Grim Reaper: End of Days

by Steve Alten

  “Mr. Kissin, the Ames strain of anthrax was discovered in a dead cow in Texas back in 1981. The FBI’s primary suspect, the late Bruce Ivins, experimented with the Ames strain as a potential bioweapon while he worked in a biosafety-3 lab located in Fort Detrick.”

  “Correct. But Bruce Ivins sent the strain to Battelle, where the anthrax was converted from Fort Detrick’s wet slurry form into the powdered weaponized form found in the letters addressed to the two senators.”

  “In your opinion, Mr. Kissin, what was the motivation behind this alleged FBI cover-up?”

  “The anthrax letters had ‘Death to America,’ ‘Death to Israel,’ and ‘Allah is Great’ printed in them, a crude propaganda attempt to make the public believe the letters were sent from Muslim terrorists following the events of 9/11. The Bush administration used this fear card to ram the Patriot Act through Congress, even though the evidence overwhelmingly proves that the military-grade anthrax came from labs run by our own intelligence agencies. The Amerithrax investigation metamorphosed into an FBI cover-up soon after the New York Times and Baltimore Sun reported that the Ames strain in the letters had been weaponized, meaning the anthrax had to have come from either Dugway Proving Ground or Battelle. From that point on, the FBI stonewalled, phasing out any reference to weaponization, referring to the anthrax spores as merely dried. This allowed the FBI to paint immunologist Bruce Ivins as a rogue operator in order to divert attention away from Battelle and Dugway. Ivins’s reported suicide in 2008 was a convenient way to wrap things up and close the books on this case before the evidence trail could be traced back to the US intelligence community and Battelle’s private labs. The cold harsh reality, Senator, is that the United States has embarked on a program of secret research into biological weapons that violates the global treaty banning such weapons, and threatens the lives of every citizen on this planet. These programs were begun under the Clinton administration without the president’s knowledge, then embraced during the Bush administration and the tenure of CIA Director George Tenet, who was looking for ways to quote-unquote ‘break the back of biological terrorism.’ As a result, we now have a series of covert and extremely dangerous bioweapons research programs that are being controlled for profit by our own military intelligence.”

  “Can you elaborate more in regards to these secret research programs?”

  “Yes, sir. As explained by the science editor of the New York Times in his book, Germs, in 1997 the CIA funded a covert project called Clear Vision, a program which focused on developing weapon systems that could effectively deliver lab-harvested biowarfare germs. President Clinton was never told about the program; in fact, only a handful of officials knew the program even existed, most of them associated with the military-intelligence industry. A second program, Project Jefferson, run by the DIA at Dugway, is focused on genetically engineering anthrax. Battelle was contracted to modify this anthrax into a weapons-grade form. The anthrax letters sent to Senators Daschle and Leahy contained two grams of this weaponized anthrax, each envelope holding over a trillion live spores per gram, more than 2 million times the average dose necessary to kill a person. It should be noted that Daschle and Leahy were the two Democrats who stood in the way of the Patriot Act being passed.”

  A murmur buzzed through the Senate chambers.

  “Mr. Kissin, in your opinion, how involved is Fort Detrick in this… scandal?”

  “Senator, that’s not an easy question to answer. Fort Detrick serves many masters, including Homeland Security and the National Cancer Institute. I happen to know that there are many scientists at Fort Detrick who take the international treaty banning bioweapons very seriously. The problem is not Fort Detrick itself; the problem is the military-industrial complex and their insane goal to replace détente with full weapons spectrum dominance. And let’s not discount the variable of profit in those plans. What is both terrifying and criminal is the fact that the new 10-billion-dollar lab expansion at Fort Detrick is being secured and managed at a sizeable profit by Battelle, the very organization responsible for weaponizing the anthrax attacks in the first place.”

