Burn (5 page)

“If she wants.”

“Are you sure that’s smart? I mean, no telling what’s on there, and she’s already been through a lot. . . .”

“Harry Toledo, I don’t believe what you’re saying! You just chewed my butt about limiting your access to the world, and now you want to limit Sonja’s?”

Harry laughed for the first time in . . . a while. At least a couple of days. And it felt good.

“You’re right,” he said. “Thanks, Major. I don’t want to become the enemy. We’ll take everything we can get.”

“I’m being selfish,” she said. “Maybe there’s a clue in there that’ll let me let you out sooner. We just need to know what they made and what it’ll do, first.”

“And whether any of these little beasts survived?”

“Exactly.”

Harry felt energized, suddenly, and the tremor was gone from his hands.

“Okay, Major. You got my full attention. I’ll do everything I can.” Harry turned his palms up. “But you have to let us out to do that.”

“Soon, Harry.” She patted the glass where his palm rested. “I’ll see about getting your access cleared to the networks. Good luck.”

The console included a sound system, and as the structures of the Artificial Viral Agents scrolled down the viewer, he keyed up the bridal procession from Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Le Coq D’Or.” It always helped him with memorization. For the moment he ignored the blinking symbols on his control panel that signaled messages from Marte Chang and Sonja. He wanted this brief time alone with his music and his mission.

“That gate of yours is a piece of cake,” the console speaker squawked. “You taught me better than that.”

No such luck with the time alone,
Harry thought.

“Voice direct,” he said, and his console made the switch. He was frustrated that they didn’t have a video pickup. “Hello, Sonja. How’s your head?”

“Throbbing,” she said, and went on. “ViraVax, what a perfect name. All of the clues were there, out in the open. Look.”

The word “ViraVax” appeared in front of him, then enlarged fifty percent.

“ ‘Vira’ for ‘virus,’ “ Sonja said. “They figured out how to make their own viruses. What did they use them for? Vaccines. That’s the ‘Vax.’ But here’s the good part.”

She drew a circle around the “aVa.”

“Artificial Viral Agents,” she said. “That’s what killed my dad, and all those people. That’s what made the Down syndrome kids.”

Harry knew she was crying, and he was glad that the machine’s primitive translator filtered it out. He didn’t tell her that he was already into those files, starting pattern searches.

“So, you cracked your dad’s files?”

“No,” she said. “Marte Chang’s working on that. I just saw an unscrambled memo that he made for me the day he died. They experimented on
us,
Harry. On you and me.”

“Who?” he asked. “Your dad?”

“No,” she said. “ViraVax. That dzee, Mishwe, he did something to us before we were born. My dad’s message says the details are in one of the files; nobody knows
which
one. Marte’s searching structures first because they need to know which of those AVAs is loose out there.”

“I can help with that.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I barged in.”

“Well, if we synchronize our machines, we can do the rough search twenty-seven times faster than Dr. Chang can do it alone. This gives me the creeps, you know. The idea that Mishwe has been messing with us since before we were born. . . .”

“And he may not be done yet,” she said. “Let’s get Marte tied in and move on this.”

“Yes, my Empress, my Queen.”

“Don’t be zed. You know what I mean. Now, Wonder Boy, tell me what we have to do to get out of
this
one.”

Chapter 6

Yes, the hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think that he is offering worship to God.

—Jesus

Father Free had been awake now for over twenty-four hours, and he had a couple of hours to go before daybreak lifted the nightly curfew. He sat at a table with the beautiful Yolanda Rubia in the back of the restaurant El Ranchón Cuzcatlán. A single paddle fan stirred up the flies overhead and drained power from the lamp on the wall. With the checkered tablecloth, the softened light and their hunched postures, they might be mistaken for a couple. Every so often he caught a whiff of her perfume over the burned-diesel smell of his shirt and jeans.

“It was like nothing I have ever seen,” Yolanda said, and rubbed her arms as though chilled. “And you, Father, know the kinds of things I have seen. You have seen as much yourself.”

