Chapter 2

How is it that I can know that Exxon Mobil and their entire ilk have their days numbered? I've instituted a protocol that has 99% effectiveness. Consider it an experiment in evolutionary science, environmental rehabilitation, and for lack of a better term: justice. Allow me to explain. I've always been interested in mortality, virology, lifecycles, and disease transmission patterns. I've always been interested in greater understanding in my chosen field. The unfortunate part is you need live trials to be able to truly understand the magic that you've created. Like some scientific Copperfield I create life and make life disappear.

I have studied the use of chlorine and mustard gas from WWI and found it dehumanizing. No one likes coughing up a lung and it is an approach to chemical superiority that I don't hold in high regard. I tend towards prettier solutions to solve my "problems". I watched as sarin gas I guided through formulation was used in Japan; and found it less than elegant. It was also much less effective than predicted which was incredibly disappointing. I have used hydrogen cyanide gas in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq and take this moment to apologize to Saddam's cousin Ali for using him as a stalking horse (so long and enjoy the virgins when you get there, bud). Chemical Ali, as he was known in the West, was furious when he found out someone had compromised the chain of command. He knew it was one of us in his inner circle, and even though he wanted to see it used, he wanted to give the order himself. History will remember him as the author of that horror. Me, I just needed to see it work. The dispersal patterns meant that although the gas was effective, controllability was ultimately lacking.

The nature of what we do is to try and kill the most enemy with zero casualties. It is a laudable goal unless, of course, you're on the other side. Then it becomes monstrous. The underlying problem with transmittable death, like anthrax for example, is the nature of the living organism itself. When an infection begins it spreads rapidly at first because the organism goes about its normal routine. When bodies start to collect, organisms isolate themselves. If the isolated organisms are 'clean' the isolation saves their lives. If the isolated organisms are infected, their own isolation saves everyone else. It is instinct and irrational in most cases — but ultimately effective.

Anthrax for the record is a scary bitch. This is because most deadly organisms require specialized environments and have a shelf life of hours to days in the wild. The anthrax spore can last for years. Everyone in my chosen fraternity studies the old girl somewhere along the way. When we design weapons we strive for the same type of survivability while trying to ensure we can still manipulate its results. It's easy to get one or the other but both characteristics in one pretty box is the Holy Grail. We do what we do by separating the puzzle from reality. It's like a business cutting its workforce. You work the numbers, and the numbers say cut so you cut. You may feel a twinge of conscience but its just numbers not people. For us, its just numbers, and a desire to do the best job you can.

My background includes chemistry and virology. I had fully intended to save the world one infectious disease at a time. I may even have been smart enough to do it. Like everyone else the dreams of youth don't often stand up to the light of day. Upon graduation some of my more "interesting" proposals and early adulthood decisions meant I ended up blackballed from the scientific fraternity in the West. Had I been born 10 years earlier I'm sure I could have worked out a mutually beneficial agreement with the Eastern Bloc. As it was I was left with China or fringe groups and usually less than ideal conditions. China was not an option; in the end you just can't trust'em, so that left me on the fringes. The pay was great and tax-free. Working for fringe groups ultimately meant being limited to chemical toys and not the viruses that fascinated me. They had money, but some equipment is just out of the reach of anything but a relatively wealthy country. The developing world was out, the West had rejected me, so what was a non-poor person to do? By nibbling the edges of respectable research I landed in Iraq and in a roundabout way Iraq ultimately brought me home to the West.

Honestly, I loved Iraq. Had Saddam been a little less megalomaniacal and a little more country (even though he had a thing for Shania Twain and pork rinds) I would still probably be there. He definitely wasn't the worst despot I've worked for and he honestly believed in his country and his ideals, misguided or not. Its something that very few Western leaders can claim and I've had the misfortune of being in the general vicinity of more of these than I would care to admit. I miss Iraq, I miss the people, I try not to think of the men, women and children that are dying for petrol on both sides of the war. It's one of the reasons I've decided on "Whimper" my little plan of love.

While developing chemical weapons, Ali and a few of us started playing around with a few harmless viral forms of the common cold. It was science for the proverbial 'shits and giggles' of doing science. We were playing the 'imagine if... ' game using various ideas to try to mentally model 'what would happen if... ' and then build scenarios more outlandish than the one before. It was one of the Mohammed's or was that Mohamed's (always got those boys confused) that started that tickling in the back of my brain. He wanted to build a virus that was harmless that when introduced to another harmless designer virus combined, using portions of RNA from both, to create a third. Now the idea wasn't feasible, at least at the technological level of understanding in 1998 (and dispersion would be negligible to my mind), but there was something about the idea that gave me the itch. Try as I might I couldn't dredge from my memory what my mind wanted me to know. Instead of trying to force it I left it to percolate and bubble up on its own.

