ViraVax (22 page)

Chapter 31

Ex-Colonel Rico Toledo did not fight men in his sleep anymore, he fought viruses. Great skeletal predators stalked his dreams, shifting their protein shells to catch the light. He had allowed Yolanda and El Indio to use the hypnotic on him, for refreshment, but he’d already listened three times, dry-mouthed and incredulous, to the recording he’d made.

He had much to remember, much that ViraVax, perhaps even the Agency, had tried to block from his mind forever. He was beyond being shocked at how they’d used him, the one Agency officer who should have been above their machinations, beyond their reach.

Nothing is beyond their reach,
he thought.

The Colonel was embarrassed and woozy; He felt the drug dissolving in his bloodstream, and the kaleidoscope of visions dissolved with it.

One crystalline monster had Joshua Casey’s face. The Colonel snatched at the kingpin that would bring its elaborate structure down. As always, the vital pin reappeared elsewhere, out of reach, and the hard viral shell slammed shut on his arm.

The Colonel woke from the hypnotic to the jarring chatter of an old printer in the next room. His disorientation was momentary, but waking didn’t bring him relief, just the awareness that tonight he would face Casey and his forces alone. He hoped he could find a kingpin, like in his dream, and pull Casey’s operation apart without destroying the kids, himself and two governments in the process.

Rico rubbed the tension out of his eyes, reached for a sweetened rum beside his chair, then changed his mind. He would be meeting Yolanda soon for the hop, providing she was still willing to let him go. It probably would be the last time he would see her, and he wanted her to remember him well.

Even if he hadn’t lived with dignity lately, Rico thought that he could at least die with dignity. He had no illusions for this operation. The only thing that would save the kids would be a full-scale invasion of that facility, and nothing around him looked full-scale.

But I bet we can start one.

Yolanda’s new equipment was scattered about him on the bunker floor: code-burst device, locator, a tumbler-sensor lockpick, fiber-optic scanner/encoder. The one item that bulked up his belt was a gift beyond price: the Pulse. The Pulse had been designed to be dropped into the heart of an enemy’s command center to fire three electromagnetic bursts at ten-minute intervals, each one obliterating all electronic activity within a three-klick radius. Ignition systems, computer hardware, radios, security locks, pacemakers, cameras, laser drivers—if it sparked, the Pulse could kill it.

Harry would like these gadgets,
he thought.

All of them were available to the special operations unit that he had formed as an adjunct to ViraVax in 1998: the Night School. The Night School had gone from being ViraVax security to being ViraVax hired muscle, and the Colonel objected. The Gardeners changed over to their private security, and saw to it that Rico went nowhere from then on.

Just another bunch of goons.

Rico picked up the code-burst device, rolled the thimble-sized unit between his sweaty palms and clipped it into the socket on his Sidekick. Then he shook his head, sighed and reminded himself that he had very little idea what Harry would or would not like.

I
don’t know him any better than he knows me.

They looked so much alike that the Colonel expected them to think alike, but that was clearly not the case. Perhaps, when this free-lance operation was over, Harry would understand, once and for all, that his father was not the monster he imagined him to be.

Or else he’ll be convinced of it.

Something stirred in the back of his mind, then elbowed itself to the fore:
And so will I.

A tap at the door and a cough: Yolanda.

She stepped inside without a greeting and set up a squelch on the dressing table. Their conversation would be secure.

“You’re not ready,” she said. ‘That’s not like you.”

“I’m ready.”

“Afraid?”

Rico checked her eyes for intent. No taunt, just fact.

“Yeah,” he said, “afraid. Not paralyzed.”

“Good. I’m not even going and this scares me to death.”

Yolanda dropped her gaze and sighed.

“You’re a better man than Casey,” she said, “and better men should live.”

“ ‘Should’ has not been in our vocabulary before, why start with it now?”

“Are we arguing again?”

“Probably.”

They laughed together, and Rico exercised a musculature that had been too many years in atrophy.

