Germ Read online

  More important than the room’s aesthetics, thought Reynolds, was its security. A grid of fine wires embedded in the walls, ceiling, floor, and single door completely enveloped the room with an electromagnetic field. The air itself, pushed in and pulled out of two large vents in the ceiling, went through filters charged with the same

  electromagnetic field. No signal of any kind—from the timbre of the human voice to the most sophisticated electronic data pulses—penetrated this barrier. It was one of perhaps a half dozen rooms in the world absolutely impervious to eavesdropping. There were no phone lines, no permanent computers, no power outlets or electric wiring to transmit signals to the outside world—a method of eavesdropping known as “carrier current.” The same type of power cells submarines used energized the room’s lights and needed replacing only once a year. Though visitors navigated a battery of X-ray machines and ohm detectors, the guards manning these machines looked for recording devices, not bugs, which the electromagnetic field would render useless. Computers brought into the room had to be TEMPEST certified, meaning the transient electromagnetic pulses they emanated were too low to be detected by devices designed to capture them from the atmosphere and recreate the data they represented.

  Reynolds turned from a disturbingly violent monochrome by H. R. Giger and hobbled to a rectory table where his laptop waited with more patience than he himself could manage. Reaching to touch the closed lid, he caught a slight tremble in his hand. He clamped it into a fist and watched it as he might a supposedly dead snake.

  He heard the door open and looked up to see John Franklin stepping through the threshold, a guard leaning in behind him to pull the door closed again.

  “Kendrick, what is it?” the president asked. In his late forties, square-jawed and blue-eyed, he was an aging golden boy whose stature and refinement reflected a life of privilege and spoils. The man’s thick hair was artificially silvered because an image consultant had told him it would suggest experience and wisdom.

  Kendrick listened for the click of the door’s latch and the hydraulic swelling of its seal, which gave the room its Zero Acoustic Leakage rating. When he heard it, he said, “We have a problem. Not a little one.”

  One of the president’s eyebrows rose slightly, a practiced maneuver.

  Kendrick continued, “As you know, one of my projects has been looking for a man named Karl Litt.”

  The president sat on the sofa, crossed a leg over his knee. He searched his memory. “The scientist who disappeared …”

  “Yes. Almost thirty years ago. But, Jack, there are some things about him I never told you.” To the president’s furrowed brow, Kendrick shrugged and added casually, “Plausible denial and all that.”

  That got his attention, Kendrick noticed. He pushed his fingers under the laptop, thought about his cane and tripping and the thing crashing to the floor, and said, “I’m sorry … Could you?”

  The president hopped up and moved the computer to the coffee table. They both sat. Kendrick opened the laptop and pushed its power button.

  “I’m not going to bore you with details you’ve probably heard a hundred times. The preliminaries are simple. Around the end of World War II, the U.S. recruited hundreds of German scientists. Many of them we brought in covertly, so other countries didn’t know who we had or what we were doing. Almost every case proved invaluable to our technological advancement, to our ability to defend this country. Physicists like Wernher von Braun and Otto Hahn made the atomic energy program in Las Cruces. Hubertus Strughold went to the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph, where he continued his human experiments in radiation warfare. Gerhard Schrader, who developed the nerve gas called tabun, went to the CIA’s Chemical Biological Warfare program. They were everywhere, working on everything from jet propulsion to mind control techniques.”

  He glanced at the computer monitor. It was cycling up.

  “I worked primarily with biologists. I met Karl Litt when his father sent him and thirty-four other gifted children to us instead of sending the scientists we were expecting. Long story short, my bioweapons program was at least as successful as the other programs. Ours was the most secret. Nobody likes the idea of intentionally using germs to kill people. They’re too unpredictable, too mutable. Nuclear power is limited. If every bomb in existence ignited, they’d destroy the world. But if one or ten or a hundred went off, it’d be awful, absolutely, but most of the population would survive.

