Stigma

by Philip Hawley Jr.

  Luke threw open the door. “You’re gonna stunt your growth.”

  “Huh? What you mean?”

  “Never mind. Where’re my clothes?”

  Frankie threw a thumb over his shoulder.

  Luke looked back inside. Sitting on the dresser were all of his clothes — two shirts, a pair of pants, underwear and socks — laundered, folded, and stacked.

  “Monjas—the sisters,” Frankie said. “At the hospital, they make me clean clothes, like a girl.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “It no right.”

  Luke swiped the butt from him and tossed it over the balustrade.

  A drop of rain struck his wrist. Above them a churning swarm of dark clouds reached over to the western horizon where a reddish-orange sun was dipping into the earth.

  The fever was coming back and his left shoulder throbbed. He went inside, grabbed the bottle of antibiotics from the dresser top and swallowed two more pills.

  When he returned to the balcony, he was holding one of the rifle scopes he’d taken from the assailants at the lab. He clicked a knob, set the scope to ambient light, and surveyed the park across the street. A stone pathway bisected broad swaths of manicured Bermuda grass. At the end of the path was a wrought-iron gate, and behind it stood a drawbridge that spanned the narrow moat around Castillo San Felipe.

  The castle’s entry gate was closed. Except for a man sitting on a decorative iron bench outside the entrance, the grounds were empty.

  About fifty feet to the left of the castle, a small dinghy was tied to a dock.

  This will work, he thought. He grabbed Sammy’s phone from his rucksack and placed a call to Wilkes.

  “Where you been?” Sammy barked. “I been calling you for the past hour.”

  Luke realized he had slept through the phone’s ringing.

  Sammy launched into a hurried description of some rendezvous site outside of town.

  Luke interrupted him in mid-sentence. “I’m changing the plans. We’ll meet at Castillo San Felipe. If he knows this area, he’ll know where the castle is.”

  “You’re gonna scare the guy off, Flash. I told Calderon I’m working for University Children’s, remember? And this informant thinks you’re some yokel that works at the clinic in Santa Lucina. How’m I supposed to explain you changing the meeting like this? It won’t smell right.”

  Luke ignored him. “The castle, eight o’clock. If the guy’s one minute late, I won’t be there.” He wasn’t going to give Calderon enough time to set up an ambush.

  “It’s your play,” Sammy conceded. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. There’s a bench near the castle’s front gate. Have the guy sit on that bench, then light a match. If I don’t see the flame, he won’t see me.” Luke pressed the END CALL button.

  He had Frankie call the front desk for messages. There was a message for Rosalinda from someone named Julia, who left the name of the hotel where she was staying and a room number.

  “That was Rosalinda,” Luke explained, “letting us know where she is.” He went back out onto the veranda and studied the entrance to the castle. The man who had been sitting on the bench was gone.

  “Frankie, I need you to do something for me.”

  51

  Luke lay across his hotel room’s veranda in a shooter’s prone position, his legs spread behind him. His rifle rested on the lower railing of the balustrade, its barrel protruding between two posts. It was 7:48 P.M.

  Privacy walls jutting from either end of the balcony shielded him from the neighboring rooms. Behind him, his room was dark. Above him, only an occasional streak of moonlight penetrated the thick cloud layer. And below him, a roadway without street lamps completed the void of darkness.

  He had an elevated perch on the second floor, and more importantly, he was nowhere near where a trained reconnaissance team would look for him. Someone with a trained eye would expect him to take a position along the top of the castle’s wall, behind the battlement. From that position, he not only would have had the advantage of elevation, but also an unimpeded view of the entire plaza, the protection of water on three sides, and the concealment of stone walls.

  Which was exactly why he wasn’t there. From his current position, men approaching the castle by land would have their backs to him. He’d have them flanked from the outset.