The Colonel cinched his belt over the blue maintenance coveralls, loaded his zapper for last. He inserted his green card into his Sidekick, keyed for encryption, then downloaded the file “Someday; you” into a likely juncture on the satellite networks. Only one code could retrieve the file, and that was the photon bubble in the upper left-hand corner of the green card that Major Scholz had passed to Harry. He realized with a pang that he missed the major. She’d been his shadow, his right arm, the kind of second who bordered on clairvoyant. Giving Harry the card had been her idea. Writing up the file had been his own.

If he’s as smart as they say he is, he’ll find it,
Rico thought.

Eventually.

And if not?

“Well, we all die sooner or later,” he muttered.

“Your usual cheerful self,” Yolanda replied. “Too bad so many people die without ever having lived.”

“Well, you and I have lived a little.”

“Not together.”

“No.”

“Not my fault.”

“No.”

His gear was ready. By the slim line of his tool belt, no one would guess that he carried anything more than machete, hammer, screwdriver and wrenches. He glanced again in the mirror at his shaved eyebrows and plucked-out eyelashes. He pulled the bill of his blue cap lower over his eyes and let his mouth go slack. Couple it all with the weight he’d put on and Rico would pass as an Innocent, at least for a moment, and a moment was all he needed.

Yolanda drove him in silence the half dozen kilometers to a squat barn beside a flat pasture. A thin breeze snaked down from the higher canyons and did nothing to quell his profuse sweating.

Yolanda hugged him, then kissed him a long, tender one. Her tongue tapped his once before she stepped back. It took all of his control to keep from throwing her down onto the alfalfa. Now, of all times, was not the time.

“We should have done that years ago,” she said.

“There you go again,” he said, “spoiling a perfectly good moment with a ‘should.’ “

“Come back.”

“I’ll try.”

“ Try,’ “ she snorted, “that’s as bad as ‘should.’ “

Yolanda folded the antenna of her scrambler and then, as an afterthought, slipped it into his overalls pocket.

“Bring me a present,” she said.

“Bottle of Poison?” he asked, and stroked her cheek with a finger.

“You,” she said.

Yolanda didn’t wait to see the Buzzard lift, but drove off in a dust devil at the
snick
of his door. Rico snapped himself into the chute leaning against the skids, thanked the DEA for their carelessness and climbed aboard.

The Colonel liked the Buzzard for its near-silent flight, high cruise speed and extremely low stall-speed. The gangly little bird was designed as a drone for drug-intercept missions. It carried up to two observers or extra fuel, had a nearly undetectable radar profile, and with camouflage was difficult to track visually as well. He knew where the DEA kept two more in mountain hideaways.

The Buzzard was outfitted with standard controls, but Colonel Toledo wouldn’t be needing them. He had lifted a drug-interdict flight program and transponder ID from the DEA system. A satellite would be his pilot on a low-topography mission. This mission would stall the aircraft several times en route, mimicking the surveillance techniques of the DEA. One of these stalls would occur at the north end of “ViraVax Valley” in the Jaguar Mountains.

Rico Toledo crawled out of the cockpit onto the flimsy undercarriage of the Buzzard just before its stall over ViraVax. He popped his chute enough to fill it and hurtled the forty meters through darkness into the trees. If ViraVax picked up the Buzzard on any of their sensors, the satellite would feed the phony DEA flight plan into their system with the DEA authorization plastered all over it.

The facility’s infrared line didn’t start for a kilometer to the south, so he was confident that he hadn’t been spotted. The nighttime chirps, shrieks and warbles rippled the jungle air.

The Colonel lay wide awake under a ceiba tree in Costa Brava’s lush highlands. He was out of breath, out of shape and doubly thankful that the drop had gone without a hitch. The quick tropical dawn had not yet started its sprint above the horizon and he was already soaked with sweat.

Been out of the saddle too long,
he thought.

But he knew, in reality, it was the booze.

Rico felt something flutter past his face and into the dark, something leathery and damp.

Another virus on the prowl.

He shuddered, something he didn’t do often, and reminded himself that it was just a joke. Costa Brava always warped his humor, much as it had warped his dreams, his life.

