The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  While they waited for his assay, Isabel read the report that Stark had pulled up for her. It was marked BLACK LETTER across the top. She glanced at him, eyes rounding, then continued.

  Dolores Barracon. Prostitute. Treated and released for fever and flu May 14 Zedillo Satellite Clinic. Readmitted 5:00 A.M. Zapata May 15. GP speculates dengue, so Epidemiology was contacted. Blood draw. Assay nonconfirming. Refer to Cruz. Primary: Pedro Muñoz.

  Stark had loaded the report with links to the blood draw results and genome prints of this woman’s virus, everything Isabel would need, he hoped, to create an effective T cell in the recoding matrix.

  Isabel typed something into his memboard and handed it back to Stark.

  How did you get this? It’s classified.

  “I’ll explain later,” said Stark. He hit the genome print’s link and a cascade of As, G’s, C’s, and T’s spilled across the little screen. Then he hit MUTATION which compared Patient Barracon’s virus to the virus that Pathology had dubbed Generation T, their earliest known generation of dengue-5 to date. It was a simple computer function to determine that the two viruses were 34 percent similar.

  Isabel sucked in her breath quietly, as if recognizing a rare bird in flight. “You think this might be Generation S?”

  Stark glanced at the technicians in the room. After Muñoz’s revelation that a nurse had told him about Stark’s role on the Task Force, Stark felt surrounded by ears and eyes. He typed, Better than that. It’s either Generation One or Generation Two. He handed the memboard back to Isabel and watched her expression as she realized their research and prospects had just taken a great leap forward. If this really was patient zero, as Muñoz had asserted last night, the question was, did Barracon’s blood contain unmutated virus, straight from the trough, or were they still a step behind Joaquin Delgado? Isabel looked down and the silver light of the memboard reflected across her face shield as she read the genomic report. “Henry David,” she said after a moment. “This isn’t what we hope it is.”

  Stark had imagined that this would take several hours to analyze. “What? Why? How do you know?”

  “Mutation markers.” She showed him the screen but he watched her face. “Wetcoded viruses can’t mutate without leaving markers. It’s like a flaw in a printing press. All subsequent copies will have mutation markers.” She winced. “And this genome has them.”

  He typed angrily, But I’m sure that’s patient zero. He wasn’t ready to tell her about Muñoz, yet.

  She may be, Isabel typed back. But she lived long enough for the virus to mutate.

  Stark deflated. The risky trip into the hot zone felt like a snipe hunt. “This still has to be worth something, right? Tell me that much.”

  Isabel sighed deeply and her breath rushed inside her helmet. Oh yes. It’s at least Generation Two. With Gen 2, I can predict what JD originally scripted in Gen 1. Not 100 percent. But close.

  Stark read her words. “How close, Bela?” asked Stark. “What percentage effectiveness?”

  Isabel thought for a moment, called up the genomic print, and thought some more. “Maybe a nanophage with 95 percent effectiveness, if I get lucky.”

  It wasn’t good enough. With only three days left before the next wave of infections hit, scattershot nanophages weren’t the right strategy, as Isabel herself had said yesterday.

  The option of the immune-recoding project floated before him—only this time, an even greater urgency raced in Stark’s heart. Isabel had to see what Stark had found in Zapata.

  “I want to show you something,” he said. Then he brought up the file called “Grandmother Muñoz’s Tripe Soup.” He hesitated a moment, wondering if he should keep that to himself, confirm with Muñoz that it was what he thought it was, but realized he couldn’t, realized he needed Isabel to help him bear the reality of it. “Here.” Beneath the recipe’s heading was a second heading, which read COLONEL XAVIER SANJUAN S EPIDEMIC INTELLIGENCE SERVICES REPORT TO THE HOLY RENAISSANCE.

  “Dr. Stark,” the snotty technician said, “you’re white. Leave whenever you’re ready. Please.”

  Isabel looked like she was shrinking inside her suit and helmet as she read, unable to mask her loathing. “What is this?”

  “Read.” Stark picked up his Racal-plus suit, his shirt, and clean clothes. “I think you’ll agree we’re obligated to move quickly. Let me change, then let’s find Ahwaz.”

