Burn (17 page)

Chapter 24

I am quite sure you all see the lesson learned here. It is very simple.
It is that all of you must have strong hearts.

—Hyemeyohsts Storm,
Seven Arrows

Harry Toledo slipped out of the trap door at the top of his closet and into an attic stairwell. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s security had done an electronic sweep of the Casa Canada compound, but they had not found this escape route that old Mr. Marcoe had built into the house and outbuildings.

Before Costa Brava, before Quebec, the old Frenchman who built the place had grown up in French Indochina, which became Vietnam. His family had been trapped and slaughtered in their own house on the outskirts of Dien Bien Phu. Mr. Marcoe attended a small Catholic school in Saigon, and a sympathetic Vietnamese nun got him onto a plane to Canada. The old-timer built escape routes into every building he owned, and named his small coffee farm after the country that took him in.

Now the DIA and their goons won’t even let him on the place.

They’d moved the Marcoes and the
campesino
families to a tent encampment on the perimeter of the farm.

Harry worked his way up the steep, narrow stair in a darkness so black that his excellent night vision was no help at all. Two latches at the top released a slab of roof. Harry slid it back and was greeted with a gust of cold air and a dazzle of stars. He pulled himself up and over the edge, onto the rooftop. His silhouette was swallowed by a false gable to his mother’s bedroom.

After nearly twenty-four hours at the terminals Harry didn’t feel the least bit sleepy, but he did feel a whole lot trapped.

At least I’m trapped at home; that’s an improvement,
he thought.
Marte Chang’s right. If you can’t sprint to freedom, take what steps you can.

He squatted low and still in the shadow, and listened for night-calls in the coffee trees. Nothing. So many patrols secured the plantation that even the birds and small animals were lying low. Harry wondered how he could get to see Marte Chang again.

Harry really liked Marte. She listened to him when he simply needed to jabber, and she made sense of the jabber. He liked the sound her long, black hair made when it moved across itself. Harry reminded himself that a lot more fish got collared in this net than just himself and Marte Chang.

Mom, Dad, Sonja and Nancy Bartlett, Colonel Scholz and Sergeant Trethewey. . . .

His mother was Liaison Officer between the U.S. and Costa Bravan diplomatic corps. With a bombed-out embassy, a two-day civil war and the resignation of a president in the works, Grace Toledo had her hands full. He saw her for a few moments when they were released at the airport, and she looked okay. She took the clone news pretty hard, but then, so did he.

She isn’t the specimen under the microscope, either.

Harry stepped out to the edge of the roof, careful not to lean across the plane of the Watchdog’s alarm. Holobursts and traditional fireworks bleached out the stars over La Libertad as the confederation celebrated the announcement of President Garcia’s flight from the country. Harry suspected that a few of the blazes against the sky were not celebration, but evidence of the growing religious war between Catholics and Gardeners.

The U.S. Embassy sent up a traditional Stars-and-Stripes volley that lit up the sky from ten klicks away, then a follow-up holo of the Costa Bravan flag flickered against the thick, black smoke. Harry caught a whiff of burning rubber and diesel on the gunpowder wind.

“Hello, kid.”

Harry started at the voice in his ear, then froze when he felt the zapper at his neck.

A chuckle at his other ear. A second voice said, “Well, he’s a cool one, I’ll give him that.”

“It’s okay, kid,” the first one said, with a pat on his back. “We know who you are.”

The zapper was gone. Another pat on the back.

“This here’s The Druid, kid. Don’t matter if it’s dark, you can’t see him anyhow. He a Stealthman. C’mon, let’s watch the show.”

Harry recognized that voice—it was Joe Clyde, the SEAL medic who’d dug his dad out of the mud below ViraVax and kept him alive.

Two dark shapes made holes in the fireworks as they walked with him to three lounge chairs set up along the edge of the roof. A cacophony of music and cheer rode the cooksmoke up from the
campesino
encampment at the perimeter.

