Burn (11 page)

“For your penance, you will apologize to your wife and son, and ask their forgiveness. It is not necessary that they forgive you, but you must ask. Since you will have a fresh start with this absolution, I suggest you get back on good terms with your God. Make a good Act of Contrition, and go, and sin no more.”

Colonel Toledo was surprised to find himself weeping as he typed out, as best he could remember, the Act of Contrition.

“Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee. . . .”

On the other side of the glass, Father Free murmured his absolution, delivered his blessing, and faithfully deleted everything that the Colonel had transferred to his machine. Colonel Toledo’s tears burned the lacerations on his face, and he hid his face behind his hands as Father Free hurried to deliver to Yolanda the message that just might save them all.

Chapter 15

Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them, then, or bear with them.

—Marcus Aurelius

Marte Chang scanned her Litespeed’s record of the ViraVax disaster, as though by review she could point to something on-screen and say to herself, “There, see, it was just your imagination.” She froze and enlarged the image of a large sheet of gel riding the crest of a mud wall. In stop-action sequence the gel ripped apart and rolled into the rest of the debris sweeping along in the flood. She touched the gel’s image, shimmering the air in front of her. The embassy’s artificial intelligence filled her headset with a litany of organic models in a near-human voice.

“Biostat. Virometallic. Trade Name: Sunspots. . . .”

“I know,” she interrupted. “I made them.”
 

“I know. Marte Chang, virologist, creator of these ‘Sunspots,’ returned to this image thirty-five times since oh-eight-forty.”

“They were my children, and now they’re dead.”
 

“Not children,” the voice corrected. “Ideas made real, but not children.”

As though a machine could know,
Marte thought, and shuddered. How could a machine know about ten years of research, ten years of her life? Like the musical prodigy or the math whiz, she had no childhood, a bizarre puberty and a crippled adulthood. No social skills whatsoever. What could a program know of that?

Everything is all this moment to a machine.

“Show: Sabbath Suicides.”

Marte Chang’s headset responded: “Searching: Sabbath Suicides.”

“Correction. Sabbath Suicides, yesterday and today only.”

“Sabbath Suicides, the previous forty-eight hours. Up.”

Marte’s view inside her headset was of the last moments of the ViraVax compound. Red lights flashed and klaxons blared their warnings that shutdown was in progress. Speakers around the ViraVax compound announced:

“Condition Red. Suit up and seal off.”

Her viewpoint came from the monitor atop the water tower beside the landing pad. This was one of several security stations that Red Bartlett had jacked into and diverted to memory before he died. The program that he’d set up continued to monitor ViraVax from just before his death on Ash Wednesday until the dam blew at sunset on Good Friday, scouring the facility with thick, red mud.

Marte watched the security monitor sweep the compound below where small, blue fires bobbled about on the grounds or stopped in a
whump
of flame to simmer out in a smoky red glow.

Marte made a fist of her right-hand glove. The viewer zoomed in and enhanced. Each blue flame was a human being. Each red glow was just a simmer of tissue.

Some, apparently, felt no pain while others suffered acutely. The difference could be extremes of acceptance and fear, but the pain was the same for those who had it. Crews on the flight line shot one another as flames burst their flight suits. Loyal company men to the last, they kept each other away from the planes. Had they not, she and the others would have died there, too.

Marte Chang lifted her headset, removed her gloveware and rubbed her exhausted eyes. Another cup in an endless supply of hot coffee appeared at her elbow.

“He’s smarter than smart, Scholz,” Marte said, without turning.

“Was,” Colonel Scholz replied, her voice as soft as her tread. “He’s dead. Old news.”

“But his bugs are very much alive,” Marte said.

“Cheer up, Chang,” Scholz said. “So are we.”

“So far,” she said. “But I don’t think I can keep us that way locked up here.”

In the strained silence that followed, their gazes never met.

“Every journey starts with a single step,” Major Scholz said. “We’ve opened up these isolettes so that we can all work better. Next step is out of this warehouse. It’s in the works, Marte, and works take time.”

Marte brushed her black hair out of her eyes and reached for her headset, but Major Scholz stopped her with a hand on her arm. The major pulled another chair to the workstation and sat beside Marte. She slopped a little coffee onto the knee of her uniform, frowned and blotted it with a tissue she had wadded in her fist.

“How long since you slept?” they both asked.

Then they both almost laughed for a second.

“A couple of hours Friday night in isolation,” Marte said. “A couple of hours today. You?”