  The changing room was nothing more than an old broom closet. It smelled like bleach and sour antivirals. Stark kept smacking his wrists against the walls as he wrestled into his new Racal-plus suit and wondered what should be done with that memboard filled with Zapata information. They would have to download the pertinent files that Isabel needed—namely, the genomic analysis of Patient Barracon’s virus.

  But how to handle Sanjuan’s EIS report? Delete it? Stark could appeal to no authority in Mexico. Yet as a policy statement advocating genocide, the report seemed too volatile for one person to erase or ignore. An old, quiet voice in Stark, the part of him that had grown up on his grandfather’s farm in Land Reform America, wanted to protect the people targeted by this report, wanted justice. Revenge. They let it go, this old voice fumed. Bastards let the virus spread just like in the Tuskegee syphilis study. Bastards should pay.

  But the archly practical Special Pathogens agent dismissed that voice. Stark couldn’t afford to be a jailed whistle blower when Mexico needed him to be the best virus hunter he could be. Nor could Isabel resist any longer. The best way to make the Holy Renaissance pay was to stop the outbreak and expose this information afterward.

  When Stark stepped out of the changing room, Rosangelica was standing by the ALHEPA air lock, her thin body leaning against the wall like a rifle.

  Stark froze, hand on the closet doorknob. The Zapata computer terminal’s warning flashed across his mind’s eye as if Stark himself had a pilone connection to the hospital. “The Ministry of Health is now being alerted to your request. Please wait.”

  To hide his shock at seeing the sabihonda, Stark immediately bent over and fussed with his ankle locks. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the memboard in Isabel’s hand, perched there, brimming with damning evidence that could either get him killed or bring down a government or both. When he stood upright, Stark let his face go passive, slack, his eyes drowsy. “Rosangelica, hello.” His stomach felt like a teakettle ready to whistle.

  The medical staff had all found jobs on the opposite side of the screening room away from the sabihonda. She turned toward Stark, and he could see by her expression that she was excited about something. “I tracked you down,” she said with a curt nod, seemingly pleased with herself.

  He waited for her to speak again, explain herself, and give him a clue as to whether or not she knew he had been to Zapata. He came to stand by Isabel, next to the couch, and casually put a hand on her shoulder.

  Beneath his hand, Isabel started. He glanced down at the memboard to see what she was reading. It was still that bastard Sanjuan’s Epidemic Intelligence Report. Black Letter. He caught the words solution to the indigenous problem.

  “Can we talk, Stark?” Rosangelica said.

  She sounded eager, not her usual deadpan neutral voice. Stark was frightened of what made her eager. (Access granted. Ministry of Health alerted.) He inclined his head toward Isabel. “I was hoping to talk to Dr. Khushub about a recent breakthrough. Can it wait, Rosangelica?”

  “A breakthrough?” She sounded surprised, honestly surprised—which was good. “I haven’t heard anything new from the health boards. What breakthrough?”

  Isabel was a pathetic liar but smart enough to know not to try. She looked up from the horrors contained in the EIS report, eyes blank as empty saucers.

  “We’re not sure what we have,” Stark said. “That’s why we haven’t posted any reports yet.” He was trying to sound frustrated, then decided to lay the groundwork for future lies. “I hope that it’s Generation Two.”

  “Two? A number designa
tion instead of a letter?” Rosangelica nodded. “That does sound promising.”

  “I hope.”

  “What would that mean?” Rosangelica asked.

  Stark was so paranoid that he couldn’t bring himself to look Rosangelica in the eye. He wished he could rub his face and hide behind his hands for a moment. Instead, he shut his eyes, playing the role of exhausted researcher. “If we’re lucky, it could mean a very effective nanophage.”

  “And T cell,” Isabel said. She showed Stark her eyes and her furious resolve. “The recoding project suddenly seems a more viable option to me.”

  Stark caught his breath. Generation Two increases our odds of a successful recoding matrix, too. Stark wanted to shout with joy when he realized what had put the fire back in those glorious eyes. Isabel Khushub, the woman who came riding into Cairo like the cavalry when it looked like smallpox was going to explode unchecked across the planet, was finally here and on his side in Mexico. Goddamn hallelujah, baby.

  “Adorable. You two kissed and made nice. In that case, you will definitely want to hear what I have to say, Estarque,” Rosangelica said, raising her thumb. Out.

