Stigma

by Philip Hawley Jr.

  A lifeless man in a khaki work uniform hung out of the cab’s open door, his body strewn with bullet holes. Luke reached across him and turned off the engine, then went around to the back of the truck where he found a second body curled in a fetal position.

  Next, he checked the guards. Both men were dead. The one he had shot in the shoulder lay in a crimson pool. Blood was still seeping from two chest wounds that were too large to have been made by Luke’s 9mm handgun.

  A soft footstep interrupted his thoughts. He turned toward the sound.

  “He dead, boss?”

  Frankie had stopped several feet short of Luke and was staring at the soldier’s body. The boy’s eyes looked as though they were well acquainted with death.

  “Yeah, he’s dead.”

  Ten minutes later Luke had completed a quick search of the compound, flushed three men and a woman from their hiding places, and confirmed what he already suspected. Megan wasn’t there.

  The killers’ tactics weren’t those of men guarding a hostage. They weren’t defending this site. Rather, they had gunned down two of its guards and abandoned the area as soon as he had reduced their numerical advantage.

  So what was this place? Paco had been certain he’d seen a truck identical to the one used by Megan’s abductors. What was the connection between this site and her kidnapping?

  Another question, a darker question, swirled within the contradictions and puzzles.

  Was Megan still alive?

  He pushed the thought away and focused on his immediate problem — he now had four captives to deal with. After herding them outside at gunpoint, Luke had them carry the six dead men into the main building. The bodies were laid side by side on the floor of what he discovered was a large laboratory.

  Workbenches crowded with titration columns and Erlenmeyer flasks ran the length of the room. Along the walls, glass-enclosed units outfitted with rubber sleeves held machines with robotic arms that moved columns of pipettes over rows of test tubes, extracting and injecting amber-colored fluids.

  Floor-to-ceiling cages lined the far wall, and each cage held a monkey. The small dark primates had yowled loudly when Luke walked through the door with his entourage. It was a menacing, raspy howl that sounded like a lion’s roar, and their first wail had sent Frankie scurrying out the door.

  Luke seated his captives around a lab bench in the middle of the room. Three of the four faces staring back at him displayed a convincing mask of terror. He did nothing to reassure them.

  His fourth captive, a woman about his age, carried herself with an air of command despite a withered leg and noticeable limp that Luke guessed might be the residual of polio. She had ghostly white skin that picked up every hollow in her face, and jet-black hair that glimmered blue under the fluorescent lights. An ornate silver chain hung from the temple stems of her black-rimmed eyeglasses. Sitting sideways in her chair, she looked at him obliquely with her shoulders held back as if to prop up a flagging bravado.

  When Luke stooped next to the body of one of his attackers to inspect it, the woman said, “Are you going to tell us what you want?”

  He was surprised at the evenness of her voice. “So you speak English,” he said with his back turned to her. “How about the others?”

  “Only I speak English,” the woman replied. Her stiff English phrasing gave her Spanish accent an aristocratic tone.

  Luke searched the pockets of the second assailant, who, like his dead partner, was dressed in black fatigues and military jump boots. “Where are the video recordings from your security cameras?”

  “You will not find any because our cameras are not connected to a recorder. I am sure you will confirm that for yourself.”

  “You’re right. I will,” he said. “What about telephones?”

  “We have two satellite phones, but you will find that they do not work well at this hour. Something about the position of the satellites. I have already tried.”

  Whether she was telling the truth was unimportant. He’d be gone long before anyone could respond to a distress call.

  But it reminded him — he had missed his call from Sammy.

  He gestured toward the cages with his gun. “What is this place, and who are you people?”

  “So, you kill people and you do not even know who they are?”

  Luke ripped open one of the dead men’s Velcro thigh pockets, fished out a piece of paper, and unfolded it. While looking at it, he said, “This is how it’s going to be. I’m going to ask questions and you’re going to answer them—fully. Do you understand?”

  The woman sighed. “This is a research laboratory. We’re developing a human vaccine for malaria.” Her voice turned to acid when she added, “We’re here because we want to save lives. You probably would not understand that.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  The paper in his hand was a digital photograph of himself, walking out the front door of Kolter’s Deli. It was a close-up of his head and chest, but he recognized his father’s jacketed shoulder in the foreground. Someone had snapped a picture of them leaving the restaurant after their breakfast meeting last Sunday. He folded it and put it into his pocket.

  “Why so much security?” he asked.

  “It’s not so much, really, if you consider the amount of money we spend on our research. Our company wants to protect its investment.”

  “And the military guards?”

  “You do not know much about this country, do you? We pay the government a generous permit fee to operate here. In return, they arrange for security from the army. It is a common arrangement between foreign companies and the government. The companies and their employees are targets for armed bandits. The bandits, they stay away from places that are guarded by soldiers.”

  Luke said, “Who do you work for?”

  “The name of our company would have no meaning for you.”

  He jumped to his feet and turned on her. “Give me the name!”

  She startled. “Zenavax — Zenavax Pharmaceuticals.”

