The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  He was rewarded with a smile from Isabel and a furtive wink from Jarum. Even the stony-faced, unnamed Mayan cracked a smile.

  Cazador put his left hand flat on the table, right in front of Stark. “I assure you, Doctor, the Holy Renaissance did not create, store, or release these viruses.”

  But you still got Zapata records quarantined, thought Stark, looking at Roberto Cazador for a long, uncomfortable pause, wondering if this was the moment to confront him. Why you do that?

  “Please,” Cazador said to the driver, “take us farther down Avenida Venezuela. I want the Coordinator to see how los bajadores are dealing with this outbreak.”

  The aerobus floated down the street, toward a clinic in a crumbling blond-stone supermarket. It wasn’t a Task Force perimeter operation. Indeed, there was no organization at all. It looked like a third-world infirmary from a CDC textbook, a twentieth-century Ebola hot zone dropped in the middle of a modern city. Bodies arrived in parades of litters. Through the plastic bags that encased them, Stark could see naked corpses with bloated abdomens and tin hearts pinned to their chests. Those carrying the dead ranged from medicos in gloves and useless surgical masks to family members who could not bring themselves to leave their loved ones—not even here, in hell. As he watched, Stark realized that no one was carrying newly infected patients into the supermarket clinic. In the street, a line of bonfires gassed the sky with oily smoke.

  “Not much has gone right, but at least we’ve managed to impress on los bajadores that proper disposal is essential,” Cazador said. “Maybe now that we have a beachhead with the perimeter clinics and dedicated outbreak hospitals, we can begin to help these field clinics.”

  “Maybe,” Stark said. He gazed down into the bonfire before the supermarket/clinic. As fresh bodies in bags were placed on the hottest part of the fire, the plastic melted back to reveal arms and knees at tortured angles. “Take us down lower. I want to look inside that supermarket.”

  As the aerobus descended, the clinic workers nearest the fire looked up with hopeful eyes peering over bandana masks. Inside the dark market, light from holes in the ceiling angled down, and Stark could see that all the beds inside the clinic were empty.

  Stark sat back in his seat, exhaling sharply. “I’ve seen enough,” he said. “There’s no need to show me the other clinics.”

  Rosangelica strained to see what Stark had seen in the market.

  Minister Sanjuan pointed up the street. “But there are eight more clinics. They’ll need to be incorporated into your plan eventually.”

  “This is lost ground,” Stark said, shaking his head.

  “Lost ground?” Sanjuan sneered. “You don’t even know about the circuit doctors and other medical volunteers who’re working the hot zones day and night.”

  Stark noted Cazador watching Sanjuan with furtive glances. Maybe Sanjuan’s performance ain’t for me. The Minister obviously had something to prove to Cazador, and Stark wondered what it was.

  “Please, Doctor, be realistic,” Stark said. “The only good thing about megaviruses is that they overeat their food supply, then die of starvation. That’s what happened in that clinic,” he said, pointing at the empty beds. “That is no longer a viable part of our response.”

  “But it’s all los destitutos have, sir.”

  “Now, now let’s keep our heads,” said Rosangelica, trying to sound reasonable. “Stark, let’s see what Sanjuan has to show us. It’s the least we can do.”

  Stark would have to correct any presumptions the sabihonda had about becoming his medical assistant. “We are in the middle of a deadly emergency,” said Stark, “but I still haven’t heard about efforts to determine who patient zero was. That’s my first order of business, not a tour through hopelessness.”

  “Dr. Stark,” Cazador began, “this devastation requires that we sensitively—”

  The sabihonda cut him off. She leaned forward and brought her elbows onto the table like a viper coiling into position. “Why are you taking this nihilistic attitude,” said Rosangelica, “now that you’re finally here? Why?”

  “I am not being nihilistic. I’m being efficient,” Stark assured her with a sideways glance at Cazador. Not wanting to get sucked into whatever political game was being played at this table, he said, “If you want to put on a dazzling medical performance for your people, don’t worry, I’ll give it to you, Jefe. But, please, follow my script and don’t distract everyone with misguided sentiment for the dead.”

  In the quiet of the aerobus, six Racal-plus suits whirred and clicked like a watchmaker’s studio.

  Stark was surprised at his own callousness. He wanted to relieve the tension, explain his strong feelings about the horrendous task at hand, but the coldness he felt after looking at all the empty beds wouldn’t crack. He opened his mouth to speak, but just then, Cazador called to the driver, “Up!”

