Harvest of Terror

By Oliver Chase

A mysterious epidemic breaks out in the American Midwest, killing hundreds of thousands of people. In an ultimatum to the U.S. Government, a Mexican terrorist group claims responsibility for developing and releasing a new type of biological weapon of mass destruction (WMD) by means of genetic engineering. With panic and chaos engulfing the nation and the threat of a second attack looming, a massive manhunt is launched to track down the terrorists.

Written by a real scientist with authentic detail, this novel provides a chilling warning of the technical feasibility of building a powerful new type of biological weapon that has thus far been overlooked, but that is more easily constructed and delivered and yet more potent than any previously conceived weapon. But don't be terrified: For the time being at least, it's still fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 17, 2005
• ISBN: 9780595796755

Oliver Chase

Oliver Chase worked as a scientist in the field of plant biotechnology for more than 20 years. He is currently a research administrator for a major medical university.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Driven by the chill autumn wind, the rain beat incessantly against the window of the bleak hospital room. Countless droplets pelted the building, wearing away at the brick façade. Inside, other forces of nature pursued the same relentless strategy. Evelyn Haughn sat at the foot of the hospital bed watching helplessly as her son, Robert, succumbed to invisible legions of rogue proteins that tore away at the living tissue of his brain, eroding his consciousness. Robert Haughn was only 32 years old. His decline had begun almost three months ago. The first signs of depression and insomnia were mistakenly interpreted as a psychiatric disorder. However, the symptoms became more severe and unambiguous as the disease progressively incapacitated larger sections of his brain. Lapses of memory, loss of coordination, failing sight, and finally spasmodic movements left no doubt that Robert was afflicted by a rapidly advancing and irreversible form of dementia. It was a strangely cruel disease, as merciless to those who would find relief in providing aid as to its victims. There were no gaping wounds to bathe or dress, no soothing compresses to apply, no medicines to administer. She could only look on in horror and impotence as the personality she had shaped and nurtured became grotesquely transformed and then disappeared altogether; as the life that she had created and into which she had poured her own life, slipped away. She wanted to tear into the sarcophagus of the still living body in which the person who had been her son was interred and bring him back. But she could do nothing. Now, in the final stages of the disease in which all mental and physical function had ceased, he lay clad only in a thin hospital gown with tubes feeding glucose into his emaciated arm. The rain continued its savage barrage.

The hospital reeked of the combined stench of disinfectant, human waste, and institutional food. On cold days, such as this one, the rooms were always overheated, producing a steamy miasma from which there was no relief or escape. It made visitors nauseous and dizzy, but left mysteriously unaffected both the patients and their caretakers. The nurses came and went quietly and efficiently, seemingly inured to death by having witnessed it so many times, as they were immune to the fetid air that they continuously breathed. In these dismal surroundings, Evelyn maintained her solitary vigil by the comatose and wasted form that was her son. She no longer thought of his suffering. At first the persistent low moaning emanating with each breath made her believe that he was in constant pain. The pathetic sound broke her heart. But the nurses had since assured her that Robert couldn’t feel anything. The blank television mounted on the opposite wall and the unused telephone beside his bed stood as mute symbols of the powers of communication that had been irretrievably lost. Evelyn knew that he would never regain consciousness. Numbed by grief and oblivious to the elemental struggles raging around her, she sat waiting for her son to die.

Dr. Paul Friedman gently knocked on the door and walked into the room without pausing for a reply. He was accustomed to not having his entrance acknowledged. He viewed the tragic scene, which had been played out before him so many times in his 25 years of practice, yet which never lost its poignancy. Despite his years of experience, Friedman still felt acutely awkward in such situations, never having gained the confidence that he was able to provide adequate or appropriate comfort to his patients. He had excelled in all other areas of his medical training at the University of Chicago, but his bedside manner had always drawn criticism from his professors. Perhaps it was because he cared too deeply. Although instructed repeatedly to do so, he had never been able to develop the emotional detachment that is generally regarded as essential for survival in the medical profession. He knew that over the years this involvement had taken its toll on his appearance. More than a few colleagues had remarked that his stooped posture, as if bent under the cumulative burden of the suffering of decades of patients, made him look older than his fifty-five years.

