Upon A Pale Horse

THIRTY-FOUR Alfie

Schmidt’s room was actually more akin to a tiny apartment, with a separate bedroom and a small living room that barely accommodated a sofa, a faded brown La-Z-Boy lounger, a coffee table, and a small circular dining table with two wooden chairs in the far corner. The German stepped into the room and made straight for the lounge chair, and Jeffrey took a seat on the couch and extracted a notepad from his laptop case — a prop to add to his journalist demeanor. He leaned forward and placed a small recorder on the table that he’d bought at an electronics store adjacent to the station in Paris.

“Do you mind if I record this?” he asked, and Schmidt shook his head.

“Absolutely not. I don’t want anyone thinking that you made it up.”

Jeffrey switched the tiny device on and then announced the date and Schmidt’s name with officious sincerity. Once he was done, he hesitated at how to begin, eyeing the old man as he continued speaking.

“Well, then. Rather than asking questions, I’ve asked for Alfred Schmidt to tell his story in his own words. The next voice you will hear will be his,” Jeffrey said, and then sat back, waiting for the German to begin.

“I originally started working on biological weapons for the Nazis in 1942 after graduating from Justus Liebig University in Giessen. We were weaponizing foot-and-mouth disease, and spent much time on cholera as well. Some of our work was sent to the Japanese, who did widespread testing on the Chinese during the invasion and occupation of China — about half a million dead, but you’ll never hear about it. Unfortunately, the research was never able to reach its full potential due to wartime constraints on resources. Those were dark times, with the party coming apart and the Allies attacking on all fronts. Anyway, that’s ancient history, and everyone agrees that the Nazi party was guilty of atrocities that make anything we did on the biological side meaningless.”

Schmidt cleared his throat.

“After the war, the U.S. approached me about moving to the United States to continue my work, which I jumped at. I spent the next forty years in its biological weapons program, first working at Camp Detrick, in Maryland, and then later at a number of other facilities, including Plum Island and Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where I was primarily working on lethal viruses, including viruses that could destroy the immune system. Even though—”

“You mean to say…” Jeffrey couldn’t help interrupting. “You mean, after all… well, after the Nuremberg trials, our government actually hired you to—”

“Yes, yes, they contacted me. They wanted my expertise. Does that surprise you? The important thing is that, even though your President Nixon officially ended offensive efforts in 1969, the clandestine agencies continued to secretly fund offensive programs that showed promise. So while the programs were supposedly finished, and everyone made a big deal out of signing the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972 banning bio-weapons research, the truth was that select experimentation went on. I continued my work, and perfected a number of different agents before turning to retroviruses.”

Jeffrey’s ears perked up.

“The cattle mutilation period was when we were testing a variety of pathogens, specifically trying to synthesize a variant of bovine leukemia and splice it with simian immunodeficiency virus. We already knew from experimentation that we could make diseases jump species — that was a major thrust of our research. In 1972, we were able to infect chimps with leukemia and destroy their immune systems by causing bovine leukemia virus to cross to chimps. The subjects died of Pneumocystis pneumonia, and there was great excitement at the time because we’d created not one, but two new diseases never before seen in chimps — leukemia and Pneumocystis. We did it by having them drink milk from cows with bovine leukemia. Anyway, the findings were later duplicated and written up in 1974 in Cancer Research. This was extremely exciting in my circle because it presented a whole new approach to bio-weapons — the ability to create a contagious immuno-suppressive agent that would kill targeted populations.”

“Wait a minute. I recognize the second cause of death — the Pneumocystis pneumonia. Isn’t that one of the primary complications from…” Jeffrey paused.

“Yes. Exactly. It’s one of the leading causes of death from AIDS.”

Both men were silent for several moments.

“Wait a minute. You’re not saying…”

“I will tell you this much: I was working on a contagious bio-weapon that could cause catastrophic damage to the human immune system. Through most of the early and mid-seventies. I was part of a team — one of several teams, as a matter of fact, that had been integrated under the umbrella of the NCI — the National Cancer Institute.”

“But… where do the cattle come in?”

“We needed hosts we could use to culture our little germs. And we wanted to see how they would spread in the wild — in populations that were interacting normally, not lab animals in pens.”

“Back to Pneumocystis pneumonia… and AIDS.”

“Yes. And now we get to the real meat — the reason anyone will care about my sordid history. I’m an expert on retroviruses, and as such, I’m one hundred percent convinced that HIV is a lab-created pathogen, an engineered variant of simian immunodeficiency virus, and that AIDS is a man-made disease. I worked on similar pathogens. I should know.”

Jeffrey was speechless. In his wildest dreams, he’d never thought the cattle mutilations would lead to… this. His mind raced as he fought to find words.