Scholz shook her head, and Marte couldn’t tell by that whether she hadn’t slept at all, whether she didn’t know when she’d slept or whether it didn’t really matter. Marte guessed the latter.

“Rico’s not doing so well,” Scholz announced.

Marte didn’t feel like small talk. Every second meant another person infected out there, and pretty soon it wouldn’t be just “out there.” She sighed, and resolved to give Major Scholz two minutes.

“He was pretty banged up in the flood,” Marte said. “I thought they had him stabilized.”

Rena Scholz shrugged, and her worry appeared to be more personal than professional.

“They stabilized his injuries,” Scholz said, “but ViraVax did more to him than just scratch his butt with barbed wire.”

“And it’s going to do more than that to all of us if you don’t get me to a decent lab!” Marte snapped. “I don’t have the luxury of worrying about one person.”

“You’re killing the messenger, here, Dr. Chang,” Scholz said. “Besides, he risked his life to get your butt out of there and bury that place. You owe him.”

“Don’t guilt-trip me, Scholz. He put that place there in the first place. You kept it running. My sympathies are with those innocent people burning up in the streets. And with myself.”

Scholz seemed a little stunned by that, and Marte was surprised, herself. It was the truth, but delivered in a voice that Marte had never heard from her own mouth before.

“We shouldn’t be keeping this a secret,” Marte added. “That’s been the problem here all along. If I broadcast our problem to every qualified virologist out there—.”

“—It would never leave the building,” Scholz interrupted. “Everything out of here is monitored. That’s why you don’t communicate with anybody in real time.”

“But don’t you see? I could transmit these structures to a half-dozen good people, and we could have a hundred variant antibodies in our hands in forty-eight hours. Besides, people should be warned so they can isolate themselves.”

“We can’t risk anyone else knowing how to make these things. Ever.”

“Other people already know how,” Marte said. “They just have the good sense to leave it alone.”

Marte slumped in her seat and twisted her hair tight into her fingers, then she pulled hard to help her concentrate.

“You’re never letting me out there again, are you?” she asked. “I’m going to disappear someplace with those kids, right?”

“Sorry,” Scholz said. “It’s not my call.”

“You can’t risk giving me my life back, not with what I know.”

“That’s not my call either, Marte. But I promise you, like I promised Harry and Sonja, I will not let them do that to you. I owe you that.”

Marte stared at her hands for a moment. They were chapped from so much work inside the gloveware, but she didn’t feel any pain.

“Does that mean you’ll kill me, Scholz?”

Marte couldn’t face her, and heard Scholz suck in a deep breath and let it out slow.

“If, at any point, things are as bleak as you say, and that’s still what you want,
then
we can talk about it,” Scholz said. “But I think we have plenty of options to run through before we come to that.”

“And if they order you to kill me?”

Scholz reached out, put a finger to Matte’s cheek and turned her so that they could look one another in the eye.

“I will disobey that order. Subject closed, okay?”

Marte nodded. But she had to find a way to get this information out. If she couldn’t get it out, maybe Harry could. He was persistent, and confident. She sighed, and smiled for Scholz.

“All right, Major,” she said. “Let’s talk about Colonel Toledo. ViraVax installed several Artificial Viral Agents into him over time; we know that from Red Bartlett’s log. But to isolate which AVAs, where they hide, how they interact and how to defuse them, I need a lot of samples and a good facility. Don’t you understand how frustrating this is?”

Colonel Scholz’s gaze never wavered.

“Well, we’re stuck here until the Agency says different,” Scholz said, “and the Colonel’s wasting away in the next building. If you’re so set on saving the world, why don’t you start with him?”

Marte rubbed her eyes again, then took a long pull at her coffee. Before she set the cup down, she knew what they must’ve done to Toledo.

“They altered his metabolism when they made him a drinker,” Marte said. “When he drinks, he activates the AVAs that bring on his rage and . . . attraction to women. He’s not drinking now, so everything should be pretty quiet. Am I right?”

Scholz scooted her chair closer, until their knees touched.

“You wouldn’t recognize him, Marte. He’s a shadow. All of his resources go to keeping him away from alcohol. It’s done wonders for his attitude. But his body can’t hold out much longer at this rate. I’m scared, Marte. Things looked so good there, for a minute.”

“Well, I’m scared, too,” Marte said. “The whole goddamn world is coming apart out there, and all I can do is sit here and theorize. . . . Shit, to isolate the things that ViraVax turned loose I need . . .”

