Burn (24 page)

Rico’s attention switched from Rena Scholz to the peel-and-peek beside the mirror, and what he saw there raised the few fine hairs on his arms. The pain and itching from his wounds washed away.

Clumsy camera work panned Mexico City through the window of a commercial airliner. Dust, black smoke and steam boiled up from acres of rubble. The thick plume flattened out as it hit the colder air atop the city. One finger of smoke reached out towards the camera, and the international airport.

Chapter 35

And there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men
were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.

—Revelation

El Oso shaved the part of his new beard that irritated his neck, his boot knife gliding nicely over the cold, hand-soap lather. In this brief standoff he had lost nearly ten kilos, and the image that regarded El Oso from his mirror was hard, lean, noble.

‘Take your time, Oso,” El Tigre called from the sniper’s roost. “We are in charge here. The albino
pendejo’s
message is
mierde,
nothing more.”

El Oso rinsed his face and neck, then toweled himself dry. He put on Hernan’s clean shirt, since Hernan would no longer have need of shirts, and called back.

“Pay attention. We lost four men who did not pay attention. We have to think of food, soon, or we will be too weak to shoot the gringos when they come.”

“We can eat Hernan,” El Tigre said. “He was hit yesterday, but he didn’t die until this afternoon.”

El Oso shook his head, chuckling at the joke, but when he looked up and saw the fear in the others’ eyes, he stopped.

“No more talk of eating Hernan,” El Oso ordered. “No more talk of eating, period.”

“They say they come tonight,” Guillermo said. “Then what? If we kill them all, they’ll send more tomorrow night. We will run out of ammunition. They pick us off one by one. . . .”

“What would you have us do?” El Oso interrupted. “Surrender, and be shot against this wall like pigs? No, when the phony earthquake never comes—one day, two days more—the city will fill up again and we will all leave here rich men.”

“But how . . . ?”

“El Oso has a plan,” El Tigre cackled in his unnerving way. “And shadows collect on the roof across the street. It is time, Oso.”

El Oso heard the hard
blat-blat
of Tigre’s compressor.

“One less shadow, Oso,” El Tigre said. “Tell them the plan.”

“Osvaldo, bring me that tape!” Oso ordered. “Umberto, Miguel, unpack two of those cartons. With care, you two! Don’t do to us what the gringos cannot.”

Osvaldo handed Oso three rolls of duct tape that he’d found in a tool box. Oso pulled off a dozen meter-long strips and placed them on a workbench beside the pallet of cartons. Twice more El Tigre’s compressor coughed.

“These are very careless men, Oso.”

“Continue to instruct them in their carelessness, Tigre,” El Oso said. “Osvaldo, Umberto, over here.”

El Oso unpacked one of the shiny cylinders from its protective carton and carefully twisted off the top. He lifted out the rack of cold, blue vials and set it gently atop the carton. Wisps of vapor slipped from the vials as Oso removed them one by one and stuck them onto the tape. Then he wrapped the tape around their chests and foreheads.

“Everybody see this?”

“Sí, Oso.”

“Sí.”

“Sí.”

“Then come down here one at a time and prepare yourselves this way. We will transmit a portrait of each of you to those gringos, and we will see how many want to come in here shooting. Come!”

Umberto picked up his shoulder launcher and tested his mobility.

“Oso,” he said, “I ask only one thing.”

“What is that, Umberto?”

“My little bottles. If any of them break . . . please, shoot me right there. Don’t let this devil-bug kill me.”

“If you will promise me the same courtesy,” Oso said. “You have my word, I will not let you, or any man here, die of the devil-bug.”

“You speak of money,” Miguel said, “yet I see none. Nor do I see how we
will live to spend this money that I do not see.”

El Oso prepared a few strips of the vials for himself and attached them gingerly around his chest.

“This is the plan,” Oso said. “The northamericans provide each of us with a driver, car and tickets to a different continent. Each of us gets a briefcase with ten million dollars as traveling money. Accounts will be set up later through the Swiss for a suitable ransom. . . .”

Oso was interrupted by a very disorienting flex in the floor and a cascade of dust from the ceiling. A deep-throated groan, like that of a woman in labor or lust, issued from the concrete walls around them.

