ViraVax by Bill Ransom Page B

when the family was out of reach.
    Though he was a young forty-five, the Colonel knew that anger had already kicked his blood pressure into the danger zone. He reminded himself that this was something that was happening to him lately. It wasn’t Hodge’s fault. Hodge just happened to be handy.
    “Conversation,” the Colonel hissed. “You mean small talk.”
    The Colonel glanced around the bare office: fan, desk, three windows with blinds, the inevitable mold that bled through a fresh coat of government-issue pastel lime; two olive-drab file cabinets, one cabinet of electronic wizardry capped with two telephones. It was just as he had entered it nearly twenty years ago, except for the holos, the Litespeeds and Sidekicks. He couldn’t bring himself to focus on Hodge.
    “Conversation. . . okay.” The Colonel glanced at his watch. “Conversation.”
    Easily said, not so easily begun.
    Another glance at the embassy and he felt his testicles sucked towards his abdomen—he had nearly lost them out there, seventeen years ago. They took over a month to heal and still gave him trouble. And every Wednesday that they kept him in this office overlooking the embassy, he had remembered. Even though it was a punishment assignment, Rico knew he would feel better facing the weekly demonstrators from the front.
    “Adhesions,” the embassy physician had told him. “Take a week off so that you can just lie around and we’ll take care of that for you. If you wait, it’s just going to get worse.”
    Maybe that’s my problem, he thought.
    The Colonel preferred to think that his problem was anything but pressure. If it were pressure, he’d have to retire, just when his organization was in place and its position in this country secure.
    The Colonel had taken some licks in his time, but that series of kicks to the groin had been so quick and so hard that he couldn’t remember it. He remembered gagging on his own vomit, and a crushing, stunning pain that even morphine didn’t cure.
    Then, in the hospital, he got infected with some tropical bug that didn’t even have a name and he nearly sweat to death.
    “Fever of Unknown Origin,” he said.
    “Colonel?”
    “What I had, in the hospital. Fever of Unknown Origin.”
    Rico saw the shade of fear cross the assistant’s eyes. There was a vaccine against almost everything these days, but plenty of things left that a vaccine couldn’t help.
    Plenty of things new.
    AIDS had been the first breakthrough, a real money-maker. Now everyone got a multivax the same way the Colonel got one of the last smallpox scratches as a child.
    The Colonel had worked with ViraVax, the developer of the multivax, setting up their compound only a half hour away from the capital by chopper. No one had yet come up with a cure for everything. But someone had come up with a few other viruses, every bit as nasty.
    Of course, there were always a few who succumbed to the vaccine itself.
    The Colonel had been immersed in the world of viruses and vaccines for years now, much against his will. ViraVax had been his cover job here while he infiltrated the local rebels. Then the Colonel had been plucked out of field intelligence just when his networks were humming and his sources secure.
    Maybe they know my opinion of which side we’re taking, he mused.
    He thought it unlikely. Colonel Toledo shared his opinions with no one, not even Rachel.
    He had some scores to settle in the intelligence community, and now his government was making that impossible. He had been around too long to think that it was an accident, a toss of the die.
    In Costa Brava bullets outnumbered beans by three to one, and the most valuable commodity was information. Colonel Rico Toledo’s boss in the Agency back home called it “the product.” Costa Bravans, living closer to poetry, spoke of a “little sigh,” or “the whisper,” but very few real whispers bent hairs in real ears.
    Lots of high-tech tricks had sprung up in the last twenty