Minutes to Burn Read online

  Savage laughed, then his eyes went cold. "What the fuck do you know about Vietnam?"

  "Not much," Szabla said. "Heard it was some fucked-up shit."

  "You heard right," Savage said. He grinned, the glint in his eyes matching the cherry of the cigarette. He glanced at Szabla. "How old are you, princess?"

  "Twenty-six."

  Savage shook his head, making a humming noise. "We were out of there before you were even born."

  "You're old," Tucker said.

  "I'm experienced."

  Justin glanced over at Derek, as if unsure of what to make of him. He looked back at the others. "Look, why don't we-"

  "Experienced at what?" Tucker snarled. "Slaughtering villagers? Raping women?"

  "What are you, boy? A fuckin' dove?"

  "No, I was just trained with a military code of ethics. Some of the shit you guys pulled…"Tucker's voice trailed off with disgust.

  Savage nodded calmly. "I seen some things," he said, as if agreeing. He raised his cigarette, lodged in the fork of his fingers, and pointed it at the track marks on Tucker's arms. "Bet you have, too."

  Tucker sprang to his feet, but Savage leaned forward quickly on the bed, yanking his knife from his ankle sheath and setting his feet on the ground. He flipped the knife once, caught it by the handle, and smiled. Tucker stared at him a while then looked down, almost shyly, and walked out of the room. Over at the window, Derek still didn't move.

  "You lay the fuck off," Justin said to Savage.

  "You know what they say." Savage leaned back on the ripped pillow. "If you play with fire…"

  Justin stood and began to change into civies. "We need to get the fuck out of here."

  "Where the hell are we gonna eat?" Szabla said. "Anyone speak Spanish?"

  "I only know three words," Savage said. "Casa de putas."

  "What's that mean?"

  Savage smiled. "Look it up."

  Justin crossed to Derek and laid a hand on his shoulder. "We're gonna grab Tucker and find somewhere to eat," he said.

  Derek turned slowly from the window, his eyes blank. "I'll take weapons watch." He stood and stepped out onto the small balcony, pulling the chair with him.

  "Any time you want us back?" Justin asked. "LT?"

  Szabla leaned forward, lowering her voice as she spoke to Savage. "Is it true?" she asked. "Did you really rape women there?" Her face was calm, but her eyes were excited.

  Savage shrugged, enjoying the web of intrigue that he'd spun around himself. The new breed of soldier, raised with ethics books and dry-cleaned LTs, always expressed a certain disgust at anyone involved in the Vietnam mess. It had angered him at first, but he'd come to realize that the disgust was a form of respect. They knew he'd seen things that they'd never see, not in the push-button, long-range sniper world they lived in now. They knew he'd done things.

  He sucked hard on the butt. "I was eighteen," he said. "It got lonely."

  Szabla leaned back against the bed. She ran one of her hands up the curve of her arm, gripping her biceps. Justin had overheard Savage's remark. "You sick bastard," he muttered. "Rape, that's admirable."

  Savage cocked his head, looking into Justin's handsome blue eyes. "Who ever told you war was admirable?"

  The sunlight was dwindling, the brief equatorial dusk already under way. Tank and Cameron flanked Rex. Cameron was grateful to Rex for qui-etly letting the matter of the dog go. Frustration was setting in-they were beginning to realize just how difficult it was to locate one man in this neighborhood of dark streets and broken buildings. If they didn't find Juan to alert him of the take-off time tomorrow, Rex's survey would be compromised.

  Cameron shooed away beggars as they approached, and watched for eyes darting to her boots so that she could thwart advancing shoe shin-ers. A woman walked by peddling newspapers-El Comercio's headline announcing another 120 dead in a Quito landslide.

  They stopped at a vehicle underpass before Julian Coronel, a thor-oughfare with four lanes of quickly moving traffic. Across Coronel, an enormous white wall ran in both directions for as far as Cameron could see, broken only by large arches with locked metal gates. Ahead and to the left stretched a white pedestrian bridge, which Rex indicated with a gesture. "Might as well try there."

  Underneath the bridge, colorful advertisements for ice cream were peeling from the concrete in strips. One strip ran through the smiling face of a light-skinned woman.

