Upon A Pale Horse (Bio-Thriller)

by Russell Blake

  “Exactly. And the African strain targets mucous membranes, not rectal tissue. So you have supposedly the same virus appearing after widespread vaccination programs, but which amazingly targets different cell types. I never understood why the medical community never questioned why it was a gay disease on one continent and heterosexual on another. Even better, nobody wants to explore how that happened. It’s one of many scientific taboos in a discipline that isn’t supposed to have any.”

  “I always assumed it was lifestyle or something.”

  “Lifestyle? Humans have been having sex for millions of years. Why within twenty-four months of the first cases being diagnosed in the U.S. did AIDS suddenly explode in Africa and Haiti? Let’s see. Big vaccination programs in Africa, including fourteen thousand Haitians there who subsequently went back home, big vaccination trials to only gay white men in the U.S., and then bam, there’s an epidemic of a ‘new,’ and yet paradoxically, if you believe the disinformation, a simultaneously ‘old’ disease.”

  Schmidt took a sip from a glass of tepid water on the low coffee table. “Look, the vaccine connection in Africa is so obvious to many that some of the accepted theories grudgingly concede that the smallpox vaccine programs might have played a role in the spread… but only because of dirty needles. The only problem there is that there’s no evidence of that. It’s another convenient invention. With AIDS there are so many flights of fancy touted as official explanations, and when one’s debunked, the experts and the media all switch to another, equally absurd theory, absent any evidence.”

  Jeffrey’s headache had returned with a vengeance. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you…have any proof?”

  “Ah. Proof. No, I’m just an old man who helped create viruses that were almost identical. Working for top secret organizations that would deny their very existence. No, I don’t have a nice, tidy blueprint with “Top Secret” stamped across it articulating that AIDS is a deliberate experiment, as with my old Nazi bosses, to decimate the ‘undesirable’ populations of the world.”

  “Then in the end, while it’s compelling on the surface, there’s no motive and no proof,” Jeffrey said.

  “Motive? How about the usual twins, power and money? Think about it this way – in 1970, Nixon declared a war on cancer. A decade later, the retrovirologists who were the great hope of that assault, who had devoured impossible-to-envision resources, were no closer to coming up with a cure than they had been when they started. The whole thing was a failure and their credibility was in shambles. Funding dried up. And then suddenly, this new retrovirus appears, and overnight the stars of medicine and science are the same retrovirologists who failed to accomplish anything with cancer. They went from failures to being on the cover of Time.

  “And the money? It poured in. Developing treatments, tests, researching. Drug companies made fortunes treating symptoms. Federal money taps were opened and never closed. Here we are, forty-something years after Nixon declared war on cancer, and not one vaccine, not one cure, has resulted from billions and billions of dollars, and two generations of work. Young man, here’s a reasonable question: how can scientists who can’t develop a cure for even simple viral animal diseases after forty years be expected to cure anything substantial in humans? The money’s not in curing. It’s in treating and researching.”

  “Then this was all about money.”

  “If you look hard enough at most things, you’ll find they’re about money.”

  “Genocide. To make money,” Jeffrey repeated in a hushed whisper.

  “Don’t act so shocked. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “I don’t believe it. More importantly, nobody else will believe it, either. The official position is too entrenched, and people are reluctant to research anything. Whatever the papers say is what most believe, without question.”

  “So you understand why it’s awfully convenient that the establishment’s experts all came out of the bio-warfare culture in the sixties and seventies, and that a handful of authorities dictate what will be researched and taken seriously, and what won’t? Authorities, like the one who ‘mistakenly’ claimed he discovered the virus, who apparently couldn’t tell them apart for years – or rather, couldn’t spot that they were identical – and then concocted increasingly absurd hypotheses about simian virus jumping while making it effectively taboo to acknowledge decades of contamination and species-jumping experiments? Carried out by many of those very same scientists, whose pet meal ticket got shut down only two years before fate smiled upon them and HIV miraculously appeared?” Schmidt looked ready to spit. “Those are your experts.”

  “They effectively control the dialogue.”

  “Which is why nobody dares introduce the words ‘lab-created’ into the discussion. They’d rather conveniently forget they were experimenting in causing simian viruses to species-jump. I don’t blame them. Certainly, there’s nobody with nearly their money or power to take the opposing view. It’s career suicide. So instead, everyone pronounces the origin of the AIDS epidemic ‘irrelevant’ or ‘unknowable,’ and prefers to focus on the origin of HIV – the virus – all the while pretending that biological warfare labs weren’t experimenting with cross-species virus jumping. No wonder they want it ‘unknowable’ and can’t wait to rush the dialogue along. I would, too.”

  “Be that as it may, nobody’s going to want to hear it, especially absent hard evidence.”

  “You might be right. In your country it’s like everyone has their fingers in their ears rather than simply examining the evidence and calling foul. In that respect it reminds me of prewar Germany – an entire population that so wants to believe in something it will ignore what’s obviously happening before its eyes.”

