Chapter 21

 

Harry smelled the familiar burst of blood in his nose and thought for a moment that he was home. Something snapped his head back, and a facemask shoved itself into his field of vision. Blue eyes flicked a quick, assessing glance over him.

“Hey!” Harry yelled, releasing his harness. “What the hell. . . ?”

Someone popped a spray at his face, and someone else shouted at Sonja, but the helmet speaker was off, so it sounded like a child at the bottom of a well calling for its mother.

“Freeze!”

A spatter of blood brightened the cockpit’s leather liner, but he couldn’t move to find out where it came from. He had no sensation at all in his arms or legs. Blank spots swam across his vision, like great black amoebas, and time slowed way down. His pulse and respiration also slowed, and his body broke out in a profuse sweat.

Sonja moaned just a few meters away and Harry agonized because he could do nothing for her.

“Look at me!”

The spacebitch’s voice commanded, though muffled through the seals of her hazmat suit, and Harry’s body tried its best to obey. She, too, was sweating: the suit’s conditioner could barely keep her faceplate clear. He tried to focus, but all that came to him was the blur of her blue eyes. His eyes twitched uncontrollably from side to side. When he quit trying to control them, the spasms stopped.

He knew from the blue eyes and the bio suit that she was ViraVax security, Night School trained and equipped. No natives were allowed in the Night School or in ViraVax security, though the Colonel had admitted applicants from other nations as long as they became U.S. citizens. Precious few were willing to do that these days.

Harry was not surprised that his father didn’t trust the locals. Maybe that was part of why they took him off the Night School and stuck him in the embassy. The Colonel didn’t trust anyone, even his superiors, and he had made that clear. They saw it as paranoia aggravated by booze.

Spacebitch and her partner wrestled Harry out of the cockpit and dumped him unceremoniously onto the ground. The next time he saw those blue eyes in the bio suit look down on him, they spun down a long dark tunnel just out of reach, and Harry fell in after them.

Harry woke on his back, hot and under lights, bright lights. His musculature rippled with uncoordinated twitchings. He managed to get his legs and arms to work well enough to roll himself onto his belly. This way the glare didn’t pain his eyes quite so much. Harry’s mouth was very dry and sore and tasted like an old handkerchief.

“If you move too much you’ll get sick.”

The voice was Sonja’s, off to his left. The pulse in his ears was his own. He couldn’t focus on Sonja; the effort hurt his eyes and started them twitching again.

“Pull up your sheet,” she told him, “you’re naked.”

Harry scrabbled his hands against a pillow, mattress, bed frame. He found the corner of a sheet and pulled it over his shoulder. That was much too hot, so he shrugged it off to his waist. The tremors came and went. When they mostly went, his vision began to clear and the lights didn’t seem so bright. Sonja was asking him something over the loud rushing in his ears.

“. . . hear me? Harry?”

Sonja spoke to him from a bunk across the room. She had her sheet pulled up to her chin, and she sat upright against an institutional-pink wall. Wet blonde hair tangled around her face and shoulders, dampening her sheet. Harry’s own hair was wet, too, but not from sweat. He could not tell whether she’d been crying.

“Yes,” he answered, “I hear you.”

His voice squeaked a little in his dry throat.

Harry sat up and looked the room over. Not much to see: Windows at the far end, very bright light, lots of plants outside; refrigerator, cupboards, sink, door. Sonja’s bunk, a foldout type, nearly touched his in the center of a room empty of embellishment or inspiration. Another door, table with two chairs. Back to the windows.

“Are you okay?” he rasped. “Is the plane okay? She was hit. . . ?”

“I’m okay. Sore and sick. Mariposa wasn’t hit, but the crash definitely killed her.”

Sonja spoke in a monotone, her knees pulled to her chin and her lips buried in her sheet.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Harry said.

He wanted to reach out and touch her but he didn’t trust his trembling muscles. He blinked his eyes rapidly but his vision didn’t clear any faster.

“Did they bring anyone else here?”

“No,” she said. “Just you and me.”

