Burn (20 page)

Chapter 29

Outward show is a wonderful perverter of reason. And when you are most sure that the
things you are busy about are worth your pains, it is then that it cheats you most.

—Marcus Aurelius

El Oso and El Tigre waited at the International gate while the traitor Yolanda Rubia cleared Mexican customs. El Oso remained calm; the prospect of killing always rendered him calm. His hulking, bear-like form moved with deliberation, and once set into motion it could not be stopped easily. El Tigre jittered beside him and lit yet another cigarette, the backs of his hands revealing the stripe-like scars that gave him his name.

Yolanda Rubia, Comandante of Costa Brava’s Peace and Freedom Brigade, presented herself to the customs officer in her disarming elegance—gold watch and chain, rings encrusted with diamonds, a teal jumpsuit of wrinkle-free silk.

How many mortars could we buy with that?
El Oso wondered.
How many rifles? How many rounds?

Yolanda Rubia flashed a bright smile at the officer; he flashed one back, and with that she was through the line.

“The bitch,” El Tigre whispered. “Let’s do her now and teach the rest of those arrogant bastards a lesson.”

“She has something to tell us.”

“We have the shipment in Coyote Warehouse. We know it’s a new weapon that frightens even the northamericans enough to empty the pink zone with an earthquake alert. Our people are in place. What more do we need?”

“You were a fool once, Tigre,” El Oso growled, nodding at the scars. “Don’t be a fool again. This weapon could kill us all; that’s why we’re here and the northamericans aren’t. She is here to tell us what it is and how to use it.”

“Then can I do her?”

“Then you can do her. And the rest of them. They’re all in bed with the northamericans. They’re all whores.”

As Yolanda Rubia stepped through the gate, El Oso manufactured his biggest smile and El Tigre reached for her bag.

“With much pleasure,” El Oso said, adding a slight bow. “You have been away too long.”

“It’s been a tough time,” she said. “But now that Garcia is out of the way, our prospects for the presidency are excellent. For the first time, Costa Brava will be in the hands of the people who love her.”

El Tigre broke out in a coughing fit.

“The car is this way,” El Oso said, taking her elbow.

He turned to El Tigre. “Really,” he said, “you should quit smoking for good.”

“After this operation,” El Tigre said. “I’ll take better care of myself after we’ve disposed of the weapon.”

“It’s not exactly a weapon,” Yolanda said. “What is the situation now?”

El Oso opened the passenger door to the gray Bushido van and steadied Yolanda with his hand as she stepped in. He and El Tigre scanned the parking lot visually and electronically. El Oso double-checked their Watchdog system to make sure the van hadn’t been tampered with while they waited at the terminal. He activated the scrambler on the Watchdog. Any conversation now would be secure. Any call for help would not be heard.

“We took their position this morning, as you know,” he said. “The missionaries moved in their pathetic Jesus Rangers, but they were no match for us. Alfonso says he saw another team drop on the rooftops across the way, but they have made no move. We barricaded ourselves inside, and whoever they are we know they are no match for our snipers, particularly El Tigre. The missionaries are dead, all Rangers dead. El Tigre slipped inside last night before the battle. Their security was terrible and they paid the price. Even the Jesus Rangers were lightly armed. Except, of course, for whatever is in those boxes. They seemed to be waiting for something.”

“Yes,” Yolanda said. “Their own Sabbath killed them. They were waiting for orders and reinforcements. Their entire facility in Costa Brava is gone, along with that television preacher, Casey. He was the pope of their church, and it will take them time to reorganize. The northamericans wanted to keep it out of the news, even after we secured this shipment.”

“Shipment of
what?”

El Tigre had been impatient for the entire twenty years that El Oso had known him. Still, he voiced the question that had nettled El Oso himself for two days.

“Shipment of death,” Yolanda whispered. “The man who invented it wanted to kill every human being on the planet.”

El Oso whistled his surprise.

“And this could do it?”

Yolanda nodded.

“Just the slightest fraction could do it,” she said. “This virus melts people from their very bones. Our sources tell us that even one virus cannot be permitted to escape, or every human being is lost, no matter what their religion or their politics.”

“And your sources?” El Oso asked. “How do they intend to dispose of this plague?”

“They intend to pour concrete around it, place it in a hole in the center of the desert, encased with a neutron bomb.”

Again, Oso’s whistle of surprise. This was deadly stuff indeed.

“But they don’t want to be here for the capture.”

“No.”

El Tigre leaned forward, his lips nearly touching Yolanda’s ear.

“Why don’t they just burn it where it lies?” he asked. “Are you sure they’re not using us merely to capture it for use against us later?”

