only a few choices among terrible alternatives. What will it be? Let us say we go with option one.” She turned to the agency woman. “What’s the status of the Russian nuclear forces as of this moment?”
“Highest alert.”
“Typical of Putin,” Tildy said. “He escalates quickly to freeze our response. Then he can deescalate a bit to make us think we’ve won something. He’s been cheating on every arms control agreement we’ve ever had with him. And in the agency’s judgment, how likely is he to fire the first nuke?”
“He will do so at the slightest indication that Russian security may be compromised.”
“We’re talking about the end of civilization, not just for Russia and the United States, but for who knows. And that’s not your concern, I realize,” Tildy said to Jürgen. “Maybe Mother Earth would be better off without us. But you tell me what the world would look like after an all-out nuclear exchange. Your animals, for instance.”
Jürgen refused to be drawn in. He just stared at Tildy.
“Option two. Endless cyberwar. A continual attack on progress. Inadequate, no clear end to it. Fewer people die, I’ll give you that. But we fight at a disadvantage. Russia has been waging cyberwar on us for years. We’ve survived, they’ve survived. But Putin went too far, he made an all-out strike on our infrastructure. This is something he’s had in his bag for years and years. And yes, we can punish him in the same way. But it doesn’t hurt him as much, you see. He doesn’t have enough to lose. Not like us. So we have to find another response. And that’s where you come in, Dr. Stark. Option three.”
“You want me to create a pathogen?”
“There’s no time for that. We need something now. Off the shelf. Something that looks like it might have walked out of a Russian lab. But with minimal blowback for us.”
“That doesn’t exist. Look at Kongoli, it spread around the world in three weeks, a universal pandemic. You could choose a noncontagious agent, such as anthrax. But then you have to distribute it. Same with toxins. Spray it from crop dusters, package it in warheads, but there’s nothing accidental about it. They don’t ‘walk out of the lab’ the way diseases do—the way Kongoli may have. It’s too obvious.”
Tildy was struck by Jürgen’s indifference to the contingencies that were being placed before him. He was unimpressed by the confidences that were being shared—secrets of the very highest level. A cool customer. Thin. Spidery. Handsome, or certainly striking, with that chiseled face and long silvery hair. And frightening. He would have made a wonderful Nazi, she thought. She noted how quiet Dr. Parsons had become. They used to work together, her briefing notes said.
“And how would you have done it, Dr. Stark?” Tildy inquired.
“I would have chosen a different agent.”
“What would you have chosen?”
“I know of only one ideal candidate. So far as we know, it is only deadly in humans, where it shows an extreme level of lethality. It was developed, of course, by Dr. Parsons here.”
It had happened. Henry had always dreaded that his secret would be disclosed. He had imagined being arrested, put on trial. He had thought about what his family would think of him. He had seen himself in prison. But he had never expected that Jürgen would betray him publicly, or that his own government would turn to him because of his invention’s singular capacity to kill.
“You assured me that all the stock of my virus was destroyed,” Henry said in a voice gone dry.
“It was. We used up your batch in our little experiment in Brazil,” said Jürgen. “And we don’t have your lab notes to re-create it.”
“This agent that you speak of, could it be released in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, surreptitiously, so that there is no evidence of the source?” Tildy asked.
“If it is as infectious as we think it is, it will decimate the Russian population in a short period of time,” Jürgen said. “There is nothing they can do to control it. But then, neither can we.”
“What was the level of mortality in your experiment?” Tildy asked. Her clinical tone suggested that they had already gone far past moral considerations.
“Near total,” Jürgen said. “Some subjects were disposed of by other means, but it is likely they would have died anyway.” He looked at Henry. “We know of only one survivor, but that was an unborn child.”