Warnings: The Warmbrunn-Knight Report by Max Brooks Lyrics
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL
[Jurgen Warmbrunn has a passion for Ethiopian food, which is our reason for meeting at a Falasha restaurant. With his bright pink skin, and white, unruly eyebrows that match his “Einstein” hair, he might be mistaken for a crazed scientist or college professor. He is neither. Although never acknowledging which Israeli intelligence service he was, and possibly still is, employed by, he openly admits that at one point he could be called “a spy.”]
Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature. I don’t blame anyone for not believing. I don’t claim to be any smarter or better than them. I guess what it really comes down to is the randomness of birth. I happened to be born into a group of people who live in constant fear of extinction. It’s part of our identity, part of our mindset, and it has taught us through horrific trial and error to always be on our guard.
The first warning I had of the plague was from our friends and customers over in Taiwan. They were complaining about our new software decryption program. Apparently it was failing to decode some emails from PRC sources, or at least decoding them so poorly that the text was unintelligible. I suspected the problem might not be in the software but in the translated messages themselves. The mainland Reds… I guess they weren’t really Reds anymore but…what do you want from an old man? The Reds had a nasty habit of using too many different computers from too many different generations and countries.
Before I suggested this theory to Taipei, I thought it might be a good idea to review the scrambled messages myself. I was surprised to find that the characters themselves were perfectly decoded. But the text itself… it all had to do with a new viral outbreak that first eliminated its victim, then reanimated his corpse into some kind of homicidal berzerker. Of course, I didn’t believe this was true, especially because only a few weeks later the crisis in the Taiwan Strait began and any messages dealing with rampaging corpses abruptly ended. I suspected a second layer of encryption, a code within a code. That was pretty standard procedure, going back to the first days of human communication. Of course the Reds didn’t mean actual dead bodies. It had to be a new weapon system or ultrasecret war plan. I let the matter drop, tried to forget about it. Still, as one of your great national heroes used to say: “My spider sense was tingling.”
Not long afterward, at the reception for my daughter’s wedding, I found myself speaking to one of my son-in-law’s professors from Hebrew University. The man was a talker, and he’d had a little too much to drink. He was rambling about how his cousin was doing some kind of work in South Africa and had told him some stories about golems. You know about the Golem, the old legend about a rabbi who breathes life into an inanimate statue? Mary Shelley stole the idea for her book Frankenstein. I didn’t say anything at first, just listened. The man went on blathering about how these golems weren’t made from clay, nor were they docile and obedient. As soon as he mentioned reanimating human bodies, I asked for the man’s number. It turns out he had been in Cape Town on one of those “Adrenaline Tours,” shark feeding I think it was.
[He rolls his eyes.]
Apparently the shark had obliged him, right in the tuchus, which is why he had been recovering at Groote Schuur when the first victims from Khayelitsha township were brought in. He hadn’t seen any of these cases firsthand, but the staff had told him enough stories to fill my old Dictaphone. I then presented his stories, along with those decrypted Chinese e-mails, to my superiors.
And this is where I directly benefited from the unique circumstances of our precarious security. In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack almost drove us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in front of us, all the warning signs, and we had simply “dropped the ball.” We never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional assault from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing’s true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it’s necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor’s nuclear power plant might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a dictator was rumored to be building a cannon so big it could fire anthrax shells across whole countries, you dig; and if there was even the slightest chance that dead bodies were being reanimated as ravenous killing machines, you dig and dig until you strike the absolute truth.
And that is what I did, I dug. At first it wasn’t easy. With China out of the picture… the Taiwan crisis put an end to any intelligence gathering… I was left with very few sources of information. A lot of it was chaff, especially on the Internet; zombies from space and Area 51…what is your country’s fetish for Area 51, anyway? After a while I started to uncover more useful data: cases of “rabies” similar to Cape Town… it wasn’t called African rabies until later. I uncovered the psychological evaluations of some Canadian mountain troops recently returned from Kyrgyzstan. I found the blog records of a Brazilian nurse who told her friends all about the murder of a heart surgeon.
The majority of my information came from the World Health Organization. The UN is a bureaucratic masterpiece, so many nuggets of valuable data buried in mountains of unread reports. I found incidents all over the world, all of them dismissed with “plausible” explanations. These cases allowed me to piece together a cohesive mosaic of this new threat. The subjects in question were indeed dead, they were hostile, and they were undeniably spreading. I also made one very encouraging discovery: how to terminate their existence.
