Pandemic pr-2

by James Barrington

  ‘But the aircraft,’ Richter objected, ‘was flying westwards across the Mediterranean, away from Africa.’

  Nicholson nodded. ‘Yes, but it was at the end of the mission, not at the start. We knew even then that we needed to cover our tracks, and that’s why we had to order the escorting fighter to shoot it down. The Learjet was supposed to end up in deep water and be lost for ever, but instead it veered off course. I’ve been waiting since nineteen seventy-two for somebody to stumble across it.’

  ‘So what was it you were taking into Africa?’ Richter demanded. ‘And what does CAIP stand for?’

  Again, Nicholson’s voice rose and strengthened. ‘We needed to find a simple name that would be meaningless to anyone not involved. It stood for Central Africa Inoculation Program, and that’s exactly what it was.’

  There was a moment of silence that seemed to stretch for an eternity as the two men stared at Nicholson. Then Richter glanced at Westwood, noticed his look of incomprehension. ‘I think I can see where this is going,’ he said, ‘but I just pray that I’m wrong. Tell us what you were injecting.’

  Nicholson shook his head. ‘It was a good, simple idea. All we intended to do was reduce fertility levels, bring the population growth under some kind of control. Our only mistake was that we had no idea what the long-term effects would be. It was merely intended to inhibit reproduction – to act as a damper. We never realized—’

  ‘What were you injecting?’ Richter asked again. ‘What was in those flasks?’

  And again Nicholson shook his head. ‘We couldn’t have predicted the long-term results. We should have spent more time on trials before we started the program, but there was a real sense of urgency at this end. We—’

  Richter stood up and kicked Nicholson’s shattered thigh. ‘Just tell us,’ he shouted. ‘What the fuck were you injecting?’

  Nicholson howled with renewed pain, grabbed again at his leg. He looked up at Richter. ‘You fucking bastard,’ he cried. ‘OK, OK,’ he continued quickly, as Richter stepped forward again. ‘It was an entirely new substance. The Army scientists had spliced a bovine virus onto a sheep virus, and then modified it further. It had just the characteristics we were looking for, so we tried it by using a smallpox vaccination program as cover. It was only a trial run. We were only out there a few weeks before the program was shut down.’

  ‘Shut down by whom?’ Richter demanded.

  ‘The authority came from the President himself. I think he was secretly informed about the program by one of the doctors involved in the African trial.’

  ‘OK, I’ll ask one more time. What were you injecting?’

  ‘A virus,’ Nicholson said. ‘The strain contained in the flasks was extremely concentrated, a mother strain, and its effectiveness was chemically reduced on site by a factor of over ten billion before we could inject it. That’s why we needed doctors and scientists to carry out the trial. But we never thought—’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Westwood interrupted, with an appalled expression. ‘Is he saying what I think he’s saying?’

  Richter nodded. ‘Yes, but I can hardly believe it. What this bastard means is that in the nineteen seventies some rogue element in the fucking American Army developed AIDS to depopulate the Third World – and a bunch of CIA fanatics filled the syringe for them. It’s no wonder those files were sealed by the authority of the President. If this ever became public knowledge, the CIA would be finished – possibly the American Government too.’

  ‘Jesus Christ almighty, what the hell do we do now, Paul?’

  ‘What you do, Westwood,’ Nicholson said, his voice stronger as some of his previous fire returned, ‘is get me proper medical attention to get this leg fixed. Then you give me those flasks and the file. I’ll make sure that the evidence is destroyed permanently. That’s the only option that makes sense. We cannot, under any circumstances, allow word of this to leak out. The damage to America would be incalculable.’

  Westwood glanced at Richter, who shook his head and motioned him towards the door. Westwood moved across there and stood watching as Richter picked up the silenced SIG and gazed down at the wounded man.

  ‘There are a couple of things you should know, Nicholson. This room is soundproof and airtight. The reason we haven’t all suffocated so far is because there’s a closed-circuit air-conditioning system that keeps the air fresh. But because it’s a closed-circuit system it means that any particles that are present in the air stay in the air: only the carbon dioxide is allowed to escape. That’s the first thing.’

