“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.”
FORTY-ONE
Quiet Contemplation
Reginald Barker watched the waves pound against the shore from the long terrace of his estate home on a secluded bluff in Montauk, New York, at the northeastern tip of Long Island. The area was home to some of the most expensive real estate in the world, and his retreat numbered among the most exclusive, the rambling acreage as far as he could see privately owned — by him — with an almost incalculable value.
The sun had risen a half hour earlier, and the industrialist was enjoying his first cup of coffee of the day, preparing for a walk along the trails that he loved, down the rise and to the beach, which at that hour would be secluded, his only company the unobtrusive security detail that shadowed him to ensure he wasn’t accosted.
While some of his neighbors down the island had built gauche, mega-opulent estates that were featured in magazines and whispered about by the locals, Barker had always adhered to the philosophy he’d inherited from his father — that it was better to go unnoticed and not to flaunt the riches with which he’d been blessed. His home, one of eight he owned, was modest by his standards: nine thousand square feet, with none of the garish frills favored by the nouveaux riches; no bowling alleys or movie theaters for him. Simply well-designed, beautifully appointed elegance, boasting Chippendale furniture that would be the envy of half the museums in the world and a collection of art as breathtaking as it was valuable.
His full-time staff at the Hamptons estate included three housekeepers, a butler, a driver, two gardeners, a maintenance man, a chef, and sundry helpers, not counting his bodyguards, which alternated between a core of four to as many as twenty, depending upon which of his abodes he was frequenting. It was the burden of being rich, he mused as he sipped the special Kona blend grown for him at a private farm — he’d bought half the growing land after he’d tasted the roast at a getaway he’d taken there thirty years before, and was the sole consumer of the beans in the U.S.
The accumulation of wealth and power had long since passed from being a passion to a routine, and he didn’t bother to track his worth anymore — it was in the hundreds of billions, depending upon the performance of his largest holdings. The number had ceased to be meaningful, and the things money could buy didn’t interest him, beyond ensuring that his every need was attended to.
He finished his cup and set it on a small circular marble table by the door, then zipped his coat up tighter, his breath steaming in the chill. With a glance at his rose gold Patek Philippe Sky Moon Tourbillon watch, he stretched his legs and did a series of knee bends, grimacing at the popping as his aged joints protested the exertion. One of the truisms of life, he mused — nothing could stop the inexorable creep of time, not even truckloads of riches. Of course, he had a team of the finest medical practitioners at his beck and call, but even they couldn’t sustain him indefinitely. His time was drawing to an end, he knew, but he wouldn’t go easily, and he was determined to stay vital until death’s cold hand landed on his shoulder. His father had lived to be eighty-four, as mean as a black mamba and twice as lethal, and he had every expectation that the combination of good genes and improved science would keep him drawing breath for as long, if not longer, than his ancestors.
He paced along the terrace, back and forth, three, then five times, before carefully descending the stairs to the path that led through the immaculately tended grounds and into the wooded area, where he could lose himself in the solitude, imagining himself to be the only person in the world — a common dream of his, although he routinely forgot it seconds after waking. The muffled thud of his rubber soles on the well-worn trail was the only sound other than the overhead rustle of the occasional bird and the snap and popping as a gymnastically inclined squirrel leapt from branch to branch on its morning rounds.
Would that the rest of his day be as untroubled as these first hours! As usual, it would be a non-stop series of meetings, his hand firmly in every aspect of the multitude of companies he owned, his habit to stay active in their management as a board member whose calls would always be answered, or in a more silent and deniable fashion through intermediaries and attorneys, of which he employed a phalanx. His accountant had informed him that last year he’d spent eighty million dollars on Washington lobbyists alone, and that had barely scratched the surface of the money he spread around. He knew from experience that there was no point in hoarding his wealth. The cash would only work for him if he put it to use, and he’d bought the very best government he could afford — and he could afford anything.
The amount he’d made during the Vietnam war paled by comparison to what he’d earned from America’s undeclared wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had paled again compared to what his pharmaceutical companies generated, as well as his partial ownership in a slew of the globe’s largest banks — a special club that was by invitation only, and which conferred upon its members unimaginable power.
Barker made kings, decided who ran countries, balanced the fate of nations on his salad fork while debating which wine to enjoy with dinner. He and his clique ran things; which was as it should be, because the planet’s people couldn’t be trusted to run the place themselves. And now, his most ambitious project was coming to fruition, and he was only days from deploying the virus that would sweep the globe, eradicating the lion’s share of the Earth’s unproductive and parasitic, leaving a healthier, revitalized planet in its wake.
The brainchild of a group of like-minded thinkers during the Cold War, the latest innovation would transform the future into a better one for the survivors — a sustainable population of only the most productive in each society, selected on the basis of merit rather than emotion. When his company announced that it had isolated the virus after working round the clock, only once the flu had spread far past the tipping point and was ravaging the most problematically populated countries, and then leaked that it had a vaccine that might work, but could only be produced in adequate quantities to protect, at most, half a billion people… at that point, the governments of the world would have to make difficult but necessary choices, for the betterment of all.
Naturally, he and everyone he valued would be inoculated far before the virus could make it to the U.S., and his cronies in the CIA and at the highest circles of government had already put into place plans to effectively seal the borders and shut down air traffic, sequestering all inbound travelers in internment camps until they could be verified as being healthy — which would take a week, even though the effective incubation period was more like twenty-four hours.