“What’s behind the doors?”

“We’re monitored,” she cautioned, and lifted her gaze to a thumb-sized wide-angle bubble overhead.

“We don’t want them to know what we know,” she said. “It’s in the handbook under ‘Don’t let them know what you know.’ “

Harry’s stomach untightened a little in relief at her wry humor.

Her monotone must have been for the camera’s sake.

Harry chilled suddenly, and when the chill passed he felt more in control of his arms and legs.

“Where are we?” he asked, indicating the foliage outside their window.

It looked like Mosquito Coast country around Monkey Boy Creek.

“Decontamination,” Sonja said.

She answered the question in his gaze.

“It’s not a window,” she said.

At that, the scene shifted and reshifted to become the cinder-ridden tree line of the volcano Izalco.

Harry tested his legs, then stood up, clutching his sheet like a lifeline.

“Is one of these doors a bathroom?” he asked. “I’m sure that’s not a national security question.”

Sonja raised her voice and nodded at the door. “The end of my bed.” She moved to the foot of her bed so that she could whisper as he walked by: “I saw shadows moving behind the mirror. Two of them.”

Harry pulled his sheet into the bathroom with him, regarded himself in the mirror and used the toilet. The room was small with just a basin, shower and toilet. Walls and floor were made entirely of one piece of porcelain with a large drain in the middle of the shower area.

Not large enough to get through, he thought.

His father had taken him through a warehouse drain once, as part of one of Harry’s hostage-escape lessons. Harry showered four or five times a day for weeks afterward, and he was glad for the excuse not to go that way.

Little packages of soap, shampoo and conditioner sat out on the counter just like in the hotels. Someone had already scrubbed him clean, but they hadn’t bothered to dry him off very well.

Harry tried to position himself so that his back was to the mirror. He had to lean against the wall that the mirror was on, directly across from the door. He knew that they probably had a wide-angle that would pick him up, anyway, but he tried not to think about it.

He turned, adjusting his sheet, and studied the mirror from an angle.

There!

A sliver of light on, then off, as someone slipped through a door in a darkened room. Sonja was right. When he relaxed his gaze, he saw dim features on the other side of the glass, two faces reflecting the red wash from their controls.

“Of course it’s the Double-Vee,” Sonja went on, loud enough for him to hear through the door. “Who else would allow that idiot pilot in anything but a bad suit? You call that flying?”

He faked a dizziness and leaned against the mirror. It was good old glass, not metal or petroleum. Through his palm and forehead he detected a flurry of activity behind the mirror, then a high-pitched machinery whine.

This time the dizziness was real, and his stomach lurched towards his throat. Like anyone reared in Costa Brava, Harry had experienced his share of earthquakes. This movement was not the characteristic jolt-and-roll of the local temblors, but a prolonged sinking. . . .

Decontamination, Harry thought. We’re starting down.

He didn’t know much about what happened in the bowels of ViraVax, but he had heard a lot of stories. The sinking feeling in his stomach wasn’t all the fault of their elevator.

He opened the bathroom door and stood under its frame, anyway. Harry didn’t feel so nauseated standing up, and he got a better view of their room. The peel-and-peek that he had mistaken for a window now hosted a clean-cut young Gardener, pointer in hand, explaining decontamination precautions.

Sonja was not paying attention to the canned spiel coming from the viewscreen, even though she had the volume as high as Harry could stand it. Both she and Harry pretended interest in the safety instructions, though Harry knew that they didn’t have to worry about that. Clearly, wherever they went would be under escort.

Harry leaned over and whispered, “They’ll split us up, sooner or later. They probably only had the one decon elevator available. If you get the chance to run, don’t think about me, just go.”

Sonja laughed. “Where to?” she asked. “Even the Pentagon isn’t as secure as this place, you told me that yourself.”

Harry shrugged. “Something might come up,” he said. “Just be sure you’re ready for it when it does.”

Harry tried to think of a few somethings that might come up, but his thinking was mushy, like running in molasses.