  “You see my problem, then?” Jeffrey asked. “It’s an inflammatory set of allegations, but without proof…”

  Schmidt seemed to shrink as the silence stretched between them. Jeffrey decided to change tactics.

  “Why haven’t you talked about this before now?” Jeffrey probed.

  “I was afraid. That simple. I knew the only way I was safe was if I never spoke about the past, and minded my own business.”

  “Then what changed?”

  “I’m dying. I’m old. And I’ve participated in many evils. But this one, even I am ashamed of. Something I helped create has been used to kill over thirty million people. That makes World War II seem tame. And it will kill hundreds of millions more. I can’t go to my grave in silence. It’s that simple.”

  Jeffrey shifted, studying the old German’s wizened face, and made a snap decision. He reached over and shut off the recorder.

  “I was recently shown a document that made no sense to me. But it might to you. It was a diagram with some kind of a bar chart and a random string of letters beneath it. And pages of numbers. The person who showed it to me was afraid for his life, and felt it might be related to your story somehow. Connected to the animal mutilations. Which you say were experimentation…”

  Schmidt’s face froze. “A diagram with bar charts and a letter string? What kind of a diagram? Where did the document come from?”

  “It was classified, so I presume it was stolen from some government database. As to what kind, if I drew it, do you think you might be able to place it?”

  “You can draw it from memory? This thing?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “I can look at it. Why not?” said Schmidt, trying to be nonchalant, but failing.

  Jeffrey sat in silence, sketching the diagram and charts in detail, and after a few minutes handed the notebook over to the German. Schmidt squinted at what he’d drawn, then retrieved a pair of reading glasses from his breast pocket. An eternity passed, and then he looked over the rims at Jeffrey, his face pale.

  “Lieber Gott. It’s a virus. One of the most lethal in history.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Revelation

  Schmidt’s hands were visibly trembling when he lowered the notepad to his lap, lost in t
hought. Jeffrey waited, wanting to give him time to absorb the drawing’s implications.

  “It’s the Spanish Influenza virus. H1N1. But…different. Modified. I’d need specialized equipment to calculate how much more lethal and contagious this could be, but believe me when I tell you that even with only slight modifications, it would be catastrophic if unleashed on the world. One of the goals of weaponizing this type of virus would be to create something which the current crop of antiviral medications wouldn’t work against, and for which there’s no natural immunity.”

  “I…Spanish Influenza?”

  “It was a global disaster. In 1918. Killed about fifty million people – more than everyone killed in World War I. What made it particularly lethal was that it hit healthy adults the hardest – the ordinary flu usually is only dangerous to the very young and the very old. The death rate from the average flu season is 0.01 percent. Spanish Flu killed 2.5 percent, and did so within hours of the onset of symptoms.”

  “How do you know so much about it off the top of your head?”

  “It was my line of work. I studied it intensely as a near-perfect example of an incredibly contagious disease that spread like wildfire, and killed faster than just about anything else ever seen. To put it into perspective, it killed four times more people than the Black Death in the Middle Ages. It’s one of the true nightmare diseases nature has visited on the planet. It infected nearly forty percent of the world population, and caused the body’s immune system to turn against itself. Victims literally drowned in their own lung fluid while their skin turned blue from lack of oxygen. One of the reasons it was so deadly was because those with stronger immune systems had a more powerful response, which translated into it being more severe in the young and healthy. It’s incredibly virulent, and a relatively simple protein chain. The full RNA was sequenced in 2005, and I spent considerable effort analyzing it in my spare time. Which believe it or not, I have an abundance of, even with my busy social schedule here.”

  “And this…is a weaponized form of H1N1?”

  “I would say it’s definitely lab-created, but I can’t tell what the modifications are. The letter string is a description, so I could figure it out in broad strokes given enough time, but the real question would require computing time and a controlled population study.”

  “The real question?”

  “How much more lethal is it, and how much more contagious, than the original eight-gene virus. Whenever you modify something like this, it would be to increase one, or both. But…this is insanity. It could wipe out huge population centers in a matter of days or weeks. I mean, huge, as in a percentage of the total global population. Nobody would want to release this, much less develop it…”

  “Unless…” Jeffrey blurted, unable to help himself.

  “Unless there was already a vaccine developed that was a hundred percent effective, that could be manufactured in sufficient quantities and rapidly enough to inoculate those you wanted to save from it.”

  “Wait. Then this could be used for a crude population control?”

  “I can’t see any other reason to use it. It’s akin to releasing the devil onto the planet. If it’s been modified substantially enough, it could kill ten, twenty, thirty or more percent of the human race in short order…” Schmidt stopped, a thought obviously occurring to him. “It is madness, but it could make sense to those who released HIV. The big problem there might have been that ultimately, HIV doesn’t kill fast enough.”

  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.