by Dick Couch
A part of Meno wanted to continue the work, even though he was anxious to get out of this hellhole. The power that he felt in the art of genetic manipulation of a virus had a definite hold on him. It was God-like. They had altered their virus so that no known vaccine would be effective in controlling the disease. They had also engineered it for a longer incubation period—no small feat when dealing with this particular pathogen. With more time, he could make it a truly super disease, one that effectively suppressed the victim’s immune system, like the HIV virus. Or he could give his virus the ability to quickly mutate so as to defend itself against the battery of drugs that would surely be thrown at it. Some of the best pathologists and epidemiologists in the world would be called in to stop his creation. Meno smiled at the thought. Some of them were clever, but not as clever as himself. It would be very interesting if he just had a little more time to build a disease that reflected his full range of talent.
Meno was a Frenchman. The French were superior, and he considered himself all that, and more. As the handsome only son of a prominent Parisian physician, he had enjoyed privilege and all the pleasures of Paris. At seventeen, he was sent to the Sorbonne in Geneva, where it was discovered that he was something of a prodigy in mathematics. Encouraged by his father, he had taken a degree in medicine, but he had no intention of ever becoming a healer. After school he spent a year in Nice, where he became a society favorite on the French Riviera. That ended with an expensive paternity suit by a wealthy New York socialite who had brought her sixteen-year-old daughter to Monaco for her coming-out. Back in Paris, and with the help of his father, he won an appointment at the Pasteur Institute. There, for the better part of five years, he distinguished himself as both brilliant and extremely difficult to work with. His job at the Institute was not unlike that of Elvis Rosenblatt at the CDC. When he was not offending his colleagues or some senior research fellow, he was capable of brilliant research. His specialty quickly became tropical disease, and he was considered one of the Institute’s leading specialists on the subject. François Meno was just thirty when his father died of a massive stroke in the arms of his mistress. His father, as it turned out, had far more debts than assets, so François was suddenly made to balance a practiced, extravagant lifestyle with his less-than-generous salary from the Pasteur Institute.
François Meno’s understanding of World War II came solely from those in his liberal and medical circles. He was aware only of the shame it had brought to France. From his perspective, the France of his parents’ era had been humiliated by the Germans, and now his France was being continually humiliated by the Americans—the Americans and their toady surrogates in Europe, the British. It appeared to him that the influence of the United States was heaping one indignity after another on France. The massive oil reserves in Iraq had been largely under contract and the control of TotalFinaElf, the French oil consortium. Had the Americans not interfered, those resources would still be under French control. Energy was the key to national prosperity and influence, and that had been taken away by the Americans’ unilateral intervention in Iraq. Meno hated Americans, much as he hated the narrow-minded, politically driven bureaucracy at the Pasteur Institute.
In the summer of 2004, the juxtaposition of two events drove Meno from the Institute. The first was the appointment of a woman as his department head. In his opinion, she was a large, bovine creature, physically unattractive and his intellectual inferior. That she was a competent, proven administrator was beside the point. The second came when they instituted the practice of random drug testing. Meno ran with a crowd of recreational drug users, and he felt that what he did when he was away from the Institute was his own affair. If he had been smart, he would have simply resigned and, like his father, entered private practice, where the compensation was more in keeping with his habits and lifestyle. Instead, he devised a vitamin-rich herbal drink that masked any drug residue in his system. He might have continued to deceive the inspectors, but he couldn’t resist bragging to one of the lab techs about his ability to fool the system. His new department head, who was not as dumb as Meno thought, managed to get her hands on his drug-masking concoction, and the drug screening procedures were altered accordingly. One Monday morning, François Meno tested positive for cocaine and was summarily dismissed from the Institute. The fact that this woman had beat him at his own game infuriated him. His only consolation, both financially and personally, was that he was able to sell his formula to an American consulting firm that specialized in advising professional athletes on how to avoid detection in the use of performance-enhancement drugs. The proceeds got him back on the Riviera for the summer, and in the company of bored, wealthy women. He was essentially living as a kept man when he received a call from Helmut Klan in September. They met, and Klan had only one question for him: Was he interested in a genetic engineering project that would pay him a great deal of money? He didn’t have to tell Meno that it was illegal. Meno knew it instinctively.
Meno regarded Lauda across his desk. As much as he would love to take this virus a step further, he, like the others, was tired of Africa and the isolation. And he was also anxious to take his money and get back to the good life in the south of France.
“I think what we have will achieve our goals quite nicely, and I can’t imagine that these final tests would cause us to alter the product. These are simply confirmation tests. Tell Lyman to begin his cultures.”
Lauda left Meno’s office and set off down the long central corridor. On one side were the laboratories, and on the other were the isolation chambers where the wretched test subjects spent their final days. With some care and thought, the isolation wards had been soundproofed so that the researchers did not have to hear the agonized screams of the infected. A strange thing, Lauda mused, it was not so much the sight as the sounds of suffering that affected the staff. He wondered if that were true of those who presided over the Holocaust, or if it was just a peculiarity of this particular research cadre. No matter, he concluded; they would be finished very soon. He did not know the ultimate destination of their product, whether it was for blackmail or actual use. It didn’t matter. That was none of his concern, he concluded, just as it had not concerned I.G. Farben what Hitler did with the Zyklon-B gas that Farben had developed.
