Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

54

“IT REALLY STARTED WHEN I met a man named Juan Cruz,” began Mr. Urrea. “I was giving a talk at a library as part of a book tour. The book was about a family of immigrants who are trying to reconnect north of the border and build a life for themselves as part of the Ame

rican Dream. Do you understand any of that?”

“I’m good,” said Gutsy. “Keep going.”

Urrea nodded. “My book was being adapted into a TV series. Juan heard about me and looked me up on the Net, found my list of appearances, and was in the audience for that talk. I focused partly on the plight of people who risked everything to come to America because their country—Mexico—had always suffered through poverty, a shortage of decent-paying jobs, and none of the advantages that would allow a working man or woman to provide comfort for their families.”

“He also talked about politics,” said Ford, “and went on a rant about how unfair the immigration system was, and how immigrants in this country were used for cheap labor and then disposed of when some politician wanted to be elected on an ‘America first’ platform.”

“You weren’t even there, Ford. You didn’t hear my lecture.”

“No, but every time you talked about immigration, that’s where you always went.”

Urrea looked like he was going to argue, then smiled faintly. “Fair enough. Anyway, after I gave my lecture, I took questions from the audience. Juan Cruz stood up and said, ‘You give a lot of statistics about how many people sneak over the border, how many manage to eventually become US citizens, and how many are captured and sent back. Where do you get those numbers?’ It was a fair question, and I cited a number of sources that included government agencies and public watchdog agencies.”

“What are those?” asked Gutsy.

“Groups that tried to make sure the government was doing the right thing and telling the truth,” supplied Ford. “Some of them in defense of immigrants, and some dead set against them. People didn’t always agree about how many people should be let into this country, how many should be allowed to become citizens, how many should be sent back to wherever they came from. There were plenty of fights about it. Not just in state and national Congress, but actual fights in the streets.”

Gutsy nodded. She knew a lot about this part. New Alamo had, after all, been a detention and relocation camp for illegal immigrants. Some of the people in town had been survivors from among the guards and staff of the camp, though they were now a minority. She remembered Mama once telling her that after the End, when the old camp was being turned into an actual town, many of the former undocumented people who’d been imprisoned there had wanted to force the old staff members out. But it was the Chess Players who stood up to argue against it. They made a case for mercy and forgiveness among all the survivors, citing that they were all badly outnumbered by los muertos and that there was strength in numbers. Not only physical strength, but by polling the crowd at a big town meeting they proved that each person there—American, Mexican American, or Mexican—had some skills or knowledge that made them useful to the whole. Carpenters and builders, hunters and farmers, engineers and designers, clergy and psychologists, cooks and tailors, and on and on. The more knowledge they had, the more of the best parts of the old world they could retain, and the more of the structure of society they could maintain.

“I told Juan about how I’d collected the statistics he asked about,” continued Urrea, “but there was something about the way he looked at me that bothered me. It wasn’t that he didn’t agree with me or didn’t believe me. No, from the look on his face it was obvious he knew I was wrong. His certainty really rattled me, and after the lecture I looked for him. He was gone, though, but when I went out to walk back to my hotel, there he was. Scared the heck out of me, because I’ve had trouble before because of speaking my mind. Juan Cruz was angry because he said that I was making statements without knowing the truth, and he said that made me complicit. You know that word?”

“I remember it from class,” said Gutsy, nodding. “It means to be involved with people who were doing something illegal.”

“Good girl,” said Urrea, beaming. “Yes, that’s what it means, and that’s what Juan meant. However, he came to me because he believed I had been fooled, that I did not know the whole truth.” He paused and studied his pipe for a moment. “I have a lot of faults. We all do. But I have a great respect for the truth. I’ve never been comfortable with an ‘accepted truth,’ as some people call it. That’s not truth. It’s a distortion caused by opinion or misunderstanding or some other factor. The truth can’t have a ‘version.’ I know you get that, Gutsy, because you have that kind of mind. Always have. That’s why people don’t always trust you: because they can never be sure you’ll side with them or back the ‘version’ of the truth they insist is real. You’re not a follower. You’re not even a pack animal, despite your friends Spider and Alethea. You’re more like Sombra there.”

She said nothing. Gutsy never needed her ego stroked and generally felt uncomfortable with compliments.

“Get on with it, man,” said Ford quietly. “Tell her what Cruz told you.”

“I’m getting there,” Urrea said.

“Glaciers are faster.”

“Okay, okay. So, after Juan and I went back and forth a few times, with me defending the statistics because I’d double-checked them while researching my book, and again while working with the TV people, and again while prepping for my lecture tour, he said that I was wrong. He told me that he was an illegal. He said that he and his family had been arrested in Corpus Christi and sent to a relocation camp. He said that he had spent weeks there and been tested, photographed, fingerprinted, blood-typed and everything else. The same with his family. And then he said that I could look for him in the system, that I could check every record and I wouldn’t find him. Or his family. When I asked him what he meant, he surprised me by taking a flash drive from his pocket.”

“A what?”

“It’s a little device about the size of your thumb, but flat. It was part of the computer world and it stored data. You’ve seen computers—”

“Only dead ones. But I know what they were.”

Computers always amazed Gutsy, and she wished they still worked. The thought that almost all the world’s information had been available on a little metal and plastic box . . . that was incredible. She thought about how quickly and hungrily she devoured books and tried to imagine how easy it would be to lose herself completely in an endless ocean of things to know.

“The information on the flash drive Juan Cruz gave me,” said Urrea, “included his complete medical history, and also the medical files on his family. Every test done in the US and in Mexico, every procedure, all of it. He’d been a computer expert in Mexico and was an excellent researcher, so he collected an incredible amount of information. He said that he’d hacked the information—stolen it from government computers—and he had proof that some of the undocumented people who had been detained were being used for some kind of medical research. Not legal stuff, though it was hidden behind various labels and lies. Because of the spread of viruses like Zika and other pathogens, all those people were being tested for the presence of diseases that might pose a threat to the United States population.”

Gutsy heard how Mr. Urrea leaned on the word “tested.” “You’re saying that’s not what happened?”

“Oh, they were being tested,” said Ford, “but not to prevent the spread of diseases. Oh, sure, some of the doctors at the camps were doing that, but not the ones Juan told Urrea about.”

“No,” said Urrea. “There was a special group working for a department within the government that had no official name. It was one of many sections hidden behind bland titles or simply unnamed. They were known as ‘black budget’ groups; projects paid for by tax dollars but whose nature was never made public. Juan said that they were using those people to test the spread of different kinds of diseases.”

“What’s so evil about that?” asked Gutsy. “Wouldn’t keeping tabs on people with diseases help to prevent outbreaks?”

“Sure,” said Ford, “if you’re talking about tracking existing diseases. That’s not what this program was about. This was a covert biological weapons research program tasked with implementing field applications and tracking outbreak models through controlled release of infected vectors.”