The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  The hell that supposed to mean? Stark thought, still smiling. Was this professional jealousy of some kind? Ridiculous. Bela’s stellar expertise as a wetcoder put her in the same constellation as Joaquin. Stark ignored the comment and mugged, jutting out his chin, so that his two-day beard rubbed against his face shield. “Do I really have a lantern jaw?”

  Isabel turned away as if he hadn’t spoken and gestured to the stolid, cliff-faced man in the Holy Renaissance suit. “Do you know the Minister of Health, Dr. Xavier Sanjuan?”

  Still puzzling over Isabel’s coldness, Stark’s mind collided against the phrase Minister of Health Xavier Sanjuan. “Excuse me?” He slowly turned to Sanjuan, eyes still on Isabel. “Who is this?” He finally looked at the fellow, who was a head taller than Stark. “Where is Diego?”

  Sanjuan handed Stark a memboard, almost by way of greeting. Stark accepted it, and the man told him, “Dr. Alejandro accepted a promotion into President Orbegón’s inner circle.”

  Stark felt like he was standing in a room whose doors and windows kept shifting position. First Isabel’s prickliness, now this. He’d been spoiling for a knock-down-drag-out fight with Diego for the last two days, and having it snatched away made him angry. “A promotion?” He was about to inquire if that was wise, but figured Sanjuan wasn’t the person to judge. “That’s absolutely the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Minister Sanjuan was an athletic man with a top-heavy build and a clipped, mechanical precision to his movements. He smiled confidently at Stark, clearly untroubled by the American’s opinion. “I understand you had quite an adventure getting here.”

  “Cargo planes. Jailbreaks. Border crossings.” Stark was speaking, but, really, he was worried about Diego. He slipped Sanjuan’s memboard into the pouch at the small of his antiviral’s suit back. “Very adventurous.”

  Minister Sanjuan gestured to the round man wearing the other red-and-black Racal suit, standing before the aerobus. Secular Mexico’s eagle-and-snake crest was on his shoulder. “Dr. Stark, this is President Orbegón’s Chief of Staff, Jefe Roberto Cazador. He’s here to make certain that the Task Force transfers easily to your authority.”

  Stark nodded to Cazador, trying to hide his revulsion. If Americans like the puppet seller in Houston sometimes portrayed Orbegón as a clown, it was only to soothe their fears of Cazador. “Jefe.” Stark forced a grin. “My pleasure.”

  “Please. I’m Roberto,” said Cazador, warmly clasping Stark’s hand in both of his, a gesture that put Stark at ease against his will. “Welcome back to Mexico, Dr. Stark.”

  Though he had become something of a statesman in recent years, Chief of State Roberto Cazador had first built an international reputation as party assassin during Emil Orbegón’s rise to power. Cazador’s name was attached to the deaths of two thousand Purépecha nationalists in Chiapas, after they rallied to demand autonomy from Holy Renaissance Mexico. The man was a butcher. It was too easy to forget, so loose and comfortable was his manner.

  Stark willed himself to look away from Cazador. La Alta’s towers shot up from downtown Ascensión, he could see in the distance. “Things have changed since I was here last.”

  Cazador followed his gaze, and said, “Our shining city in the heavens. Eight million people, so close to God.” He gave Stark a champion grin. “La Alta will be rather different from your grandfather’s cooperative farm in Wisconsin, yes?”

  Stark imagined he was supposed to feel threatened by Cazador’s intimate knowledge of him. It worked. But it also served to rile Stark’s patriotism. “Probably,” said Stark in English. “Mexico ain’t run democratically with an open membership and a guaranteed return of profits, right?”

  Cazador shook his head pityingly. “An American romantic?” he replied in Spanish. “You cling to notions like votes and elections—as if those little levers were ever hooked up to anything.”

  Minister Sanjuan laughed on cue.

  “We voted Land Reform in,” Stark said, returning to Spanish.

  “Thank you for that,” El Jefe said. “You reformers chased your biggest corporations to Mexico—and your middle class, of course, followed the money to us.”

  Stark was about to say, birds of a feather, but he already regretted stepping into this lame tennis match. “According to my calculations,” Stark said, “viruses aren’t political. We’re all in the same boat here, Jefe.”

