Upon A Pale Horse (32 page)

Jeffrey was shocked to his core at the calm speculation, the discussion of exterminating billions of innocent humans with a deadly pathogen.

“…And it incubates for a decade…” he murmured.

“That’s another one of the big lies. HIV
can
incubate for a decade – but that assumes that it is transmitted organically, with only a small amount of virus transferring from one person to the other. If there’s a heavy dose of virus transmitted, as in a vaccine, it can overwhelm the immune system in a matter of months. That’s one of the reasons the official accounts are nonsense. History shows that HIV can take ten years to develop into full-blown AIDS, and yet it became a global outbreak within a matter of a year or two. Like so much in the story, that should be impossible, because the spread would have taken a generation to reach the levels it did within a few years. Of course, the scientists ignore that aspect of it, because it goes into extremely uncomfortable territory.”

Schmidt wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, suddenly tired. “Whoever crafted this Spanish Flu variant undoubtedly had a reason to do it. I don’t have to tell you how troubling that is. There can’t be that many objectives that come to mind.”

“Wait. Why would you develop a virus that could annihilate a huge chunk of the population without any selectiveness? I would have thought that if it was for warfare, you’d want something reasonably precise. Isn’t this sort of like trying to thread a needle with a backhoe?” Jeffrey asked.

Schmidt sat back and grimaced. “There is a certain line of reasoning among social planners that the current population of the Earth is unsustainable. Seven billion people, all consuming resources and placing a burden, a load, on the planet, and that number growing every day. The prevailing sentiment in that circle is that it would take a reduction to under a billion to have a sustainable load. That would mean six billion would need to die. That’s the math. Of course they always avoid stating that in bald terms. They usually simply target an optimum number. But it works out the same. There are far too many people. So a lot of them have to go.”

“And this might be a way to decide which ones…”

“Exactly. If you had stockpiles of the vaccine, you could pretend to be working to develop one when the epidemic hit everywhere but at home, do so with amazing speed while immediately quarantining the country to keep the flu from entering the borders, and then blame the death of most of your adversaries, as well as the entire third world, on an inability to manufacture the vaccine fast enough. The survivors would go through a period of crisis, and then bury the dead and move on. And you could allocate the limited vaccine to friendly governments and those in your population you deemed worth keeping, allowing the rest to perish.”

“And make a fortune in the process, not to mention emerge as the leaders of the new world. It’s…it’s pure evil. Diabolical,” Jeffrey spat, still trying to get his head around the enormity of the act.

“Yes. Then again, that’s the business I was in. Building doomsday bugs. But this eclipses anything I worked on. It’s unspeakable. And it makes me relieved I’ll be dead soon. Because the world won’t be much good to live in after this. It’s every megalomaniac’s fantasy. A new world order, with the surviving leadership the emperors of whatever civilization is left. Hitler was thinking so small…”

“How would you disseminate it? You’d have a huge logistical problem, wouldn’t you?”

“Depends how contagious it is. If highly virulent, you could release it as an aerosol in major travel hubs, like Beijing, Moscow, Paris, Mexico City…or you could do the old vaccine trick. Inject it into the target populations along with something else. It wouldn’t be hard. If you’re capable of culturing enough to poison the global population, you’ve probably got the wherewithal to distribute it.”

The atmosphere in the room was leaden, the mood hopeless. The German tossed the notepad back to Jeffrey. “It doesn’t really matter what you do with the bio-weapons story, you know. There’s nothing you could do to stop this. It’s a lost cause.”

“I could warn people…”

“Warn them? That an old man thinks there’s a threat? You have to know you’d be laughed out of the room. And no news network would touch it. Assuming you weren’t killed the moment you opened your mouth.”

Jeffrey eyed the drawing a final time. “One person already has been.”

Schmidt nodded. “Who?”

“The man who gave me the material.”

“Then there’s your answer. It’s not theoretical. Of course they’ll kill to keep this quiet. We’re talking about wiping out huge swaths of the human race. What’s a few more?”

Jeffrey’s dour expression was that of a condemned man. He could smell the sour odor of fear seeping from his pores, and hated himself for it. His head had started pounding somewhere in the discussion, and now it felt as if a bear was swatting it like a beehive.

“He also gave me a dozen pages of spreadsheets. But they’re just long columns of numbers. Meaningless to me. Would they mean anything to you if I could recreate them?”

“Recreate? What about the copies he gave you?”

“They’re gone. Everything was destroyed.”

“Then no, I couldn’t do anything. Even if you could duplicate them, even one number out of place or one error could significantly alter the thing. And twelve pages of numbers? Forget about it.”

“What if I could?”

Schmidt spoke to Jeffrey like he was addressing a none-too-bright student, his voice cracking on the final words. “It still wouldn’t necessarily be possible to know what the data was. Although I can guess. It’s probably the results of testing. Statistics on mortality expectations, infectiousness, time to death, collateral damage to survivors. But it would take supercomputers to crunch everything and make it meaningful. All of which assumes you could reproduce it, which you can’t. So it’s like asking how many toys Santa can carry in his sled. The answer’s idiocy because so is the question.”

Schmidt groaned on the last word and then made a choking noise, and then his chin dropped onto his chest. His breath grew labored, and came in rasps. Jeffrey was shocked by the suddenness of it, and wasn’t sure what to do – he didn’t know if Schmidt had just nodded off, or was having some kind of event.

He rose and approached the German. “Schmidt. Alfie. Are you all right?”

No response. He listened to the struggling breath, and then one of the German’s hands fell from his lap to his side and began clenching spasmodically.

