Burn (4 page)

Chapter 5

Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent?
or where were the righteous cut off? Even as I have seen,
they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.

—Job

Harry Toledo ran a trembling hand through sweaty hair and studied his reflection in the glass of the isolette. His dark hair hung into his eyes, and for the first time in his fifteen years Harry saw that he actually needed a shave. Except for a few nicks and cuts, and a major bruise on his right hip, he had survived two plane crashes remarkably well.

Sonja Bartlett and Marte Chang also survived that last one, and they were penned up in isolettes flanking his own. His remarkable memory that had served him so well in his life got jarred a little in the last crash. Of course, the heavy dose of tranquilizer that his dad had shot him with didn’t help.

“Dad!” he said to his reflection. “I hope you make it.”

It felt good to say, after the bad years between them. Harry and Colonel Toledo could be twins if they weren’t different ages—gray eyes, Gallic nose with an
indio
flare of nostril, thick black hair, usually kept short for the heat. The new scatter of whiskers on Harry’s cheeks added to their remarkable similarity.

Physical similarity,
Harry reminded himself.

He was sure that he and his father were nothing alike inside. Harry couldn’t stand the smell of alcohol, he was very shy around women, and he was sure that if he ever had a wife and children he wouldn’t beat them. Still, in that few minutes that the two of them had worked together to escape from ViraVax, Harry understood that his father loved him in his tormented way.

Harry hated his father for so long that he got used to daydreaming him dead from a bullet, a bomb, an accident of the bush. He would review the memories of his father later and come to terms with that.

When you wish somebody dead, and then they die, does that mean you killed them?
he wondered.

Father Umberto told him in confession that wanting to kill his father constituted a mortal sin in the eyes of the Church. What was there to keep him from actually doing it, then? Nothing but his own will, and his own fear. And did he really want his father dead? “No,” he’d admitted, “I want him
back.”

Colonel Toledo had shot Harry with the trank gun to get him out of ViraVax alive. Harry had to admit now that his father had saved his life.

Maybe in trade for his own!

Harry hoped not, but it didn’t look good. He thought back on all the times in his life that he had wished his father dead, and felt a hot blush wash his cheeks. He had gone so far as to figure out ways to kill his father without getting caught. He was glad, now, that he hadn’t tried it.

“Good Friday,” Harry told his reflection. “Dad always said that anything you do on Good Friday will die on you before sundown.”

His father wasn’t a by-the-book colonel or a by-the-book Catholic, but he believed in God and Country, in that order.

That’s it,
Harry realized.
If his family was anything to him, it was just another state in Country.

Colonel Toledo had trained Harry in two different karate styles, Tong Soo Do and Tae Kwan Do, and lately he had considered the occasional beating to be part of his son’s training. Karate, and a few other tricks that his father had taught him, helped Harry and Sonja in their escape. Harry wished mightily that his father had escaped with them.

Harry slapped the glass barrier of his isolette.

Escaped! What a joke!

They crawled more than five stories of elevator shaft, stole a plane and got shot down in it, only to be sealed up again by their own government.

“For your own protection,” Major Scholz told him. “No telling what you picked up out there.”

That didn’t worry Harry as much as being locked up and forgotten in some warehouse during a civil war. He had already figured out how to get out of this isolette, but it involved mucking around in the septic tank, so he decided he could wait.

Sonja was another matter. He didn’t think she could wait long, at all. Sonja’s reaction when she first saw the isolettes shook Harry almost as much as the ghastly scene at ViraVax and the plane crash. As the two of them and Marte Chang were escorted from the ambulance into the warehouse, Sonja collapsed.

“Oh, no!” was all she’d said, and she dropped, limp, to the concrete deck.

And then she cried. Harry had seen Sonja through a lot, and she never cried. Watching her sob on the concrete broke his heart. When he moved to help her up, one of their escorts pressed a rifle across his chest to stop him. Harry nearly tried the snatch-and-keep move that had saved them in ViraVax, but the neuropuff in his bloodstream wouldn’t let him. His dad taught him that move, and he hoped now that he would get the chance to thank him for it.