“I do love to see people happy,” Clyde said. “Here, kid, have this one.”

Clyde sat in one chair and tapped the arm of the next one. Harry smelled fresh coffee—good coffee, not that boiled slop that they brought over from the embassy cafeteria. Ironic that he lived on a coffee plantation and had to drink instant from town. The Marcoes had sold every ounce of this year’s crop before Nancy and Sonja Bartlett bought the place.

Clyde turned to Harry.

“So what about you?” he asked. “You’re sixteen years old, got locked up naked with a girl who’s a ten-point-five and you ain’t smiling. I don’t get it.”

Harry jerked a thumb towards the
fiesta
fireworks in the distance.

“I’m sixteen years old, and this is the third time I’ve seen those fireworks. You’re down here on a gig. I
live
here. Every time they say it’s for freedom, and every time things just get worse.”

The Druid handed Harry a cup of coffee.

“For them, maybe,” Clyde said, “but not for you. Even with the trouble with your dad, your life . . .”

“My life is over,” Harry said. “Sonja’s, too. We’re bugs in a jar, Joe, for the rest of our lives. At best, we’ll be studied in the same facility so we’ll at least see each other. And maybe Dr. Chang will do the studying. With luck, they won’t peel us apart muscle by muscle. And you’re the lid on the jar, right? Joe?”

“That’s being a little hard, kid. . . .”

“Then why don’t you just stroll me out the front gate and down the road to the bus depot?”

Clyde shook his head.

“You a real party-pooper, kid.”

Harry took in the fireworks, car horns, bonfires across the slopes of the volcano Izalco.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet, Joe,” he said.

He set his unsipped coffee down and walked back to the rooftop hatch.

“Whatever you’re planning,” Joe hollered after him, “don’t pull it on my watch!”

Harry returned to his room on the first floor the same way he went up.

No use waking up the whole house,
he thought.
As though anybody could sleep.

He slipped out his bedroom window, found the ladder that the two SEALs used to get to the rooftop, and quietly laid it on its side before climbing back into his room. They couldn’t unlatch the hatch from the outside to get in through the attic, but they’d think of something. That was what they were trained for. Harry couldn’t escape Joe and The Druid yet, but if they weren’t going to help he could make himself a pain in the ass.

Harry decided to get back to the terminals and see what’s cooking with Marte. All of the equipment that the Agency could muster was set up in the living room and front parlor. Both Nancy Bartlett and Grace Toledo had brought Litespeeds and access boxes from the embassy. Harry had his own, now cabled through to theirs, still they blocked every move he made to send data out to the webs.

The primitive air-conditioning only serviced these two rooms and the kitchen, and it couldn’t keep up. Yellow pine walls beaded sweat to match the worried, scurrying humans whose vacant eyes betrayed an almost universal hopelessness. Security outnumbered residents by three to one, but at least a few of them knew the hardware and made themselves useful. Harry hoped that one of the cables they were laying would be a mistake that would get him a line out.

Two hand-lettered signs taped beside the open doorway indicated that someone retained a bit of humor in the face of the inevitable: “Mitochondria Manor” and “Deathbug Suite.” This place was definitely not a home anymore, and he wondered whether it would ever be a home again. Harry couldn’t bring himself to jump back into the breach just yet.

Sonja Bartlett’s room was down the hall at the opposite end of the house from Harry’s. Time didn’t mean what it used to to any of them, and he was sure she was awake down there. She’d been locking herself in, not talking and not eating.

He soft-stepped down the hallway and saw Sonja’s door ajar. Inside he glimpsed the ever-present console and the unlit peel-and-peek staring down at him from the wall. In the past, she always had the Knuckleheads on the peel playing “Skyborne” full blast. Harry knocked, and when she didn’t answer he let himself in.

