Purdue stepped out from the group and attempted to take the major aside for a quiet word, but Major Alfsson did not respond well to Purdue's light touch on his arm. He stopped in his tracks and stood at ease, refusing to be drawn aside, forcing Purdue to state his business in front of the company.
"Major Alfsson," Purdue said quietly, "I realize the dangers of having a large group of people in that room, but I specialize in nanotechnology and have experience with ballistics, so having another look in there is of particular professional interest to me. I wonder if I might persuade you…"
"The hangar is out of bounds, sir. You are welcome to explore the rest of the facility. Under escort."
Purdue pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. "Yes, I understand that. However, I am quite capable of taking responsibility for my own safety. Just five minutes, that's all I ask — no photography, no disturbance, just the briefest of looks—"
Major Alfsson raised a hand to halt Purdue's speech. Sam, who was pressed up against Ziv Blomstein in the crowded corridor, felt the bodyguard instinctively reach for the place where his gun had been. "Sir. The hangar is out of bounds. You are welcome to explore—"
"Damn it, man, I want to see what's in there!" Purdue exploded, his face flushing a sudden pink. "Do you have any idea what you're obstructing here? Let me in or I promise you, you won't—"
"Escort this man back to his quarters immediately." The major's tone was curt, dismissive. Instantly a pair of soldiers marched forward and stood on either side of Purdue, who gave an irritated snort but did not push his luck any longer. He beckoned Blomstein to accompany him and allowed himself to be led away. Moments later Major Alfsson and the rest of his company disappeared back toward the control room, leaving only the expedition party, their guards, and the soldiers blocking the entrance to the hangar.
"Well, I don't know about you guys," said Fatima, as the sound of marching footsteps died away in the distance, "but I really want to see these labs. Come on."
The air in the laboratory was musty and still, apparently undisturbed for decades. For several long moments the group was completely silent, each lost in thought. Nina and Matlock briefly set their differences aside, united by the presence of their specialist subject all around them. They gravitated toward the neat stack of notebooks that sat at the end of the nearest workbench, but their hands hovered above the books, neither prepared to disturb them yet.
It was Admiral Whitsun who picked up the first book. He lifted it lovingly, holding it to his nose and inhaling the scent of old paper. "This may be the very laboratory in which my father worked," he whispered, half to himself. He opened the notebook. It was filled with labeled sketches of what looked like cells, accompanied by densely written paragraphs in tiny, neat writing. "It is one of my great regrets that I never learned the language of my ancestral country," the admiral mused, tracing his finger along a line of handwriting. "Professor Matlock, Dr. Gould — would you be so kind as to tell me what we have here?"
The two historians huddled around the book in the admiral's hands. "It seems to be the results of an experiment concerning a particular chemical compound," said Professor Matlock. "There's a hypothesis here concerning the use of sodium and… I'm not entirely sure of this, it's quite technical vocabulary… a couple of other elements. It's speculating about using this compound as an antidote to something. Then there's a description of how the experiment was carried out — lamenting the lack of suitable test subjects, I notice — and a note suggesting that it was inconclusive. Have you anything to add, Nina?"
"I don't think so," said Nina. "As you say, the vocabulary is quite technical and there are some abbreviations that aren't helping. I would need to spend a bit of time with these. But Fatima, you might be able to help."
"I'll try," Fatima said, approaching and leaning in to look at the books. "I don't speak much German, though. All I know is the really, really basic stuff."
"You might know what the drawings are, though," Nina suggested, handing the book over. For a few long minutes Fatima studied the meticulous little sketches.
"They look like diagrams," Fatima said. "This one here is a virus — Filoviridae. Maybe that's what they were trying to find a cure for, although this seems like a really weird place to do it."
"Why is that?" Nina asked.
"Filovirus — it's stuff like Ebola, viruses that you find in places such as Africa. Countries near the equator, you know? I wouldn't have thought it would be that big of a problem here."
"I suppose if you're planning world domination, anything's fair game," Sam said. "I mean, you wouldn't want to get close to conquering the whole world only to have your army decimated by a virus, would you?"
Fatima looked skeptical. She was still flicking through the pages of the notebook, and with every drawing she looked at she seemed a little more concerned. "I'd love to think that it was as straightforward as that, Sam," she said. "But think about it — what's in the room next to these labs?"
"That rocket thing. A missile, was it?"
"Yes, a missile. An intercontinental ballistic missile, I think. So I'm guessing…" She trailed off and rubbed the heel of her hand against her forehead as if to soothe her brain. "Look, I'm sorry if this is going to sound alarmist, but… I think what we're seeing here is an early attempt at biological warfare. It looks like they were trying to find some way to engineer a virus that works something like Ebola, but more communicable and with a lower incubation time."
"And that means?"
"Well, it would mean that if that missile hit a populated area, in addition to the damage caused by the missile strike itself there would be an outbreak of a really virulent hemorrhagic fever. We're talking pain, nausea, diarrhea, respiratory tract hell, bleeding from places you really don't want to bleed from… not to mention probably hallucinations and delirium. It would not be pretty. And there would be no cure, so the mortality rate would probably be something like 70–80 percent."
Sam gave a long, low whistle as the thought of an attack on that scale sank in. Like any adult, he had always been aware of biological warfare — but only as a remote possibility, an abstract concept, a thought experiment played out in the conversations that followed zombie movies. He knew about the occasional training exercises that the emergency services carried out, but even those seemed more like games than serious preparation for a real attack. Even now, the idea of 80 percent of a place's population being swiftly wiped out by a disease seemed crazy — but standing in the laboratory, knowing that there was a partly-built ICBM in the next room, it suddenly felt like a more realistic and far more chilling prospect.
"That's sick," Jefferson said. His suspiciously golden tan had faded by a couple of shades. "Who were these people?"
"It's nothing that isn't going on now," Sam pointed out. "Your government's done it. Our government's done it. They're probably still doing it. There are certainly plenty of dodgy organizations experimenting with biological weapons. These guys were just ahead of their time."
"Are you making excuses for the Nazis?" Jefferson demanded, looking outraged.
"He's saying that war tends to involve unpalatable things, no matter who's doing them," Nina butted in. "But I wonder whether they really were ahead of their time, or whether this place was in use for longer than we originally thought. Look — there's a note here referring to the daughter of the scientist who owned this notebook. It refers to her as 'sie' instead of 'es,' but that German pronoun didn't change until sometime in the 1960s. Either people were using that form earlier than I thought, or someone was still working here after the change was made."