It had taken him the better part of a day to reach this place, even with his GPS unit pointing him in the right direction. Finding these villages was like a mad scavenger hunt, a lesson he had learned during his first visit to the West African republic during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
A genetic engineer by trade, Van Der Hausen had been part of the World Health Organization’s response team deployed to Liberia to combat the spread of hemorrhagic fever. Once on the ground, he had discovered that the team had little use for his scientific expertise. Instead, they needed people on the front lines, trekking out to the rural villages, isolating the infected, educating the superstitious villagers about quarantine measures and how to safely dispose of corpses. He had spent weeks tramping around the jungle, in constant fear of the deadly virus, wild animals, bandits and ignorant villagers who were suspicious of everyone.
It had been a life-changing experience.
He had come to Africa with a burning zeal to help the afflicted, to make the world a better place. He had left with the realization that sometimes the only way to fix a thing was to burn it down and start over.
That and one other thing. He had also brought a little souvenir of his stay in West Africa: an ampoule of human blood teeming with the Ebola virus.
He could still recall the heady mixture of exhilaration and panic he had felt when smuggling the sample out. It had been much easier than he had anticipated; everyone trusted the scientists. Of course, things had not exactly gone according to his plan after that. His fumbling attempt to sell the sample might have gotten him arrested, if not for the intervention of the man who now stood beside him, staring down at the nameless village.
“That’s the place?” Vigor Rohn asked.
Rohn was Bulgarian—Van Der Hausen recognized the distinctive Sofia accent. His voice was gravelly and irritable, like someone who had woken up with a hangover, except Rohn always sounded that way. He was big—six-foot-two, with the broad-shouldered physique of a footballer—and ugly. His face was pock-marked, like someone who had taken a double-barreled shotgun blast of rock salt. One of his ears looked like a cauliflower floret. Van Der Hausen felt quite certain that the man was no scientist, but Rohn always asked the right questions. He was either more intelligent than he appeared or he was being coached by a remote mentor. Probably both.
Van Der Hausen nodded and waggled his GPS unit. “I tagged the devices, just to be sure that no one tampered with them.”
“And we will be safe here?”
“Technically, we could get a lot closer. This isn’t some run-of-the-mill infectious bio-weapon.” He smiled, recalling how Rohn had used very similar language two months earlier during their first meeting.
Rohn had found him, just five minutes before his first attempt at selling the Ebola virus to a man in the Stockholm underworld. Rohn had appeared out of nowhere, warning Van Der Hausen that the meeting was a set-up. They had left together, narrowly escaping the tightening police dragnet.
“My employer has noticed you,” Rohn had told him. “You are an amateur, playing a dangerous game with no idea of the risks you face. But my employer admires your initiative.”
Van Der Hausen, still in shock, had managed to ask whether Rohn’s employer might be interested in purchasing the virus.
Rohn had laughed. “Ebola is nothing. A run-of-the-mill threat, good for creating a panic, but almost useless for strategic purposes. You should know this better than anyone.”
“Then what—”
“You have something of even greater worth that my employer is willing to pay for.”
“My scientific expertise?”
Another derisive laugh. “There are many scientists in the world. But only a few of them are...” Rohn paused as if searching for the right word, “...unscrupulous enough to sell a deadly virus to the highest bidder. That is what makes you special. My employer is interested in research and development. Genetic engineering is the new frontier. Those who are the first to blaze trails into unexplored territory reap the greatest reward. You want that, don’t you?”
Van Der Hausen most definitely did.
“Then you must continue to impress my employer.”
With a generous advance of seed money, Van Der Hausen had taken a leave of absence from the University of Stockholm and set up his own genetics lab, outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment purchased off the Internet. At first, he had felt like a frustrated artist, staring at a blank canvas, waiting for inspiration to dawn. Then he had remembered his earlier ordeal, and an idea had come to him.