by Jon McGoran
Regi’s eyes went distant for a moment, then he winced.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Portia is dead,” he said. He managed two full seconds before the horror of it overcame him and he dissolved into tears.
“What?” She put her arm around him. “What happened?”
He just shook his head, unable to talk.
Watching the two of them comforting each other over their losses made me that much more determined not to suffer a similar fate, or to cause Nola to. But it also reinforced my determination to stop the bastards responsible for it.
I thought about all those bodies in Gaden and the ones in Saint Benezet. Gone without a trace. So many lives lost, so many survivors scarred by sorrow, never to be whole again.
The question of how Portia had died hung in the room, unanswered. Regi wasn’t ready to tell her yet.
“I brought your files to show Regi,” I said.
Her eyes showed the tiniest flicker of hope as she turned to Regi. “Did you see them?”
He shook his head.
“The police confiscated them from me. We just got them back.” I pulled the bag out and showed her. “A little worse for wear.”
She unbuttoned the top of her blouse. “I have them, as well,” she said, pulling out a sheaf of paper. The pages were crumpled and yellowed, looking almost as rough around the edges as she did.
She gave them to Regi, and he started leafing through them.
“These are better,” he said quietly.
“There’s more to tell you,” I said. “But we need to get going.”
“Going where?” Miriam asked.
“We have some samples we need to test. We are going to the university.”
“Not your lab?”
Regi shook his head. “The facilities are better at the school. Besides, these are interesting times at work.”
60
We took Elena’s dented Mitsubishi and left the Jeep parked around the corner—the weapons and the keys stashed under the seats with Officer Turnier’s wool cap. Miriam sank down low in the back to avoid being seen. Regi drove, weaving between the cars and trucks and bicycles and pedestrians, his voice oddly detached as he told Miriam what had been going on.
“Ebola?” she exclaimed, sitting up when he told her about Saint Benezet. “That’s ridiculous. There were no signs of Ebola when we were there. And there hasn’t been Ebola in Haiti. Did people test positive?”
He shook his head. “The Interior Ministry sealed the village,” he said quietly. “They claimed authority, and Dissette let them.” He wiped his eyes as he drove. “They said there were no survivors.”
“There’s always survivors,” she said, barely a whisper, as if she could see where this was going.
Regi cleared his throat and got himself under control. “They said there were none. And in order to eliminate the possibility of an epidemic, they incinerated the village.”
Miriam clamped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide above it.
“I had already tested the Soyagene for allergenicity against the samples from Saint Benezet, but it was negative. Stoma Grow was positive, but that doesn’t quite make sense. Anyway, yesterday, while Doyle and I were trying to find some kind of connection to the Soyagene theft, a call came in. Another outbreak of the same respiratory distress syndrome, this time at Gaden, another tiny village a couple miles away.” His voice was steady, but tears began to roll down his face. “Portia went to investigate, to deliver inhalers and take samples, as before. We went after her, but the police had already sealed the village. They wouldn’t let us in. They said it too was Ebola.”
“It wasn’t Ebola,” Miriam whispered again.
“We snuck in through the woods,” he continued.
We were driving through the eastern outskirts of the city, past the airport. Regi drifted to a stop on the side of the road.
“It wasn’t Ebola,” Miriam repeated.
Regi shook his head. “No. It wasn’t Ebola. They had been shot. The whole village. We found them piled up in one of the houses. Dozens of them.” He suppressed a shudder, taking a deep breath before he continued. “Portia was among them.”
“Oh, Regi,” she said, tears streaming down her dirty face. She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around his neck, squeezing him tight. “I’m so sorry.”
“They burned the whole village,” he said, holding her arms around him for a moment. Then he patted her arms, and she sat back, wiping the tears from her face.
Regi resumed driving. “Portia took blood samples from the villagers at Gaden,” he continued. “So we have to test them, to see if they react to anything. But also we must test it for Ebola.”
“There’s no Ebola,” she whispered, her face turning paler as the news about Gaden and Saint Benezet continued to sink in. She slumped back down in her seat, and this time I don’t think it was because she was hiding.
“We have to be sure,” Regi said quietly.
“We’re all going to die,” she said softly. She sounded almost relieved.
“No, we’re not,” I said.
As we drove in silence for a few minutes, she regained her composure. “So what is this all about?”
“I think Ducroix is planning a coup,” Regi said gravely, turning to me as he said it.
“A coup?” Miriam said.
I nodded. “I was wondering if that might be part of it.”
“Dominique Ducroix has never been a big supporter of Alain Cardon,” Regi said. “He supported Charles Martine in the last election. Cardon kept him on for political reasons. But he is constantly talking about rebel activity when all I see are peaceful protests. He seems to be overstating the threat to justify his increased presence on the street. I warned Cardon not to give him too much power.”
I nodded. “I don’t know how Gaden and Saint Benezet fit into it, but our friends from Energene and Stoma seemed pretty cozy with Ducroix, and they would surely benefit from a change.”
“They could just be here for the trade summit, right?” Miriam asked. “And talking to Ducroix about the Soyagene theft?”
