Burn Read Online Free PDF Page A

exhausted.
    “. . . Old,” Nancy whispered, involuntarily, but not loud enough for her father to hear.
    Hodge knew for a fact that Nancy had not spoken to her father since her husband had been killed over a month ago. He had studied the Bartlett family long enough to know that the Secretary believed that Red Bartlett had stolen his daughter away to the ends of the earth. Staying on in Costa Brava after her husband’s death had been the ultimate betrayal of her father and her native land. At least, that’s how her father saw it.
    Nancy Bartlett straightened her shoulders, cleared her throat and faced the video pickup to the right of the screen.
    “Dad,” she said, swallowing a sob in a tight throat, “my baby’s missing, and so is Harry Toledo. A farmer saw Sonja’s plane forced down by an unmarked Mongoose up in the Jaguar Mountains. He thinks the kids might be alive. . . .”
    Here her voice betrayed her shock and grief by tightening up her throat too much to speak.
    “I know, Nancy,” he said. “I got a scramble from Colonel Toledo earlier, via an Agency field linkup. . . .”
    “That bastard!” she snapped. “I knew he was behind this. He bombed the embassy and took the kids . . .”
    Secretary Mike Mandell raised a hand to calm her down.
    “Nancy, listen,” he said. “It’s not like that at all. Let’s take one thing at a time. You and Grace weren’t hurt in that bombing, were you? The wires here say that six people died and a lot of us are worried about you.”
    “No, Dad, we’re okay. Physically, anyway. And how very thoughtful of Rico to contact you instead of me, or his ex-wife. Look, I don’t know what he told you, but you know you can’t believe that slimy bastard. President Garcia has troops all over the countryside looking for him. He’s turned to the guerrillas and he’s probably got Sonja and Harry in some hellhole in the mountains.”
    “Rico didn’t take the kids.”
    Her father said it slowly, to make it clear.
    “He didn’t bomb the embassy,” he said. “It was a diversion, to put the heat on Rico.”
    Hodge sat forward at this. He had not expected his efforts to be pinpointed so soon.
    “But why?” Nancy asked. “Who’s behind this?”
    Her father’s gaze faltered for a moment as he listened to someone off-camera.
    “It appears that the Gardeners are behind both the bombing and the kidnapping.”
    “The Children of Eden? But why, Dad? What could two teenage kids mean to them?”
    Mike Mandell sighed, and in that sigh Major Hodge heard the deep wheeze of death in the Secretary’s lungs.
    He won’t have to worry about the smoking getting him, Hodge thought with a smirk.
    “It’s ViraVax,” Mandell said. “I can’t give it all to you right now, but trust me, we’re on it. We’ve diverted a SEAL team to help out, we believe that Garcia is part of the problem, so we do not want his people to find either Rico or the kids before we do.”
    “ViraVax? But that doesn’t make any sense.”
    “It does if you think of unauthorized experiments on human beings.”
    Nancy dropped heavily into a chair, her expression numb.
    “Sonja tried to warn me about ViraVax,” she said. “If I had listened, she wouldn’t have gone out there on her own.”
    “Nancy?”
    Nancy Bartlett’s face betrayed a dizzying disorientation for a moment. She batted at something in front of her eyes, and Hodge knew what it was. The memory adjustment that he had arranged for her after die incident with her husband was coming unraveled. Right now he imagined that a flood of grotesque images, suppressed memories, crossed her vision—her husband, dead . . . a pistol in her hand . . . his body melting to sludge on the living-room carpet.
    It doesn’t matter now, he thought, and caught himself smiling. His part in Nancy Bartlett’s memory adjustment had been a pleasant one. Creative.
    Nancy shook her head and cleared the tremble out of her voice.
    “Sonja was convinced that ViraVax had something