  Steering wide of a group of homeless men, they climbed the pedes-trian bridge and walked over the busy thoroughfare. When they got halfway across, the land on the far side of the wall became visible, and Cameron gasped out loud. It was perhaps the most breathtaking sight she had ever seen. Against the backdrop of several small hills, white marble gravestones, tombs, and mausoleums stretched up into the air, forming what appeared to be a miniature city. Some of the tombs were so extravagant that they resembled residential buildings with distinct floors, each one featuring gates for the ornate caskets. A few others were domed, fronted with immense tinted-glass doors with polished metal handles. Paved walkways ran between the tombs, some of them as wide as small streets. Shrines, statues, and trees gave the cemetery a jagged skyline. Only a couple gravestones had fallen over; for the most part, the cemetery had been resistant to the tremors. It almost glowed in the dark-ening air, a small forest of white stone.

  Even Tank stopped dead in his tracks.

  "They call this 'La Ciudad Blanca,'" Rex said. "The White City." He grinned. "For obvious reasons."

  Rex walked down the far set of stairs, descending down into the cemetery. It was almost nightfall, and Cameron glanced ahead at the rows of tombs, the myriad hiding places for muggers and thieves. Tank felt for the pistol in the back of his pants, so Cameron knew he was thinking the same thing.

  "This is the history of Ecuador," Rex said. "Every important name, every important date, is here. Buried, gilded, commemorated."

  As they walked through the grounds, Cameron noticed the family names carved into the white marble. Palm trees lined a slender, marble-paved lane, the trunks painted white. The silhouette of a man appeared in the middle of the path. He was genuflecting, staring up at the humbler monuments dotting the dark hillside.

  Rex drew closer. "Juan?"

  The man rose and threw his arms wide in greeting. He was an ugly man, with wide, uneven features, his cheeks deeply pocked. His skin was dark, his arms covered with hair. "Dr. Williams," he said in heavily accented English. "You are here in one piece, no?" He nodded to Cameron and Tank. "And the soldiers. A pleasure to meet you. Thank you for your offer to escort us."

  "Offer?" Tank said, but Cameron elbowed him in the ribs.

  "You might have waited at the lab," Rex said. "We've spent hours searching for you."

  "I am sorry. It is hard for me to be in the lab now, you see." Juan fid-dled with his wedding ring nervously, rotating the gold band around his thick knuckle. Despite his warmth, he exuded a gentle sadness. "I do not know how much longer it will exist. There is no funding. I've had to let go my assistants. Many of the experiments will not be finished. And the islands are in bad shape, my friends. I was doing a longitudinal study, tracking a population of masked boobies on Espanola…"Heshook his head. "But with the feral goats taking over the past few years…"

  "They're bad?" Cameron asked. "The goats?"

  "Animals aren't good or bad. They're just sometimes in the wrong place. If they don't belong, they can threaten the entire ecosystem. Gala-pagos are especially fragile. Many of the animals evolved on the islands with no enemies, so they have no way to contend with predators if they arrive. And man has brought many predators, most of them seemingly benign, protected by their very…how do you say?…banality. Puppies and kittens, hamsters…all killers. All capable of wiping out whole pop-ulations of endemic species. Like the goats on Espanola with my masked boobies…eating the eggs, the chicks…" He sighed heavily. "All dead. I received a report from a friend at the Darwin Station telling me not to bother coming
back." He tapped his hand against the corner of a nearby gravestone, his wedding band making a soft clicking noise. "There's so much we've lost." He looked away, his eyes growing moist.

  Tank dug something out of his teeth with a finger.

  "We really should get back," Rex said.

  Cameron reached out and touched Juan gently on the sleeve. "I'm sorry," she said.

  Juan's smile was a faint, dying thing. He looked back up at the hillside. "Those graves up there, those are the graves of the poor." Evidently, the families of the dead buried on the hills couldn't afford marble; the gravesites were decorated with bright fabrics and flowers. A number of these plots were recent additions, with dark, freshly turned soil. "So much death, so quickly."

  "Let's be honest," Rex said. "This is nothing new. Life has always been cheap here. Children succumbing to preventable diseases, poison-ous snakes in the Oriente, buses colliding on windy pueblo roads. Death happens here."