The Middle East is a study of dichotomies that provided sufficient cultural cracks for someone like me to grow and thrive. It was just after the first Gulf War that I read the writing on the wall and started to plan for a new place of work. Honestly I tried to talk Saddam out of invading Kuwait but it was the equivalent of two brothers ripping off Saddam's bicycle. It was a sandlot dustup where he knew he could basically kick the crap out of the little brother, Kuwait; and dare the bigger brother, the US, to protect the pup. The worst-case scenario in Saddam's mind was having his nose bloodied a bit and he was right. Saddam didn't intend to win; he just needed to show up and show everyone in the Middle East that he had stood up to the bully and the lapdog. It was about machismo, who's dick was bigger and who knew how to use it better.

Truth of the matter is I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually win any of those contests yet. It just keeps going and going; a never-ending game of one-upmanship that ends up costing everyone. Having decided that the dick swinging between Iraq and the West would eventually erupt into something a little less than conducive to the kind of lifestyle I preferred (free as opposed to caged) I made the arrangements to have an accident. Not at work, God forbid. You never, ever count on being able to control my work — contain it yes but never think you're in control. It's far safer to assume that my viruses are loose than to assume that they're not.

I had mentioned the first Gulf War and I'll give credit where credit is due — y'all kicked our collective arse. Mind you, Bush had managed to get it right through the use of coalition forces and a masterful management of the Israeli powder keg. (I sort of threw up in the back of my throat just typing that out.) Had they pushed on into Baghdad, and overthrown Saddam I'd probably be in Gitmo or more likely working for USAMRIID (that's the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases for the uninitiated). It would have been reminiscent of the German rocket scientists at the end of WWII, a forced service plan even if I managed to prove that I wasn't an American citizen. Why do I think I'd end up doing biological/viral work for the Army? While I was working on a joint project between the CDC and USAMRIID I actually saw one of the Mohammed's as well as catching a glimpse of a back of someone that looked suspiciously like one of the Mohamed's. Thankfully, they were involved with strictly chemical ordinance while I was putzing around as a low level gopher assigned to one of the biological teams, essentially invisible.

You thought the US wasn't researching biological and chemical weapons? It isn't a significant portion of the US budget by any means but anytime your spending tens of billions of dollars your doing more than trying to identify threats, you are a threat. It's one of a few places inside the US administration where you do not walk loudly and noisily carrying a big stick. The American people do not view my kind of toys in a good light. I think it may be the gunslinger mentality of 'facing your opponent at high noon and heroically shooting the bad guy' hero worship that turned people off of the sneaky, deadly weapons that make my heart flutter. The thing that slays me about the gunslinger romantic ideal is that it ignored the fact that the really good shootist's were not opposed to shooting someone in the back. Often times it was actually the preferred method for trash disposal. It's much harder to get yourself shot standing behind your target as opposed to in front.

When I realized that Iraq and I had to part I did what any good little scientist would do, I died. Full state honours were afforded me and I have to admit I was honoured that Saddam really, really liked me. Even better was the fact that he really, really couldn't tell me apart from other Caucasians. In this case, cultural bias was my friend in that white people look alike to members of other cultures. Just as white folk like me see the yellow, black, red and brown to the detriment of finer features, so to do the Iraqi people see white and miss some of the distinguishing individual characteristics. I was happy, I was dead, I was relatively safe and having planned several different ways and how's to get where I wanted to go, I went. I made my way to India via Pakistan and made a few minor surgical changes to my nose and eyes. It was enough of a change to pass for someone similar but different, but non-evasive enough to require only a local anaesthetic and a couple of weeks to heal. Being able to get away with a local was an absolute necessity in my mind. Even though I was dead, staying alive was high on my list of things to do. People get antsy when you know their deepest, darkest secrets and do disturbing things to make sure that those secrets are kept. To this day I still don't assume I got away clean, assuming in my work gets you killed.

Through the judicious use of Internet newspaper obituaries, numbered bank accounts, mail services and really expensive lawyers I created a new identity as an American citizen. It's almost frightening how easy it actually is to insert yourself into the bureaucratic machine, and once you're in it just grinds away until your spit out with all the proper documentation on the other side. The beautiful part is all your paper is legal and incontrovertible. The bad part, I needed to live in the US, Atlanta, specifically. What the hell does Hotlanta mean anyways, I still don't get it? I had tossed around the idea of Maryland but ultimately passed. Employment with a publicly funded level four biohazard containment facility required enough background checks for me. I felt I would be pushing my luck to try to squeeze past first-contact protocol Army security checks. The simple fact is that private citizens are generally programmed to want to believe what someone tells them. The military retrains its personnel to mistrust everything except ones own unit and ones own weapons.

