Burn (19 page)

Chapter 28

A fast, busy spirit is undesirable . . . when your opponent is
hurrying recklessly, you must act contrarily and keep calm.

—Miyamoto Musashi

Harry Toledo helped pull a tarp tight over the last pour of fresh concrete.

“Tack that stake in and we’ve got it,” Sergeant Trethewey said. “I’ll wet it down good so the mud won’t crack.”

Harry hammered the tent stake through the grommet in the tarp and stepped back to let another water tanker through. His part of the day’s work had been intended to be more ritual than real, but Harry had worked himself hard. He had to know what his body could do, because he wanted out and he wanted out
now.

A very nervous, very deferential Solaris offered him the first chopper ride to the site, and Harry took it. He was glad to work outside for a change, even under Costa Brava’s tyrant sun. Besides, Scholz told him there was an outside chance that his dad would be there, and Marte Chang. He had some things to say to his dad that he’d prefer to say in private, and there was no privacy at Casa Canada.

The squad from the Corps of Engineers was a young one, the oldest being twenty-two, and they all showed the dry, flush faces of heat exhaustion. Harry might be a few years younger, but he had lived all of his fifteen and a half years in Costa Brava’s heat and humidity. Besides, he had something personal at stake, and he would do whatever it took to see the horrors of ViraVax entombed forever. He brushed his sweaty brown hair out of his eyes and watched the last of the cement trucks pour its load into the access shaft up at the dam.

In two days they punched in a road, commandeered every cement truck in northern Costa Brava and buried the Double-Vee,
he thought.
Why can’t the government work this way every day?

“Boys will be boys. Always playing in the mud.”

Sonja’s voice behind him was huskier than usual, and Harry guessed that she’d been crying again. When he turned around, she was squinting at him in that way that said, “Who is this person, really?”

Both of them had plenty of reason to wonder. Next to the Meltdown virus, their mystery genetics was the hottest topic of conversation among the embassy crowd. He did not feel the magnetism that he used to feel when their gazes met. He felt a little leap of fear, instead, and saw that she felt it, too.

Are we biological time bombs?
he wondered.
Like those Innocents?

Hundreds of Innocents and dozens of missionaries had died on this spot, melting into sludge before his eyes. Besides Sonja, only three other people knew how that felt—his father, Rena Scholz and Marte Chang. The leap in his heart at the thought of Marte Chang used to be reserved for thoughts of Sonja. Harry saw a smile on Sonja’s lips, but fear widened her stark blue eyes.

“How is this going to change us?” he asked.

“Subtlety is not your strong suit,” Sonja said.

Her gaze held his, searched him. . . .

For what?

“No one else could understand what happened here,” he said. “I get really nervous when you’re gone. I . . . you’re
part
of me.”

“Yes,” she said, “we’ve changed for the closer. At the last, when you were still in school, you frightened me.” She hesitated, a blush coming to her cheeks. “What was happening to you at home frightened me, so I stayed away. So did my mother and father. We would have grown further apart. I can’t imagine that now.”

Harry would have cried if she hadn’t hugged him in time.

We’re almost like a different species,
Harry thought.

“We’re almost extinct already, and we just got started,” he whispered. “We have to stick together.”

“Let’s play whatever we have to play to get out of here,” Sonja whispered, and took his hand. She nodded towards the nearest chopper, beside the mess tent, and they started walking slowly, affecting a casualness that Harry didn’t feel.

Major Scholz spoke privately with his father nearby, and helped Rico discreetly as he caned his way into the mess tent from the other side. Harry liked the influence that the major had on his father. He wished that his parents could live happily ever after together, but that was impossible now. He wished them well in their separate lives. ViraVax had removed him from both of his parents in a kind of death, and now, if he escaped with Sonja, he might never see them again.

“Can you get that thing off the ground in less than a minute?” he whispered.

“Probably not,” she said. “You’d better think of a distraction; I’ll have my hands full.”

Harry and Sonja were a half-dozen steps from making their second break in three days when a guard stepped from around the back of the chopper and leaped aboard for some shade.

“Shit!” Sonja hissed.

“It’s okay,” Harry whispered, and squeezed her hand. “We’ll get our chance. Think hideouts, and supplies, and don’t leave without me.”

