ViraVax (3 page)

Chapter 5

Dajaj Mishwe was slightly out of breath when he entered Joshua Casey’s inner office, and his bald head glistened sweat. This, and the casual smile he wore, angered Joshua Casey even more.

“What have you done?” Casey demanded.

“I was teaching my Innocents to run the tires.”

Casey slapped the desktop and scattered a stack of transparencies.

“Don’t play with me!” Casey shouted. “You know what I’m talking about! Red Bartlett!”

Mishwe stood a little taller, and to Casey he seemed relieved, satisfied—certainly not penitent.

“He stumbled on the Nullfactor AVA and a shipment of parts,” Mishwe said. “I told you to keep him above Level Five.”

“So you
killed
him?”

Mishwe shrugged.

“It was an experiment,” Mishwe said. “How did I know he would go to town for his ridiculous ash-rubbing?”

Casey strode around his desk and poked a finger into Mishwe’s chest.

“Better that he did,” Casey said. “Better that he killed anyone here, because now he’s killed us all. Colonel Toledo is his best friend, and a Catholic, and he hates my guts. . . .”

“But he is not a problem,” Mishwe said. “We have seen to it that he is out of control. A drinker. A womanizer. His own Agency has confined him to his office for two years now. He commands no respect, not even from his family. . . . ”

“His best friend went berserk, then melted down and burned up spontaneously in front of a half dozen Agency witnesses,” Casey said. “Whatever the Colonel says or does is irrelevant. The Agency itself will mount an investigation and demand an accounting. My God, man! Bartlett’s father-in-law is Speaker of the House. . . .”

Joshua Casey ran a hand through his thinning hair, then sat on the side of his desk, trembling. He tried to calm himself. He was embarrassed. He had taken the name of the Lord in vain in front of a subordinate. It eroded his authority, his personal integrity. He didn’t permit it in others, and he couldn’t tolerate it in himself. He had to get a grip.

“There is more to this,” Mishwe said.

Casey pinched the bridge of his nose, gathered himself and said, “Go on.”

“The AVA that took Bartlett down, I linked it to that aggression package that Toledo’s Agency wanted.”

“That never worked.” Casey said. “We dropped it. I don’t—”

“The Agency dropped it,” Mishwe corrected him, “because the subjects turned on anything, including their own troops. Their sole purpose was to kill rivals and reproduce. Bartlett worked on that project for a while, and the Agency wants to keep it quiet. Tell them that he continued studies on his own, and this is what it got him. Complain about the damage he did here, about the work he’s left undone, about how hard it will be to replace him. Tell them he showed bad judgment, and we were lucky it wasn’t worse. Tell them you’ll keep it quiet if they will, and they will.”

Casey noted that Mishwe’s voice was unexcited, smooth, with just a hint of mirth around the edges.

“You call yourself the Angel, Dajaj, I have heard you say it myself. But what you have do . . . you have killed a man—no, three men, including his victims. . . .”

“You have said yourself that the Catholics are breeding the world to death,” Mishwe said. “Your father has preached that they who worship idols are lost; not soulless, like the Innocents, but
lost.
You were not squeamish about Project Labor. Why do you squirm over this?”

“There will be an investigation,” Casey sighed. “The new woman. . .” He turned his palms up in helplessness.

“The new woman may very well take Bartlett’s place,” Mishwe said. “Her work is meticulous, and her Sunspots, the product of genius. If she sees too much, she’ll simply have to stay with us forever.”

“Get out,” Casey croaked. “Get below where you belong, and don’t let me see you topside unless I call for you.”

Mishwe’s only response was an underbreath chuckle as he strode out the door.

Chapter 6

Colonel Toledo stood aside from the handful of mourners at Red Bartlett’s funeral, his full-dress uniform tighter and hotter than he’d ever remembered. The cloudless afternoon glared back at the Colonel watching Sonja Bartlett circle the little biplane from the El Canada coffee plantation into position. She carried a canister of her father’s ashes along with her.

Sonja and Harry,
he thought.
They’re like brother and sister.

Sonja loved Red Bartlett, that had been clear. Her father was Rico’s best friend since before Harry and Sonja were born. Sonja and Harry grew up together. Their parents had spent hundreds of weekend evenings together, playing pinochle, barbecuing. Red stayed at the ViraVax facility during the week and came home most weekends.

