“Make no mistake,” Ranga continued. “In every corner of the world people dream of living like an American. But that means each person consumes six times as much food, water, and fuel as the worldwide average. That would be the equivalent of a planet with fifty billion people on it.”
A collective gasp escaped from the audience.
“Like any population growing out of control, be it animals, insects, or bacteria, such growth ends in a crash. Our species will eventually crash as we destroy the host and starve.”
“The host?” It was one of the other panelists.
“The earth is our host,” Ranga replied, then turned back to the crowd. “The real solution lies not in growing more food but in reducing the population. The sooner we take action the less radical it will need to be, but based on religions that demand we all go forth and multiply and on both cultural and secular morality of reproductive rights, we will likely only act when it is far too late. At that point the action will have to be drastic. Beyond voluntary birth control, beyond individual decisions, beyond the Chinese one-child rule.”
An uneasy question came from somewhere off camera. “What exactly are you suggesting?”
Ranga cleared his throat again. “Just as it is possible for us to engineer crops, it is within our grasp to engineer humankind. A virus could be created that would spread randomly from person to person. It would bring with it genetic coding that would either sterilize some percentage of those it attached to, or reduce fertility or drastically shorten life spans. If the average life span were forty to fifty years — as it was once in this world — population growth would be severely curtailed if not reversed.”
“What!” someone shouted.
“Are you out of your mind?” a second voice said.
“Please,” Ranga said, speaking over a murmuring, restless crowd. “This may be the only real solution. There are either too many of us making too many babies, or we live far too long. One variable must change. It is up to us which one.”
It was an academic argument, delivered to the wrong crowd. They broke into jeers and shouts.
“You’re a freak,” someone shouted.
“Nazi!”
“Calm down,” the moderator requested.
Other shouts came forth, but Ranga did not back down.
“You live here in a big country, with plenty of space. But go to other places. See the crowds in the slums. See the children naked and begging. That is overpopulation. Not a crowded freeway or a line at a restaurant. It’s hundreds of thousands begging. People crawling on each other like ants.”
A shoe came flying onto the stage, barely missing Ranga’s head. He ducked and then looked out into the crowd. The discord was so loud it became hard to hear him, even with the microphone.
“You have to understand!” he shouted, trying to get his point across. “If we don’t do this ourselves, nature will eventually do it for us. Nature will always cull the herd.”
More shouts and accusations came from the crowd. The moderator took the microphone and started pleading for calm. People began to walk out, others pressing up onto the stage pointing and shouting. The room became chaotic; something crashed into the table, and then the tape ended.
Hawker stared at the static on the screen, blindingly aware that Ranga had used the very term written in the cult’s letter. If the jury was still out on Ranga, they had to be leaning toward conviction now.
“I’m sorry,” Danielle said.
He appreciated her words, appreciated that there was no “I told you so” tone to her voice.
“Not your fault,” he said.
His thoughts turned back to the tape, and the friend who now sounded like some version of the Nazi regime’s Dr. Mengele. Ranga looked awfully young, thinner, smoother face, fuller head of hair.
“When was that tape made?”
“In ’98,” Moore said. “At a conference on food production, two years before he went on the run.”
Hawker looked up at the ceiling and exhaled. “Well, my old friend certainly sounds like a lunatic,” he admitted.
He looked at Danielle and tried to telegraph his regret without saying it. She turned to Moore.
“So what are we dealing with here?”
“Walter Yang and the CDC are analyzing the data you pulled off the computer. I’ll let you know what we can find.”
“And this group?” Hawker asked. “Can they really be capable of what they’re threatening?”
“They wouldn’t be the first to try,” Moore said. “Jim Jones poisoned more than nine hundred of his own people with cyanide in Guyana. He and his thugs shot everyone who tried to interfere, including a U.S. congressman. The Aum Shinrikyo cult dumped Sarin nerve gas into the subways of Tokyo. Twelve people were killed, thousands more injured, but the scary part came when police raided the cult’s headquarters. They found anthrax and Ebola cultures, explosives, hallucinogenic drugs, and storehouses of chemical precursors. Based on what they had on-site, they could have manufactured enough Sarin to kill four million people.”
“I remember that,” Hawker said. “I didn’t know they had anthrax and Ebola. Why didn’t they use them?”
“They weren’t ready,” Moore said. “Rumor had it the police were about to raid them, so they went suicidal. Same with Jim Jones. He was getting a lot of heat about keeping people trapped there; that’s what Congressman Ryan went to check out. When things start to look bad, the leaders of these groups snap. Suicide pacts, murder suicide, mass killings. The endgame is always the same.”
“Whoever’s leading this cult, he sounds a lot like Shoko Asahara,” Moore added. “The guy who led the Japanese cult. His obsession was bringing about some type of apocalypse that combined the writings of Revelation with Buddhism and the predictions of Nostradamus.”
“Another lunatic,” Hawker noted.
“Like I said, they don’t have to make sense,” Moore noted. “They just have to get others to follow them. In Asahara’s case those who didn’t were jailed in cells at their headquarters or killed. In Guyana the same thing. Waco was the same.”
“We’ve seen that they’re capable of murder,” Danielle said. “And torture as well, in a very direct one-on-one style. Releasing a bioweapon might be easy by comparison.”
Moore nodded. “And if Ranga’s work went the way it seemed to, they might be close to possessing one: a weapon with the power to either sterilize a good portion of the human race or cut their life spans in half.”
For the first time in a long while Hawker felt a wave of uncertainty. He couldn’t imagine his old friend being part of such a group, but he’d obviously been just that. At least he’d tried to break away. “We have to stop these psychopaths, whatever it costs.”
He looked at Danielle, who nodded.
“So what do we do in Beirut?” she asked.
“Bashir was a known dealer in stolen art,” Moore said. “Beirut is one center of that trade. Gateway to Europe, as it’s often been called. We know somebody there who might be able to help. Might be able to get you into the party.”
“For what?” Hawker asked, thinking it sounded like an absurd waste of time.
“To follow the lead,” Moore replied sternly.
Danielle took the middle ground. “You think they were using stolen art to fund Ranga’s experiments, or even the cult itself?”
Moore shook his head. “We thought of that. And we haven’t been able to link anything else to them, so maybe. But the word is Ranga was a buyer, not a seller. Why? We have no idea. One of you is going there to find out.”
“One of us?” Danielle said.
“Our other lead is in Dubai,” Moore explained. “A venture capital fund-raiser for a start-up drug company called Paradox. They once claimed Ranga as one of their founders.”