More as a matter of performing a routine that was expected of him than from anticipation of finding any change in his patient’s condition, Friedman perfunctorily examined Robert and then turned to his mother.

The tests that we ran strongly suggest that your son has a condition called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

He waited for a reaction, and when it was clear that there would be none, continued, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is a rare form of dementia that is sometimes mistaken for Alzheimer’s because many of the symptoms are similar. In fact, we first thought it was Alzheimer’s, but because that condition almost exclusively afflicts older people, we performed some additional tests.

He hesitated before adding, I am sorry to say his condition is terminal.

Evelyn turned to Friedman, finally brought out of her trance by his words. She nodded deferentially to assure him that she had been listening, but he knew that his declaration didn’t shock her; that he had told her nothing that maternal instinct hadn’t already. Nor did his explanation matter. Identifying the force that was destroying her son could make no difference. He was dying, and no one could deter or reverse that inexorable process. Friedman knew that she had wanted to hear words of hope and, that when none were forthcoming, wanted only to be allowed to return to the solace of her stupor. He remained for a moment trying to think of something reassuring to say. Then, impelled by a sense of discomfort that came to him long before any suitable words would, he turned and left.

In describing Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), Friedman had used the term rare from accepted convention despite his present situation. Indeed it had been a rare syndrome, arising with a frequency of less than 1 in one million in the general population. Tending to afflict older people, CJD occurs at an even lower frequency of fewer than 5 cases per billion in people aged 30 or less. But now suddenly there seemed to be an explosion in the number of cases. In St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City where Friedman was on staff, and which was a good-sized hospital with 650 beds, cases had rarely been seen, if ever, even though its reputation for treating neurological disorders attracted patients from throughout the Midwest. Now, in addition to Haughn, he had one other case, and had just received a call about a third. The trend was alarming.

Friedman knew that he had to consult a colleague with more experience with CJD to confirm his diagnosis and that he had to do so right away. Although he had extensive clinical experience with more common types of neuropathies, such as Alzheimer’s, CJD occurred too infrequently for him to have encountered it but a few times. He simply couldn’t afford to either wait or be wrong: The consequences of an outbreak of CJD would be too disastrous. Fortunately, he knew just the right person: Dr. Maria Bellini, a former student of his at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he had taught for several years before going to St. Luke’s. She had been one of those bright eager faces that every professor hopes to find looking back at him from the class, but all too rarely does, that conveys an intellect that somehow miraculously managed to survive the prior 16 years of education. Now in her early thirties, Maria was a highly regarded specialist in neurodegenerative diseases. As he walked back to his office to place the call, Friedman recalled with pride how, after finishing medical school she had joined a research program at the Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch and acquired a considerable reputation in this rarefied field. However, opting for a career as a clinician, Maria completed her internship and residency at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, where her abilities were soon recognized and she was invited to join the staff. Now back in his office, Friedman flipped through the Rolodex on his desk until he found Maria’s number and then punched it into the phone’s keypad. A voice that seemed to have answered too many phone calls that day for too many doctors who were unavailable curtly informed him that Dr. Bellini was on rounds, and, therefore, could not be reached. He left a message. He didn’t call her often. He hoped that she would recognize that only an urgent situation would have caused him to phone and that she would call back immediately.

Friedman leaned back in his chair while waiting for the return call, going over in his mind the evidence that led him to his diagnosis of CJD. First, there was the progression of psychiatric symptoms: Depression, paranoia, and sudden unprovoked outbursts of laughter. These were followed by neurological symptoms: Tremors, ataxia (loss of muscle coordination), and myoclonus (involuntary and sporadic muscle movements). Then there was the abnormally high level of a particular protein, simply known as 14-3-3, in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). But these symptoms alone did not distinguish between other types of neurodegenerative disease or, for that matter, between different forms of CJD. Rather, it was Haughn’s relatively young age and normal EEG pattern that had pointed toward the rarer form known as variant CJD, or vCJD. In contrast, the more prevalent form, representing about 85% of cases and known as sporadic CJD, typically produced abnormal EEG patterns and affected older patients, above the age of 50. Finally, there was the distinctive MRI image.