  Earlier, he had watched Frankie tape Sammy’s phone to the underside of the wrought-iron bench, then shuffle away with slouched shoulders and an occasional glance in Luke’s direction. The boy had trudged off in the direction of Rosalinda’s hotel with the enthusiasm of someone walking the plank.

  When Calderon or his surrogate sat down on the bench, Luke would call him using Rosalinda’s satellite phone. He’d direct the would-be killer to the far side of the plaza, watching the area around the man as he moved across the park. From Luke’s position, he could easily spot any accomplice within a quarter mile of his mark.

  Suddenly, an explosion of light seared his eyes.

  A lightning flash had blinded him. A moment later a peal of thunder rolled over him. The gallium arsenide amplifier in his nightscope had magnified the light ten-thousand-fold, creating a burst of radiance so bright that it temporarily stole his eyesight. He blinked away the pain.

  Slowly, his vision returned.

  His task was already difficult enough without having to deal with lightning bursts. At this range — he was about two hundred yards from the castle — slow moving objects would be difficult to detect.

  Even more troublesome were the variations in lighting across the search area, which degraded his scope’s optics. A light post near the dock cast a distorting glare on the eastern approach to the castle, while the western side of the fortress was in total darkness.

  A fast-moving object on the water interrupted his thoughts. It was a large boat, over thirty feet long, with a steering house on the foredeck, speeding up the river toward the mouth of Lake Izabal. It suddenly changed course and slowed, steering toward the fortress. He hadn’t considered the possibility that they would arrive by water.

  A minute later the boat neared the dock to the left of the castle.

  He checked his watch: 7:57 P.M.

  Luke couldn’t hear the engine but he saw a froth of water behind the boat as it throttled back and gently tapped against the dock. Two men jumped from the deck, quickly moored the boat, then stepped back onto the vessel and disappeared below deck.

  The clouds broke and a patch of moonlight reflected off the lake. The castle turned into a black silhouette against the water’s gleaming surface.

  He swung his scope across the front of the castle and swept the other side of the plaza, searching the trees for movement, then swung it back and scanned the area around the dock. He repeated the process three times.

  On the third pass, as his scope moved across the castle’s front wall, he caught a fleeting shadow at the edge of his lens. A man was climbing over the fortress’s dockside wall.

  He swung his rifle to the other side of the castle. Another black figure was scaling the opposite wall with a rifle slung across his back.

  They climbed like well-practiced spiders. He found a third man crouched just inside the castle wall, along the upper rim of the parapet just above the drawbridge.

  When his eyes were elsewhere, the men had probably slipped over the boat’s stern and waded through shoreline waters to the castle’s lakeside wall, then around its perimeter. How many other movements had he missed?

  All three men disappeared into the castle’s interior, searching the stony structure just as Luke had guessed they would. A short time later two of the men reappeared at either end of the fortress’s front battlement, scanning the park with their rifle scopes.

  Luke centered his scope on the boat and increased the magnification. He didn’t have to wait long.

  A dark form emerged from the boat’s steering house, stepped down onto the dock, and began walking toward the castle. The lone figure moved tentatively at first, then settle
d into a slow and deliberate gait.

  Just before reaching the castle’s front gate, the person stopped and sat on the bench.

  A match flared in Luke’s nightscope. His lens filled with a bright green flash of light.

  Luke looked away, keyed in Sammy’s cell phone number on Rosalinda’s satellite unit, and pressed SEND.

  He reacquired the dark figure just as the first ring sounded in his earpiece. The person on the bench startled at the sound, then looked down to where Sammy’s phone was taped.

  He increased the magnification and quartered the target in his sights.

  The second ring sounded.

  The figure slowly raised the glowing match to chin level.

  Oh my God!

  Megan’s tremulous face filled his scope, her eyes darting from side to side.

  Luke’s breaths came in heaving gasps.

  She was mouthing a word, the same word over and over. Rat?…Rap?

  “Trap,” he whispered.

  The slide of an automatic weapon clicked in his right ear. “That’s right, cockroach.”

