United States—had eventually culminated in a face-to-face meeting. That meeting took place in a Seattle hotel room, on a sunny autumn morning when Scotch mist swirled over streets bustling with weekenders going about their chores.
“Bring out your dead,” Mephisto had said then, gazing down at them as the bitter, dying virologist puffed on a Lucky Strike and blew out smoke rings.
“Bring out your dead!” The cry had echoed through the burghs of fourteenth-century Europe as street carts gathered up the twenty-five million victims of the Black Death.
Mephisto envisioned streets of panic.
Streets red with blood.
“What you have here,” Grof said, tapping the box on the table, “is a plague of biblical proportions. The 1918 flu wiped out one percent of the human population. This will annihilate ninety times that, or nine of every ten people.”
Mephisto did the math.
It took a million years to populate the earth with a billion people:
1 billion around 1800;
2 billion around 1930;
3 billion around 1960;
4 billion around 1975;
5 billion around 1987;
6 billion around 1999.
Seven billion were projected for 2011, the year following the Whistler Olympics.
A 90 percent cull rate would cut that to seven hundred million, or a global population about double that of the United States. Instead of a planet in peril from melting polar ice caps, receding glaciers, rising sea levels, freak weather patterns, vanishing species, food shortages, and mobs of climate refugees, we’d be left with the fallout of a biological killer unlike anything the world had ever seen, a weapon conceived to eliminate urban populations but save infrastructures. Gone would be the overwhelming pressures on the environment, energy sources, natural resources, food, water, and housing. Every survivor would have his choice of home from those already built, meaning slums could be demolished to recover green space. The last time the earth had had a population of seven hundred million was 1700.
Wouldn’t that be El Dorado?
The elusive City of Gold.
Especially for the Gilded Man, who was immune to this plague, and thereby free to speculate for his self-interest.
Me, thought Mephisto.
The savior of humankind.
The only man with the balls to do what had to be done, while lesser men talked and talked at useless gabfests that accomplished nothing, staging silly Earth Hours and self-aggrandizing rock concerts, obviously afraid to deal with the real threat: too many people pumping too many people out of their loins.
“Bring out your dead!”
“Pandora’s box,” said Grof, caressing the lid of the oblong case in front of him. “The hard work is done. All you do now is release the monster in here—” he raised the lid to expose three cans of freeze-dried horror and a vaccination kit—“at a meeting of people about to fan out around the globe, and they will carry the incubating plague home with them. Six to seven days later, the world will be bleeding, and the blood won’t clot. By day nine, most of the population will be dead. Fate will determine who lives and dies.”
Grof tapped the vials and syringes.
“The Ebola genes are inside the smallpox shell, so all you need to protect yourself are smallpox antibodies. Smallpox vaccinations stopped in 1971, and the world was declared smallpox free in 1979. Because a smallpox vaccination lasts for ten years, no one alive today—with the exception of those who inoculate themselves with what is in this kit—is immune to this virus.”
Mephisto’s original plan had called for the simultaneous release of the supervirus in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Had DeClercq not found his hideout on Ebbtide Island and cleaved the boat on which he tried to flee, sinking Pandora’s box to the bottom of the strait, he’d have succeeded. It had taken precious years for Mephisto’s secret salvage operation to recover the box. And in those years, the U.S. military had launched a smallpox vaccination
“Bring out your dead,” Mephisto had said then, gazing down at them as the bitter, dying virologist puffed on a Lucky Strike and blew out smoke rings.
“Bring out your dead!” The cry had echoed through the burghs of fourteenth-century Europe as street carts gathered up the twenty-five million victims of the Black Death.
Mephisto envisioned streets of panic.
Streets red with blood.
“What you have here,” Grof said, tapping the box on the table, “is a plague of biblical proportions. The 1918 flu wiped out one percent of the human population. This will annihilate ninety times that, or nine of every ten people.”
Mephisto did the math.
It took a million years to populate the earth with a billion people:
1 billion around 1800;
2 billion around 1930;
3 billion around 1960;
4 billion around 1975;
5 billion around 1987;
6 billion around 1999.
Seven billion were projected for 2011, the year following the Whistler Olympics.
A 90 percent cull rate would cut that to seven hundred million, or a global population about double that of the United States. Instead of a planet in peril from melting polar ice caps, receding glaciers, rising sea levels, freak weather patterns, vanishing species, food shortages, and mobs of climate refugees, we’d be left with the fallout of a biological killer unlike anything the world had ever seen, a weapon conceived to eliminate urban populations but save infrastructures. Gone would be the overwhelming pressures on the environment, energy sources, natural resources, food, water, and housing. Every survivor would have his choice of home from those already built, meaning slums could be demolished to recover green space. The last time the earth had had a population of seven hundred million was 1700.
Wouldn’t that be El Dorado?
The elusive City of Gold.
Especially for the Gilded Man, who was immune to this plague, and thereby free to speculate for his self-interest.
Me, thought Mephisto.
The savior of humankind.
The only man with the balls to do what had to be done, while lesser men talked and talked at useless gabfests that accomplished nothing, staging silly Earth Hours and self-aggrandizing rock concerts, obviously afraid to deal with the real threat: too many people pumping too many people out of their loins.
“Bring out your dead!”
“Pandora’s box,” said Grof, caressing the lid of the oblong case in front of him. “The hard work is done. All you do now is release the monster in here—” he raised the lid to expose three cans of freeze-dried horror and a vaccination kit—“at a meeting of people about to fan out around the globe, and they will carry the incubating plague home with them. Six to seven days later, the world will be bleeding, and the blood won’t clot. By day nine, most of the population will be dead. Fate will determine who lives and dies.”
Grof tapped the vials and syringes.
“The Ebola genes are inside the smallpox shell, so all you need to protect yourself are smallpox antibodies. Smallpox vaccinations stopped in 1971, and the world was declared smallpox free in 1979. Because a smallpox vaccination lasts for ten years, no one alive today—with the exception of those who inoculate themselves with what is in this kit—is immune to this virus.”
Mephisto’s original plan had called for the simultaneous release of the supervirus in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Had DeClercq not found his hideout on Ebbtide Island and cleaved the boat on which he tried to flee, sinking Pandora’s box to the bottom of the strait, he’d have succeeded. It had taken precious years for Mephisto’s secret salvage operation to recover the box. And in those years, the U.S. military had launched a smallpox vaccination
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