Germ

silvered because an image consultant had told him it would suggest experience and wisdom.

Kendrick listened for the click of the door's latch and the hydraulic swelling of its seal, which gave the room its Zero Acoustic Leakage rating. When he heard it, he said, 'We have a problem. Not a little one.'

One of the president's eyebrows rose slightly, a practiced maneuver.

Kendrick continued, 'As you know, one of my projects has been looking for a man named Karl Litt.'

The president sat on the sofa, crossed a leg over his knee. He searched his memory. 'The scientist who disappeared . . .'

'Yes. Almost thirty years ago. But, Jack, there are some things about him I never told you.' To the president's furrowed brow, Kendrick shrugged and added casually, 'Plausible denial and all that.'

That got his attention, Kendrick noticed. He pushed his fingers under the laptop, thought about his cane and tripping and the thing crashing to the floor, and said, 'I'm sorry . . . Could you?'

The president hopped up and moved the computer to the coffee table. They both sat. Kendrick opened the laptop and pushed its power button.

'I'm not going to bore you with details you've probably heard a hundred times. The preliminaries are simple. Around the end of World War II, the U.S. recruited hundreds of German scientists. Many of them we brought in covertly, so other countries didn't know who we had or what we were doing. Almost every case proved invaluable to our technological advancement, to our ability to defend this country. Physicists like Wernher von Braun and Otto Hahn made the atomic energy program in Las Cruces. Hubertus Strughold went to the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph, where he continued his human experiments in radiation warfare. Gerhard Schrader, who developed the nerve gas called tabun, went to the CIA's Chemical Biological Warfare program. They were everywhere, working on everything from jet propulsion to mind control techniques.'

He glanced at the computer monitor. It was cycling up.

'I worked primarily with biologists. I met Karl Litt when his father sent him and thirty-four other gifted children to us instead of sending the scientists we were expecting. Long story short, my bio-weapons program was at least as successful as the other programs. Ours was the most secret. Nobody likes the idea of intentionally using germs to kill people. They're too unpredictable, too mutable. Nuclear power is limited. If every bomb in existence ignited, they'd destroy the world. But if one or ten or a hundred went off, it'd be awful, absolutely, but most of the population would survive.

'On the other hand, one very aggressive germ could go on forever, killing its host, moving to the next person and the next, exponentially, mutating to defeat our attempts to stop it. Where a bomb kills quickly, death by virus can be horrendously slow, unimaginably painful. Plus, as we disintegrated from the inside out, we'd get the added pleasure of watching our loved ones bleeding out around us.'

The president's face registered his disgust. He rose, walked to a credenza, and lifted a portion of its top. He removed a decanter and two crystal glasses.

'Glenlivet?' he asked.

'Thank you.' Kendrick looked across the room at a vividly rendered oil painting of David's triumph over Goliath, in which the boy warrior had not only decapitated the giant but proceeded to devour his oversized heart.

The president returned to the couch, arrayed the glasses on the table beside the laptop, and poured in two fingers. He thought a moment, then doubled the volume in each glass. He handed Kendrick one and sipped from the other.

Kendrick pulled in a mouthful, savored it, swallowed. Holding the glass just under his chin, he said, 'At the end of World War II, the Soviet army discovered a biowarfare factory at Dyhernfurth, Germany. The idea that the Nazis were making such things infuriated the world even more than their conventional war machine did. In 1979, an outbreak of anthrax poisoning in Sverdlovsk, USSR, was attributed to an accident at a Soviet germ-warfare factory. Soviet citizens and people worldwide were outraged. The incident sowed the seeds that eventually strangled Communism.' He sipped. 'People don't like that stuff.'

The president nodded. 'That's the reason we've stopped pursuing it.'

Kendrick smiled. 'Not completely. As a nation, we can't let other countries advance beyond us in this field, if for no other purpose than to understand what's possible and develop defenses against it.'

'The Geneva Protocol.''

Kendrick bowed his head in respect, surprised that Jack Franklin knew the citation. The Geneva Protocol of 1925, a treaty among the League of Nations, outlawed the offensive use of chemical and biological warfare agents but allowed their use to defend against attack. The treaty was still in effect.

He said, 'In '69, Nixon proclaimed that the U.S. unilaterally renounced any use of biological and toxin weapons, and ordered the destruction of all of the country's biological warfare stockpiles. His administration then made quite a show of converting the biological warfare research facility at Fort Detrick to a cancer research laboratory. Other facilities suffered similar fates.'

The president scowled, serious. 'I am aware that several facilities survived and continued . . . experimenting, developing, whatever it is they do.'

'In the spirit of the Geneva Protocol, the ultrasecret nature of our germ program allowed us to keep a few facilities up and running, the most clandestine labs.'

The president nodded.

'What you don't know is that Karl Litt had a particular interest in developing race-specific diseases.'

'Race-specific? You mean—'

'He wanted to target particular people groups and annihilate them.'

The president started to speak, then chose instead to empty his glass into his mouth.

Kendrick said, 'I think it was a remnant of his father's influence, his father's work. Josef Litt taught his son extraordinary things in the field of science. He may have instilled a distaste for Jews as well. If so, he hid it well. I never saw it overtly displayed.' He shrugged. 'Or it was something Karl wanted to do in honor of his father. He loved him very much, and over the years, I think he came to idolize him.'

'You're talking about the Final Solution.' The president shook his head. 'Jews are not a race.'

'Most Jews trace their lineage back to a group of Semitic, nomadic tribes dwelling in the eastern Mediterranean area before 1300 BC—the Hebrews. That gives them an ethnicity that population geneticists can identify. For years, biologists have possessed the technology to discern between ethnically defined populations. The same way we can identify certain physical traits commonly attributed to people of a particular heritage, biologists can examine DNA for ethnic traits. Litt focused his efforts on aligning pathogens with these ethnic markers.'

Kendrick fell quiet a moment, remembering. 'Litt told me once that he'd found a DNA characteristic unique to Ashkenazi Jews, those who settled in central and eastern Europe, and whose members include most American Jews. For some evolutionary reason, Ashkenazim are prone to ten inherited disorders—Tay-Sachs, ulcerative colitis, Gaucher's disease, I forget what else. Most of them are caused by recessive genes, meaning that symptoms appear only if two copies of the mutant gene are inherited, one from each parent. Litt was trying to mutate the second gene in people who had inherited only one. He abandoned the idea when he couldn't figure out how to accelerate the disease's effects once the mutation occurred. Victims simply took too long to succumb.'

'That's insane,' the president said quietly. 'We supported this research?'

'Of course. Think of the applications of a substance that could instantly incapacitate an enemy while leaving our own men unaffected. Vietnam, Desert Storm—in both cases, our troops were in close combat with an army ethnically distinct from most Americans.'

'So much for the melting pot.'

'Some of our men would, no doubt, carry the ethnic markers of the enemy, and they would die. There's no way around that, at least for now. But the losses on our side would be insignificant compared to the losses incurred during conventional war.'

Kendrick watched the president absorb this. He felt the presence of the room's vile artwork pressing in on him. The collection, which he'd always suspected was an attempt to muster courage and aggression in the men who would gather here to decide on issues of war, seemed merely repugnant in light of the current conversation.

'But . . . genocide?' the president said finally.