“What? What you got for me?” said Stark.
“It’s nothing but a hunch.”
Before the smallpox outbreak in Cairo, Joaquin had advised Stark and Khushub to monitor the grave-robbing trade out of the newly discovered Ra-Imhotep site. “Your hunches are worth hard data. What you got?”
“Well, I must say, it reminds me of something I read on Ghana’s Ministry of Textile boards last month.”
Joaquin was the most voracious reader of mednets Stark knew. He was better than an AI for sifting through them, too, since AIs didn’t carry with them twenty years of personal experience in handling viruses and outbreaks. “Ghana? What happened in Ghana?”
“Fascinating, actually.” Joaquin’s voice was still emotionless, perhaps wounded, but the fast gruffness with which he normally spoke had returned. “There’s a pipeline of illegal fabric smugglers running between Ghana and Ascensión. Did you know that?”
“No.” Stark laughed. “What? Contraband cotton?”
“Mexico is culling fields of the old US cotton cultivars, and their own indigenous ones, too, and replacing them all with new transgenic varieties whose patents the Holy Renaissance owns. Meanwhile, fabrics out of West Africa are cheaper for La Baja and out-state Mexican tailors. Read the Ghanaian Textile boards if you can. It’s fascinating. The cotton—”
“Joaquin, I don’t have time to hear about cotton. I barely got time for this conversation.”
“Of course, of course. I’ll summarize and Queen Mum can research it if it seems relevant. An emergent virus appeared in the workers’ ranks of Ghana’s cotton industry last month. The mutation rate was so high that it was impossible to isolate and identify the virus.”
“Interesting. Have you heard that this virus’s mutation rate is in double digits?”
“Is it? There may be a connection then.”
“I didn’t hear about the Ghana outbreak.”
“You wouldn’t have,” said Joaquin. “Ghana’s National Surveillance Unit released stock nanophages and ended the outbreak quickly but their Health Department is still investigating what it was. Perhaps Mexico caught it from Ghana? I think a Dr. Kodzo was heading up the pathology team for the government, but I may have the name wrong. You may want to look into the backgrounds of the so-called dengue victims in Ascensión and see if any of them—especially poorer bajadores—have ties to the textile industry—clothing, printing, costuming, et cetera.”
“We’ll see. Right now, my working theory is that this dengue virus mutates too fast for stock nanophages, let alone custom-made ones,” Stark said, though he tapped all of Joaquin’s information into his memboard.
“Maybe Ghana caught it before it mutated,” said Joaquin. “Maybe Mexico didn’t.”
It wasn’t a great theory, but it made more sense than a dengue outbreak hitting fourteen deaths in a single day. “Thanks, Joaquin. I appreciate you taking the time.”
“This means you’ll be going to Mexico then?” said Joaquin.
“No, I’ll stay here and consult from Wisconsin,” Stark said. “There’s a report due from an emergency dengue conference at Zapata Hospital, and I hope to review it.”
“Who’s at the conference?”
“Miguel, Elena, and a staff doctor named Muñoz, who’s been on the case since the beginning,” Stark said, “and Diego, too.”
“Perhaps, you won’t be too busy to call me in a few days. I’d like to hear if”—the slightest of hitches could be heard in Joaquin’s voice—“my theory held water.”
Stark said he would, even though they both knew that even Joaquin’s wildest theories always held a little water, and signed off.
Down in the yard, he could hear his grandfather talking with Phil the Dairy King. Stark heard the words “truck” and “Minneapolis,” and, though he was about to unleash Queen Mum on Joaquin’s Ghana lead, he swept off his brain gear and leaned out the window, yelling, “What that? You hauling out?”
Grandfather looked up at him, shading his eyes from the blaring light of the goat barn. “Yes. The milk is cool and in the tank. Why?”
Stark clapped his hands. Goddamn hallelujah! “No reason. Hold up. I coming right down!”
SUNDAY, MAY 15. 11:31 P.M.
