Upon A Pale Horse (Bio-Thriller)

by Russell Blake

  “Can you enter the data and run whatever you need to run in order to better understand it?” Jeffrey asked, finally daring the big question. “You’re one of the only scientists in the world equipped to interpret the data. That’s what my research has led me to believe…”

  A knock at the door interrupted them, and Bertrand hastily gathered up the papers and stuffed them into his desk drawer before pressing the button that opened the remote lock. His assistant stuck her head in.

  “Ah, Marianne. We will need a few more minutes. We are just finishing up,” Bertrand said, affecting his collegial air.

  She eyed Jeffrey disapprovingly and nodded. “Oui. D’accord,” she said, and closed the door.

  Bertrand returned his focus to Jeffrey. He exhaled noisily, staring at a point somewhere to the left of Jeffrey’s face.

  “Will you do it?” Jeffrey asked softly.

  “What choice do I have? You’ve dropped a scientific atomic bomb in my lap. How can I not act on this? Of course I have to do it. And it will take many hours of my, and my staff’s, time. We’ll have to drop everything and work only on this. For which I have you to blame…”

  “I’m sorry. There was nobody else I could go to.”

  “The damage is done. Now I need to characterize this virus and see what the data says. If your story is even half true, we could be facing the biggest threat to our species in history.” Bertrand shook his head. “I have long feared something like this, and now that it’s here, it doesn’t surprise me. Nothing about man’s ability to destroy surprises me. As a scientist who has spent his life trying to untangle the riddles nature visits upon us, the greatest mystery I have seen is man’s willingness to do the unspeakable to his fellow man.”

  They agreed that Jeffrey would call him in forty-eight hours for an update and would leave the spreadsheets with him. Jeffrey rooted in his jacket and withdrew the flash drive, and handed it Bertrand as they were walking to the door together.

  “That’ll save you some time on the data entry, I hope,” he said, and Bertrand gave him another surprised look.

  “Who are you, really?” Bertrand asked in a low voice.

  Jeffrey thought long and hard about how to answer the question.

  “Just someone in the wrong place at the right time.”

  FORTY-ONE

  Quiet Contemplation

  Reginald Barker watched the waves pound against the shore from the long terrace of his estate home on a secluded bluff in Montauk, New York, at the northeastern tip of Long Island. The area was home to some of the most expensive real estate in the world, and his retreat numbered among the most exclusive, the rambling acreage as far as he could see privately owned – by him – with an almost incalculable value.

  The sun had risen a half hour earlier, and the industrialist was enjoying his first cup of coffee of the day, preparing for a walk along the trails that he loved, down the rise and to the beach, which at that hour would be secluded, his only company the unobtrusive security detail that shadowed him to ensure he wasn’t accosted.

  While some of his neighbors down the island had built gauche, mega-opulent estates that were featured in magazines and whispered about by the locals, Barker had always adhered to the philosophy he’d inherited from his father – that it was better to go unnoticed and not to flaunt the riches with which he’d been blessed. His home, one of eight he owned, was modest by his standards: nine thousand square feet, with none of the garish frills favored by the nouveaux riches; no bowling alleys or movie theaters for him. Simply well-designed, beautifully appointed elegance, boasting Chippendale furniture that would be the envy of half the museums in the world and a collection of art as breathtaking as it was valuable.

  His full-time staff at the Hamptons estate included three housekeepers, a butler, a driver, two gardeners, a maintenance man, a chef, and sundry helpers, not counting his bodyguards, which alternated between a core of four to as many as twenty, depending upon which of his abodes he was frequenting. It was the burden of being rich, he mused as he sipped the special Kona blend grown for him at a private farm – he’d bought half the growing land after he’d tasted the roast at a getaway he’d taken there thirty years before, and was the sole consumer of the beans in the U.S.

  The accumulation of wealth and power had long since passed from being a passion to a routine, and he didn’t bother to track his worth anymore – it was in the hundreds of billions, depending upon the performance of his largest holdings. The number had ceased to be meaningful, and the things money could buy didn’t interest him, beyond ensuring that his every need was attended to.

  He finished his cup and set it on a small circular marble table by the door, then zipped his coat up tighter, his breath steaming in the chill. With a glance at his rose gold Patek Philippe Sky Moon Tourbillon watch, he stretched his legs and did a series of knee bends, grimacing at the popping as his aged joints protested the exertion. One of the truisms of life, he mused – nothing could stop the inexorable creep of time, not even truckloads of riches. Of course, he had a team of the finest medical practitioners at his beck and call, but even they couldn’t sustain him indefinitely. His time was drawing to an end, he knew, but he wouldn’t go easily, and he was determined to stay vital until death’s cold hand landed on his shoulder. His father had lived to be eighty-four, as mean as a black mamba and twice as lethal, and he had every expectation that the combination of good genes and improved science would keep him drawing breath for as long, if not longer, than his ancestors.