Lauda did find it interesting that the senior members of the medical research team all seemed to share a dislike of America, and a great need for money. He often wondered if they had been selected for just those reasons. Yet they all somehow focused on their resentment of America as the primary reason for their participation in the project. That was a lot of idealism, Lauda mused, since each of them was being paid $1 million U.S. for a few months’ work in this remote laboratory. He, Lauda, was not so inclined to use ideology as a crutch, but then he was being paid closer to $1.5 million for his part in this venture.
“Lyman,” he said in German as he entered the office of Lyman Hotch, the team’s pathologist. Lyman was the only one who habitually left the door to his office open, as if he somehow knew better than the others that the deadly virus they were perfecting could just as easily find its way through a closed door. “I believe it is time for you to begin farming the most recent strain of our virus. I’m on my way to see Helmut about the final production details, but I believe that you can now begin your cultures.”
“Does that meet with the approval of Himself?” Meno’s personality was no less abrasive to the research team at the Makondo than it had been to his coworkers at the Pasteur Institute.
Lauda grinned. “As a matter of fact, it does, so the sooner you are able to make what we need, the sooner we can leave this garden spot and return to the congestion and pollution of some overcrowded city.”
“Jawohl, Herr Lauda,” Hotch replied. He rose and, tossing an explicit pornographic magazine on the desk, donned his lab coat.
Elvis Rosenblatt had been a little off the mark, but not by much. The Makondo team had in fact developed a virus that was hemorrhagic in nature. Their vir
us was resistant to all known vaccine stocks, and designed with a much higher mortality rate than in its naturally occurring form. Oddly enough, it was a deadly disease that had been entirely eradicated by modern medical science—the last case on record in the United States was in 1949, and the last documented in the world was in Somalia in 1977: smallpox. The disease had been effectively wiped out by vaccine. So complete was the eradication of smallpox that vaccination was no longer necessary. Older Americans still bore the small, circular smallpox vaccination scars, but it was rare for anyone under forty to have one; smallpox simply did not exist in the general population. Only small quantities of the pathogen had been retained by the Soviet Union and the United States, just enough for medical research and antibody testing should there ever be another outbreak of the disease. Those held by the United States were in a secure facility at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, while those formally held by the Soviet Union were thought to have been destroyed in the transition that led to the formation of the Russian Republic. Most had been, but one of the vials of the disease had fallen into private hands. This one individual had been contacted by Dimitri Muschovia and persuaded, for $16 million, to surrender the deadly vial.
The Soviets had done half of the work for Helmut Klan’s team. This particular vial of smallpox contained an enhancement of the more prevalent smallpox, variola major. At one time there were more than fourteen thousand scientists and clinicians working in the Soviet bio-weapons effort. They had isolated and refined a particularly deadly naturally occurring strain of smallpox—hemorrhagic smallpox. The eradicated variola major strain of smallpox was 30 percent fatal; hemorrhagic smallpox was 99 percent fatal. So really, all the Makondo team had to do was to genetically alter this strain of pox so it was immune to the highly effective stocks of smallpox vaccine that were kept on hand. They also engineered their virus to extend the incubation period and to make it a little more contagious. Normal variola major was most contagious at the onset of the rash, when the infected person was usually very sick and immobile. Someone infected with the Makondo-developed strain of this pox was highly contagious during the final ten days of the extended incubation period, when the carrier was still freely moving about and had yet to exhibit any symptoms of the disease. What Klan and his team had developed was a depopulation agent perfectly suited to thrive in a Western, urban society. It would frustrate and confuse the epidemiologists who would have to deal with it until the pandemic was completely out of control.
It took Garrett Walker, aka John Naye, close to five minutes to negotiate the fare for himself and Dr. Elvis Rosenblatt, aka Greg Wood, from the airport to the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Lusaka. English was the official language of Zambia, spoken by almost everyone in the capital. The negotiation took longer than needed, since Garrett felt that there was nothing like a good bargaining session to get the feel of the people, even though price was not really an issue. Garrett used a few words of Swahili that the cabdriver seemed to understand, which finally got them to a mutual agreement on the fare. Swahili, like Zulu, Shona, and close to five hundred other languages, was of the Bantu language family. Garrett learned that their driver was Lozi, and from the large cross that hung from the rearview mirror, he assumed that he was Christian. More than half of Zambians were Christian, while something less than half were Muslim and Hindu. With their business concluded, they made the twelve-mile, forty-minute drive from the airport to the Intercontinental with a running commentary on current events in Lusaka. Elvis Rosenblatt observed the squalid approach to the city without comment.