Like a worthless mine I had salted my history proving the lie of my fictional existence. Using contacts fostered through my work around the world I was able to procure a simple history of accomplishment that generally reflected the lies told on my resume. Several terrorist groups/freedom fighters (depending on your political affiliations) were more than happy to take my money to arrange 'clean' liars, neither linked to my 'friends' or to me except for the truths they had been paid to tell. Would my new history survive military scrutiny? The answer was probably. Was it worth the risk? Absolutely not. Hero's don't get to play in my cabbage patch for very long, so working safe and careful becomes ingrained in every breath, every movement, and every thought. It requires an iron will to maintain the requisite level of vigilance, mind you there is a significant impetus to maintain said vigilance — dying is a bitch.

The human being is an adaptation machine. It will find some way to cope or break itself in the attempt. Loud, continuous noise leads to the ear cutting back on the amount of signal received. Kids go deaf because the music starts off loud enough, only to become noticeably quieter over time. The end result, the kids turn it up to '11' to maintain a seemingly consistent volume. Constantly exposed to heat — the temperature becomes normal and bearable; constantly exposed to cold the body adapts as well. Adapt or die isn't just a bumper sticker. The bitch is the tool that ensures a species survival is the same one that tends to kill people like me. Under constant threat of death, the mind adapts and becomes comfortable in its environment. It becomes like slipping into a hot bath, the sting of heat followed by the relaxing of tension and total immersion, it can be like heaven on earth. And then you're dead, insidious.

This adaptation mechanism has been the death of more of the people I have worked with than anything else I have come across. The risk of death starts fresh every day, but by noon the old-timers tended to get a little sloppier, and to a lesser extent so to did the young pups. Even the ever-present and real danger of death becomes something that is muted by the human minds' familiarity with a constant threat. To protect the people I worked with as well as myself I promoted my own "sober second thought moments" to anyone and everyone that would listen. Whenever the thought to do something without thinking crossed my mind, say reaching for my notes in front of me on my bench, I would stop, carefully stand, and walk away for five minutes. I would spend that five minutes going through some of the more exotic critters and the symptoms of infection. Refocused, I could return to the lab and work in a safe and controlled manner. I had decided early on that I liked to play with my toys and being selfish in the way all humans are, promised myself that I would do what ever was necessary to continue playing.

It's not a job that lends itself to a long career. 25% of us snap and disappear into a comfortably padded room with no visitors, if your lucky — a hole in the ground without visitors if your not. 50% of us do it for a few years and quit sick of the nightmares and with appropriate oversight lead happy and productive lives. 12% become the administrators and agenda setters for the next crop of wide-eyed kids with dreams of saving the world. 3% are built like me. For whatever reasons we manage to maintain and continue in a job that makes marines shit themselves, literally. We like to play with the military types; nerds very rarely get the kind of payback we are afforded and you take what you can get.

The other 10% well lets say some of the 25 % that go nuts get planted with extra fertilizer and not talk too much about it. It isn't the dying so much that scares the crap out of us; it's the way you get to die. An Alaskan crab fisherman has a greater chance of dying but its comfortable - intense cold and then your gone. Compare that to vomiting out your own liquefied organs and you begin to understand that the how of dying can be just as important as why. I shudder because I always looked in on those infected, a mea culpa if you will. Most of the people I work with don't, they hope it will go away and like sunshine follows the rain it always does. I just like to remind myself one slip and I'm the one bleeding out of my ass, eyes and ears. The word is 'sobering'.

Close calls are part of the business, we deal in death and it is a constant companion in everything we do. I pride myself on never once having created one of those close calls and by staying calm in the eye of the storm I've managed to defuse a few of those situations myself. Again this wasn't heroic stuff. My motivation was much simpler, solve it or die. Focus comes easy in that environment, and a cold beer in the aftermath tastes sweeter, colder, and more heavenly than anything has a right to. The funny thing, I hate drinking, call me Captain Herbal Life if you must, but a beer after a day like that is a reward I can't refuse. For me a near death experience and beer are as linked as the daytime heat of the desert is followed by the bone-chilling cold of its nights.

