Testimony of Mr. J. Stanley

Going back, aiming at an overturned ambulance, and moving over to the burning tent, the smoke was a weird color, the same kind of gas was coming out of the crater, some kind of yellow fog that didn't follow the heat The ascent spreads out and lazily flows around, pressing down on reporters and photographers, "God, what's that?"

Stanley knew what that was.

He has only seen the "effect" of Apophis on experimental animals. First, there are continuous blisters, the scorched skin peels off, and the fleshy muscles and soft tissues continue to be corroded.The theorized cause of death was an acute hemolytic reaction, but most animals did not live to that point, the agent turning their respiratory tracts into a festering paste.The scream from the TV lasted only a few seconds, the camera fell to the ground, looking at half a brick and Holden Parkinson, the reporter's fingers looked like burnt branches, he scratched his throat, necrotic With this movement, the whole piece of skin fell off, exposing the bloody muscles and cartilage, and there were only two pits where the eyes should have been, and the blood dripped down together with the melted eyeballs.The camera cuts to the helicopter, no one speaks, only the roar of the rotor.Nine hundred meters below, thick yellow fog engulfed streets and collapsed buildings.

"Why can't they broadcast the ball game properly?" Dad complained.

-

Jason answered the phone after the sixth ring.

"I saw the news, too," he said, directly answering the question Stanley hadn't asked.In the background was the noise of the airport, with broadcasts announcing delayed and canceled flights in alternating German, French and English.Jason was in Switzerland attending a seminar on preventive medicine and was due to return to London this morning.

Stanley started the car, "Aren't you still in Zurich?"

"My flight is cancelled, the ground crew is on strike. Are you in the R&D center?"

"On the way. Why do they have Apophis in their hands?"

"I do not know."

"Jason, I'm going to ask you a question calmly and expect you to answer it honestly." The speed greatly exceeded the number on the speed limit sign on the roadside, and Stanley decided to ignore it. "Did you leak Apophis to Jim?"

"This is not a good time to talk about it."

"You did not answer my question."

"Look, if I get to the train station right away and I'm back in London tomorrow morning, we'd better meet face to face—"

"Did you ever get Jim Follett to get the finished Apophis?"

There was a brief silence, and the airport broadcast was looking for a passenger who had left his luggage at the door of the restaurant.

"Lest you forget, Jim is also one of the investors."

"He's also a weapons dealer," Stanley said, gripping the steering wheel tightly. "Now we all know where he sold the monsters in the basement. You know—"

"Gaspar, no one can connect IG with this."

"Someone threw a chemical weapon into a hospital, and you're concerned about a public relations crisis."

"Otherwise what else should I care about?" Jason asked. "Someone got shot and you want to blame whoever made the bullet?"

Stanley hung up the phone.

-

In the lobby of the R&D center is a group of students wearing blue peaked caps, lined up in two loose rows, waiting to visit the lab.Dodging the excited critters, Stanley put his ID card on the scanner, the glass air pressure door to the restricted area slid open, and he walked briskly down the empty hallway to the elevator.The phone vibrated, and it was Jason again. Stanley turned off the phone and pressed the button marked "Basement 5".

There were no guards on the way to the freezer, but he had to stop every five or six steps to deal with scanners, blast doors and combination locks, proving over and over that he was indeed Gaspar Stanley.The monitoring room is on the right side of the freezer. It is small enough to accommodate a table and a swivel chair. It is separated from the freezer by a thirty centimeter thick glass wall.Stanley connected the identification card to the groove of the monitoring system, and pulled out all the access records. The entries were very short. In the past year, only Jason came here frequently, once a week on average, and everything seemed to be normal.The remaining bits and pieces of records come from ventilation duct engineers or researchers from the Razor group, neither of whom had access to the freezer.Stanley checked the inventory, all five divisions had green lights, and not even a milligram of medicine had ever left this huge underground iron box.

Stanley stared at the data for a while, put on protective clothing and gloves, and opened the air pressure door of the freezer.The lights were harsh, and the ventilation ducts rumbled muffled in the walls.

He opened the door of the cabinet closest to him, and it was empty save for the aluminum brackets.Stanley opened a second holding cabinet, then a third and a fourth, also empty.