WITH GRANDFATHER at the wheel, the ride through the winding river valleys in the quop’s beat-up milk tanker was heart-stopping. The old man decided that as long as Stark needed a ride to Minneapolis, he’d drive the pasteurized load in himself and sell it at the Urban Milk Alliance, an umbrella group for neighborhood quops and manors in the city. With distribution so poor these days, milk, especially pasteurized, was at a premium in cities.
Stark feared driving with his grandfather—the dour farmer was a daredevil on country roads—but he couldn’t wait around for the produce trucks that left at dawn. So here he was, at the age of thirty-eight, in the same tanker that his grandfather had been driving when Stark was ten. Twenty-nine thousand pounds of milk in the tank made each upslope a suspenseful trudge and each downhill run a barreling, dashboard-gripping plunge. “Couldn’t just take this load to our bottler, huh?” shouted Stark.
“UMA bottles it themselves, so we don’t pay for glass.”
“Where you learn to drive anyway?” Stark said, as his grandfather accelerated toward another hill.
“Costa Rica,” shouted Grandfather over the gunning engine. “Pardon me. Tiquizia, now that the Mexicans own it. OK. Here comes another! Ready?”
“Gawd.” After a grinding ascent, they reached the top and Stark’s stomach rolled over on itself as they plummeted over the hillcrest. “Ever think about getting a skyboat?”
“Never!”
“Think about it.”
Grandfather turned toward him, about to argue, then said, “Do you have to wear those in the truck?”
Stark looked at his grandfather, cybergoggles pushed up and bulging atop his head, brain tags stuck to his face. “Wear what in the truck?”
Grandfather swore at him quietly and downshifted into first in order to make it up the next hill, which would finally take them out of the hilliest stretch.
They had been in the tanker for almost thirty minutes, but neither of them had mentioned the spinach sample in the field press yet. Stark didn’t know how to bring it up. Instead, he said, “You know that Earl? That new intern?”
“Sure I do. The one who left this morning?” Grandfather said. A light seemed to go on. “You had something to do with him taking off, didn’t you?”
“Maybe.”
The tanker’s belching muffler sounded like it was about to abandon ship. “Was he a spy?” said Grandfather.
Stark sucked air in a gasp of surprise. His grandfather’s deductions were positively spooky sometimes. “Makes you say that?”
“Well, I think he was from Mexico, not Baltimore like he told Jink,” said Grandfather, leaning a hand against the shift as if that would help the whining tanker up the hill. He was chattier than usual, a little too eager to have this conversation, but Stark thought he understood why. Better this conversation than the obvious one. “In the field yesterday, I caught him tucking a crucifix under his shirt. It looked like a Holy Renaissance cross to me, you know, the shepherd’s staff and sword? Not that I cared.” Grandfather paused, and a mile went by. “Why would the Holy Renaissance take an interest in you?”
Stark felt like a pinned butterfly. He sat blinking, mouth dropped open, unable to confirm, deny, or obfuscate what his grandfather had just said. So he did the math. Earl had arrived on Thursday evening, three days before Zapata Hospital started receiving dengue patients. It didn’t make sense that Earl been sent by Mexico. Unless, Stark thought, the Holy Renaissance knew about this outbreak sooner than Muñoz realized. The chicken reports had indicated that something virulent was passing through Ascensión, so, conceivably, some Mexican scientists might have already known what the virus was. Especially if it was theirs, in which case, maybe it made sense for the Holy Renaissance to secretly investigate an American before inv
iting him across the border.
Stark looked at the clock on the tanker’s dash. Ten after four—which meant it was really 11:30 or so (the clock hadn’t worked right for eons). The dengue conference should have let out by now, and he hoped that Muñoz would contact him as soon as he could. Stark had a lot of questions for the “unique man.”
Another mile went by, and the tanker passed from wooded hills into meandering grasslands as it approached the Mississippi and the prairies of Minnesota. “Come on. Fess up, kid,” said Grandfather. “Are you going to Mexico? Is that what this midnight run is about?”
