“Do I need to remind you of the consequences if you fail to deliver it?”
“Fuck you!” John was done being servile. The man on the other end of the line might be his master, but he was long past his willingness to be treated like a dog by anyone. “I’m well aware of the outcome if I fail. I know exactly how dangerous this thing is.”
“Good. Then at least, in that, we are in agreement.” The man coughed and then said, “I will call you in a week to see how you have progressed.”
“No, you won’t. I’ll call you when we have it, and if you’d like to be the first to have her in your possession, you will remember to permit me to do my job.”
John hung up the sat phone, ending the call.
On the desk in front of him, there was only one photo. It was a picture of him and his daughter at her graduation after she had completed her undergraduate degree at MIT. She had a big smile on her face, and you could see the pride on his own face from a mile away.
He studied that picture for a moment.
What have I done?
John Wolfgang had more phone calls to make.
His business was worth a fortune and he rarely slept for more than a few hours at a time these days.
The company, which was started by his grandfather before Hitler lost the war, had a prolonged moratorium after his grandfather lost all credibility and financial support. John took over the family business shortly after the Berlin Wall came down. Since then, he had immigrated to the U.S., where his scientific acumen could take him further. His pharmaceuticals had saved millions of people worldwide, not to mention winning him the Nobel Prize for medicine.
John placed the graduation photo back on his desk, his determination visible in his eyes.
He was committed now and there was nothing he could do to change that.
He knew when he first accepted the man’s help that it would be difficult to say no to him when it was time to return the favor. To fulfill this obligation would be unconscionable. However, failure to do so now, was unthinkable. It all seemed so far away at the time, that John secretly believed that it would never be found, or that he would be the one to release its horrible wrath.
All that he had worked for would be lost, because they had maintained control over him and over everything held dear.
As painful as this was, John would have been more than willing to suffer it all alone, the blame landing squarely upon his head; the price of fulfilling this obligation was too terrible for the world.
Before he was even given a chance to falter in his obligation to the man he’d never met, a package arrived.
We own you — don’t falter.
Those were the only words displayed on the outside of the brown package. They were handwritten, in the carefree scrawl of someone who knew, without a doubt, that John would never go to the police.
Its contents confirmed what he already knew, there was no way he could get out of this.
It was a picture of his daughter. She was in her pajamas, having breakfast alone. John recognized the room. It was the 32nd floor penthouse he’d bought for her while she was still studying at MIT. It was a secure apartment, and he had taken steps to ensure that few people knew where she lived.
But somehow, they’d found her.
They always would.
How can a father bring himself to choose, between the well-being of billions of people, or the life of his only daughter, the one thing he’d managed do right in his entire life.
Mathematically, the equation appeared simple.
To a father, the mathematics were irrelevant.
He considered killing himself. Some part of him wished that he’d simply have a fatal heart attack or some other form of death over which he had no control. He knew that if he died, he’d fail to complete his obligation, and, as a result, his daughter would die, so killing himself wasn’t an option.
No, he would go through with it, as he’d agreed to do all those years ago.
John Wolfgang leaned back in his lounge chair, staring out the window of his Lear Jet, more than forty thousand feet above the earth, over whose very existence he held so much power.
It went all the way back to the start of the Second World War.
To a story that he’d heard from his father many times during his childhood, as the only child of a poor family living in post-war Germany.
Walter Wolfgang, John’s father, had been a promising young microbiologist, who had been pursuing a PhD in viral adaptations to change. His supervisor, Professor Fritz Ribbentrop, immediately saw the promise of such research, and its potential danger to humanity.
Walter had worked hard for three years on his project before discovering the strange mutation. It had been well established that viruses, such as influenza, naturally mutated, from time to time, often becoming more easily transmittable. The virus’s undesired result of some of these mutations might often result in the death of the host.
In theory, a virus wants to be symbiotic — living on or within a host organism, without draining its host of its strength and vitality.
Often, these changes occur every decade or so, to keep up with their host’s immune system, which is constantly adapting to better protect itself from the virus. Every now and then, something strange happens, and the new viral strain leaps ahead of its hosts ability to protect itself, perhaps jumping ahead by two or three decades worth of random mutations, and becoming stronger than the hosts natural immune system.
One such strain that springs to the mind of any microbiologist is the Influenza H1N1 — AKA, the Spanish Flu pandemic, which occurred in the early twentieth century, which decimated more lives worldwide than the First World War. This type of event generally occurs only every couple of centuries, or so.
What Walter discovered, while attempting to speed up the rate of viral mutations in a controlled environment, was the genesis of a strain of influenza which had made several hundred steps towards evolution. The type of anomaly that would only occur once every couple of millennia, under normal circumstances.
It had evolved such that the longer it remained undetected, the safer it would be, and therefore, the greater would be its chance of propagating. In one study, Walter learned that its host would not display any symptoms whatsoever for an entire month after infection, and then result in an astonishing 80 % mortality rate.
The implications of such a prolonged incubation period in a virus with such a phenomenal mortality rate were immediately obvious to him.
It could wipe out 80 % of the planet’s population.
He brought this discovery to the attention of his mentor and friend, Professor Fritz Ribbentrop.
Walter’s original thought was that he should destroy it immediately, but Ribbentrop had a different viewpoint. What would happen if this anomaly occurred naturally at some time in the future? Could their investigations now possibly save the entire planet from what might prove to be the worst plague ever faced by mankind in recorded history, at some future date?
In the minds of scientists, who had no loyalties to either good or bad, but only wanted to further man’s knowledge, such a discovery could only be viewed as a good thing.
The next day, the riots began and ended with the raids on Jewish families, heralding the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich and start of World War Two.
Professor Fritz Ribbentrop was the first to point out what these events might mean for their discovery. “Do you understand the consequences of your discovery, given that the world is about to be plunged into the depths of a war?”