“. . . at first I thought they were after your dad,” Sonja was saying.

“What?” Harry snapped his attention into focus. “What about my dad?”

She reached up and squeezed his hand.

“Something blew up at the embassy,” she said, her voice still noncommittal. “They say your dad did it. I didn’t hear anything about. . . about anyone else, except that no Americans were killed.”

Grace was at the embassy. Nancy Bartlett was there, too.

He wouldn’t be that crazy. . . .

Harry wouldn’t bet his Litespeed on it.

“Where did you hear this?”

“On board the Mongoose, when they were bringing us in. It was on the radio.”

“The sonofabitch.”

Sonja squeezed Harry’s hand again, twice, and he remembered they were being watched. The Gardener on-screen directed them to several faithlines that they could access via satlink.

Harry changed the subject.

“What do you mean ‘at first’?” he asked. “Who do you think they’re after now?”

“They’re after us,” she said. “Your dad’s just icing on the cake. Doesn’t the book say they usually separate prisoners?”

Harry shuffled from the bathroom, careful to close the door behind him. They were undoubtedly observed in either room, but it made him feel like he’d shut out something noxious. He paused to examine the second door at the foot of his own bunk before answering.

Solid. No latch on the inside.

“Maybe we aren’t prisoners.”

“What else would we be, then, locked up here like this?”

Harry didn’t even have to think about that one.

“The other’s over the peel.”

Harry felt like he was smothering, for a moment, then his ears popped and he felt the whish of conditioned air.

“They exchange and sterilize the air completely at every level,” she said with a nod at the screen. “The dzee on the peel just explained it.”

Through the sweaty sheets, Sonja’s naked hip touched his own. He had dreamed of her touch more than once, but never this way. Still, he did not lean away. Neither did she.

“So,” he said. “They’re probably not holding us hostage. That would be stupid, even for them. We could describe the Mongoose, this place—’course, they could send us out of here with completely new memories.”

“They can do that?” Sonja asked.

Her pale face paled even more.

Harry shrugged. “It was part of a study the army did out here,” he said. “My dad objected to having a civilian company involved. ViraVax claimed that he was a Catholic and prejudiced against the Children of Eden. I never heard of anyone actually using what they developed here. . . .”

“They brought my mother here after my father was killed,” Sonja said. “It was much closer to get her to the hospital at La Libertad but they said this was more secure. . . .”

Once again they struck a silence between them. Harry half listened to the missionary explaining the timesaving features of their cubicle. His attention pricked up when the dzee said, “When this orientation is complete, a console will be provided to maximize your time here in the bosom of God’s plenty. Praise Jesus, for He is the Vine and we are the branches. . . .”

A console!

“Did you see the spacesuits they wore?” Sonja asked. “They were afraid to touch us until they got us in here.”

“Maybe they did something to your dad and to my dad, and now they want to see what it’s done to us.”

“That’s the way the guards talked.”

Harry felt chilled again.

What if I get like my dad?

That thought scared him as much as his capture.

“Mariposa warned me, too,” Sonja said.

“The mysterious woman of the webs,” Harry said.

His mouth still didn’t work right and it came out like mush.

“Mariposa could be a man or a woman, or several people,” Sonja said. “But I have the sense that she’s a she, and one person, and she’s trying to help.”

“A key would be nice.”

The peel-and-peek washed itself clean with a sweep of intense white light. A dark-skinned, bald-headed man came into focus, naked to the waist. He bowed and grinned at them through the backlight glare.

“Welcome,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”

The camera pulled back and the bald-headed dzee gestured two deficientes into view.

“Matt and Deborah will assist you through decon,” he said. “Please do not hinder them or confuse them in their duties. They become anxious when things don’t go as planned.”

Baldy patted each of them on the shoulder, and the couple, who looked to be about Harry’s age, smiled broadly.

“What is your plan?” Harry blurted.

“Your console will be available shortly. I will speak with you again at that time.”

The screen blanked, then displayed a rain-forest waterfall with the caption “Another piece of our Garden won back!”