“They don’t burn it because fire makes steam, and some of the virus might escape on the steam before it’s burned,” she said. “This way, it is killed twice—by the radiation and the explosion.”

“Why don’t the northamericans just drop their bomb on Coyote Warehouse?” El Oso asked. “Surely Mexico City is expendable.”

“That’s exactly what they plan to do if we don’t succeed,” she said.

El Oso drove in silence for a moment, wrestling with this troubling news.

Bomb Mexico City! Truly, the northamericans were scared shitless!

He negotiated the roadblocks that kept unauthorized vehicles and looters out of the abandoned downtown corridor. The earthquake alert broadcast by the northamericans was working, to a degree, but it would not work for too much longer.

The diplomatic code broadcast from their Watchdog cleared them all the way to what was left of the National Palace, a short distance from Coyote Warehouse.

“If someone started shooting,” El Oso said, “and by accident hit one of these boxes, what happens?”

“Everyone in the room is dead within twenty-four hours. Everyone in the world, within thirty days.”

“And the antidote? Where is that?”

“There is none.”

El Oso sucked air through his teeth in a wet hiss.

“What kind of fool builds a weapon without a defense?”

“An American fool,” Yolanda said, her grim lips cracking a smile. “A Gardener fool. He is now a dead fool.”

El Tigre’s jitters cranked up to a new level.

“Shit,” he hissed. “And I was in there with it. And there was much shooting.”

“As there may be again,” El Oso said. He was no longer smiling. He turned to Yolanda. “Do you have anything else for us?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “The northamerican Agency doesn’t want a panic, so no one is to know. The strategy is up to you.”

“Who will replace Garcia as President of Costa Brava?” El Oso asked. “You?”

“No,” Yolanda said, and sighed. “As it has been all along—Philip Rubia. I will be Minister of the Interior.”

“I see,” El Oso said. “You and your rich ex-husband.”

He pulled into a rubble-strewn alley off Avenida El Salvador. He edged past three children sleeping in a cardboard carton, stopped the van, shut off the engine, took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“What are we doing here?” Yolanda asked.

“Giving El Tigre a moment to refresh himself,” El Oso said.

He nodded to El Tigre in the mirror, and swifter than it could be said El Tigre pulled Yolanda’s head back, slipped a sharpened piece of stiff wire into the outside corner of her right eye and shut off her brain.

El Oso busied himself looting the body of its gold and mopping up the inevitable mess on the seat, regretting only that they had too little time to retrieve certain fillings that later might be worth safe passage to Singapore. El Tigre scattered a fistful of pamphlets over the body, religious pamphlets from the pack of a dead Jesus Ranger lying inside the back door of Coyote Warehouse.

The more deaths over a thing, the more valuable that thing becomes,
El Tigre thought.

He would have to tell that one to El Oso.

Had El Oso taken the time, he might have noticed the peculiar electronics within one of Yolanda Rubia’s teeth. Its battery was her body itself, and because it lay on its face it continued to broadcast her whereabouts for another six hours.

By the time the Agency contracted for a SEAL team, El Oso and El Tigre were barricaded safely inside Coyote Warehouse, refining their new plan to hold the whole world hostage. By the time the SEAL team located its target in Avenida El Salvador, El Tigre had shot the last of the wounded resisters.

El Oso backed in the truckload of earthquake relief that they’d liberated from a Red Cross encampment at the
hipodromo.
They set up watches, sentries and fortifications, including a thick jacketing of cement bags around the pallet of cold cases full of the Devilbug. Then they waited to make the deal of a lifetime, to buy their country back from the traitors who took it from the traitors who took it from their great-grandparents eighty-three years before.

Chapter 30

I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh. . . .

—Deuteronomy

The albino was aboard his Lancer and on approach to Mexico City before he took the call he’d been avoiding from Senator Myers. The senator didn’t waste any breath on pleasantries.

“Mr. Solaris, it appears that everything you touch turns to shit.”

Solaris sat stiffly in his harness with the video pickup off and didn’t respond.

“Are you receiving me, Mr. Solaris?”

“I hear you.”

“The committee and the President have agreed that your contract be suspended immediately. You will return here voluntarily for a debriefing tomorrow at oh-eight hundred at Camp David, or I will have you brought here in handcuffs. And you will bring with you all records pertinent to ViraVax. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Senator. Perfectly.”

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, Senator.”

The connection ended as the Lancer’s wheels scorched the concrete. Solaris didn’t ask who would replace him, because that was none of his concern now. Now he would be disgraced, his thirty years of service to his country held up to ridicule, and as scapegoat he would spend the rest of his days in a forgotten corner of some federal prison.

