Conover laughed heartily at that. 'Oh, that's delightful; they must have partially decoded one of the transmissions. The poor bastards don't have a clue.'
'To what?' asked Jonny.
'That we are the Alpha Rats.' said the smuggler lord.
Jonny turned on Conover who casually flicked his gun up at Jonny's face. Jonny just ignored it. 'I knew it,' he told the lord. 'It's all a ruse, isn't it? There are no Alpha Rats; there never were any extraterrestrials. It's been the government all along using the Alpha Rats as an excuse for the rationing programs and the damned war preparations.'
'Bravo!' yelled Conover, clapping his left hand against the one holding the Futukoro. 'Well done Jonny. What remarkable deductive powers.' He smiled apologetically. 'Of course, you're wrong on most of it. But it was a good try. Keep moving and I'll straighten you out.'
Before they continued up, Conover lit another Sherman, the flame on his lighter briefly illuminating the wreckage of his face. He had developed a slight tic in the cracked skin under one eye. His lips were moist and slack. 'Getting thin,' thought Jonny as the smuggler lord nudged him up the stairs.
'Of course there are Alpha Rats,' Conover told him. 'Do you really think the Tokyo Alliance would put itself in such a dangerous economic position intentionally? The extraterrestrial's ship crashed on the moon fifteen years ago. Yes, crashed. They're dead, you see.
All the Alpha Rats on board. It was a plague ship, son, on auto-pilot, packed full of dead Alpha Rats.
Think about it, Jonny. The odds are staggering. The Alpha Rats drifting through empty space for god knows how long, getting caught in the moon's gravity and crashing there. I don't think that it would be far-fetched to think that in some way they were sent there for us to find. We're just lucky a Canadian team got to the site first. If the Arabs had made it, they would have discovered what we did; eventually, they would have analyzed it and figured out how it worked.'
'The layered virus,' Jonny said. He stumbled on loose carpet, felt Conover's gun in his back before he found his footing.
'See? Your history's not so bad,' said Conover. 'Of course, what killed the Alpha Rats had very little resemblance to NATO's layered virus, but it was during the early research we did on the bodies of the Alpha Rats, breaking down the genetic structure of the plague that killed them, that we finally found the key on how to make the damned virus work.'
'Funny,' said Jonny. 'I thought for awhile that maybe you'd gotten some surplus virus juice from somebody and decided to let it loose in L.A. so you could peddle the cure through us dealers.'
'You think too small, Jonny. I keep telling you: You're in business, but you're not a business man. This is government work, boy. Multinational dollars.'
'But all the rationing for all these years, that was a put-on wasn't it? Keep the Pentagon fat and happy.'
'Yes and no. After the Alpha ship was located, we couldn't very well have people trampling all over the moon, could we? The local military authorities took the opportunity to burn the Arab bases and mining operations. Naturally, we had to take out a few of our own to make it look good, but the circumlunar labs are still operating. You didn't know that, did you? Yes, that's where the Alpha Virus was synthesized. All we did was blow-up a few non-essential orbiters and dress the ones we needed with debris from the surface.'
'So the government's got their virus and their war. What do you get out of this?'
'Freedom. From this,' said Conover, touching his chest. 'They're going to give me a new body, Jonny. With the government's bankroll I can leave this place and not have to worry about territory disputes or watered down drugs or the rabid dogs that run this city breathing down my neck.'
'They must have given you a bundle for releasing that virus,' said Jonny.
'Not at all. Raquin, as the Colonel no doubt told you, was working for the Committee. He stole the virus from me to turn over to the Colonel, but before he had the chance, Easy stole it from Raquin. No son, I'm afraid what Washington is paying me for has nothing to do with releasing the Alpha Virus. I'm being paid to deliver you.' Conover sighed. 'I was hoping you might figure this part out on your own. That's why I set up that little game with 'Blue Boy' and the cases of Mad Love. I thought maybe if you knew who I was, you'd see some of this coming. Maybe I'm getting eccentric in my oldage. Playing too many games. After a century or so it's easy to forget how ordinary people think. And it was probably too much to expect of you with all you've had on your mind lately.' They came around a sharp turn and started up another flight of stairs. Along one wall was a stained glass fresco depicting men in armor carrying Christian banners into battle. 'Why would you put that in a stairway with no lights?' Jonny wondered. 'You going to tell me why the Federales want me, or should I just assume it's my magnetic personality?' he asked the smuggler lord.