Friedman got up from his desk and went over to the wall-mounted light box to look one more time at the MRI film that he had left hanging in place. The signal pattern was unmistakable: Bilateral and symmetrical light spots stood out against the otherwise dark grey background of the central basal region of the brain known as the posterior thalamus. This so-called ‘pulvinar sign’ was highly sensitive and specific for vCJD, occurring in more than 90% of verified cases. Without actually examining the brain tissue, which could not be done while the patient was still alive, more convincing evidence could not be obtained.

Apart from their dissimilar presentations, there was another ominous difference between the two forms of CJD. Unlike sporadic CJD, which arose mysteriously and spontaneously in older patients, vCJD was transmissible, which meant that it could be spread by exposure to sources of infection. Friedman remembered first learning about a related disease, known as Kuru, as an intern. The exotic and gruesome story once heard was never forgotten. A bizarre neurodegenerative disease that appeared among natives of the Fore region of Papua New Guinea in the early 1900’s, Kuru reached epidemic proportions in the late 1950’s and 1960’s, killing more than 1,000 of the South Fore population of approximately 8,000. The disease tended to run in families, and so was first believed to have a genetic basis. However, it almost exclusively affected women and young children and didn’t conform to any known inheritance pattern. Finally, a connection to ritual cannibalism was established. The natives of the Fore region would dismember and eat the bodies of relatives who died. Ingesting diseased human remains spread the disease. The higher incidence among women and children resulted from their being preferentially fed internal organs, especially the brain, which were considered delicacies. Death followed three to six months after the appearance of symptoms. After many years of experimentation, the ability to induce the disease in monkeys by directly injecting their brains with brain material of human victims demonstrated the involvement of an infectious agent in the spread of the disease.

The trademark damage to brain tissue caused by CJD and Kuru, which leave the brains of victims so riddled with holes that they actually look like sponges, caused this family of diseases to be named ‘spongiform’ encephalopathies. Various types of infectious or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) appear in different animal species: Scrapie is the disease found in sheep, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE, and also known as Mad Cow Disease, is the form that occurs in cattle, and Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) afflicts deer and elk.

Kuru had disappeared with the cessation of cannibalism. However, more than a hundred cases of vCJD linked to the consumption of meat from BSE-infected cattle had occurred in Europe starting in the mid 1980’s. Only a few isolated cases had ever been reported in the U.S. and those individuals were believed to have been infected abroad. With Haughn’s MRI and the sudden appearance of similar cases was he looking at an outbreak of vCJD in the U.S.? The thought was terrifying.

Finally, the phone rang.

Hello, Paul? I heard that you tried to call. What’s up?

Hi, Maria. Look, I hate to trouble you. I know how busy you are, but I’ve got a neuropathy case here that looks like vCJD. The symptoms and tests leave little doubt: I’ve got an MRI clearly showing a twin pulvinar high signal, but I’ve never seen a case like this. And a couple of more seem to be coming in, although not confirmed.

Really? I’ve been getting some, too. And, you’re right, as frightening as it is to say so, it does look like vCJD.

How many do you have? Friedman asked.

Just two so far, but you know that for a disease as rare as this, that’s a lot.

Young?

Yes, one in his twenties.

Have you heard of any cases elsewhere?

No, they just seem to have popped up out of nowhere; but when we report our cases to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), I can ask. I actually happen to know someone in the CDC’s National Center for Infectious Diseases (NCID) that keeps track of all CJD cases nationwide.

Can we set up a conference call? If you don’t mind I’d like to be in on the conversation.

No problem, Maria quickly replied. I’ll call you back as soon as I get through.

Friedman was patched into the conference about an hour later. In addition to Maria’s pleasant contralto, Paul heard an unfamiliar resonant bass voice speaking with Maria when he was connected.