I'm not as anti-American as I come across. America in the abstract, the patriotism and nationalism, that's scary and I don't support it. It allows Americans to accept things that rational people should be able to reject. The people of America, they are the same as the people in Iraq: are the same as every person in the world — just trying to survive. Sure, some are assholes, but they aren't statistically significant through sheer numbers. I've worked it out. The asshole quotient of the population is between 1.6% and 2%. The problem is that when you do an analysis by sectors of economy 83% to 85% of government, corporate management, and the judiciary are made up of that 2%. Law enforcement and the military get between 25% and 30% in high-ranking positions. So the political, economic and 'coercive force' areas of human endeavour are over-represented by that portion of the population that the rest of the population spends our time avoiding. If an asshole sits at your table, you leave. If the asshole follows, you keep moving. When assholes run the government, you like me tend to ignore them. Why is that voter turnout continues to drop? When you get to choose between assholes is it really a choice? Everyone knows what you get from an asshole.

Believe it or not I have done this statistical analysis. It's a probability distribution, just like my dispersal patterns. Some relatively simple math, a few strange attractors and Chaos Theory, and if you've defined your variables correctly you get an answer that will be relatively correct. In my work defining your variables is essential, in my work you also understand that flipping a coin enough times can get you tails 100 consecutive times. The odds are infinitesimal but enough monkeys, word processors, and time get you the Star Wars saga. I guess what I'm saying is that it is possible that the system can be turned around. It is possible to clean house and implement something a little more sane. It is conceivable that we could put good, normal people into positions of power and all it would take is the united will of like-minded people. I won't tell you that probability. Better that you believe we could, as humanity, come together in a rational dialogue than know the probability of it actually happening. Better to believe I took something away than gave a gift.

I'm not exactly sure why I'm explaining myself. It's a risk you see, an incredibly small one but a risk nevertheless. Maybe it's from being wound so tight for so long that 'cutting loose' is necessary and imperative. It's human to seek understanding. It's human to seek camaraderie and fellowship. It is also imperative that the legend become something real with tangible human thoughts, thoughts that you yourself may have had.

You see, the monster that frightens children and makes adults wake up sweating in the night is a part of every person's makeup. Your mind creates the nightmare while I simply provide a framework for it to exist in. I love life; it's why I became involved in virology in the first place. I am a doctor, not just a PhD doctor but a bona fide "this won't hurt a bit" MD. What I do, it goes against everything I was taught in school, everything I was raised to believe in. My parents loved me and I grew up in an exceptional home. I am not from a broken home or maladjusted. My parents only had a few fights that I ever witnessed and there never was anything physically involved. The last time I checked they were still married, but they think I'm dead from the first time so I leave them be. Instead I work industriously everyday for a government and a country that considers itself morally superior to most others around the world. I work to increase the survivability of America and its allies and increase the mortality of its enemies. 9 to 5, Monday to Friday about 200 days a year I fight the fight for the red, blue and white.

On the weekends I fight for the rest of humanity. I've said I'm smart. Before going to med school I had got it into my head I was going to be a lawyer. I was going to go into politics and by damn I was going to fix the pain and suffering of the world. When I started to apply my brain to specific issues like poverty, corruption, bureaucracy, and accountability in politics I became more and more convinced that it couldn't be repaired. Imagine power as ruts in the road and government as the vehicle that travels that road. There are so many ruts that even getting out of one firmly entrenches you in the next, and so on. The rut fundamentally determines the direction of travel not the steering committee. The analogy is rough but it highlights the flaw inherent in a top-down power structure. The top steers, the next couple of layers, especially the bureaucracy are the ruts. To restate Newton's inertia: those that are empowered tend to stay empowered; those not empowered tend to stay un-empowered. Yes I could have made it in politics. It isn't like I'm not ruthless or vicious enough. Truth is I'd probably scare some of the big fish — which is ultimately why I chose another field. Scared people do strange things.

While studying political systems I couldn't help but be drawn to the JFK saga and the myth and legend that surrounds the last great man in American politics. You could make a case for Bobbie but they died so close together that both their deaths are essentially interchangeable. No I have no idea who did the killing but I am certain that it wasn't the Mafia acting alone, it wasn't the Government acting alone, it wasn't the military acting alone, and it wasn't the industrial complex that supports the military acting alone.

Before John F Kennedy's assassination governments worked in a predictable fashion. After his assassination governments worked in a new but no less predictable fashion. Somebody changed the ruts. Before Kennedy, government made the attempt to deal in a relatively fair manner with the American people, that is relatively. After Kennedy the American people were some times an after-thought if they were thought of at all. Before the Cuban missile crisis, the military supported the president, after wasn't very long for Mr. Kennedy. Up until that point Kennedy seemed to be insulated. After, well the one shooter, one gun and a few bullets doesn't really support the physical evidence of a warm day in Dallas. Everything shifted inside government that day, and having been born after that day it isn't pining nostalgia for the good ole days that drives me to say it.