  Luke closed his eyes. “How’d you find me?”

  “So many sloppy mistakes. You college boys don’t know how to work a con. Setting up a meeting so close to your hotel, using the woman’s name on the hotel register.”

  “What woman?”

  “Let’s not play games. Did you think we didn’t know the microbiologist’s name? Did you think we wouldn’t check the hotels in this area?”

  A sudden sick feeling swept over Luke.

  “In case you’re wondering — yeah, she’s dead. We had a little talk. It seems you told her too much. I’m afraid you left me no choice.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  Luke didn’t hear the loud clack when his skull smacked against the concrete deck.

  His world had already gone dark.

  * * *

  Calderon heard the clap of footsteps on the dock as he and his men were securing their human cargo below deck. He came up through one of the forward hatches, holding his Colt semiautomatic low and behind his thigh.

  Standing on the dock, next to one of the mooring lines, was a small boy.

  The boy said in Spanish, “You need supplies, boss? I’ll run to the store for you. Ten quetzals.”

  “Get outta here, kid.”

  The boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. “You like? Two quetzals.”

  “I’m gonna count to three. One…two…”

  The boy turned and ran from the dock. He had an odd, swaying gait.

  Calderon went below deck again. Two minutes later, just as he fired up the diesel engines, he heard a creak directly above him on the deck. Using hand signals to communicate, he and Kong made their way to the fore and aft hatches. Simultaneously, they charged up through the openings, their guns held at chest level.

  A seagull fluttered off the roof of the steering house. Kong gestured toward the fleeing bird.

  Calderon made a looping motion with his gun, indicating that he wanted the Asian to search the deck anyway.

  Calderon checked the poop ladder, then walked the length of the boat’s port side. He did this while Kong searched the aft section, including the fantail where an inverted lifeboat — an inflatable Zodiac with outboard motor — was secured with ropes across the backend of the boat.

  In the shadowed light, Kong didn’t notice the subtle tenting of the raft bottom’s rubber skin.

  52

  The knot on the side of Luke’s head throbbed violently, and he was still drifting at the edges of a mental fog when he saw Petri Kaczynski emerge from an enormous rock-walled tunnel. Two men walked alongside the geneticist, supporting him at his elbows. The moon threw an eerie blue cast on the old man’s face — he looked like a conjured spirit.

  Luke and Megan lay hog-tied next to Calderon’s boat on a thick timbered dock that reached out from the mouth of the tunnel into a black water lagoon. Sheer limestone cliffs rising straight up from the river’s edge swept around them in a lazy curve, forming a large cove that kept out the Río Dulce’s currents.

  On the other side of the dock was a massive barge onto which several workers were loading crated equipment. The word TAIFANG was printed on the back of their hard hats. Armed men stood guard over the operation.

  A few minutes earlier, as three of Calderon’s men had dragged them from the boat, Luke spotted the running lights of a stationary freighter in the middle of the river.

  Calderon was nowhere in sight, which brought back the question that Luke had been asking himself ever since he awoke: Why hadn’t Calderon already killed them?

  Kaczynski took a halting step. “I need to rest,” he said. “Stop here.”

  The geneticist’s keepers lowered him onto a wooden crate, where he sat catching his breath. All three men wore shirts stenciled with the word CHEGAN.

  Before arriving at the remote site, while locked away in the boat’s hull, Megan had whispered to Luke about Kaczynski, the secluded cove, and the walled compound at the other end of the tunnel where she’d been held captive. Until now her words had sounded like the imagined driftwood of a bizarre dream.

  Kaczynski’s eyes traveled past Megan and settled on Luke. “I wish you hadn’t come here. I truly do.”

  “I’m sure your family would be very proud of you, Petri, if only they knew.” Luke recalled watching Kaczynski’s wife drowning in grief at her husband’s memorial service five years earlier.

  “It was necessary,” the frail man offered without a shred of remorse.