Going for the brain.
[He chuckles.] We talk about it today as if it is some feat of magic, like holy water or a silver bullet, but why wouldn’t destruction of the brain be the only way to annihilate these creatures? Isn’t it the only way to annihilate us as well?
You mean human beings?
[He nods.] Isn’t that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body? The brain cannot survive if just one part of the machine is destroyed or even deprived of such necessities as food or oxygen. That is the only measurable difference between us and “The Undead.” Their brains do not require a support system to survive, so it is necessary to attack the organ itself. [His right hand, in the shape of a gun, rises to touch his temple.] A simple solution, but only if we recognized the problem! Given how quickly the plague was spreading, I thought it might be prudent to seek confirmation from foreign intelligence circles.
Paul Knight had been a friend of mine for a long time, going all the way back to Entebbe. The idea to use a double of Amin’s black Mercedes, that was him. Paul had retired from government service right before his agency’s “reforms” and gone to work for a private consulting firm in Bethesda, Maryland. When I visited him at his home, I was shocked to find that not only had he been working on the very same project, on his own time, of course, but that his file was almost as thick and heavy as mine. We sat up the whole night reading each other’s findings. Neither of us spoke. I don’t think we were even conscious of each other, the world around us, anything except the words before our eyes. We finished almost at the same time, just as the sky began to lighten in the east.
Paul turned the last page, then looked to me and said very matter-of-factly, “This is pretty bad, huh?” I nodded, so did he, then followed up with “So what are we going to do about it?”
And that is how the “Warmbrunn-Knight” report was written.
I wish people would stop calling it that. There were fifteen other names on that report: virologists, intelligence operatives, military analysts, journalists, even one UN observer who’d been monitoring the elections in Jakarta when the first outbreak hit Indonesia. Everyone was an expert in his or her field, everyone had come to their own similar conclusions before ever being contacted by us. Our report was just under a hundred pages long. It was concise, it was fully comprehensive, it was everything we thought we needed to make sure this outbreak never reached epidemic proportions. I know a lot of credit has been heaped upon the South African war plan, and deservedly so, but if more people had read our report and worked to make its recommendations a reality, then that plan would have never needed to exist.
But some people did read and follow your report. Your own government…
Barely, and just look at the cost.
[Jurgen Warmbrunn has a passion for Ethiopian food, which is our reason for meeting at a Falasha restaurant. With his bright pink skin, and white, unruly eyebrows that match his “Einstein” hair, he might be mistaken for a crazed scientist or college professor. He is neither. Although never acknowledging which Israeli intelligence service he was, and possibly still is, employed by, he openly admits that at one point he could be called “a spy.”]
Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature. I don’t blame anyone for not believing. I don’t claim to be any smarter or better than them. I guess what it really comes down to is the randomness of birth. I happened to be born into a group of people who live in constant fear of extinction. It’s part of our identity, part of our mindset, and it has taught us through horrific trial and error to always be on our guard.
The first warning I had of the plague was from our friends and customers over in Taiwan. They were complaining about our new software decryption program. Apparently it was failing to decode some emails from PRC sources, or at least decoding them so poorly that the text was unintelligible. I suspected the problem might not be in the software but in the translated messages themselves. The mainland Reds… I guess they weren’t really Reds anymore but…what do you want from an old man? The Reds had a nasty habit of using too many different computers from too many different generations and countries.
Before I suggested this theory to Taipei, I thought it might be a good idea to review the scrambled messages myself. I was surprised to find that the characters themselves were perfectly decoded. But the text itself… it all had to do with a new viral outbreak that first eliminated its victim, then reanimated his corpse into some kind of homicidal berzerker. Of course, I didn’t believe this was true, especially because only a few weeks later the crisis in the Taiwan Strait began and any messages dealing with rampaging corpses abruptly ended. I suspected a second layer of encryption, a code within a code. That was pretty standard procedure, going back to the first days of human communication. Of course the Reds didn’t mean actual dead bodies. It had to be a new weapon system or ultrasecret war plan. I let the matter drop, tried to forget about it. Still, as one of your great national heroes used to say: “My spider sense was tingling.”
