Stryker: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale Read Free Page B

pity that someone died over them. If he had it to do over, he
would never have entered the house. But, nobody is right 100 percent of the
time. Risk and reward. It wasn’t like doing accounting. The perfect ledger didn’t
end with a zero in each column. It usually was a one-to-zero ending and Stryker
was lucky the zero wasn’t in his column that day.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    DIE OFF MINUS ONE MONTH
     
    Richard Biggs sat in the first-class
section of a Lufthansa 747 that was making its way to Frankfurt, Germany. He
grinned as he reviewed the email that confirmed the deposit of four million
dollars into his bank account in the Bahamas.
    After years of eking out an existence as
a Department of Defense bioengineer, he was retiring. He did take a parting
gift with him, though. It was a small vial of weaponized Ebola virus. He had
slaved away for twenty years in the labs at Fort Detrick in Frederick,
Maryland. The installation had been the center of the U.S. biological weapons
program that theoretically halted in 1969 by virtue of the U.S. signing an
international treaty banning further development of the weapons. The truth was
known to only a handful of researchers, including Biggs: the development of
bioweapons had never stopped, and the security where Richard worked was so
compartmentalized that nobody even knew he had developed the deadliest weapon
in the history of the world.
    Richard did most of the work on weekends
and after hours. He was seen as a workaholic by most of his fellow scientists,
and he was just fine with leaving that impression. The work was entirely off
the books, as was the development of the new virus. He had not used computers
or kept lab notes. He kept it in his prodigious memory until he arrived home,
then made the notes and used a computer that was not connected to the Internet.
It had taken close to four years.
    There were two strokes of true genius
with his strain of Ebola. He had managed to make the virus into an airborne
pathogen that would spread much more quickly than the normal strains that
required human fluid to transmit the disease. He also found the means to make
the virus mutate with every new host; the incubation period grew shorter with
each mutation. So when the outbreak actually occurred, it would hit all the
victims at roughly the same time, thus overwhelming the medical care system.
Ebola was not always deadly as long as intensive medical care was available.
Often, as many people died from the lack of treatment as they did from the
disease itself. But this strain would tax any health care systems to the edge
of a total breakdown, and beyond.
    He also invented a vaccine for the
virus, and nobody knew that either. He was on his way to Frankfurt to collect
the second of three payments he was due. His new friend, Hans, owned a large
German pharmaceutical company, and was purchasing the vial and a single sample
dose of the vaccine.
    During a previous meeting in New York,
Hans explained the plan in stunning simplicity: He intended to release the
pathogen in a small remote village in Africa and immediately rush in medical
staff to reduce the loss of life. Once quarantined, the disease would be
contained in that village. But, the market for the vaccine would explode, and
Hans was paying Biggs another four million dollars for the formula to
mass-produce the vaccine once the outbreak was contained. It seemed like a
workable plan to Richard, and it would give him enough money to buy anything he
desired. He would drop his facade and live the way he truly wanted.
    Biggs, a tiny man with bird-like
features and beady eyes, was an angry person. Having put up with bullies
throughout his childhood and well in the high school, he was forged into
someone who saw only evil in others, and didn’t particularly care for the human
race. He was also a 200-point IQ genius with an incredibly complex mind. He
understood things that others just couldn’t see, even if they were pointed out
to them. He lived behind a