Sonja was as he’d left her, sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at a larger-than-life holo display of herself beside her mother. Except for Sonja’s cuts and bruises, they looked identical—twins at different ages—not just the same shade of blonde hair and blue eyes, but the precise positioning of eyes and nose, the exact line of jaw, full lips, tilt of nose. The reason for that, and for his own twinship to his father, churned his belly with a fast nausea. He breathed deep and choked it back.

“I can’t believe it,” Sonja said, without looking at him.

“What?” he asked. “That you two look so much alike? We knew that even before we had the gory details.”

The images vanished at a flick of Sonja’s gloveware, but she continued to stare at the afterglow.

“Not that,” she said. “I
know
the biological consequences of . . . cloning. What I don’t know is . . .
what am I
?”

Harry sat next to her, not touching, aware that she was very spooky. So was Harry. Now, in their own house, their every word and gesture was monitored, security patrolled the rooftop and the coffee trees. It was claustrophobic, but it was bigger than a cell. They were moving in the right direction.

So far.

He had to get some of Sonja’s fight back.

“That doesn’t seem very productive,” he said.

Sonja turned on him in a flash.

“Oh, yes,” she hissed, “you’re Mr. Productive. You and Dr. Chang seem to be making great progress on your little terminals. There’s nothing I can do here and this time we can’t run.”

“Wanna bet?”

“We’re
surrounded,”
she said. “And we blabbed to them about how we got out last time. Damn! Damn! I
hated
them when we landed here. They gave me a hand down from the cockpit, then wheeled the plane into that hangar and locked it up. We were
so stupid!”

“No,” Harry said, “we’re not stupid. We’re tired, frustrated and scared. Even without this AVA thing, you know, we’ve had a pretty hard day. Nobody else in the world knows what it’s like to get the news we got today. Clones! Jesus! And they think everything’ll be chill if we just talk to the embassy shrink.”

Sonja leaned against him and he leaned back.

“I can’t make sense out of relationships, now,” she said. “Think about it. You’re a clone of your father, right? Doesn’t that make him your twin, but with a head start? Your father is your brother—the rest of the world calls that sort of thing incest.”

“I might be my father biologically, but I’m my own person in here.” Harry tapped his temple for emphasis. “Except for the augmentations, of course.”

“Oh, yes, the augmentations.” Sonja hissed the last word out long and hard. “We learn fast, we forget nothing. What else did they pump into us? An ‘off switch? An abort mechanism? Attack mode?”

“That’s what all the testing is about.”

“All this testing is about keeping us locked up,” she said. “They had their nice little ceremony to thank us for what we did, they gave me a pretty new plane to replace
Mariposa,
and when we landed here they took the prop off the plane, sealed this place off and we haven’t seen the light of day since.”

Harry knew that Sonja was glum about losing
Mariposa,
her little yellow biplane. Crashing twice in one day would stomp the ego of any pilot. Surviving two crashes in one day should merit
some
strokes. Harry wanted Sonja thinking less about airplanes and clones and more about getting
out

Out to where?
was one of the questions she would ask that he didn’t have an answer to, yet.

“I’ve seen the light of night,” Harry said. “I was just sightseeing on the roof.”

“If I were up there right now, I’d probably jump off.”

“Glad I didn’t bring you along.”

Harry reached into her wastebasket and pulled out a sheet of paper. He leaned close to her ear and crumpled the paper near their faces as he whispered: “On your airstrip in back—two choppers and a Mongoose.”

Sonja looked at him for a moment, her lips pressed into a tight, white line. Then, for the first time in two days, her expression softened. She reached for her own piece of paper, and crumpled it as she whispered back, “You get us there and I’ll get us out. Where can we go?”

Harry shrugged.

One thing at a time,

“Let’s hit the kitchen,” he said. “I could use a snack.”

Besides,
he thought,
it’s noisy down there. Maybe we can get some planning done.

Chapter 25

When Phidias saw the claw, would he ever have known it for a lion’s if he had never seen a lion?