Not yet dawn, not yet the end of Holy Week, and Father Free sweated out the curfew with Yolanda, a half-dozen snoring guerrilla leaders and his third pot of coffee. Yolanda drank rum, sugared with lemon. He remembered it was Rico Toledo’s drink, as it had once been his own. After the embassy, the Archbishop’s office and its broadcast station had been bombed, and Father Free’s room was behind the sound booth. The Garcia government was a Gardener government, and they feared a Catholic retaliation.

With good reason,
Father Free thought.

Both the Peace and Freedom guerrillas and the predominantly Catholic
campesinos
had looked for an excuse for an all-out uprising against the Gardeners. Father Free had fought the fire at the Archbishop’s office for hours, while outside the poor people fought the Gardener army detachment with rocks and bottles. Twenty people died, including two seminarians.

Father Free had married Rico and Grace Toledo, baptized their son, and he did not believe for a moment that Toledo was guilty. But this news that Yolanda brought him now, of hundreds of people bursting into flame at ViraVax, had him scared. Few people knew of the ViraVax facility, and only a fistful of that few knew the kinds of things that went on out there. Father Free was one of those few.

“And none of your people got this melting sickness?”

“No.” She sipped. “Not yet, thanks God.”

Five years ago she’d have made the sign of the cross when she said that,
he thought.

He remembered, too late, not to rub his eyes again.

“There’s a good side,” he offered. “Your team saved the kids and turned them over to U.S. custody. That’s some negotiating clout that you’ve been needing lately, since Sonja’s grandfather’s the Secretary of State.”

“And I intend to use it,” Yolanda said. “This will be the time of times, Father. Truly, the final offensive. You should stay here at the
cooperativa
for a while. Many priests are shot in times like these.”

“Easter is supposed to be a time of joy, and resurrection, and moving forward,” he said, staring into his coffee. “I can’t believe . . .”

A soft chirp sounded from his Sidekick, and Father Free pressed his earpiece to listen privately.

“Father Free? Chief Solaris.”

Solaris and Toledo had both gone through his ethics course at the Academy. Father Free had always found Toledo a straight shooter and Solaris frightening, and twenty years ago he never would have believed that either of them would still be in his life. It was Rico who had given him the nickname “Luke the Spook,” and in an academy of intelligence officers, the name “Spook” stuck fast. It was Solaris the Sneak that he never trusted.

“Yes.”

“Give me your address. I’ll have you picked up right away.”

“I’m comfortable where I am, thanks,” Father Free said. “It’s been a long night.”

“It has, indeed,” Solaris said. “Toledo’s here, badly injured. He’ll want to speak with you when he wakes up.
If
he wakes up.”

“I’m at Ranchón Cuzcatlán,” he said. “Send some clothes, Rico’s size; mine are ruined. And nobody comes inside, this is neutral turf.”

“There is no neutral turf anymore, Father,” Solaris said. The word “Father” had a contemptuous edge to it. “Those days are gone forever. Your escort will be outside in fifteen minutes. You’ll have to excuse our limited selection of apparel.”

Father Free pressed the “break” button.

“Make sure your gear is screened,” he told Yolanda. “There’ll be army outside in fifteen minutes and we don’t want to tempt them to look in the back.”

“It’s Rico, isn’t it?” she asked. “He’s alive?”

“So far,” he said.

“Thanks God,” Yolanda said.

This time she made the sign of the cross.

Chapter 7

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world.

—Helen Keller

For the second time in a half-hour, Sonja Bartlett watched the image of her dead father run long, pale fingers through his shock of thick, red hair. He always did that when he was nervous, and so did she. Sonja knew now just how scared he must have been when he recorded this cube. She resisted the urge to run a hand through her own hair. Her pulse throbbed against the stitches in her forehead, souvenirs of a Mongoose instrument panel.