“At least we got Sonja’s dad out,” Harry muttered. “Even if he’s just an image in a cube.”

Red Bartlett had been dead for nearly two months. Sonja had convinced Harry that ViraVax had something to do with her dad’s death, and she’d been right. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on the information in that cube, and get it out to the world. Marte Chang would get to review it first, with the Agency’s snoops on-line, as usual. Harry had taught Red Bartlett how to make the cube, and he was sure that neither Marte Chang nor the Agency could break it without him.

Harry could feel how much Sonja desperately wanted to see and hear her father in front of her one more time. Red had been largely an absentee father, working all week, and sometimes more, out at the ViraVax compound. Her relationship with her father was as loving as Harry’s was antagonistic.

Some data was flowing into Harry’s makeshift terminal already, spillover from Marte Chang’s machine. That part had been easy. What he really wanted was to figure out how to get data flowing the other way. Every attempt he’d made to connect with the outside world had been terminated by an autoguard. And it really irked him that the autoguard operated out of his father’s old DIA office, and that it was Harry who showed him how it worked.

One of the few times Dad admitted that I actually knew something.

Harry still didn’t know what to feel about his dad, except he hoped that he wasn’t dead. Scholz told him that the flood following the blown dam had scoured ViraVax and the entire Jaguar Valley. A SEAL team continued the search for Colonel Toledo, but from what Harry heard after he was lifted out of the valley, it sounded hopeless.

“How are you doing in there?”

The voice through the tinny speaker was Major Scholz’s. He felt his cheeks flush as he realized he had been staring at his reflection in the glass, and Major Scholz looked back at him from the other side.

“Like any bug under glass,” he said. “What about my mom?”

“She’s still at the embassy,” Scholz said. “We’ll arrange for her to come out here in the morning.”

“If we’re alive in the morning, you mean.”

“So far, so good,” Scholz said with a shrug. “She and Nancy Bartlett have been briefed on your situation. That console of yours includes a line to the embassy. You’ve already found that, I hear. She was probably relieved to hear from you.”

“Yeah,” Harry said, “she was. No thanks to you.”

“They’ve got their hands full over there, as you might imagine. I know you’re angry about this. . . .”

“You don’t know the half of it, Major,” Harry said.

Harry was mad because he escaped one trap to get into another, because he was exposed to God-knows-what Artificial Viral Agents, because the aftereffects of the tranquilizer left him trembling all over like a weak kitten and he hated feeling weak, like being at his father’s mercy when he was on a rampage.

“Look at this!” Harry shouted, waving his arm at his tiny chamber. “You keep criminals better than this. Chill, you gave all of us Litespeeds. Crammed in here with a cot, a pump toilet with a see-through curtain and a camping sink in a goddamn warehouse. . . .”

“It’s temporary, it’s necessary and you know it,” Scholz shot back. “Besides, you have your console with the usual network access. . . .”

“Don’t give me that ‘temporary’ crap, Scholz,” Harry said. “Ten minutes in here is eleven minutes too long. And I’ve already found the gates you put on that so-called ‘network access.’ Everything’s triple-snooped, so that I’m shut down if I try to get out of the neighborhood. That Agency card you gave me is a major red flag.”

“I thought they took that at ViraVax when they took your clothes.”

“Yeah,” Harry admitted, “they did. But I ran it through my Litespeed at home and got the coding sequences for verification and access.”

“You mean, you
remembered
a sixty-four-digit code?
And
the random sequencing fuse?”

“I remember everything,” Harry said, and shrugged. “But it didn’t do me any good.”

“This is a security matter,” Major Scholz said. “You can understand why we don’t want . . .”

“Why you don’t want the world to know what you’ve done,” Harry finished. When Scholz’s gaze went cold and distant, he added, “They couldn’t have done it without you, you know. Or without my dad. Personally, I think we should tell everybody.”

“What good would that do?”

“It would get a lot of good minds working on the problem,” Harry said. “And warn people, in case it’s contagious.
Is
it contagious?”

“Contagion-factor tests are being run now,” Scholz said.

“This could be a multistage thing that doesn’t flag the CF,” Harry said.