Stark wished his grandfather would shut off his deductive mind for the duration of the ride. But Stark couldn’t lie to him. “I goin’ to Mexico.”
“You are going to Mexico.”
“I ammm embarking for the Holy Republic of Mexico. They have a dengue outbreak they want me to consult on.”
“Well”—Grandfather sighed a weary breath—“I hope they aren’t setting you up.”
The rumble of the tanker’s engine filled the silence. Now that they’d passed to the other side of the high bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, Stark saw the first abandoned farmlands burning with the gold mold that surrounded the cluster of Land Reform Farms in southwest Wisconsin. Even under the watery light of the moon, he could see the telltale ratty look of the plants where viruses had found purchase years ago. As he watched the terrain gradually change from the unglaciated, rolling hills to the flattened prairies, Stark debated whether or not to finally change the subject to the spinach plant. But Grandfather’s statement was still chewing on him. “Setting me up how? What you mean?”
Grandfather lifted a skinny shoulder. “You tell me. Why are they bringing you there in the middle of their embargo?”
Stark could easily imagine why Pedro Muñoz and the Holy Renaissance were both frightened enough to contact him. Bioweapon. He hadn’t even allowed himself to entertain the thought until now, because it didn’t really matter if this dengue was natural or man-made—it had to be stopped. But on the quiet road, speeding between ruined farm fields, breaking down this situation with the help of his grandfather’s sharp mind, he could allow himself to speculate. Perhaps even Muñoz thought it was an attack of some kind and that was part of what he couldn’t say on the phone. This dengue is not dengue. It wasn’t far-fetched. A core of prominent scientists at the National Institute of Agronomy still contended that the gold mold outbreaks were the result of a bioattack. Stark saw it as a convenient way to explain the complete collapse of US agriculture and subsequent crippling of her economy. But Stark understood the impulse to look in that direction. Viral warfare was silent, mysterious, and the mere thought of it could make a paranoiac of anyone. Even Stark.
He looked sidelong at his grandfather, and said, “You look at that field press yet?”
Grandfather’s profile looked like a face from a coin. His lips tightened for a moment, then he said, “It was just one plant.”
It never just one plant, Stark was about to say. But he kept his mouth shut and didn’t prod his grandfather for once. In the wake of gold mold, the Land Reform Act had redistributed much of America’s farmland from collapsing agribusiness to energetic quops like Nissevalle all over the country. So much depended on its being just one plant.
Stark filled the moment by flipping down his goggles and sticking his brain tags in place. “Go,” Stark told his brain gear, and, once connected, he glanced down at the outbreak icon on his left wrist.
It looked like three digits for a moment, so he blinked and glanced back.
Three digits it was.
“What?” he said to his wrist.
112.
120.
127.
“Mum,” whispered Stark. “What the hell happening in Ascensión?”
His grandfather took a long look at Stark, then faced the road.
“I’ve had nothing to relay, Doctor,” said Queen Mum. “Reports are just now available. Are you in a proper, decision-making frame of mind?”
“Just show me what you got! Hurry!”
Grandfather slowly accelerated until the little tanker’s engine started whining again.
Queen Mum avalanched a ton of recently written reports, their headlines cascading over the nighttime prairie, each with the word “dengue” in it.
“Summarize, Mum.”
Fifteen May, 2061 Ascensión, DF—President for Life Emil Orbegón of the Holy Republic of Mexico declared Zapata Hospital a national disaster Sunday night after fifteen doctors were found dead in the hospital’s conference room. Initial cause of death was diagnosed as an airborne version of dengue hemorrhagic fever.
Stark felt like a boat taking on seawater. He scanned down the document, reading the names of the twenty-four doctors who had died.
Elena Batista was on the list.
Miguel Cristóbal.
And thirteen others, all of whose names and reputations Stark recognized. The best of Mexico’s best.
Including Dr. Pedro Muñoz.
