Free ViraVax by Bill Ransom

address, Mrs. Toledo?”
    Harry saw the hint of a smile twitch the corner of Grace’s mouth, something that Gil probably would not notice. Harry did not know what to feel, but he knew he didn’t feel like smiling. Besides, it would probably hurt his eye and his split lip.
    “Show us the guesthouse.”
    Harry watched Gil’s eyes reflected in the rearview mirror. They widened in disbelief, then Gil turned to protest.
    “Guesthouse,” his mother repeated.
    There were a lot of code words in Costa Brava, this Harry well knew. He knew several for use with security or the embassy and they all carried standing orders that did not require confirmation. Their driver might not like whatever Grace just told him, but he wouldn’t dare take a chance and disobey.
    Before turning back to the wheel, Gil gave Harry’s mother a long, appraising look. Then he grunted, punctuating some personal decision, and drove. He kept his white handkerchief on the seat beside him, draped over a pistol. He attempted conversation only once.
    “Mrs. Toledo . . . ”
    “Call me Grace.”
    “Yes. Well, I had something personal to say and now it looks like there won’t be time.”
    “Tell me now.”
    “I don’t want to disturb the boy.”
    “Harry knows everything.”
    “I see.”
    Harry saw a tic of disapproval in Gil’s cheek reflected in the rearview mirror.
    They were leaving the posh suburb of Colonia Escalon and entering the first of several shantytowns that lined the roadway circumnavigating the capital. Skinny pigs dozed in potholes, veiled in the blue smoke of a thousand charcoal fires. The scent of fresh tortillas breached the car’s air-conditioning. Williams cleared his throat and continued.
    “I wanted you to know that a lot of us know what you went through with your husb—with Colonel Toledo. You did what had to be done.”
    Harry watched a barefoot boy and girl his own age pushing a cartful of broken metal towards the city. The curbside tire wobbled under the weight and made the going tougher. A piece of chrome trim nailed to the side said “Mitsubishi.” A makeshift cage with two scraggly chickens teetered atop the load. The dark boy bent to his traces, his bare back a study in tendon and bone. Two Down kids, deficientes, followed behind, holding hands and the tail end of a rope.
    The swell-breasted girl glanced up from her chore and their gazes met. Harry waved and she flashed a smile and waved back. The brother never looked up. The Down kids compared tongues and laughed at some unspoken joke.
    “Yes,” his mother said to Williams, “thank you.”
    Her voice sounded weak, detached, unlike her.
    Harry had not seen much of his father during the last few years, and what he had seen he did not like. His father didn’t take him to the gym for karate on Saturdays anymore, and Harry was too old to play hostage-and-escape. Harry’s father had spent most of his military career in Central America, first as an advisor and then as chief of intelligence. Costa Brava was a new country, rising out of the ashes of four old ones. Colonel Toledo had made that happen, at the expense of his family.
    The Colonel kept two households, the one in Colonia Escalon and an apartment across from the embassy. Grace Toledo, young and lonely, lately had outmaneuvered the advances of a half dozen junior officers who paid casual visits, but seldom when the Colonel was home. To her, and to Harry, this was a sign that his father’s affair with the red-haired embassy staffer was more than rumor.
    Finally, the Colonel’s increasingly bizarre and violent behavior brought her to an ultimatum: they would live together as a family or split up for good. Grace Toledo, like her husband, was a Catholic, and this was a decision that she had not made lightly.
    Costa Brava seethed with secrets, with codes within codes. Harry’s movement within the country had been tightly restricted all his life, which was true of all dependents of embassy personnel. Still, he had