'Actually, they'd prefer your grandmother, but she disappeared years ago. Then when your mother OD'd in Mexico City, it left you as heir-apparent to the throne,' explained Conover. 'See, your grandmother was a child of the streets, much like you and your friends. She sold blood, breathed polluted air for pay in university experiments, you know the routine. Then in nineteen ninety-five she volunteered for a series of injections at UCLA. Of course, she didn't know it was one of the Defense Department's genetic warfare projects. The school told her they were testing a new hepatitis vaccine.
Tokyo and Washington were still thinking of war strictly in terms of atomic weapons back then. Some Pentagon bright-boy had the idea that through genetic engineering he could increase the general population's tolerance to certain wavelengths of radiation.
Like the rest of the research programs, it eventually ran out of money, but not before your grandmother and a few dozen others were doped with an experimental retro-virus. The doctors had removed key sections of the virus's genetic code, so it could not hurt her, but the retro-virus was very efficient in entering her bone marrow. There, it bonded successfully with her red blood cells, producing a sort-of anti-radiation antibody.
As I said, the project ran out of money, and the subjects were dismissed, but not before they were re- examined. The little viruses really took to a few of them; your grandmother was one. But the project leaders had no hold over her or the others, no money to keep them around. Like most of the research subjects, she simply drifted away.'
'So now the Federales think because my abuela had lead in her veins that something in my blood is the cure for the layered virus?'
'Apparently so.'
'Then if there is no cure, why the hell did you let me go to Little Tokyo after Easy Money?' Jonny shouted. 'What were you setting me up for?'
'Oh yes, Easy,' said Conover. He looked tired; the junk flesh around his eyes was drawn and brittle. 'Well, I couldn't take a chance on Nimble Virtue finding out what she had. It was a second batch of the virus, of course. Ricos had orders to kill her and Easy when she turned it over.'
'Beautiful. Fucking beautiful, ' Jonny mumbled. 'Then I'm it as far as this cure goes? I mean, with all of the government's resources, they couldn't come up with one other person connected with those tests?'
'It's been a long time, Jonny. Records get lost; discs get erased. When you ran away from the state school as a boy, they we sure they'd lost contact with the program for good. Then you turned up on the Committee. You couldn't hide that blood from them for long.'
Jonny laughed mirthlessly. 'Serves me right.'
At the top of the stairs, they came out into an immense geodesic solarium. Through the bullet-proof glass, Jonny could make-out the tattered edge of the HOLLYWOOD sign, crawling neon of the movie district below. Overhead, the moon was obscured by billowing waves of sand, like hordes of locusts moving across the sky.
'You know, Mister Conover, you really piss me off,' Jonny said. 'I mean, I expect this kind of chickenshit behavior from Nimble Virtue, but I thought you were my friend.'
'I am your friend, Jonny. Understand, there's nothing personal in any of this.'
'Right, I know. Don't tell me. It's business. Economics, it always is.'
'You're looking for someone to blame again,' Conover said. 'I told you once: life's more complicated than cowboy and Indian movies. You think the Arabs wouldn't use the virus if they had the opportunity? Or your friends the Croakers? What if Groucho had a weapon like this?'
'You know what's funny?' Jonny asked. 'What's really funny is even though you're telling me all this now, I keep thinking that maybe I'm hearing it wrong. I keep thinking, 'Maybe Mister Conover got sucked into this deal by mistake, just like everybody else.' But that's not how it is, is it?' Outside the solarium was a sculpture garden. Jonny
