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“First,” said Singer, “the grand tour. Then we’ll head back to my office for a cold drink and a chat.” He moved forward.

“This project ...?” Carson began.

Singer stopped, turned.

“Scopes wasn’t exaggerating?” Carson asked. “It’s really that important?”

Singer squinted, looked off into the empty desert. “Beyond your wildest dreams,” he said.

Percival Lecture Hall at Harvard University was filled to capacity. Two hundred students sat in the descending rows of chairs, some bent over notebooks, others looking attentively forward. Dr. Charles Levine paced before the class, a small wiry figure with a fringe of hair surrounding his prematurely balding dome. There were chalk marks on his sleeves and his brogues still had salt stains from the previous winter. Nothing in his appearance, however, reduced the intensity that radiated from his quick movements and expression. As he lectured, he gestured with a stub of chalk at complex biochemical formulae and nucleotide sequences scattered across the huge sliding chalkboards, indecipherable as cuneiform.

In the rear of the hall sat a small group of people armed with microcassette recorders and handheld video cameras. They were not dressed like students, and press cards were prominently displayed on lapels and belts. But media presence was routine; lectures by Levine, professor of genetics and head of the Foundation for Genetic Policy, often became controversial without notice. And Genetic Policy, the foundation’s journal, had made sure this lecture was given plenty of advance notice.

Levine stopped his pacing and moved to the podium. “That wraps up our discussion on Tuitt’s constant, as it applies to disease mortality in western Europe,” he said. “But I have more to discuss with you today.” He cleared this throat.

“May I have the screen, please?” The lights dimmed and a white rectangle descended from the ceiling, obscuring the chalkboards.

“In sixty seconds, I am going to display a photograph on this screen,” Levine said. “I am not authorized to show you this photograph. In fact, by doing so, I’ll be technically guilty of breaking several laws under the Official Secrets Act. By staying, you’ll be doing the same. I’m used to this kind of thing. If you’ve ever read Genetic Policy, you’ll know what I mean. This is information that must be made public, no matter what the cost. But it goes beyond the scope of today’s lecture, and I can’t ask you to stay. Anyone who wishes to go may do so now.”

In the dimly lit room, there were whispers, the turning of notebook pages. But nobody stood up.

Levine looked around, pleased. Then he nodded to the projectionist. A black-and-white image filled the screen.

Levine looked up at the image, the top of his head shining in the light of the projector like a monk’s tonsure. Then he turned to face his audience.

“This is a picture taken on July 1, 1985, by the image-gathering satellite TB-17 from a sun-synchronous orbit of about one hundred and seventy miles,” he began. “Technically, it has not yet been declassified. But it deserves to be.” He smiled. Nervous laughter briefly filled the hall.

“You’re looking at the town of Novo-Druzhina, in western Siberia. As you can see by the length of the shadows, this was taken in the early morning, the preferred time for image analysis. Note the position of the two parked cars, here, and the ripening fields of wheat.”

A new slide appeared.

“Thanks to the surveillance technique of comparative coverage, this slide shows the exact same location three months later. Notice anything strange?”

There was a silence.

“The cars are parked in exactly the same spot. And the field of grain is apparently very ripe, ready to be harvested.”

Another slide appeared.

“Here’s the same place in April of the following year. Note the two cars are still there. The field has obviously gone fallow, the grain unharvested. It was images like these that suddenly made this area very interesting to certain photo-grammetrists in the CIA.”

He paused, looking out over the classroom.

“The United States military learned that all of Restricted Area Fourteen—a half-dozen towns, in an eighty-square-mile area surrounding Novo-Druzhina—were affected in a similar way. All human activity had ceased. So they took a closer look.”

Another slide appeared.

“This is a magnification of the first slide, digitally enhanced, glint-suppressed, and compensated for spectral drift. If you look closely along the dirt street in front of the church, you will see a blurry image resembling a log. That is a human corpse, as any Pentagon photo-jock could tell you. Now here is the same scene, six months later.”

Everything appeared to be the same, except that the log now looked white.

“The corpse is now skeletonized. When the military examined large numbers of these enhanced images, they found countless such skeletons lying unburied in the streets and the fields. At first, they were mystified. Theories of mass insanity, another Jonestown, were advanced. Because—”

A new slide appeared.