Harry let go of Sonja and moved to catch up with his father, but Trenton Solaris stopped him. Solaris had always looked ghost-like to Harry, but now his eyes were dark-circled, sunken, wild as a whipped dog’s.

“Harry!” the albino called. “One moment, please.”

The albino walked out of the tentside shade, removed his right glove, then reached out into the sunlight to shake Harry’s hand.

“Congratulations again, Harry,” he said. “Your performance was first-class. Your country is very proud of you.”

“Thanks,” Harry said. “My father taught me a lot more than I realized. We have our differences, but I’m glad he’s alive. I’m glad it worked.”

Solaris’s gaze shifted away from Harry’s, then back. He didn’t seem to know what to do, so he shook Harry’s hand again. The albino congratulated Sonja, too.

“Give some thought to what you want with your lives,” he said. “You both have skills that your country—and your adopted country here—can use. I urge you to consider making a career out of what you do best—learning, and helping others.”

“If you mean working for the Agency, I’m not sure I’d care to be in my father’s command,” Harry said. “I mean, I’ve learned a lot, and one thing I’ve learned is to not press my luck.”

Solaris laughed.

“I think you would make a better statesman than an agent, Harry,” he said. “But I, personally, and the Agency will support you in anything you choose. And we have many, many resources.”

Solaris waved a pale hand to indicate the mass of concrete in the middle of a high jungle river valley.

Sonja cleared her throat and said, “I’d like to be part of the Mars colony shot, but with all the trouble in the U.S. it looks like it’ll never get off the ground.”

“I promise you all of the flight time you want in anything you want,” Solaris said, his smile-wrinkles fully deployed. “That’s the first step. The rest is up to the politicians. Good politicians.”

Solaris winked at Sonja and nodded at Harry.

“You need somebody like him to get their attention. If you do that, the sky’s the limit.”

Harry’s stomach flipped at the thought of Sonja going anywhere without him, but
Mars
. . . ?

She must have read his mind, or at least his expression.

Sonja laughed, and took his hand.

“Hey, baby,” she said, “wanna be Mayor of Mars?”

“Chill,” he said, and laughed. “With you? Anytime.”

But Harry knew it was all a sham, a joke, a way to lighten a heavy afternoon. The Agency wasn’t going to let them out of its grip, not until they teased out every secret tangled in their genes and their mitochondria.

He loved Sonja, that was true, but it was no longer the blush-cheeked, stammer-tongued infatuation he’d felt for her before. Theirs was the love that bonds two people who have firewalked the holocaust together and survived.

This new drymouth feeling he had for Marte Chang was something else again. They would have to find a way to save Marte, too. For now he would play the Agency’s game, but he and Sonja were ready to run, and he hoped they’d get a chance soon.

We escaped one hellhole,
he reminded himself.
We can get ourselves out of this one.

Sonja gave his hand a squeeze, cupped her free hand to his ear and whispered, “It’ll be okay, Mayor. Have I let you down, yet?”

He swallowed back a wisecrack about her flying.

“Never,” he said.

Solaris and his entourage entered the mess tent, which was really just a large tarp stretched over a dozen poles. The conversation among his father, Rena Scholz and Yolanda Rubia was fast and furious until Solaris walked in. Harry eyed the chopper again and the lone, sweltering guard.

“Not yet,” Sonja said, reading his intent. “Besides, choppers aren’t my strong suit. These other good old boys would just tag along until we put it down, anyway.”

“Then let’s take a little stroll by the mess tent,” Harry said. ‘The Agency always says that ‘Information is Power.’ We could use a little of both, right now.”

They put on their strolling-lovers act and skirted the outside of the tent. The sides were rolled up to admit a hint of breeze. Sonja’s arm around his waist gripped Harry a lot stronger than their act required, and he hoped that didn’t mean she was really in love with him. He couldn’t take that, right now, and he couldn’t take hurting her, either.

“Yolanda’s Peace and Freedom team has secured the warehouse,” Solaris was saying. His hollow voice had a raw rasp to it. “Another squad of Jesus Rangers jumped into the area, but they don’t seem to be a match for the guerrillas.”

“Is the shipment intact?” Rico asked.

“You’d know if it wasn’t,” Solaris said. “Any fighting or accident in the vicinity of that GenoVax threatens us all. That’s why it’s important to evacuate the downtown area immediately.”

