Jurgen Warmbrunn's 1st Interview

**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
mind-set, 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 e-mails
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 stike 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.