TUESDAY, MAY 24. 1:13 P.M.
THE QUARANTINE DIRECTOR, a Oaxaqueño with a bad lisp, signed Pedro Muñoz into the La Alta holding facility newly filled with Perimeter Four Clinic workers, saying, “Everyone’s been tested, so you’re safe in there, Doctor.”
Three floors above the docking bay where Garcia had been housed, the quarantine facility was a complex of sealed apartments accessible only by elevator. Stark had asked for these rooms to act as quarantines, in case La Alta was overwhelmed by the virus. But in this scenario, with the clinic staff all uninfected but for Garcia, these apartments made a nice little retreat. Spanish dagger plants and cactuses thrived beneath the cheery wash of false La Alta sunlight, and down one corridor, Muñoz could hear the solemn back and forth of a joyless Ping-Pong game.
“Dr. Muñoz?” An earnest young medico greeted Muñoz on the other side of the bolted air lock. “Protocol requires me to request your identification.”
Muñoz showed him his genbadge, signed in, and then the customary blood draw and pheresis ritual followed. After Muñoz had resuited himself, he told the medico, “I’m here to determine how Dr. Garcia de la Costa contracted the virus. I especially want to see logs that never made it onto pilone storage this morning.”
“We retrieved our data cache before fleeing La Baja. I’ll show you,” the medico said, aiming the crown of his white helmet toward another air-locked room. “We’re speculating that she contracted it from one of the new patients who arrived right before the clinic was compromised.”
Muñoz followed him, memboard in hand, gazing at its screen. Accessing the security cameras from his memboard, he could see that the old Azteca College turned Clinic Number Four looked ironically serene. In fact, after tapping up the particle report from the clinic’s ALHEPAs, he discovered only one area that had to remain quarantined in the building: Dr. Garcia’s private office.
Entering the computer room with the clinic’s data cache, Muñoz fell to the task of making certain that procedure had been followed, so that meant reading reports that hadn’t yet made it to “wet text” on the pilone net. This had to be done manually at a computer terminal, and Muñoz was poor at typing on keyboards, let alone doing it with gloves on. He brought up the computer’s screen interface and tapped the scroll on the right side of the screen, bringing him to the top of Garcia’s log.
Muñoz found grim pleasure in reading the head physician’s log from yesterday. Dr. Garcia was thorough, and reading her elegant attention to detail was oddly inspiring.
May 23. My personal items stowed: Skirt, O’Hara-brand shoes, rayon blouse. Blood draw normal. New gloves before and after Checked clinic’s four external door filters and low-pressure units starting at 1005. 1031 ALHEPA filters: clean (though a bit wheezy—called Support). Oversaw maintenance of new particle arresters in the main infirmary with Dr. F and Dr. T, and all three of us certified the level-six hot lab together. Began my rounds at 1114.
Muñoz smiled in admiration. Her notes were exact down to the brand name of her shoes. Garcia then went into her patient logs, but Muñoz ignored them. The medico said a patient must have somehow infected Garcia, but Garcia wasn’t sloppy enough for that.
One way to find out more, he figured.
Muñoz’s pilone Connection wasn’t fast. Though he could receive almost anything with his Connection (and did—the Holy Renaissance propaganda engine made sure of that), he could only send short data packets. Glancing at the head physician’s profile on the computer screen, Muñoz contacted Garcia de la Costa’s node and sent her as concise a message as he could manage. It was hard to restrain himself from raining questions on her.
The pilone wetware tapped his language centers and his words or “phonemes” appeared on his VisionField. This wasn’t necessary for pilone communication (Rosangelica, he imagined, could “think” to her satellites as if by telepathy) but it allowed Muñoz a modicum of privacy and self-editing.
>Garcia<, he addressed, >Well enough to answer??’s?<
He was relieved to receive a response almost immediately. Garcia clearly had a better Connection, but with pilone net controls still shaky, her data packet hit Muñoz’s wetware, sapping from his thalamus a cocktail of dopamine and other neurotransmitters—and a mild euphoria.
>Muñoz< Yes. I’m waiting for a blood draw. Who’s the American?<
Henry David is there. Good, Muñoz thought. >Theorize please, dr: time/place of infection.<
>I feel like someone took a crowbar to my arms.<
Knowing that he sounded more abrupt than he would have liked, Muñoz repeated his request.