  Richter put the SIG down on the desk, then dragged the small table across the room and positioned it about three feet from where Nicholson was propped against the wall. Then he moved across to where Henderson’s body lay and picked up the CAIP flask. He held it in his left hand and peered at it for a few moments, as if seeing it for the first time, then he placed it on the table.

  ‘The second thing is that I believe in responsibility and blame. If your organization was responsible for deploying the AIDS virus in Africa and starting the present pandemic, then your organization should take the blame, either in private or in public. Whether it does or not won’t be my decision, but the evidence should certainly not be simply destroyed. It’s just barely possible that some of the information in the CAIP file, maybe even the concentrated virus in the flasks, might help find a cure for AIDS, and no matter how slim that possibility, that alone is sufficient justification for not destroying it.’

  ‘But you don’t understand,’ Nicholson protested through his pain. ‘The damage that you could do is—’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ Richter cut across Nicholson’s protest, ‘about damage. Anything anyone might do with this information is totally insignificant compared to the damage your repellent scheme has already done, and not just in Black Africa. You simply don’t understand, do you? AIDS could exterminate the entire human race, and it would be your doing.’ His last words came out as a bellow and again he kicked Nicholson hard in the leg.

  ‘Get out of here, John.’ Richter’s voice was suddenly low and controlled. He waited until Westwood had left the briefing-room and picked up the SIG.

  Nicholson was howling with pain, his hands clutching desperately at his bloody leg, but Richter’s face was without pity or remorse. ‘If you have a god,’ Richter spoke in a voice as cold as death, ‘I hope He can forgive you, because I can’t. You are responsible for creating AIDS, so it’s only right that you should die from it.’

  ‘No, no! Please! We can work this out,’ Nicholson cried out. ‘I’ll hand over everything, I’ll tell you everything I know.’

  Richter ignored his sudden pleading. He walked over to the door, then turned and took careful aim. The pistol coughed once and the steel flask on the table bounced into the air. Its side ruptured where the bullet had struck, scattering a dirty brown cloud down towards the injured man. Richter pulled the door closed immediately.

  The last thing he heard before the soundproof door slammed shut was Nicholson’s despairing wail as the viral spores began to fill his lungs.

  Chapter 29

  Monday

  Browntown, Virginia

  John Westwood seemed almost in a state of shock as he drove the Chrysler away from the safe house. He’d said nothing since Richter had ushered him out of the place and slammed the door shut behind them.

  Richter had left a note for the caretaker, warning him not to go into the briefing-room but to wait for a decontamination team to arrive. He would have to consult Tyler Hardin again, so that the expert could advise what procedures were needed before the room could be safely opened. But all that could wait for a day, at least.

  ‘It’s not my call, John,’ Richter commented eventually. ‘Ultimately, this is your mess and you’re the ones who are going to have to clean it up. But I do feel very strongly that you can’t just bury it. Going public wouldn’t achieve anything except to pillory the CIA and America itself, and you can certainly do without that. My advice is that you tak
e the remaining flasks back to Langley to brief Walter Hicks and suggest that they’re handed over to the boffins at Fort Detrick. They just might help in the search for an eventual cure.’

  ‘What are you yourself going to do?’ Westwood spoke for the first time. ‘Will you tell Simpson?’

  Richter nodded. ‘Yes. I don’t really see I’ve got much option. If the circumstances were reversed, you’d do the same.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Westwood murmured, then straightened slightly in his seat, as if he’d come to a sudden decision. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the next few days are going to be mayhem over here. I’m going to be spending all my time at Langley explaining what the hell happened back at the safe house – that’s the easy bit really – and trying to find an answer to the harder question: why a bunch of rabid neo-Nazi lunatics in the CIA decided thirty years ago that killing off half of the population of Africa seemed like a good idea.