Red Bartlett’s flickering image queasied her stomach as he explained to her how ViraVax had fooled him, fooled the world.

All Sonja could think was,
Dad, for a genius, you were way dumb.

“I keep telling myself,” the image was saying, “that if you’re seeing this, then we’re all okay. We’re probably celebrating someplace nice while the good guys put the bad guys away for life. But it doesn’t look good. I’m using some tricks Harry showed me to shunt data and keep it feeding onto the web, in case anything happens to me. He can find it if he looks; I can’t say anything about it here.

“
If
something happens, your mom should get: you, Harry and Grace Toledo to Spook. He can be trusted, and he has connections outside the Agency. If I’m not with you when you get this, then there’s only one thing you can do—hide. You and Harry, both. Get to Spook and have him get you someplace safe. Don’t wait for anybody if you get this without me. Get yourself and this message to Spook.

“Dajaj Mishwe has gone way over the edge with his AVAs. He’s found a way to get them into the DNA of our mitochondria, and to get them to work together. Each subassembly is smaller than a viroid, even. But when linked up and coordinated they form something completely different inside the cell, something bigger and slipperier than a virus.”

The view behind her father showed little icons of gears and levers sliding through tubes inside a giant cell. “The gears and levers pick up other materials, meet in the DNA of an organ inside the cell and assemble themselves into a mechanical spider that bites off chunks of genetic material and spins an artificial replacement, which it tacks into place.

“Mishwe intends to infect the whole world with one of these. He called it ‘GenoVax,’ for ‘Genome Vaccine,’ to get the collateral work that he needed from uninformed people. A universal DNA repair kit, that’s what he was selling. But what he was building and installing in humans was a bomb. It can be set to kill all blue-eyed females. All black-haired diabetics. All brown-eyed males. But Mishwe’s not being that fussy. Anything with a basic human genome dies.

“The ‘Geno-’ is really for ‘Genocide.’”

Behind Red Bartlett, banks of holographic batteries floated around the cell, linking up with golden wires. Other machines chewed up the cell to make littler machines that dissolved what was left, and they all gave off a gas that was sparked to flame by the chain of golden batteries.

So
that’s
how all those people melted down and burned up,
she thought.

“Maybe I’m already too late,” her father was saying.

He clenched and unclenched his fists, knuckles blanching on long, freckled fingers. Fingers through the hair again.

“The worst of it is, ViraVax developed this technique by practicing on humans, including you and Harry. You’re both . . . clones.”

Here the image of Red Bartlett took a couple of deep, shaky breaths, rubbed his face, ran his fingers through his hair. When he spoke again, his voice was very strained, tight and high as an adolescent’s.

“As a parent and a human,” he said, “I’m disgusted by what they’ve done. But as a scientist, I know how excited I would be to study the first two successful human . . . clones. Mishwe’s technique, infecting sperm with the proper AVAs, avoids the clumsiness of laboratory manipulation that ruins most attempts at cloning the higher animals. I hate the man, but I do admire the technique. So will others.”

The cartoon behind him showed a robot rebuilding the inside of a sperm.

“That technique, by the way, used my genetic material as the Trojan horse for the Artificial Viral Agents that took charge of one of your mother’s eggs and made you a perfect copy of your mother.

“They have done some horrible things down here at Level Five, many military projects for the U.S. and others, but this is where they stole my daughter from me. I’m not your father; you don’t
have
a father. Just like Harry doesn’t have a mother; he’s a duplicate of Rico. Except you’ve been enhanced a bit, which explains why both of you blistered right through school and you did so well on your night flights.

“But you’re always my daughter to me. I love you.

“Now, once it’s triggered, this thing will move really fast. It will flash fast through crowds on water droplets but won’t survive long outside the cell. Trouble is, these triggers are small and when the cell blows, thousands of them spill out.

“I hope none of us ever sees it. Tell Spook to smoke up some proverbs for me.”