  Luke summoned his recollections of Kaczynski. What he remembered most was the geneticist’s absorption with himself and his work.

  “And the killings?” Luke said. “What’s so important that it justifies murder?”

  An Asian appeared on the boat’s deck, the same man whom Luke had spotted following him in L.A. “Don’t tell them anything,” he said.

  Kaczynski ignored the man. “I’m not sure you’d understand, Luke.”

  “Try me.”

  The geneticist seemed to take the measure of Luke before saying, “We’ve spent the last hundred years and countless fortunes unlocking the genetic code, and for what? Instead of using what we know to eliminate diseases, we’ve let them become a yoke around the world’s neck.”

  Kaczynski’s eyes went to a pickup truck coming through the tunnel’s entrance, then back to Luke. “Medical resources aren’t limitless, and we’re squandering them on children who, in a better world, should never have been born. Children with brains so shrunken they can’t register a thought as simple as hunger, children with lungs so crippled that each breath is an agonizing test of their will to live. And we do everything possible to keep them alive, so that those who aren’t infertile can pass their disease on to the next generation. It’s insanity.”

  Megan struggled against her rope ties. “You’re giving us a lecture on insanity?”

  “Like I said, I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  Luke jumped in, hoping to keep Kaczynski talking. “So what’s the solution, Petri?”

  “He’s playing you, Doc,” the Asian said. “Let’s go. I need to get you to the ship.”

  Kaczynski waved off the grim-looking man. “The solution? These children should never have been born. They simply should not exist.”

  Luke shot a glance at Megan.

  “It’s not a difficult concept, once you understand it,” the geneticist said. “Others in my field have struggled to repair the damage caused by faulty genes, and most of those efforts have failed miserably. The rare success leads to therapies that cost a small fortune. They’re an unimaginable extravagance in most parts of the world.”

  “So you took a different path,” Luke said, gently stoking the man’s ego to keep him talking.

  “A simpler, more direct path. Eliminating nature’s blunders before they happen. We can program the human immune system to seek out and destroy a woman’s flawed eggs, a man’s damaged sperm, before t
hey join to create a defective human.”

  “And how’re you going to do that?”

  The man started kneading his hands. “Substantial portions of the human genome exist for no other purpose than to protect the structural integrity of our chromosomes. In effect, we have genes protecting our genes. There are thousands of so-called repair genes that remove damaged segments of DNA, build new DNA, and, when repair efforts fail, signal the cell to destroy itself. But, of course, nature’s repairs are often imperfect, and that’s where my work comes into play.”

  Kaczynski’s voice oozed with self-importance. “What I discovered is the common starting point for that process in the body’s reproductive cells. It’s a gene that’s present only in oocytes and sperm. I call it the Mayday gene — it sounds the alarm and initiates the repair-or-destroy response. And it’s the only gene that turns on in the presence of any chromosomal defect, no matter what the cause.”

  “And what exactly are you planning to do with your discovery?”

  “It’s not what I’m planning to do, Luke. It’s what I’ve already done. I’ve created a vaccine that harnesses the power of our immune system and destroys defective eggs and sperm.” The geneticist’s eyes brightened. “When activated, the Mayday gene produces a protein — that’s the distress signal that triggers the repair-or-destroy sequence. Like every protein, it has a unique structure, and once I had determined what that was, it became a relatively simple matter to develop my vaccine.”

  Luke said, “You have a vaccine that goes on search-and-destroy missions in a person’s reproductive organs, and you think people are going to line up to get it?”

  “They won’t have to,” the old man said. “The ubiquitous mosquito will administer it for me.”

  “Oh my God,” Megan whispered.

  Luke remembered Kaczynski convincing his father that they could genetically alter a mosquito’s saliva glands to produce a vaccine. The insect’s salivary glands already produced dozens of complex proteins, so why not a vaccine? Kaczynski had argued.

  “If your goal was to create a mosquito-borne genetic vaccine, why interest my father in your concept? Why bother?”