River in the rainforest of Central Africa.”
The oozing man shuffled up an aisle squeezed by hospital beds filled with thrashing wretches in the grip of seizures. Gore pooled underneath them and inched across the floor. The lurching zombie slopped through the slime and stalked the camera out the door.
The living dead terrorized the street beyond, crawling among the corpses and clutching at those not yet infected. Women wailed in anguish and yanked out their hair. Babies cried for mothers who lay dying in the blood-soaked dirt. If they ever offered an Oscar for hell on earth, this place would win it hands down.
“Ebola Zaire is a perfect parasite,” said Joe. “It assaults every part of the body, except skeletal muscle and bone. The virus lives to replicate itself, and it turns each victim into a seething bio-bomb. Spread around the globe, it would kill off 90 percent of the world’s population in six weeks.”
All of a sudden, the horror movie morphed into a science fiction film. Astronauts in biohazard suits, their heads sheathed in breathing equipment, filled the screen. They roamed the village collecting samples from the dead while their flesh liquefied into red gumbo.
A tiny Soviet emblem adorned each man’s shoulder.
“The Vektor compound in Siberia,” said Joe as the DVD switched scenes again, this time to a labyrinth of tunnels sealed by airlocks. “In the 1980s, forty thousand scientists worked for Biopreparat, the Soviet Union’s biological weaponry agency. They had access to ten thousand viruses, including 140 strains of smallpox and three kinds of Ebola. The Ebola Zaire strain came from the village we just saw.”
“Black biology,” commented Gill.
The Russian nodded.
“Ebola’s weakness is twofold. First, it kills too quickly, eating up bodies from brain to skin before victims can infect enough new hosts to sustain an epidemic. Second, like the AIDS virus, it spreads solely by direct contact with infected body fluids. To address this, the virologist you see here—Vladimir Grof—created an airborne strain.”
“How?” asked Gill, about to drain her glass.
“He began by thinking about the worst scourge in history: smallpox. That disease has a longer incubation period and a much lower kill rate than Ebola, but it spreads more easily. Grof realized that if he could combine the virulence of Ebola with the infectiousness of smallpox, he would have a supervirus without compare. He found a way to insert Ebola genes into a smallpox shell to create a hybrid that could be spread by air.”
“Phew!” said Gill. “What happened to Grof?”
The previous scenes had shown him going about his work in a secret lab at the Vektor compound, weaponizing viral agents for the Soviet military. In the scenes they were watching now, he’d become a living skeleton, his Slavic face merely angles of skin and skull.
“A Vektor virus wormed into his heart,” said Joe. “This footage was taken shortly before he died. During the Soviet era, Grof had had it all. A dacha on the Black Sea and a hunting lodge in the Urals. But with the fall of Communism, he lost everything. Suddenly, he was working in a crumbling lab and went months without getting paid. He blamed American capitalists for his decline. For revenge, he sold his supervirus—in the form of three aerosol bombs—to a bioterrorist.”
“Who?” asked the Mountie.
“We don’t know.”
“Where?”
“Seattle,” answered Joe.
“How did he smuggle it in?”
“By diplomatic pouch. You see, the fall of the Soviet Union had created a new threat from broke, disgruntled Biopreparat scientists looking to sell their toxic wares to hostile states. To stop that, Washington funded several make-work projects through Russia’s Academy of Sciences. Ironically, Grof was sent to America as an example of the program’s success. He used the opportunity to transact his revenge.”
“So you know what he sold and where he sold it, but not who the buyer was.
The oozing man shuffled up an aisle squeezed by hospital beds filled with thrashing wretches in the grip of seizures. Gore pooled underneath them and inched across the floor. The lurching zombie slopped through the slime and stalked the camera out the door.
The living dead terrorized the street beyond, crawling among the corpses and clutching at those not yet infected. Women wailed in anguish and yanked out their hair. Babies cried for mothers who lay dying in the blood-soaked dirt. If they ever offered an Oscar for hell on earth, this place would win it hands down.
“Ebola Zaire is a perfect parasite,” said Joe. “It assaults every part of the body, except skeletal muscle and bone. The virus lives to replicate itself, and it turns each victim into a seething bio-bomb. Spread around the globe, it would kill off 90 percent of the world’s population in six weeks.”
All of a sudden, the horror movie morphed into a science fiction film. Astronauts in biohazard suits, their heads sheathed in breathing equipment, filled the screen. They roamed the village collecting samples from the dead while their flesh liquefied into red gumbo.
A tiny Soviet emblem adorned each man’s shoulder.
“The Vektor compound in Siberia,” said Joe as the DVD switched scenes again, this time to a labyrinth of tunnels sealed by airlocks. “In the 1980s, forty thousand scientists worked for Biopreparat, the Soviet Union’s biological weaponry agency. They had access to ten thousand viruses, including 140 strains of smallpox and three kinds of Ebola. The Ebola Zaire strain came from the village we just saw.”
“Black biology,” commented Gill.
The Russian nodded.
“Ebola’s weakness is twofold. First, it kills too quickly, eating up bodies from brain to skin before victims can infect enough new hosts to sustain an epidemic. Second, like the AIDS virus, it spreads solely by direct contact with infected body fluids. To address this, the virologist you see here—Vladimir Grof—created an airborne strain.”
“How?” asked Gill, about to drain her glass.
“He began by thinking about the worst scourge in history: smallpox. That disease has a longer incubation period and a much lower kill rate than Ebola, but it spreads more easily. Grof realized that if he could combine the virulence of Ebola with the infectiousness of smallpox, he would have a supervirus without compare. He found a way to insert Ebola genes into a smallpox shell to create a hybrid that could be spread by air.”
“Phew!” said Gill. “What happened to Grof?”
The previous scenes had shown him going about his work in a secret lab at the Vektor compound, weaponizing viral agents for the Soviet military. In the scenes they were watching now, he’d become a living skeleton, his Slavic face merely angles of skin and skull.
“A Vektor virus wormed into his heart,” said Joe. “This footage was taken shortly before he died. During the Soviet era, Grof had had it all. A dacha on the Black Sea and a hunting lodge in the Urals. But with the fall of Communism, he lost everything. Suddenly, he was working in a crumbling lab and went months without getting paid. He blamed American capitalists for his decline. For revenge, he sold his supervirus—in the form of three aerosol bombs—to a bioterrorist.”
“Who?” asked the Mountie.
“We don’t know.”
“Where?”
“Seattle,” answered Joe.
“How did he smuggle it in?”
“By diplomatic pouch. You see, the fall of the Soviet Union had created a new threat from broke, disgruntled Biopreparat scientists looking to sell their toxic wares to hostile states. To stop that, Washington funded several make-work projects through Russia’s Academy of Sciences. Ironically, Grof was sent to America as an example of the program’s success. He used the opportunity to transact his revenge.”
“So you know what he sold and where he sold it, but not who the buyer was.
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