Dead Man's Rule

by Rick Acker

  “Okay, I’m taking you with me when I buy my next car.”

  Ben laughed. “I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that you’ll do just fine on your own. In fact, I’d like your help with some negotiations I’ll be starting shortly.”

  “That’s what I figured from your call. What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve gotten a lot of document and interview requests from the Bureau and the US Attorney’s Office for stuff on the Ivanovsky case. They haven’t said that Dr. Ivanovsky is the target of a criminal investigation, but—”

  “But you’re worried and you want to know what I think they’re doing.”

  “Yeah.”

  Sergei nodded. “They probably have opened a file on him. After all, he did break a lot of laws. Trying to obtain bioweapons is serious business, even if his intentions were good. And he did cause the Bureau, the CIA, and several police departments a whole lot of trouble.”

  “Think they’ll indict him?”

  “Good question. There’s a grand jury hearing evidence against what’s left of the Vainakh Guard. It’s possible that they’re also hearing evidence against Dr. Ivanovsky.”

  That’s what Ben had feared. “I’d like to get this out in the open as soon as possible so we can start dealing with it. Do you think it’s worth calling the US Attorney’s Office and asking what their intentions are?”

  “Sure. Criminal-defense attorneys do it all the time. Sometimes the assistant US attorney in charge of the case will tell you, sometimes they won’t. There’s no harm in asking, though.”

  “That’s what I was wondering. Thanks.”

  Just then, Auntie Olga walked up with Ben’s lunch. “You must be Ben Corbin,” she remarked as she served him. “Sergei has told me a lot about you.”

  “And you must be Olga,” replied Ben. “I understand you hosted the whole Spassky clan for Christmas.”

  “She even invited Elena,” put in Sergei. “She couldn’t make it back to Russia because a snowstorm cancelled her flight.”

  “She’s a nice girl, but I don’t see why she wants you to eat more Chinese food,” said Auntie Olga with a wink.

  “Chinese food?” asked Ben.

  “Elena gave me a wok for Christmas,” Sergei explained.

  “Hi, Curt,” Ben said into the phone. Curt Grunwald was the assistant US attorney handling the Vainakh Guard investigation. “I just thought I’d call and touch base with you about a couple of things regarding Dr. Ivanovsky.”

  “Fire away.”

  “First, is your office considering criminal charges against my client?”

  “Sorry, Ben. I can’t tell you anything one way or the other.”

  “Okay. The second thing I’d like to talk about is the judgment in Ivanovsky v. Zinoviev. There’s a final and nonappealable judgment that gives my client the rights to a set of lab notes and a sample of Variant D. I believe those are currently in the possession of the federal government.”

  The line was silent for several seconds. “So? I could get that judgment vacated a dozen different ways.”

  “Probably, but not quickly and not without giving Dr. Ivanovsky his Fourteenth Amendment due-process rights. At the very least, you would have to explain the whole story to a federal judge, which I suspect you’d rather not do.”

  “All things being equal, no, I’d rather not. But all things aren’t equal here, are they?”

  “Nope,” said Ben.

  “All right. I assume you have a proposal to make.”

  “I do, but it won’t be worth either of our time unless the government is willing to forgo prosecution of Dr. Ivanovsky.”

  “We might be, under certain circumstances,” Grunwald said thoughtfully. “I’ll call you back.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Grunwald was back on the line.

  “We’re willing to agree not to prosecute,” he said, “if we can agree on a few points. First, Dr. Ivanovsky will assign to the United States all rights he has under that judgment. Second, we’ll need him to sign a confidentiality agreement similar to the one you signed. Third—”

  “Hold on a sec,” said Ben as he scribbled. “I take slow notes. By the way, my client has an additional condition.”

  “What’s that?” Grunwald asked warily.

  “He’ll have to be involved in any further work on Variant D,” said Ben, choosing his words carefully. If there was going to be a sticking point, this was it. “As you know, he’s concerned that it might be developed into an offensive weapon. This will let him verify that it isn’t. Involving him will also give the government access to his extensive—and in many cases unique—knowledge of biodefense and decontamination.”

  Grunwald chuckled. “The last point on my list says, ‘Must make Ivanovsky available to DoD as consultant re Variant D countermeasures.’ We’ll need to paper this, but I think we have a deal.”

  Fort Detrick, home to the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, is a collection of utilitarian-looking buildings scattered over roughly three square miles outside of Frederick, Maryland. USAMRIID’s nerve center is a huge tan building on the fort’s grounds, and it was to this building that two large MPs escorted Ben and Dr. Ivanovsky.

  Dr. Ivanovsky was there to meet with the team of scientists that was probing the secrets of Variant D. Ben was there at the insistence of Dr. Ivanovsky, who now treated him as something of a security blanket. They spent the morning discussing protocols for storing and handling the organism, a subject that Dr. Ivanovsky and his new colleagues found endlessly fascinating. Only an iron will and four cups of coffee kept Ben awake.