I shrugged. “Possibly, but they seem to be up to something else. We saw them meeting with Ducroix. At his house.”
“It would make sense,” Regi said, as if talking to himself. “If they want to control Haiti’s vote on the trade agreement, guarantee access to the agricultural free-trade zone, they might try to topple Cardon before the vote takes place.”
“When is the vote set for?” I asked.
“Monday.”
“That’s the day after tomorrow.”
Miriam looked confused. “But if the Soyagene is not allergenic, how does it fit in? What about Saint Benezet and Gaden?”
“I don’t know,” Regi said.
“Maybe they somehow got in the way,” I said quietly. “Maybe that’s just what they do to people who get in the way.” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud. When I looked back, Miriam had lost some of her recently regained composure.
“If that is the case,” Regi said, “we must make sure they didn’t die in vain.”
61
The Université Roi Henri Christophe was ten miles outside the city, just past the town of Limonade, on a luxuriously smooth stretch of modern highway. It was less than twenty minutes by car. The campus consisted of a cluster of modern buildings with an enclosed pavilion at the entrance and a large courtyard. It even had ample parking.
We were a quarter mile away from it when I noticed the police, a cluster of cars and a crowd of officers in tactical gear milling around on the edge of the highway by the entrance. As we got closer, I saw the students inside the gate, two hundred of them gathered around a concrete monument, chanting and holding up banners and crudely drawn signs. The signs looked a lot like the ones at the other protests, with plenty of drawings of corn and other plants, and plenty of slogans, some reading AYITI POU AYITI, some with the Stoma logo or the letters GMO with a big red line through them. A handful of them mention
ed Ebola and cholera, and I wondered if the fake secret was becoming a fake rumor.
The police looked bored, but there was a definite air of menace about them.
Regi whispered, “Ayayay.”
Miriam leaned forward. “What is it?”
His foot came off the gas, but he didn’t touch the brakes. Instead, we coasted past the college’s main entrance. A few of the police watched us go by.
“Are those rebels?” Miriam asked, looking at the protestors.
Regi shook his head. “There are no rebels. Those are students protesting in support of farmers. Against the agricultural free-trade zone just down the road. Against Stoma and Energene.”
Just past the university, Regi turned slowly into a side entrance and followed a driveway around to the back of the campus. The sound of chanting faded behind the buildings.
We parked near a rear door, and Regi swiped his ID to open it. We followed him to a lab on the third floor. The hallways were empty, and the building was silent except for our footsteps and the muffled sound of chanting from outside.
I could see them from the lab window, the protestors inside the gate and the police on the outside.
Regi placed Portia’s bag and Miriam’s files on the table. As he started pulling lab equipment out of the cabinets, I took the files over to the window and studied them in the daylight, hoping this time something would jump out at me.
“We will be doing ELISA tests for both the Ebola and the allergens,” Regi announced. “The Ebola test takes longer, a couple of hours, so we’ll start that first.”
“I can help,” Miriam said.
He looked at her and smiled. “Thank you. We will take proper precautions, but if this is Ebola, there are still risks.”
She smiled bitterly and shook her head. “There is no Ebola.”
“Even so.”
They put on plastic shield masks, yellow plastic gowns, and blue nitrile gloves. I gave them plenty of space. I was confident it wasn’t Ebola, too, but it still made me nervous.
“We’ll be doing a similar tests for the Ebola and for the allergen. For the Ebola test, we have these well plates, courtesy of the World Health Organization.” He held up a stack of individually wrapped rectangular plastic plates, each covered with rows of dots or indentations. I couldn’t tell if the play-by-play was because he was used to teaching there or because he wanted us to understand exactly what he was doing. Whatever the reason, it seemed to have a calming effect on all of us. Maybe that was the point.
“Each well is pre-coated with a monoclonal antibody that binds to a glycoprotein in the Ebola virus. We put the samples in and give them sixty minutes to bind. Then we wash them to remove the material that is not Ebola. Next, we’ll apply a second antibody that binds to a different part of the Ebola virus. After a quick rinse, we’ll apply a detection molecule followed by a reaction agent. If any of them turn blue, there is Ebola present.”
He looked at us as that hung in the air, then he turned to Portia’s bag on the table and pulled out the two Ziploc bags with the blood samples. He paused again, looking at them in his hands. They were all that was left of the people of Gaden. Apart from those samples, there was only ash.
“This part takes about an hour,” he said quietly, pulling himself out of it as he turned the dial on an old-fashioned kitchen timer. “We do almost the same thing to check for allergen proteins. It is a shorter test, and I have everything we need from the tests I ran on the samples from Saint Benezet. I’ll test against Soyagene, regular soyflour, the Stoma-Grow corn, and the Early Rise corn.” He looked at Miriam. “Have you ever run assay tests like this?”
“We did them in nursing school.”
“Good. Then you can monitor me, to make sure I don’t make any errors.”
She studied his face. “Are you okay?”
He nodded. “Are you?”
She nodded back.
They stared at each other for a moment, like they both knew the other was lying.
I went back to studying the pages.
