The new batch of mosquitoes was ready!
Dr. Nader Cardozo, thirty-eight, stood with pride and excitement in the glass-walled terminal of Porto Velho’s Governador Jorge Teixeira de Oliveira International Airport, watching an Azul Airlines Boeing 737 board. Flight 34 was the daily milk run plane that circled Brazil’s hinterland, its Amazon cities, terminating in São Paulo, from where international flights left the country.
Passengers jogged through misty rain to hurry up the mobile stairway. They included locals, gold miners heading for the duty-free city of Manaus, cattle ranchers going to their main residences in São Paulo, a couple of forest police — charged with protecting Brazil nut trees from being cut down — and, thanks to the martyr Tom Fargo, five newly trained ops from Europe and North America: a female hospital worker from Florida, a baker’s assistant from London, a former lieutenant in the French paratroops, a Turkish sailor, and a Moscow cab driver. They would release vectors in Orlando and Tampa, Marseille, Moscow, London, and Istanbul. Inshallah!
Nader’s eyes went to the mobile baggage cart by the plane. He watched suitcases glide up the conveyer belt. A pet carrier. Then seven square wooden boxes marked FRAGILE.
I did it. I figured out how to make another batch.
It was eight months since Fargo’s death, and the success of the martyr’s mission: terror in the U.S., the defeat of a presidential candidate, the money transfer, and more gridlock in Congress, not to mention the stupendous profit realized by jihadists who’d invested in pharmaceuticals. Cardozo thought, The money was a side benefit, but the whole thing even made the Caliphate money! And now, soon, more threats, more power, more panic everywhere.
The doors to the 737 closed. Airport workers rolled away the staircase. The terminal vibrated as the jet rolled down the runway, diminished into a speck in the sky, and was eaten by clouds.
Cardozo felt the muscles relax in his neck as he turned to Yasmine Riquera, the sexy lab receptionist, who he had brought along today. She was dressed in one of her usual fetching outfits, tight sleeveless V-necked aquamarine top, showing off toned arms and firm-looking breasts, and a hint of delicious cleavage. Tight-fitting white jeans, formfitting her fantastic legs. Well-defined ass, jutting up because of the cork-heeled sandals. Fingernails and toenails a matching peach color. And the whole mouthwatering package topped by dyed chestnut hair that accentuated her slutty aspect. His own wife was a Russian Brazilian, blond and sexy, theoretically, but after ten years of marriage, familiar.
“Dr. Cardozo, it was so kind of you to invite me to see the plane leave with our young scientists on it.”
“Well, not just watch,” he told Yasmine. “We’re also going to lunch, aren’t we?”
Yasmine giggled. They both knew what “lunch” meant.
“You are a hero fighting illness,” Yasmine said.
“I wanted to spend my life helping people.”
He put his hand on her rump as they made their way outside, to a privately hired Toyota Land Cruiser. Cardozo told the driver to go to the main dock on the Madeira, and “the floating restaurants.” In the backseat he allowed his hand to fall over Yasmine’s shoulder. She moved closer, smelling of citrus shampoo.
“The mosquitoes you make will end much malaria,” she said in the semi-worshipful tone he adored.
True, up to a point. In his official, legal job, Cardozo ran the Amazon labs for Allard-Foss Pharmaceuticals, the French multinational. The two million male insects they had genetically engineered back at Colonel Rondon Industrial Park would do exactly what Yasmine said. The males were sterile. By breeding with wild females, they’d eliminate the possibility of offspring. Allard-Foss vans in two Brazilian jungle states were even today releasing mosquitoes. Company stock was soaring. Journalists visited regularly, and interviewed Cardozo, took his photo, lauded his public work.
To create the other secret 10 percent of his crop, Cardozo had labored long and hard, alone at 3 A.M., working from sketchy notes he’d made in talks with Dr. Umar, and notes made at Dachau death camp almost eighty years before by Cardozo’s great-great-grandfather, a Lebanese-born SS doctor who hated the British and was a follower of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler’s Arab ally. Cardozo’s ancestor had escaped Germany on a U-boat at the end of the war, set up shop in Brazil, and restarted his research, first for a Nazi group. Later — when the Nazis were gone — for liberation groups in the Mideast.
Tom Fargo thought I didn’t know that he chose his targets for personal reasons. But as long as he created panic, I didn’t care which targets he chose. And now the new people will carry on his work.
This thought excited him so much that he allowed his hand to brush Yasmine’s breast. They had reached the waterfront. Mostly it looked seedy, a mud landing area for old riverboats, but there was also a new dock, and a half dozen small motorized craft, their drivers ready to ferry tourists or picnickers out for an afternoon pleasure ride.
Cardozo chose a larger boat with a private room. It was a mobile motel. As they chugged into the river Yasmine and Cardozo examined the cabin. She seemed to think the red walls, crisply made double bed, lit candles, and stocked wine rack classy. He’d probably fire her in a couple of weeks. You never wanted to keep them around too long. Otherwise gratitude turned to expectation, hero worship to something more human. Cardozo got enough human treatment from his wife at home.
“Are you hungry, Yasmine?”
They chugged around a bend, and Porto Velho disappeared. They were in a wider section of river, with three or four other floating motels out here, probably hosting businessmen and girlfriends, ranchers and girlfriends, politicians and girlfriends, tourists and bar girls. Sex in the heat.
“We will dine on deck. Bring wine,” Cardozo told the captain.
They ate at the little round table on the fantail. He saw a spider monkey staring at him from the branches of a tree; probably the last such creature alive within miles. Yasmine ate in small bites, tearing at her beefsteak like an animal. White teeth flashed against smooth, coppery skin.
“Yasmine is an Arabic name,” he observed.
“My grandparents came from Gaza.”
“Do you keep in contact with family there? I have no people there,” he lied.
Mideasterners could carry grudges in DNA. Your ancestor hit mine with a rock, in a cave. Your ancestor stole my ancestor’s sheep when Jesus was alive. Someday we will return and take back our land. Our home. Our water.
Lunch over, he took her hand and led her down two stairs into the cabin. She smiled when he locked the door. His head pounded with anticipation. He felt himself stirring beneath his waist. Her blouse came off. She wore no bra. She looked eager, and the sight of her bare breasts drew his hands forward, as if by themselves.
“You are so very beautiful,” he said.
“You murdered Sublieutenant Salazar.”
Dr. Cardozo blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Vai te foder, Doctor! The boxes you loaded are not filled with vectors. I killed all the vectors last night. You shipped normal mosquitoes, which will be removed from the plane at the next stop. Along with your murderers.”
This can’t be happening, Cardozo thought as she moved toward him. Why was she smiling?
The first blow rammed into his solar plexus, doubling him over, dropping him to the deck. He couldn’t breathe. She kicked him and yanked his hands behind his back, and suddenly he was handcuffed. He called out to the captain, for help, even knowing that none was coming. The door opened and the driver of the boat stood there, staring down at him but not moving. Cardozo told the man to get this crazy bitch off him. To overpower her.