Upon A Pale Horse

FORTY Dr. Bertrand

Jeffrey waited nervously in the outer waiting room of the Pasteur Institute’s third floor administrative offices, shifting on the leather couch as he inspected his shoes, trying to appear calm while his synapses tingled with adrenaline. He hadn’t dared go back to the hotel and risk detection, so he’d spent his afternoon meandering around Paris, with several breaks for coffee, which he was now paying for as the caffeine jangled his frayed nerves.

The room was modern, cold, the lines clean, the furniture contemporary; the few magazines on the table in front of him were French scientific journals, from what he could tell. He’d drawn a new version of the virus diagram and the bar charts, and was satisfied that his newest masterpiece was as detailed as the original. He had the spreadsheets and his handiwork in his jacket pocket. Another notepad and his French cell phone lay in a newly purchased a satchel, along with a recorder and a hundred business cards he would likely never need.

A tall, frosty woman with mannishly cut hair the color of smoke emerged from one of the doorways behind the reception counter, and after a brief, hushed discussion with the secretary, opened the small half door separating the area from where Jeffrey sat and approached him.

“Monsieur Stanley?”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, rising from the sofa, taking her outstretched hand and shaking it. She had the grip of a longshoreman, he thought, and her cobalt eyes scrutinized him with the precision of a laser. For some reason he felt inadequate under her blistering gaze, but he shrugged it off.

“The doctor will see you. Please. Follow me, yes?” she said, the final word not so much a question as an order.

Jeffrey walked behind her, and once through the door found himself in an industrial hallway, sterile and lacking any furniture or art, painted a polar white that the overhead fluorescent lights imbued with an alien quality. She led him to the final door on the right, and paused just before she knocked on it.

“Forty-five minutes,” she said, her tone as playful as a marine sergeant’s barked drill, and then she rapped on the door three times, each percussive pop echoing in the hall like a firecracker.

A male voice called from inside and the door buzzed, a remote electric security latch presumably triggered by the occupant. She pushed the door open, her eyes never leaving his face as he nodded his thanks and edged by her. He could feel her stare boring holes in his back as he approached the inner office, where a pudgy man with oversized horn-rimmed glasses on his bald head sat behind a desk large enough to house a family of four.

“Dr. Bertrand. Thank you so much for meeting with me,” Jeffrey said, his feet sinking into the plush carpet in the scientist’s office as he moved toward the desk.

“My pleasure, Mr. Stanley, my pleasure. I’m sorry I have so little time for you, but I’m afraid my days are all like this — many hours of work, and not enough time to get everything I need done…” Bertrand said with a small, apologetic frown. “Your email says you are doing an article about retrovirology?”

“Yes, Doctor. Specifically, on lab-created retroviruses. And the potential for disaster if one of these experiments were ever to make it out of the laboratory and into the general population,” Jeffrey explained, pulling his recorder out of his bag and setting it onto the desk. “May I record this?”

“Certainly.”

Jeffrey activated the recorder and pushed it between them. “As I was saying, I’m doing a series about retrovirology, recent advances in science, and the possibility that something lab-generated could make it into the real world.”

“All facilities doing this sort of research will use level three or four bio-containment protocols, so the odds of anything escaping the lab are so remote as to be incalculable,” Bertrand assured him. “Everyone involved in the field is aware of the risks, and it has become standard to have these kinds of systems in order to protect against accidents.”

“That’s reassuring. Before we get too far into my questions, though, could we go back and touch on your background? You were one of the members of the team that discovered HIV, were you not?”

“Yes. Working with Montagnier in the eighties. I was a young scientist in a cutting-edge field. It was a very exciting time. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for that discovery, you know.”

“Yes. And a tremendous honor for you, as well,” Jeffrey said.

“It’s all part of the job. Most of which involves impossibly long hours in the lab, you know. Nothing glamorous, I’m afraid. Just test tubes and microscopes.”

They spent some time going back and forth about the group that Bertrand led, and some of the noteworthy advances he’d pioneered, and then Jeffrey nudged the discussion into the direction he needed it to go.

“As part of my investigations, I’ve interviewed other scientists, and I’ve gotten a good picture of some of the dangers involved in certain types of research. Biological warfare programs, for instance,” Jeffrey started.

“There are no more biological warfare programs. They were outlawed in 1972, and virtually every country in the world has signed the convention banning them.”

“I understand that. But I’ve also spoken to some who claim that there have been secret programs, in violation of the agreement.”

Bertrand’s eyes hardened, and his tone went from one of cheerful good nature to unfriendliness. “I wouldn’t know anything about that. France has no offensive biological warfare program. That is a matter of public record.”

“Yes, I know. But there are other countries with advanced capabilities, and there have been allegations. They’re not a secret. The Soviets had aggressive offensive programs that continued until the fall of the Soviet Union, and which continue, some believe, to this day.”

“I’m not sure that there is a question in all this. Is there?”

Jeffrey shook his head. “I suppose not. I’m trying to understand the implications of a lab-created virus making its way into the general population.”

“That would be most unlikely.”

“What would you say if I told you that I have uncovered evidence that there is such a virus, and that it looks as though it’s in imminent danger of being released?”