Her response came bounding back, filling Muñoz’s wetware like a surge of enthusiasm.
>I lost my husband four days ago. I lost him.< >There’s an officer. He’s talking to the American. Can you tell them to hurry?<
The double-packet transmissions were dunking his brain in a dopamine bath. He knew he ought to stop transmitting and catch his breath, but he needed this information. >Not much time. Theorize please, dr: time/place of infection!!<
>What are they arguing about out there? Why don’t they hurry and take this sample from me?<
Her fever was high and affecting her mind, Muñoz realized. It didn’t make any sense to keep harassing her. >Must go, dr—poor connection—node out.<
How in the name of God could this have happened? Muñoz immediately pulled up the Outbreak Protocol, a simple piece of canned software that, when particle arresters registered pathogens in the perimeter clinics, would initiate the Task Force Coordinator’s script, sound alarms, deliver orders via cell and sat phones. It was easy enough to see that it had been rewritten—Stark would never call for infected patients to be lifted to La Alta—so Muñoz checked to see when the canned software was last accessed.
24 May. TFCHDS001ASDF/1205 hours.
Muñoz couldn’t make sense of this. He presumed the pass code would have been Perimeter Four’s own code, stolen by Joaquin Delgado. He read it again, and a third time.
It was the Task Force Coordinator’s own code. It was Henry David’s time stamp.
Henry David Stark? Henry David gave this order?
Muñoz read it a fourth time. Noon today, the timestamp read. That was while Stark, Ahwaz, Isabel, and Muñoz were consulting. Of course, Stark did have his memboard with him. Easy enough to give such an order mid-conversation, without anyone in the room knowing.
A falling, swirling sense of dread caught Muñoz, and he thought about the night that he’d snuck into La Alta, when he and Stark determined together that Joaquin was still in Ascensión, still infecting people. They’d reached a curious moment, that night. One minute, Stark had been talking about mouth pustules and Generation One, the next, he was insisting they had to stop the street fighting. At the time, Muñoz had been so disoriented after five days in the hot zone, that he chalked it up to his own burning paranoia.
Then, yesterday, he read the chicken report that confirmed Joaquin was definitely still alive, still infecting people in the hot zone. <1%: Unknown IgG: viral: retro: max virulence. Citizens were encountering Generation One. Now, looking at Stark’s timestamp on the retreat order, he looked at Stark’s non sequitur that first night in La Alta in a completely different light.
The Holy Renaissance’s initial distrust of Stark was correct. Stark is helping his old friend. He deliberately left an opening for Dr. Delgado to weasel in.
Didn’t he?
Muñoz pushed himself away from the keyboard, squeezed his eyes shut so he couldn’t read the gel screen anymore. It was ridiculous. Stark wasn’t a pathological killer. Why would he do this? Genocide? To what end?
Henry David is the most amoral man I’ve ever known, Isabel had told Muñoz. Stark’s longtime friend and colleague had said that.
Virgin Mother, what’s happening here?
The particle arrester for the office surged to life as someone opened the air lock and stepped into the doorway. Muñoz didn’t turn. This would be the nurse, he figured, come to giv
e him the staff’s immunological assay results.
“Dr. del Negro? I’m Marta Berra. Can I bother you a moment?”
Muñoz saw Marta’s name while scanning Garcia’s reports. A “careless girl” who had to be threatened with Mortuary detail to follow basic protocol.
“Are you busy, señor?”
He glared at her over his shoulder. Was she kidding?
“Dr. Reynaldo Cruz is here to see you.”
Dizzying excitement flooded through Muñoz as he heard that name. He slowly turned in his chair. “What? What did you just say?” Cruz was dead, wasn’t he? Isn’t that what Muñoz had read when he checked the mortuary manifest upon arriving in La Alta? Reynaldo had been a good friend, one of the few doctors to sign Muñoz’s letter of protest to the Holy Renaissance. Muñoz was about to leap from his chair, eager and full of hope for the first time in days.
But as his hands lifted and rested on the arms of his chair, an instinct stilled Muñoz, stopped him in place. It was as if he could hear a bone-thrumming bass note on the other side of the door.
Somethings wrong.