“But why? Why would a lab-created bio-warfare virus be released into the world?”

“Ah. Finally, a good question. The answer to that, my friend, has nothing whatsoever to do with science, and everything to do with politics and social engineering.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“One of the problems we had should be obvious from the cattle mutilations: We needed real-world data on how our creations would spread, and how lethal they would be in humans. Sure, we had models, and we could extrapolate, but that’s not the same — one mistaken assumption and all the models turn out wrong. It’s always an issue. A big one. I believe that HIV was deliberately introduced in Africa in order to obtain data on how a new weaponized retrovirus would mutate and flourish in a general population, and at the same time potentially solve, or at least moderate, the global overpopulation problem.”

“In America, it served a dual purpose. It was inserted into a control group that could be easily followed and that was a troublesome minority, so data could be obtained on its spread in that community; a cohort group that didn’t seem to be at risk of transmitting it to the general population. Also, though, it was a group that was emerging as a troubling political force based in sexuality — sexuality that was not just dangerous on a political level, but also threatened to undermine the values of conservative America.”

“You’re saying that HIV was deliberately spread in the U.S. to decimate the gay community? And that Africa was some kind of population control exercise?”

“There’s no other explanation for how it was released in both the U.S. and Africa around the same time—”

“Well,” corrected Jeffrey, “it started in Africa first, so that—”

“Is that what you think?” Schmidt chuckled slightly. “Well, of course. That’s what you’ve been told so many times you accept it as fact. But actually, it appeared in Africa after it did in the U.S.” He held up a hand to silence Jeffrey’s objections before continuing.

“And there’s no question that it was released. The explanations about cross-species jumping from monkeys to humans in Africa via bush meat was always ludicrous, and was first advanced by a scientist who falsely claimed to have discovered the virus, and whose staff were later shown to be perpetrators of fraud. It was a stupid theory that stretched the limits of scientific credulousness to new levels, and relied upon hypothesis on top of speculation on top of guess — never mind that AIDS is a disease of the cities in Africa, and hardly ever occurs in the bush, where bush meat is made and consumed. But it was a convenient bit of theater that took the focus off a lab-created possibility.”

The German stared at a faraway spot on the wall for a moment, and then returned to the discussion as though he hadn’t missed a beat. “Through repetition, it became the prevailing accepted explanation, which is now trumpeted and repeated as fact — with the original green monkeys now changed to chimps after the Japanese proved that HIV wasn’t closely related to the monkey virus. That HIV came from chimps or gorillas, jumping species in the wild, is repeated like gospel, with the weight of fact. Only it isn’t fact. It’s an invention. A post hoc explanation designed to befuddle and confuse. Because the other explanation is too horrible to contemplate — that factions within the U.S. government singled out whole populations based on race or sexuality, and earmarked them as expendable, part of a big experiment that was both financially and ideologically driven.” Schmidt glowered at Jeffrey, and then a tight smile cracked his sagging face.

Jeffrey’s eyes drifted over to the recorder, confirming that it was catching everything. His head was swimming with the density of the information the old scientist was reciting as if reading from his notes.

The German coughed and cleared his throat again. “Damned bug is running around here. Be careful, or you might catch a cold.”

Jeffrey tried to formulate a response, but words eluded him.

“Back to my role in all this. Remember I told you about infecting chimps with a virus that destroyed their T cells and caused them to die from Pneumocystis pneumonia? I was working on creating a virus that would do the same in humans — weaken the immune system and kill the host from opportunistic afflictions. I made great strides in doing so, as the chimp experiments should tell you. Then I was pulled off the project in the mid-seventies and moved to another operation, with no warning. Several years later the first cases of AIDS began to surface out of New York, and then later, in Africa. I didn’t have to be a genius to recognize my own handiwork.” The German reached to his side and lifted a plastic bottle of water to his lips, drew a few swallows, then set it back down.

“But a bigger question than whether it had been released into targeted subsections of the population, was how. How had a laboratory-created, contagious bio-weapon made it into the gay population of New York, and into Haiti, and Africa, and even more interestingly to me, how had the perpetrators managed to get the entire scientific community to be comfortable with it being a gay disease on one continent, but a heterosexual one on another? As a scientist, I found it impossible that nobody seemed puzzled by that, and that the possibility of the virus being lab-created was never seriously examined. Maybe because I was familiar with the bio-weapons ability we’d developed that allowed us to target pathogens specifically for different cell types — some for blood, others for mucous membranes. To me it was as plain as day what had happened, and I thought there was no way that the world would blindly go along with the official explanations — that monkey virus had spontaneously jumped species in Africa, and made it to the U.S. as a completely different strain, getting into a time machine in the process.”

Schmidt leaned forward and fixed Jeffrey with a hard stare. “Turns out I was wrong.”