Chapter 10: Back To Earth

Julio Martinez was alive, with a bullet in his knee, and tangled in the canopy deep within the Honduran rain forest. A quick self-assessment revealed the knee as his only injury. But the vial, the precious vial that he had only barely snatched from its cabinet in the lab was safe!

Martinez was Catracho, a native Honduran. Educated in the United States at Austin, then later at Cal Tech, he was an excellent biomedical researcher. He had returned to his own country after being awarded a number of advanced degrees. He loved Honduras, and was fond of the buen dicho: “¡No hay pueblo mas macho que el pueblo catracho!” (“There’s nothing more macho than a Catracho town!”).

During his time at Cal Tech he was intrigued by early research of Dr. Moritz Kapozi. Dr. Kapozi, a Hungarian-born doctor, worked at the University of Vienna back in the late 1870’s. It was his research, Martinez firmly believed, that first pointed to an understanding of viruses and their potential for mutation. Kapozi, according to Martinez, was an unsung hero of virology. Martinez now specialized in oncovirus transmission.

He mused that it was Kapozi’s fault, therefore, that he was now in the treetops, injured, and cradling a vial containing a liquid only recently titrated. Martinez mulled over the strange twists of history that connected these disparate events, then began to formulate a plan for his next move. First, he had to get out of the trees. Second, he had to figure out who was pursuing him. And why.

He had sent a carefully coded dispatch telling of his formulation (by way of Hondutel, the nationalized telegraph network) to NIH at Bethesda only a week earlier. Could it have been intercepted? By whom? Besides, his discovery was not a weapon. It was life-giving, not life-taking. Who would want to kill him for this?

There were trailing vines stringing down from his canopy, and Julio Martinez began to descend on a particularly stout liana. Howler monkeys kept him company as he willed the pain in his knee to remain localized. Within an hour he was back on terra firma. If he followed the Cangrejal, keeping Pico Bonito to the west, he could make it to La Ceiba within days.