No, there was a new paradigm in one of the most powerful entities on the planet. If you look closely and squint just right, a lot of what seems to be bad luck for some poor sap is actually good planning on someone's part. Kennedy's legacy was bringing together diverse interests that bonded themselves together with his blood. Once it was done there was no going back, the rut was set and steering unnecessary. You do not get a do-over on assassination. You do not get to throw yourself on the mercy of the public for doing a bad thing. Your course is determined; your life tied to the lives of your co-conspirators and nothing is ever the same again. This is of course my long-winded way of saying getting shot trying to fix the broken machinery of government was at best an unpalatable idea. So politics was out.

That left me viruses. Yes it sounds odd to grow up with a love of viruses. It's not how it started at all. I was sick as a dog - I had a cold and I was miserable. Being young enough to not realize how futile it was I got it in my head that I was going to fix myself by getting rid of my cold. Lets say that literature at the time and especially the literature available to me was negligible at best. Growing up in today's world, with enough information at your fingertips to choke countries, is a blessing that you can't convey to the cyber-kids. They have never know the joy of getting to the library to find the only copy of the book you need has gone missing in the stacks.

What I could get was sophomoric at best but what I could do was work on how the virus spread itself. That kind of math was easy to find and fun to do especially when you realized that small cities could be infected with just the right set of circumstances. With 200 hosts placed in the appropriate traffic areas and with the proper people interactions, saturated infection approached 100% per 1,000,000 persons. Basically the trickle down effect allowed 1 person to reach out and intimately affect 5000 lives. Power is seductive in all its forms and if I was doing the infecting I was the one with the power. At this point it was all mind games. Mind games that meant I did really well in math, biology and chemistry because they were subjects that I could make interesting for myself. The education system never really did anything for me except leave me cold. It always struck me that providing some sort of financial compensation would have had more kids interested in doing well. The only reason I did well is that I convinced myself that the only way I could follow my interest in virology was to continue through the stultified morass we call higher learning.

The only thing I'll say about my university career is that I wept with joy when it was over. My doctorate was an exercise in pulling teeth. Every avenue of research that I presented to my advisor was rejected because it wasn't considered appropriate, feasible, or based on sound scientific fundamentals. Finally, I let the tool choose a line of inquiry that dovetailed into his 'higher level research', defended, and got the fuck out. Imagine my shock to read two years later about the new and innovative techniques introduced by my esteemed advisor in advancing the human understanding of chemistry. At this point I'd already made decisions that would make a debate over intellectual property 'uncomfortable'. There wasn't a lot I could do about getting my work back, so I did the 'life's a bitch' shrug and wrote the bastard a letter. In it I expounded on the ways the rat bastard had screwed me in a variety of languages including the four letter one. When the time came I actually flew to Stockholm where my friend was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I wasn't able to get the time to catch up with him though it was awarded posthumously. It seems he caught something. What little I heard suggested it was lingering and painful as well as new and innovative. Sometimes life is like that, who knew?

No I don't blame my advisor for me to turning to a life of crime. That was a conscious decision on my part. When you make an omelette you break a few eggs. When you make a designer virus you have to find the appropriate test subjects. Everyone, and I mean everyone, does human trials. I just chose to pick my subjects with a little more care than most governments. It didn't last long; the science demanded less controlled interactions. It was bias you see. The harder I tried to ensure infection stayed inside the criminal element the more useless my infection data became. If I guided the infection then the infection wouldn't propagate the same way it would have if the virus had really been on the loose. The sarin attack was a prime example. I said I was disappointed. It wasn't that there wasn't enough dead. God there were more than enough bodies in my past even this early in my career to be considered in the same breath as some of the heavies. We're not talking Khmer Rouge, Idi Amin, or Hitler style body counts but I was generally the most dangerous person in any room I was in — by thousands if that's how you keep score.

No the disappointment lay in the modelling. The attack in that environment, with that many people packed that tight, should have had a higher mortality rate. The model was bad and as one of the prime modellers I felt that I had let my employer down. Yes I was working in Iraq. No I wasn't being sneaky. The fact is my greatest contribution to the project was to provide a step-by-step instruction/protocol for mixing and handling the gas itself. I made some extra cash by putting the idiots in touch with some suppliers to get the components to make the gas. I gave a discounted rate on delivery protocols in return for the data on how and where the gas would be released as well as local conditions at the time. I modelled their expected distribution on a few different scenarios and waited for my phone call.