  Damn her. She could sound eager one minute and harsh the next. She gonna accuse me of something?

  Stark said to Isabel, “Can we talk later, Doctor?”

  As though released from a trap, Isabel quickly stood. “Of course. I should get back to the Institute anyway.” She took a step away from the couch, leaving the memboard where she had dropped it.

  “Please,” Stark said, offhanded, smothering his own jolting fright, “why don’t you go ahead and take that memboard? We’ll discuss all the ramifications after you’ve had a chance to read it more thoroughly.”

  Isabel had no subterfuge in her. She looked like he’d asked her to pick up a scorpion. “Yes,” Isabel said without moving to take it. “I can take the memboard.”

  “Consult with Dr. Ahwaz about this too, please,” Stark said as he scooped it into her hand.

  Rosangelica turned, leading them out of the screening room. Light from a high clerestory of stained-glass windows threw blue-and-yellow light down on the trio, and bells clanged as a gaggle of clamp-masked nuns on bicycles passed in the hallway’s road.

  Stark put a hand on Isabel’s arm and gently pushed her, cueing her to get moving. “I’ll call you when I’m free, Bela. We’ll have plenty of time to talk later.”

  “Fine. That’s just fine.” As if unmoored from Rosangelica, Isabel started walking slowly down the hall, then, once she was a few yards away, broke into a run for the nearest elevator. The last bike-riding nun had to swerve to avoid hitting her.

  Rosangelica pointed down the hallway, the opposite direction. “Let’s go. We have work to do.”

  The sabihonda’s apartment was located just off Torre Cuauhtémoc’s Triforium with its halls of pointed arches. Not merely the home of Mexico’s Majority, its corporate elite and political power center, the Triforium was the Holy Renaissance’s home turf. Cardinal de Veras and his rival church were here, and, the rumors went, the Orbegón family residence, too. Stark and Rosangelica entered a terra-cotta-tiled courtyard with palms and birds-of-paradise bobbing under ceiling fans and a slanted glass roof of red and orange.

  Inside, Rosangelica’s apartment was posh, just like Stark’s. Her windows faced east, so the light was diffuse at this time of day, making the dark, wooden molding of her rooms ominous. As she turned on lamps, Stark couldn’t read her expression. He braced himself for an onslaught of accusations. Get him alone, away from his ally Isabel, probe him. Pathology of the sabihonda.

  After flinging back the drapes that had covered the east windows, Rosangelica went to her closet and removed a rifle case.

  Stark coughed. “What do you need a gun for?”

  “I spoke with my superiors,” she said, “and they agreed.” She removed another lugall that looked too small for clothes and books—probably ammunition by the metallic clank within.

  “Agreed to what?”

  Rosangelica frowned at him as if he were ill. “What do you mean ’to what? To your proposal. To grant Sor Domenica free sanctuary in La Alta.”

  Stark sat down hard. He’d forgotten all about his “proposal,” which had primarily been a means to get Rosangelica away from him for a few hours. He hadn’t hoped in his wildest fantasies that the Holy Renaissance would actually agree to that. He listened to the clank of the ammunition packs for a moment, gathering himself. “Free sanctuary, eh? Then why do you have a Matador class rifle?”

  She laughed at him. “What kind of idiot would go into the hot zone without a loaded gun?”

  Stark watched her load it, slipping three different sizes of magazines into six separate chambers. The gun’s power cell had the pilone symbol on the side, the jagged lightning bolt, and Stark wondered what sort of gun the Matador was. “The Holy Renaissance agreed to allow Domenica to make a broadcast appeal to the insurgents?” Stark asked.

  “That’s right. If we can find her this afternoon, we can broadcast tonight.”

  Stark tried to keep his thoughts from spilling out of control. “So we have to find her. OK.” His inclination was to delay, go back to his room, plot. But there was no time. This was working too well. “OK then. OK. How do we find Domenica?”

  With the rifle loaded, Rosangelica spread her hands as though revealing her winning hand. “No worries, Estarque. I know exactly where she is.”

  “You do? How?”

  “Her long-range trinity boosts,” she said, tapping her forehead. “I’ve been searching for her all afternoon while talking to—to my superiors. Domenica has someone very good protecting her. Very difficult to triangulate on the ground and pinpoint her signal. But I did it from orbit once I got clearance. Sagrado servicio really wants to know where she is, but she’s as good as dead if I tell them.” She zipped up her Matador.