  “Tell us more about Battelle. I know they’re a private corporation—”

  “—a private corporation that operates in conjunction with the military-intelligence-industrial complex. Battelle maintains a national-security division that offers the services of engineers, chemists, microbiologists, and aerosol scientists that are supported by state-of-the-art laboratories that conduct research in the fields of bioaerosol science and technology. Battelle’s Pharmaceutical division, Battelle-Pharma, has developed a new electrohydrodynamic aerosol that delivers more than 80 percent of a drug into the lungs in an isokinetic cloud of uniformly sized particles, compared to 20 percent efficiency among competitors. To reiterate, the spores used in the anthrax letters were coated with a polyglass which tightly bound the hydrophilic silica to each particle. Bruce Ivins had zero access to this type of advanced technology at Fort Detrick. In short, Senator Gibbons, this is what we mean when we use the term weaponization. It’s the necessary postproduction that allows a bioterror weapon to be used on a large population, be it on pamphlets dropped from airplanes or some other means of delivering a toxin to an enemy.”

  “The chair recognizes the Republican senator from Ohio.”

  Kimberly Helms offered a pert smile. “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Kissin, with all due respect, I have a serious problem with your ‘conspiracy theories’ being made part of the public record. You just testified under oath that the FBI has been involved in a massive cover-up regarding the attempted murder of two US senators, the attacks originating from a covert bioweapons program run by our own intelligence agencies without congressional oversight or even the president’s knowledge. In the process of attempting to frighten the American public watching these proceedings, you managed to smear the good name of the Battelle Corporation, a company that has never been a target of the Amerithrax investigation. As far as I’m concerned—”

  “Everything I stated under oath is true, Senator Helms. Battelle worked on Project Clear Vision, Battelle was contracted to genetically modify the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks, and Battelle is now being paid to manage the biowarfare labs at Fort Detrick. What you refer to as conspiracy theory is conspiracy fact. More important, as a result of this insane black ops program, small unmonitored labs across the United States, funded by $100 billion in taxpayer money, are devising, as we speak, species-threatening agents for which there is neither a vaccine nor cure. And if that doesn’t frighten you, Senator Helms, then perhaps we need to check you for a pulse!”

  * * *

  Ernest Lozano exited the Senate building into a budding September maelstrom. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The western sky had taken on a bizarre appearance — the cloud’s low-hanging ceiling undulating like a forty-foot sea, the distant horizon over Washington, DC, appearing lime green.

  Lozano descended one concrete stair at a time, each weight-bearing step causing his two artificial knees to buckle. Reaching the sidewalk, he limped toward a line of black limousines parked bumper to bumper along two city blocks.

  There were many entry points into the lucrative military intelligence — private industrial complex, but the two most effective remained politics and the military. Lozano’s career had been swept along by the latter, his years spent in Army Intelligence introducing him to gun runners, drug warlords, mercenaries, and despotic dictators — all part of a moving current navigated by clandestine factions within the CIA and other intel organizations. It was an arena that suffered no fools nor sense of morality, its operators using fear and fraud to create new niches within the global marketplace.

  What few Americans understood was that the “war on terror” was big business, and big business had to be protected at all costs — costs defined in terms of swaying the legislation in power, be it through charitable contributions, political favors, or campaign contributions. It was the military-industrial complex that ruled the roost, an
d the new game in town was biowarfare. Unlike weapon systems, biowarfare monies could be tucked out of sight, budgeted under everything from Homeland Security to the National Cancer Institute, or farmed out to private companies like Battelle.

  Of course, there were also practical military applications to consider.

  To Ernest Lozano and the “Pentagon piranhas” he did business with, biological warfare was the wave of the future. Oil refineries and natural-gas pipelines were vital commodities that had to be protected; without them, populations would starve, economies would collapse. Tanks and soldiers were profitable, but their resources were limited to the availability of steel and flesh. A biological weapon was clean, quick, and indiscriminating in its lethality. Plus, there were plenty of residual profits to be made by allies in the pharmaceutical industry when it came time to mass-produce a cure. The swine flu “epidemic” had been a trial run — a resounding financial success.