Stark heaved in a breath and read the last line of the press release. “An airborne version of dengue hemorrhagic fever.” Stark thought, No such thing. He scanned the outbreak updates, grateful that this information had been declassified under Diego Alejandro’s orders. One hundred and twenty-seven dead. These were shocking numbers even for a virulent disease like Ebola. For dengue, they were impossible.
Mexico needed help. Stark needed help. He had never heard of anything so virulent—and the doctors who’d died were the very heart of Mexico’s chance at survival.
“Dr. Stark, you have a message waiting for you from Dr. Pedro Muñoz at Zapata—”
“Open it, open it!”
Mum had found a pathway into the Holy Renaissance through countries with a Romance language base. It made the translation of Muñoz’s final words perfectly legible.
15 May URGENT Attention Dr. Henry David Stark. Dr. Stark, I stepped away from the conference under the pretense of tending to a patient in order to write you.
The field team has decided that “Big Bonebreaker,” as the media calls this virus, is a fifth dengue serotype and have dubbed it D5 in all documents. They’ve also confirmed my findings that this serotype communicates human to human, without a mosquito vector. This discovery officially supports my work, and it might save me.
Miguel Cristóbal’s field teams spoke openly to the conference about searching for patient zero and finding ample evidence of D5 appearing throughout La Baja in Ascensión. Of great interest, he spoke to us at length about several clinics in the Basilica neighborhood, charged with keeping the sex trade clean in La Baja, and how one of them may have handled D5 patients before Zapata saw its first this morning. My first patient arrived at 11:45 P.M. last night—we’ll have to match her samples with the Zedillo clinic samples and see what we get—once the quarantine is lifted.
My suspicion is that you are coming to Ascensión. Hints were dropped, and signs point to an American. If you arrive, please contact me at Zapata so we can speak openly.
—P.M.
Stark blinked the letter away. He felt a plunging despair—
132, 133
—knowing that Muñoz was gone. He needed time to talk to someone who actually had experience with virulent bioweaponry but there was no time. Stark blinked an open channel to the World Health Organization and issued a global alert, asking for any and all information on suspected dengue outbreaks or patients with symptoms similar to dengue, and recommending the suspension of all travel into and out of Mexico.
He immediately received alerts from AIs in reporting offices in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Havana, and Manila that their hospitals had begun quarantining suspected D5 patients in the last two hours.
Damn, it got loose, thought Stark. With 133 already dead, the virus would span the globe by tomorrow night.
“Mum,” said Stark, “can you get me a map of Ascensión’s outbreaks? Someone in Mexico’s NIH must have made one.”
Stark felt his body slouch. It was already too far gone. The virus had already accomplished the only thing that viruses do.
Breed as fast as they can.
Stark stared at the reddened map of Ascensión in defeat. But he straightened in his seat as he noted that the various hot zones were actually highly localized. The viruses weren’t spreading out of control—the opposite of what he expected. Something strange about they pathology, something I can’t see about the viruses from up here, Stark thought, scanning the map. They slower than they look maybe. Maybe I actually got time to rally a response before the next wave hits.
“Mum, you in Mexico’s NIH right now?”
“I’m accessing the NIH’s Dengue Task Force data, if that’s what you mean.”
“Good. Do something illegal for me, would you?”
Grandfather pressed the gas pedal down even farther.
“My, won’t that be a nice change of pace for you, Doctor?”
“Monitor any pathways and databases you can in NIH and see if you can find any reference to the word bioweapon.”
“After I spy on a foreign federal bureau, I presume you’ll want me to violate Central Command protocol by erasing evidence of my investigation?”
“Don’t make me explain the obvious. Now, omnivalents. Update me.”
“Omnivalent vaccines are still in production. All existing stockpiles will be exhausted by morning.”
Well, they finally got their vaccination program under way, Stark thought. “Any other messages for me?”
“No, Dr. Stark.”
The Patron Saint of Plagues Page 6