Germ

He heard the door open and looked up to see John Franklin stepping through the threshold, a guard leaning in behind him to pull the door closed again.

"Kendrick, what is it?" the president asked. In his late forties, square-jawed and blue-eyed, he was an aging golden boy whose stature and refinement reflected a life of privilege and spoils. The man's thick hair was artificially 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."'