—Lucian

Colonel Rico Toledo propped himself against the wall of the embassy’s makeshift communications center. Two canes took the weight off his lacerated feet, but nothing eased the pain in his butt.

The ambassador’s inner office was the last place Rico would’ve set up communications, but that was Hodge’s problem, not his. Hodge was flinging orders willy-nilly the last couple of days, and it looked to Rico that, as usual, Hodge was more a problem than a solution. He’d hoped to find Hodge at this hearing so he could rattle his cage. It wouldn’t be the same without a few drinks, but it would still be fun.

Rico watched Marte Chang, with her back to him, face a closed-circuit interrogation. She testified rapid-fire on a scramble to the Senate Intelligence Committee. They’d accepted a taped statement by Rico that he’d made for Scholz at the hospital, but they wanted Marte Chang choppered in from Casa Canada to face them in person.

Rico chuckled.

They know that if they hook up a broadcast unit out there, Harry will find a way to piggyback on it.

Rico was working on that very problem himself. He was sure, now, that Spook was their only hope. Everything else had either been royally screwed or stonewalled, and he was getting a bad feeling about the silence in Mexico City.

Rico itched all over from the sweat in his stitches. Condensation dripped from walls of the tight-packed room as the early-morning sun went to work on the plastic windows. The air-conditioner was overwhelmed by the Costa Bravan humidity and the press of Agency officials, witnesses, experts and a three-to-one security cadre. They weren’t afraid of anyone getting in. They just didn’t want anyone to get out, particularly Marte Chang and the Colonel.

Getting out wouldn’t be easy, but it was exactly what the Colonel intended to do. He just couldn’t move fast, or far. Even with the canes, he could barely put one foot in front of the other. Moving around helped, but he didn’t move much. And when he did move, he exaggerated grimaces of pain.

—
That’ll make ‘em careless,
he thought.

It was an optimistic thought, his first in a while.

He thought of Harry, and smiled.

I
taught him that elevator shaft escape trick in this very building.

At least one thing they’d done together turned out all right. He hoped that they’d have to bring Harry into town to testify at the last minute, but he’d heard they, too, would be recorded instead. He intended to snatch Harry out of here at the first opportunity, but first he had a couple of favors to call in from Spook and the Peace and Freedom guerrillas.

Major Scholz entered the doorway, caught his gaze and worked her way through the crowd and cables to join him. As she crossed the room, Rico saw everyone perk up at her presence, and greet her as she passed. She left smiles on their faces, and on his own. Why hadn’t he noticed that before?

I didn’t dare.

“Is this the line for butt transplants, Colonel?”

“Scholz, you’re merciless. Please, don’t ride my ass. Is Harry coming in?”

“No,” she said. “It’s confirmed. They’ll interview him out there at the farm, with Sonja.”

“I’d sure like to figure a way to see him.”

“Well, Grace forbids us to let you set foot out there, I’m afraid. Something about some punched-out cupboards and a raging asshole.”

“That was before all this,” he said, waving a hand at the wreckage of the embassy and the frenetic workings of the hollow-eyed staff. “I was drunk then. I was stupid then.”

“And now you’re smart?”

“Smarter, Scholz. It’s a start.”

Rico resisted the urge to scratch the gel seal that covered the left side of his face and pretended to focus on the painful sluggishness of the inquiry at hand.

“When
can
I see him?” he whispered.

“When we pour the concrete over ViraVax, at the latest,” Scholz said. “This afternoon.”

She fingered the top brass button on her jacket.

Wearing a bug,
he realized.
And she wants me to know.

“I’ll be glad to see
that
show, Major, for three reasons.”

The peel-and-peek wall holo showed the jowly, red-nosed face of the Intelligence Committee Chair, the Honorable Frank Myers. His sensitive mike transmitted the rustle of off-screen paperwork from Washington, D.C. to La Libertad, Costa Brava.