“I know,” Scholz interrupted, counting on her fingers. “A lab with the proper medium, assistants who can splice genes using AVAs, and time. Solaris is talking with the President about that today.”

“Everybody’s
talking,”
Marte said, and thumped the desktop. “Nobody’s
doing
anything.”

“Calm down, Marte,” Rena said. “We’re all doing what we can. Besides, I understand from the web that your Sunspots may make you rich
and
famous.”

“It’s too late to start a garden when you’re starving to death, Major. I’m going to disappear, remember? So it’s likely that riches and fame won’t mean a damn thing. Remember, once we get the medium we still have to
grow
these things. Odds are that none of us will cash our next paycheck.”

“My, we’re in a mood, aren’t we?”

Marte sipped her tepid coffee and didn’t answer. She didn’t want to discuss her moods, her Sunspots or their sorry predicament. She wanted the key to Mishwe’s Artificial Viral Agents, his personal pets, because without that key, humanity and everything associated with it was moot. Images of the rows and stacks of cages of helpless lab animals that would die without humans haunted her as much as the deaths of the humans themselves. Marte had the drawings for a dozen AVA keys on her desktop, but no way to make them into real keys for real locks.

Marte twisted and untwisted her hair again.

“Since they wanted Colonel Toledo to drink and womanize himself out of their lives,” Marte said, “maybe those AVAs need some alcohol input to trigger his metabolism.”

Colonel Scholz raised a blonde eyebrow.

“You’re saying that he
has
to drink to live?”

“Maybe.” Marte shrugged. “Mishwe targeted the mitochondrial DNA, not the cellular DNA, for his most vicious pets. Interrupt the mitochondria, and the body can’t metabolize glucose, doesn’t get energy, then . . .”

“Then he starves to death, right?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Can you substitute any other substance for alcohol?” Scholz asked. “You know, something similar that might trigger the same response.”

“Excellent suggestion, Major,” Marte $aid, and smiled. “You’ve also been doing your homework the last couple of days. As a matter of fact, antifreeze binds to the same receptors. Trust me, he’d be better off with the alcohol.”

“I see,” Scholz said. “Now, what if he got it in an IV drip, very slow and very dilute? That way he wouldn’t have to drink it and, frankly, he wouldn’t have to know.”

“It sounds good to me,” Marte said. “But I’m no doctor. I do know one thing, though. You like Colonel Toledo. If you try to trick him or lie to him, you’ll both lose the chance to see whether something might work between you.” She emptied her cup. “Just my opinion, of course.”

“So noted,” Scholz said. “And you’re right, I’ll talk to him about it. Now, there’s one other thing.”

“Always,” Marte sighed. “Now what?”

“They’re moving you out to Casa Canada. For safety. An attack on the embassy is imminent, in my opinion, and a move out of here will put you one step closer to that lab you’re demanding. The Agency has put Harry on the payroll officially as your research assistant.”

Marte glimpsed her sleepless, disheveled self reflected in the blank peel-and-peek on the wall. Her tangled black hair and bloodshot Asian eyes contrasted in spades with the clean-cropped, well-scrubbed, blonde and blue-eyed Rena Scholz. The thought of Harry working beside her was Marte Chang’s first burst of excitement in days.

Excited over a teenage boy,
she clucked to herself.
What have you come to, Chang?

Marte’s self-criticism wasn’t completely fair; she knew that. Harry navigated the webs, the networks, the satlinks and hardware—all elements of her work that Marte hated to face. She preferred the lab, pure and simple. But she needed someone to sleuth the networks, and Harry was perfect. He single-handedly retrieved all of Red Bartlett’s data that survived from ViraVax, and he was patiently seeking out more that the company had secreted away in the webs. Harry was fast, and tireless, and speed was important right now. The academic phase was over. Now she wanted somebody who could get a warning out to the world, and Harry would be perfect.

Rena Scholz flipped through a stack of transparencies, all variations on one viral base code that ViraVax had used for several vaccines.

“Have you found something here?” she asked. “They all look pretty much the same to me.”

Marte set a half-dozen of the transparencies onto the light box and pointed to a tiny triangle on the shell of each virus.

“Those are all the same five-protein structure, except for one isomer in the protein of the coat. Each, therefore, is the key to a different lock, or a link in a different chain of messages or commands. If I can find and destroy one link in the chain, then this ‘Deathbug’ can’t carry out its program within the cells.”