“Terremoto!”
El Tigre shouted. “To the doorways!”

By then the floor had upended, tumbling the small band of guerrillas and the pallet of deadly cartons into a pile against one wall. Those who remained conscious tried to rip the taped vials from their bodies, but most of them had already broken.

The wild, rolling motion was replaced by a severe back-and-forth jerking of the earth that severed each floor of Coyote Warehouse from the floor below and tumbled the pieces together into a heap of concrete and a billowing cloud of dust. Propane lines to their basement generator ruptured, and the generator itself touched off a flash fire that added steam and smoke to the dust-choked air.

The earth continued its seizure, leveling Mexico City from the Zocaló nearly to the airport. Its fresh shroud of dusty smoke caught in a breeze and sifted down on the international airport, the bus blockade, the four hundred and fifty evacuee encampments along all four major highways and onto the only water supply for twenty-two million people.

Within minutes, international rescue teams were on their way to help.

Chapter 36

This is a truth: when you sacrifice your life, you must make fullest use of
your weaponry. It is false not to do so, and to die with a weapon undrawn.

—Miyamoto Musashi

Trenton Solaris picked himself up from the floor of his office, tested his arms and legs and found nothing broken. He had ridden out more earthquakes than he could count, in Mexico City and in the old Guatemala, but this one was the Big One. Everything from his walls—books, disks, cubes, his personal collection of Mayan artifacts—lay in a tumble of shards and paper on his office floor. The walls still held most of the ceiling aloft, but the lining of acoustical tile hung in great white shreds.

This thick silence, after the terrible grinding shrieks and the groans, made him test his hearing as well.

“Yes?” he asked himself aloud.

Yes, he was alive. Yes, the gods had punished him for his presumptuousness.

Declare an earthquake, human,
they said.
We will give you a shake to remember.

His mother would have expected as much.

The albino checked the instrumentation on his console. As expected, the local hard-wire was out but the battery-powered satlinks persisted. Had he planned on surviving the afternoon, Solaris would have sent a congratulatory memo to the Corps of Engineers. As it was, he had some ugly business to be about.

Solaris tried his window shield, and it would not open. The building’s emergency generators must be out, as well. That meant his communications abilities lay within the range of his battery packs—four or five hours. He did not feel like communicating. He knew that he should see about the condition of his staff, other people in the building, survivors among the poor on the street. But that which was required of him now made all of that moot. None would survive his final duty, and nothing would stay his trembling hand from that duty.

The confirmation was solid. The lot numbers on the canisters inside Coyote Warehouse matched the numbers in the logs that Harry Toledo extracted from ViraVax. The Deathbug was, indeed, alive and well in Mexico City. Perhaps the stainless steel canisters could have survived the earthquake intact. But Solaris had watched the transmission from the observation post across the street from the rebels. The greedy fools had removed at least fifty vials from their nests, and there was no denying what that meant. Even now, survivors of the earthquake inhaled the great death.

Our air processing is gone with the generators,
he thought.
Right now I could be breathing that virus myself.

Solaris admired, for the last time, his Maya mural. Born to a poor village in the Petén region of Guatemala, he had learned Spanish from a medic who came through with polio inoculations. Being the only villager who spoke Spanish, Solaris found himself indispensable by the time he was twelve. At fourteen, he spoke English and German. At sixteen he changed his name to a form suitable to one who desired more fluidity in the greater world. His father was already dead at forty-four, an elder by village standards, burned alive by the Guatemalan army as a lesson to their village. The point of the lesson was never clear, except that they
would
do these things simply because they
could
do them.

The albino recalled how his father taught him that the end was near—not the end of the world, which would survive, but the end of time.

“That is why the Old Ones quit building the cities of stone,” he’d said. “The stars told them that time itself would end when the planets aligned in their two-thousand-year cycle.”

“When will that be, father?” he’d asked.

“By the
ladino
calendar, about 2012. Some of our cousins farther south say 2020, but I think they just like the number. You will have more years by then than I do,” he said. “It saddens me that you will endure such a thing, but surely it will be glorious to behold, this end of time.”

“How can time end without the world ending?” he’d asked.

His father had merely shaken his head and pursed his lips in his way that meant,
I
don’t know. Discussion ended.