Paul, are you there? asked Maria.

Yes, he answered. I hear you clearly.

Excellent. Paul, I would like to introduce you to Dr. William Cartwright of the NCID. Dr. Cartwright is Director of the Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases, which handles CJD.

A pleasure to meet you. Dr. Paul Friedman, Neuropathology, Saint Luke’s Hospital, Kansas City.

Thank you. Yes, I know. Maria has told me quite a bit about you. She said that you called her this morning to discuss some suspected vCJD cases.

That’s right.

What do you have so far?

Textbook neurological symptoms and elevated levels of 14-3-3 protein in the CSF, Friedman answered. The blood tests and EEG were normal and the MRI…

Pulvinar sign? Cartwright interrupted.

Yes. Without a doubt.

Well, the MRI is most informative, but still not conclusive. Nevertheless, I’m afraid that you’ve already done about as much you can while the patient is still alive. Brain tissue histology is still the only definitive evidence. I’m sure you know that biopsies are difficult to obtain, and you can never really be sure that you’ve sampled an infected region. That leaves brain autopsies as the only reliable method for accurate diagnosis.

Friedman had hoped that Cartwright would be able to inform them of a new type of test that would provide a conclusive diagnosis before death. But there wasn’t any. Excising samples of brain tissue postmortem and examining them under the microscope for the disease’s characteristic patterns of cell and tissue destruction was still the only unambiguous means of identification.

Why don’t I come out and have a look at your patients? Cartwright offered. I might as well tell you that I’ve had quite a few reports of cases in the Midwest, but none in the southeast. Although they’re spread over a pretty wide area, it’s beginning to look like a cluster. I don’t know what’s going on, but there are too many reported occurrences to ignore. It’s time that I came out and checked things out for myself anyway.

Why don’t Bill and I fly into Kansas City? Maria proposed. Paul, you can meet us both at the airport. Then we can examine your patients together. Time permitting, Bill can fly back to Chicago with me to see my patients and then return directly to Atlanta.

Sounds like a plan, said Cartwright. I’ll check the flight schedule and get back to you.

You’d better hurry, said friedman. I have one case that’s very advanced. I don’t know how much longer he’s going to last.

CHAPTER TWO

Straining to pull herself and her suitcase up to the first step of the bus, Ana could not help but wish she had been able to afford the first-class fare. Traveling third class to Mexico City would take twice as long and be far less pleasant. She swung the suitcase up to the top step and, using its momentum as an assist, clambered up after it. On reaching the landing by the driver, she stooped to pick up the suitcase while scanning the interior of the bus for an empty seat on the side facing the station platform.

The bus stood baking in the midday sun. It was already more than half full and, with no breeze, the open windows offered scant relief from the stifling heat and the strong odors emanating from the passengers, both animal and human alike. She worked her way toward the back, lugging the weight of her belongings behind and stepping over the tangle of legs and bundles that spilled over into the aisle. Agitated by the commotion, a rooster struggled against his confinement in the crook of the arm of a seated man. Its head, with the large red comb flopping after it, stabbed in all directions with short, staccato movements. It thrust forward and pecked viciously at Ana as she passed. Perhaps she should have let the driver put her suitcase in the roof rack, as he had offered. But she was afraid of having all her possessions stolen or lost. She reached the seat, slid over the torn vinyl cover, and looked out the open window to where her mother was standing searching the side of the bus for a sign of her only child.

Ana waved and called to her mother, whose face brightened as she looked in the direction of her daughter’s voice and caught sight of her. She hurried over to the bus and reached up to clasp the hand Ana extended through the window. Looking down at that familiar face, Ana again felt the warm comfort it had always provided. But now tears flowed down her mother’s cheeks, following lines engraved by time and hardship and making Ana suddenly realize how old and tired her mother had become. She had seen her mother cry only once before; when her father died.

Mama, don’t cry. I’ll be all right.

"Of course you will, cariño."

I’ll come home for the winter break.

Excuse me, miss, said a man’s voice behind her, but if this seat isn’t taken, can you move your luggage?

