Stigma

by Philip Hawley Jr.

  “I’m a realist. The world never strays too far from the status quo, and purifying the human genome is an idea that most would not understand or accept. But malaria — that’s a problem that everyone understands. It kills over a million people every year. Governments around the world are clamoring for a vaccine. And I’m going to give it to them.”

  “In a mosquito that also carries a stealth egg- and sperm-killing vaccine,” Megan said in a voice filled with venom.

  Kaczynski shrugged.

  “So you stole my father’s malaria vaccine,” Luke said.

  “Steal?” he said. “Hardly. Your father’s mosquitoes are my Trojan horse. I want the world to recognize your father’s work for the stunning achievement that it is. In fact, I’m counting on it.”

  The man seemed to recognize the quizzical look on Luke’s face, and explained. “It was never our plan to steal your father’s creation, and I doubt I could have replicated his mosquitoes even if I’d tried. The antigenic structure of his malaria vaccine is far too complex. I modified colonies of his mosquito — colonies he thought were going to China for field tests — making the necessary modifications to add my vaccine, which is much simpler. My challenge was to grow a stable self-sustaining colony that produces both vaccines, and just recently I finally accomplished that goal.”

  “Where did Zenavax figure into all of this?”

  “They’re what brought me here. I’m sure you know that the earliest versions of your father’s mosquito didn’t effectively protect against the falciparum species of malaria. We needed a mosquito that prevented both of the common forms of malaria — vivax and falciparum. When we heard of Zenavax’s falciparum project through our contact in the Guatemalan Health Ministry, we took a closer look at what they’d found—”

  “And you decided to steal their work.”

  Kaczynski laughed. “Only to the extent that Zenavax’s research allowed your father to improve his malaria vaccine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In a manner of speaking, it was your father who stole their work. Not knowingly, of course, but he was receptive to incorporating new ideas as they came along.”

  “You have moles working in my father’s research group?” Luke said. “Who?”

  The man shook his head. “That’s not important. And I prefer to call them my colleagues—committed coworkers who are looking out for the interests of our patrons.”

  “Patrons?” Luke glanced at the man’s shirt patch. “CHEGAN.”

  Kaczynski nodded.

  “Who are they?”

  “People who share my vision, and collectively have the resources to make it a reality. They live in the real world, Luke, a world beset by poverty and disease.” Kaczynski seemed to anticipate Luke’s question and added, “The name CHEGAN derives from the first letter of our benefactors’ countries, countries that are going to buy your father’s mosquitoes.”

  “There are governments supporting this?” Megan said.

  “Not entire governments. We need only a few enlightened minds who are well placed and have access to funds. The benefactors of our organization — a Deputy Prime Minister, two Ministers of Health, a Politburo member, an Undersecretary of Economic Planning — they understand the social imperative of our mission, even if the leaders of their countries may not.”

  Luke tried to quell his anger, show the man an impassive face. “These benevolent patrons — they supported your decision to murder a village of Mayan Indians?”

  “That wasn’t my decision, Luke, but it was the right thing to do. We couldn’t allow one unfortunate mishap to jeopardize this project.”

  “Mishap?”

  Kaczynski took a heavy breath. “Initially, I used conventional injections, not mosquitoes, to test my vaccine and validate the concept.”

  Luke remembered Rosalinda mentioning CHEGAN’s hospital for children with genetic disorders. He didn’t need to ask Kaczynski whom he had used as test subjects.

  “Those injectable doses,” the geneticist continued, “were much larger than anything I could hope to attain in the saliva left behind from a mosquito’s blood meal. So before I recoded the genome of your father’s mosquitoes to add my vaccine, we made some modifications to my antigen to boost the immune response. Ironically, it worked too well.”

  “What happened?”