  “And this is on the level? Cazador won’t disappear her once we get her back to Ascensión?” Stark said. “What assurances do I have?”

  She smirked her most condescending smirk. “None.”

  Stark gripped the arms of his chair.

  “But,” Rosangelica said, laughing at his discomfort, “if we can convince Domenica to convince the insurgents to put down their arms, then the Holy Renaissance will give her sanctuary. It’s in everyone’s best interests, right?”

  Stark edged forward on his seat with an eager lurch of his body, about to make his next flood of requests: a full-media broadcast for Domenica, Orbegón at her side, the whole dog-and-pony show so that Joaquin could see where Domenica was. But suddenly Stark saw the hole in this half-assed plan of his, a hole so wide it filled him with dread. “And if Sister Domenica doesn’t agree?”

  Rosangelica stared at Stark for such a long time that he wondered if she’d heard him. “You can’t have it both ways, Stark,” she said finally. Slow blink. Dead eyes.

  Stark’s chest went cold and his hands sweat. Don’t jump into the middle of anything and bullshit your way out, like you usually do, the grandfather in his brain was saying.

  “That nun is fomenting civil unrest by siding with the insurgents.” Rosangelica swung the lugall full of ammo back into her closet. “You said yourself it was impeding your investigation.”

  Imagining that he was on a field trip to help a wetwared secret agent kill a psychotic nun, Stark wondered if the outbreak had slipped beyond his grasp. “I’ll just have to convince her of the right thing to do, I guess.”

  “I guess you will.” Rosangelica hefted her gun case.

  LONG AGO, Filomeno Mata Avenue was probably a bustling, volcanic brick-paved alley between façades of crumbling Old Money. The street might have housed modest businesses in the last century or important families in the century before that. While its buildings were still beautiful with Austrian scrollwork on the lintels, Mexico’s New Money had obviously digested and forgotten this little avenue with the rise of La Alta’s wealthy Gallery neighborhood, the gilded Triforium, and their plasc
eron-patios in the heavens.

  Just a few blocks from the hot zone’s ground zero of Zapata, this cobble-stoned Mata Avenue seemed more than forgotten. It was beautifully dead.

  “Mata 11. That’s her safe house, I think,” Rosangelica said, standing on the sidewalk beneath a chipped and weathered stone balcony. Because of her too-straight posture, her Racal suit looked like a marionette, turning this way and that, rifle slung over one shoulder. She was scanning the street’s addresses, embossed on brass plates on every blond-stone building. “It should be right here.”

  They had lowered their barco onto Tacuba Avenue and walked, looking for Filomeno Mata, where Rosangelica’s satellites had told her she would find the vanguard of Los Hijos de Marcos and the trinity boosts that Domenica used for broadcasts. They passed the old National Art Museum and walked through its plaza, past a neat stack of twenty or so bodies near the statue of the ancient and hated Carlos I V, last Spanish king over Mexico. A man walked around the pile of corpses with a can of gasoline, dousing it. Carlos looked on.

  Stark craned his neck as he passed, watching the gasoline splash. “Mata 11 is that way, I think.”

  “Yeah, I know, it’s probably at the corner,” Rosangelica said. “I have a map right in front of me.”

  Stark turned away as the man lit a match. He heard the whoosh of gasoline igniting. Stark told himself not to look back, but he did anyway. The stacked bodies burned, and skin ran like wax. Fatty soot unfurled from the bonfire and blew over Carlos, rendering him a silhouette in smoke.

  “Did you hear me? I said, I have a map right in—”

  “Yes,” Stark said, nausea making his voice croak froglike for a moment. “Can we stay on task, please?”

  Rosangelica lifted her face and the filter of her gas mask pointed at the sky. The greasy smoldering from a hundred bonfires lay like a lake of smoke in the sky, and the fans of the nearest La Alta tower, Tower Juárez, were drawing it in. “Look at that.”

  Stark didn’t look. “Let’s go.”

  Rosangelica kept her head craned back as she watched the smoke rise from the bonfire. “You know the instances of influenza and other common diseases in Ascensión have lessened since putting the tower filters on maximum output?”