  “On the other hand, one very aggressive germ could go on forever, killing its host, moving to the next person and the next, exponentially, mutating to defeat our attempts to stop it. Where a bomb kills quickly, death by virus can be horrendously slow, unimaginably painful. Plus, as we disintegrated from the inside out, we’d get the added pleasure of watching our loved ones bleeding out around us.”

  The president’s face registered his disgust. He rose, walked to a credenza, and lifted a portion of its top. He removed a decanter and two crystal glasses.

  “Glenlivet?” he asked.

  “Thank you.” Kendrick looked across the room at a vividly rendered oil painting of David’s triumph over Goliath, in which the boy warrior had not only decapitated the giant but proceeded to devour his oversized heart.

  The president returned to the couch, arrayed the glasses on the table beside the laptop, and poured in two fingers. He thought a moment, then doubled the volume in each glass. He handed Kendrick one and sipped from the other.

  Kendrick pulled in a mouthful, savored it, swallowed. Holding the glass just under his chin, he said, “At the end of World War II, the Soviet army discovered a biowarfare factory at Dyhernfurth, Germany. The idea that the Nazis were making such things infuriated the world even more than their conventional war machine did. In 1979, an outbreak of anthrax poisoning in Sverdlovsk, USSR, was attributed to an accident at a Soviet germ-warfare factory. Soviet citizens and people worldwide were outraged. The incident sowed the seeds that eventually strangled Communism.” He sipped. “People don’t like that stuff.”

  The president nodded. “That’s the reason we’ve stopped pursuing it.”

  Kendrick smiled. “Not completely. As a nation, we can’t let other countries advance beyond us in this field, if for no other purpose than to understand what’s possible and develop defenses against it.”

  “The Geneva Protocol.”’

  Kendrick bowed his head in respect, surprised that Jack Franklin knew the citation. The Geneva Protocol of 1925, a treaty among the League of Nations, outlawed the offensive use of chemical and biological warfare agents but allowed their use to defend against attack. The treaty was still in effect.

  He said, “In ‘69, Nixon proclaimed that the U.S. unilaterally renounced any use of biological and toxin weapons, and ordered the destruction of all of the country’s biological warfare stockpiles. His administration then made quite a show of converting the biological warfare research facility at Fort Detrick to a cancer research laboratory. Other facilities suffered similar fates.”

  The president scowled, serious. “I am aware that several facilities survived and continued … experimenting, developing, whatever it is they do.”

  “In the spirit of the Geneva Protocol, the ultrasecret nature of our germ program allowed us to keep a few facilities up and running, the most clandestine labs.”

  The president nodded.

  “What you don’t know is that Karl Litt had a particular interest in developing race-specific diseases.”

  “Race-specific? You mean—”

  “He wanted to target particular people groups and annihilate them.”

  The president started to speak, then chose instead to empty his glass into his mouth.

  Kendrick said, “I think it was a remnant of his father’s influence, his father’s work. Josef Litt taught his son extraordinary things in the field of science. He may have instilled a distaste for Jews as well. If so, he hid it well. I never saw it overtly displayed.” He shrugged. “Or it was something Karl wanted to do
in honor of his father. He loved him very much, and over the years, I think he came to idolize him.”

  “You’re talking about the Final Solution.” The president shook his head. “Jews are not a race.”

  “Most Jews trace their lineage back to a group of Semitic, nomadic tribes dwelling in the eastern Mediterranean area before 1300 BC—the Hebrews. That gives them an ethnicity that population geneticists can identify. For years, biologists have possessed the technology to discern between ethnically defined populations. The same way we can identify certain physical traits commonly attributed to people of a particular heritage, biologists can examine DNA for ethnic traits. Litt focused his efforts on aligning pathogens with these ethnic markers.”