They checked into their rooms, which were clean and modern, even by Western standards, then met on the terrace at the entrance of the Savannah Grill. They had gained a day and lost some six hours during the trip from Hawaii. When going west, Garrett always did his best to stay awake, then retire early evening, local time. It was now 7:00 P.M., so a good night’s sleep would hopefully wash out most of their jet lag. When the menus arrived, Garrett chose some native dish that he had never heard of, while Rosenblatt simply told the waiter to bring him the closest thing they had to a cheeseburger. Both ordered the best scotch in the house. While they waited for their food, Garrett’s Iridium satellite phone vibrated against his hip with a soft purr.
He snapped the phone open. “Yes?” He listened for a moment, then said, “We’re on the ground and on schedule. The day after tomorrow we’ll be on the Zambezi as planned, or we can stay in Lusaka another day…. Tomorrow? That’s good to hear…and have you heard from AKR?…Don’t worry, he’ll be checking in soon…. Thanks, Janet; we’ll talk tomorrow after I’ve spoken with Benjamin…. Good luck to you as well…. Good-bye.”
“E.T. phone home?”
“Something like that. The rest of the team will be airborne tomorrow and are scheduled to arrive just after dark. If all goes well, they will leave the following morning, shortly before we leave for the Zambezi. Steven Fagan will be here early tomorrow to do the advance work at the airport.” Garrett hesitated, not wanting to withhold needed information from Rosenblatt, but reluctant to tell him everything about their cover story. “Elvis, we plan to stage our people out of a vacant hangar at the airport. We will be using the cover of two NGOs to stage men and equipment. We have a proprietary relationship with one of these NGOs. The other knows only that we have deep pockets and that we will help to ferry some well-drilling equipment into the bush for them. Many of these NGOs operate on a shoestring and are glad for any financial or material assistance that they can get. However, the NGO that we work directly with does not have that problem. Our initial objective is to get our men and support equipment, along with your medical equipment, to Lusaka and safely in our hangar. Then we will take up the problem of getting across the Zambezi and to our objective in Zimbabwe. It might look like we’re making this up as we go, but that’s not the case. You haven’t had the pleasure of meeting our operational planner, but she is one of the best in the business. She and her team of planners have been working the issues of getting across the border into Zimbabwe and the mechanics of approaching the target. When it comes to breaking into the laboratory proper, she is going to want your help as to how to safely go about it. But that’s still a few days off. For now the drill is to get our people, equipment, and air assets in place at the airport. That done, we will move out into the bush as quickly as possible.”
“So we have aircraft?”
“We do. A special C-130 from Bahrain will bring in most of the men and equipment. Two Bell Jet Rangers will be here as well. All three aircraft will be available to us. When we’re not using them, they’ll be tasked with a variety of humanitarian and community support duties to support our cover story. And candidly, they will do a lot of good when they’re not working for us.”
“Transport aircraft. Helicopters,” Rosenblatt replied. “You must have backing with some very deep pockets. You sure Uncle Sam isn’t paying for this?”
Garrett smiled. “Elvis, I may not be able to tell you everything, but I wouldn’t lie to you. We are privately funded. This also includes the use of commercial communications satellites with dedicated, secure comm channels. As a matter of fact, you’re our biggest security risk.”
“Me!”
“That’s right. A secret government-sponsored operation is almost an oxymoron. Money and people on the government payroll are hard to conceal or lie about. We didn’t want to be in the business of dodging GAO inquiries or misleading congressional oversight committees, so we are a private organization—one that is only known to very few in the government. You are our only government employee, so we’re going to take good care of you.”
“I should hope so,” Rosenblatt said. “But if I’m such a liability, why didn’t you just hire some microbiologist from Johns Hopkins?”
“You’re unique. No one has your experience in dealing with disease. Your security clearance has allowed you to see things in the lab that few civilian researchers have access to. And there’s no one with your background even
at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. You da man, Elvis.”
Their food arrived, and they ate in companionable silence. “How was the burger?” Garrett asked after the waiter cleared the table.
“Well, for my first Zambian cheeseburger, it was okay. The quality of its cheeseburger says a lot about the culture of a nation.” He glanced around the restaurant. “For me, it’s a leading indicator. How was your…whatever it was?”
“I have no idea what it was, but it was delicious.”
Rosenblatt sipped the last of his drink, trying to imagine just where they might be in another week. It was exciting, and somewhat scary. “Who is Benjamin, if I’m allowed to ask?”
“Benjamin Sata is one of our African retainers. His family lives on the outskirts of Lusaka. He arrived yesterday and is looking into a few things to help with the planning effort. There will probably be a need for some local arrangements, and he can do that without attracting attention.”
Rosenblatt nodded and took the last of his drink in a single swallow. “I’m bushed. Think I’ll turn in.”
Garrett signed John Naye’s name to the bill and walked back to the lobby with Rosenblatt. The concierge greeted them by name. John Naye and Greg Wood were important guests, as were all Western businessmen on holiday. Were someone to check on them, they would learn that the two were employed by a Toronto-based commercial real estate firm that did business across Canada. They were here to photograph wild animals, and their passports and visas were in perfect order. By Intercontinental Hotel standards, they were wealthy, but not super wealthy. Rosenblatt headed for the bank of elevators, but Garrett held back.