Not long afterward, at the reception for my daughter’s wedding, I found myself speaking to one of my son-in-law’s professors from Hebrew University. The man was a talker, and he’d had a little too much to drink. He was rambling about how his cousin was doing some kind of work in South Africa and had told him some stories about golems. You know about the Golem, the old legend about a rabbi who breathes life into an inanimate statue? Mary Shelley stole the idea for her book Frankenstein. I didn’t say anything at first, just listened. The man went on blathering about how these golems weren’t made from clay, nor were they docile and obedient. As soon as he mentioned reanimating human bodies, I asked for the man’s number. It turns out he had been in Cape Town on one of those “Adrenaline Tours,” shark feeding I think it was.
[He rolls his eyes.]
Apparently the shark had obliged him, right in the tuchus, which is why he had been recovering at Groote Schuur when the first victims from Khayelitsha township were brought in. He hadn’t seen any of these cases firsthand, but the staff had told him enough stories to fill my old Dictaphone. I then presented his stories, along with those decrypted Chinese e-mails, to my superiors.
And this is where I directly benefited from the unique circumstances of our precarious security. In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack almost drove us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in front of us, all the warning signs, and we had simply “dropped the ball.” We never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional assault from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing’s true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it’s necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor’s nuclear power plant might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a dictator was rumored to be building a cannon so big it could fire anthrax shells across whole countries, you dig; and if there was even the slightest chance that dead bodies were being reanimated as ravenous killing machines, you dig and dig until you strike the absolute truth.
And that is what I did, I dug. At first it wasn’t easy. With China out of the picture… the Taiwan crisis put an end to any intelligence gathering… I was left with very few sources of information. A lot of it was chaff, especially on the Internet; zombies from space and Area 51…what is your country’s fetish for Area 51, anyway? After a while I started to uncover more useful data: cases of “rabies” similar to Cape Town… it wasn’t called African rabies until later. I uncovered the psychological evaluations of some Canadian mountain troops recently returned from Kyrgyzstan. I found the blog records of a Brazilian nurse who told her friends all about the murder of a heart surgeon.
The majority of my information came from the World Health Organization. The UN is a bureaucratic masterpiece, so many nuggets of valuable data buried in mountains of unread reports. I found incidents all over the world, all of them dismissed with “plausible” explanations. These cases allowed me to piece together a cohesive mosaic of this new threat. The subjects in question were indeed dead, they were hostile, and they were undeniably spreading. I also made one very encouraging discovery: how to terminate their existence.
Going for the brain.
[He chuckles.] We talk about it today as if it is some feat of magic, like holy water or a silver bullet, but why wouldn’t destruction of the brain be the only way to annihilate these creatures? Isn’t it the only way to annihilate us as well?
You mean human beings?
[He nods.] Isn’t that all we are? Just a brain kept alive by a complex and vulnerable machine we call the body? The brain cannot survive if just one part of the machine is destroyed or even deprived of such necessities as food or oxygen. That is the only measurable difference between us and “The Undead.” Their brains do not require a support system to survive, so it is necessary to attack the organ itself. [His right hand, in the shape of a gun, rises to touch his temple.] A simple solution, but only if we recognized the problem! Given how quickly the plague was spreading, I thought it might be prudent to seek confirmation from foreign intelligence circles.
Paul Knight had been a friend of mine for a long time, going all the way back to Entebbe. The idea to use a double of Amin’s black Mercedes, that was him. Paul had retired from government service right before his agency’s “reforms” and gone to work for a private consulting firm in Bethesda, Maryland. When I visited him at his home, I was shocked to find that not only had he been working on the very same project, on his own time, of course, but that his file was almost as thick and heavy as mine. We sat up the whole night reading each other’s findings. Neither of us spoke. I don’t think we were even conscious of each other, the world around us, anything except the words before our eyes. We finished almost at the same time, just as the sky began to lighten in the east.
Paul turned the last page, then looked to me and said very matter-of-factly, “This is pretty bad, huh?” I nodded, so did he, then followed up with “So what are we going to do about it?”
And that is how the “Warmbrunn-Knight” report was written.
I wish people would stop calling it that. There were fifteen other names on that report: virologists, intelligence operatives, military analysts, journalists, even one UN observer who’d been monitoring the elections in Jakarta when the first outbreak hit Indonesia. Everyone was an expert in his or her field, everyone had come to their own similar conclusions before ever being contacted by us. Our report was just under a hundred pages long. It was concise, it was fully comprehensive, it was everything we thought we needed to make sure this outbreak never reached epidemic proportions. I know a lot of credit has been heaped upon the South African war plan, and deservedly so, but if more people had read our report and worked to make its recommendations a reality, then that plan would have never needed to exist.
But some people did read and follow your report. Your own government…
Barely, and just look at the cost.