ViraVax Read Free Page A

afraid of this moment, knowing even what little she did of her father’s work and the kind of place that employed him. This she got aplenty from Harry, since his father had been chief of security, and from the web. The guerrillas fed plenty of stuff into the web for her to pluck off, and it wasn’t all propaganda.
    The leader glanced at his second, then back at Sonja.
    It was the second who spoke.
    “Yes,” she said, “it involves your father. Your mother is safe.”
    “It’s serious, isn’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    They showed no sign of escorting her to another room, so Sonja sat on the simulator step, her body edging close to panic.
    He must be dead, she thought. They wouldn’t be so close-mouthed if he was alive.
    She thought of her mother, alone in her apartment, and of her grandfather, who had fought to keep them out of Costa Brava.
    “You can’t raise a family there,” he had said. “It’s a stinkhole of a country, even if it is new. I should know, I see the reports.”
    That was a smoke screen, Sonja knew. Her grandfather was Speaker of the House back in the U.S., and he saw their unwillingness to relocate in America as a cowardice.
    “Everybody wants out!” he’d shouted over the speaker at Christmas. “The good people of this country can’t just bail out and leave it to the goddamn criminals. . . .”
    But they hadn’t fled America. Nancy Bartlett was a Latin America specialist who had followed her love and her dream. She’d married the virologist Red Bartlett, who also followed his dream, and they had converged on Costa Brava. Sonja knew no other place and, like her closest friend, Harry Toledo, she called Costa Brava home.
    A squawk on the leader’s Sidekick indicated an incoming message. He glanced at the screen, then nodded at Sonja.
    “We’re authorized to move you now. We’ll be taking you to Colonel Toledo’s. He will inform you of the situation. Do you have anything here that has to go with you?”
    Sonja pulled her flight log out of the rack beside the simulator.
    “Just this,” she said, hoping she didn’t show any of the fear that shimmied in her knees and bladder. “Let’s go.”

Chapter 4

    Marte Chang’s black hair whipped her face as she stepped onto the gangway and into the downdraft of the unmarked Mongoose’s huge twin rotors. The exhaust stink was worth it; the rotor wash cut the smothering humidity trapped with her on the valley floor. Marte shaded her eyes with one hand and shifted her underwear with the other. ViraVax spread out before her, nothing like she had expected.
    No roads, she thought, and suppressed a shudder.
    The only way into the remote facility was by air, and air travel was not her strong suit. From her vantage point atop the lift pad, Marte noted the triple fencing tipped inward around the perimeter, the precipitous valley walls, the tangle of lush jungle. Occasionally, over the exhaust smell, she caught a sweet whiff of floral perfume. She didn’t see a lot of people topside, but the few she saw seemed very busy and spoke very little.
    A crew of red-clad workers unloaded supplies from the Mongoose while another crew refueled. They whirrrrred along in little carts with fat tires and followed dotted lines painted into the concrete. Marte Chang’s eyes became accustomed to the glare, and she saw that all of the workers displayed the moon-faced, close-eyed, thick-tongued features of Down syndrome.
    “Innocents,” she said.
    No one could hear her over the noise of the rotors, and it wouldn’t matter if they did. That was what the Children of Eden called them, “Innocents.”
    Because they don’t have souls, she thought.
    This she had heard often during her undergraduate days at the Universidad de Montangel, the high-tech school in Mexico owned by the Children of Eden. They had no souls because, according to the Children of Eden, these people weren’t truly human.
    Trisomy twenty-one.  
    Her genetics instructor at Montangel called them