“Three reasons?” Scholz asked. “What are they?”

Marte Chang took off her own headset and shrugged a question toward the floor director. She accepted the liaison’s headset and nodded her okay.

“Harry, of course,” Rico said. “I don’t know what I’ll say to him, but maybe he’s got something to say to me.”

“I know for a fact that he does,” Scholz said. “What are the other two?”

“ViraVax,” the Colonel sighed. “Not that it’s anything but symbolic, but I still want to see that place buried.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee began its interview of Marte Chang.

“Dr. Chang,” Senator Myers said, “you were a virologist for the company known as ViraVax, is that correct?”

Marte Chang, her smooth features wan and her eyes dark-circled, sighed.

“Yes.”

Rico was unimpressed by the Intelligence Committee’s intelligence except for one thing—they were intelligent enough to interview all survivors by satellite. His tape had rolled first, and Marte Chang’s statement would cap things off. It had been a very long night.

Major Scholz whispered so close to his ear that Rico felt the barest flutter of lips.

“What’s reason number three?” she asked.

Rico placed his hand over Scholz’s top jacket button, the one right between the swell of her breasts.

“You,” he whispered back. “I’ll get to see you.”

Scholz patted his hand, then removed it from her chest. She gave it a squeeze before she let go.

“I’ll be in touch,” she said.

Rico didn’t answer. He watched her walk past his hired security and return the man’s salute. The guy was a rent-a-gun who didn’t have to salute, but he probably thought she’d be impressed by the move. Scholz turned to the guard on just the right beat.

“Sergeant,” she told the guard, “Colonel Toledo will give you the slip. Page my on-call line when he does.”

“Yes, Major,” the young man said. He blustered on, “I’ll see to it that he doesn’t give me the slip, Major.”

Scholz was already walking away. When the sergeant turned around, Colonel Toledo was gone.

Colonel Toledo intercepted Marte Chang at the side door. Sweat-soaked security guards waited impatiently to take her back to quarters.

“They’re going to study the kids,” he said. “Whisper says they’re shipping them to the States in a day or two.”

Marte shook her head.

“That’s the least of my worries. And theirs . . .”

“Your work,” he interrupted. “It’s all theoretical, isn’t it? I mean, it’s computer work, not tissue work, right?”

Marte hesitated, glanced at their guards, then stepped back inside.

“You’re up to something, Colonel,” she whispered. “What is it?”

“Insurance,” he whispered back. “For all of us. And a way you can continue your work in private.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Trust me,” he said. “Have yourself and all your data ready to jump immediately.”

“But,
look
at you. How can you travel . . . ?”

“Motivation,” he whispered. “Someone
will
turn loose that virus, and you know it.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Someone will. But what can I accomplish on the run?”

“Warn the world, help people protect themselves. Until somebody comes up with an antidote, it’s the best we can do.”

One of their escorts interrupted.

“Colonel . . . ?”

“Shut up, soldier,” Colonel Toledo ordered. “Step outside and give us some privacy. I’ll let you know when I’m going to escape.”

The young sergeant backed away, his face a pale blur.

“The recipe is one thing,” Marte reminded him. “Manufacture and distribution on a worldwide scale is another. How . . . ?”

“You can’t do it here, either,” he said. “We take one problem at a time. Like the flight attendant says, ‘In case of loss of cabin pressure, place your own oxygen mask first.’ We’re no good to the rest of the world if we’re dead.”

“Good point.”

“Unassailable. Try to get a little sleep. Be ready.”

With that Marte Chang hurried out the door, her escort just a pace behind her. Colonel Toledo took less than a minute to give his greenhorn guard his second slip in ten minutes. He left a scrambled message with Rena Scholz via Sidekick, then caught a cab to the harbor in La Libertad. They would find him soon enough, this he knew, but by then arrangements would be made with Spook and there would be nothing they could do to stop him.