Maybe if I’d worked it that way, Harry and I.
. . .

The Colonel didn’t like thinking about maybes. Harry hated him, and there wasn’t much the Colonel could do about that. Not any more than he could control his own anger, or the drinking that brought it on.

Rico Toledo reflected on his son’s antagonism—the embassy counselor called it teenage rebellion syndrome. Rico recalled their many Saturdays in the gym, how he taught the boy to fight and to navigate the embassy’s elevators from the secret controls on top. They were good memories, but not recent memories.

The Colonel stood alone and reviewed his failing marriage, his drinking, his bad standing with the Church since the ViraVax fiasco years ago.

It all started with the mission that led him to meet Red Bartlett in the first place. The Colonel—a lieutenant then—created a character with the guerrillas in what was then Belize. This character lived on now in legend throughout the region, even to the Rio Grande and Texas. “Jabali,” they had called him then: “Wild Boar.”

Colonel Rico Toledo watched Red Bartlett’s ashes puff for a moment and disappear behind the yellow biplane. The dead man’s wife had returned from her hospital stay just this morning. Her blonde hair framed that classic, oval-faced beauty, but her blue eyes remained unfocused. The Colonel’s wife, Grace, supported Nancy Bartlett on one arm. Nancy’s step was unsure and her mind confused, but no sign of her ordeal remained.

No one from ViraVax came for the service because Saturday was their Sabbath, and Colonel Toledo, a notoriously bad Catholic in a country where it mattered, knew their customs entirely too well.

ViraVax was none of the Colonel’s business now. This he had been told clearly and repeatedly, and with that understanding he initiated his own investigation of Red’s death. The Colonel knew that it wasn’t a
who
that killed his friend Red Bartlett, it was a
what.
He wanted to find out who made the what, and how it got into Red Bartlett. Somebody was making sure that he didn’t.

Just yesterday the Colonel had stood apart from mourners at the funeral of Henri Vasquez, known member of the Peace and Freedom underground and one of Colonel Toledo’s principal contacts with the guerrillas. Henri Vasquez was the man that the Garcia government accused of Bartlett’s murder. The Hacienda Police offered ample opportunity for the press to photograph the rebel’s body. They had cut off his hands before they shot him, and it would have made a convincing story if Rico Toledo had not already known the truth.

But he didn’t know details, like the part about how Red Bartlett had become the Agency’s first documented case of spontaneous human combustion.

Spontaneous, my ass!

The Colonel wanted a drink from the bottle of Flor de Caña in his glove box. He did not walk the twenty meters to his car because he was proving to himself that he might
want
a drink, but he didn’t really
need
one. Red Bartlett would’ve called “bullshit” on that but Red had never been much of a drinker and, besides, he was dead.

Rico kept his eyes on the sky even though the plane was gone. That way, he didn’t have to watch his wife console the shattered Nancy Bartlett. Soon enough he would have to face the press and announce what the United States intended to do about Red Bartlett’s death.

Bury it
was the statement that the Colonel wanted to give but, like the matter of the rum, he had to sort out want from need.

The Colonel had met Red Bartlett just before the turn of the millennium and a month after Guatemala finally took Belize. The U.S. ambassador, a black man, was being held with three other U.S. citizens by elements of the Guatemalan Tigres, a particularly lethal battalion that also employed an extensive death squad arm in the civilian sector. The ambassador had suffered a heart attack on the third day. On the fifth day, he had suffered another.

Lieutenant Rico Toledo had volunteered for this mission because he spoke Spanish and looked Hispanic, and it was his opportunity to prove he was as American as anyone else in the U.S. Army.

His mission was specific—locate and free all four Americans, trapped somewhere in the Maya Mountains. He was a wild card, an experiment. If he was killed, they sacrificed a lieutenant to save an ambassador. If he was captured, not killed, the Guats gained an indefinite period of excellent propaganda out of him.

Rico Toledo came out of it with a promotion, a reputation and guerrilla contacts that would serve him well for nearly two decades. “Wild Boar,” they had called him in the bush. It was nothing like what they called him now.