  Over lunch, Dr. Ivanovsky asked the head of the USAMRIID team, a general who also had a PhD in molecular biology, “What do you think of this Variant D? It is brilliant, no?”

  The man frowned. “No offense to your countrymen, but I think they created an abomination. It’s a death sentence hanging over the whole human race. We don’t know when the ax will fall, but we need to be ready to catch it when it does. If I was sure that we had the only culture of it, I wouldn’t be so worried—at least not about this bug, anyway. I’d heat it in the autoclave and count my blessings that it was dead.

  “But you know as well as I do that when the Soviet Union fell apart, so did their bioweapons program. Things disappeared, especially valuable things.” He pointed to a partial analysis of Variant D’s genome. “Things like this. Every morning when I wake up, I wonder if today will be the day that some terrorist or rogue nation lets loose one of these superbugs. And every night when I go to bed, I thank God that it didn’t happen.”

  “Yes, thank God,” said Dr. Ivanovsky, who seemed oddly reassured by the military man’s answer. “And trust him, too.” He turned to Ben. “This general thinks correctly. You can go home. I am okay now.”

  AFTERWORD

  Not nearly enough of this book is fiction.

  The Soviet Union did indeed have a massive and secret biological-weapons program, of which Biopreparat was a part. The scientists who worked there developed a number of genetically engineered germs that are deadlier, more infectious, and less curable than anything humanity has ever faced. When the program was shut down—or at least scaled back—after the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of germ factories were simply abandoned. Thousands of scientists with only one marketable skill were suddenly without jobs.

  The Ebolapox virus depicted in the story probably exists. Russian scientists admit to having developed the technology to insert Ebola genes into smallpox viruses, but claim they have not actually done so. The former second-in-command at Biopreparat, Dr. Ken Alibek, doubts that claim. But even if his former coworkers have not bred Ebolapox in Russia, some of them may well have done so for Iran, North Korea, or one of several other new employers. Now that the process for breeding this virus is known, it is only a matter of time before someone actually does it—if they have not
already.

  Shortly before the 9/11 attacks, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies led a war-game-style simulation called “Dark Winter.” It was intended to study the effects of a terrorist attack like the one plotted by the Vainakh Guard (i.e., simultaneous attacks on multiple American cities). The only significant differences were that (1) the simulated terrorists in Dark Winter used ordinary smallpox—not one of the “superbugs” created by Biopreparat or another secret weapons lab, and (2) the terrorists hit only three targets, shopping malls in widely separated cities. Within three weeks of the simulated attack, the Johns Hopkins scientists projected, smallpox would have spread from those three malls to twenty-five states. Within two months, up to one million Americans would have died and the epidemic would be out of control. After the simulation ended, former senator Sam Nunn, one of the Dark Winter participants, said this in his testimony to Congress: “It’s a lucky thing for the United States that—as the Emergency Broadcast Network used to say—‘This is just a test, this is not a real emergency.’ But, Mr. Chairman, our lack of preparation is a real emergency.”

  Much has been done since Dark Winter, including the initiation of Project BioShield, a comprehensive federal effort to protect America against bioterrorism. But much remains to be done. Some of the deadliest organisms used in biological weapons have no cure. Further, the Director of National Intelligence’s 2015 Worldwide Threat Assessment found that “the time when only a few states had access to the most dangerous technologies is past. Biological and chemical materials and technologies, almost always dual-use, move easily in the globalized economy, as do personnel with the scientific expertise to design and use them.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  You would not be holding this book in your hands right now if I had not received help and support from innumerable people. First and foremost, I thank my wife, Anette, who is my muse, sounding board, and biggest fan.

  Thank you to Amy Hosford, associate publisher at Waterfall Press, for believing in this book and bringing out a new edition.

  Thanks to Sue Brower, agent extraordinaire, for tirelessly advocating for her authors and their stories.

  I also owe a special debt of gratitude to those experts who reviewed the portions of the book dealing with Russian crime and biological weapons—subjects with which I happily have no personal experience. Assistant United States Attorney Terry Kinney provided extensive and invaluable feedback on the Russian criminal culture in Chicago. Dr. Nwadiuto Esiobu, professor of microbiology at Florida Atlantic University, who does federally funded work on bioterrorism countermeasures, offered helpful insight on the care and culturing of the virus described in these pages. My fellow Golden Domer, Special Agent Cathy Viray, was generous with her time and expertise in providing several useful details about the inner workings of the FBI.

  Dennis Hillman and Dave Lindstedt edited an earlier version of this book and made invaluable suggestions throughout.

  Last, but certainly not least, I appreciate the suggestions and corrections of the Valley Community Church Writers Group and dozens of other test readers.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bestselling author Rick Acker is supervising deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice. Most recently, he and his team won a string of unprecedented recoveries against the Wall Street players who created the mortgage securities that triggered the Great Recession. Acker has authored several legal thrillers, including When the Devil Whistles, which award-winning author Colleen Coble described as “a legal thriller you won’t want to miss.” He spends most of his free time with his wife and children. You can learn more about Acker and his books at www.rickacker.com.