  He paced along the terrace, back and forth, three, then five times, before carefully descending the stairs to the path that led through the immaculately tended grounds and into the wooded area, where he could lose himself in the solitude, imagining himself to be the only person in the world – a common dream of his, although he routinely forgot it seconds after waking. The muffled thud of his rubber soles on the well-worn trail was the only sound other than the overhead rustle of the occasional bird and the snap and popping as a gymnastically inclined squirrel leapt from branch to branch on its morning rounds.

  Would that the rest of his day be as untroubled as these first hours! As usual, it would be a non-stop series of meetings, his hand firmly in every aspect of the multitude of companies he owned, his habit to stay active in their management as a board member whose calls would always be answered, or in a more silent and deniable fashion through intermediaries and attorneys, of which he employed a phalanx. His accountant had informed him that last year he’d spent eighty million dollars on Washington lobbyists alone, and that had barely scratched the surface of the money he spread around. He knew from experience that there was no point in hoarding his wealth. The cash would only work for him if he put it to use, and he’d bought the very best government he could afford – and he could afford anything.

  The amount he’d made during the Vietnam war paled by comparison to what he’d earned from America’s undeclared wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had paled again compared to what his pharmaceutical companies generated, as well as his partial ownership in a slew of the globe’s largest banks – a special club that was by invitation only, and which conferred upon its members unimaginable power.

  Barker made kings, decided who ran countries, balanced the fate of nations on his salad fork while debating which wine to enjoy with dinner. He and his clique ran things; which was as it should be, because the planet’s people couldn’t be trusted to run the place themselves. And now, his most ambitious project was coming to fruition, and he was only days from deploying the virus that would sweep the globe, eradicating the lion’s share of the Earth’s unproductive and parasitic, leaving a healthier, revitalized planet in its wake.

  The brainchild of a group of like-minded thinkers during the Cold War, the latest innovation would transform the future into a better one for the survivors – a sustainable population of only the most productive in each society, selected on the basis of merit rather than emotion. When his company announced that it had i
solated the virus after working round the clock, only once the flu had spread far past the tipping point and was ravaging the most problematically populated countries, and then leaked that it had a vaccine that might work, but could only be produced in adequate quantities to protect, at most, half a billion people…at that point, the governments of the world would have to make difficult but necessary choices, for the betterment of all.

  Naturally, he and everyone he valued would be inoculated far before the virus could make it to the U.S., and his cronies in the CIA and at the highest circles of government had already put into place plans to effectively seal the borders and shut down air traffic, sequestering all inbound travelers in internment camps until they could be verified as being healthy – which would take a week, even though the effective incubation period was more like twenty-four hours.

  The data didn’t lie. It would be a plague of unprecedented proportions, and would once and for all reset the clock to an earlier time, when the population was sustainable, given the limited resources of the ecosystem. It was impossible for growth to continue at its present rate, and only the far-thinking and the brave were willing to take the steps necessary for the survival of the species. Left to their own devices, the weak and the liberal would just kick the can down the road, leaving the problem to future generations.

  He reached the beach and stood on the sand, breathing in the salt air, the wind crisp, clean and pure, as it must have been hundreds of years before when his predecessors had arrived on these untamed shores. As he had planned, he was the only one on the beach, and try as he might he couldn’t see his bodyguards, although he knew they were somewhere in the trees.

  There would be civil unrest here at home, he was sure, as only a portion of the population could be saved. Preparations had already been put into effect, the emergency measures that would be enacted for the nation’s own good plotted out in secret. He wasn’t worried about that – after a few weeks of death, any resistance or argument would have gone out of the survivors, who would just be grateful to have been spared. He expected the same in Europe and the other areas that he would have the vaccine shipped to, and any outcry from the problem areas would quickly go silent as the populations perished.

  He stood, face into the breeze for a few minutes, and then he reluctantly turned and made his way back up the hill, revitalized and refreshed by his encounter with nature. He would do what he needed to do. Fifty years of planning would soon come to fruition, and a brave new world would finally see its new dawn – the first of many to come, even if his were numbered.

  A thought struck him and he slowed as a grin played across his creased face. You had to break eggs to make an omelet. That’s what his father had always said when he’d had to consider collateral damage from one of his campaigns. Damned if the old man hadn’t been right.

  Maybe he’d have Rosa cook up huevos rancheros for breakfast.

  It was, after all, a beautiful morning.

  FORTY-TWO

  The Verdict

  Jeffrey spent the two days following his meeting with Bertrand on pins and needles, holed up in his hotel room, taking advantage of the time to recuperate and rebuild his resilience. The blow to his head had taken a lot out of him, and the stress from his encounters with the German and Bertrand hadn’t helped matters. But even though he knew he needed the down time, every hour seemed to crawl by as if in slow motion.

  He’d spoken to Monica once, and begged off after a superficial discussion, mostly her assuring him that she missed him terribly and couldn’t wait for him to come home, with him offering anodyne responses. If she detected a cooling from his end she didn’t let on, and he didn’t really care much whether she did or not – he’d be ending the farce once he got back, beginning with breaking the news that he’d had a lot of time to think, and that things had moved too fast for his taste, and that he’d put off dealing with his feelings about his brother’s death by plunging into a relationship and a new job instead of processing the emotions and grieving. It was the kind of psychobabble he heard on television all the time, including when he tuned into one of the forty English channels offered by the hotel.

