Jarum stood waiting for her to enter the room. “Whenever you’re ready, Doctor.”
Isabel looked over her shoulder and made a face at him. “This isn’t a foquin nightclub. You’ll get in.”
“Yes? Well, it’s a HEPA filter, not a car wash,” Jarum said, trying his hand at a little sarcasm in Spanish. “You don’t have to stand there and—”
“Would you two quit it?” Stark shouted.
As Isabel and Jarum took seats near the netmonitor, Emil the Damned listed the Task Force’s accomplishments over the last nine days: pilone net functional; 520,000 vaccinated in the states surrounding the distrito federal (thanks in no small part to the pilone going up two days ago); rabid outbreaks isolated in Cuernavaca, Cholula, and Managua where pilone users were fewer; and Ascensión’s mortality rate was down from nearly 2,000 deaths per day at the height of the outbreak to less than 150 per day over the last seventy-two hours. Orbegón gave all the credit to former Minister Sanjuan.
“But I must be completely honest with you, Mexicanistas. We have reached a critical juncture,” Orbegón said. “An even greater danger than we’ve already experienced is directly in front of us. If a cure for Big Bonebreaker is not found immediately, we may see even more loss of precious life. That’s why the Holy Renaissance has called in one of the greatest scientific minds of our time, Dr. Henry David Stark.”
The four doctors in the room leaned back in their chairs and looked at one another as if their roller coaster car had just lurched forward.
“Dr. Stark’s track record as a Special Pathogens agent is superb, having worked the famous Borna epidemic in Guangzhou, China, and most notably, the smallpox outbreak in Egypt.” Orbegón gave an absurd nod of his cinder-block head. “His efforts to stop the virus are already under way, and if anyone can stop Big Bonebreaker, it’s Dr. Stark.”
Stark stood and turned off the monitor with an angry punch.
“If I may?” Jarum said with real concern in his voice. “I believe they’re setting you up, Henry David.”
Muñoz laughed at Jarum with a mix of reproof and mockery.
Scrunching up his eyes, Stark did the math and decided that they were already operating on borrowed time. Five days ago, Isabel had predicted that a new wave of infections would hit in four to six days. Current rates of vaccination and efficacy levels of Isabel and Jarum’s new nanophages had obviously bought Mexico more time—but those efforts were merely staving off the inevitable. In twenty-four to thirty hours, the viruses would breed three more generations and completely mutate, rendering the weekend’s new nanophages useless. Joaquin’s twin demons were unforgiving, so Stark walked himself through the worst case scenario: By tomorrow mid-day at the latest, a tiny percentage of dengue-5 and dengue-6 would worm free and breed. The collective immunity of Ascensión would give way the perimeter clinics would clog with bodies by tomorrow night, and, with omnivalent vaccine caches about to be used up, Big Bonebreaker would spread unchecked across Mexico the day after tomorrow.
When Stark opened his eyes, he could see that his three colleagues were looking at him with pity. They saw what he saw, and the daily rain beat against the windows.
“Update, Recoding Project?” Stark said to Isabel and Jarum. Through a plasceron window, Jarum’s bank of three ia.’s gleamed black against the white of the laboratory. Black-and-white photographs of Jarum’s three daughters, pencil-colored by his oldest, hung on the frame of one computer. “What happened to Debora3 this morning?”
Jarum and Isabel seemed to negotiate who would report to the Task Force Coordinator with a series of glances and, finally, Jarum, ever the gentleman, deferred.
“Not good, but not a total loss,” Isabel said. Her voice was clear, hard, and it worked on Stark like a tonic. “My original conclusions are bearing out. There’s no way to save the volunteer and keep the target lymphocyte cell viable,” Isabel said, almost as if this were good news. “They are at cross-purposes in the procedure.”
Stark made a little noise of affirmation and straightened. “Did you try infecting Debora3 with your new working model of Generation One?”
“Yes,” Jarum said. He did not seem quite as energized by their findings as Isabel did. “But only the real Generation One virus would render more effective results.”
For a moment, Stark’s mind flitted to Sister Domenica. She safe? He glanced at his cell phone, briefly confused, as always, by the Farsi keypad (tens of thousands had been donated by Iran when the pilone network went down). No calls. It was an obsession, now, checking for calls from the Convent of Guadalupe.