  Lozano walked to the last limousine. He verified the license plate, then signaled to the female driver, a short-haired woman in her forties, her black turtleneck sweater barely concealing a bodybuilder’s physique and her 9mm sidearm.

  Like Lozano, Sheridan Ernstmeyer was former CIA. Unlike Lozano, Sheridan had chosen combat over cash, joining the Joint Special Operations Command. The JSOC was an independent wing of Special Ops, exempt from any congressional or departmental oversight. Established after 9/11, the unit had been used as an assassination ring to eliminate perceived enemies of the United States, both home and abroad.

  Sheridan unlocked the doors, allowing Lozano to climb inside the limo.

  Alone in back was a spry seventy-three-year-old man. Silky white hair yielded to a receding hairline, magnifying the gray-blue slightly upturned eyes — an effect resulting from a recent face-lift.

  Known around Washington circles as a “ruthless intellect,” Bertrand DeBorn had established his tough-guy image during the late seventies, when he and two of his fellow foreign policy advisors in the Carter administration were reported missing on a three-day hunting trip in the Alaskan wilderness. A search-and-rescue mission had been deployed for more than a week when DeBorn was reportedly found by loggers, “delirious, dehydrated, and suffering from frostbite,” thirteen miles southwest of his hunting lodge. Rumors of a “savage bear attack” were kept purposely vague, the only verifiable injuries coming from the frostbite that had cost DeBorn two toes on each of his feet.

  The remains of his dovish-leaning colleagues were never found.

  Old European blood ran through the National Security Advisor’s veins. As a young man, DeBorn’s paternal grandfather had survived Stalin’s Great Revolution by trekking from Siberia to Warsaw. Once in Poland, he pretended to toe the Communist Party line rather than face a firing squad. DeBorn’s father, Vasiyl, had been far more vocal about his hatred toward totalitarianism. Working covertly as a Cold War correspondent, Vasiyl smuggled letters out of Poland that detailed torture at the hands of the communist regime.

  When he was eleven, Bertrand had witnessed his father’s arrest by the secret police. Vasiyl DeBorn was tortured in prison over the next six months before being executed.

  Bertrand dedicated the rest of his life to fighting the Communist Manifesto. His anti-Soviet views would play to a large audience in Washington during the 1970s and ’80s. A hawkish Democrat, DeBorn was one of the architects of a plan to dethrone the Shah of Iran in order to strengthen Islamic Fundamentalism. By arming the Mujahadeen, DeBorn hoped the Afghani freedom fighters could give the communists their own debilitating version of Vietnam. They did far more, forcing the communists out of Afghanistan to a rousing defeat. That his plan indirectly gave rise to the birth of al-Qaeda never bothered DeBorn, who considered it a small price to pay for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  A decade later, the Bush/Cheney White House would use al-Qaeda to justify their own “war on terror,” a decision that infuriated DeBorn, who saw Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the real enemy of democracy. Working behind the scenes, DeBorn helped seal the deal with Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski to deploy a U.S. missile interceptor system in Poland, a strategic move designed to incite officials in Moscow. Years later, he would team with Vice President Cheney to convince Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to attack the South Ossetian rebels during the 2008 Summer Olympics in China, an action designed to unleash a very public counterattack by Russia.

  A founding member of both the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, Bertrand DeBorn was a man on a mission to change the world, the cost be damned. The Washington power broker had backed Eric Kogelo’s candidacy in the last presidential election, serving as a military advisor, offering the voting public the assurances they needed that the junior senator could handle the war on terror while bringing a conclusion to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Having spent many long hours conversing with the candidate, DeBorn saw in Kogelo a conservative in liberal’s clothing who could inspire like John F. Kennedy yet whose foreign views could be manipulated, aligning certain global variables necessary to bring about a new paradigm sought by both neoconservatives and hawkish Democrats for decades: a New World Order.

