Burn by Bill Ransom Read Free Book Online

government.
    “For your own protection,” Major Scholz told him. “No telling what you picked up out there.”
    That didn’t worry Harry as much as being locked up and forgotten in some warehouse during a civil war. He had already figured out how to get out of this isolette, but it involved mucking around in the septic tank, so he decided he could wait.
    Sonja was another matter. He didn’t think she could wait long, at all. Sonja’s reaction when she first saw the isolettes shook Harry almost as much as the ghastly scene at ViraVax and the plane crash. As the two of them and Marte Chang were escorted from the ambulance into the warehouse, Sonja collapsed.
    “Oh, no!” was all she’d said, and she dropped, limp, to the concrete deck.
    And then she cried. Harry had seen Sonja through a lot, and she never cried. Watching her sob on the concrete broke his heart. When he moved to help her up, one of their escorts pressed a rifle across his chest to stop him. Harry nearly tried the snatch-and-keep move that had saved them in ViraVax, but the neuropuff in his bloodstream wouldn’t let him. His dad taught him that move, and he hoped now that he would get the chance to thank him for it.
    “At least we got Sonja’s dad out,” Harry muttered. “Even if he’s just an image in a cube.”
    Red Bartlett had been dead for nearly two months. Sonja had convinced Harry that ViraVax had something to do with her dad’s death, and she’d been right. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on the information in that cube, and get it out to the world. Marte Chang would get to review it first, with the Agency’s snoops on-line, as usual. Harry had taught Red Bartlett how to make the cube, and he was sure that neither Marte Chang nor the Agency could break it without him.
    Harry could feel how much Sonja desperately wanted to see and hear her father in front of her one more time. Red had been largely an absentee father, working all week, and sometimes more, out at the ViraVax compound. Her relationship with her father was as loving as Harry’s was antagonistic.
    Some data was flowing into Harry’s makeshift terminal already, spillover from Marte Chang’s machine. That part had been easy. What he really wanted was to figure out how to get data flowing the other way. Every attempt he’d made to connect with the outside world had been terminated by an autoguard. And it really irked him that the autoguard operated out of his father’s old DIA office, and that it was Harry who showed him how it worked.
    One of the few times Dad admitted that I actually knew something.
    Harry still didn’t know what to feel about his dad, except he hoped that he wasn’t dead. Scholz told him that the flood following the blown dam had scoured ViraVax and the entire Jaguar Valley. A SEAL team continued the search for Colonel Toledo, but from what Harry heard after he was lifted out of the valley, it sounded hopeless.
    “How are you doing in there?”
    The voice through the tinny speaker was Major Scholz’s. He felt his cheeks flush as he realized he had been staring at his reflection in the glass, and Major Scholz looked back at him from the other side.
    “Like any bug under glass,” he said. “What about my mom?”
    “She’s still at the embassy,” Scholz said. “We’ll arrange for her to come out here in the morning.”
    “If we’re alive in the morning, you mean.”
    “So far, so good,” Scholz said with a shrug. “She and Nancy Bartlett have been briefed on your situation. That console of yours includes a line to the embassy. You’ve already found that, I hear. She was probably relieved to hear from you.”
    “Yeah,” Harry said, “she was. No thanks to you.”
    “They’ve got their hands full over there, as you might imagine. I know you’re angry about this. . . .”
    “You don’t know the half of it, Major,” Harry said.
    Harry was mad because he escaped one trap to get into another, because he was exposed to God-knows-what