from there. It was a lighter red in Iran, diminishing in intensity to a pale pink in Afghanistan and Turkey. Russia was curiously unaffected, except for a pink dot on Moscow. China was pale in the eastern portion and red in the west, where the largely Muslim Uighur population was concentrated. India was covered with pink dots in the cities, but Pakistan was barely touched. A large pink stain blanketed northern Europe. Red dots of different intensities were scattered across the U.S. but no sizable pink splotches; it was mainly in the cities. Canada had a single mild outbreak in Toronto. The Southern Hemisphere was virtually untouched. That would likely change as it moved into winter.
“We know the disease is in the avian population, so that could account for some of the randomness,” Henry said. “But I’ve never seen an influenza map that looked exactly like this.”
Majid was standing behind him. “Is it possible that the disease was seeded in some places?” he asked.
“I was thinking the same thing. If this is an engineered virus, it would make sense that the perpetrators would pick targets.”
Majid paused, then said, “Funny about Russia.”
Henry nodded. “Lots of disease all around it, but very little in Russia itself. They have an unorthodox vaccine for seasonal flu, which is different from the world standard. It’s an attenuated live virus, which has advantages. It’s inhaled, rather than injected. It’s cheaper. They also add a compound called polyoxidonium. It appears to be an immunomodulator with a lot of bewildering claims. Hard to know if that would make a difference, but of course they’re testing for that at the NIH.”
“If this is what you think it is, I pray it is Russia and not al-Qaeda,” said Majid. “The world already thinks all Muslims are terrorists.”
Henry silently recalled the years he had worked to counter the Russian bioweapons program. Highly skilled Soviet scientists had crafted deadly and incurable diseases in their germ warfare centers—mainly, the Vektor Institute in western Siberia and the bioweapons research facility in Obolensk. The great scourges of history, such as plague and smallpox, were refined into aerosol form, manufactured by the ton, and resistant to any known treatment.
The chief scientist at Vektor in the Soviet era was Nikolai Ustinov. He was studying Marburg, a member of the poorly understood family of diseases called filoviruses. Marburg first erupted in the human population in the German city that would give it its name. In 1967, a lab worker died after culturing the virus in kidney cells from African green monkeys. Seven other researchers died in other German labs working with infected monkeys. Nine years later, a related virus erupted in Zaire, and it would be named after the Ebola River.
Nobody knew Marburg better than Ustinov. Like many disease researchers, even great ones, Ustinov was the victim of a fatal mistake. He was holding a guinea pig to be injected with the virus when his partner accidentally plunged the needle into Dr. Ustinov’s finger.
Henry once had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Kanatzhan Alibekov, who had been the first deputy director of Biopreparat, an arm of the secret Soviet biowarfare program. Alibekov defected to the U.S. in 1992 and changed his name to Ken Alibek. A heavyset man with large glasses and a round, fleshy face, reflecting his Kazakh origins, Alibek told the story, in a lightly inflected Russian accent, of what happened to Dr. Ustinov. Immediately after his accidental injection, Ustinov had been given the antiserum, but the disease continued to progress. Over the next few days, for the purposes of science, Ustinov precisely described the course of his infection. He even joked with the nurses, until he was incapacitated by the disease’s paralyzing headaches and nausea. “He became passive and uncommunicative,” Alibek recalled. “His features froze in toxic shock.” Small bruises covered his body and his eyes turned red; sometimes he would burst into tears. Then, on the tenth day, he suddenly seemed to get better. His mood improved, and he asked about his family, but inside his body the virus was finishing its work. The bruises on his skin enlarged and turned dark blue as the blood began pooling near the surface, and then it spilled out of his body, from his mouth, his nose, his genitals. He was in and out of consciousness. Two weeks after the infection, the genial Nikolai Ustinov was dead. During the autopsy his liver and spleen were removed, along with his blood. Ironically, the pathologist who conducted the