‘Two detectives are on their way to see you, Mister Oppenheimer.’
Oppenheimer hurried across to the panel and pressed a button.
‘Who are they?’ he growled.
‘An Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez, sir.’
Oppenheimer started to reply, and as he pressed the button Willis opened his mouth and screamed as loudly as he could.
‘Help me! For God’s sake, call the police…!’
Oppenheimer shut off the intercom and walked across to Willis and slapped a thick adhesive patch across his mouth. Willis watched helplessly as Oppenheimer walked back to the intercom and pressed the button.
‘I will be there momentarily. Have my security team on standby.’
Oppenheimer walked back to where Willis lay bleeding, and tapped his chest with the scalpel.
‘I shall return, my friend,’ he said coldly. ‘Have a long hard think about what you’re going to tell me. A wrong answer will lose you a perfectly serviceable kidney, understood?’
Willis screamed beneath the tape, sweating profusely as Oppenheimer turned for the door of the laboratory and looked for the first time at Lillian Cruz. He walked across to her, the bloodied scalpel in his hand, and she reared up and away from him.
‘You’re sick,’ she gasped.
Oppenheimer set the scalpel down and unlocked the cuff from one of her wrists before yanking her across to the mortuary slab and cuffing her to that instead. He looked down at Willis.
‘Patch him up,’ Oppenheimer snapped. ‘I don’t want him losing consciousness until I’m fully satisfied he knows nothing.’ He looked down at Willis. ‘Don’t forget now, Tyler. Kidney, or no kidney. It’s your call.’
27
Donald Wolfe left his family in the dining hall and followed his companion to the executive suite. His attendance at the Bilderberg Conference the previous month had been his first, when he had delivered a speech to the other attendees on the dangers of future pandemics. It was there he had been approached regarding the search for solutions to what the men had called the ‘human’ problem, and he had realized how high the stakes were for humanity. He was considering those stakes when they reached one of the rooms, and he was led inside. Four men, all immaculately dressed, waited in the suite as Wolfe closed the door.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said simply.
They never used names. It wasn’t impossible for journalists or even foreign intelligence operatives to bug rooms in the Mandarin, although it was highly unlikely as they would never have known that men of such power were present at all, so secretly did they move through the halls of governments. The four men before him could have passed the average citizen in the street and they would never have known that they were within inches of the most powerful men on earth. One was an elderly oil tycoon who liked to hide behind another individual who was the public face of his company. Another was an equally aged property magnate whose line of work required no public presence whatsoever. The remaining two younger men were both heirs to fossil-fuel fortunes forged before and after World War Two, who had taken the helm of their fathers’ companies with ruthless efficiency. All four were worth more than the GDP of a small European country and infinitely more influential.
‘What news?’ Wolfe asked, his throat tight and dry.
The eldest of the four regarded him for a moment before speaking in a soft, cultured voice.
‘The steering committee has considered your suggestions. We agree that the imminent presence of a global catastrophe due to overpopulation, a lack of physical and energy resources and the growing threat of global pandemics is a clear and present danger. However, we disagree that a radical reduction of select elements of the human population is necessarily the correct course of action.’
Wolfe felt a chill plunge down his spine.
‘What more practical solution do you envisage?’ he asked, struggling to remain calm.
‘We don’t,’ said the shortest of the men. ‘There is no alternative.’
Wolfe frowned uncertainly. ‘Then what’s the problem?’
‘Simply,’ said another of the men, ‘that in your plan the culling of a major proportion of the inhabitants of developing countries is required to affect a solution. Our problem, Donald, is that you’re eradicating the wrong people. The populations of the Western world are far greater consumers than those of the East. Removing a population like our own, that of the United States, will have a profoundly better resolution for global resources than removing the entire population of India, for instance. We consume more, therefore by your own logic it is we who should be removed.’
Wolfe stared at the men in disbelief.
‘The whole point of this is to conserve the better prepared populations for the future!’
‘Is it?’ the eldest man asked. ‘In your proposal it was to save the planet from certain doom.’
Wolfe cursed himself mentally, put off guard by the unexpected hostility.
‘It is,’ he replied. ‘But eradicating ourselves isn’t exactly what I had in mind.’
‘Eradicating?’ asked the last of the men, a young man with hawkish good looks. ‘I thought this was about a humane global call for a reduction in population.’
‘Yes,’ Wolfe replied, ‘combined with the proposed arrest of aging in selected individuals. The longer that you live anonymously at the head of the Bilderberg Committee, the longer that your objectives and desires can remain in place. We, right now, have the power to take control of the globe and control human destiny for decades, perhaps centuries to come.’
‘We?’ said the eldest again. ‘I take it that by we you mean us, yourself and Jeb Oppenheimer?’
Wolfe hesitated for a long moment before replying.
‘I said nothing of Jeb Oppenheimer.’
The four men exchanged glances for a moment before the youngest of them spoke again.
‘I presume that your men have not yet isolated the source of this supposed elixir that you claim to have found?’
‘They are working on it as we speak,’ Wolfe assured him. ‘I have a team in place, and as soon as Oppenheimer locates a viable sample I will acquire it from him and bring it to you.’
Another moment of silence followed before the eldest man spoke.
‘You believe that it is imminent, that a pandemic will strike the East within our lifetimes?’
Wolfe nodded, relieved to be on surer ground.
‘It is inevitable. The HN-51 virus showed us that the influenza strain has already made the leap between animals and humans on numerous occasions, each time with a new mutation more virulent than the last. Global inoculation is not possible, especially given the locales in which the strain exists and mutates. With the populations in Africa, India and the Malay Archipelago growing at a terrific rate it can only be a matter of time before another, truly lethal, treatment-resistant pandemic spreads to all corners of the globe.’
The four men exchanged glances; it was clear they understood the threat and the choice they were being forced to make: reduce the population of the East to prevent a pandemic, or wait for the disease to spread and see the populations of all countries fall.
‘It’s eugenics,’ one of them said. ‘Whatever way we look at it, we’re taking away natural selection and playing god with millions of lives, perhaps billions.’
‘Perhaps we are,’ Wolfe countered, ‘but what else can we do? We know it’s coming, we know it’s going to happen. What would you prefer, given the choice? A controlled, orderly reduction of the population? Or a brutal disease ravaging every continent and killing indiscriminately?’