja squirmed away, but he just laughed and renewed his hold.

Her bearers jog-trotted, grunting and huffing, then slung her up, up, and let her drop to a metal deck. She heard the whine of turbines overhead and the clamor of boots.

The ship lurched and sideslipped. Sonja leaned against another body, also in a bag, unmoving. She nudged it with her foot once, twice, and it was a body, all right. Nothing nudged back.

Oh, God, it’s Harry!
she thought.

She remembered the shots and prayed that they hadn’t killed him.

Nobody would gain anything by killing him,
she thought.
Like the hostage trainer taught us, we’re worth a lot more alive than dead.

Sonja remembered a warning from the Mongoose, and the crash.

She remembered racing
Mariposa
to the edge of a burned-out cornfield before the Mongoose overtook her. A dirt road entered the jungle just ahead and she had strained the little biplane to its limit trying to make it. The Mongoose settled just a few meters above her and its turbines robbed her of all her lift.
Mariposa
dropped unceremoniously the last ten meters to the ground, the stick completely loose in Sonja’s fierce grip.

When Sonja woke up, someone sprayed her in the face from a small canister before she could climb out of the cockpit. The person who sprayed her wore breathing apparatus and a black flight suit without insignia.

Stunned by the impact of the crash and by the spray, Sonja was fightless when her assailant pulled her T-shirt over her head and stripped off her pants and underwear. Another dzee held her up from behind. Her vision faded as they bound and gagged her, and she did not remember anything more until she woke up in the bag.

Men and women in the outfit that took her had to speak up so that they could hear each other over the noise of the rotors.

“Casey says she’s safe,” a man’s voice said, “but he said that her old man was safe, too, and look what went down with him.”

“I don’t like any of this,” a woman said. “Casey didn’t tell us the truth about Bartlett, or Bartlett’s wife. Now this, for no reason. . . .”

“No,” the man corrected, “it’s the reason that we all live for. To serve the Master Gardener in his restoration of the earth. You could be the one headed for Level Five, you know. Watch your mouth.”

The woman snorted. “Yeah, well, I’ve had my fill.”

“What are you going to do about it, sweetie? Quit?. . . Shit!”

The plane pitched forward and dropped, the pilot a few beats late on the uptake. Sonja’s stomach churned.

What has Casey done with my mom and dad?

She swallowed hard past the lump in her throat.

And what has he done to me that makes them worry about whether I’m “safe” or not?

The Mongoose lurched and slewed, lurched again.

“Won’t that shitbird ever learn how to fly?”

“He must have relatives in high places.”

“He does,” the woman said. “His father’s president of the JIL chain. Started by the Master himself. . . .”

The bird dropped so suddenly that Sonja cleared the floor. When the pilot corrected, the deck came up fast and knocked what little wind she had out of her. The bag next to her groaned, then kicked against her back.

“Hey,” the woman said, “now our other puppy’s waking up. I thought they were supposed to stay out for four to six hours.”

“Have you ever known anything that was military issue to work the way it’s supposed to?”

“No,” she said, “but if these
payasos
beat themselves up, there’ll be hell to pay when we deliver.”

“They haven’t been that fussy in the past.”

“There’ll be hell to pay,” she answered, “and you know it. Buster, we are in a no-win situation.”

“You better watch your mouth. Casey doesn’t much care for rough language.”

Then the military frequency came on, reporting that Harry’s father had bombed the U.S. Embassy, that he’d used his familiarity with security personnel to get it past the sniffs and into position.

“This attack is believed to be a personal, not political gesture,” the dispatcher reported. “Officials believe the bomb to be an attack on Colonel Toledo’s ex-wife, who wounded him in a domestic dispute recently. No U.S. citizens were reported killed in the blast. Three Costa Bravans were killed. . . .”

Thank God,
Sonja thought,
Mom’s okay.

A frightening thought came to mind.

Maybe the Hacienda Police think Harry and I had something to do with it.

Their landing was a hard one and Sonja heard the head next to hers hit the deck just before her world exploded in a burst of white light. She woke up moments later as someone wheeled her somewhere on a very smooth gurney. The air was cooler here, at least, and she no longer felt like she was suffocating inside the bag.

She remembered the hostage training that repeated, “Don’t worry about what you can’t control. Concentrate on what you
can
do.”

Right now, she couldn’t even muster a scream.

The electric motor whined to a stop, and Sonja heard a strange language gather around her, full of thicknesses and grunts. At first, she was afraid. Then, when she realized where she was, she was terrified.