  Cazador and Sanjuan, in a tense pause, stared at Stark, their eyes pairs of headlights. “Well put. In any event, we’re pleased that you arrived safely in our boat, Doctor,” Cazador said, “and we appreciate the effort you made to get here. Did you place yourself amidst hooves?”

  ¿Métese entre las patas de los caballos? Stark puzzled over the translation. “Once more, please?”

  Rosangelica broke off her conversation with Isabel with an abrupt turn of her body, and said to Stark, “The phrase means, were you in over your head? No, Jefe,” she said, nodding slightly to Cazador by way of a bow, “he was with me. It’s an honor to finally meet you face-to-face.” Her Mexican accent suddenly became so pronounced that Stark had to lean forward to catch every word.

  “Likewise.” Cazador’s smile was so kind, so calm that Stark shuddered. “Brava. Your capacity for finding your way to the eye of a hurricane is shocking, Rosangelica.”

  Rosangelica said, “Perhaps I could have a word with you after the conference?”

  Cazador’s face registered apprehension, but his chuckle sounded like a bow bouncing across cello strings. “One might think you were making your way to the eye of this hurricane, too.”

  “No,” said Rosangelica, “I’m here because I have volunteered to act as Dr. Stark’s personal attaché, Jefe.”

  A cagey choice of words. Rosangelica used the passive tense, as if to say that it was out of her hands. Chief of State Cazador, however, was the highest-ranking bureaucrat they’d yet encountered in Ascensión. If Cazador didn’t do it, then who OK’d her volunteering to be my attaché? Stark wondered and by the frowning and flicking of his hazel eyes, El Jefe was wondering the same thing.

  “Please, everyone, take a seat in the aerobus,” Minister Sanjuan interjected, indicating the vehicle’s open door.

  The aerobus was shaped like a giant ladybug, with a small cockpit for the driver and his armed guard and a large circular chamber behind. In this larger room, the floors were elevated and carpeted with rich brocade, and silver-tinted windows allowed a 360-degree view over the top of the forward cab. A single padded seat ran the circuit of the bus’s wall and a circular table with imbedded screens and memboards was positioned in the center. Stark sat on the padded bench and scooted on his rump to make room for the other passengers.

  Of the eight people waiting for him, Stark had met everyone except the driver, the guard, and one last fellow, who didn’t have the self-important air of a medical doctor. The stranger appeared to be a Mayan Indian and walked just behind Cazador, making it difficult to tell if he was acting as bodyguard or simply another member of the Task Force currently taking orders from the Chief of State. This unnamed man was the last to enter the aerobus, and when all seven passengers were seated, Cazador told the driver to take them up.

  TUESDAY, MAY 17. 8:04 A.M.

  STARK HAD NEVER SEEN the spires of Ascensión before. By the strata of smog and smoke capping the mountain valley, the city’s ion-scrubbers weren’t working properly but Stark could still see the seven gleaming, green spikes soaring above the pollution. The towers seemed too close together, rising from the floor of the Valley of Mexico like densely packed bristles and shooting two thousand meters into the sky. It was an illusion of distance, Stark knew. Each tower was at least a kilometer away from one of its mates. “Is La Alta’s integrity still intact?” he asked.

  “Still the safest place in Ascensión, yes,” said Minister Sanjuan, waking the screen in front of him.

  “And the pilone net?” Stark asked.

  Rosangelica cut off the Mayan gentleman who was about to s
peak, saying, “Still inoperable.”

  There was much to discuss, but Stark was wondering when the transfer of power would occur. Experience told him to expect a careful bureaucratic speech about the limits of powers that were being granted to a visiting CDC epidemiologist. Despite the Holy Renaissance’s infamy for pomp in war and crisis, Stark assumed the power transfer in this case would be done cleanly and secretly, so that the Task Force could get on with its mission. He kept quiet and felt the purr of the aerobus as it flew toward the sheaf of towers.

  “Tell us your assessment of the situation so far,” said Cazador, leaning toward Stark. “We expect that you’ve been monitoring our progress in transit, yes?”

  The last thing he wanted was a medical consultation with politicians. “I’m still missing large pieces of the story so an assessment would be hard right now, Jefe,” said Stark. He turned to Isabel and Jarum Ahwaz. “Could one of you update me on Pathology? I’m confused by what I’ve read so far.”