Bertrand drew back, clearly uncomfortable. “Monsieur, this interview is at an end. I am not going to entertain flights of fancy or science fiction. I don’t mean to be rude, but this is not what I agreed to participate in,” Bertrand said, and lifted his telephone handset from the cradle and prepared to dial.

Jeffrey extracted the diagram from his pocket and wordlessly placed it in front of Bertrand. The Frenchman’s finger hovered over the phone keypad, and then he slowly set the phone back down as he squinted at the drawing. He pulled his glasses down from his head and peered at Jeffrey’s diagram, his complexion going pale as the minutes slowly ticked by. Eventually he put the paper down and fixed Jeffrey with a shocked gaze.

“Where… where did you get this?”

“It doesn’t matter. Do you know what it is?”

“I… I would need to study it more closely to be sure.”

“I’ve been told it is a variant of H1N1. Spanish influenza. But that it has been modified.”

Bertrand stared at the diagram again. “How?”

“In one of those offensive bio-warfare laboratories that the Biological Weapons Convention says no longer exists,” Jeffrey said.

“I mean how has it been modified? Do you know?”

Jeffrey let him absorb the drawing, and then pulled the spreadsheet from his pocket and placed the pages on the desk next to the diagram. “It’s been made more lethal, more infectious, deadlier. The reason I wanted to meet with you is because I suspect you’re one of the few people who can tell me just how much more dangerous this new variant is.”

Bertrand stared at the spreadsheet like it was toxic. “What is that?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

Bertrand began paging through the sheaf of paper, then looked at Jeffrey. “These are results. It looks to me like trial results. A data set.”

“So they should be able to tell you what it is we’re dealing with?”

“Possibly. I would need to enter everything and run some models. I ask you again — where did you get this?”

Jeffrey sighed. This was the moment of truth. The point where he would need to trust the Frenchman with his life. If he called it wrong, or if the scientist was somehow involved in the scheme, Jeffrey would be dead in a matter of hours.

“It started with a plane crash…”

Five minutes later, Jeffrey finished, feeling like he’d run a marathon.

Bertrand was studying the diagram again. “I’ll need time. But if this is what it appears to be, then you’re correct. This is an unprecedented disaster. I just can’t believe that it could have originated in America. It makes no sense.”

“The German said that there was a faction in the U.S. government, or that colluded with the government, that’s been working on reducing the world population for four decades. That he was part of their scheme, and that the projects he was involved with were approved in the clandestine back rooms. He said that HIV was part of that.”

“He said what?” Bertrand demanded incredulously.

Jeffrey took him through the German’s claims. His developing an immune-suppressive agent in chimps, and then for humans. The incredibly coincidental timing of the global AIDS epidemic, and his observations of the timing of the AIDS outbreaks and the hepatitis B vaccination trials in the U.S. and the smallpox vaccination programs in Africa.

“These are very dangerous claims, and I would be very, very careful about voicing them. Certainly, there’s a case that can be made for HIV being lab-created, but you’ll find it’s a controversial topic that nobody wishes to debate,” Bertrand warned.

“I’m aware of that. It’s just one of many things these days that’s best not discussed, apparently. Anything that contradicts an official explanation is treated as conspiracy nonsense, even if all the data supports the alternative explanation.”

“I’m not going to debate ideology or ethics. But this… this, if it is an actually model of a modified virus, is frightening,” Bertrand snapped.

“Can you enter the data and run whatever you need to run in order to better understand it?” Jeffrey asked, finally daring the big question. “You’re one of the only scientists in the world equipped to interpret the data. That’s what my research has led me to believe…”

A knock at the door interrupted them, and Bertrand hastily gathered up the papers and stuffed them into his desk drawer before pressing the button that opened the remote lock. His assistant stuck her head in.

“Ah, Marianne. We will need a few more minutes. We are just finishing up,” Bertrand said, affecting his collegial air.

She eyed Jeffrey disapprovingly and nodded. “Oui. D’accord,” she said, and closed the door.

Bertrand returned his focus to Jeffrey. He exhaled noisily, staring at a point somewhere to the left of Jeffrey’s face.

“Will you do it?” Jeffrey asked softly.

“What choice do I have? You’ve dropped a scientific atomic bomb in my lap. How can I not act on this? Of course I have to do it. And it will take many hours of my, and my staff’s, time. We’ll have to drop everything and work only on this. For which I have you to blame…”

“I’m sorry. There was nobody else I could go to.”

“The damage is done. Now I need to characterize this virus and see what the data says. If your story is even half true, we could be facing the biggest threat to our species in history.” Bertrand shook his head. “I have long feared something like this, and now that it’s here, it doesn’t surprise me. Nothing about man’s ability to destroy surprises me. As a scientist who has spent his life trying to untangle the riddles nature visits upon us, the greatest mystery I have seen is man’s willingness to do the unspeakable to his fellow man.”

They agreed that Jeffrey would call him in forty-eight hours for an update and would leave the spreadsheets with him. Jeffrey rooted in his jacket and withdrew the flash drive, and handed it Bertrand as they were walking to the door together.

“That’ll save you some time on the data entry, I hope,” he said, and Bertrand gave him another surprised look.

“Who are you, really?” Bertrand asked in a low voice.

Jeffrey thought long and hard about how to answer the question.

“Just someone in the wrong place at the right time.”