When he thought of the warp of his life, he thought of his son, whom he had tested mercilessly and found to be sound. He could not say the same for Costa Brava, his confederacy of republics, the dream of the free world.

It was necessary for him to hate me,
he thought.
This way, he stands a chance.

Rico had waited for the day his son would stand up to him. That day Colonel Toledo would be freed to be about the greater business of destroying Casey, ViraVax and everything inside. Now that it had happened, Harry would see what really made his father tick. Then they would all see. . . .

He spun at a rustle behind him. The probes on his zapper framed the quivering nose of a small anteater. He smiled at his own adolescent nervousness and flicked the safety back on. The anteater sniffed his way again, its little black eyes curious, then it backed clumsily into the underbrush.

Rico checked his watch, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The preliminary to action always had been harder on him than the action itself. This action would have its delicacy. He would destroy Casey, though that was only temporary insurance against the onslaught of artificial viral agents. But his immediate goal lay either topside, near Casey’s private quarters where the bigwigs stayed, or in decon. The Colonel was sure that they would not want those children anywhere near the surface. Decon meant the elevators and the elevators were a snap.

Rico did not know for sure that there was an antidote to any of Casey’s special projects, but he presumed so. He presumed that Casey would cover himself in case of an accident, and that some other virologist could duplicate it. He presumed, he hoped, but he didn’t know.

In his professional life, the Colonel had seen himself as a virus on the prowl long before real viruses had come into the business. Perhaps that was why the Agency paired him up with Casey nearly twenty years back: both of them thought like viruses.

Find the weakness, gain entry, locate and duplicate the product, get out,
he recited to himself.

His personal synopsis of espionage, the sentence that boiled his life down to a thick paste of tapes, disks, wafers and files was supposed to be simple. The enemy was supposed to be “the other side,” as though the world were as simple as a coin. Rico stopped counting sides when his world had become a dodecahedron, nearly twenty years back.

He had a standard lecture to the Night School recruits.

Make the enemy your host. Use his own resources against him. Get the product.

That product, information, had been his passion for nearly thirty years. Ironically, this passion that had destroyed everything that he’d made of his life. He intended to see it destroy Joshua Casey as well.

“The enemy is anyone that you can’t trust,” he had warned Joshua Casey in the beginning.

“That pretty much takes in everybody, doesn’t it?” Casey had replied, cool, unaware of how much he had given away. The lift of his eyebrow, the clear gaze, told the Colonel that it was true, that this was a man who was satisfied to be completely alone.

Colonel Toledo had something now that he could entrust to no one, and Casey was at the heart of it. That made the world his enemy, and the world was making him pay. If he told what he knew about Casey and his doctored-up vaccines, the world would tear itself apart. Executioner’s axes would pop heads around the globe, beginning with Colonel Toledo’s and Joshua Casey’s. Casey had inserted new viruses into his vaccines as skillfully as he crafted his cures. The inoculated had become his puppets, ignorant of his tug at their strings. The world had become Casey’s lab and half of humanity his deliberately infected mice.

Toledo rubbed absently at his arm. The hypnotic had brought it all back.

You even got to me, you bastard,
he thought.
You cost me everyone and everything I loved.

Drink didn’t drive him to rage, or pheromones to lust, but an artificial viral agent that took charge and ground him down. The fact that he had been duped like so many ignorant millions was a hot coal that he refused to swallow.

The Colonel had been more suspicious than wise, but whatever the case he had not allowed his son to receive any of Casey’s concoctions. He hoped that Harry would be lucky enough to avoid them now. The encryption that Yolanda downloaded from her mole at ViraVax explained why, explained the history, explained the ultrasecrecy surrounding everything. But even the mole didn’t have all the cards, and the blank spots worried Rico a lot more than the bad news.

A headache pounded the Colonel’s skull, reminding him that at least one insidious pet of Casey’s still swam his bloodstream, awaiting its cue.

Don’t be dramatic,
he thought.
It’s a hangover.

The Colonel smiled for the first time all evening, a smile that coincided with moonrise over the great green canopy of the Costa Bravan highlands.