Stark looked up from his phone and caught Muñoz staring at him, the same scrutinizing stare that he’d been giving Stark lately, the same stare that Muñoz had given him when the two were deducing Joaquin’s pattern of targeting Sister Domenica together. Pedro, you seeing through me? Stark wondered, returning Munoz’s stare. Predicting the second outbreak, seeing mouth pustules as symptomatic of early viral mutations—the man obviously had an antenna on him to rival the nun’s. Had Muñoz determined Stark’s plan to capture a sample of Generation One? Perhaps. No, probably. Stark wished he could be open with Muñoz—he admired him, truly liked him. But after Isabel of all people had accused Stark of helping Joaquin Delgado, Stark felt he could trust no one. That no one could trust him, either. A plan to lure Joaquin into the open, no matter how logical it might be to do so, would probably simply appear as conspiracy in Ascensión’s culture of paranoia. Sorry, Pedro, Stark thought, and looked away.
“The old system still won’t accept the new long enough to allow T cell differentiation or the matrix to learn from that differentiation,” Jarum was saying. “I calculated a success rate of 15 percent for this matrix.”
“Well, 15 percent,” Isabel said, surprised, impressed, “is better than I ever got, Jarum. Well done.”
Stark was surprised by Isabel’s note of optimism. So, 15 percent sounds good to her? He bit his lower lip. Hoo, we so screwed.
“But,” Jarum said, “I have something new to go on for the matrix.”
Isabel sat back, crossing her legs, annoyed. Typical consultation with Jarum and Isabel, Stark thought. The left hand ever outdoing the right.
Jarum touched his memboard’s screen, pulling up his morning’s work. “I went back to Dr. Delgado’s original notes on Isabel’s project, archived at Barcelona Technical.” He folded his arms and spoke to Isabel, probably thinking that Stark and Muñoz wouldn’t really understand him anyway. “Delgado’s supposition that virus and immune response are evolutionarily linked provided me with a few insights to Protein Three’s codon arrangement. I took the liberty of stealing several more arrangements right from dengue-5’s genome and inserting them into the matrix. It wasn’t enough to save Debora3.” He smiled. “But then, I considered what you discovered about dengue-5, Isabel.”
Isabel nodded. “Which was?”
Jarum’s voice thrummed with excitement. “Histocompatibility. The moment that virus and immune system meet and exchange identifications is where—”
“Piss on that. We’ve gone through that,” Isabel said. “It’s not about rejection, it’s about compatible systems—”
“We didn’t make it thoroughly compatible. The tropism sequence!” Jarum said with a little strangled noise of excitement. “Remember?”
Stark looked at Muñoz for a translation, but he shrugged. Jarum and Isabel were speaking their own shorthand now.
“The scrap of Native Mexican DNA in the virus’s tropism sequence, telling it what to attack?” Jarum said. “I believe it’s a passkey that works both ways—not only for the virus to target the immune system but for the immune system to identify the virus. I believe it’s a base code even for the very surface proteins of the virus, which Joaquin stripped down so far as to be unrecognizable by a Native Mexican immune response. But he couldn’t do away with that one last code. That’s what we need for the recoding project to be a success.”
“Jarum, that would require entering that
sequence into every shitty little cell in the foquin body involved in T cell production,” Isabel said.
“Can we afford to pin our hopes on 15 percent?”
Isabel shrugged in exhaustion.
“I already provided the structural foundation for this new code with the work I did on Protein Three,” Jarum said to Stark, making his pitch when Isabel relented. “Personally, I think this is the right direction.”
Stark was distracted by a shadow passing across the atrium window, and, a moment later, the sabihonda, in long coat and boots, barely paused in the particle arrester as she entered the room, the skirts of her black cloak rustling. Rosangelica glanced at the faces of the four doctors as if she were scanning the pieces on a board, midgame. “What’s happening here, Doctors? Three volunteers are awaiting instruction in the recoding project labs.”
Stark leaned back, hands behind his head. “We were about to discuss the Task Force’s next plan of attack.”
“A new plan of attack? Really?” Rosangelica said, her voice singsong with sarcasm. She pulled up a chair and sat backwards, legs spread, leaning her elbows on its back. “What a surprise. Maybe skulking around Zapata Hospital put the fear of God in our Task Force Coordinator?”