  And, like that, the seething pressure in the aerobus snapped.

  Isabel edged herself up to the table, and Jarum leaned forward, gripping his left thumb in his right hand. His poker tell, Stark noted. He always held on to that thumb when he was bluffing with a crap hand. Meanwhile, the Jefe and Rosangelica both leaned back from the table, Cazador with a hand on his beer belly like a favored pet.

  Sanjuan sighed, and said, “I think it’s time you finally took a look at that memboard I gave you, Dr. Stark.”

  With the tension in the aerobus shifting, a new round in the mysterious game seemed under way, and Stark felt suddenly vulnerable. Sanjuan was testing him for some reason, so Stark looked down at the memboard and read. It was the same g-print that he had read on board the Dulce. He scanned the initial codons again.

  AGTTGTTAGT CTGTGTGGAC CGACAAGGAC

  AGTTCCAAAT CGGAAGCTTG CTTAACACAG … 60

  “I read this on the flight into Ascensión,” he said.

  “And what do you think?” asked Sanjuan.

  Stark put the report down and touched the memboard screen blank. “Well, I’m not a geneticist, but the tropism sequence is unusual, probably unnatural. This looks bad, but someone else will have to explain what it means.”

  Sanjuan’s scowling gaze didn’t waver and Cazador looked at Stark as if he knew to the penny how much money he had in his pocket.

  “It looks bad, you say,” said Sanjuan, his voice dry as gravel. “Yo te conozco bacalao aunque vengas disfrazado.”

  Stark translated to himself: I know you, cod, though you come disguised.

  He didn’t wait for Rosangelica’s explanation of the saying; it seemed plain enough. “If you have something to say Minister, please be honest with me.”

  “Honest? You want us to be honest?” said Sanjuan.

  “President Orbegón has taken a great political risk bringing you here,” said Cazador. “We were hoping to get something more decisive from you than ‘it looks bad.’”

  “Not in this outbreak.” Stark kept his eyes on Sanjuan as if the man might lunge at him. “These prints are state-of-the-art genetic snapshots but they’re useless because they’re genomes of mutated virus. Generation Zed, from what I can tell?” Stark dismissed the memboard with a flick of his hand. “If we were talking twelve hours into the outbreak, or if we had Zapata’s records, we might have a prayer of analyzing this virus. Until we find the earliest, the first generation, fancy g-prints won’t help us.”

  Isabel looked wounded, and Jarum’s eyes bugged with anger and confusion. Stark assumed he had been too blunt, but did scientists of their caliber want handholding? The aerobus sailed out from beneath the shadow of a tower and the sun suddenly seemed hotter. Stark wondered what was happening at this table.

  “I disagree with your assessment.” Minister Sanjuan leaned forward and folded his hands on the table, the international gesture of a disenchanted bureaucrat. “Unlike you, Dr. Khushub here has discovered something quite decisive with the information at hand. Doctor?”

  She may have dubbed him “the Patron Saint of Plagues” in her book, but Isabel was the real h
ero of the Cairo outbreak in Stark’s opinion. Stark had spotted the common denominator in the first smallpox patients—all young boys hired to help in the robbery of a burial crypt where the virus was preserved in a mummified corpse. But Isabel wetcoded the nanophage that ended the outbreak in a matter of days. A good thing, too. Egypt had no smallpox vaccine stockpiled. “Let’s hear it, Isabel.”

  Isabel’s eyes flicked up and down from Sanjuan to the table before her, as if she were delivering a speech to the Minister, not conferring with Stark. “The tropism sequence is unnaturally brief, as you say, Dr. Stark,” Isabel said. “Dengue-5 doesn’t attack or breed the way it should. As a result, it has defied the typical approaches for determining pathology.”

  “But you were able to find alternate methods?” Stark asked, allowing hope to brighten in his voice.

  “With help, yes,” Isabel said. She lifted her hand to the unnamed Mayan-looking fellow who had been sitting through the meeting so far as a patient observer. “This is Ofelio Xultan,” said Isabel. “He’s the Chief Engineer of the Pilone Network.”