  Kaczynski lifted his gaze to the moon. “We released the first testing batch of my mosquito in the area around Mayakital about a year ago. There’s a high prevalence of a rare cystic fibrosis mutation in their tribe. It’s one of the reasons we chose that area for our initial field tests. Almost sixty percent of the villagers are carriers, but it’s an innocent mutation. Even those with two copies of the mutation have virtually no clinical disease. It’s probably an adaptive mutation.”

  Luke knew that, just as the mutation for sickle cell disease protects against malaria, the cystic fibrosis mutation affords some protection against cholera and typhoid.

  “My vaccine induced an immune response that was several thousand times stronger than we had anticipated. Villagers who had the disease and were bitten by the mosquito — they were devoured by their own immune systems.”

  “Killer T-cells,” Luke said.

  “Exactly.”

  “I thought you said your vaccine was only active against reproductive cells.”

  “It is, but unfortunately, Killer T-cells are not nearly as precise in their targeting as my vaccine. T-cells are programmed to respond to specific antigens, but they’re also opportunistic killers and will go after any cell that secretes stress proteins, so any cell that’s injured or defective is fair game. Apparently, this particular CF mutation burdens affected cells to the point that they produce stress proteins even though, to outward appearances, the cells function normally.”

  Luke thought back to Jane Doe, and the pieces started to come together. The cells most affected by CF — the epithelial lining of her airways, the exocrine glands in her pancreas, and her bile ducts — were producing stress proteins that were not, of themselves, potent enough to induce an immune response.

  But they were sufficiently abnormal to become an inviting target for the swarms of activated Killer T-cells that were prowling around, hunting for prey. She and Josue Chaca were dead long before their hearts stopped beating.

  “We realized what was happening within a few weeks,” the geneticist said, “but we’d already released our third batch of mosquitoes by that time. There was nothing we could do but watch it happen.”

  The mosquitoes had done their work over many weeks. Luke now understood why the illness had appeared to spread.

  Megan shouted, “You have killer mosquitoes breeding out there?”

  “The testing prototypes were infertile females. Those three colonies were extinct within several weeks of releasing the first batch.” He shrugged. “But the biological fire they left behind smoldered for a lot longer.”

  An image of Josue Chaca flashed in Luke’s mind. “What I saw wasn’t a smoldering reaction.”

  “If you’re talking about the boy, he has his mother to blame. Leaving their village to get medical care only hastened his death. She exposed her son to viruses that his immune system had never seen before. His immune system became a raging inferno.”

  Luke thought of the cold virus found in Jane Doe’s nasal passages.

  “So Zenavax’s vaccine had nothing to do with this?” he asked.

  “Nothing at all.” Kaczynski brushed a spider from his pants leg. “What happened in Mayakital was a tragedy, but we’ve corrected the problem. It won’t happen again.”

  Kaczynski leaned forward and draped his hands over his thighs. The man’s strength was sagging.

  “You know you’ll be stopped,” Luke said.

  “On the contrary, there will be nothing to stop. My genetic vaccine is invisible even to those whose ovaries and testicles are affected. The biological mechanism — apoptosis — leaves no trace of itself. The impact of our program won’t even
be seen until the next generation of children is born. Twenty-five years from now, when the effect of our work becomes apparent, we’ll have already purged those societies of genetic disorders. The gene pool will have been cleansed. By then, I suspect that most will see the benefits for what they are.”

  “So,” Megan said acidly, “women that have a breast cancer gene just won’t exist in your perfect world.”

  Luke remembered Megan telling him that her mother had tested positive for one of the breast cancer genes before dying from the same disease. She — and in domino fashion, Megan — simply wouldn’t be allowed to live in Kaczynski’s world.

  Everyone turned to a giant forklift coming through the mouth of the tunnel. On it was a twenty-foot-square Plexiglas cage. A large generator was humming along its side.

  As the forklift passed under the wash of a portable floodlight, Luke saw mosquitoes swarming inside the clear container. Four monkeys — a source of blood meals for the insects, he figured — leapt between the branches of what looked like a miniature arboretum.