  During the long silence that followed, she seemed to recognize the turmoil in his face. “Why do you look at me that way?” she asked.

  “Tell me about Kate Tartaglia.”

  “How do you know…Who are you?”

  He pointed at the dead killers. “Someone who wants to know the secret these men were protecting.”

  “How would I know anything about that?”

  Luke stepped closer and drilled the woman with his stare. “There are two possibilities here. Number one — you already know who I am, why I’m here, and what I want.” He pointed at the dead assailants. “In which case, you know who these goons are and you’re stalling, waiting for their reinforcements to show. Then there’s possibility number two — that you have no idea what I’m talking about. Either way, you have information I need, and I don’t have time to play games with you.”

  He erupted in a fit of rage, sweeping his arm across the lab bench. Two flasks and a tall glass tube crashed to the floor.

  “So tell me what you know. Now!” he shouted.

  One of the men lifted off his seat as if yanked by a cord.

  The woman’s hands came together in her lap, trembling. “About what?”

  “Start with Kate Tartaglia. Tell me what you know about her murder.”

  “I heard she was shot during a robbery. That is all I know. What does that have to do with—”

  “What was she working on when she died? What projects?”

  “Nothing that anyone would want to kill her for.” Her head wobbled in confusion. “She was in charge of our clinical trials, our vaccine testing programs.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  Her eyes hardened. “Why are you here? You don’t even say who you are.” She looked past Luke at the bodies lying on the floor. “I knew four of those men. They were good men. You point a gun at us like we have done something wrong. But we have done nothing wrong.” Her lower lip trembled and her eyes moistened. “What? Are you goi
ng to kill us after you ask your questions? Is it so easy for you?”

  The men sitting on either side of her looked nervously at one another.

  The woman’s blue eyes shone with the intensity of a quasar, and her body language told him that she was done talking unless he terrorized her.

  “No. It’s not easy.” He blew out a heavy breath. “I’m a doctor, and this isn’t in my job description.”

  Her jaw slackened.

  Everything about the woman’s manner and words seemed genuine. Whatever Zenavax might have done, he felt certain that she wasn’t involved, at least not knowingly. So he had taken a chance and revealed himself — at least partially — hoping to break through her defenses.

  He didn’t stop there. He told her about Josue Chaca and Jane Doe, and Kate’s mysterious connection to both of them.

  “Kate’s killing had nothing to do with a robbery,” he added. “She was murdered because of something she knew.”

  He took the photograph of Mayakital from his rucksack and handed it to her. “And it has something to do with this village.”

  The woman took the photo, glanced at it for only a moment, and handed it back to him.

  “I took that photograph.” She saw Luke beginning to speak and held up a hand. “And I know about the boy, Josue Chaca.”

  45

  “I’m the one who sent Josue Chaca to your hospital’s clinic in Santa Lucina,” the woman said. “I don’t know anything about the girl, the one you call Jane Doe. But I assure you, the rest of what you have told me can be explained without conspiracy theories.”

  “Tell me,” Luke said.

  “I see the suspicion in your eyes,” she said. “Before I tell you, you need to know that there is nothing evil going on here. The only deception that I know of, one in which I willingly participated, has to do with those howler monkeys.”

  She looked over at the small primates. “Several years ago, while doing research as a microbiologist at the university in Guatemala City, I discovered that the howlers in this region have a unique resistance to malaria falciparum.”

  Plasmodium falciparum—the deadliest form of malaria.

  “I approached Zenavax and they were interested in my work,” she continued. “A short time later they hired me and built this laboratory. Most experts in my field thought us foolish because the primary form of malaria in this region is vivax, not falciparum. But then, my colleagues did not know what I had found here.”

  “What does this have to do with Josue Chaca?”

  “You will understand in a moment.” She brushed a strand of hair from her face. “Using the antigen that I isolated from these monkeys, researchers at our U.S. laboratory created our first prototype malaria vaccine almost three years ago. We have already demonstrated its effectiveness in primates, and testing on human volunteers began ten months ago. That’s when Kate became involved.”

  Both of them turned to a rattling sound. One of the monkeys was working the latch on its cage.

  “Kate was responsible for analyzing the results from our human trials,” she continued. “We had identified five villages, all within fifty kilometers of here, where malaria falciparum is known to occur. Four of the villages, including Mayakital, agreed to participate.”

  Her gaze suddenly turned inward. “Everything went well at first. But several weeks after we administered the vaccine, an illness began to spread through Mayakital. Kate was monitoring the situation from her office in the States, analyzing the test data. Then, four months ago, she came here because she wanted to visit Mayakital herself. That was the first and only time I met her.”

  “She thought your vaccine was responsible for this illness?”

  “Not my vaccine, specifically,” she said. “Kate thought that our alphavirus vector had caused the illness.”

  “Explain that.”

  “We administered our flu vaccine to the test subjects months before they received the malaria vaccine. It was simply a goodwill gesture, a small gift in exchange for their participation. When several of the test subjects became ill after receiving the malaria vaccine, Kate had us collect several additional blood tests over a period of months.”