Shame!
he thought.
They visit shame upon me now, after I kept their hands clean and saved the country a dozen times over!

He knew it was coming. The nature of bureaucracy is to peck its own to death at the first sign of blood. He had not got so far from the chicken pens of his childhood, after all.

As he choppered to his office from the airport, he passed over the mess at Coyote Warehouse. The entire block was cordoned off by U.S. and Mexican troops, and he saw bodies in the street and on the rooftops. He spoke to no one as he made his way to his office, and he relied on his com alone for a briefing. He could not bear to speak to another human quite yet.

The com showed him the chilling images of the rebel standoff at Coyote Warehouse. Five of the fifty-eight bodies that bloated in the street were rebel comandantes who had tried to reason with their dissident troops. The rest were Jesus Rangers who dropped in a tight formation that accommodated the guerrilla snipers nicely.

Trenton Solaris hoped that this turncoat sniper was not a subcontractor on his own payroll. As though that would make a difference. As though there would be a
later
to worry about.

Those fools will kill us all!

The Peace and Freedom faction that held the warehouse now called themselves the Death Brigade. They didn’t care who they killed—they knew they would die soon no matter what the outcome. Trenton Solaris had a personal backup plan that would guarantee it, but he prayed to all the gods that he wouldn’t have to carry it out. Everything rode on Yolanda Rubia’s ability to reason with her people, and her people had proved to be beyond reason. She faced death in the street to do what must be done. Solaris would do the same.

The rebel leaders must have known from the start that their elimination was nonnegotiable. Their immediate goal would be to put off that inevitability as long as possible.

From his position in the Agency, Solaris commanded more than two hundred agents, and a tone from his Sidekick mobilized entire divisions. Usually he felt much taller than his one hundred and sixty centimeters, but today he felt small, and weak, and old.

I
wish the Colonel were here.

Colonel Rico Toledo’s recovery in La Libertad was fraught with setbacks. He’d barely had the strength to tape his testimony for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

ViraVax could have done anything to him when he went in after those kids,
he thought.
They did plenty to him before.

He had been shocked at the level of betrayal perpetrated upon him by Casey, and Mishwe, and ViraVax. They had worked many projects together over the years: military, health and agricultural projects that had made Solaris the darling of the Department of Defense—and a rich man. He had invested heavily in ViraVax, though he was no Gardener.

Solaris was disgraced already, that was clear. His life was over. The bugs were loose in La Libertad, but a shutdown of the country’s airports, ports and highways should contain it there. But this one in Mexico City was the worst. Mexico City was the largest city on the globe, and the center of worldwide travel and commerce. If that virus got loose here, Washington itself would die only three days to a week later. Or so his analysts told him, and his analysts were never wrong.

The lights on his com and on his Sidekick winked insistently, but the albino ignored them.

In a few days, whatever they want won’t matter.

For a moment he regretted not having children, then in the same breath he was thankful that he wouldn’t have to watch them die. The Agency had been his parent; ViraVax, his child. The albino had a very bad feeling about this one.

Trenton Solaris swiveled his chair to face the mural behind him. This plasticized carbonite reproduction of the Maya calendar superimposed upon the Aztec Temple of the Sun hid a double-filtered, triple-glazed window that framed the famous Zocaló of Mexico City. The albino thumbed a switch that lifted the mural with a series of clacks and hums. The Agency’s engineers built the finest filters into this glass for his comfort—still, Solaris squinted under the sinking, unforgiving eye of the enemy sun.

He blinked his vision clear and surveyed the abandoned Zocaló—the well-picked rubble of the cathedral, one precarious wall of the National Palace, the restored and unshaken temple of Tenochtitlán. Crude barricades protected the surviving half of a Diego Rivera mural from souvenir-seekers, and a nun in her habit whirred past on her electric scooter, skirting debris, her traffic-flag barely mustering a flap behind her. Earthquake warnings didn’t frighten off the street kids, or the few, like this nun, who tended them. Solaris donned his shades and sipped his ice water. As always, the Zocaló belonged to the poor, the pigeons and the tourists. There had been no tourists since Earthquake Watch issued their doctored warning. Possibly, very soon, there would be no poor, either.

“The pigeons shall inherit the earth,” he muttered.

The great earthquake of ‘13 had flattened a third of Mexico City and inspired his own mural—a practical piece of art that shielded his office from the enemy sun, enemy electronics and from the shrapnel that his previous window had become at the eye of an earthquake. Though the Aztec empire had eclipsed the Maya, Trenton Solaris commissioned his mural with the Maya calendar foremost—an oblique testament to his own ancestry, an ancestry that he had spent a lifetime denying, down to his pseudo-Blackpool accent and his anglicized name.