Ana turned from the window to face a middle-aged farmer carrying a young pig that squirmed in his embrace. The animal’s front and rear legs, separated by the arm tightly wrapped around its girth, flailed about wildly and independently of one another in their common determination to escape.

Of course. Sorry, sir, she replied, hastily dragging her suitcase onto the floor in front of her seat.

Discharging a cloud of diesel exhaust, the bus lurched into motion, its surprised cargo letting out a barnyard chorus of protest. The farmer pitched into the seat beside her, grabbing the seatback in front of him with his free hand and clamping his other arm down on the pig’s hindquarters as it squealed and tried to break free. The loathsome odor of pig intensified.

Ana had hoped to get to Mexico City without smelling like a farm animal, but that now seemed impossible. She looked down with annoyance at the pig nestled in her neighbor’s lap. Its beady eyes stared at her from behind the vertical plane of its snout, oblivious to the distress it was causing.

The farmer looked at her apologetically and shifted the pig to the farthest side of his lap. She didn’t know why, but there was something familiar about him. The lines of the tan face beneath the straw hat curved into a gentle smile.

The bus rounded a curve and the mountains of the Sierra Madre came into view. Taxco clung to the side of the mountain. From this distance Taxco did not look like a city that had been built by man over centuries, but like a geological formation carved into the mountain by nature over millennia. Its narrow cobblestone streets wound their way down the steep slope like rivulets after a heavy rain, cutting through the surface deposits of red clay roof tiles into the deeper strata of whitewashed adobe and stucco. Ana tried to make out her mother’s house, but it was too small and on the far side of the town.

With the town receding as the bus drove on, Ana turned back to the farmer. Suddenly she realized what it was about him that stirred recognition. The rope sandals, the hat, and the piglet that was now asleep in his lap had misled her. But the tender wisdom in his eyes—deep brown eyes, from the outside corners of which a lacework of creases radiated when he smiled—were the same. It didn’t matter that he earned his living in a different way: He reminded her of her father. Different instruments, perhaps, but they played the same note. The realization released a stream of remembrance.

Ana had been very young when her father died. He had been a silver miner. Her scant but fond memories of him were the only flowers on the otherwise desolate landscape that afterward was her life. She remembered running to greet him on his way home from work and, heedless of both the filth and fatigue that weighed upon him, perching delightedly upon his knee. His adoration glowed through the grime of the mineshafts.

Papa, I want to be just like you when I grow up, she asserted with the earnest simplicity of childhood.

Are you sure? he asked, his voice registering doubt.

Yes. Completely.

Well then, there is no reason to wait that long, he declared as he reached around and grasped the thick black braids that hung from either side of her head, crossed them over her upper lip to imitate his own full mustache, and pinned them in place with his forefinger.

Ana giggled, in part because of how she imagined herself to look and in part because the hair tickled.

Let me see, let me see, she pleaded.

With his other hand, Ana’s father reached down, opened his lunch box, and took out a small steel mirror that he carried just for this purpose. Ana seized the mirror and looked into it. She laughed freely and, continuing to hold the mirror with one hand, hugged her father all the more tightly with the other.

Ana had kept that mirror and had watched herself grow up in its scratched and dented surface. She had hated the way she looked when she was young. Then she only wanted to be like the women in the American magazines that the other children brought to school and passed around furtively during recess or while the teacher, with her back to the class, scrawled the lessons on the blackboard. Ana admired the faces of smooth porcelain on which small delicate features were perfectly placed. When she complained about her appearance, her mother angrily scolded her for wanting to look like a doll and for being ashamed of her Aztec heritage.

But it was the attentions and the admiring glances of the boys at school, rather than her mother’s remonstrations, that made her feel attractive. It was then that she began to feel pride and pleasure in the image she studied in the mirror. The face that looked back at her was crafted with the rugged topography of the Andes. Its chiseled features formed a miniature of the snow-capped, cloud-cloaked mountains that for countless millennia had afforded sparse shelter for her ancestors in the folds of their sheer slopes. Between the angular plateaus formed by her high prominent cheekbones and broad forehead, large dark brown eyes communicated a resolute intelligence.