  The two pathologists balked, each looking to Cazador, then waiting for the other to speak, until Jarum cleared his throat. “Please to go, Bela. My Spanish is poor.”

  Isabel gave Jarum a caustic glance. “Pendejo twit.” She turned her face toward Stark and focused somewhere on the table before him. “It’s—we’re glad you’re here, Henry David.” She coughed and began again. “The epidemiological data that we need remains unorganized in any sort of database that we can use.”

  “I’ll work on that,” said Stark.

  “However,” continued Isabel, “the epidemiological team at the university cobbled together a decent if incomplete base of information for us, sourced from patients brought to the overflow hospitals.”

  “And what have you been able to determine?” asked Stark.

  “According to the chicken reports, it originally took four days for the first dengue-5 patients to arrive at Zapata Hospital. But now,” said Isabel, “we’re not dealing with just two serotypes of the virus, dengue-5 and airborne dengue-6. Because dengue-5 has mutated into viable, subsequent generations, and because the new generations continue to emerge every ten to twelve hours, it’s as if we’re dealing with scores of dengue serotypes—any combination of which can create a dengue hemorrhagic syndrome—either airborne or non-airborne, and mutated from either dengue-5 or dengue-6. Big Bonebreaker can now kill in four hours instead of four days.”

  Stark nodded. He felt his hands growing slick inside their gloves. We in trouble. “How is Pathology discerning between the various generations? Or are you?”

  Isabel’s eyes met Stark’s, as if in reluctant appreciation. There was something else in her gaze. Regret, perhaps, or apology. What was wrong with her? “Pathology always calls the newest generation—that is, the most recently discovered generation—Zed. Its parent’s generation is Y, the one before that is X, and so on. As new generations are discovered, the Pathology database is automatically updated.” Again her eyes flicked up to Stark’s to make sure he was following her. “But my instinct tells me that the earliest generation of dengue-5, ‘Generation One,’ acted differently than the mutations we’re seeing now. It’s probably simpler, more like the natural dengue we know and love. Finding a sample of Generation One, or approximating it myself in a wetcode lab, may be our best shot at creating an effective nanophage. Because, right now, with multiple hot zones giving birth to multiple viral strains, all of which are breeding at different rates depending on where the virus finds agreeable hosts—” Isabel gestured as if releasing a dove from her hands. “We can never be one hundred percent certain which generation we are actually seeing at any given moment.”

  Jarum Ahwaz added in halting Spanish, “For example, this day, university reports that older generations—arrive—arrived—are arriving—after younger generations. That is how strange and without hope we are.”

  Stark picked up a memboard, tapped open a screen marked GENERATIONAL ANALYSIS and compared it to the information he’d read last night. The viruses were breeding too fast, faster than anything Stark had seen before. Ahwaz was right. Strange and without hope. “What do you recommend?”

  “We’re wetcoding a nanophage,” Jarum said, “but it will hunt only for the most recent generations, beginning with Generation Zed. As newer generations discover—are discovered—new nanophages will have to be wet-coded.”

  Nanophages were Joaquin Delgado’s greatest gift to public-health agents. Sprayed over hot zones with a swoop jet or a barco, released in water and food supplies, or injected into the population as part of a vaccination program, nanophages worked like an epidemic feeding on a specific virus. But they would be a stopgap measure with so many mutations to account for. Certainly, the terrorist counted on this.

  Stark said, “Isabel, your work on wetcode for enhancing T cell antigen recognition. Update me.”

  “I was hoping it would help us here.” She nodded. “But it’s a failure. It turns the lymph system into jelly.”

  Stark wanted to console her, but he simply nodded in regret. “What happened?”

  “We couldn’t find a way to recode without killing the simulated human body,” she said, dismissing what must have been years of work with a wave of a white-gloved hand. “A urinal bag of wasted fucking time.”

  Cazador rumbled in appreciative laughter, while Jarum Ahwaz pointedly turned his head away from Isabel in disgust. A Parisian-educated Palestinian of dignified lineage, Jarum rarely swore in his own language, let alone Spanish. Born in Mexico but living in Pakistan, Isabel, meanwhile, could draw from two cultures for her love of swearing. Stark smiled. The Khushub and Ahwaz Comedy Show hittin the road again, Stark thought.

