“And the military guards?”
“You do not know much about this country, do you? We pay the government a generous permit fee to operate here. In return, they arrange for security from the army. It is a common arrangement between foreign companies and the government. The companies and their employees are targets for armed bandits. The bandits, they stay away from places that are guarded by soldiers.”
Luke said, “Who do you work for?”
“The name of our company would have no meaning for you.”
He jumped to his feet and turned on her. “Give me the name!”
She startled. “Zenavax — Zenavax Pharmaceuticals.”
During the long silence that followed, she seemed to recognize the turmoil in his face. “Why do you look at me that way?” she asked.
“Tell me about Kate Tartaglia.”
“How do you know…Who are you?”
He pointed at the dead killers. “Someone who wants to know the secret these men were protecting.”
“How would I know anything about that?”
Luke stepped closer and drilled the woman with his stare. “There are two possibilities here. Number one — you already know who I am, why I’m here, and what I want.” He pointed at the dead assailants. “In which case, you know who these goons are and you’re stalling, waiting for their reinforcements to show. Then there’s possibility number two — that you have no idea what I’m talking about. Either way, you have information I need, and I don’t have time to play games with you.”
He erupted in a fit of rage, sweeping his arm across the lab bench. Two flasks and a tall glass tube crashed to the floor.
“So tell me what you know. Now!” he shouted.
One of the men lifted off his seat as if yanked by a cord.
The woman’s hands came together in her lap, trembling. “About what?”
“Start with Kate Tartaglia. Tell me what you know about her murder.”
“I heard she was shot during a robbery. That is all I know. What does that have to do with—”
“What was she working on when she died? What projects?”
“Nothing that anyone would want to kill her for.” Her head wobbled in confusion. “She was in charge of our clinical trials, our vaccine testing programs.”
“Tell me about that.”
Her eyes hardened. “Why are you here? You don’t even say who you are.” She looked past Luke at the bodies lying on the floor. “I knew four of those men. They were good men. You point a gun at us like we have done something wrong. But we have done nothing wrong.” Her lower lip trembled and her eyes moistened. “What? Are you going to kill us after you ask your questions? Is it so easy for you?”
The men sitting on either side of her looked nervously at one another.
The woman’s blue eyes shone with the intensity of a quasar, and her body language told him that she was done talking unless he terrorized her.
“No. It’s not easy.” He blew out a heavy breath. “I’m a doctor, and this isn’t in my job description.”
Her jaw slackened.
Everything about the woman’s manner and words seemed genuine. Whatever Zenavax might have done, he felt certain that she wasn’t involved, at least not knowingly. So he had taken a chance and revealed himself — at least partially — hoping to break through her defenses.
He didn’t stop there. He told her about Josue Chaca and Jane Doe, and Kate’s mysterious connection to both of them.
“Kate’s killing had nothing to do with a robbery,” he added. “She was murdered because of something she knew.”
He took the photograph of Mayakital from his rucksack and handed it to her. “And it has something to do with this village.”
The woman took the photo, glanced at it for only a moment, and handed it back to him.
“I took that photograph.” She saw Luke beginning to speak and held up a hand. “And I know about the boy, Josue Chaca.”
45
“I’m the one who sent Josue Chaca to your hospital’s clinic in Santa Lucina,” the woman said. “I don’t know anything about the girl, the one you call Jane Doe. But I assure you, the rest of what you have told me can be explained without conspiracy theories.”
“Tell me,” Luke said.
“I see the suspicion in your eyes,” she said. “Before I tell you, you need to know that there is nothing evil going on here. The only deception that I know of, one in which I willingly participated, has to do with those howler monkeys.”
She looked over at the small primates. “Several years ago, while doing research as a microbiologist at the university in Guatemala City, I discovered that the howlers in this region have a unique resistance to malaria falciparum.”
Plasmodium falciparum—the deadliest form of malaria.
“I approached Zenavax and they were interested in my work,” she continued. “A short time later they hired me and built this laboratory. Most experts in my field thought us foolish because the primary form of malaria in this region is vivax, not falciparum. But then, my colleagues did not know what I had found here.”
“What does this have to do with Josue Chaca?”
“You will understand in a moment.” She brushed a strand of hair from her face. “Using the antigen that I isolated from these monkeys, researchers at our U.S. laboratory created our first prototype malaria vaccine almost three years ago. We have already demonstrated its effectiveness in primates, and testing on human volunteers began ten months ago. That’s when Kate became involved.”
Both of them turned to a rattling sound. One of the monkeys was working the latch on its cage.
“Kate was responsible for analyzing the results from our human trials,” she continued. “We had identified five villages, all within fifty kilometers of here, where malaria falciparum is known to occur. Four of the villages, including Mayakital, agreed to participate.”
Her gaze suddenly turned inward. “Everything went well at first. But several weeks after we administered the vaccine, an illness began to spread through Mayakital. Kate was monitoring the situation from her office in the States, analyzing the test data. Then, four months ago, she came here because she wanted to visit Mayakital herself. That was the first and only time I met her.”
“She thought your vaccine was responsible for this illness?”
“Not my vaccine, specifically,” she said. “Kate thought that our alphavirus vector had caused the illness.”
“Explain that.”
“We administered our flu vaccine to the test subjects months before they received the malaria vaccine. It was simply a goodwill gesture, a small gift in exchange for their participation. When several of the test subjects became ill after receiving the malaria vaccine, Kate had us collect several additional blood tests over a period of months.”
The woman seemed hesitant to continue, but after taking a deep breath she said, “After looking at the data from the blood tests, Kate seemed to think that our flu vaccine had primed these people’s immune system in some unusual way, and that their second exposure to alphavirus from our malaria vaccine triggered an overwhelming autoimmune reaction. She believed that the test subjects’ immune systems were literally devouring their bodies.”
Luke recalled the batch of mice destroyed by his father’s prototype flu vaccine.
“Did she mention Killer T-cells?”
“Yes. She thought apoptosis was to blame,” the woman said. “But you must understand, no one else in our company agreed with her.”
“What about you?”
“I have seen none of the data. Our company builds what you might call a one-way mirror between the research staff — those of us involved in developing vaccines — and clinical analysts like Kate who collect and study the test data. They see our work, but we do not see theirs. The regulatory agencies require that we do it this way. Supposedly, it is to lessen the probability of bias. But even without seeing the data, I think there are reasons to doubt Kate’s theory.”