Upon A Pale Horse (31 page)

“Correct. I’m saying that the predecessor virus might be SIV from apes; but the
origin
of the AIDS epidemic isn’t some natural cross-species jumping in Africa. It couldn’t be. AIDS didn’t appear there until after a completely different strain than the African strain appeared in the U.S. and the AIDS epidemic was already well underway.”

He leaned forward and fixed Jeffrey with a penetrating stare. “Do you not understand the significance of that? It’s like blaming a disease that appears in New York in January on something that appears in Africa in late November of the following year – and is completely different in terms of the tissue type it targets. All it takes to debunk that theory is a working knowledge of a calendar. Look, if HIV causes AIDS, which nobody is disputing, why did the epidemic wait to start in Africa until after it was a wildfire in the U.S.?”

“But I read somewhere that they tested the blood supplies in Africa from older samples, and found HIV.”

“Again, false positives. Most of those were retested in Israel and England, and found to have zero HIV. It was malaria and other immune system-destroying diseases that caused the false results. Look, a 1986 study of geriatric Ugandans in nursing homes at the epicenter of the African AIDS epidemic found not one HIV positive, when the general population had a fifteen percent infection rate, so the theory that it had been there for decades or centuries is simply false, predicated on assumptions and tainted lab samples. It couldn’t have happened the way the theories say, and yet they’re parroted as if undisputed fact.”

Jeffrey nodded slowly. “So in Africa, the vaccines were given to everyone, not just one minority.”

“Exactly. And the African strain targets mucous membranes, not rectal tissue. So you have supposedly the same virus appearing after widespread vaccination programs, but which amazingly targets different cell types. I never understood why the medical community never questioned
why
it was a gay disease on one continent and heterosexual on another. Even better, nobody wants to explore
how
that happened. It’s one of many scientific taboos in a discipline that isn’t supposed to have any.”

“I always assumed it was lifestyle or something.”

“Lifestyle? Humans have been having sex for millions of years. Why within twenty-four months of the first cases being diagnosed in the U.S. did AIDS suddenly explode in Africa and Haiti? Let’s see. Big vaccination programs in Africa, including fourteen thousand Haitians there who subsequently went back home, big vaccination trials to only gay white men in the U.S., and then bam, there’s an epidemic of a ‘new,’ and yet paradoxically, if you believe the disinformation, a simultaneously ‘old’ disease.”

Schmidt took a sip from a glass of tepid water on the low coffee table. “Look, the vaccine connection in Africa is so obvious to many that some of the accepted theories grudgingly concede that the smallpox vaccine programs
might
have played a role in the spread… but only because of dirty needles. The only problem there is that there’s no evidence of that. It’s another convenient invention. With AIDS there are so many flights of fancy touted as official explanations, and when one’s debunked, the experts and the media all switch to another, equally absurd theory, absent any evidence.”

Jeffrey’s headache had returned with a vengeance. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you…have any proof?”

“Ah. Proof. No, I’m just an old man who helped create viruses that were almost identical. Working for top secret organizations that would deny their very existence. No, I don’t have a nice, tidy blueprint with “Top Secret” stamped across it articulating that AIDS is a deliberate experiment, as with my old Nazi bosses, to decimate the ‘undesirable’ populations of the world.”

“Then in the end, while it’s compelling on the surface, there’s no motive and no proof,” Jeffrey said.

“Motive? How about the usual twins, power and money? Think about it this way – in 1970, Nixon declared a war on cancer. A decade later, the retrovirologists who were the great hope of that assault, who had devoured impossible-to-envision resources, were no closer to coming up with a cure than they had been when they started. The whole thing was a failure and their credibility was in shambles. Funding dried up. And then suddenly, this new retrovirus appears, and overnight the stars of medicine and science are the same retrovirologists who failed to accomplish anything with cancer. They went from failures to being on the cover of
Time
.

“And the money? It poured in. Developing treatments, tests, researching. Drug companies made fortunes treating symptoms. Federal money taps were opened and never closed. Here we are, forty-something years after Nixon declared war on cancer, and not one vaccine, not one cure, has resulted from billions and billions of dollars, and two generations of work. Young man, here’s a reasonable question: how can scientists who can’t develop a cure for even simple viral animal diseases after forty years be expected to cure anything substantial in humans? The money’s not in curing. It’s in treating and researching.”

“Then this was all about money.”

“If you look hard enough at most things, you’ll find they’re about money.”

“Genocide. To make money,” Jeffrey repeated in a hushed whisper.

“Don’t act so shocked. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I don’t believe it. More importantly, nobody else will believe it, either. The official position is too entrenched, and people are reluctant to research anything. Whatever the papers say is what most believe, without question.”

“So you understand why it’s awfully convenient that the establishment’s experts all came out of the bio-warfare culture in the sixties and seventies, and that a handful of authorities dictate what will be researched and taken seriously, and what won’t? Authorities, like the one who ‘mistakenly’ claimed he discovered the virus, who apparently couldn’t tell them apart for years – or rather, couldn’t spot that they were identical – and then concocted increasingly absurd hypotheses about simian virus jumping while making it effectively taboo to acknowledge decades of contamination and species-jumping experiments? Carried out by many of those very same scientists, whose pet meal ticket got shut down only two years before fate smiled upon them and HIV miraculously appeared?” Schmidt looked ready to spit. “Those are your experts.”

“They effectively control the dialogue.”