  The woman seemed hesitant to continue, but after taking a deep breath she said, “After looking at the data from the blood tests, Kate seemed to think that our flu vaccine had primed these people’s immune system in some unusual way, and that their second exposure to alphavirus from our malaria vaccine triggered an overwhelming autoimmune reaction. She believed that the test subjects’ immune systems were literally devouring their bodies.”

  Luke recalled the batch of mice destroyed by his father’s prototype flu vaccine.

  “Did she mention Killer T-cells?”

  “Yes. She thought apoptosis was to blame,” the woman said. “But you must understand, no one else in our company agreed with her.”

  “What about you?”

  “I have seen none of the data. Our company builds what you might call a one-way mirror between the research staff — those of us involved in developing vaccines — and clinical analysts like Kate who collect and study the test data. They see our work, but we do not see theirs. The regulatory agencies require that we do it this way. Supposedly, it is to lessen the probability of bias. But even without seeing the data, I think there are reasons to doubt Kate’s theory.”

  “Like?”

  “Many of those who became ill did not develop symptoms until several weeks after the initial cases of the illness. I am not a medical doctor, but it seemed that the illness was spreading, like an infection. Our alphavirus vaccine produces a simple antigen — it cannot spread from person to person. And more importantly, no one in any of the other three villages suffered an illness similar to what occurred at Mayakital.”

  “I saw this illness. What I saw isn’t an infection.”

  “Well, now we will never know what it was. Mayakital was destroyed by a flood.”

  “I heard.” Luke wasn’t ready to reveal the evidence of cold-blooded murder that he’d found at the village. At least not yet.

  “You said you took the photograph, the one at the village,” he said.

  She nodded. “A few months ago, Kate called me. She wanted me to persuade some of the sick villagers to go to the University Children’s clinic in Santa Lucina. I am not supposed to have any contact with test subjects, but she sounded desperate. I agreed to do it if she would not tell anyone. To be honest, I did not think that I would convince any of the villagers to go to the clinic. Most Mayans living in these remote villages choose to live in seclusion.”

  “Even when they’re dying?”

  “Sometimes, even then. Most have lived through epidemics of malaria and cholera.” She shrugged. “But Josue Chaca’s mother agreed to take her son to the clinic. Later, I called Kate, told her about the boy, and e-mailed her one of the pictures I had taken at Mayakital. From that point on I do not know what happened.” Her eyes lost focus for a moment. “That was the last time I spoke to Kate.”

  Luke now understood Kate’s contacting him on the same day that Josue Chaca arrived in the E.R. She must have monitored the boy’s travels. Kate was fluent in Spanish and could have easily called the clinic in Santa Lucina, using a ruse to learn of his trip to the U.S.

  “I still don’t understand how this works,” he said. “You say that your group, the people here, aren’t directly involved in the clinical trials.”

  “That is correct.”

  “And Kate’s team, the people that analyze the data, are located in your U.S. office.”

  She nodded.

  “So who administered the vaccines in the villages? And who’s doing the blood tests? I assume you have to collect blood samples to monitor things like titer levels.”

  “CHEGAN FOUNDATION. We pay them a fee, and they do the fieldwork for us.”

  “Who are they?”

  “An international healthcare foundation. They work under a United Nations charter and provide basic healthcare servic
es in several developing countries. They have a contract with the Guatemalan government to provide immunizations in outlying areas. The Health Ministry makes an effort to immunize every person, but it’s just not feasible with their limited resources. Without CHEGAN, the people living in the more remote areas would have virtually no access to healthcare. They make a big contribution, especially to Mayan tribes that are on the bottom of the social ladder.”

  “Explain to me what they do, how they work with you.”

  “It is a straightforward arrangement. They have medical technicians who visit these villages on a regular basis. Many of their people are trained to draw blood samples, and almost all of their technicians can administer a vaccine. I don’t know the exact financial terms, but we pay them a fee for their services.”

  “How do they take delivery of the vaccines, and where do they send the blood samples they collect? How does it work, exactly?”

  “We store the malaria vaccine samples here, for quality control reasons, and CHEGAN’s medical technicians pick them up on their way to the villages. When they return, they deliver the blood samples here. Everything coming from, or going to, our U.S. office stops here first. Why?”

  “What kind of vehicle do they drive?”

  “Vehicle? I am not sure.”

  “Think. What type of vehicle?”

  Her face was a bundle of puzzlement. “A truck, maybe. But I haven’t paid any attention. Why are you asking about this?”

  “Any logo on the side?” Luke pointed at the men on either side of her. “Ask them if they’ve seen the vehicle. Ask them what color it is, and whether there’s a logo on the side.”

  She went back and forth with two of the men, then said, “The men from CHEGAN, they drive a tan truck. It has a red symbol on the side. From their description, I think it’s a caduceus.”

  The medical caduceus symbol: two snakes curled around a wooden staff. Close enough to Paco’s red snakes, Luke thought.

  “CHEGAN — where are they located? Where’s their office?”