  “Somewhat more primitive than your father’s equipment, but equally effective,” the geneticist said. “Within a few months our breeding facility in China will be producing enough of my mosquitoes to begin deploying them on three continents — all with your father’s blessing and support, who will think that we’re using his mosquitoes.”

  The clear container brushed against the side of the tunnel’s entrance. A loud scraping sound sent the monkeys into a frenzy.

  Kaczynski went ballistic. “Take it easy with that pen, you fools!” He turned to one of his keepers and muttered, “Clumsy idiots almost wiped out five years of work in this hellhole.”

  The forklift backed up a few feet and turned to the right. When it finally cleared the entrance, a large cloud of dust was boiling in its wake.

  Seconds later Calderon emerged from the dark brown haze like a ghost. He was wearing a miner’s hat, its halogen light piercing the night gloom like a spear. When he spotted the geneticist, he yelled to the Asian, “Get him to the ship. Now.”

  Kaczynski glanced at the freighter, then looked between Luke and Megan. “I’m sorry it’s ending this way for you two…I truly am.”

  As soon as Calderon reached his captives, he leaned down, grabbed Luke’s neck with one hand, and lifted him to a kneeling position. “Cockroach, you’re coming with me.”

  Luke squirmed, struggling to free himself from Calderon’s grip, but the blood flow to his brain had already ceased and a dark void quickly overtook him.

  53

  “My mother was afraid of the dark, cockroach. She always had to keep a light on at night.” Calderon kissed his thumb and traced an X over his heart.

  They were deep inside the mountain and two of Calderon’s men had just finished securing Luke, Megan, and a priest named Joe to wooden support columns in the center of a cavern. The three captives faced one another like points on a triangle.

  The rock-domed cave appeared to be a storage area. It was strewn with overturned cargo boxes and empty pallets — the remnants of a soon-to-be abandoned operation. The only light came from miners’ lamps mounted on their captors’ headgear.

  The light beams occasionally flashed on the priest, who had barely spoken a word since they joined him in his prison. The man’s shoulders lifted heavily with each breath, and his sunken eyes and parched mouth made clear that he’d been without food or water for some time.

  Their wrists, torsos, and ankles were cinched tight with quarter-inch nylon rope, their hands wrapped in duct tape to deny them the use of their fingers. Every few minutes Luke tightened and relaxed his hand muscles to keep his fingertips from going numb.

  “My mother — she died in a tornado,” Calderon said. “She was buried alive.”

  There was a reason Calderon hadn’t killed him at the hotel in Río Dulce, and it seemed he was about to find out what that was.

  “She died like a rat under a pile of rubble,” Calderon said. “Never been able to get that outta my mind, that she spent her final hours in total darkness, terrified.”

  Calderon’s plan was beginning to take shape in Luke’s mind. After dragging them from the dock and throwing them onto a pushcart, Calderon and his men had hauled them several hundred yards into the mountain’s interior, then through a honeycomb maze of intersecting tunnels.

  Eventually, they’d reached a long passageway leading into the cavern where they were now being held. There were old scorch marks on the tunnel’s walls where explosives had been used to widen it, and the roof was supported by timber posts and crossbeams.

  When they had passed through the tunnel’s entrance, two of Calderon’s men were rigging it with explosives. One man was wrapping strings of white putty — C-4 explosive — around joints where the structural members came together. The other was drilling a borehole into the rock ceiling, creating a pocket for another explosive charge.

  A box with a roll of detonation cord and small pencil-thin blasting caps sat on the ground next to them.

  “You’re going to seal the tunnel closed, bury us alive,” Luke said. “That the plan?”

  Calderon stooped next to him and checked his ankle bindings. He slowly untied the knot, and then suddenly yanked the rope tighter.

  Luke winced when the nylon cord cut into his skin.

  “If you hadn’t busted up my knee, my mother wouldn’t’ve been in that building when it collapsed.” The skin near the corner of Calderon’s mouth twitched. “She would’ve been at home, sleeping in her bed, instead of cleaning up other people’s filth.”