Sonja paused the cube and rubbed her aching forehead, trying not to disturb the Quik-Stitch that closed her jagged laceration. She didn’t understand the reference to Father Free smoking up some proverbs.

“Harry,” she said, her voice a croak, “can you hear me?”

“I’m here,” her speaker said. “Going nowhere yet. What’s up?”

“Have you looked at Dad’s cube?”

“Just organizing the file index,” he said. “I’ve been concentrating on how to get through these goddamn gates that the Agency’s put up so that I can find that GenoVax stuff he talked about.”

Sonja waved her hand at the Watchdog unit that recorded their every move, as though Harry could see her.

“Nice of you to announce that you’re trying to defeat their system,” she said. “That’ll be a
big
help.”

“They know,” he said. “No big deal. If I get out, I get out. Besides, if I get the data, they get it, too. They’re just worried that we’ll tell the world about this before they can put a lid on it.”

“We have to, you know.”

“Yeah. I’ve been a bad boy. Computer-persistent. That doesn’t seem to bother anybody. I want out of here, and I don’t see why we have to be nice little kids.”

“Yes,” Sonja said, “that’s right.”

She picked up her chair and swung it with all of her strength against the air-intake glued into the glass. The incredible
bang
inside her isolette popped her ears.

“Sonja!” Harry said. “What’s going on over there?”

She swung again, another
bang
and this time the coupling loosened. Another
bang
and she could barely stand, her head wound pounding, as two guards and Major Scholz ran up to her cubicle.

Harry shouted over the intercom, “What’s happening over there? Are you all right?”

Sonja rested on her knees, her pounding head in her hands.

“I bashed their hose-line out of the wall.”

Harry laughed.

“Chill. You got their attention, wild woman. Now, what are you going to do with it?”

Two Marine guards in bio suits scrambled to hook the hose back up. Major Scholz approached the glass to speak to her. She wore the same sweat-soaked fatigues and looked dead on her feet. Sonja took a deep breath and blew it out the hole. Scholz jerked back as though Sonja spat fire.

“What’s happening now?” Harry asked.

“I’m blowing through the hole to piss them off.”

“Is it working?”

“Yeah. It sure is.”

“Chill.”

Sonja picked her chair up and popped it against the glass, to keep the two guards back. Scholz kept yelling at her, but Sonja couldn’t understand what the major was saying. She popped the glass again and again, but finally couldn’t lift the chair anymore, and she slumped to the floor. Her head hurt so bad that she had to crawl to her toilet and throw up.

“Satisfied, now?” Scholz said, over the speaker. “You know, Sonja, we can cut your power. There’s a grunt busting his balls on a Lightening out back so you can breathe and play with your Litespeed. He’d love to take a break. Or we can send a chemical lobotomy in with your air. Is that what you want?”

“I . . . “ Sonja cleared her sore throat and spat, “I want out.”

“You two are like a bad recording,” Scholz mumbled. She sighed. “Listen,” she said, “we’re having a bigshot meeting here that will include President Garcia and Solaris from the Agency. They’ll see what your dad had to say, they’ll see the condition you’re in, and you’ll be out. Trust me.

“You keep saying that,” Sonja said. “But my dad isn’t my dad, and I’ll never trust anybody again.”

“Harry! Sonja!”

Marte Chang’s excited voice came across her speaker much too loud for comfort.

“What now?”

“I’ve got the first clue. From your dad’s cube. What we’re dealing with is a trigger. The bomb is already in place. It’s a catalyzing effect of AVAs, already in place, working together. Rapid onset, rapid contagion. We’re going to need a lot of help, and fast.”

“Count on me,” Harry said. “You divvy up the work and I’ll do the snooping—that is, if we can get the Major to lift some of her network and satlink restrictions.”

Sonja stumbled back to her terminal, set up her chair and tuned out the others. She thought about Spook, about stealing a plane and flying out of this country, and sat down to hear the rest of what her father who wasn’t her father had to say.