Oh damn. Stark had wondered when this moment would come. They know. Out of the corner of his eye, Stark could see Muñoz lowering his head to let the crown of his helmet block his face. “Afraid? Of what?” Stark said, trying to keep cool. “I broke quarantine and I got the information we needed regarding patient zero.”
“The ends justify the means, eh? You’ll get no argument from Emil Orbegón on that score.” The sabihonda was clearly relishing the tension in the room. “But how can I trust you when you lie to me like that?”
“Yes, how to trust someone who breaks a ridiculous law in order to save lives?” Stark laughed but he knew it sounded forced and furious. “It’s a mystery.”
She closed her eyes. “We’ll settle up over lawbreaking later, Estarque. And with you, Dr. del Negro.” Those silver pupils shone at Muñoz and Stark felt his breath leave him. “Or are you going by Muñoz again?”
Muñoz bowed his head, unable to look Rosangelica in the eye, Stark could tell. He was about to insist that Muñoz’s name was del Negro, but he told himself that Rosangelica wouldn’t be chatting like this if she knew about Grandmother Muñoz’s Tripe Soup recipe or that Stark and Isabel had read Sanjuan’s genocidal recommendation. If the sabihonda knew, they would have already been drawn and quartered, and realizing that, he felt a bit braver. “Rosangelica, the grown-ups are busy,” he said. “We can’t play spy with you right now.”
Rosangelica gave a twisted smile. “What’s the new direction, Estarque?”
Stark explained what Jarum had proposed, that the base code from Joaquin’s Monterrey work had provided hope for creating a more effective T cell, but that the time it would take was almost prohibitive. “However,” Stark said, “we have over twenty WHO-affiliated wetcode labs worldwide willing to help us. Coordinating with them—”
“I’ll be brutally honest with the Task Force,” Rosangelica said, cutting him off and pausing. “We don’t have the time, as Dr. Khushub admirably put it, to enter that sequence into every shitty little cell in the foquin body.”
“Sons of whores.” Isabel let out a shocked gasp as she heard her own words coming from the sabihonda’s mouth.
Stark’s mind reeled in fright for a moment. Rosangelica got a bug on us. His eyes flitted over the memboards, their suits, the speakers in the atrium that allowed them to speak to medicos in the hot labs, the computers, the netmonitors. Who knew how many ways the sabihonda could have tapped their conversation? Stark felt even more grateful that he had never uttered aloud his plan to use Domenica as bait for Joaquin to anyone but Domenica down in La Baja.
Rosangelica suddenly seemed like a bird of prey in that chair, perched but ready for flight. “The United States has managed a twenty percent troop buildup since the start of the Big Bonebreaker outbreak. We’re on the verge of being outmanned at the border. Emil wants a quicker end to this outbreak,” she said. “One hundred fifty deaths a day and another delay from the Task Force are not satisfactory.”
Stark had relied on rudeness as a tool his whole career. The petty needs of governmental figures nearly always required that an epidemiologist browbeat and humiliate them into understanding the limits of their power during an outbreak. Though Rosangelica scared him to his bones, he let Stark, the Special Pathogens agent, take over. “Rosangelica, did you read the morning medical boards?”
Rosangelica blinked slowly, pondering him. “Yes.”
“Then you know it has been established that political pressure has no effect on dengue-5. I believe it was Dr. Huffenpuff who proved that.”
Raising her chin, lips pressed together, Rosangelica clearly had more to say, but instead she smirked at him. “You don’t think Emil would pull you off this Task Force?”
“Domenica and Los Hijos stopped the civil unrest that Orbegón couldn’t,” Stark said, throwing punches for the hell of it now. “Troop movements? Please. Let’s move on.”
“You are in no position to talk shit with me, Stark.”
“And you’re no doctor. Shut up or leave. Those are your options.”
Rosangelica grinned at Stark like he was a piece of fruit she intended to devour. “You’re a good flirt, papi.” Glancing at Jarum and Isabel, she said, “You’re the two I trust now. I want to talk to you about this proposal later. I can’t sign off on it, Doctors. It’s dangerous.”