But Solaris thought that he knew, now, how time would end. Time would die with the last timekeeper, the last human being.

“We missed 2012. Five more years to go, by those cousins farther south,” he muttered. “Maybe I can put it off that long, at least.”

To do what needed doing, he had to get to the rail yards, and to a nondescript freight car that awaited the ultrasecure coding sequence that was stored in his Sidekick.

Solaris cleared rubble from the doorway and found the little clay dog-shaped whistle that he had uncovered with his own hands at Chacben Kax. A front foot was broken, but the whistle remained intact. The whistle always made him smile because the ancient potter was quite the jokester. One had to blow into the dog’s butt to make it work. He slipped it into his jacket pocket and wrestled open the door to his outer offices.

Terrelle and Workman were dead, crushed under a failed concrete truss and ceiling debris. Hot water sprayed across the room, and a tangle of wires and cables blocked the only exit. Solaris picked up a twisted metal bookend and threw it into the wires. Nothing. He wrapped his Sidekick in a shred of plastic film, covered his head with his arms and bulled his way through the tangle to the far door.

In his struggle down the dark stairwells to the ground floor he met not one living human. He grew ever more apprehensive of the thickening dust, smoke and steam billowing around him.

What if it kills me before I make the rail yards?

Then nothing would matter, and time would stop on time.

He slipped and scrabbled his way through the rubble that used to be the Hotel Majestic. Fires raged in the remnants of downtown Mexico City, lighting the dusty scene with blood. All around him he heard the
hiss
and
pop
of explosions. More and more screams pierced the night. The screams didn’t usually last long before shifting to hopeless moans or hopeful shrieks for help.

They should have left as they were told,
he thought.
We warned them to get out.

What did it matter now that the warning was a fraud, a cover for the struggle over the supply of virus? As the stars would have it, the lie could have saved them anyway. Rescue from the rubble would mean only the horrible melting death awaiting them from the virus, so Solaris struggled on with his mission and ignored the pleas for help rising from the devastation around him.

Dust and smoke watered his eyes, and already he was wracked with the long, deep cough that comes with the inhalation of pulverized stone. For the first time in his adult life, Solaris wished for the full onslaught of the sun. No moonlight pierced the pall over the center of the city, and he struggled towards the little sun that he himself was about to create.

The Agency had prepared his building well. As he glanced back through the firelit haze, he saw that only his operations center remained standing. The National Palace, gone. Diego Rivera’s murals, gone. The national cathedral, gone. Gone, too, was his sense of direction. He took his bearings from his office, and estimated that he was entirely too close to the mess that used to be Coyote Warehouse. He checked the subway, hoping the tunnels could lead him past the enemy bug, but huge blocks of beautiful old stone blocked everything—streets, subways, alleys. Gouts of water burst from the buckled pavement.

Though Solaris was small, and unused to physical exertion, he persisted in this mission with a fever born of absolute fear and desperation.

I
got us into this,
he thought.
It’s up to me to get us out.

The “us,” of course, would not include himself, nor the few survivors back at Operations who were, even now, helping dig the dead and injured from tons of collapsed ceilings and walls. Nor would it include any of the international rescuers and firefighters who faced crushed propane tanks, live electrical lines and shifting wreckage as they shouted and poked their way into what used to be the Zocaló.

He had forgotten how hot exertion could be. In his adult gentility he had forsaken the hard physical work of his childhood.

As a child in Guatemala, a Maya of an American father, Solaris had always been special. His mother’s father told the village that this albino child represented the advent of the coming of the end of time, which their calendar had predicted a thousand years ago. Now, by playing both ends against the middle with ViraVax, he had become the agent of that end. Things would continue, but time itself would unravel and existence as we know it would cease. It was, he admitted, a marvel that his people saw this conclusion so clearly from so very far away.

He looked over his shoulder and saw the humped shapes of the dozen armored vehicles that had surrounded Coyote Warehouse. He heard no cries from within, and the three vehicles that were not buried in brick appeared abandoned.

They knew what they were fighting,
he thought.
But they can’t outrun the bug, or my penance, here.