  ‘You probably want to get back home anyway, so why don’t we just pick up your stuff at my house and then I’ll run you out to Baltimore International?’

  Haywood, Virginia

  Richter replaced the Clancy novel in the bookcase – he’d seen the film, knew exactly where the ‘Red October’ had finished up. He took another look around John Westwood’s guest bedroom to ensure he’d left nothing behind that he didn’t intend leaving, picked up his overnight bag and Stein’s briefcase, and pulled the door closed behind him.

  ‘John,’ he explained, as he walked into the kitchen where Westwood was sitting at the breakfast bar, a blank expression on his face, ‘I can’t take the pistols with me so I’m going to have to leave them here. You can keep the SIG – call it a gift from the late Richard Stein – but if you could get the Browning Hi-Power sent over to the US Embassy in London in the diplomatic bag so I can pick it up, that would be a great help. You have no idea how many forms I’ll have to fill in if I don’t hand the fucking thing back. I’ve left both pistols upstairs in the guest room, unloaded and with the magazines out, on the top shelf of the built-in wardrobe. Your kids won’t be able to reach them up there.

  ‘You can have this, too,’ he said, putting a bulky heavy-duty carrier bag on the kitchen table. ‘It’s got Murphy’s mobile phone and laptop in it, just in case you need to show Hicks the sequence of emails you exchanged with Nicholson. There might also be some other information there that could help you.

  ‘I’m taking Stein’s briefcase back with me. I’ll get our guys to see if there’s anything useful on his laptop, and then I’m going to keep it; it’s time I had a computer of my own. And he had a better mobile phone than the one I use back in the UK. Let’s call it the spoils of war.’

  British Airways 747, direct Baltimore–London Heathrow, mid-Atlantic

  The in-flight movie was crap, Richter knew, because he’d already seen it in the Wardroom of the Invincible, what seemed like half a lifetime ago. The in-flight meal hadn’t been a lot better – pretty much the only edible part being the roll and butter – and as soon as the grumpy stewardess, or cabin staff operative or hostess or whatever the hell they were being called this month, had taken away his tray, Richter had tried to get some sleep.

  That hadn’t worked either, and after fidgeting around for thirty minutes trying to get comfortable – a nearly impossible task in the plane’s economy section – he’d given up trying and hauled Stein’s briefcase down from the overhead locker and opened it up. He’d been vaguely planning to have a fiddle with the dead man’s laptop – Richter wasn’t quite as computer illiterate as he usually made out – but when he lifted the lid of the briefcase something else caught his attention.

  Sticking out of one of the narrow document pockets was a piece of paper. Richter pulled it out, unfolded it and found it was actually six sheets of thin paper stapled together. At the top of the first sheet was the unmistakable dark blue CIA seal, the bald eagle surmounting the white shield with the sixteen-pointed red compass, and the classification – Ultra Secret – stamped in red at the top and bottom of every page, supplemented by a caveat: ‘CAIP EYES ONLY’.

  He knew immediately, even before reading to the bottom of the first page, exactly what this document was, and where it had come from. It was the executive summary of the aims, conduct and procedures of Operation CAIP. Krywald or Stein had obviously removed it from the file, and Richter could guess why.

  It was dynamite, with enough explosive force to blow the Central Intelligence Agency into oblivion, and the only living soul who now knew it existed was Paul Richter.

  Wednesday

  Hammersmith, London

  Richard Simpson turned the pages slowly, rereading the document for the third time. Then he dropped it onto his desk and stared across at Richter.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ he asked.

  ‘I didn’t get it from anywhere, really,’ Richter said. ‘I liberated a briefcase from this CIA agent named Richard Stein, because it contained his laptop computer and it was convenient for carrying it. I wasn’t watching the bloody awful movie on the long-haul back from Baltimore, so I decided to have a play with the laptop instead. When I opened up the briefcase, I saw this bit of paper sticking out of a document pouch. That’s it really.’

  Simpson looked down and prodded the sheaf of pages a couple of times in an experimental manner. ‘So what do you expect me to do with it?’ he demanded.