  She would undoubtedly try to weasel her way back into his bed, but he would simply be unavailable, even if it meant taking a long vacation to recover. Which stopped him. Could he return to his job now that he believed that it was all a lie, and that he hadn’t been hired because he was a rarity but merely so that unseen watchers could more easily keep their eye on him? And even if he could, was working in an office twelve hours a day, structuring byzantine schemes to help his clients avoid taxes, really how he wanted to spend whatever life he had? He could probably never know for sure that the job was part of the scheme he’d uncovered, but his gut told him it was, and he was learning to trust his instincts.

  The events of the last week had changed something fundamental in him: They both depressed and sickened him, but also reinforced how precious his existence was. And his brother’s death was always lurking in the background, just out of reach, a reminder that there were no guarantees of a long and prosperous life. It could be over at any moment. And if he couldn’t figure out a way to stop the virus, it very well might be sooner than later.

  He’d come up with some possible ways to block dissemination of the plague flu, as he thought of it, but none of them was foolproof, and all depended upon him being successful in implementing them before it was released. Once it was, it wouldn’t really matter who knew that it was man-made – everyone would be too busy dying. Even as he lay on the bed, watching another mindless show, his mind was racing into the redline, counting the seconds until he could reasonably call Bertrand and find out what he’d learned.

  After lunch on the second day, he repeated his sneaking out trick, which had apparently worked like a charm the last time. Whoever was watching him obviously had bought that he was doing little but watching television and running up a big tab while he convalesced. He’d called the neurologist in the morning and made another appointment for the following day, at which point he was planning to give the man a progress report just to keep up appearances, even though he wasn’t due to check in for a week.

  Jeffrey slipped out of the service door and down the alley, and then paused at the main street, waiting for a lull in the traffic to dart across and melt into the throng. The sidewalks were crowded, and he had no problem blending in with his fellow pedestrians, his dark pants and jacket rendering him as anonymous as you could get in a big city.

  Once he was three blocks from the hotel, he sat down at a sidewalk café, ordered coffee, and placed a call on his burner cell to Bertrand. The Frenchman answered on the second ring, and sounded out of breath.

  “When can you be here?” the scientist asked.

  “In about half an hour, I think.”

  “I’ll tell Marianne. See you then.”

  Bertrand’s voice gave nothing away, but Jeffrey figured that he wouldn’t have told him to come to the office if he didn’t have big news. Either that or Jeffrey had misjudged him, and there would be an executioner waiting for him with a silenced pistol or a straight razor when he approached the building. There was only one way to know for sure, so he paid for his coffee and scanned the street, hoping to find one of Paris’ ubiquitous taxis. It took him five minutes, but eventually one skidded to the curb next to him, and soon the little vehicle was rocketing toward the rue de Vaugirard and the Pasteur Institute.

  Jeffrey had the driver drop him off two blocks away, and he approached the main entrance of the six-story tan building from across the street, watching for anyone suspiciously lurking around the front doors. His primitive attempt at tradecraft exhausted after several moments of watching the passers-by, he crossed the boulevard, dodging speeding cars, and entered the lobby. The escort to the third floor was repeated, and Marianne was waiting for him, her face as grim as the last time he’d seen her, not a trace of warmth on it.

  “This way,” she said in her typically clipped style. Without w
aiting for a response, she led him down the empty hall to the scientist’s office. Three raps, the buzzer sounded, and then Jeffrey was once again with Bertrand, who looked like he hadn’t slept since he’d last seen him.

  The doctor was sitting behind his desk and started speaking before Jeffrey had a chance to sit.

  “It’s far worse than we thought. It’s H1N1…but it’s not. It’s something much more devastating. We ran the data, crunched the numbers, examined the modifications that were made. How much do you know about the original H1N1 virus?” the Frenchman asked, obviously frazzled.

  “Just what the German told me. Deadly, affected the young and healthy, had up to a five percent mortality rate, typically killed very quickly – within twenty-four hours of the onset of symptoms, in most cases.”

  “That’s probably as much as most know, if not more. This…this makes that look like having the sniffles. The death rates will be off the charts. Literally. The numbers you gave me…it looks like this virus would kill eighty to ninety percent of those infected. And it’s extremely contagious. Again, almost immeasurable. If this was released, it would wipe out much of human life. Our rough model says six billion people, possibly more, before it ran its course.”

  “Good God. Are you serious?”

  “I have never been more serious about anything in my life. The main problem is that there would be no resistance – it’s been modified enough so that the existing flu strains and the natural resistance that develops over time from exposure to those won’t have any positive effect.”

  “What about a vaccine?”

  “By the time we could create one, it would be too late for many. And by the time we could go into full production, it would be over.”

  “Antiviral meds?”