Bio-Strike pp-4 Read online

  A business-suited investor in Manhattan’s financial district. A crop duster winging over open farmland. An airline passenger filling out postcards to kill time during a layover. All are sights that fit and belong. And all may be something other than they appear, camouflage to deceive the willing eye.

  In San Jose, California, a municipal street sweeper brought the aerosol payload through the target zone, dispensing it from an extra spray reservoir aboard its heavy steel frame. It whooshed along Rosita Avenue, amber cab lights strobing, circular gutter brooms whirling, wash-down nozzles deluging the pavement with water as the lab-cooked agent jetted from its second tank.

  An everyday part of the urban scene, the sweeper barely scratched the surface of people’s awareness: It was a minor inconvenience, a momentary hiccup in their progress through the morning. Motorists shifted lanes to get out of its way. Pedestrians backstepped onto the curb to avoid its rotating brooms, raised their conversational pitch a notch or two as it swished past, and otherwise ignored it.

  They breathed invisible clouds of aerosol and never attributed the slight tickle in the nose or scratchiness at the back of the throat to anything more harmful than stirred up sidewalk grit. They scattered the microscopic particles with their shoe bottoms, ferried them on their skin and clothing, and sent them out along countless routes of transmission with the money they exchanged for newspapers and lattes.

  Their eyes seeing nothing amiss, no disruption in the orderly and ordinary course of their lives, they went on to their workplaces without an inkling that they had become carriers of a wholly new and insidious type of infection — many of them heading north on Rosita toward the high, sleek office spire that was the famed main branch headquarters of UpLink International, far and away their city’s largest corporate employer.

  Hardly by chance, the street sweeper kept moving in the same direction.

  * * *

  When Roger Gordian’s daughter telephoned him on her way home from the courthouse, he didn’t know what to say. No matter that the proceeding’s outcome had been a foregone conclusion or that he’d had months to prepare for the news. No matter that he was used to talking to business leaders and heads of state from everywhere on earth, often under hot-button circumstances that required quick thinking and verbal agility. Julia was his daughter, and he didn’t know what to say, in part because almost everything he had said to her these past few months had proven to be exactly the wrong thing, leading to more than one inexplicable skirmish between them. Gordian had found himself having to consciously resist feeling like the parent of an adolescent again, prepared for every word he spoke to come back at him and explode in his face. That would have been thoughtless, unfair, and corrosive to their relationship. Julia was a remarkably competent thirty-three-year-old woman who’d led her own life for many years, and she deserved better than stale, fatherly programming from him… difficult as that sometimes was.

  “It’s over, my divorce is final,” she had told him over her cellular. “The paperwork’s signed, and I should be getting copies in a couple of weeks.”

  That was four long seconds ago.

  Five, now.

  His stomach clutched.

  He didn’t know what to say to her.

  Six seconds and counting.

  His watch ticked into the silence of his office.

  Gordian was not by disposition an introspective man. He saw his mind and feelings as fairly uncomplicated. He loved his wife and two daughters, and he loved his work. The work less. Though for some years it had consumed a greater share of his time than it should have, and the family had felt bumped to the sidelines. His wife, in particular. He hadn’t realized, then, how much.

  At first there was so much to be done, a decade of struggle building his electronics firm up from the ground. The importance of being an earner, a provider, had been fostered in him early in life. His father had died before the term quality time was coined, but it was doubtful Thomas Gordian would have been able to grasp the concept in any event. He’d been too busy adding thick layers of callus to his fingers at the industrial machine plant where he had pulled a modest but steady wage from the day he’d turned sixteen and quit high school to help support his depression-stricken family. For the elder Gordian, bringing home a paycheck was how you expressed your love of family, and that dogged blue-collar sensibility had taken deep root in his only son, enduring long after he’d returned from Vietnam and, with the help of loan officers and a handful of farsighted investors, purchased a limping, debt-ridden San Jose outfit called Global Technologies for the giveaway price of twelve million dollars.

  The rewards of his gamble far exceeded Gordian’s hopes. In less than a decade, he turned Global into a Silicon Valley giant with a slew of tremendously successful defense industry patents. One after another, the contracts started coming in, and Gordian had worked harder than ever to keep them coming. He had used the technological windfall from his development of GAPS-FREE advanced military reconnaissance and targeting equipment to propel his firm to the leading edge of civilian satellite communications, and rechristened it UpLink International.

  He had earned. He had provided for his loved ones. He had made more money than he would ever need.

  And so he’d gone ahead and found a new reason to keep working.

  By the time his corporation went multinational — and Fortune 500—in 1990, Gordian’s thoughts had slung outward to pursue what his wife usually referred to as The Dream, based upon an idea as straightforward as his personality: Information equaled freedom. No lightning bolt of originality there, perhaps, but his real inspiration had been in how he’d set out to draw concrete results from the abstract. As head of the world’s most extensive civilian telecommunications network, he’d been in a position to bring people access to information, a currency with which he could buy better lives for untold millions, particularly where totalitarian regimes sustained themselves by doing the very opposite — choking off the gateways of communication, isolating their citizens from knowledge that might challenge their strangleholds of oppression. History had shown that radical government change nearly always followed quieter revolutions in social consciousness, and the old axiom that democracy was contagious seemed no less true for all the times it had been used as a political cheer line.