“—as you can see, everything else is still alive. Horses are still grazing in the fields. And there in the upper left-hand corner is a pack of dogs, apparently feral. This next slide shows cattle. The only dead things are human beings. Yet whatever it was that killed them was so dangerous, so instantaneous, or so widespread, that they remain where they fell, unburied.”

He paused.

“The question is, what was it?”

The hall was silent.

“Lowell Cafeteria cooking?” someone ventured.

Levine joined in the general laughter. Then he nodded, and another aerial slide appeared, showing an extensive complex, gutted and ruined.

“Would that it were, my friend. In time, the CIA learned that the cause was a pathogen of some sort, created in the laboratory pictured here. You can see from the craters that the site has been bombed.

“Exact details were not known outside Russia until earlier this week, when a disenchanted Russian colonel defected to Switzerland, bringing with him a fat parcel of Soviet Army files. The same contact who provided me with these images alerted me to this colonel’s presence in Switzerland. I was the first to examine his files. The events I am about to relate to you have never before been made public.

“What you must understand first is that this was a primitive experiment. There was little thought to political, economic, even military use. Remember, ten years ago the Russians were lagging behind in genetic research and struggling to catch up. In the secret facility outside Novo-Druzhina, they were experimenting with viral engineering. They were using a common virus, herpes simplex Ia+, the virus that produces cold sores. It’s a relatively simple virus, well understood, easy to work with. They began meddling with its genetic makeup, inserting human genes into its viral DNA.

“We still don’t know quite how they did it. But suddenly they had a horrific new pathogen on their hands, a scourge they were ill equipped to deal with. All they knew at the time was that it seemed unusually long-lived, and that it infected through aerosol contact.

“On May 23, 1985, there was a small safety breach at the Soviet laboratory. Apparently, a worker inside the transfection lab fell, damaging his biocontainment suit. As you know from Chernobyl, Soviet safety standards can be execrable. The worker told nobody about the incident, and later went home to his family in the worker’s complex.

“For three weeks the virus incubated in his peritoneum, duplicating and spreading. On June 14, this worker felt ill and went to bed with a high fever. Within a few hours, he was complaining of a strange pressure in his gut. He passed a large amount of foul-smelling gas. Growing nervous, his wife sent for the doctor.

“Before the doctor could arrive, however, the man had—you will excuse the graphic description—voided most of his intestines out through his anus. They had suppurated inside his body, becoming pastelike. He had literally defecated his insides out. Needless to say, by the time the doctor arrived, the man was dead.”

Levine paused again, looking around the room as if for raised hands. There were none.

“Since this incident has remained a secret from the scientific community, the virus has no official name, it is known only as Strain 232. We now know that a person exposed to it becomes contagious four days after exposure, although it takes several weeks for symptoms to appear. The mortality rate of Strain 232 is close to a hundred percent. By the time the worker had died, he had exposed dozens, if not hundreds, of people. We could call him vector zero. Within seventy-two hours of his death, dozens of people were complaining of the same gastrointestinal pressure, and soon suffered the same gruesome fate.

“The only thing that prevented a worldwide pandemic was the location of the outbreak. In 1985, movement in and out of Restricted Area Fourteen was highly controlled. Nevertheless, as word spread, a general panic ensued. People in the area began loading their belongings into cars, trucks, even horsecarts. Many tried fleeing on bicycle, or even on foot, abandoning everything in their desperation to get away.

“From the papers the colonel brought with him out of Russia, we can piece together the response of the Soviet Army. A special team in biohazard suits set up a series of roadblocks, preventing anyone from leaving the affected area. This was relatively easy, since Area Fourteen was already fenced and checkpointed. As the epidemic roared through the neighboring villages, whole families died in the streets, in the fields, in the market squares. By the time a person felt the first alarming symptoms, a painful death was only three hours away. The panic was so great that at the checkpoints, the soldiers were ordered to shoot and kill anyone—anyone—as soon as they came within range. Old men, children, pregnant women were gunned down. Air-dropped antipersonnel mines were scattered in wide swaths across woods and fields. What these measures didn’t catch, the razor wire and tank traps did.

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