Jeffrey’s headache had returned with a vengeance. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you… have any proof?”
“Ah. Proof. No, I’m just an old man who helped create viruses that were almost identical. Working for top secret organizations that would deny their very existence. No, I don’t have a nice, tidy blueprint with “Top Secret” stamped across it articulating that AIDS is a deliberate experiment, as with my old Nazi bosses, to decimate the ‘undesirable’ populations of the world.”
“Then in the end, while it’s compelling on the surface, there’s no motive and no proof,” Jeffrey said.
“Motive? How about the usual twins, power and money? Think about it this way — in 1970, Nixon declared a war on cancer. A decade later, the retrovirologists who were the great hope of that assault, who had devoured impossible-to-envision resources, were no closer to coming up with a cure than they had been when they started. The whole thing was a failure and their credibility was in shambles. Funding dried up. And then suddenly, this new retrovirus appears, and overnight the stars of medicine and science are the same retrovirologists who failed to accomplish anything with cancer. They went from failures to being on the cover of Time.
“And the money? It poured in. Developing treatments, tests, researching. Drug companies made fortunes treating symptoms. Federal money taps were opened and never closed. Here we are, forty-something years after Nixon declared war on cancer, and not one vaccine, not one cure, has resulted from billions and billions of dollars, and two generations of work. Young man, here’s a reasonable question: how can scientists who can’t develop a cure for even simple viral animal diseases after forty years be expected to cure anything substantial in humans? The money’s not in curing. It’s in treating and researching.”
“Then this was all about money.”
“If you look hard enough at most things, you’ll find they’re about money.”
“Genocide. To make money,” Jeffrey repeated in a hushed whisper.
“Don’t act so shocked. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“I don’t believe it. More importantly, nobody else will believe it, either. The official position is too entrenched, and people are reluctant to research anything. Whatever the papers say is what most believe, without question.”
“So you understand why it’s awfully convenient that the establishment’s experts all came out of the bio-warfare culture in the sixties and seventies, and that a handful of authorities dictate what will be researched and taken seriously, and what won’t? Authorities, like the one who ‘mistakenly’ claimed he discovered the virus, who apparently couldn’t tell them apart for years — or rather, couldn’t spot that they were identical — and then concocted increasingly absurd hypotheses about simian virus jumping while making it effectively taboo to acknowledge decades of contamination and species-jumping experiments? Carried out by many of those very same scientists, whose pet meal ticket got shut down only two years before fate smiled upon them and HIV miraculously appeared?” Schmidt looked ready to spit. “Those are your experts.”
“They effectively control the dialogue.”
“Which is why nobody dares introduce the words ‘lab-created’ into the discussion. They’d rather conveniently forget they were experimenting in causing simian viruses to species-jump. I don’t blame them. Certainly, there’s nobody with nearly their money or power to take the opposing view. It’s career suicide. So instead, everyone pronounces the origin of the AIDS epidemic ‘irrelevant’ or ‘unknowable,’ and prefers to focus on the origin of HIV — the virus — all the while pretending that biological warfare labs weren’t experimenting with cross-species virus jumping. No wonder they want it ‘unknowable’ and can’t wait to rush the dialogue along. I would, too.”
“Be that as it may, nobody’s going to want to hear it, especially absent hard evidence.”
“You might be right. In your country it’s like everyone has their fingers in their ears rather than simply examining the evidence and calling foul. In that respect it reminds me of prewar Germany — an entire population that so wants to believe in something it will ignore what’s obviously happening before its eyes.”
“You see my problem, then?” Jeffrey asked. “It’s an inflammatory set of allegations, but without proof…”
Schmidt seemed to shrink as the silence stretched between them. Jeffrey decided to change tactics.
“Why haven’t you talked about this before now?” Jeffrey probed.
“I was afraid. That simple. I knew the only way I was safe was if I never spoke about the past, and minded my own business.”
“Then what changed?”
“I’m dying. I’m old. And I’ve participated in many evils. But this one, even I am ashamed of. Something I helped create has been used to kill over thirty million people. That makes World War II seem tame. And it will kill hundreds of millions more. I can’t go to my grave in silence. It’s that simple.”
Jeffrey shifted, studying the old German’s wizened face, and made a snap decision. He reached over and shut off the recorder.
“I was recently shown a document that made no sense to me. But it might to you. It was a diagram with some kind of a bar chart and a random string of letters beneath it. And pages of numbers. The person who showed it to me was afraid for his life, and felt it might be related to your story somehow. Connected to the animal mutilations. Which you say were experimentation…”
Schmidt’s face froze. “A diagram with bar charts and a letter string? What kind of a diagram? Where did the document come from?”
“It was classified, so I presume it was stolen from some government database. As to what kind, if I drew it, do you think you might be able to place it?”
“You can draw it from memory? This thing?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“I can look at it. Why not?” said Schmidt, trying to be nonchalant, but failing.
Jeffrey sat in silence, sketching the diagram and charts in detail, and after a few minutes handed the notebook over to the German. Schmidt squinted at what he’d drawn, then retrieved a pair of reading glasses from his breast pocket. An eternity passed, and then he looked over the rims at Jeffrey, his face pale.
“Lieber Gott. It’s a virus. One of the most lethal in history.”
THIRTY-SIX
Revelation
Schmidt’s hands were visibly trembling when he lowered the notepad to his lap, lost in thought. Jeffrey waited, wanting to give him time to absorb the drawing’s implications.
“It’s the Spanish Influenza virus. H1N1. But… different. Modified. I’d need specialized equipment to calculate how much more lethal and contagious this could be, but believe me when I tell you that even with only slight modifications, it would be catastrophic if unleashed on the world. One of the goals of weaponizing this type of virus would be to create something which the current crop of antiviral medications wouldn’t work against, and for which there’s no natural immunity.”
“I… Spanish Influenza?”
“It was a global disaster. In 1918. Killed about fifty million people — more than everyone killed in World War I. What made it particularly lethal was that it hit healthy adults the hardest — the ordinary flu usually is only dangerous to the very young and the very old. The death rate from the average flu season is 0.01 percent. Spanish Flu killed 2.5 percent, and did so within hours of the onset of symptoms.”
“How do you know so much about it off the top of your head?”