In a few years, the stares of the young men would become less innocent. Still, the local boys were not to be feared as were the American college students who came to Mexico on their holidays. With the value of their money inflated by conversion into pesos, the Americans swaggered through the town as if they owned it. They began their days in the bars and, when their inhibitions had been dulled and their courage raised by drink, pursued the town’s girls. Some of the girls enjoyed being treated and yielded to them; others were forced. A sordid industry grew up around the American college students. More than the bars, hotels, and souvenir shops, it was the law enforcement agencies that flourished. Corrupt police arrested students for disorderly conduct or rape and received kickbacks from lawyers who were hired to defend them before judges who were bribed to release them. And once they were back on the streets, the cycle began all over again. Only the virtuous girls suffered and they were far fewer in number than those who benefited.

She shifted in her seat, hoping to find another position that would relieve the cramps that were spreading up her body. Unable to place her feet on the floor and wanting to keep as far from the pig as possible, she had spent the past hour huddled against the window with her knees drawn up to her chest. She looked over at the farmer and wondered if he had children and if he took them on his lap and told them stories. His face told her that he did. Her thoughts again turned to her father. Her love for him only grew with the passage of time, but her memories were fading. She relied on her mother’s stories to keep those memories alive and to teach her about the beliefs and history of her people.

She recalled her mother’s tales of Oztotl and Tepeyollotl, the gods of the earth and the mountains, who cast up nodules of silver ore to the surface for use by the ancient Aztecs in return for their worship and sacrifices. The Indians extracted the metal from these outcroppings and fashioned it into jewelry and ornaments. For untold centuries the Indians accepted these divine gifts as sufficient for their needs and lived in harmony with the fearsome Oztotl and Tepeyollotl. To follow these veins of the precious metal into the body of the mountain in pursuit of deeper deposits would have aroused the wrath of the powerful gods. But lacking such religious restraints and driven by greed, the conquistadors employed whips and torture to force the Indians to tunnel into the mountain to reach the richer subterranean lodes. Many refused, fearing the anger of their gods more than that of the Spaniards, and were slain. Others who bowed to the brutal task were killed by the hazards and exertion of mining. The Spanish applied the same ruthless zeal to the eradication of the Aztec religion and culture, in part because of a belief in the superiority of their own and in part because they presented an obstacle to their exploitation of the resources of the New World. The Spanish god and language were imposed on the hapless Aztecs, who now also bore Spanish names as a further reminder of their subjugation.

The conquistadors had long since disappeared, but they had been replaced by corporations that found hunger and privation to be more effective than the lash in coercing the people to work their mines. Ana’s father, for lack of any alternative and desperate to eke out a living for his family from the unyielding rock, had descended daily into the perilous labyrinth of narrow passageways bored into the earth by generations before him. Her mother lived in constant terror of the inevitable consequences of this routine defiance of the mountain god.

One day Tepeyollotl decided he would abide the insult no longer, and Ana’s father, like so many before him, was swallowed by the mountain from which he had scratched his meager livelihood. Her mother, having prophesied her husband’s death, resigned herself to it with religious fatalism. But Ana could not do so. She struggled to accept the loss of her father and to understand why he had been taken from her. Poverty and hunger, which had always pushed against the door of their home, but whose persistent pressure had been just barely withstood by her father’s paltry wages, now forced their way inside. Hunger was vividly associated with her father’s death. To this day she still felt the gnawing in her stomach when she thought about those years.

Her mother, without having time to mourn her husband, went in search of employment in the town below. She was fortunate to find work at one of the better silver shops. Along with her accustomed burdens of cooking and cleaning and raising a child, she now stoically shouldered the additional burden of earning a living.

