Immortal

25

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to thank you for coming here tonight and for giving me this opportunity to address you directly.’

Donald Wolfe stood before a small lectern overlooking an array of dining tables in the Mandarin Ballroom, each delicately arranged with wine glasses, champagne bottles on ice, dinner plates and elaborately illuminated bouquets of flowers. Along an entire wall, tall windows looked out across the glittering nightscape of the Manhattan skyline. Each table was occupied by smartly dressed men and women, each of whom was potentially worth millions or billions of dollars, depending on which pharmaceutical company they happened to own. Yet none of them was important, at least not to Wolfe. The focus of his gaze rested instead on the small handful of Bilderberg Committee members who were worth trillions of dollars, sitting unobtrusively at tables far from the stage.

Wolfe’s vision of the future was shared by such men: streets devoid of the wearisome crowds and their gluttony for material wealth. The parasite would soon be eliminated, the infection cured, and what would be left of humanity would proceed onward into a brighter future.

The thought provoked in Wolfe a sense of well-being that was further amplified by the knowledge that his efforts at the annual Bilderberg Conference, a three-day event that had taken place a month before, had come to fruition. It had been a close-run thing, but his determination and dedication had paid off, and he knew his revelations had been laid before the Bilderberg steering committee and discussed at length by its members as a matter of global importance. Their decision, which he was sure would be aligned with his plans, would change the face of humanity forever.

Few people knew of the existence, let alone the importance, of the Bilderberg Group.

Members of the Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations had been charged by global corporations with the post-war takeover of the democratic process. The measures implemented by this group provided general control of the world economy through indirect political means. The meetings were held annually and attended by most prime ministers and presidents in the developed world. It was not a conspiracy, for attendee lists were available to the public. But its meetings were screened from the public domain and the prying eyes of the media for one simple reason: so that every attendee could speak their mind without fear of public reprimand. No journalist was ever invited to attend the Bilderberg meetings. If any leaks occurred, the journalists responsible were discouraged from reporting them. The group took its name from the location of the first meeting — the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland, in May 1954. The concept of Bilderberg was not new. Groups such as Bohemian Grove, established in 1872 by San Franciscans, had played a significant role in shaping post-war politics in the US. The Ditchley Park Foundation had been established in 1953 in Britain with a similar aim.

Bilderberg was originally conceived by Joseph H. Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Prince Bernhard, at the time, was an important figure in the oil industry and held a major position in Royal Dutch Petroleum. There were usually some one hundred fifteen participants in each annual meeting. Eighty were from Western Europe and the remainder from North America. From this mixture, about one-third came from government and politics, with the remaining two-thirds from industry, finance, education and communications.

The Americans were heavily influenced by the Rockefeller family — owners of Standard Oil — competitors of Bernhard’s Royal Dutch Petroleum. Bilderberg business always reflected the concerns of the oil industry in its meetings which centered almost entirely on two unnerving facts: one, that oil was rapidly running out; and two, that the population of the planet and its demands for fuel were still increasing at a trimetric rate. Soon, it would all be over and humanity would come to an end. The search for alternatives was pointless as everything from hydrogen cells to the virtually useless wind turbines required abundant supplies of rare metals which were hoarded by China; materials such as europium, lanthanum, neodymium and countless others. It was now no longer about how to save humanity: it was about who would survive the coming catastrophe.

Donald Wolfe cleared his throat. If this speech went down well, then his next, to world leaders at the United Nations, would herald nothing less than a new epoch in human history.

‘The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases,’ he began, ‘is the army’s main institution and facility for infectious-disease research that may have defensive applications against biological warfare. At the present time, the development and procurement of medical countermeasures for pandemic influenza and other emerging infectious diseases is our chief concern, especially in these difficult times of cultural upheaval, ideological wars fought in the name of opposing religions and ever-increasing population density. Any one of them, at any time, could be the cause of agents that could potentially kill millions of people.’ Wolfe smiled. ‘So we’re handy to know.’

A ripple of polite humor swept across the tables, white smiles above black tuxedos and ball gowns, a couple of the suited magnates raised champagne glasses to Wolfe. He should have despised them for making their fortunes by selling drugs at the highest prices to the Western world while withholding them from those who needed them most, the poor of the developing world, but he couldn’t, for he had become wealthy outside his military service on the back of the vast chemical wonderland that was Big Pharma. Hell, it wasn’t their fault that some countries couldn’t afford medicines: if those country’s governments had spent more on their own people than on buying weapons then there wouldn’t be such a divide between the healthy West and the sickly East. It was a point of view Wolfe had made on a few occasions when traveling overseas as a representative of his department, and the reason why the higher office he’d sought had eluded him. Washington didn’t like straight talkers and people who ‘tell it like it is’, as a senator had once told him. It risked giving ordinary citizens the illusion that they actually had some kind of influence in government, and that was the last thing that the ruling classes wanted.