Scholz’s blonde eyebrows arched in surprise.

“Very good,” she said. “That’s what Dr. Chang thinks.”

“I’d like to hear from Marte Chang what Marte Chang thinks,” Harry said.

Scholz shrugged off his surliness.

“I think Dr. Chang wants you to help her research this problem within security parameters. I’ll help wherever I can.

“Where are they taking our blood, by the way, if it’s so dangerous? And what about the people who took our blood? And the suits we wore, the ambulance and chopper we rode in . . . ?”

Major Scholz put up a hand to stop him, and pointed with her thumb towards the back of the warehouse, farthest from the runway.

“Well,” she said, “the ambulance and your hazard gear, the hazard gear and clothing of the two doctors, four nurses and six medics who helped you, the clothing and equipment of the guerrilla team who found you . . . those items are being buried in concrete behind this building as we speak.”

“Chill,” Harry said. “What about the people? And that chopper?”

“The people are quarantined, as you will be soon. The chopper’s been sprayed with three kinds of death.”

Harry flicked his right middle fingernail against the glass.

“What’s the difference between ‘quarantine’ and this prison we’re in now?” he asked.

“You’re in ‘isolation’” Scholz said. “Marte Chang says there is more than one variation on this AVA. You each may have none, all or several agents in your bodies. We don’t want any of you acquiring more while you’re in our care.”

“And you don’t want anyone acquiring them from us.”

“No, we don’t. And, frankly, I don’t want to catch anything here myself, clear? We just found another pile of Meltdowns in the Gardener warehouse across the runway. There was a palm-cam in there with them, we’re analyzing the record now. Dr. Chang suspects that it’s their ritual water that carried the AVA package. There hasn’t been time to see whether there’s a stage two.”

Harry shook his head.

“It might take weeks or months for a secondary to show up,” Harry said. “And there’s that brain virus with a twenty-year incubation period. Are you planning on keeping us nice and safe here for twenty years?”

“I keep telling you, this is only temporary. . . .”

“Frankly, Major,” Harry snapped, “this setup you’ve got here is a kid’s tree-house next to the accommodations at Level Five of The ViraVax Palace. I don’t think you’ve isolated us from
mice,
let alone virions. It’s a joke. Admit it, and let us out.”

“We’ve done our best—.”

“Don’t scare me more than I already am, Major,” Harry interrupted. “You’re monitoring anything that Sonja, Marte Chang or I might say to each other, right? Do you have a camera in that toilet, too, Major?”

Major Scholz’s face drained to a marble-white under her blonde buzz-cut.

“Would you like to hit me, Harry? Would that make you feel better?”

“You bet your ass it would, Major.”

“Then I promise you, Harry, that you can take your best shot as soon as we can let you out of there.”

“That’s another shuck, Major, and you know it. I might never get out of here. I want that shot
now!”

Harry fisted the glass and found that, even in his weakened state, the panel flexed with a satisfying
whup.

Major Scholz didn’t flinch, and Harry was almost sure she didn’t blink. In spite of his foul mood, he liked that about her. Then she
really
surprised him.

“All right,” she said, and pressed herself hard against the glass. “Do it.”

Her arms spread wide, and her thighs, pelvis, breasts and right cheek flattened under the pressure.

Harry curled his left fist and cocked it into his armpit for a quick, snapping punch. Then he flashed on all the times that his father hit his mother, who could only cover her head with her arms and take it.

“Do it, goddammit!” Scholz growled. “I can’t stay here all night.”

Harry took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and uncocked the fist. He reached out his hand and patted the place where her cheek met the glass.

“That’s okay, Major,” he said. “I don’t need to do that.”

She stepped back, a flush in her own cheeks creeping into her short, blonde hair.

“I’m on your side, Harry.”

“I know, Scholz.”

“And I do have
some
news. We’ve begun unraveling that data cube you lifted from ViraVax so that Chang can tell us what they were up to. She’s feeding it into her system right now, and you’re on the same linkup. Have a look.”

“Sonja’s dad is the one who made that cube,” Harry said. “Can she see it, too?”