In a rare gesture, Solaris drank to the past, because the last-ditch plan that he’d formed in case the virus got loose here ensured that, for himself and a few hundred thousand collaterals, there would be no future. If his personal plan failed, there would be no future for any humans on the face of the planet. He drank to the memory of humans, of humanity, of intellect and poverty and greed. He drank to the inspiring lecture that Marte Chang had given him on cell-mediated immunity. Sometimes, the cell had to die to protect the body.

Solaris debated dying now and avoiding the horror to come, but he could not raise the pistol to his head. He drained the last of his water, instead, and thumbed the mural closed. He reviewed the three most likely scenarios:

In the first, the deadline that he’d imposed on the rebels approaches, the rebels fight to the last man and the virus is released as a side-effect of the fighting.

The second scenario finds the rebels beating his deadline by releasing the virus themselves out of frustration and spite.

His personal option responds to either number one or number two: detonate a neutron device presently side railed near Coyote Warehouse, atomizing all of the rebels and their vials of virus as well.

Solaris had recommended to the Joint Chiefs that stockpiled devices be planted in the rail yards, freighters and hangars of every major city in the world. Paying freight and storage was much cheaper than building missiles, and much quieter. Solaris had used up every favor he had to get the detonation codes to the devices in his own back yard.

Better with a bang than a whimper.

The albino made this decision because none of his analysts’ options included the surrender of the Death Brigade with their cache of virus intact. He shuddered at the memory of what had happened at ViraVax.

And that version of the virus wasn’t even communicable,
he thought.
Thank God we put that place in the middle of the jungle.

He wondered how many other versions were buried under the mud in Costa Brava. And how long they would stay buried. The way things were devolving in Mexico City, it probably wouldn’t matter.

The ViraVax satellite clinics in the United States had been fooling around with the water supply for some time, which was now apparent. These new AVAs were puzzle pieces, undetectable until they assembled themselves inside the cell. And then it was too late. Just a few little twists of protein that made the uninoculated very ill, that did not show up on contagion-factor tests because, at first, they weren’t contagious.

Now he saw how the Children of Eden had taken over towns, cities, whole regions by altering the water supply with one AVA and adapting their people to it with another. Nothing showed up in standard tests. When entire neighborhoods got sick, property became worthless. The Children of Eden bought up whole towns and villages for pennies on the dollar, blaming the “unhealthy lifestyles” of their non-Gardener neighbors as the culprit.

Solaris recalled a stanza from a poem he’d memorized in grammar school:

“And when it comes to slaughter
 

you’ll do your work on water
 

and you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots
 

of ‘im that’s got it.”

Kipling, another child of colonial days with one foot in two cultures.

He sighed, and continued to ignore the pleading electronics around him.

And to think I was proud of the project when they came up with that marijuana AVA for the DEA to turn loose!

He and the Director of the Drug Enforcement Administration had laughed when they saw film of the results: one toke on a joint, and the subjects vomited themselves into exhaustion. At first he was disappointed that it wasn’t applicable to opiates or cocaine. Then the scales fell from his eyes and he saw the truth: it
was
applicable to opiates and cocaine. The big payoffs were in the big drugs. Nobody was willing to tamper with the big stuff. Marijuana was, as Colonel Toledo had put it without apologies, “a smoke screen.”

Solaris comforted himself with the thought that his motives had always been pure. Everything he did in his career, including ViraVax, had been for the benefit of his country. He had never taken a penny for throwing his weight around; his investments had been legitimate. He saw now that his colleagues in the intelligence community and in Congress considered him not as an altruist or a hero, but as a fool.

Solaris poured himself another ice water, and this time he added a slice of fresh lime. The citrus mist at the top of the glass refreshed him.

Yes, the whispers coming in from Costa Brava were bad. It was not a major nexus, as Mexico City. The Deathbug worked quickly, and movement in Costa Brava was slowed to a stop right now. But Mexico City was the hub of the world, and the concentrations in that warehouse tremendous. Solaris knew that his life was finished. If this solution required drastic measures, he would have to be the one to take them.

This bug must not leave this city, or human beings are through!

Sacrifice for the good of the people was in his blood. Trenton Solaris was now the captain of the great Mayan ball game, and it was the winning captain who got sacrificed to renew the crops. He would have to be strong, now, and merciless. Nothing must stop him from redeeming himself in the eyes of his country.

He stared through his shades at the enemy sun and tried to muster affection for the heat and for that unfamiliar gift of radiance that he might have to pass on.