But Ana’s fatherless youth was marked by more than material deprivation. She also felt a deep sense of having been forsaken. It made her feel different from other children. It wasn’t her poverty that set her apart, for many of them were poor, too, if not quite as poor as she. It was that they had fathers. It was a difference that was not visible to the other children and that they seemed not to notice. Yet Ana was always aware of it. It became part of her consciousness, shaping her outlook and perceptions. It made her more observant of other things that are taken for granted by those who have them. She began to take notice of other inequities and to ponder their causes.

She wondered why some children were merry and well fed and others were sullen and gaunt. And she wondered why some lived in luxury while others lived in destitution. She knew that these cruel disparities were not due to the difficulty or amount of one’s labor, for no one worked harder or longer than the miners, yet few were poorer. Nor did her mother’s religious explanations offer either comfort or satisfaction.

She sought answers elsewhere and found them in an unexpected place. Her insight came from a school reading assignment about Japanese fishermen who trained cormorants to catch fish for them. The fishermen fitted collars around the necks of the birds to prevent them from swallowing their catch and tied leashes to the collars. Light from torches mounted on the prows of their slender craft attracted the fish and made them visible to both bird and master. Bobbing in the water at the ends of their tethers, the birds repeatedly disappeared beneath the waves and returned to the surface with small silver fish that they quickly stored in the expandable pouches of their throats. When a bird could hold no more, a tug on the leash urged him to return to its keeper, who massaged the bird’s neck to make it deliver its catch into a basket in the bottom of the boat.

Occasionally the fisherman rewarded the cormorant with one of the fish it had caught, but he carefully controlled the amount the bird was fed so that hunger remained as an incentive to continue fishing.

In reading this simple story, Ana perceived an analogy between the plights of the trained cormorants and of the silver miners, and this analogy served as the seed on which an understanding of the organization of society crystallized. Like the cormorants, the miners descended beneath the surface to retrieve nature’s riches and deliver them up to their masters. Also like the cormorants, the miners were given just enough of the wealth they created to sustain their ability to work, but not so much as to reduce their need to continue working.

Ana often wondered why the story of the cormorants cast light into shadows that myriad similar examples had previously failed to illuminate. After all, she had grown up surrounded by man’s exploitation of animals, and throughout her youth she had listened to the miners complain of being treated like beasts of burden. Why was the fisherman’s use of the cormorants different from the harnessing of a horse to the plow or the appropriation of the chicken’s egg? Perhaps the familiarity of these commonplace examples earned them acceptance in her mind, or the use of animals born and bred in captivity did not arouse her imagination as did the use of animals captured from the wild. Why, Ana wondered, did some ideas or experiences when brought together create a spark of insight, whereas the juxtaposition of others failed to do so? She remembered studying in biology class about Darwin and his development of the theory of evolution. Darwin, her teacher had said, had to endure an arduous voyage half way around the world to have the finches and iguanas of the Galapagos awaken his understanding of natural selection and the evolution of species. But his contemporary Alfred Russell Wallace was able to deduce the same principles from much more commonplace examples, such as the divergence of the raven and the rook, that were to be found in his own backyard in England. And so, by whatever mysterious mental processes observation gives rise to revelation, the cormorants became a watershed in Ana’s understanding of the world in which she lived. The cormorants were her Galapagos finches.

This new perception changed the way in which Ana viewed her life. It was no longer a string of disconnected and unaccountable tragedies to be suffered passively. Instead, she now realized that her condition and the events of her life were the consequences of relationships between people, relationships based on the kind of labor they performed and for whom they labored. She began to understand the origins of these relationships, and to assign responsibility for their existence. What had been misfortune now became injustice.

The bus slowed as it climbed a steep hill, the driver grinding through a series of downshifts. Sensing a change in the vehicle’s rhythm, the animals stirred from their stupor. The pig’s inquisitive snout probed the air. A car’s horn sounded sharply and repeatedly. Suddenly, with a screeching of tires and its horn blaring, a big black sedan with California license plates tore by the bus, leaving whirlwinds of dust in its wake that came through the windows, choking and covering the passengers. Toward the front of the bus a startled chicken broke loose and fluttered about wildly for a few moments before being recaptured.

Gringos, the farmer muttered.

"Yes, Americans.