  Kendrick fell quiet a moment, remembering. “Litt told me once that he’d found a DNA characteristic unique to Ashkenazi Jews, those who settled in central and eastern Europe, and whose members include most American Jews. For some evolutionary reason, Ashkenazim are prone to ten inherited disorders—Tay-Sachs, ulcerative colitis, Gaucher’s disease, I forget what else. Most of them are caused by recessive genes, meaning that symptoms appear only if two copies of the mutant gene are inherited, one from each parent. Litt was trying to mutate the second gene in people who had inherited only one. He abandoned the idea when he couldn’t figure out how to accelerate the disease’s effects once the mutation occurred. Victims simply took too long to succumb.”

  “That’s insane,” the president said quietly. “We supported this research?”

  “Of course. Think of the applications of a substance that could instantly incapacitate an enemy while leaving our own men unaffected. Vietnam, Desert Storm—in both cases, our troops were in close combat with an army ethnically distinct from most Americans.”

  “So much for the melting pot.”

  “Some of our men would, no doubt, carry the ethnic markers of the enemy, and they would die. There’s no way around that, at least for now. But the losses on our side would be insignificant compared to the losses incurred during conventional war.”

  Kendrick watched the president absorb this. He felt the presence of the room’s vile artwork pressing in on him. The collection, which he’d always suspected was an attempt to muster courage and aggression in the men who would gather here to decide on issues of war, seemed merely repugnant in light of the current conversation.

  “But … genocide?” the president said finally.

  “Genocide would occur if the virus was used indiscriminately or maliciously, yes,” Kendrick agreed. “But that would never be our intention.”

  “Is it Lift’s intention?” Something occurred to him, and he squared his shoulders at Kendrick. “Are you saying Litt has perfected this … this Jew-killing virus? Kendrick, is he planning an attack on the Jews?”

  Kendrick suppressed an urge to lower his head. Instead, he leaned forward. “It’s much worse than that, Jack. Much worse.”

  seventy-seven

  The laptop displayed a menu of the files Julia Matheson had sent him. Kendrick reached for the track pad. He said, “Watch these videos closely. The first one shows a field test of a virus—Ebola.” A village with dirt roads appeared on the screen. As a black man stepped out from one of the shacks, Kendrick continued. “Ebola is very similar to the rabies virus. In fact, it was created in the Elk Mountain lab during Litt’s tenure.”

  Jack Franklin nodded, then his brows came together. “Whoa, what?”

  Kendrick tapped a key to make the video pause.

  “Litt created Ebola?”

  “All his fiddling with the rabies virus,” Kendrick confirmed. “Trying to make it more virulent, more lethal, faster acting. Before we knew it, it wasn’t rabies anymore. It was something new.”

  “But the outbreaks in … uh …”

  “The first one occurred in Sudan in 1976, after Litt disappeared. Of course, it wasn’t called Ebola when it was in our lab. He called it Zorn, or Zorn des Gottes—wrath of God. It wasn’t until I saw a slide of Ebola, like an ampersand or G clef in music with a long tail, that I knew Karl was out there somewhere, perfecting his creation, field-testing it.”

  The president stared vacantly into a dark corner of the room. He had been jarred out of his presidential persona; it was as a member of the human race that he was considering what Karl had done. Kendrick hoped to keep him in that frame of mind, at least until his presentation’s coup d’etat. He lifted the decanter and refilled their glasses. The president gazed down at the swirling amber, then brought the glass to his lips. He nodded at the laptop. Kendrick restarted the video.

  As Jack Franklin watched the man on the screen succumb to Ebola, a thin film of perspiration broke out on the chief executive’s upper lip and forehead. Several times he glanced over at Kendrick, who would nod grimly. The second video began right after the first ended.

  Kendrick tilted to one side and fished the meerschaum pipe out of his right jacket pocket. Then he leaned the other way and pulled a small leather pouch out of the opposite pocket. He packed a wad of tobacco from the pouch into the top of God’s head, taking great care in tucking straggly strands into the mound. He stuck the pipe between his teeth. He stashed the pouch, withdrew a lighter from the same pocket, and waved a two-inch flame over the bowl.

  The video wound to its conclusion, and the menu screen took its place.