  Stark was girding his loins for the subject of Zapata Hospital’s records, when the driver’s voice buzzed from Cazador’s suit. “We’re passing over the hot zone, Jefe.”

  “Please look, Dr. Stark.” The Chief of State pointed and his voice was grim. “See what has happened to us.”

  Stark craned his neck to look out the aerobus windows, down into the grimy lattice of La Baja Ciudad. Beneath islands of smoke and smog, he could see neighborhoods stretching off to vanishing points in all directions—old Mexico City. He was surprised to find that, after civil uprising, street wars, and two viral outbreaks, he could still see the city as he knew it.

  Stark turned back to the group and realized that all the Mexicans were staring at him. “I don’t see the hot zone,” he said.

  “Take us down,” Cazador said to the driver. “Show us Zapata Hospital.”

  The aerobus banked into a downtown descent lane, dropping through the thin layers of soot, down into the darkness between La Alta’s magnificent spires and La Baja Ciudad’s old Tower of the Americas, Pemex Building, and other modest skyscrapers that made the old skyline.

  As soon as they dropped through Ascensión’s veil of pollution and floated toward the centro histórico, Stark could see ground zero. It stretched some eight kilometers across in a wide arc of smoke-scorched, abandoned buildings, funeral pyres, and carcasses of torched vehicles, as if the viruses had been explosions of hellfire and sulfur. The aerobus passed over the zócalo and its bomb-blown banks, where the worst of the street clashes between Los Hijos de Marcos and Holy Renaissance troops had taken place. Corpse-removal teams nearly had the wide, paved plaza clean, but nothing could be done for the Austrian-style National Palace and its gray colonnade, or the cathedral with soot streaking across its standing walls and fallen façade. The Aztec pyramid, El Templo Mayor, reconstructed by the Museum of Anthropology during Mexico’s more secular days, sat alongside the National Palace. With a ring of plumed serpents at its summit like a pagan crown, the pyramid surveyed the wreckage of the old Catholic church with ironic majesty: El Templo Mayor was now the tallest structure on the Square.

  Floating over Avenida Venezuela, the aerobus took them toward Zapata Hospital. The army and city militia had erected walls and hurricane fences across every street in a twenty-block arc around the hospital. A hot zone within the hot zone. T
he region within seemed a Dantean nightmare. Processions of Mortuary teams filed below and some stopped to yell at the aerobus.

  They hovered over a little checkpoint clinic, placed inside a bank of hurricane fencing that ran around the eight-kilometer-wide hot zone. Stark hadn’t asked for a physical barrier around the hot zones, of course, and it horrified him to think of the people trapped within. But the part of him that had seen urban outbreaks before, that had kept death close as a companion, looked down at those barbed-wire walls and admired the cruel, practical mind that had ordered such a thing. “Whose idea was that? The fences, I mean?”

  The Chief of State stared back at him blankly but Sanjuan couldn’t hide his pride. He had given that order.

  Well done, bastard.

  The aerobus came about and sped toward Zapata, just a few blocks away. An astonishing amount of debris ringed the ten-story building. Its long bank of windows was shattered and the pieces lay like a green pebble beach before the atrium.

  “Why the street fighters—would to destroy the hospital?” asked Jarum.

  Rosangelica gave a tart cluck of her tongue. “Maricones estúpidos.”

  With the same note of derision, Minister Sanjuan added, “Rioters thought the Holy Renaissance created the virus and released it at Zapata.”

  Stark clamped his mouth over the question that popped to mind, but then he thought he’d better ask it, after all. “Has it been proved that this outbreak wasn’t a government operation?”

  Sanjuan faced Stark, and his furious expression told Stark that this had not been discussed, nor would it.

  Cazador placed a hand on Sanjuan’s huge shoulder and gave him a friendly laugh. “Easy.”

  The sabihonda, however, wasn’t on Cazador’s leash. “In the middle of Mexico’s greatest military action, you think,” fumed Rosangelica, “a leader would release a bioweapon on his own people? Who sold you your degree, Estarque?”

  Stark crossed his arms. “My doctorate? La Universidad de Oaxaca, actually.”