“May Dr. Cruz come in, señor? He’s in the hallway here,” Marta said, turning and looking at someone standing to her left.
Muñoz feared that he could guess who was there in the hall, just beyond the particle arrester. He had come for the Joint Operations Coordinator. An intelligent maneuver.
“Are you all right, Dr. Muñoz?” Marta asked, stepping into the computer lab.
Muñoz turned away to hide his face by feigning engrossment in his gel screens. He decided that he had to be cool and collected, that he had to lie as well as Henry David Stark right now. He decided to be Henry David Stark, conjuring the American’s demeanor, his cold, abrupt aloofness. “Of course, Marta,” Muñoz said, back turned to her. “Send him in.”
He heard someone enter the room, and then Muñoz spun back to the door in his chair. He looked up into the eyes of a creature from another world.
It was the man with the backpack, the orderly who had been at Zapata Hospital the night Muñoz had appeared before the media with Minister Alejandro and Elena Batista. Muñoz recalled thinking that he’d never seen that orderly before. But how fine, an orderly of his age. The man now stood holding a stack of white bedsheets, wearing Reynaldo Cruz’s genbadge on the outside of his Racal-plus suit. He said to Muñoz, “I just finished making the quarantine beds and wanted to let you know that the Perimeter Four staff can stay here tonight, if needed.” He held his stack of sheets to his chest as if they were family linens. “You’re Dr. del Negro, yes?”
Ahí está, Muñoz thought. The man who brought a city to its belly is right in front of me.
Dr. Joaquin Delgado was disarmingly handsome, with a perfect cleft in his broad chin, but he had black, thirsty wells for eyes and it took all of Pedro’s willpower to hold the demon’s gaze without flinching.
“I’m Dr. del Negro.”
Marta turned her helmet back and forth between them. “Dr. Cruz was stranded in the hot zone for many days.”
“Incredible,” Muñoz said. “Were you working in a—hospital at the time of the outbreak, Doctor?”
“I was at Zapata,” Joaquin said. He set the bedsheets on a counter, patted them, rested his hand there, and nodded his upper body, which he carried with rigid grace. Then he faced Muñoz, waiting for reprisal perhaps or a contradiction of some kind.
Muñoz lowered his hands from the armrest and folded them in his lap. Waiting. Waiting. Did the demon know that Reynaldo and Muñoz had had lunch every Thursday afternoon at a taquería, three doors down from the ambulance bay?
Joaquin closed his eyes. “I was there the night of the outbreak. An officer took me away to work at a clinic. He broke quarantine but he saved my life.” Joaquin fussed at the hems on the sheets. “How are we faring? Did we contain the clinic’s outbreak?”
Every word was a taken pawn, as if Joaquin were gobbling up a chessboard with his mouth. Muñoz felt he couldn’t speak without feeding the demon pieces that he might later need. “I think so. Yes. I hope so. I do.” That didn’t sound much like Henry David Stark so he cleared his throat, and said, “I’m busy. What can I do for you, Cruz?”
Joaquin nodded his head in a little bow of deference, and said, “Marta, please excuse us.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She laughed at herself. “I was just waiting to hear more stories about the hot zone. You know, I heard someone say that Dr. del Negro here was in—”
“Marta,” said Muñoz, in Stark’s exhausted, impatient voice.
Joaquin said, “Go watch the Ping-Pong game. I’ll come find you in a moment.”
She laughed her nervous laugh, apologized two more times. Then she slipped through the ALHEPA and shut the door behind her.
As soon as the room had fallen into its cadence of clicking suits and chugging particle arresters, Joaquin said, “Can I be honest with you, señor?”
I’d be surprised, Muñoz thought.
“I wish I were a brave, young macho, but I am nearly fifty.” Joaquin leaned his hip against the counter and folded his arms, hands on his biceps as if hugging himself. “I don’t want this anymore. I don’t want to see infected people anymore. I would rather make beds.”
These words were said with such sadness that Muñoz heard himself say, “I understand, sir.”
“I can tell from the reports that another wave of infections is likely to hit the lower city.” Joaquin let his hands drop down to the edge of the counter. “I—I can’t do it, señor. I can’t go back to La Baja and watch it happen all over again.”