  Again, Gordian’s triumphs went far beyond his expectations — but, ironically, the signals Ashley was sending from home about her own unhappiness weren’t getting through the bottleneck of humanitarian goals he’d continued to pursue. Not till she’d compelled his attention with words he would remember for the rest of his days.

  “I know that everything you’ve accomplished in the world makes a huge difference to people everywhere. I know it’s your calling, something you have to do. What I don’t know is if I’m strong enough to wait until you’re done.”

  Her words, those shattering, unforgettable words, had forced him to look into a deep mirror and see things about himself that were difficult to accept. Far more importantly, they also saved his marriage.

  He had been luckier than he’d even realized at the time.

  “Dad, you still with me? I’m on the highway ramp and it’s pretty noisy—”

  “Right here, hon.” Gordian tried to pull his thoughts together. “I’m just glad the worst of the ordeal’s behind you and that you can get on with your life.”

  “Amen.” She produced a sharp laugh. “You know what happened when we were leaving court? After everything we’ve been through, all the legal sniping, all the ugliness, he asked me to have lunch with him. At this Italian place downtown we used to go to sometimes.”

  Her voice dropped abruptly into silence.

  Gordian waited, his hand tight around the receiver. That laugh — so harsh and humorless — had startled him. It was like hearing a thin pane of glass suddenly crack from extreme cold.

  “I guess,” Julia finally said, “we were supposed to toast to our future as born again singles over wine and pasta.”

 
Gordian heard the creak of his office chair as he changed position. He, common noun, had once been referred to by name: Craig. Her husband of seven years. It was still unclear what had pulled them apart. The divorce petition Craig had filed cited irreconcilable differences, no elaboration. Over the months she’d been staying with her parents, Julia had occasionally talked about their long separations because of his career, about her loneliness when he was away on the job. He was a structural engineer, freelance, though most of his recent assignments had been for the big oil companies. His specialized niche was the design of fixed offshore drilling platforms, and he’d often spent many weeks on-site, overseeing construction. One month it was Alaska, the next Belize. His absences surely contributed to their problems, but Gordian suspected there had to be more. If Julia was the one feeling neglected, why was it Craig who’d wanted out? Gordian hadn’t pushed for answers, however, and Julia had offered very few on her own to either him or Ashley. She had claimed there was no infidelity, and they were trying to take her at her word. But why had she been so guarded with them? Were the reasons too painful to share? Or might Julia herself still be in the dark?

  Gordian shifted in the chair again. “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. I was too incredulous,” she said. “But wait, it gets better. While I was staring at him, really dumb-struck, he leaned over and tried to kiss me. On the lips. I turned my head soon as I realized what he was doing, or trying to do, and it landed on my cheek. I had to stop myself from wiping it off. Like a kid who gets a wet one from some ancient aunt or uncle she hardly knows.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he backed off, wished me luck, and we went our separate ways. God, it was just so awkward and squirmy.”

  Gordian shook his head.

  “An overture toward putting the bad feelings to rest,” he said. “Ill-advised, inappropriate, and without any grasp of how you’d be affected. But I suppose that was his intent.”

  “He wanted the greyhounds as part of the settlement, Dad. If I hadn’t been the one to sign that contract at the adoption center instead of him, giving me ownership in black and white, he’d have taken Jack and Jill away from me. There’s an overture I won’t forget.”

  Gordian strove to come up with a response. In the end he could only echo his own previous comments.

  “It’s behind you now, Julia. You can move on. Let’s be glad for that.”

  Another significant pause. Gordian heard car horns squalling at the other end of the line. He wished she hadn’t insisted on going to court alone, wished she weren’t driving unaccompanied — not being as distressed as she sounded.

  “Better go, traffic’s a mess,” she said. “I’ll be home in time for dinner.”

  But it was barely nine o’clock in the morning, Gordian thought.

  “There are quite a few hours between now and then,” he said. “How are you planning to fill them?”

  There was no answer.

  He waited, wondering whether she’d heard him.

  Then, her tone suddenly brittle: “Did you want a complete schedule?”

  Gordian raised his eyebrows, puzzled. His fingers tightened around the receiver.

  “I only meant—”

  “Because I can pull over at the nearest Kinko’s and fax something over for your approval.”

  Gordian made a gesture of frustration into the empty room. His stomach went from bad to worse.

  “Julia—”

  “I’m a grown woman,” she interrupted. “I don’t think you need a full rundown of my comings and goings in advance.”

  “Julia, hang on—”

  “See you later,” she said.

  The connection broke.

  Blew it, Gordian scolded himself. Somehow, you blew it again.

  And try as he did to see where he had gone wrong, he could not.

  He simply could not.

  Many stories below on Rosita Avenue, a street sweeper shot past the building as Gordian’s employees began to arrive for the commencing workday, but the clamor of its equipment would not have impinged upon his thoughts even had it reached the heavy floor-to-ceiling windows of his office. From where he was sitting, alone at his desk, the dead, silent telephone still clenched in his hand…

  From where he was sitting right now, the rest of the world seemed immeasurably far away.