Harry couldn’t sit still. He had to pace the tiny room in a jerky stumble, trailing his sheet behind him. He noticed that not just their walls, but the ceilings, bunks, and doors were all shades of pink.

We’re either on another planet, or I’m still rummy from the spray.

He focused on Sonja’s blue eyes. Finally, she smiled.

“ViraVax,” he said. “Chill.”

Sonja nodded.

“I was hoping maybe I was hallucinating.”

“My dad talked about their decon,” she said. “The first time it takes hours, and they do it in a pink room because pink calms people down.”

“Great,” Harry said. “The only facility in the world guarded by security developed by my father. That was before the Agency pulled out, and we can see they’ve gone downhill. All five levels underground can survive a direct hit by a nuke. This place has a private army better than most countries. Our odds of getting out of here are not good.”

A human figure filled the screen. The bald-headed dzee picked up as though they’d been in the middle of a conversation.

“You’ve been rattled,” Baldy said. “We’re keeping you here for observation.”

“I guess that’s right, since you did the rattling,” Harry said. “For how long? Twenty-four hours? Twenty-four years?”

“Until we have what we need,” he answered.

“You promised a console the next time you saw us,” Sonja said. “Where is it?”

Baldy blinked a couple of times, looked off camera and then back.

“Yes, that will be provided.”

“What about my mother, and Sonja’s mom?” Harry asked. “They were at the embassy. . . .”

“The embassy has them under protection,” Baldy said. “They are not harmed.”

The man’s voice was soft, modulated, accented from a region that Harry couldn’t place. His gaze was intense, chilling. Baldy didn’t budge, and neither did his smile. Harry cautioned himself to believe nothing, like the textbook said.

Consider everything a lie which is not an order, Harry recalled.

He hoped, at the very least, that his mother was not here at the Double-Vee.

“And where are we?”

“You are not home.”

“Tell us something we don’t already know,” Sonja muttered.

“If I did that,” he said, “we wouldn’t have any fun at all, would we? I would tell you things, then you would tell me things, then we would just sit around, bored and crabby, picking on one another. We have all the time in the world, and this is much more interesting.”

Harry caught a glimpse of several wide, round faces staring at the camera from a white room behind Baldy. One of them pointed and laughed around a huge tongue. Right at the edge of his awareness, Harry perceived a very high, very faint mechanical whine.

“My name is Mishwe,” Baldy said. “You are under my supervision. Your health is excellent and will remain so. Any communication to or from the outside comes through me. A handset and console are provided for this purpose. This is a biological hazards area, so your door will remain locked for your own protection. ‘patrolled by guard virus,’ you might say. Exploration discouraged, should you find yourself outside.”

“What about our clothes?” Harry asked.

“For now, you’re wearing them. Think of yourselves as Adam and Eve for the moment, and be unashamed.”

The door snicked open and Harry jumped towards it. His vision flickered, winked, and he woke up in a heap on the floor, weak as water. Mishwe smiled at him from the peel.

“A test and a demonstration,” Mishwe said.

“Eat shit and die,” Harry mumbled through jaws locked tight in spasm.

The dzee appeared not to hear.

“Your bodies will not tolerate sudden moves,” Mishwe said. “Whatever you do, I suggest you do it slowly.”

The doorlock whisked shut. The whine deepened, then picked up with a noticeable lurch.

“They’re cycling us down another level,” Sonja said. “That’s two so far.”

The deeper they went, the worse their chances.

Sonja helped Harry onto his bed and pulled his sheet up for him. Uncontrollable trembling in his legs and arms rendered him helpless. She draped part of her sheet over his own and lay down beside him. She began a vigorous rubbing of his arms.

“I’m not cold,” he told her. “Whatever he did wiped out my muscle control. I’m not cold, I just can’t stop shaking.”

Even as he spoke, the shakes let up. Harry stretched each arm and leg carefully, then tried to rise. Sonja gently pushed him back down. Her lips brushed his ear.

“Don’t let them see how fast you recover,” she whispered.

Of course! Harry thought.

