Upon A Pale Horse (35 page)

Jeffrey shook his head. “I suppose not. I’m trying to understand the implications of a lab-created virus making its way into the general population.”

“That would be most unlikely.”

“What would you say if I told you that I have uncovered evidence that there is such a virus, and that it looks as though it’s in imminent danger of being released?”

Bertrand drew back, clearly uncomfortable. “Monsieur, this interview is at an end. I am not going to entertain flights of fancy or science fiction. I don’t mean to be rude, but this is not what I agreed to participate in,” Bertrand said, and lifted his telephone handset from the cradle and prepared to dial.

Jeffrey extracted the diagram from his pocket and wordlessly placed it in front of Bertrand. The Frenchman’s finger hovered over the phone keypad, and then he slowly set the phone back down as he squinted at the drawing. He pulled his glasses down from his head and peered at Jeffrey’s diagram, his complexion going pale as the minutes slowly ticked by. Eventually he put the paper down and fixed Jeffrey with a shocked gaze.

“Where…where did you get this?”

“It doesn’t matter. Do you know what it is?”

“I…I would need to study it more closely to be sure.”

“I’ve been told it is a variant of H1N1. Spanish influenza. But that it has been modified.”

Bertrand stared at the diagram again. “How?”

“In one of those offensive bio-warfare laboratories that the Biological Weapons Convention says no longer exists,” Jeffrey said.

“I mean how has it been modified? Do you know?”

Jeffrey let him absorb the drawing, and then pulled the spreadsheet from his pocket and placed the pages on the desk next to the diagram. “It’s been made more lethal, more infectious, deadlier. The reason I wanted to meet with you is because I suspect you’re one of the few people who can tell me just how much more dangerous this new variant is.”

Bertrand stared at the spreadsheet like it was toxic. “What is that?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

Bertrand began paging through the sheaf of paper, then looked at Jeffrey. “These are results. It looks to me like trial results. A data set.”

“So they should be able to tell you what it is we’re dealing with?”

“Possibly. I would need to enter everything and run some models. I ask you again – where did you get this?”

Jeffrey sighed. This was the moment of truth. The point where he would need to trust the Frenchman with his life. If he called it wrong, or if the scientist was somehow involved in the scheme, Jeffrey would be dead in a matter of hours.

“It started with a plane crash…”

Five minutes later, Jeffrey finished, feeling like he’d run a marathon.

Bertrand was studying the diagram again. “I’ll need time. But if this is what it appears to be, then you’re correct. This is an unprecedented disaster. I just can’t believe that it could have originated in America. It makes no sense.”

“The German said that there was a faction in the U.S. government, or that colluded with the government, that’s been working on reducing the world population for four decades. That he was part of their scheme, and that the projects he was involved with were approved in the clandestine back rooms. He said that HIV was part of that.”

“He said what?” Bertrand demanded incredulously.

Jeffrey took him through the German’s claims. His developing an immune-suppressive agent in chimps, and then for humans. The incredibly coincidental timing of the global AIDS epidemic, and his observations of the timing of the AIDS outbreaks and the hepatitis B vaccination trials in the U.S. and the smallpox vaccination programs in Africa.

“These are very dangerous claims, and I would be very, very careful about voicing them. Certainly, there’s a case that can be made for HIV being lab-created, but you’ll find it’s a controversial topic that nobody wishes to debate,” Bertrand warned.

“I’m aware of that. It’s just one of many things these days that’s best not discussed, apparently. Anything that contradicts an official explanation is treated as conspiracy nonsense, even if all the data supports the alternative explanation.”

“I’m not going to debate ideology or ethics. But this…this, if it is an actually model of a modified virus, is frightening,” Bertrand snapped.

“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 isolated 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.