Scholz barked a nervous laugh in response.

“Evacuate downtown Mexico City?” she asked. “Without anyone knowing why? Impossible.”

“Not so,” Solaris said, a trembling index finger striking the air like a lecturer’s pointer. “Earthquake Watch issued a warning yesterday for a three-point-five quake near the Zocaló. They say three PM tomorrow.”

“That’s not going to faze anybody in Mexico City,” Rico said. His voice sounded raw and painful. “They eat that kind of quake for breakfast.”

“Not if it’s upgraded to eight-point-five,” Solaris said. “And not if Earthquake Watch predicts that it will hit one day after the three-five that they’ve already predicted.”

“What if the three-five is a no-show?” Scholz asked. “And how do you evacuate twenty million people in twenty-four hours?”

“Good questions, Major . . . ah, that reminds me.”

Solaris fished around in his pocket and handed something to Rena Scholz.

“My apologies for the lack of ceremony, Lieutenant Colonel Rena Scholz,” he said. “Your promotion cleared this morning, and I’m proud to present you with these silver leaves, on behalf of Military Assistance Command Central America and your Commander in Chief. It is too small a token of our appreciation of your excellent service to your country.”

The small gathering applauded as Colonel Scholz contemplated the two shiny objects in the palm of her hand. Rico struggled to his feet and leaned heavily on Colonel Scholz as he removed the brass leaves from her collar and replaced them with the silver. Harry found his father’s gesture moving.

“Now,
Colonel
Scholz,” Solaris said, “to answer your questions. The three-point-five quake is a certainty. Earthquake watch hasn’t missed a prediction by over an hour in two years. Second, we focus on evacuating the damage zone around the epicenter—which just happens to lie between my office and the U.S. Embassy, and includes Coyote Warehouse. . . .”

A shrill tone from Solaris’s Sidekick shattered the moment. As he listened through the earpiece to the unscrambling message, the albino’s complexion remained unreadable until a last-second flush betrayed his anger.

“Trouble?” Rico asked.

Solaris nodded, and the hand that removed his earpiece trembled conspicuously.

“Trouble,” he admitted. “Here and Mexico City. Much more than we bargained for. You will reconvene at Casa Canada, which will be your temporary headquarters, in fifteen minutes.”

Solaris turned and tipped his hat to Yolanda.

“Ms. Rubia,” he said, “please secure your troops in Mexico City. They refuse to release the shipment to anyone but you. This chopper will lift you to the airport immediately. The sergeant will escort you aboard. We have already initiated the earthquake scenario so that Mexican authorities will clear the immediate area of the warehouse as a precaution.”

Yolanda hesitated, but when the armed sergeant stood at her side she threw a quizzical glance at Rico before leaving the tent for the chopper.

When Solaris turned to speak privately with Rico and Colonel Scholz, Harry saw a blankness in the man’s eyes, a shutdown of emotion so complete that it could only come from fighting back unbridled fear. And Harry knew for a fact that Solaris did not frighten easily. He did not come to any emotion easily. Harry pressed Sonja closer to hear what more Solaris might have to say.

The Agency veteran spoke in a low voice, and he spoke very quickly.

“I’ve been recalled to Washington,” he said. “I’m delaying that as long as possible. I’m sure you can appreciate why I want to have this matter fully under control before reporting to the President. I’m returning to Mexico City immediately to oversee operations there. The Gardeners’ houses here haven’t been firebombed. The fires came from the bodies. It seems our friend here at ViraVax managed to taint their ritual water nationwide before he died.”

Harry didn’t care who knew he was eavesdropping now. He interrupted Solaris’s briefing.

“The dead ones we saw at ViraVax, they didn’t give it to any of us,” he pointed out. “As long as we don’t drink that water…”

Solaris ignored him.

“We will seal off Casa Canada for you now,” he said. “Expect to be airlifted from there to an emergency shelter within twenty-four hours. Save your questions; we don’t have that kind of time.”

Harry started to ask about his mother, and all the others working at the embassy compound, but Solaris was already boarding his chopper for liftoff. Two rent-a-guards grabbed Harry and Sonja at the elbows, and guided them silently but firmly towards the chopper that they had hoped would fly them to freedom.