“No,” he said, “others are ahead of me. Military chiefs. Cabinet members. First responders. God, what a decision to have to make. I’m gonna have to pray on this.”
For the first time, Tildy felt a bit of sympathy for him. “One other thing,” she said, as they were about to break up. “I don’t think we can chance meeting in person again until the contagion has passed. The White House will set up conference calls. Maybe Lieutenant Commander Bartlett can suggest how we should conduct ourselves until we’re clear.”
Bartlett had little to offer except to shelter in place, wash your hands, don’t go out in public unless vitally necessary, and, if you do, wear a mask and sanitary gloves. “If you have symptoms, bear in mind that the hospitals are already full and may not be the best place for you anyway unless you need a ventilator. If you have no one at home to take care of you, make sure that you have at least two people who will call you twice a day. Drink fluids. Stay in bed.”
“Is aspirin okay?”
“Absolutely not!” Bartlett said, startling everyone. “This is a hemorrhagic disease. You can’t take anything that will thin your blood. No Aleve, Advil, Midol, Motrin, Percodan, Alka-Seltzer, Bufferin—a good rule of thumb is just don’t take anything that makes you feel better.”
It was such a Bartlett thing to say. “Tylenol is okay,” she conceded.
While they were packing up their briefcases, Joint Chiefs asked the agency man, “Did you ever hear of this group called Earth’s Guardians? My middle daughter is all caught up in it. Kinda cultish, you ask me.”
The agency man hadn’t heard of it. Neither had Tildy.
“The reason I bring it up is they’re anti–population growth, I mean in a big way. You see them at rallies. Down with humans sort of thing. They seem like the kind of folks who wouldn’t mind shaving a few billion people off the planet. Not my daughter, exactly, but she’s sympathetic.”
“The Bureau arrested some of them in Los Angeles,” said Justice. “They broke into a sperm bank, of all places. Wrecked the place. Turned off the freezers and destroyed the whole inventory.”
Tildy observed that it sounded like a splinter group led by some crank.
“You’d think,” said Justice. “But their leader used to be in the government. Led a lot of hush-hush stuff at Fort Detrick. Then he got canned and went off to do some dirty work with a private contractor.”
“A scientist?” Tildy asked.
“Yeah, a microbiologist. Named Jürgen Stark.”
26
The Human Trial
It was an opportunity, Jürgen had told him. Priceless. A test of their theory. This was after Jürgen had become a liability and left Fort Detrick. Congress was investigating some experiments that were hard to justify as defensive measures. It was all done in secret session, but leaks were beginning to spill. A decision was made to put distance between the CIA and the dark operations that had been farmed out to Fort Detrick. That meant cutting loose the talented impresario of manufactured diseases.
In the shadow world that surrounds the intelligence community, Jürgen Stark was well known, and as soon as he came on the market there were many competitive bids for his employment. Private security firms had mushroomed after 9/11 and the Iraq War. Trained by the best—the Navy SEALS, CIA, Mossad, South African paramilitaries—their operatives came from the worlds of intelligence and the military. Political consultants and academics were added to the mix, along with computer hackers from the National Security Agency. In addition to supplying hired killers, such firms could also function as turnkey interior or defense departments, fielding an actual army if the money was right.
Jürgen offered a competitive edge to the company that finally landed him, AGT Security Associates. The name gave nothing away. It was intentionally anodyne, although among those who moved in the shadows, AGT was known as the insider’s choice. The next step for private contractors like AGT was microbiology. Hiring Jürgen was a masterstroke. He was immediately the golden boy, the future of the company. Jürgen had a vision, and he knew all the secrets. One of them was Henry Parsons’s intriguing discovery.
At Fort Detrick, Henry had been working on polio derivatives. Poliomyelitis was one of the most dreaded pathogens of the early twentieth century. Like influenza, polio was an RNA virus, but it spread through food or water contaminated by human fecal matter—one of the reasons swimming pools were chlorinated. In the 1940s and 1950s, thousands of children were paralyzed