“Shit,” Jeffrey exclaimed, and sprinted into the hall, calling out for help. A female orderly came running at the clamor, and Jeffrey pointed her at Schmidt, then stood back as she rushed to him and quickly examined him. Her face was an expressionless mask, but he saw the anxiety in her eyes even as she tried to maintain her composure, and when she raced from the room to get help there was no wasted motion.

Jeffrey retrieved the recorder and his notebook and packed them into his bag, uninterested in hanging around to see how the German did. Schmidt was almost a century old, and keenly aware that his days were numbered. If this was to be how he shed his mortal coil, then Jeffrey would leave him to do so in peace. A flash of guilt hit him, intensifying his already miserable headache, but he shook it off. The conversation and the old scientist’s agitation could well have triggered this, but so could a straining bowel movement or the flu he’d been battling. There would be time enough for recriminations on the train back to Paris.

He glanced at his new Hublot and calculated that he could easily get to the station in time to make the ten o’clock train, which would put him back at the Gare du Nord at least two hours before his doctor’s appointment.

The nurse returned with an older man in a white exam coat jogging behind her and another orderly in tow, and Jeffrey used the ensuing chaos to slip away, the frigid morning air nipping at his splitting skull as he strode briskly down the long block to find a taxi and be rid of Frankfurt for good.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Return to Paris

Jeffrey tried to sleep on the trip back, but his headache had a different idea, as did his imagination as he cycled back through his amazing discussion with Schmidt and the information he’d gotten about bio-weapons.

It seemed impossible to believe, and yet the German had been compelling and surprisingly lucid, if bitter at his lot in life and dismissive of everyone around him. That he’d actually helped develop an immunosuppressive agent was hugely damaging, as was his matter-of-fact description of how a powerful faction could twist the system to hasten the Apocalypse.

Jeffrey wasn’t naïve, but he felt that way as the inside of his eyes pulsed with pain. He’d believed there were checks and balances to keep rogue groups from using their clout to pursue their own agendas, but he’d apparently been badly mistaken. Schmidt had done the forbidden since long before Jeffrey had been born; and judging by the virus diagram, he’d been replaced by others. A part of him wondered how many of those were complicit and understood what they were doing, and how many were cogs in the machine, doing their top secret work and not allowing themselves to know what happened to the fruits of their labor.

His brother’s execution didn’t bode well for them in the long term. Jeffrey suspected that any individuals who knew about the virus would be eliminated once their usefulness was over.

Then again, maybe not. Perhaps there were psychopaths who could watch billions die and be more interested in what they got out of it than what they had done. As forthcoming as the old man had been in his final hour, as apparently regretful, he’d still participated in a machine that was involved in the death industry, and had helped build better mousetraps that had already been used to kill tens of millions of innocents.

Innocent people
. He wondered if that term had any meaning to the group behind this. Did they even think of their victims as humans, or were they just numbers, a morbid crop to be harvested at the appropriate time, expendable resource sponges that had to go for the better of those remaining? Part of him tried to imagine the emotional makeup of someone who was willing to kill billions in order to further some cause, and he couldn’t. It was as alien to him as a reptile brain, as incomprehensible as a Hindi phone book.

He cracked open a weary eye and watched the dizzying panorama of countryside whirring past, all green fields and pale stone houses jutting like tombstones up the slight rise of a pregnant hill. Was that all this was to them, were they all integers, interchangeable digits on a screen? The reality of an entire species an irritating inconvenience, the noise of them dying a temporary annoyance, their corpses grist for an insatiable mill?

His senses were overloaded, the knowledge that he now possessed too much for his psyche. It was better to be ignorant of the evil that men could perpetrate; focused on the mundane, plebian day-to-day; scrabbling for a fresher crust of bread and a faster sports car for his commute; agonizing over which leather interior color was more appealing. Perhaps being a dumb animal was better than the evolutionary alternative. The real world sucked, and when he closed his eyes and shut out the light, a small part of him envied the old Nazi, if not now free of the ugliness that was reality, then soon to be.

The rumble of the train lulled him to sleep eventually, and he was startled awake when it changed tracks and began to slow on the outskirts of Paris. He checked the time and saw that he had an hour and a half before his medical appointment, which at the rate he was going, he would actually need. The pain had retreated to a dull throb, the rest having caused it to recede enough that he could move his eyes without a piercing lance of agony splitting his head. It was still a far cry from normal, though, and part of him feared that he had done some real damage with the whirlwind trip. The Swiss doctor had been pretty clear about relaxing, and his journey had been anything but.

The station was bustling, crowds of travelers jostling to make their trains like spawning salmon, intent faces filled with the ennui unique to Paris. Jeffrey slipped into the stream of humanity and wound his way to the station’s huge exit doors, where a line of taxis waited like penitents for confession. The hotel’s name elicited a grunt and an eye roll from the swarthy man behind the wheel, and then the Renault launched forward, narrowly missing a VW van that stood on its horn as the driver stoically ignored the commotion and made for the hotel like he was piloting a getaway car.

Jeffrey had the taxi drop him off a block from the hotel, and then repeated his trip through the hotel service entrance. In the room, he noted with satisfaction that his bed hadn’t been made, so it appeared his ruse had worked. He figured he would know definitively if someone jabbed an ice pick into his spine in the elevator.

He showered and changed, then opened the room safe and retrieved his cell phone and switched it on. He checked his messages and saw that Monica had called twice, and the office once. Scanning his email, he didn’t spot anything that required immediate attention, and forwarded most of it to his subordinates for responses.