  ‘What worries me,’ Richter said, ‘and has done since the moment Nicholson finally told us what CAIP was all about, was what the CIA will do with the evidence. Even John Westwood looked totally stunned at the implications, and I would be prepared to lay money there’ll be a powerful faction within the Company that will just want this buried.’

  ‘They could be right,’ Simpson said. ‘Having something like this made public would do immeasurable damage to the American Government, and I don’t really see what good it would do to anybody now. AIDS is with us and that’s a fact. Whether or not somebody created it, or if it just crawled out of the African rain forest somewhere, seems to me to have become largely irrelevant.’

  ‘But that’s not the point,’ Richter’s voice rose. ‘If the CIA was behind this, then the Company should accept some kind of responsibility. I’m not talking about a public blood-letting – I agree that wouldn’t help anyone – but some kind of financial reparation wouldn’t go amiss. Maybe they could subsidize the cost of the AIDS drugs being used these days. A lot of victims of the disease can’t receive treatment simply because they can’t afford to pay for it.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about the subject,’ Simpson commented.

  ‘I’ve done some research since I got back.’

  ‘OK, but you still haven’t answered my question. What do you want me to do about it?’

  ‘I want you to let the CIA know, through Six if necessary, that we have this document – and that we’re prepared to go public with it if the CIA doesn’t admit responsibility for CAIP, at least privately, and doesn’t offer some form of compensation to those suffering from the horrific disease it helped create.’

  There was a long silence in the office. Simpson stared at Richter, then dropped his eyes to the six stapled pages lying on the desk in front of him. When he looked up again, he slowly shook his head.

  ‘I really don’t think I can do that,’ he said. ‘I hear what you say, but on balance I think it’s probably better for everyone if we just forget about this and preserve the status quo. In fact,’ he added, ‘I think it’s better if this document never sees the light of day – ever.’

  Before Richter could react, Simpson dropped the pages into the mouth of the large document shredder beside his desk and pressed the button. There was a brief ripping sound, then just the whir of the cutting blades. Simpson reached down again and pressed the switch: silence fell.

  ‘So that’s it, is it?’ Richter demanded. He hadn’t even attempted to move as Simpson destroyed the vital document.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’ Simpson stood up, rubbing his hands together. ‘Unles
s there’s anything else you want to add.’

  Richter got up too, and pushed his chair back, then walked slowly across to the door. He reached out for the handle and then turned back to face Simpson. ‘Yes, I did quite a lot of research on AIDS yesterday,’ he said, ‘but that wasn’t the only thing I was investigating.’

  ‘Oh?’ Simpson sounded profoundly disinterested. ‘What else were you looking at?’

  Richter smiled slowly and glanced down at Simpson’s document shredder. ‘Colour photocopiers,’ he said. ‘It’s simply amazing what results you can get from colour photocopiers these days.’

  Epilogue

  ‘The amount of American philanthropy aimed at AIDS is unparalleled and the US funds nearly 30% of the Global Fund’s $4.8 billion budget. President Bush recently pledged $15 billion to fight HIV/AIDS over the next five years.’

  Extract from an article by Eric Bovim and posted at www.TechCentralStation.com

  Though what you’ve just read is a novel, with all the usual disclaimers about people living and dead, the above quotation is genuine, as is the analysis which follows.

  AIDS: An analysis

  I have had to take one slight liberty in writing this novel: I have no idea how the human body would react if exposed to an unadulterated ‘mother strain’ of the AIDS virus, or even if such a thing exists. The physical effects I’ve described in this book are violent and dramatic, but are by no means unreal. Victims of infection by either a filovirus (Ebola and Marburg) or an arenavirus (Lassa) would suffer very much the same symptoms as those I’ve described. The only difference would be the timescale, with Ebola Zaïre killing its victims the quickest, usually in about a week to ten days.

  As I’ve said, this book is a novel, but what follows here is fact, not fiction. It should frighten you – it terrifies me.