“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Hannon shouts.
“Call it an experiment if you will, Dr. Hannon, but there’s really only one thing I want to learn.”
He stands and walks around behind the desk. Hannon cringes away from him and presses himself against the blinds. His eyes grow wide with fear.
“Are you one of the three percent?”
EPILOGUE
“I’m a reporter for the New York Times, for Christ’s sake. I know how to protect my sources,” the man on the other end of the phone says. “I don’t understand the need for all of this cloak- and-dagger nonsense.”
“You will, Mr. Worthington. You will.”
“For all I know, you could be just another crazy conspiracy theorist. You say you have the story of the century? Prove it. You can start by telling me who you are.”
“In due time.”
“Then how the hell am I supposed to know if anything you say is the truth?”
“The facts are easily enough corroborated.”
“Fine. Fine. Let’s get on with it then. I have an interview with the Secretary of State in an hour. I’ll give you fifteen minutes, and then I’m out of here.”
“Where should I begin?”
“Some random point in the middle. Jesus. How about at the beginning? That works well for most people, even those hiding on the other end of an anonymous call from a disposable cell phone.”
“All right then. At the beginning.”
“You’re on the clock. Tick. Tock.”
“In 1976, an outbreak of a viral hemorrhagic fever with a case-fatality rate of ninety percent was reported at a mission hospital run by Flemish nuns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The virus was named after its suspected location of origin, the nearby Ebola River Valley.”
“That’s old news. You’re wasting my time.”
“Bear with me. I’m just setting the stage. Did you know that on July 19th, 1984, the Deputy Director of Research and Technology for the Department of Defense appeared before a House Subcommittee on Appropriations to request funding for a project to produce a synthetic biological agent for which humans had no natural immunity? Fifteen million dollars was allocated to produce this pathogen over the next five to ten years. The Congressional Record shows that according to the plan for the development of this viral agent, the integral characteristic of this new disease would be that it combines the symptomatology of the Ebolavirus with that of the aerosolized Yersinia pestis bacterium, aka the pneumonic plague, which had an equivocal historical fatality rate approaching one hundred percent within at little as twenty-four hours.”
There was a long pause on the other end.
“Where’s your proof?”
“It’s in the Congressional Record. I can’t imagine it will take you more than a few minutes to verify.”
A loud sigh, then the tapping of keystrokes.
“You said you could prove that our own military was responsible for the deaths of more than a thousand American citizens.”
“Do you want to hear the rest?”
The phone clattered. The reporter’s words were muffled by his hand over the speaker. “Call Mrs. Clinton and let her know I’m going to be late, would you?” A moment of silence. “I don’t care how pissed she’s going to be. Tell her to have a cigar while she’s waiting or something.”
“Are you ready to continue?”
“Give me a second to set up my recorder.”
“You’re on the clock, Mr.Worthington. Tick. Tock.”
“Funny. Now talk to me.”
“My story begins on the Fourth of July, 1991…”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This story is obviously a work of fiction and the product of this author’s imagination, but I ask you…could such an event actually happen? Consider the following excerpts from “A History of US Secret Human Experimentation” (© Health News Network) before you make up your mind.
1940: Four hundred prisoners in Chicago are infected with Malaria in order to study the effects of new and experimental drugs to combat the disease. Nazi doctors later on trial at Nuremberg cite this American study to defend their own actions during the Holocaust.
1950: In an experiment to determine how susceptible an American city would be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of bacteria from ships over San Francisco. Monitoring devices are situated throughout the city in order to test the extent of the infection. Many residents become ill with pneumonia-like symptoms.
1955: The CIA, in an experiment to test the ability to infect human populations with biological agents, releases bacteria withdrawn from the Army’s biological warfare arsenal over Tampa Bay, Florida.
1956: The U.S. military releases mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever over Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida. Following each test, Army agents posing as public health officials test the victims for effects.
1966: The U.S. Army dispenses Bacillus subtilis variant niger throughout the New York City subway system. More than a million civilians are exposed when army scientists drop light bulbs filled with the bacteria onto ventilation grates.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael McBride is the bestselling author of Ancient Enemy, Bloodletting, Burial Ground, Condemned, Fearful Symmetry, Innocents Lost, Sunblind, The Coyote, and Vector Borne. His novella Snowblind won the 2012 DarkFuse Readers Choice Award and received honorable mention in The Best Horror of the Year. Sunblind won the 2014 Readers Choice Award for best novel. He lives in Avalanche Territory with his wife and kids.
To explore the author’s other works, please visit www.michaelmcbride.net.
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