  Ofelio blinked a slow salutation at Stark, then placed his memboard in the conference table’s dock and tapped the screen. Stark’s memboard showed this:

  AGTTGTTAGT CTGTGTGGAC CGACAAGGAC

  AGTTCCAAAT CGGAAGCTTG CTTAACACAG

  CTGTGTGGAC CGACAAGGAC AGTTCCAAAT

  CTTAACACAG AGTTCCAAAT CGGAAGCTTG

  CTGTGTGGAC CGACAAGGAC AGTTCCAAAT

  “The virus’s tropism sequence,” said Stark.

  Ofelio Xultan had such a sober, neutral delivery that Stark imagined the man could sound professional even if his clothes were on fire. “One might assume this is the tropism sequence,” said Ofelio, but he shook his head. “This g-print isn’t from either strain of dengue, however.”

  “Oh,” said Stark, feeling stupid for speaking so quickly. He read the sequence again, more carefully this time. Like the stripped-down genome of dengue-5, this sequence had no extraneous DNA. “It’s not natural, whatever virus this comes from.”

  Ofelio held Stark’s gaze, but in his peripheral vision, Stark could see Isabel and Minister Sanjuan sharing a pointed look. Ofelio said, “Actually, this sequence was not taken from a virus at all.”

  The aerobus came about and circled a tower whose giant base was decorated with red and black Stations of the Cross, in plumed and boxy Aztec style.

  “If you wanted to prove how little I know about wetcoding, you win.” Stark wondered why he was receiving a viral pathology report from a computer scientist. “I can’t tell what this sequence signifies.”

  “This sequence appears in only two places in nature: in a specific immune response unique to Native Mexicans, and in the protein sheath of dengue-4,” Ofelio said. “With this snatch of code, the immune system can identify the dengue-4 virus and mount an attack on it.”

  A doctor wouldn’t have put it that way but Stark understood. “So this is the code that native antibodies—probably immunoglobulin cell, IgG anti-dengue-4, perhaps?—use during specific antigen recognition?”

  Isabel and Jarum Ahwaz nodded, solemn as hunted mice.

  It didn’t make sense. With tropism pared down like this, the response would be too specific, like radar that scanned only for missiles of a certain color. He frowned at his memboard for a moment, trying to discern what Ofelio was getting at. “Are you saying that the virus is tropic for Mexican Indians only?”

  “Yes, but the range is not as limited as you might think,” said Ofelio. “Unlike the United States, which ethnically cleansed its natives, the Spanish intermingled with the natives of Mexico. Thus, the word ‘mestizo,’ which means mixed. Mexico is 71 percent mixed. Another 10 percent is Indian. That means that over 80 percent of Mexico could be susceptible to Big Bonebreaker.”

  Stark looked at Isabel. “That doesn’t match up. Euros and Anglo-Americans contracted the disease, too.”

  Ofelio tensed. “The sequence you’re looking at was taken from a cybernetically enhanced organ that underwent viral therapy.”

  Stark raised his hand to touch his brow, but the face shield was in his way, making it look like he was saluting Ofelio. “Ah.” He sighed, as if this sequence of codons was a blade of light across his mind. “The pilone. This sequence is from the pilone?”

  The aerobus stopped moving and hovered in place above the rain-forest preserve in Chapultepec Park.

  “Yesterday, I ordered a three-pronged investigation of the pilone network’s failure,” said Ofelio. “The team working on the core couldn’t give me anything. Nor could the bio-net team. But Dr. Girardo Castillo was the surgical pathologist whose team performed autopsies on seventeen victims of Big Bonebreaker. His findings were key. Here’s the Castillo report.” Ofelio tapped his screen, sending it to Stark’s memboard. “To sum up, each victim’s pilone wetware had dissolved into so much blood after contracting Big Bonebreaker.”

  Stark scanned the Castillo report. “The airborne virus was designed to attack the wetware—specifically.”

  “Actually, the immune system attacked the wetware,” Isabel said. She shifted to English briefly for Stark’s benefit. “The virus was designed to disable the wetware’s ’self status so that the immune system would identify the pilone as ‘not self,’ and expel it from the body.”

  Stark said to Isabel, “The terrorist was targeting the nationwide network. Is that what you think?”

  “Exactly. Mestizos are not his aim,” she said. “Foreigners without a shred of Native Mexican DNA in their bodies can still have the pilone surgery if they receive Delgado’s viral therapy, as we saw from the North Carolina case. Indeed, viral therapy alters their histoimmunity effectively ‘indianizing’ them, as Joaquin Delgado put it.”