  Novus Ordo Mundi: one government overseeing one united global economy serviced by a single monetary system. One language: English. One unified code of laws policed by one integrated military force shining its light of justice on every terrorist organization and third-world dictatorship cowering in the shadows of global apathy. To conspiracy wackos, the NWO represented an Orwellian nightmare, but to the world’s richest and most influential movers and shakers, it was the only future that made any sense. Like it or not, the era of cheap oil that moved the global economy was quickly drawing to a close, bringing a forecast of famine and recession. Change was necessary to prevent anarchy and ensure the market’s survival… a survival of the fittest. Like an unkempt forest, populations had to be pruned to prevent a potential blaze. Left to the tree huggers and liberal extremists, everything would end up burning to the ground — taking civilization with it.

  And nothing effected change like war. DeBorn was an experienced hand in the game, having influenced Ayatollah Khomeni to rise against the Shah of Iran by using Iranian students to take over the American embassy, thereby strengthening a Muslim resolve that would be needed to challenge the Soviets. Reagan and the first President Bush had used DeBorn’s war strategy to pit Iran against Iraq. More recently, Bush II and Cheney had created their own “war on terror” as an excuse to take over Iraqi oil reserves and secure a natural-gas pipeline across Afghanistan.

  Now Bertrand DeBorn and his “commission” would instigate a completely new war — this one designed to spawn their New World Order. Iran, Syria, and Lebanon would be toppled first, followed eventually by Saudi Arabia. Any nation that refused to participate would simply be subdued or eliminated, their resources confiscated, all the while boosting the profit margins of key Western companies heavily invested in warfare. The only downside to ongoing combat operations was its drain on America’s middle class, but then the middle class had no future in a New World Economy. As anticipated, higher gas prices had succeeded in further segregating the masses into the haves and have-nots, making society easier to manage. One either staked a claim at the banquet table or was relegated to servicing the needs of the upper class — that was “Law of the Jungle” economics.

  * * *

  Ernest Lozano climbed in the backseat of the limo, waiting to be acknowledged.

  Bertrand DeBorn continued reading his New York Times, never bothering to look up. “How bad?”

  “Bad. Kissin outed Battelle.”

  “Battelle will rebound,” said DeBorn, turning to the op ed page. “They’ll discover the cure to the next pandemic and the stock will split. What is needed now is the pandemic. You saw this morning’s SAT images?”

  “Six Russian-made Topol-M SS-27 mobile ICBMs, each missile having a seven-thousand-kilometer strike range.”

  “Eleven thousand kilomete
rs, and it was a dog and pony show, orchestrated in part by Iran’s biggest oil recipient, the Chinese. The clock is ticking, Mr. Lozano. We need a suitable biological solution.”

  “Yeah, well anthrax is out. And since Battelle is out, it has to be something coming out of Fort Detrick.” Lozano searched his BlackBerry files. “West Nile virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, SARS, tuberculosis, typhus…”

  DeBorn folded the newspaper, clearly perturbed. “No, no. These are all BSL-3 toxins. I need a BSL-4, something that strikes the masses with the fear of Marburg or Ebola but carries the weaponization component of the Ames strain.”

  Lozano continued searching his files. “Lassa fever is Level-4, so is Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. Wait a moment, here’s something new… Project Scythe. It’s a BSL-4 contaminant, with a small R & D team attached, headed by an unknown, a microbiologist named Mary Klipot.”

  “Scythe… I like the sound of that. What’s the bacilli history?”

  “Yersinia pestis—bubonic plague.”

  DeBorn smiled. The Black Death was a true pandemic. In only a few short years, it wiped out more than half the population of Europe and Asia. “What did this Klipot woman find?”

  “Looks like they found the living virus.”

  “Who else has access to Scythe?”

  “Besides command, just her lab assistant, another level-four geek named Andrew Bradosky.”

  “Get to him.” DeBorn laid his head back.

  “What’s your timetable? No disrespect, but after today, we may not be the only buyer seeking product. I need to know the extent of my resources—”