Even this might be true. There was probably only one person in all of Ascensión who had seen more death than Muñoz himself, who’d beheld it in its fantastic whole, and that was Joaquin Delgado. “None of us wants that.”
“Señor, would you assign me here. To La Alta. Please? Don’t send me back to La Baja. I have all my documents. I’ve been tested twice since I’ve been up here. I’m clean.”
Muñoz was incredulous. “You received actual blood draws?”
“Yes, twice. Clean both times.” Joaquin placed his genbadge on the table next to the computer.
Muñoz looked at the picture of Reynaldo Cruz for a moment, then placed the dead man’s badge in his memboard and sure enough, Joaquin Delgado was clean. For a heartbeat, he considered dashing to the phlebotomist’s station and retrieving “Reynaldo Cruz’s” precious sample. Even if this report was legitimate, however, Joaquin would have only given a drop, a pinprick, just enough to test his immune system and not the full pint or more that the immune-system-recoding procedure required.
Could Muñoz get away with requesting a third blood draw? Would Joaquin allow it? If only Muñoz knew whether or not Stark had already retrieved a sample from Dr. Garcia. Perhaps he should call Stark now. But then he thought of the time stamp.
24 May. TFCHDS001ASDF/1205 hours.
Stark and Delgado, Muñoz thought. Does one know what the other is doing? Right now?
His pulse felt like it was going to pound out of his veins. Muñoz glanced at his cell phone, which had Stark’s emergency line tapped into it. Casually, he picked it up and turned it off.
I have to relax. I have to calm myself. I have to think this all the way through.
“Shall I come back later, Dr. del Negro?” Joaquin asked after a long, excruciating pause.
“Permit me to Connect?” Muñoz kept his eyes in middle distance, staring at his VisionField so that he would not have to look at those thirsty dark eyes. “I’ll only be a moment.”
Pretending to Connect bought him time to think, calm himself. Muñoz’s heartbeat was still racing from Dr. Garcia’s messages, and with Joaquin Delgado staring at him, he felt as though his heart might vibrate into a million pieces. He couldn’t risk putting Stark in charge of Joaquin, his blood draw, or anything to do with Generation One. Muñoz would have to do it himself, but he’d still need help, still need a way to get a sample straight from Joaquin. O heavenly St. M
ichael, Muñoz prayed, Lord of the heavenly host, you better get your limp dick to Mexico ahorita, because I got your man right here. Ave Maria, ayudame por favor, Virgen de Guadalupe, mujer en blanco, tu—
Muñoz stopped praying.
Woman in white. Yes. Woman in white.
Maybe there was someone who could help him, after all.
Gracias, Virgen. Mil gracias.
Muñoz cleared his throat, and said, “I think I know what I can do for you.” He stood and pushed in his chair. “Let’s get out of this place, Dr. Cruz.”
Joaquin was distrustful, Muñoz could tell. His eyes became thirstier, darker, for just a moment. Then he went back to playing the sad, old man. “I can just leave the quarantine facility? Just like that?”
“You’re white, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am.”
“I just gave the order to release everyone with white blood draws back to Clinic Four,” Muñoz lied. “Right now, I have something more important to do, and you can help me do it, if you want the chance to work in La Alta.” Muñoz gestured to the door.
“Thank you, Dr. del Negro. I’m forever in your debt. Where are we going?” Joaquin smiled, rising to the bait.
TUESDAY, MAY 24. 2:21 P.M.
THE NORTH CORNFIELD was a blank span of snow except for a row of hopping footprints that stretched off into the shining white. As he stood by Experiment on the edge of the field, young HD could feel Wisconsin through his fur-lined jacket. They were tracking together, boy and dog, and Experiment was HD’s best friend in the whole world.
That wasn’t true, Stark reminded himself. Experiment was too cool for young Henry David. A disturbingly smart dog, Experiment was the most popular person in Nissevalle quop, everybody’s best bud. The dog practically had a conversational command of English, so you could say to him, without a note of inflection, “Want to hang out?” and Experiment would appraise you with a sober eye, assessing your offer, and turn away with an air of contempt, continuing on his rounds (third-floor family rooms, common hall, water guys, Jan the Kitchen Duchess, garbage bins, and back again), unless you were doing something very cool.
The Patron Saint of Plagues Page 37