He mounted the closest track, popped the hatch and instead of the cool dark guts of the machine he was greeted by fresh blood cloying the air. He resisted the reflex to run, and as his eyes adjusted to the dark he saw the three crewmen, dead at their posts. Two had been shot in the back of the head. Their faces and brains clotted the gauges. The third sat propped against the rear plate, a Colt 10mm beside his hand and a huge halo of blood behind his back.

Solaris swallowed, swallowed again, frozen just inside the hatch. His trachea spasmed and he breathed in a tight wheeze, his body unwilling to accept the fouled air.

Yes,
he thought,
they outran the Deathbug.

The albino forced himself down the few rungs of ladder. The cabin of the Powell was crowded with its crew of three, made more crowded by their splatterings about the cabin. Solaris didn’t take the time to send any of them out the hatch. He didn’t want to waste the time, and he wasn’t sure that he had the necessary strength of body or mind. He peeled the two faceless ones away from the controls and let them fall back against their executioner.

The Powell was the newest of the Rapid Entry Armored Vehicles, designed for urban use against the gang armies. Extremely narrow, it could punch through walls without bringing the building down on top of it. Electric motors drove the rubberized track in near silence. In extremely hot situations, it could be directed by remote and deployed as a drone. In low-visibility situations, the crew could lock into a satlink and follow a screen-generated simulation to its target.

Solaris located the console’s input cable and plugged in his Sidekick.

“Initiate starting sequence,” he commanded.

The machine hummed to life, a far cry from its loudmouth diesel brothers. The rubberized armor would protect him from live power lines, and his passing would not spark any leaking gas to flame. He called up a district map, penned in the shortest path to the railroad yard, and forced himself to breathe.

“Run,” he commanded, and the machine set out in its indomitable twenty-kilometer-per-hour crawl toward its goal.

The ride was a rough one. At times the Powell achieved near-vertical as it clamored over rubble, and when it crawled down the other side Solaris had to push off the three bodies that crushed him against the console. He finally managed to wrestle the smaller man, the executioner, up the ladder and out the hatch. The effort and the close quarters had Solaris drenched in sweat, the muscles in his arms and legs trembled, and he concentrated on slowing his rapid breathing. He regretted that he had to breathe at all, in part from the stench of the dead, in part from fear of the Deathbug. He did not want it to get him before his mission was complete.

For the few moments that the hatch was opened he heard the terrible cacophony of death and grief, and realized that he had sorely underestimated the effectiveness of their evacuation. He had wanted to believe that twenty-plus-million people could pull out of the city in twenty-four hours, and he had wanted to believe that at least fifteen million
had
pulled out, but of course the math made a mockery of this. Roads had been blocked within hours of the alarm, vehicles abandoned, and millions of people tried to walk their way to safety. The rest simply stocked up and dug in. Now the living tried desperately to dig out.

The enormity of what he was about to do struck him with the screams and the pleadings of the survivors. Already the Powell carried a dozen or more humans clinging in hope to its rubberized shell. Solaris had imagined that a few thousand might die, but his mind had been incapable of picturing death in the millions, in the ten millions. Death at his own hand. If he saved history, he would go down in its pages beside Hitler.

Yet to stay his hand at this point would mean the deaths of nearly ten billion.

The railroad yard looked, through the monitors, like the aftermath of a child’s tantrum. His floodlights revealed boxcars tossed askew as far as he could see, and ruptured tankers poured their chemistries into the soil and the air. Even if he knew which siding held the container he sought, Solaris knew he could never find it by sight.

He entered the signal-locator code, his personal authorization code, and held his breath for the few moments that it took for the satellites to chat. Numbers had been his blessing and his curse all his life. Solaris never forgot a number—com number, address, Social Security number, license number. When traveling, he had to force his gaze away from license numbers, house numbers, numbers on boats, planes and railroad cars.

This railroad car, like others throughout the world, held a special cargo. So, too, did shabby freighters in myriad ports. Ballistic missiles still targeted the nuclear nations and their installations, but through Solaris the Agency had found a cheaper way to cover the bets in the rest of the world.

Only the President and The Football could launch a ballistic strike, and “Red Alert” only applied to a situation directly threatening the United States or its holdings. A dozen people in the world had access to the RCC—Regional Contingency Codes—and Trenton Solaris, as the DIA’s Latin America Chief, was one of those dozen.