Nichinsky and a woman who looked like some evil character in a Disney movie. They were very interested in what he had to say.
“It could be that there was some durable toxin lying around and the bears stumbled onto it,” Henry said. “I can think of a dozen that would qualify, especially in the Arctic, where the cold acts as a preservative.”
“Maybe the Russians repurposed the old biochem plant and cooked up something new,” Tildy suggested. “In a place only a handful of people know exists.”
“We didn’t know,” the agency woman confessed.
“We’re in this spot,” said Tildy. “NATO is pawing the ground over Estonia. What’s the appropriate response? Take out the Russian fleet, for starters. Move the 173rd Airborne into Latvia. But that’s just to block further aggression. It would be nice to know for certain that Putin is behind Kongoli. The whole world would turn against him and his thuggish regime. They’d drag him to the docket in The Hague and hang him. This is my dream. But things are escalating too fast. Damn. I wish we could put you on that island. Get samples. Prove to the world what we all know.”
The door opened, and a man entered, a man with black glasses and silver hair. Henry drew a breath. Nobody bothered to introduce them.
“The president needs options,” Tildy continued. “Something we can deny. Something that doesn’t have our signature on it.”
“Something chemical or biological, in other words,” the agency woman added, looking directly at the man with the silver hair.
“But I am out of this business now,” Jürgen Stark said.
“The U.S. has been out of this business ever since Nixon, supposedly,” said Tildy. “But we know you kept alive a classified program at Fort Detrick after 9/11.”
Jürgen cast an appraising glance at Henry, who could not meet his eyes.
“They say you were the best,” the agency woman added. “Now all our biological stock has been destroyed. Nobody left who knows the recipes. The techniques. The institutional memory you two represent. Your country needs you now. Both of you.”
“Is the president really willing to kill hundreds of millions of people?” Jürgen asked.
“That’s already happened with Kongoli,” said Tildy.
Jürgen took a sip of the cold brew he had purchased from the Starbucks in the basement of the CIA. “How do you know Russia is responsible?”
“We can’t divulge our sources,” the agency woman said.
“Let me rephrase,” said Jürgen. “At what level of confidence do you rate this information?”
“Medium to high.”
“There’s a lot of uncertainty in that assessment.”
The agency woman acknowledged that the intelligence was short of perfect, but what could you do? Unsaid, but understood: Putin killed our assets and we’re blind.
Henry watched the conversation as if he were dreaming. Old emotions of loyalty and inadequacy roiled his mind. As he studied the older man now in front of him, he saw for the first time how alike they had become, each having recoiled from the work that had brought them together in the first place. As usual, Jürgen had gone to an extreme, using his idiosyncratic genius to resurrect endangered and extinct animals. He had publicly stated that all life forms were equal, so he was as happy to replicate polio as he was to bring the dodo back to life. He was still the most dangerous man Henry had ever known.
“We have to go back to the president with a recommendation,” Tildy was saying. “He cannot stand aside from this attack on America—not just America, the whole world! Putin created this virus—”
“Speculation,” Jürgen interjected.
“—and unleashed this plague on humanity. Then he took down the grid. Not speculation. Fact. Hit us at our weakest moment. Millions of people have been killed, incidentally or by design. The economy is essentially dead. We must retaliate. The president will act. He has no choice. He cannot let this attack go unanswered.”
“How governments choose to fight each other is outside my realm of interest,” Jürgen said. “And what you’ve done to the avian population is unforgivable. You are already at war, but not with Russia. There is a far greater enemy. That is nature. You will not win this war.”
“We deserve that, yes, we do,” Tildy said. “Awful things we’ve done, not just with the chickens and such. Some poor decisions were made, yes. But that’s how it’s done. People get in a room, like we are now, the four of us. Options are put on the table. Politics makes a great noise in the outside world, but in this room we have