God bless us, he thought, the suit filter hissing faintly.

Author has something to say: Everything about Aleppo and Apophis is fiction

7.

Stanley watched Jason Coleman's car round the last bushy curve, its headlights as bright as a beacon on a hilltop in the twilight.In another 3 minutes, the black lotus will arrive at the gate of the R&D center, pass through the security check in 5 minutes, get a green light all the way, and enter the elevator in the restricted area.Stanley imagined the sound-sensitive lights coming on row by row following Jason's footsteps, and the hallway turning into a pale tunnel, extending outside his office door.

The computer beeped, and Stanley hurried away from the glass window to unplug the flash drive the size of a postage stamp; duplicating Project Razor's financial records took much longer than he expected, and his There is only a small amount of information about Apophis on the personal computer, lacking fragments, but it is enough for a good reporter with a keen sense of smell to make full use of.Jason doesn't trust computers, and the most critical data is in his notebook. After all, no program can beat the traditional and faithful paper and pen.Stanley stuck the data-laden chip on the inside of the empty cigarette pack.Not to make the data public, he told himself, just in case.

What if?

There was a knock on the door.Stanley turned off the computer monitor, put the cigarette case back into his pocket, and pushed the button embedded in the table, the electronic lock popped open with a loud click.The fence of the Colosseum, thought Stanley, and the lions entered.

The leather shoes stepped on the thick gray carpet without making a sound. Jason looked around the office, as if looking for an ambush that didn't exist.He looked exactly like he'd been waiting in an airport for more than six hours, crooked tie and wrinkled shirt, eyes like glass set over lead plates.For a ridiculous few seconds, they looked at each other like two fencers, trying to figure out what the other was up to.Stanley first looked away, looking at the perch in the incubator illuminated by the sun lamp. There were no lizards in it.

"I thought you were waiting for the train tomorrow morning."

Jason threw the luggage bag on the ground casually, "I honored some favors. Eddie happened to have a Bombardier parked at Zurich Airport. It's a wonderful coincidence. If you answer the phone, I will tell you."

"I'm busy counting inventory."

"It's kind of outside the scope of your job, isn't it?"

"The vanishing potion is enough to fill two standard pressurized tanks, or wipe a medium-sized city off the face of the earth."

"Three, if put into the water supply system."

"It's not funny."

"They're government property." Jason fumbled out the cigarette case, shook out one, remembered something, and stuffed it back in. "Whitehall would be happy to ship it to Cumbria, where birds don't lay eggs, and Lock up the enriched uranium, or dump it in central London, it's not up to me to decide."

"It's your decision to sell it to an arms dealer."

"Business. You understand that IntelGenes is not a charity, right?"

"We are not a mercenary organization either, the principle is—"

"You should really listen to what you're saying, Gasper," Jason said, playing with the lighter, lighting it up, and then turning it off, "If you want to talk about how clean your hands are, we can always start with the East Africa project Yes. If the group of humanitarian hippies who blocked the door last year knew who authorized the release of those drugs, you and your experimental group would be tied to stakes and burned."

It took Stanley a while to realize that he had clenched his fists and his nails dug into his palms. "The death rate has always been under control."

"But people still lose their lives, what would you call that?"

"Reasonable risk."

"Seriously, you should be hosting a late-night radio religious show peddling your ambiguous principles and morals."

"My lab develops vaccines, not weapons."

"And the original research goal of the 'razor' experimental group was to treat multiple sclerosis, you think I'm happy to see it turned into," Jason gestured, replacing the unspoken words, "Gasper, nothing Unable to be turned into a weapon, people have an astonishing enthusiasm for self-destruction."

"They at least have the right to know what they are dealing with. MSF is still using mustard gas to treat wounds. It is better to shoot the wounded directly in the head and let them die more quickly."

"IG cannot be involved in this matter."

"IG made this happen, hell we killed these people."

"It's the war that's killing them. Go home, Gaspar, have a whiskey, two, it'll make you feel better. Forget Mombasa and Aleppo, seriously, no one cares about those two Dusty corners."

-

"Then I said, I resign. Even