The virologist he saved was Red Bartlett, the only married employee of the fledgling but wealthy ViraVax. At the time of his capture he had been attending a week-long orientation sponsored by his new employer.

Rico got out, he got the ambassador and the virologist out and he effected the execution of Colonel Matanza of the Tigres in his wake.

Bartlett settled into a peculiar life at ViraVax. His wife had an apartment in town, to be close to her work at the embassy and Sonja’s school. Red traveled there every Friday at sunset and returned every Monday at sunrise, while ViraVax observed its Sabbath. They permitted him to observe his holy days, but with reluctance. Some weekends it was not safe to fly, because the airspace was not always secure, and ViraVax forbade anything from coming in or going out by land. That had been upon recommendation by the Colonel himself.

Grace Toledo and Nancy Bartlett became friends, confidants, made plans of their own while their men ground down their lives like pencils. Sonja and Harry attended the same American School but both were loners. The constant turnover of embassy personnel had taught them at an early age that it was no use to make friends who would just transfer out. They were both bright, graduating nearly three years ahead of their age group.

Colonel Toledo had kept his family in Costa Brava because he liked the information business and because living in Costa Brava was safer for them than living in the States. Things were going to get ugly here, that was for sure, but he had hoped they wouldn’t get
that
ugly.

Today his son, Harry, also stood apart, watching the lazy circles of Sonja’s yellow biplane from the opposite side of the garden.

He’s a dead ringer for me at fifteen,
the Colonel thought,
but I’ll be goddamned if I can figure out how he thinks.

Both Harry and Sonja were uncommonly bright and beautiful, but they lived in a world completely shut off from his own, a drawback of the intelligence business, but one that he’d always thought he could work around. Recently the Colonel discovered just how wrong he’d been about a lot of things.

When he thought back on his lifetime of warfare, personal combat and fistfights, his memories danced across a lighted backdrop, softened by distance and time. He remembered that job in the bulb fields, the last of his petty fights that a small-town judge would allow. He was given a choice that was a favorite of judges of that time: military service or jail.

Couldn’t get much further from embassy work than that,
the Colonel thought.

Three years before Boss fell into that bulb digger blade and they’d tried to blame it on him, Rico had fought for his life for the first time.

Late summer, and little Rico Toledo teetered on the verge of seventh grade. At twelve, and in spite of his spectacles, Rico Toledo was a fighter with a no-holds-barred reputation.

I
sure don’t miss wearing glasses.

He smiled at the memory of those antique lenses, those relics of the machine age. Rico Toledo did not like to rely on machines, not at all.

The Agency’s gift of radial keratotomy had perfected his vision years ago, as it had his son’s, and age hadn’t caught up with him yet.

Chuck had been a big tenth-grader who just walked up to Rico and hit him. Rico didn’t remember feeling the punch, but he remembered the burst of blood in his nose, and being surprised that he was sitting on the sidewalk. The bridge of his nose hurt where his glasses had rested, and, before he could react, Chuck was astraddle his chest.

Rico remembered the blurred silhouette of Chuck, holding a rock high over his head, ready to strike. He hefted the rock high for leverage, and Rico twisted to the left, curling up as tight as he could. The heavy rock threw Chuck off balance, so when he tried to catch himself Rico lifted both legs and tipped Chuck over. All he heard was their breathing, wet and popping, and the scrabble of gravel underneath them.

Rico’s shin caught Chuck a good shot in the crotch as he tipped over. Rico grabbed him by the hair with his left hand while he punched Chuck’s face with the right, as hard and fast as he could. Rico quit when Chuck stopped moving. He left him there in the driveway. Rico’s right hand was useless for a week and he didn’t get a good night’s sleep for months. Of course, there had been hell to pay, starting with his father.

Now his wife motioned for him to bring the car around. The Colonel nodded, mumbled a private prayer for whatever soul Red Bartlett might have remaining and signaled the embassy driver. He glanced up at the biplane again, but no more sign of Red Bartlett glittered on the wind. The Colonel sighed and straightened his tie.

There’s a shitload of work to do,
he thought.

Getting even for Red wouldn’t be easy. He knew, without a doubt, he would be doing it alone.