He had been taught hostage protocols many times by the embassy and by his father, but his thinking was fuzzy. The glare was gone, replaced by a sweet-smelling something on the air. Even if these were their normal precautions, it wasn’t making Harry feel any more comfortable. ViraVax was the size of a small city underground. How would they ever find their way topside again?

Harry faked the shakes for as long as he could, but finally he had to stop out of exhaustion. Sonja draped his sheet over him as he lay, half-somnolent and sweating, able to whisper only “Thanks.”

Sonja paced, naked and silent, in front of the screen. The scene remained the same, with the same caption. Sonja continued to pace unselfconsciously with her arms folded under her breasts, head down, her tuft of blonde pubic hair backlit in waterfall silver.

Harry thought her incredibly gorgeous, and unwise to display herself that way—no telling what these people would do to them. He always believed, way down deep, that she was a lot braver than he was. Maybe it was the flying.

“Stop staring,” she said. “I can’t think.”

“I can’t think, either, with you marching around naked.”

“Work on it” was all she said.

Harry reviewed his dad’s hostage drill and computed their odds.

“Most casualties occur in the first few minutes of capture,” the embassy pamphlet said. “Under no circumstances should a hostage argue with or resist the captor, unless ordered to harm another hostage. Expect to be killed if you argue or resist.”

Harry’s breathing settled down. They’d made it through that stage, and it was supposed to be the toughest.

Dad’s right, he thought, I have a lot more luck than smarts.

He hadn’t had a fond thought of his father in a long time. It felt good.

We’ve come this far, he thought.

Though aware that he didn’t know how far “far” might be, Harry knew that hours, perhaps even a day, had passed and they were alive. That meant that they would probably stay alive, barring a mistake on his part, or an accident.

These people might want to know what else his dad taught him, what else he knew of his dad’s work with the embassy. He would have to watch for that.

Meanwhile, Sonja continued her back-and-forth prowl of their room. A squirt of adrenaline headed for his groin, and suddenly Harry had a bad feeling about why he and Sonja were locked in together.

They want us to get it on, he thought.

Harry wondered whether the “Adam and Eve” remark meant that Mishwe had arranged this for the cameras, for his personal pleasure or for science.

Probably all three.

As if on signal, the whine stopped and their outer door snicked open. Mishwe stood in the glare, a bundle in his arms. His face was shadowed, unsmiling. Behind him, the unmistakable rattle and cry of monkeys in cages. Two more deficiente faces peeked around the door.

No more bare-chested stuff—Mishwe wore a white cotton shirt with long sleeves rolled back to the elbows. He placed his bundle on the floor at the foot of Harry’s bed.

“Clothing for you. I am to apologize for my treatment of you. Soon your accommodation will be made more suitable.”

“Suitable for what?” Sonja asked.

Mishwe paused, then went on without looking at her.

“A meal will be served in fifteen minutes. I have Nullfactor for that muscle tremor.” Mishwe held up a capsule and demonstrated for Harry. “Crush capsule, inhale.”

“What else does it have?” Sonja asked. “What else have you given us?”

Mishwe’s gaze never left Harry. His was an appraising gaze, as a father might look over a long-lost son.

“If you don’t take it,” Mishwe told him, “the tremors continue for days. Some people become more sensitive each time. For them, something as small as a heartbeat will set them off. Very unpleasant, sometimes fatal. One for each. Don’t swallow them.”

Mishwe placed a paper cup with two pink capsules atop the stack of clothes. He backed to the doorway and Harry stopped him.

“You didn’t apologize,” Harry said. “You said, ‘I am to apologize,’ but you never did.”

Harry’s throat was dry. He wanted to see how tight a leash Mishwe was on. The instructors always said, “Don’t antagonize your captors, particularly in front of their friends. They will kill you to maintain authority.”

Harry was gambling that authority was being maintained, and that included an authority over Mishwe.

Mishwe’s bare head flushed.

“I apologize.”

