Upon A Pale Horse (29 page)

“I was wondering when you would come,” Schmidt said in good English, his words somewhat slurred. Jeffrey studied his face and saw the tell-tale drooping of the left side. “Yes, I’ve had two strokes over the last year. My time is short, which is just as well. Can you imagine being in this hellhole for eternity? Surely death is better than that. Anything is.”

“Thank you for seeing me. I appreciate it.”

Schmidt waved it off. “I always knew you, or someone like you, would come. I’d just about given up on it, and then you called. In a way, it’s a relief. It’s about time that the world knew what has been done to it.”

Jeffrey was taken aback by his words. “What’s been done to it…” he repeated.

“Of course. By me. And people like me. Working for the Nazis, and then the Americans and Russians.” Schmidt’s voice was little more than a rasp, and he glanced warily to the side as he spoke, his eyes taking on an air of reptilian cunning before settling back on Jeffrey. “Don’t worry. The only one of these fossils that speaks English is Helga over at the card table, and she’s deaf as a post.”

Jeffrey hesitated, unsure of how to proceed. He’d been expecting to have to drag any information out of the old Nazi, and instead found him eager to talk. Jeffrey was wary of a trick, but couldn’t see one, other than the man lying – but to what end?

“Where should we begin? Would you prefer if I ask questions, or do you just want to tell me what you have to say at your own pace?” Jeffrey asked.

“You’re not much of a reporter, are you?”

“I don’t usually do interviews. I’m more of a research journalist. Forensic investigation, that sort of thing,” Jeffrey lied.

“If you’d waited much longer, you would have had more use for your forensic talents. I’m old, and I don’t have a lot of life left. I think all the doctors are amazed I’m still breathing. Sixty years of smoking, booze, womanizing, and everyone I know is dead, but I’m still here! The devil takes care of his own, they say…”

“The devil. Yes, well, you’ve certainly lived a long time,” Jeffrey echoed, wondering where Schmidt was going with the discussion.

“Too damned long. But I’m not going quietly. I won’t sit by and watch my secrets go to the grave with me. I’ve come too far. Too far…” he said, his last words drifting off as he seemed to turn in on himself.

“Then maybe we should start at the beginning. Or as close to it as you think would be relevant.”

“Relevant?
Mein Gott
, it’s all relevant. The problem is knowing what to leave out. I could sit here for days with what I know, and barely scratch the surface.”

“Well, then, perhaps just the most important parts?” Jeffrey suggested.

“Important. Fine. Maybe we should move back to my room. This is going to take a while,” Schmidt said, giving him a sly look from under hooded lids, reminding Jeffrey of the way a fox looks at chickens.

“Certainly. Is that permitted?”

“Of course. This isn’t a prison. Don’t worry. I haven’t fashioned a shank out of a spoon. If I had, I’d have used it on myself long ago.”

“Very good. Do you need help?”

“Only to get up. Then take your hands off me. I hate people touching me.”

“Haphephobia,” Jeffrey recalled, his mind automatically indexing for the disorder.

“No, that’s fear of being touched. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of anything at this point. I…I just don’t like it.”

Jeffrey extended his hand. Schmidt gripped it with surprising force and pulled himself to his feet, his body slight, almost nothing but skin and bones.

“That’s enough of the shared intimacy. Follow me back to my lavish suite. Come see what you have to look forward to if you outlive your usefulness,” Schmidt spat as he shuffled out of the room. Jeffrey trailed him as they moved into another corridor. “I call this ‘death row.’ Needless to say, my fellow prisoners don’t share my sense of humor. Pity. They’re all fools. As far as I’m concerned they can’t die fast enough. But some, like me, linger on forever, like radioactive waste.”

Jeffrey elected not to comment, and struggled to maintain a professional demeanor – as he imagined a seasoned journalist would. At the moment that consisted of following a mildly demonic troll back to his living quarters to hear…what, he didn’t know.

“Can you tell me what this is all about, Dr. Schmidt? I mean, I know the broad outline, the cattle mutilations, rumors of experimentation, but not the details…”

Schmidt slowed and then cackled, ending with a wet cough as he moved towards a door on his right. He turned slowly to face Jeffrey, whose blood froze in his veins at the old man’s next words.

“The details, eh? Well, my boy, today’s your lucky day. I’m about to give you the scoop of the century. In the old days, we called it germ warfare. Now, it’s bio-warfare, but it’s all the same thing. It’s about silently killing millions, using nature to do it. It’s all about forbidden fruit, and playing God, and boundless power. It’s about the genocide business. And you can call me Alfie. Everyone does.”

THIRTY-FOUR

Alfie

Schmidt’s room was actually more akin to a tiny apartment, with a separate bedroom and a small living room that barely accommodated a sofa, a faded brown La-Z-Boy lounger, a coffee table, and a small circular dining table with two wooden chairs in the far corner. The German stepped into the room and made straight for the lounge chair, and Jeffrey took a seat on the couch and extracted a notepad from his laptop case – a prop to add to his journalist demeanor. He leaned forward and placed a small recorder on the table that he’d bought at an electronics store adjacent to the station in Paris.

“Do you mind if I record this?” he asked, and Schmidt shook his head.

“Absolutely not. I don’t want anyone thinking that you made it up.”

Jeffrey switched the tiny device on and then announced the date and Schmidt’s name with officious sincerity. Once he was done, he hesitated at how to begin, eyeing the old man as he continued speaking.

“Well, then. Rather than asking questions, I’ve asked for Alfred Schmidt to tell his story in his own words. The next voice you will hear will be his,” Jeffrey said, and then sat back, waiting for the German to begin.