‘But right now there’s a problem, and it’s one I know you’re already familiar with. Our ability to create new drugs to treat those in need is rapidly declining. In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which drugs are discovered or designed, and productivity has collapsed over the past twenty years. In the past most drugs have been discovered either by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by serendipitous discovery. A new approach has been to understand how disease and infection are controlled at the molecular and physiological level and to target specific entities based on this knowledge.’

The process of drug discovery involved the identification of candidates, synthesis, characterization, screening and assays for therapeutic efficacy. Once a compound had shown its value in these tests, it began the process of being developed prior to clinical trials. And it was that which was slowing down the arrival of new drugs to the market.

‘Despite our advances in technology and understanding of biological systems, drug discovery is still a long, expensive, difficult and inefficient process with low rates of new therapeutic discovery. Currently, the research and development cost of each new molecular entity is approximately 1.8 billion US dollars, a financial burden too great for us to bear. Information on the human genome has been hailed as promising to virtually eliminate the bottleneck in therapeutic targets that has been one limiting factor on the rate of therapeutic discovery. However, data indicates that this is not so and that the genome cannot be relied upon to cure all ills. In short, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for change.’

Wolfe regarded them for a long moment before speaking again.

‘We need to focus new drug development to a changed home market. There are now simply too many people with too many physiological variations causing too many mutations in infectious and contagious diseases for our ability to control and treat those conditions, regardless of cost, time or availability. Sooner or later, one of those diseases is going to become a pandemic, with the loss of millions, perhaps even billions of people. In the fourteenth century in Europe, the plague known as the Black Death eliminated some sixty percent of the population, who were suffering from compromised immunity due to chronic malnutrition, a predicament common still in the developing world. It is not the science that is at fault, it is the fact that there are simply too many human beings populating our planet acting as petri dishes for and carriers of exotic infectious diseases. If we do not act now, their carrying of the next great pandemic could spill over into our own countries and threaten humanity’s very existence.’

To Wolfe’s surprise, there was a sudden burst of rapturous applause that thundered round the stage. Wolfe raised a hand before speaking again as the furore died down.

‘There will be some, particularly our friends in the media, who will no doubt vilify my comments as ignorant of the needs of millions of people around the world who have complained for many decades about their lack of access to desperately needed drugs. However, sometimes science reaches a point where the volume of demands placed upon it can no longer be met by even its most talented and determined servants. The truth is, ladies and gentlemen, that we need a reduction in population to improve almost every single facet of our modern lives. There is no silver bullet. There is no miracle cure. And there is no light at the end of the tunnel if we continue on our current path of excess consumption and bloated ignorance of the limits of our planet and our own human ingenuity in solving not just our own problems but those of our fellow man. We have outgrown our beds, and now we are forced to lie in them.’

More applause clattered around the room, and Wolfe turned to wave to the wings of the stage. Instantly, three young girls hurried out, running to his side and clinging to him with shy gazes. They were joined by Wolfe’s wife, who stood alongside him at the lectern as he spoke.

‘Our global population is impossible to maintain in the face of a world beset by a growing specter of so-called “peak” phenomena, the point at which consumption totally overwhelms resources. We have peak oil, peak water, peak phosphorus, peak grain and peak fish already threatening civilization at large. I say to you all now, to the watching media and the people who will see this on the news, not as the Director of Operations at USAMRIID but as a husband, a father and a human being: for all of our sakes we must reduce our numbers in order to conserve the very resources upon which we depend, before our success as a society becomes our downfall as a species.’

Donald Wolfe, resplendent in his tuxedo and neatly parted hair, replaced the microphone on the lectern and stepped politely off the stage as wave after wave of applause followed him. The diners were all on their feet and clapping far harder than was necessary, as though each and every clap accounted for the millions of dollars that had flowed into their accounts over the decades. Voices accompanied the slaps on his back as he weaved between the tables.

‘About goddamn time.’

‘Took the words right out of my mouth, Donald.’

‘Good work, Wolfe, you’ll save our lives with that.’

Wolfe worked his way through the tables, to where one of the discreet men he had been watching stood to greet him and gestured toward the exit.

‘We need to talk, Donald,’ the man said. ‘Please, this way.’