“Which is why nobody dares introduce the words ‘lab-created’ into the discussion. They’d rather conveniently forget they were experimenting in causing simian viruses to species-jump. I don’t blame them. Certainly, there’s nobody with nearly their money or power to take the opposing view. It’s career suicide. So instead, everyone pronounces the origin of the AIDS epidemic ‘irrelevant’ or ‘unknowable,’ and prefers to focus on the origin of HIV – the virus – all the while pretending that biological warfare labs weren’t experimenting with cross-species virus jumping. No wonder they want it ‘unknowable’ and can’t wait to rush the dialogue along. I would, too.”

“Be that as it may, nobody’s going to want to hear it, especially absent hard evidence.”

“You might be right. In your country it’s like everyone has their fingers in their ears rather than simply examining the evidence and calling foul. In that respect it reminds me of prewar Germany – an entire population that so wants to believe in something it will ignore what’s obviously happening before its eyes.”

“You see my problem, then?” Jeffrey asked. “It’s an inflammatory set of allegations, but without proof…”

Schmidt seemed to shrink as the silence stretched between them. Jeffrey decided to change tactics.

“Why haven’t you talked about this before now?” Jeffrey probed.

“I was afraid. That simple. I knew the only way I was safe was if I never spoke about the past, and minded my own business.”

“Then what changed?”

“I’m dying. I’m old. And I’ve participated in many evils. But this one, even I am ashamed of. Something I helped create has been used to kill over thirty million people. That makes World War II seem tame. And it will kill hundreds of millions more. I can’t go to my grave in silence. It’s that simple.”

Jeffrey shifted, studying the old German’s wizened face, and made a snap decision. He reached over and shut off the recorder.

“I was recently shown a document that made no sense to me. But it might to you. It was a diagram with some kind of a bar chart and a random string of letters beneath it. And pages of numbers. The person who showed it to me was afraid for his life, and felt it might be related to your story somehow. Connected to the animal mutilations. Which you say were experimentation…”

Schmidt’s face froze. “A diagram with bar charts and a letter string? What kind of a diagram? Where did the document come from?”

“It was classified, so I presume it was stolen from some government database. As to what kind, if I drew it, do you think you might be able to place it?”

“You can draw it from memory? This thing?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“I can look at it. Why not?” said Schmidt, trying to be nonchalant, but failing.

Jeffrey sat in silence, sketching the diagram and charts in detail, and after a few minutes handed the notebook over to the German. Schmidt squinted at what he’d drawn, then retrieved a pair of reading glasses from his breast pocket. An eternity passed, and then he looked over the rims at Jeffrey, his face pale.

“
Lieber Gott
. It’s a virus. One of the most lethal in history.”

THIRTY-SIX

Revelation

Schmidt’s hands were visibly trembling when he lowered the notepad to his lap, lost in thought. Jeffrey waited, wanting to give him time to absorb the drawing’s implications.

“It’s the Spanish Influenza virus. H1N1. But…different. Modified. I’d need specialized equipment to calculate how much more lethal and contagious this could be, but believe me when I tell you that even with only slight modifications, it would be catastrophic if unleashed on the world. One of the goals of weaponizing this type of virus would be to create something which the current crop of antiviral medications wouldn’t work against, and for which there’s no natural immunity.”

“I…Spanish Influenza?”

“It was a global disaster. In 1918. Killed about fifty million people – more than everyone killed in World War I. What made it particularly lethal was that it hit healthy adults the hardest – the ordinary flu usually is only dangerous to the very young and the very old. The death rate from the average flu season is 0.01 percent. Spanish Flu killed 2.5 percent, and did so within hours of the onset of symptoms.”

“How do you know so much about it off the top of your head?”

“It was my line of work. I studied it intensely as a near-perfect example of an incredibly contagious disease that spread like wildfire, and killed faster than just about anything else ever seen. To put it into perspective, it killed four times more people than the Black Death in the Middle Ages. It’s one of the true nightmare diseases nature has visited on the planet. It infected nearly forty percent of the world population, and caused the body’s immune system to turn against itself. Victims literally drowned in their own lung fluid while their skin turned blue from lack of oxygen. One of the reasons it was so deadly was because those with stronger immune systems had a more powerful response, which translated into it being more severe in the young and healthy. It’s incredibly virulent, and a relatively simple protein chain. The full RNA was sequenced in 2005, and I spent considerable effort analyzing it in my spare time. Which believe it or not, I have an abundance of, even with my busy social schedule here.”

“And this…is a weaponized form of H1N1?”

“I would say it’s definitely lab-created, but I can’t tell what the modifications are. The letter string is a description, so I could figure it out in broad strokes given enough time, but the real question would require computing time and a controlled population study.”

“The real question?”

“How much more lethal is it, and how much more contagious, than the original eight-gene virus. Whenever you modify something like this, it would be to increase one, or both. But…this is insanity. It could wipe out huge population centers in a matter of days or weeks. I mean, huge, as in a percentage of the total global population. Nobody would want to release this, much less develop it…”

“Unless…” Jeffrey blurted, unable to help himself.

“Unless there was already a vaccine developed that was a hundred percent effective, that could be manufactured in sufficient quantities and rapidly enough to inoculate those you wanted to save from it.”

“Wait. Then this could be used for a crude population control?”

“I can’t see any other reason to use it. It’s akin to releasing the devil onto the planet. If it’s been modified substantially enough, it could kill ten, twenty, thirty or more percent of the human race in short order…” Schmidt stopped, a thought obviously occurring to him. “It is madness, but it could make sense to those who released HIV. The big problem there might have been that ultimately, HIV doesn’t kill fast enough.”