  Juan shook his head, studying the fresh graves in the hills. "Not like this."

  A church bell tolled somewhere in the distance, and Rex glanced down at his watch. "I need to get back and check in with Donald." He shoved a slip of paper with the flight time and survey procedures into Juan's hand. "See you tomorrow."

  Juan nodded and walked off a short ways, sitting on the ledge of a particularly broad mausoleum. Cameron found Rex's abruptness in the face of Juan's grief to be offensive. "Tank'll escort you back," she said. "I'll be along in a minute."

  Tank followed Rex into the darkness. Cameron walked over and pulled herself up on the ledge beside Juan. The echo of the church bells lingered in the darkness. The air was thick, humid, foreign. It smelled sharply of bark, burning wood, and stale food.

  "I come here often at night," Juan said softly.

  Cameron gave him the silence, listening to the rush of cars beyond the high cemetery wall.

  Juan pulled off his wedding band and set it on his knee. He regarded it for a few moments. "I lost my wife," he finally said. "And my baby girl. I was teaching at Universidad when the apartment building collapsed. That was…that was almost three years ago, but still I feel it sharply on quiet nights like this." He picked up the ring, tilted it so that he could catch the blur of his reflection in the gold, then slid it back on his finger.

  When she realized that he was crying, Cameron wasn't sure what to do. She popped a stick of gum in her mouth and worked it over, waiting uncomfortably through the silence. Juan finally wiped his cheeks and raised his head.

  "I am sorry. You do not need this. There's just something in your eyes, some softness that lets me talk where I haven't before. That's unusual for Americans. They often come down here and see our ways and the vio-lence, and think us primitive." He shook his head. "Death is part of our culture. During the conquest, half our population was killed by disease, civil war. But no country can endure this kind of disruption, this kind of…" With a sweeping gesture, he indicated the cemetery before them. "Loss."

  A man stumbled by, his head lowered, carrying an armful of flowers. When he passed Cameron and Juan, he paused and looked up at them. Cameron couldn't make out his face, because he was wearing a hat pulled low over his eyes. "No, gracias," she said, waving him away.

  The man spoke back to her in a soft but angry voice. He gestured at her several times, and she felt for the pistol, just to make sure it was still there.

  "What did he say?" she asked Juan when the man finished speaking.

  Juan slid off the ledge onto his feet. "He asked that we get off his family's mausoleum, that he can lay the flowers there for them."

  He nodded an apology at the man and headed back toward the foot-bridge.

  Chapter 13

  Rex leaned over the hotel phone as Tank stretched out on the bed. He had to dial three times before the call went through. Donald picked up on the first ring. "How is it?"

  "Lovely as always," Rex said. "Puts Paris to shame."

  "Some interesting news. Remember that seawater that Frank sent back?"

  "Of course." Rex pulled off his shirt and turned so that he could see his back in the mirror. He pressed his hand to the back of his neck, and the white imprint of his fingers lingered a few moments before fading.

  "I finally got it under a microscope. The sample from Sangre de Dios was highly unusual. Most of the plankton were dead. Clumped together. Mostly unicellular phytoplankton-dinoflagellates were most prevalent, but a lot of them I didn't recognize."

  "Really?" Rex said. "Species you didn't recognize?"

  "My guess is that they were nonviable mutations. Remember, plank-ton are extraordinarily sensitive to UV-B."

  "Yes," Rex said, pulling a Natural History magazine from his bag and perusing the back cover, "but they live at depths that screen out most radiation."

  "Ah," Donald said. "But this was a surface sample. So my thought was, seismically motivated shifting currents pushed them upward, and their composition was altered by UV exposure. But the range of the mutations was staggering-they couldn't be based on radiation alone."

  "So?" The phone line cut out. Rex looked over at his sat phone, still charging at the outlet, cursed, and dialed again. This time, the call went through on the first try.

  "So," Donald said, picking up right where they'd left off. "I did a gas chromatography mass spec to check for DDT, but that came back negative, so I isolated some dinoflagellate DNA, and ran a gel."

