ViraVax by Bill Ransom Page A

contained and sterilized,” Joshua said. “Nothing else got out. You heard the official statement.”
    “Yes.”
    The Master, Calvin Casey, pursed his lips so that his little gray mustache looked like the edge of a blade under his ample nose.
    “Is there anyone here who would have wanted him dead?”
    “No, Father, it was nothing like that. . . .”
    “I want you to get rid of that Colonel Toledo.”
    “Get rid of. . . but why?” Joshua protested. “The Agency keeps him on a short leash at the embassy. Since his people trained our security and turned it over to us, he’s stayed out of our hair. He’s provided the ultimate security and cover—even the AMA believes we’re in Puerto Rico. Why get rid of a good thing?”
    “He has not provided the ultimate security,” Calvin said. “If he had, that madman’s wife would never have been permitted to live outside this compound. His daughter would have been schooled here, like the rest. He’s a Catholic. I want this incident to disappear. Call in a favor from the Agency, if you have to.”
    Joshua Casey wrung his hands and felt the sweat on his upper lip betray his fear.
    “Father, it’s not that easy. First, the widow is the daughter of the Speaker of the House. We have bought her a house and property nearby as a gesture of goodwill. She will stay. Second, no one goes to the Agency, the Agency comes to you. Now, the Colonel’s news release was accepted by all parties as the truth. . . .”
    “The wife shot him, you say. How long before she develops a very inconvenient recurring nightmare and tells someone?”
    “One of our best people conditioned her during her hospital stay,” Joshua countered. “We backed up her conditioning with the usual hypnotic and one of our new AVAs that permitted her to ‘remember’ more correctly. I assure you, she and the child are not a problem. His work with us was well worth—”
    “The Colonel himself, then,” Calvin interrupted. “How long before his intelligence organization informs him of your experiments on his fellow idolators? What will you do when he turns on you with all of the resources at his disposal? It is better to take care of this now.”
    Joshua Casey smiled. It was not often that he acted in anticipation of his father’s wishes, but each time he had, it had served to bond them closer. Pleasing his father was like pleasing the Lord, something that was a supreme satisfaction in and of itself.
    “The Colonel has been one of our subjects on several occasions,” Joshua said. “He was one of the first sperm vectors. Dajaj used him for a successful genetic duplication trial the year we opened here, almost seventeen years ago. We had the opportunity to reinoculate three years later and successfully sterilized his wife through the AVA delivered in his sperm. As you know, the embassy physician is our man, so we have had good follow-up on her. . . .”
    “Can you predict exactly what this Colonel will do at any moment?” his father asked.
    Joshua Casey was stung into silence. He waited in respectful silence to hear his father’s suggestions on the matter. Apparently, there would be none.
    “Then get rid of him.”
    Calvin Casey worried about his son. While Costa Brava was the perfect proving ground for the armory of the Lord, it was still a bastion of the idolators, the Catholics, and they did not take challenges to their centuries of power lying down. And his son’s company built viruses, artificial viral agents. This made Calvin Casey uneasy. He had designed the perfectly healthy regimen for the Children of Eden, a regimen that was touted as exemplary by none less than the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization. He did not relish the idea of some Catholic or some laboratory spill wiping out all that he had wrought in his forty-five years of service to the Lord.
    “Father? Are you all right?”
    Calvin Casey forced himself back to reality.
    “Yes,” he said, “I’m fine. Just