If Russia still wanted to prosecute the war, it was going to pay a terrible price.
* * *
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THAT NIGHT, Tildy sat down with her microwave dinner and her dog, Baskin, at her side and watched the news. At the peak of the pandemic in the U.S., government services were shut down and Congress had stopped meeting. The new president, still sheltering in the vast Mount Weather bunker with other senior officials, issued a reassuring statement on the Emergency Alert System that a cure was on the horizon, stores would soon be open again, the baseball season would resume—all lies, as everyone knew, but respectfully reported.
“Tonight we have a special report on the sabotage of the biomedical research laboratories at MIT’s Whitehead Institute,” Wolf Blitzer reported. There were shots of the Whitehead, which Blitzer described as one of the leading animal research facilities in the world. Like every significant biomedical facility, the Whitehead had been enlisted in the effort to develop a vaccine for Kongoli. It had gotten samples from the CDC and was growing the virus in monkeys, ferrets, and humanized mice. Many of the researchers were living in their labs, sleeping in hallways on bedrolls, as they puzzled out the secrets of the new pathogen. Because of the pandemic, security around the facilities was notional at best. It had never had the layered levels of fencing, cameras, and scanners that Fort Detrick enjoyed. Then one morning a number of people—the security cameras recorded fifty-two—wearing respirator masks, lab coats, and gloves arrived on a bus. “We thought they might have been a relief crew, or new security,” one of the scientists remarked. They said nothing as they marched down the hall and into the elevators. “They knew the codes,” the scientist said. “No one questioned them. People just don’t get in without clearance. But here they were.”
They went directly down to the animal suites. Inside were four chambers, two with ferrets and one with green monkeys and mice. The fourth was empty. They entered without space suits, which was crazily dangerous. Each of the masked intruders carried away two cages, concentrating on the primates. The remaining animals were simply set free to roam the halls, contaminating everything. Ferrets were everywhere, many of them lying listlessly on the tile of the lab floor, too ill to move, and mice just disappeared, as they do, into offices, behind bookshelves, and under desks. There was video of the abducted primates that had been let loose in Harvard Square. Blitzer interviewed the chief of police in Cambridge, who said that his force and members of the National Guard had hunted down the monkeys all night, shooting them on sight. The last two were finally tracked down in the subway tunnel on the Red Line.
“Police suspect that the leaders of this raid were members of an animal-rights organization called Earth’s Guardians,” Blitzer said. The leader of the group, Jürgen Stark, was in the studio. He denied that he or members of his organization had anything to do with the insider attack on the Whitehead, although members had infiltrated the institute in the past. Blitzer clearly didn’t believe Stark’s denials. “They had the security codes,” he said. “They knew exactly where to go.”
“Yes, it’s puzzling,” said Stark, noncommittally.
“You don’t consider this a crime against humanity?”
“Let us be clear about this,” Stark said. “What people are doing to animals, not only at the Whitehead and Fort Detrick but at many other facilities around the country, is a crime against nature. Those laboratory animals have done us no harm. They are tortured and murdered in the name of science. I know. I used to do it myself, to my great shame. Is the benefit to humanity worth the sacrifice of so many animal lives? I say no.”
“Most scientists say yes,” Blitzer remarked. “Millions of people around the world are already dead from the Kongoli flu. It’s impossible to know how many, but we have been tabulating the responses we’ve gotten, and so far they suggest a death toll in excess of three hundred million people.”
“Out of a population of eight billion, that’s a manageable portion,” Stark said coolly. He examined his glasses and wiped off a speck. “Consider the birds. How many have been slaughtered? Do you know? Have you ‘tabulated the responses’? And what good has it done? I’ll tell you what will happen when you tip the balance of nature. You prepare a catastrophe, one that is certainly greater than what has presently befallen us. You