  Donald checked his watch. His linen shirt was creased and wrinkled across the front, dotted with sweat. He'd spent the entire morning in the lab. The work required a precision that had quickly become tedious. First, he'd centrifuged the water samples, placing them in a rapidly spinning test tube so that the denser dinoflagellates would settle at one end of the tube. Then, he'd made genomic preps to isolate the DNA strands, cut specific segments, and ran those segments through ethidium bromide-soaked agar to see how they'd settle. When they did, their banding patterns were visible under UV light, and ready to be compared to the control.

  From past studies, Donald was familiar with the banding pattern of dinoflagellate DNA from around Galapagos; generally it banded from three to five kilobases down to ten base pairs. The DNA from the island of Santa Cruz matched this banding pattern. However, the sample from Sangre de Dios was irregular, with several of the DNA segments remaining at the top of the agar, barely traveling downward.

  When Rex heard the results, he sat down on the bed. "Holy shit," he said. "What are you thinking?"

  "Those segments are swollen with something to be moving that slow," Donald said. "I'm guessing a virus got ahold of them, finding its way through the UV-weakened cell walls and inserting its own DNA into their structures."

  Rex whistled. "Well, viruses are phenomenally bountiful in H2O."

  "That was my understanding. But this is well out of our field. I'd like you to take plenty of water samples on Sangre de Dios. In the meantime, I've sent the sample off to Everett at Fort Detrick."

  "Samantha Everett?" Rex rubbed his forehead. "Are you sure that's such a good idea? I've heard she's a little… " The line cut out. "Unpre-dictable."

  Former Chief of Viral Special Pathogens Branch at the Centers for Dis-ease Control in Atlanta and current Chief of the Disease Assessment Division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Dis-eases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Samantha Everett was decked out in a blue full-body space suit, complete with neoprene gloves taped to her sleeves. The droning air circulation unit inside the space suit was mes-merizing, forming a low-pitched symphony with the other sounds of the Biosafety Level Four lab-the constant one-way airflow, the blowers sit-uated near the doors to ensure negative pressure, the HEPA filters working double-time overhead. To maintain her sanity, Samantha sang "Itsy Bitsy Spider" to herself, substituting her own lyrics where she forgot the words.

  A short woman-five foot two in sneakers-Samantha had the slightly frazzled air of a mother of three. Having neglected the wash for the past month and a half, she'd shown up t
o work wearing her daugh-ter's T-shirt featuring the five smiling faces of NVME's members. Fortu-nately, she also fit into her six-year-old son's shoes-green Velcro Adidas with asphalt marks on the white rubber outsoles-as she'd run from the house barefoot that morning only to realize it when she'd pulled up to base. She'd found the Adidas in the back of the minivan, buried in a mound of camping equipment from a trip into the Catoctins that, having been planned for two months and canceled three times, had almost come to fruition the prior weekend, only to be interrupted by the emergency at hand. A pair of wire-frame John Lennon-style glasses perched on her nose, the thin metal arms disappearing back into her curly brown hair.

  Having little use for a husband, she'd adopted all three of her children over the past nine years. Earlier in her career, she couldn't have even considered being a mother. She'd been dispatched for months at a time on various projects-bleeding horses in rural Costa Rica for Venezuelan equine encephalitis, chasing Machupo virus up the eastern slope of the Andes, trekking through mosquito breeding grounds in the Nile Delta. But after her stint at CDC in Atlanta, she was given an offer to run DAD at USAMRIID, and she'd vowed to attempt some form of a domestic life. Being a mother, she'd found, had toughened her considerably more than being a major and running a division of testosterone-poisoned, military-sanctioned control freaks. But she liked Fort Detrick nonethe-less, and the seasons in central Maryland.

  The stark modern USAMRIID building looked as if it had been dropped into the middle of the base from orbit, so out of place did it look among the conservative, faded-brick buildings. Inside, the sleek, tiled floors and fluorescent lights countered the battleship-gray walls. All work with infectious agents was undertaken in one section, divided into four units, each of which was in turn split into four "hot suites." Each hot suite employed a constellation of blowers, vents, and pressure sys-tems to ensure that airborne pathogens could not leak from the area. The filters killed any atomized biohazard before laboratory air was released to the outside. Everywhere in the building, the airflow was directed inward.