Dr. Archer saw the humor of that. “Yes, John, we are. So, Vaccine-B is ready°”
He nodded. “Yes, I had my injection a few hours ago. Ready for yours?”
“And -A?”
“In the freezer, ready for mass production as soon as people need it. We’ll be able to turn it out in thousand-liter lots per week when we have to. Enough to cover the planet,” he told her. “Steve Berg and I worked that out yesterday.”
“Can anybody else-”
“No way. Not even Merck can move that fast – and even if they did, they’d have to use our formula, wouldn’t they?”
That was the ultimate hook. If the plan to spread Shiva around the globe didn’t work as well as hoped, then the entire world would be given Vaccine-A, which Antigen Laboratories, a division of The Horizon Corp., just happened to be working on as part of its corporate effort to help the Third World, where all the hemorrhagic fevers lived. A fortunate accident, albeit one already known in the medical literature. Both John Killgore and Steve Berg had published papers on these diseases, which had been made quite high-profile by the big scare America and the world had gone through not so long before. So, the medical world knew that Horizon/Antigen was working in this area, and wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there was a vaccine in the works. They’d even test the vaccines in laboratories and find that, sure enough, the liquid had all manner of antibodies. But they’d be the wrong antibodies, and the live-virus vaccine would be a death sentence to anyone who had it enter his system. The time from injection to onset of frank symptoms was programmed at four to six weeks, and, again, the only survivors would be those lucky souls from the deepest end of the gene pool. One hundred such people out of a million would survive. Maybe less. Ebola-Shiva was one nasty little bastard of a bug, three years in the making, and how odd Killgore thought, that it had been that easy to construct. Well, that was science for you. Gene manipulation was a new field, and those things were unpredictable. The sad part, maybe, was that the same people in the same lab were charging along a new and unexpected path – human longevity and reportedly making real progress. Well, so much the better. An extended life to appreciate the new world that Shiva would bring about.
And the breakthroughs wouldn’t stop. Many on the select list to receive Vaccine-B were scientists. Some of them wouldn’t like the news, when they were told, but they’d have little choice, and being scientists, they’d soon get back to their work.
Not everyone in the Project approved. Some of the radical ones actually said that bringing physicians along was contrary to the nature of the mission-because medicine didn’t allow nature to take her course. Sure, Killgore snorted to himself. Fine, they’d let those idiots have their babies in farm fields after a morning’s plowing or hunter gathering, and soon enough those ideologues would breed themselves out. He planned to study and enjoy nature, but he’d do so wearing shoes and a jacket to keep the chill out. He planned to remain an educated man, not revert to the naked ape. His mind wandered …. There’d be a division of labor, of course. Farmers to grow the food and tend the cattle they’d eat – or hunters to shoot the buffalo, whose meat was healthier, lower in cholesterol. The buffalo should come back pretty fast, he thought. Wheat would continue to grow wild in the Great Plains, and they’d grow fat and healthy, especially since their predators had been so ruthlessly hunted down that they’d be slower to catch up. Domestic cattle would thrive also, but they’d ultimately be edged out by the buffalo, a much hardier breed better suited to free life. Killgore wanted to see that, see the vast herds that had once covered the West. He wanted to see Africa, too.
That meant that the Project needed airplanes and pilots. Horizon already had its own collection of G-V business jets, capable of spanning most of the world, and so they’d also need small teams of people to manage and maintain a few airports-Zambia, for instance. He wanted to see Africa wild and free. That would take perhaps ten years to come about, Killgore estimated, and it wasn’t all that big a deal. AIDS was killing off that continent at a nasty pace, and Shiva would only make it go faster, and so the Dark Continent would again be free of man, and he’d be able to go there and observe nature in all her glory . . . and maybe shoot a lion to make a rug for his home in Kansas? Some of the people in the Project would raise pure fucking hell over that, but what was one lion more or less? The Project would be saving hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions, free to roam and hunt in their prides. What a beautiful New World it would be, once you eliminated the parasitic species that was working so hard to destroy it.
A beeper went off. He turned to look at the control panel. “It’s Ernie, MS-looks like cardiac arrest,” he said.
“What are you going to do?” Barbara Archer asked.
Killgore stood. “Make sure he’s dead.” He bent down to select a camera for the big monitor on his desk. “Here, you can watch.”
Two minutes later, he appeared on the screen. An orderly was already there, but did little more than watch. She saw Killgore check the man’s pulse, then check his eyes. Despite having the -B vaccine, Killgore used gloves and a mask. Well, that made sense. Then he stood back pup and switched off the monitoring equipment. The orderly detached the IV lines and covered the body with a sheet. Killgore pointed to the door, and soon the orderly wheeled the gurney out, heading off for the incinerator. Killgore took the time to look at other subjects, and even appeared to speak with one before leaving the screen for good.
“I figured that,” he said, returning to the control room without his protective gear. “Ernie’s heart wasn’t all that good, and Shiva went right after it. Wendell’s going to be next, M2. Maybe tomorrow morning. Liver function’s off the chart, and he’s bleeding out big-time in the upper GI.”
“What about the control group?”
“Mary, F4, two more days she’s going to be in frank symptoms.”
“So the delivery system works?” Archer asked.
“Like a charm.” Killgore nodded, getting some coffee before he sat back down. “It’s all going to work, Barb, and the computer projections look better than our requirement parameters. Six months from initiation, the world is going to be a very different place,” he promised her.
“I still worry about those six months, John. If anybody figures out what’s happened – their last conscious act will be to try and kill us all.”
“That’s why we have guns, Barb.”
“It’s called ‘Rainbow,'” he told them, having gotten the best information of the day. “It’s based in England. It was set up by a CIA guy named John Clark, and he’s evidently the boss of the outfit.”
“That makes sense,” said Henriksen. “Multinational, right?”
“I think so,” John Brightling confirmed.
“Yes,” Dmitriy Popov said, picking at his Caesar salad. “That is all sensible, some sort of NATO unit, I imagine, based at Hereford?”
“Correct,” said Henriksen. “By the way, nice job figuring out who they were.”
Popov shrugged. “It was simple, really. I ought to have made the guess sooner. My question now, what do you want me to do about it?”
“I think we need to learn more,” Henriksen said, with a glance at his boss. “A lot more.”
“How do you do that?” Brightling asked.
“It is not difficult,” Popov assured him. “Once you know where to look-that is most of the battle. Once you know that, you merely go there and look. And I already have one name, do I not?”
“You want to take it?” John asked the Russian.
“Certainly.” If you pay me to do so. “There are dangers, but-”
“What kind of dangers?”
“I once worked in England. There is the possibility that they have a photograph of me, under a different name, but I do not think that likely.”
“Can you fake the accent?” Henriksen asked.
“Most certainly, old boy,” Popov replied with a grin. “You were FBI once?”
Nod. “Yep.”
“Then you know how it is done. A week, I think.”
“Okay,” Brightling said. “Fly over tomorrow.”
“Travel documents?” Henriksen asked.
“I have several sets, all current, and all perfect,” the intelligence officer assured him.
It was nice to have a pro on the payroll, Henriksen thought to himself. “Well, I have an early flight, and I haven’t packed yet, guys. See you next week when I get back.”
“Easy on the jet lag, Bill,” John advised.