  TWO

  LA PAZ, BOLIVIA OCTOBER 15, 2001

  In the center of La Paz, on the main thoroughfare that descended from the heights to the modern business district, one could look up beyond the rows of exhausted little shacks on the canyon wall to where three of Illimani’s five snow-capped peaks took a great bite out of the Andean sky. It was a sight that none who visited the city could forget, and that even indigenous Aymara Indians, with their blood memories of the Incas as encroaching newcomers, viewed with awe and respect.

  The National Police Corps vehicle and its motorcycle escort headed southeast on Avenida Villazón to its wide fork less than a mile past the Universidad Mayor San Andrés, then bore left onto Avenida Anicento Arce toward the Zona Sur. Nuzzled deep within the canyon in Calocoto and other suburban neighborhoods, sheltered from the cold sting of high-altitude winds, the city’s affluent lived behind high gates in exaggerated chalets and sprawling, tile-roofed adobe mansions constructed in deliberate imitation of Hollywood cinematic style.

  In the police car’s backseat, the lean, ascetic man in first officer’s dress had ridden most of the way with his eyes downturned, a bony hand on the satchel beside him, his lips moving in a nearly constant whisper. He had looked out the window only twice — the first time, by simple chance, when they had passed Calle Sagárnaga, crammed as always with customers of the Witches’ Market. There at the outdoor vendors’ stalls were charms, potions, powders, and fetuses carved from the wombs of llamas for their alleged luck-bringing properties, their dessicated skin pulled tight over unformed bones, forcing them into contortions that resembled, or perhaps preserved, a state of final agony. There, indigent chola mothers, wearing traditional bowler hats and shawls, walked beside women of means in Parisian and Milanese vogue, a rare mixing of classes in this city, fear or reverence for pre-Christian deities being perhaps all they had in common. There, yatiri witch doctors eyed the crowd for potential clients, estimating their worth in bolivianos or U.S. dollars, cannily deciding how much might be charged to read their fortunes or work fraudulent magic on their behalf.

  The car’s single passenger had frowned disapprovingly. He spent much of his time among the poorest of society and knew they reached out to the ancient superstitions in ignorance and desperation. But the moneyed, well-educated elite, what was their reason? Did they think to apportion their faith like cash in separate bank accounts, placing small deposits in each, giving their full trust to no god while hoping to prejudice the will of all?

  As his escort had left Calle Sagárnaga behind, remaining on the boulevard that traced the subterranean flow of the Choqueyapu River to the city’s outskirts, he’d briefly looked out his window again, his eyes going to the slum housing on the face of the mountain. At first glance it seemed an insult to the divine scheme, heaven and hell inverted, those in the bowl of the earth living without need, those on the heights needing for everything. But that was to ignore the more sublime visual message of Illimani in the background: its sharp white peaks at once reminders of God’s soaring majesty and a warning that He had teeth.

  Bowing his head again, the passenger addressed his inner preparations for the next thirty minutes, fingers spread atop the satchel, quietly reciting the prescribed lines of verse from memory.

  Now his car swung over to the right side of the road, slowed, and turned gently into a circular drive. Ahead and behind, the flanking carabineers throttled down their motorbikes. At the end of the drive he could see the large gray hospital building rising above a handsome lawn with tiled walks, shaded benches, and a glistening multitiered fountain that drizzled off wavery rainbows of sunlight.

 
The Hospital de Gracia was the newest and best-equipped medical facility in Bolivia. The physicians recruited for its staff held model credentials. Like the luxurious homes in its surrounding neighborhood, it had been built and financed with money from the illicit cocaine trade and was affordable only to those of high status and privilege.

  How ironic, then, that the patient admitted under absolute secrecy ten days ago had vowed before the nation to eradicate the cartels and to apprehend and prosecute the mysterious foreigner called El Tío, who had unified them in his recent ascendancy.

  The man in the officiales uniform plunged deeper into his recitation, his lips fitting comfortably around the Latin.

  “Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis, et omnes iniquitates meaas dele…”

  Turn away thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities…

  “Cor mundum crea in me, Deus, et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis… ”

  Create a clean heart in me, oh God, and renew a right spirit within my bowels…

  “Ne proicias me a facie tua, et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a mei.”

  Cast me not away from thy face, and take not thy holy spirit from me.

  The motorcade pulled into a wide space that had been left vacant in front of the hospital’s main entrance, the carabineers lowering their kickstands to dismount. One of the lead riders came around back and opened the door for the passenger. Lifting his satchel off the seat by its strap, he let himself be helped from the car. He could almost feel the eyes watching from other vehicles around the parking area, peering at him through tinted windows.

  It was to be expected, he thought. There would be a great many secret police.

  He climbed the stairs to the hospital entrance with his head still slightly bent and the carabineers on either side of him, sensing their unease as he continued giving whispered utterance to Psalm 50, the Miserere, one of the preliminary invocations for the dying.