AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Colles introduced Sims and McDonald, asked, “How was theflight?” and without waiting for an answer, asked, “What’s going on? And everybody, find a seat.”
Letty stepped to one side of the office, turned to the room, and said, “I worked with an MI5 officer in England. We were working last night, doing computer searches. He continued to do that while I was in the air, and I spoke to him from Dulles. Since Scott is a British citizen, Alec has access to his passport and credit cards. Scott’s credit cards haven’t been used for a month. However, ten months ago, he traveled to India, and seven months ago, to Uganda, using his credit cards. That’s all we know for sure, about that. But, there are some indications…”
“Like what?” Colles asked.
“Let me tell you a little about Scott and what’s called the Gaia hypothesis…”
She spent a minute outlining the Gaia hypothesis and Scott’s possible conversion to the view, to his idea that humans are essentially viruses on the body of Gaia, and to his history of depression.
“Gaia’s pretty much nonsense,” Sims said at one point, and McDonald nodded.
“Makes no difference,” Letty said.
“What do you mean?” Sims asked. “If it’s nonsense…”
“Doesn’t make any difference whether it is or not, if Scott thinks it’s real,” Greet chipped in. “Where are you going with this, Letty?”
“Alec, Alec Hawkins, the MI5 officer, couldn’t find anyone who could tell him what Scott was doing in either India or Uganda. He did find a person who Scott contacted in Uganda. He said Scott represented himself as a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières. He was, at one time, but not at that point. He’d left the organization, but still hadcredentials,” Letty said. “Bottom line, he misrepresented himself. But Alec, you know, who is a smart guy, ran India and Uganda against a list of disease outbreaks at the time Scott was traveling, and compared that to hotel charges on his Visa card. There was no outbreak of anything in Uganda worse than the usual background diseases, but…”
She rubbed her forehead, and Lucas said, “C’mon. What?”
“Uganda apparently has a high incidence of the Marburg virus among its fruit bat population,” Letty said. “There’s a cave in a national park that’s full of fruit bats and is a well-known source of Marburg. Alec found that Scott used his credit cards several times in Kisenyi Village, which is right next to the park.”
Colles: “He was researching fruit bats?”
Sims: “He was researching Marburg. If you had the right permissions, credentials, you could sample bat tissue…Senator, this isn’t good. Marburg is ugly, nasty stuff.”
McDonald: “Yes, it is. It’s closely related to Ebola, which is perhaps more famous.”
Colles went back to Letty. “Okay, so what…”
“Alec looked into his India trip. His credit cards indicate that he checked into a hotel in Hyderabad, which is in the southern part of the subcontinent. Very close to the state of Maharashtra. Which, at the time Scott was traveling, was the site of one of the worst outbreaks of measles in the world.”
Sims, “Oh, shit.”
Colles: “What, Vic?”
Sims scratched his head, thinking, and Letty prompted him. “R-number. Do that first.”
Sims looked at her, said, “Yes,” and to the group, “The R-number of a disease is the number of people, on average, that an infected personwould be expected to pass the disease on to. If a disease has an R-number of 1, you’d expect the infected person to transmit the disease to one additional person. The R-number of Marburg would be…well, almost zero. That’s why we can contain it when there’s an outbreak. Not many people get infected.”
“So that’s good,” Colles said, looking around the room.
“It was difficult to calculate an R-number for COVID, because of complicating factors like the rapid development of vaccines, the fact that some people who had it showed no symptoms, that some strains were more infectious than others, and so on, but it was estimated to be between 3 and 6,” Sims continued. “That is, an infected person would be expected to pass the disease to something between three and six other people, on average, among a population with no immunity. That number was high enough that we had a worldwide pandemic, starting in a medium-sized Chinese city. We couldn’t stop it. Going by official numbers, it killed perhaps seven million people; unofficially, we all know it killed a lot more, perhaps twenty million.”
He looked around the room. “Measles has an estimated R-number of 15 to 18. In other words, it is something like three to six times more infectious than COVID. If an…insane man, or group…were adept at viral research, it might be possible that they could bind the pathogenic load from Marburg to a measles virus. If you could give the Marburg pathogen the measles R-number…” He threw his hands in the air.
Colles: “How dangerous?”
Letty: “Nobody knows exactly how dangerous Marburg is. It has killed up to eighty percent of its victims in some outbreaks. In others, it’s more like thirty percent. If you had a fast, worldwide pandemic of Marburg, and it killed thirty percent of those who caught it, you couldlose…two and a half billion people? If it were eighty percent, you might kill six and a half billion? Out of a total of eight billion people.”
The assembly gawked at her. Colles asked, “Why in God’s name would you do that?”
“Some Gaia people—and I’m talking about a small subset—think the earth is in a death spiral,” Letty said. “That everything is going down—plants, animals, humans. Getting rid of a bunch of humans might stop the spiral. In fact, some of the people I’ve been reading about think that’s the only way to stop it.”
“They’re nuts,” Colles said. “Carbon sequestration…”
“Ask yourself how that’s working,” Letty said.
