Before Harry could respond, the door opened and a beam of electric light from the hall outside shone down into his eyes. He squinted as a couple of figures walked into the room — a man and a woman. He blinked to get his focus back and saw a tall, thin man in a dark suit and beside him a younger woman… another blink revealed it was Zalan Szabo and his Swedish bodyguard Elsa.
“Let Lucia out of the freezer, Szabo. You’ll kill her in there!”
“Don’t exercise yourself,” Szabo said raising his chin to get a better view of Lucia in the freezer. He smiled coldly and returned his attention to Harry. “You need to start worrying about yourself, MI6.”
“What do you want with the dust, Szabo?” Harry said.
Szabo studied his prisoners for a moment. “I am charged with a terrible burden and you have made things very difficult for me. I have responsibilities so heavy you couldn’t possibly understand.”
“Try me.”
“A farmer must draft out sheep to be culled if he is to raise a healthy flock. It is the way of nature.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Our planet is no more than a farm, you fool, and someone must manage the livestock… the human livestock.”
“What the fuck?” Zoey said.
Szabo continued. “The Black Death was no accident… it was no natural disaster as the history books would have you believe, and neither was the Spanish Flu of 1918, or most of the plagues in between those two dates.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Among other important duties, the Ministry is charged with maintaining a healthy population for the planet. At various times in its long history it has been forced to discharge certain remedies in order to reduce that population.”
“This is insanity,” Baupin said.
Harry couldn’t hide his disgust. “You can’t cull people.”
Szabo ignored them, slipped his hands in his pockets and began to pace the floor in front of their chairs. “It’s relative to infrastructure and technology. The fact is Europe could not support the population it had before the plague, and neither could the world support its population before the Spanish Flu — just two examples. The Ministry has determined that a world with the current level of technology and infrastructure cannot support the current population and therefore a cull is required.”
“This is madness — people aren’t animals, Szabo — you can’t cull them!”
“Nonsense. We gave the governments a chance to do this and governments all over the world obeyed and have been trying to reduce their populations — look at the One Child Policy in China or the massive social and economic pressures authorities have brought to bear on Western populations to reduce their offspring. It has worked within a certain limit — no country in Europe now reproduces at the minimum replacement ratio, which means their populations are dwindling.”
“So why kill millions?”
“Because it is too little too late, and we will be culling billions, not millions. The world will be a utopia beyond your imagination after the cull. A world of seven billion ants crawling over each other reduced to a mere five hundred million.”
“You’re going to kill six and a half billion people?”
“More or less — in less than a year and with no long-lasting impact on the environment other than to improve it. Genius, don’t you think?”
“You don’t want to know what I think,” Harry said. Beside him, Niko began to regain his consciousness.
“I don’t care what you think,” Szabo said. He turned to Aleksi and gave him a series of muttered orders. The Finn padded out of the room.
“But over six billion dead…” Zoey said. “Christ on a pair of crutches!”
“I think that’s a lot of bodies to bury,” Niko said.
“Biodegradable,” Szabo said. “The governments will be given time to dispose of the dead before each new wave.”
“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when the authorities get hold of you.”
Szabo laughed. “Do you even know who the ‘authorities’ — as you so quaintly put it — truly are? If you think they are the people you vote for then you are sadly mistaken. The politicians are merely puppets.”
“You’re saying the Deep State is behind this?” Harry said.
“Deep State… deep state,” Szabo said quietly, as if recalling a long-dead friend. “More puppets.”
“Whoever’s behind this, you can’t allow it to go on,” Harry said. “It’s nothing more than genocide.”
“It’s not genocide. It is science… a beautiful cull. Almost art.”
“You can’t control something like this, Szabo. You’ll wipe out humanity.”
“That is where you are quite wrong, as I shall explain.” As he spoke, Aleksi wandered back into the room. He was dragging Andrej Liška along behind him.
Szabo beamed at the sight of the bedraggled professor. “Ah — Professor! Just in time for our little demonstration.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Harry leaned forward in his chair and strained at the roped binding his hands behind him. “Andrej — are you all right?”
The professor had been beaten badly and had two black eyes and a large cut running vertically across both his lips. “I’m… okay, I think.”
Don’t waste your concern on a man minutes from death,” Szabo said. “Anyway, where was I? Ah — yes. The nanodust is programmed to kill its target, and then after death it will exit the dead body via the lungs and hunt down its next target. This will proceed until the population is culled and then we will deactivate it. Think of it as an intelligent, controllable superbug that kills instantaneously.”
“Right now I’m thinking about what size straight-jacket you require,” Harry said, glancing at Lucia in the freezer. She was sitting down now and curled into a ball. “What if this thing develops an artificial intelligence? Who says it won’t come after you next?”
Szabo shook his head. “There is no capacity for AI in its programming. It must be controlled by man — in this case, me.”
“How very reassuring,” Niko said.
“You should be reassured,” Szabo proclaimed. “The Ministry takes its duty to control the human population extremely seriously. After the numbers are culled the nanodust will be destroyed and we will allow life to continue as before — only with a more sustainable population, naturally.”
“Until you decide we need another cull?” Niko said.
“Yes, it has always been this way, as I have already told you. It was this way in the fourteenth century when we engineered the Black Death, and the cholera epidemics that reduced numbers a century later. And again in the eighteenth century when the Ministry’s terrible duty caused it to create and spread the smallpox virus that wiped out sixty million Europeans, not to mention yet again in the early twentieth century when we reduced the numbers by another one hundred million. Sadly, as humans find more ways to live longer and protect themselves from disease, the population will require more controlling.”
Harry shook his head in disgust. “But when you say controlling, Szabo, you mean genocide, of course.”
“What we do, we do for the good of mankind. It has always been this way. If we failed in our duty the population of the world would get so out of control everywhere would look like a turkey farm in a few short decades.” Szabo turned to Harry. “Have you ever seen a turkey farm?”
“No,” Harry said bluntly. “And your comparison between people and turkeys is truly touching.”