“I originally started working on biological weapons for the Nazis in 1942 after graduating from Justus Liebig University in Giessen. We were weaponizing foot-and-mouth disease, and spent much time on cholera as well. Some of our work was sent to the Japanese, who did widespread testing on the Chinese during the invasion and occupation of China – about half a million dead, but you’ll never hear about it. Unfortunately, the research was never able to reach its full potential due to wartime constraints on resources. Those were dark times, with the party coming apart and the Allies attacking on all fronts. Anyway, that’s ancient history, and everyone agrees that the Nazi party was guilty of atrocities that make anything we did on the biological side meaningless.”

Schmidt cleared his throat.

“After the war, the U.S. approached me about moving to the United States to continue my work, which I jumped at. I spent the next forty years in its biological weapons program, first working at Camp Detrick, in Maryland, and then later at a number of other facilities, including Plum Island and Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where I was primarily working on lethal viruses, including viruses that could destroy the immune system. Even though–”

“You mean to say…” Jeffrey couldn’t help interrupting. “You mean, after all…well, after the Nuremberg trials, our government actually hired you to–”

“Yes, yes, they contacted me. They wanted my expertise. Does that surprise you? The important thing is that, even though your President Nixon officially ended offensive efforts in 1969, the clandestine agencies continued to secretly fund offensive programs that showed promise. So while the programs were supposedly finished, and everyone made a big deal out of signing the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972 banning bio-weapons research, the truth was that select experimentation went on. I continued my work, and perfected a number of different agents before turning to retroviruses.”

Jeffrey’s ears perked up.

“The cattle mutilation period was when we were testing a variety of pathogens, specifically trying to synthesize a variant of bovine leukemia and splice it with simian immunodeficiency virus. We already knew from experimentation that we could make diseases jump species – that was a major thrust of our research. In 1972, we were able to infect chimps with leukemia and destroy their immune systems by causing bovine leukemia virus to cross to chimps. The subjects died of
Pneumocystis
pneumonia, and there was great excitement at the time because we’d created not one, but two new diseases never before seen in chimps – leukemia and
Pneumocystis
. We did it by having them drink milk from cows with bovine leukemia. Anyway, the findings were later duplicated and written up in 1974 in
Cancer Research
. This was extremely exciting in my circle because it presented a whole new approach to bio-weapons – the ability to create a contagious immuno-suppressive agent that would kill targeted populations.”

“Wait a minute. I recognize the second cause of death – the
Pneumocystis
pneumonia. Isn’t that one of the primary complications from…” Jeffrey paused.

“Yes. Exactly. It’s one of the leading causes of death from AIDS.”

Both men were silent for several moments.

“Wait a minute. You’re not saying…”

“I will tell you this much: I was working on a contagious bio-weapon that could cause catastrophic damage to the human immune system. Through most of the early and mid-seventies. I was part of a team – one of several teams, as a matter of fact, that had been integrated under the umbrella of the NCI – the National Cancer Institute.”

“But…where do the cattle come in?”

“We needed hosts we could use to culture our little germs. And we wanted to see how they would spread in the wild – in populations that were interacting normally, not lab animals in pens.”

“Back to
Pneumocystis
pneumonia…and AIDS.”

“Yes. And now we get to the real meat – the reason anyone will care about my sordid history. I’m an expert on retroviruses, and as such, I’m one hundred percent convinced that HIV is a lab-created pathogen, an engineered variant of simian immunodeficiency virus, and that AIDS is a man-made disease. I worked on similar pathogens. I should know.”

Jeffrey was speechless. In his wildest dreams, he’d never thought the cattle mutilations would lead to…this. His mind raced as he fought to find words.

“But why? Why would a lab-created bio-warfare virus be released into the world?”

“Ah. Finally, a good question. The answer to that, my friend, has nothing whatsoever to do with science, and everything to do with politics and social engineering.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“One of the problems we had should be obvious from the cattle mutilations: We needed real-world data on how our creations would spread, and how lethal they would be in humans. Sure, we had models, and we could extrapolate, but that’s not the same – one mistaken assumption and all the models turn out wrong. It’s always an issue. A big one. I believe that HIV was deliberately introduced in Africa in order to obtain data on how a new weaponized retrovirus would mutate and flourish in a general population, and at the same time potentially solve, or at least moderate, the global overpopulation problem.”

“In America, it served a dual purpose. It was inserted into a control group that could be easily followed and that was a troublesome minority, so data could be obtained on its spread in that community; a cohort group that didn’t seem to be at risk of transmitting it to the general population. Also, though, it was a group that was emerging as a troubling political force based in sexuality – sexuality that was not just dangerous on a political level, but also threatened to undermine the values of conservative America.”

“You’re saying that HIV was deliberately spread in the U.S. to decimate the gay community? And that Africa was some kind of population control exercise?”

“There’s no other explanation for how it was released in both the U.S. and Africa around the same time–”

“Well,” corrected Jeffrey, “it started in Africa first, so that–”

“Is that what you think?” Schmidt chuckled slightly. “Well, of course. That’s what you’ve been told so many times you accept it as fact. But actually, it appeared in Africa
after
it did in the U.S.” He held up a hand to silence Jeffrey’s objections before continuing.

“And there’s no question that it was released. The explanations about cross-species jumping from monkeys to humans in Africa via bush meat was always ludicrous, and was first advanced by a scientist who falsely claimed to have discovered the virus, and whose staff were later shown to be perpetrators of fraud. It was a stupid theory that stretched the limits of scientific credulousness to new levels, and relied upon hypothesis on top of speculation on top of guess – never mind that AIDS is a disease of the cities in Africa, and hardly ever occurs in the bush, where bush meat is made and consumed. But it was a convenient bit of theater that took the focus off a lab-created possibility.”