  “The man at the end?”

  The president nodded.

  “Karl Litt.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was exposed to an early strain of Zorn. It … changed him. Whatever it did, it must have been wearing away at his body all these years.” He pulled on the pipe, then blew out a billow of smoke, which vanished into an air vent. “We identified the abandoned air base from the second video. And this …”

  He selected a file. The screen filled with a map of the eastern seaboard, the Caribbean, and South America. He pointed at a red do: blinking over Chattanooga.

  “This is a real-time recording of a satellite tracking operation. It’s a plane that eventually lands on that airstrip.”

  “You know where he is.”

  “One more thing.” He called up a map of the United States. A dozen or so areas glowed red. He zoomed in on one of them, which resolved itself into a distinct egg-shaped pattern with map markings in blue under it. “What does this look like?”

  “Chicago.”

  “Look at the red superimposed over it.”

  The president studied it. The color was blood-red near its center and faded irregularly to a light pink. Freckles of white permeated the entire colored area. The president’s eyes flared wider. “It’s a … blast pattern.”

  “Except less round.”

  “Yes … yes …” He seemed to be having trouble breathing.

  “It’s a biochemical disbursement pattern,” Kendrick said. “The dark red shows the vicinity of the initial release.” He touched the mouthpiece of his pipe to the screen. “The shape is defined by estimating wind direction and speed, humidity, obstructions, vector weight, and so on.”

  The president nodded. Kendrick knew he’d seen such diagrams before, attached to defense budgets, showing hypothetical terrorism scenarios. But one thing was new.

  “What are the white dots?”

  “Targets,” Kendrick answered simply. “Specific targets, specific addresses. Look here.” Clicking on the keyboard, he brought up the list of names, addresses, and medical procedures. The data began scrolling like movie credits. Name after name flashed past. “Every white dot on the map represents one of these names. They all fall within twenty geographic areas of the United States.”

  “I don’t understand,” the president said, watching the names blur by. “Litt identified his victims by name? Why?”

  “To prove he could.” He jabbed the pipe between his lips and immediately spat out a short stream of smoke.

  “So many …”

  “Ten thousand. Twenty sites, five hundred per site.”

  The president jerk
ed his head up as though he’d been slapped. A fiery redness rimmed his eyes. “All Jews?”

  Kendrick shrugged. “Could be anyone. Jews, African-Americans. Asians, Caucasians. I guess you can say Litt’s become less discriminating with age.”

  The president looked from Kendrick back to the flowing data on the screen. He reached out and, using a finger from each hand, jabbed key after key, apparently at random. “Stop this thing! Stop it—!”

  Kendrick hit the spacebar. The names froze in place.

  “This is obscene,” the president said, angry, disgusted. He stood, stepped purposely for the door, stopped. He studied the glass in his hand, drained it. Without turning, he said, “Your assessment can’t be right. A biological attack with a pathogen that affects everybody? White dots would cover the entire red pattern. Everyone would succumb. Imprecision and mass casualties are the hallmark of biochemical weapons. What’s the point in identifying a thousand victims out of millions?”

  “I said could be anyone, not everyone. Litt knows who his virus will kill. He chose them.”

  The president turned. “Chose them?”

  Kendrick reclined back into the sofa, draping one arm across the seat back, the other raised to pull the pipe from his mouth. “Apparently Litt has designed a strain of the Ebola virus that seeks out specific individuals through their DNA. Once released into the atmosphere, the virus probably travels from host to host like a flu bug, but harmless. It checks the DNA of each host, comparing it to some set of instructions he has encoded within the virus. If it matches, it turns into full-blown Ebola; if it doesn’t, it moves on to another host … until it finds a match.”

  Kendrick was calm, relaxed. He knew Jack Franklin. The man had not reached the pinnacle by following anyone’s lead, by drinking anyone’s Kool-Aid. He had a habit of responding differently from the people around him. If you wanted him to remain calm, you came at him in a tizzy; if you wanted him worked up—