Rubbing his hands together like he was wringing wet towels, Jarum’s eyes were wide, his mouth, firmly pursed. He was too aghast at the whole situation to respond.
Isabel gathered herself, and cursed, “Me cago en la tapa del organo y me revuelco encima de la mierda.”
She a cuss-poet, Stark thought. That one was so bizarre, he couldn’t even translate it.
“Are you insane?” Isabel shouted. “We can’t rush into this with only a 15 percent chance of success.”
“I disagree, Dr. Khushub,” Rosangelica calmly replied. “You have as many shots on goal as you like. Three volunteers and a 15 percent chance per shot is better than delaying further.”
Like the high barbed-wire fencing he’d seen around the hot zones when he first arrived, Rosangelica’s “roll the dice” attitude grimly appealed to the cold tactician in Stark. But killing human beings as they had just killed Deboras 1 through 3 would crack Isabel—and perhaps others. “No, Rosangelica. That’s absurd. I’ll talk to Cazador. He’ll understand that a higher percentage of success is preferable to—”
“Cazador now reports to me, Stark. Which means ultimately you report to me, too.”
Isabel scoffed. “Henry David doesn’t report to mules fucking on a beach, sabihonda, and we won’t kill indiscriminately. Do you have wetcoders in the wings ready to take our places?” She put a hand on Jarum’s shoulder. “Do you have anyone who can recode the entire immune system?”
Rosangelica’s pause was long enough for Stark to say, “Leave. You’re in the way, Rosangelica.”
“We don’t have an answer of how to proceed,” Rosangelica said, “and I don’t leave policy discussions.”
“This is a medical consultation and you aren’t helping.”
To everyone’s surprise, Rosangelica relented with a sigh. “A few volunteers,” she said, standing up, walking to the door, “or several more hundred dead.” Before leaving, she looked at Stark, and said, “I don’t trust you. There’s something behind your delay, and I intend to find out what it is.”
Only one window in the atrium looked out onto the inner, hollow shaft of Torre Cuauhtémoc where peseros and swoop jets climbed and dove, their beacons blinking red and blue. Through that window, Stark could see the massive epaulets and bearded chin of the Federal Cloister’s gigantic military figure. Stark suddenly realized that Orbegón’s naming Stark publicly and Rosangelica’s hostility were interlinked. The Holy Renaissance w
as preparing to disappear him.
“I laugh while I shit on these foquin pederasts,” Isabel murmured to no one in particular.
“I’ll contact the WHO-affiliated laboratories,” Stark said to the other three. “Get me all your recent findings, Jarum, and your recommendations for how to proceed.” He stood. “I have to meet with the volunteers and make sure they’re ready.”
Isabel, for her part, seemed relieved that they had a path that didn’t lead straight to killing human guinea pigs, so she finalized plans with Jarum to coordinate with WHO.
Stark left the atrium and headed for the nearest boost, the boots of his moon suit clopping on the cobblestone street. As he waited for the boost to arrive, Muñoz appeared next to him.
“That was awful,” Muñoz said.
“Are you worried?” Stark asked.
“Of course.”
“I guess that shows you’re smarter than I am.”
That look was back, Muñoz’s cutting stare as if his eyes were trying to peel back the very skin of Stark’s face. “I have something I want—that I need. Something I want to ask of you,” Muñoz said.
The boost arrived and they stepped in after a group of men in gloves, clamp masks, and tuxedos exited. “What is it?”
The doors closed behind them and they plunged downward. Outside the elevator, they could see the giant statue’s hands, resting on giant biceps as though hugging its giant self.
“Are you what you appear to be?” Muñoz said.
The boost kept falling and a swoop jet shrieked by. “What kind of question is that?” The layers of distrust around him were confounding to Stark. “After what Rosangelica just said to me? You ask me a question like that?”
“I have a feeling,” Muñoz said, “that I know what you’re up to.”
Could Rosangelica hear this conversation? And if she did, would it matter, if she and Orbegón had already made up their minds about Stark? He stopped the boost. Outside, the wounds in the giant hands looked all too real.
Stark didn’t think that Muñoz could have really deduced that he was trying to trap Joaquin. But the man had proven himself to have more than just a deductive mind, so Stark took out his phone. “What’s your number?”
The Patron Saint of Plagues Page 34