  Luke remained silent. He saw no purpose in asking Calderon to explain his warped logic.

  Father Joe lifted his head, choked out the words, “This…this won’t help your mother.”

  “Let the priest go,” Megan shouted. “He hasn’t done anything to you.”

  Calderon’s lamp swung around and framed Father Joe’s sagging head.

  “She’s right,” Calderon said. “He probably deserves better. Too bad he’s gotta die with you, cockroach.”

  “Killing Megan and the priest isn’t going to bring your mother back,” Luke said. “Let ’em go.”

  The fist came across Luke’s jaw like an iron mallet.

  Luke turned his head and spit out a slug of blood, holding the man’s stare as he did so.

  Calderon leaned into Luke’s ear and whispered, “If you speak of my mother again, you’ll be dead before you finish the words.” He slowly backed away and stood, then whistled at his men. “Vámonos.”

  Calderon started toward the passageway, then turned and said, “Remember how your mother used to drive out to Santa Monica and walk along those bluffs above the ocean?”

  Luke felt a tightness in his throat, recalling the fall that had killed his mother. After recovering her body from an outcrop on the cliffs, the police had called it an accident.

  “You remember that, don’t you?” Calderon said. “Every Wednesday afternoon at four o’clock. You could set your watch by her schedule.”

  Luke thrashed, his body a convulsing mass of contorted muscles.

  “I knew you’d figure out what I’m saying. You college boys are good at that,” Calderon said as he disappeared into the tunnel.

  Even after their stony tomb went black, Calderon’s laugh was still echoing in Luke’s ears.

  * * *

  Calderon stood on the dock and looked up at the starlit sky. He sucked in a chestful of night air.

  A crane in the center of the barge swung another pallet over and onto the deck as its crew members secured cargo. The last of the equipment had come through the tunnel, and in another few minutes the flatbed vessel would return to the Chinese freighter with its payload.

  For the past five years the docking facilities and tunnel — several kilometers from the nearest settlement along the river — had provided an elegantly simple means of supplying CHEGAN’s inland compound without bringing attention to their operation. Supply ships navigated upriver from
the Caribbean coastline at night and were back out at sea before the sun rose the next morning.

  Now, CHEGAN was abandoning the site, pulling up its stakes and moving the mosquito project to a permanent facility in China. The fact was, Calderon didn’t care where they were going. He just wanted them to leave. This project had become stale.

  A gaggle of birds took flight from the limestone cliffs just as the rumble of a diesel engine reached his ears. Calderon’s boat was returning from delivering Kaczynski to the freighter. Mr. Kong was at the helm.

  The Asian throttled back, making a large wake on his approach to the dock.

  He’d miss working with Kong, who was going to China to babysit Kaczynski and his team. At the beginning of the project, CHEGAN’s Chinese contingent had thrust the man upon him. Calderon had bristled at first, but Kong turned out to be a good operative.

  Calderon jumped onto the boat as it neared the dock. “Tell the workers on the barge to hurry it up,” he said to Kong. “I want that thing loaded and on its way out to the freighter in ten minutes.”

  While the Asian was shouting in Chinese at the barge’s crew, Calderon pulled a bulky device from his jacket pocket. It was an ultra low frequency transmitter, a blast initiation device whose signal could penetrate up to a thousand feet of solid rock. He ran his fingers across a pair of toggle switches.

  Enrique and Juan, his explosives team, hadn’t finished rigging the charge when Calderon and his sentries left the cavern to return to the dock.

  Calderon couldn’t contact them. Unlike the detonation transmitter, their radio signals would not penetrate the thick rock strata.

  But he didn’t have to speak to them. When the light at the top of his transmitter changed from green to yellow, he would know that the detonator was armed. Once armed, Enrique and Juan knew they had just three minutes to clear the blast area.

  Kong put the boat’s engines into reverse and eased away from the dock. After the Asian disembarked onto the freighter, Calderon would return to the cove one more time.