62
They worked in silence except for the occasional murmur of direction or reply. Regi laid out three small plastic trays. He mixed something called a coating buffer with each of the corn and soy varieties and put a tiny bit of each into a well on each of the plates. He placed them in the incubator and set a different timer for thirty minutes.
“Now we wait,” he said. He raised his visor and motioned Miriam over to the sink, turning on the faucet and washing his gloved hands. When he was done, he stripped off the gloves and the gown and washed his hands again. As he dried them, he stepped aside and gestured for Miriam to do the same.
There had been a glimmer of energy in the room while they had been working, a vague sense of something positive—not quite optimism but something along those lines.
The pause, though, the waiting, it seemed to deflate them both.
Regi walked out into the hallway. Miriam watched him go, her lower lip trembling. She stared at the door as his footsteps receded. Then she silently followed.
Five minutes later, I poked my head out the door and saw them standing by the window at the end of the hallway. Holding each other. If they had been moving the slightest bit, they would have appeared to be dancing. But they were perfectly still.
They had both been deeply hurt, damaged, and left alone by tragedy. But there was more to it than that. There was intimacy.
I had assumed they’d been friends in college. I realized then they had been more than that. Whatever there was had been awakened, revived by the tragedy and pain, the vulnerability. The need.
I wasn’t about to judge.
I ducked silently back into the room and buried myself once again in Miriam’s documents. They had to hold the answers. Why else would Ron Hartwell risk his life—sacrifice his life—to bring them to light?
There was something to the allergenicity memo, I was pretty sure of that. But I also knew Regi would be much more likely to figure out what. So I returned to the inventories and production reports.
Why were they there? And why were some secret and some not? They contained similar information, but maybe not identical. The differences would be the key.
I paired off similar documents, the secret and non-secret versions. The formatting was completely different, making side-by-side comparisons difficult. If the answers were in there, I would have to work to find them.
I found a pencil and started with a pair of production reports, a list of hundreds of different seed products. I located Soyagene on the regular inventory sheet and then on the secret version. I discovered a discrepancy right off the bat.
The regular sheet listed forty-six thousand tons of Soyagene GES-5322. The secret list said forty-five thousand tons of Soyagene GES-5322a. Interesting, but probably meaningless.
After that, I started at the top. The first item on the regular sheet was ALFALFA, DRY-RISE—TWELVE THOUSAND TONS. I found it on the other sheet and checked them both off. The next item was SUGAR BEETS, DRY-RISE—THIRTEEN THOUSAND TONS. Check and check. They were listed in a seemingly random order—and not the same random order, either. It was slow going.
I was a quarter of the way down the first sheet when Regi and Miriam walked in with wet eyes and shy, subdued smiles.
“Sorry,” Miriam whispered.
I shook my head. “No worries.”
Regi sat across from me. He rested his fingertips on one of the papers I wasn’t looking at, slid it across the table, and started reading.
I leafed through the pages and handed him the abstracts, thinking that if I were a clue that had not been found yet, that was where I’d be hiding. He read each one slowly before moving on to the next one.
Miriam watched him as he read, her eyes glued to his face, looking for any indication he had found anything noteworthy, anything that could give meaning and purpose to Ron’s death. She’d probably been through these documents so many times, trying to read them again would be useless.
Regi read all the abstracts and the memos. Then he started skimming the production reports.
When the timer went off, Regi brought the allergen plates to the sink and dumped the contents of the wells, tapping the excess out onto a paper towel. Using a pipette, he added a few drops from the blood samples to each of the wells. “We’ll let these bind for ten minutes. Then we’ll rinse it and add the detection antibody.”
As we returned to studying the documents, the chants of the students protesting seemed to grow louder in the silence.
After ten minutes, he rinsed the plates and applied the detection antibody, then he sighed and resumed his reading.
“Did you read this allergenicity report?” he asked Miriam, turning his head slightly, speaking to her over his shoulder.
“I did,” she said. “I read all of it. But I couldn’t make sense of a lot of it. I assumed it referred to the Soyagene, but you said there was no reaction to the Soyagene, right? So that doesn’t make sense. Maybe it refers to Stoma’s Stoma-Grow corn, since that’s what generated the reaction.”
He nodded absentmindedly. “We’ll see what we get this time.”
“Could the memo be from Stoma, then?” she asked. “Maybe someone at Energene stole it—industrial espionage.”
They both looked at me. “Could be,” I said, shrugging. “But it seems like Energene is behind whatever’s going on. Ron was digging around in Energene’s secret files, not Stoma’s.”
“Maybe they’re working together,” Regi said. “Bourden and Pearce seemed quite cordial.”
Miriam looked up. “Archie Pearce, from Stoma?”
I nodded. “We saw them meeting with Ducroix. Any idea why one would help the other conceal product defects?”
She shook her head. “They might be scheming together on some things, but they’re still rivals.”
Regi sighed and got up. He rinsed the allergen plates and applied another chemical. “In five minutes, we’ll add the detection reagent and see what we’ve got.” As he said it, the other timer went off for the Ebola test. “Just enough time to prep the samples for the next stage of the Ebola test.”