Harry was amazed. The claw in his belly relaxed a bit. Mishwe was on a tight leash. They would not be killed. At least, not immediately. They apparently had a high value that they were not aware of.

Maintain dignity to the best that your resources allow.

“No,” Harry said, “that’s the same thing. To apologize, you have to say you’re sorry.”

Mishwe sucked a deep breath and let it out slowly. His gaze met Harry’s. His voice did not hesitate or falter.

“I’m sorry,” Mishwe said, and he added a nod. “I treated both of you without dignity.”

He left without looking up.

“Well, what do you make of that?” Harry said.

“That you’re an idiot,” Sonja answered, “who’s bound and determined to get us killed.”

“I think he’s hurrying this ‘win over their trust’ phase just a little, don’t you?”

Sonja picked up a white pullover top and clutched it to her chest while she sorted through the clothes. They each got towels, pink blankets and a pajama-like top and bottom of white, baggy cotton. Harry laughed at Sonja, clutching the clothes to her chest.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“You,” he said. “Suddenly you’re Ms. Modesty.”

Sonja started towards the bathroom, then changed her mind and dropped the clothes on her bed with a sigh. Harry picked up his things while she stepped into the pants and pulled on her shirt.

The loose-fitting shirt and pants reminded Harry of the gi he wore during a hundred Saturdays in the gym with his father. For years, the two of them spent Saturday mornings kicking the mirrors, bags and each other to old rock and roll tunes. That had stopped a couple of years ago, when the Colonel’s anger and his drinking got out of hand.

The lights modulated in their room, slowly, and the glare from the peel dimmed to the same flat pink as the walls. A skinny young Matt and a very fat young Deborah wheeled in a cart that smelled of food. Both of them wore the same pajama-type clothing that he and Sonja wore. Matt and Deborah set up their meal quickly, placing everything meticulously on the table without so much as a gestural conversation between them. Harry noted that there were no knives or forks, only spoons.

“Do you two work here,” Harry asked them, “or are you prisoners, too?”

The young man worried his tongue in and out of his cheek and frowned deeply, as though he wanted to say something, but Deborah’s stern gaze kept him quiet.

“This stuff isn’t poison or anything, is it?”

Nothing.

The two left as they came, silent, the woman leading and the man pushing the cart. This time Harry pushed out the door behind them, but immediately he was shoved back inside by another guard dressed in a hazard suit.

“What do they think we have?” he wondered aloud. “Why do some of them have to wear those suits around us?”

“Maybe they’re protecting us from them,” Sonja said. “No telling what they have cooking inside.”

Harry was feeling a little better, a little more like he and Sonja might live through this, after all.

“Will you join me?” Harry asked, and offered her his arm.

“I’m not so sure,” Sonja said, her voice low.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“Aren’t you worried about something in the food?” Sonja whispered.

“No,” Harry said. “If there’s anything in there, it’s probably to kill whatever resident bugs we’ve got that they don’t want. So far, everything has had a reason and they haven’t really hurt us since we got here.”

“That comment about dignity,” she added. “It didn’t sound right, coming from him.”

“Are you saying that because you’ve known him so well for so long?”

“Stop it,” she hissed. “I’m not the enemy.”

“We’ve got plenty of them to choose from,” Harry whispered. “That Casey guy who runs this place, for instance. My dad hated him. I don’t know whether it was this place or the religion, but he hated him. And I got the impression that his assignment to ViraVax and away from the field work was some kind of punishment, some kind of lesson the Agency was teaching him.”

“Anyway,” Sonja said, “we’re still being recorded and studied and I’m positive that they will never allow us to leave here alive.”

Harry sat at the table and inhaled the fragrant steam from the food.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “the food’s probably safe. They’ll want to keep us in good shape during this experiment, or whatever. I’m not doing those, though.”

Harry indicated the two pink capsules in their paper cup.

“That’s transparent. If they want me to take their bogus antidote, they’ll have to give it to me the same way they gave me the original. I’m here, but I’m not helping.”

With that, he raised a middle finger to one of the lenses and dug into his bowl of hot milkrice and honey.