  Isabel paused for a beat. She gave him a look that was imploring, almost lovingly poignant. It was so unexpected that Stark glanced away, then realized the group had fallen quiet and was glaring at him again. He looked back, and Isabel’s loving expression had dissolved to something imploring and sad.

  “He doesn’t understand,” Jarum said, straightening his suit, as if anxious to pull himself out of it. “He’s innocent. For the love of God, someone just tell him and end this ridiculous game.”

  Rosangelica and Sanjuan hissed at Jarum to be silent.

  Innocent? Stark watched Jarum’s face for a clue. “Tell me what? What is this?”

  “We pulled up Universidad Catolica in Monterrey archives,” said Isabel. “This tropism code, down to the codon, was the very sequence that the young Joaquin Delgado used in his groundbreaking viral-therapy work that made the pilone possible.”

  Stark scoffed. “Joaquin?” He laughed. “Joaquin made the pilone possible?” He put his hands on the edge of the table, holding it as if for support. “Joaquin didn’t go to school in Monterrey. He matriculated in Barcelona.”

  Stark looked at the faces of the others at the table. They were all scowling at him—even Isabel, now—as if he were an imbecile.

  “No. That’s a lie he told the world. Delgado was born and raised in Monterrey,” Rosangelica said. “He got his degree just before the Holy Renaissance came to power and was an outspoken critic of Orbegón while he was mayor of Monterrey.”

  Stark’s mouth opened into a square of astonishment. He squinted at Rosangelica, unable to make sense of what she was saying. “Dr. Delgado is from Spain. Born and bred.”

  “His parents, perhaps. But Delgado is a Mexican by birth,” Rosangelica said, grinning, enjoying Stark’s shock.

  Joaquin wasn’t Mexican. He prided himself on his Spanish heritage. This could not be. It was absurd. He always bragged to Stark that he could trace his family back to a medieval lord in the Estremadura of Spain, that he adored his parents’ Barcelona home and would never sell it, that the Spanish culture was so much older and nobler than Mexico with its horrid treatment of Indians and its brutish bent toward fascists like the Holy Renaissance, which he despised, and how they had stolen work of his when he—

  Stark’s
mind walled off the thought. No. It simply could not be. No, no. “This is not what Joaquin would do. This is not how he would handle—”

  “Listen to me, Henry David,” Isabel said. She was reciting a prepared speech, he could tell. “Last night, three sabihondas in Dr. Xultan’s service hacked into Joaquin Delgado’s home drive. The evidence they gathered is damning. Delgado purchased dengue-4 cells and cloned them one year ago. The drive had built-in defenses that could not be overridden, but they learned that much and have the records of that purchase. Here’s the report. The receipts. Testimony from the Sri Lankan dealers who sold him the cells. We both know, you and I, that Joaquin has a history of hatred for the Holy Renaissance—”

  “So do you, Bela,” Stark blurted, ignoring the report on his memboard.

  “—a motive, and, most importantly, the unique skill and knowledge to make this disaster happen.” Her face was an impassive oval behind her helmet’s clear plastic shield. Finally, she cleared her throat. “And if Joaquin is a suspect, then you’re automatically a suspect, too, Henry David.”

  He opened his mouth to retort, but outrage and betrayal had stopped the thought flow in his brain. Isabel might as well have stabbed him. In the past, colleagues might have questioned his statistics or his lab work, but never his honesty. It tormented him that the accusation should come from Isabel, the woman for whom he’d once considered leaving the United States. This accusation could only have been more devastating coming from his own grandfather.

  Sparks seemed to spray before his eyes, as he managed to say, “Bela—that’s—no.”

  Sanjuan said, “Dr. Stark, do you understand what Dr. Khushub just said? You appear to be collaborating with Joaquin Delgado. You appear to be a bioterrorist.”

  Out of instinct, Stark increased the flow of oxygen in his suit to keep from blacking out. The flush of cool air refreshed and cleared his mind and, immediately, he thought of Earl, the intern he’d discovered in his room two days ago. Grandfather was right. The Holy Renaissance had been checking him out in advance of inviting him. If that was true, then they had to suspect he was innocent, too, since there was no evidence for Earl to gather. “I assure you,” Stark said, grasping on to that thought, his voice croaking, “I had nothing to do with this. The first I heard about it—”