The site was initially selected by Hitler’s Luftwaffe when a new autobahn bridge collapsed in 1940. It was discovered that the swampy land was unsuitable for a bridge that size, rendering a large new section of highway on the far side unusable.

The Luftwaffe used the abandoned stretch of road as a runway and it was taken over as such by the advancing American forces during the final months of the war.

After the Second World War, the surrounding land became the largest single-spot construction site on the planet, with the American military employing over a quarter million European laborers to drain thousands of acres of swampland.

Because of its vast size, the base was frequently used for operations the American government wanted to keep secret, or keep off domestic soil.

During the 1950’s, it was used to house NATO’s underground combat operations center, a 37,000 square foot control room from which a full air war could be waged against the Soviet Union. The bunker’s massive switchboard, complete with eighty teletype machines, was capable of coordinating in real time with the Pentagon, NATO Supreme Headquarters, and dozens of strategic air bases around the globe.

In 2015, it emerged the base was being used as a massive drone control center, with hundreds of pilots remotely piloting drones over Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia. The German government was furious, stating that their territory was being used to circumvent American constitutional restraints that would have made the strikes illegal if conducted from US territory.

In the same year, a Serbian tabloid reported the base was being used to funnel massive quantities of illegal weapons to Syrian rebels. Again, the German government was caught off guard, and while the operation was a clear violation of German arms laws, there was nothing they could do about it because their investigators weren’t permitted onto the base without American authorization.

Another thing the Germans didn’t know was that the base housed an advanced CIA laboratory specializing in the analysis of substances deemed too dangerous to bring back to the continental United States.

The vial from Istanbul fit this bill, and it was there that the analysis Roth ordered had been carried out.

A team of four technicians worked overtime on the report, calculating virulence by infecting rats with such minute amounts of the substance that doses were measured in Daltons, or twelfths of the mass of a carbon-12 atom.

The technicians worked in an underground, lead-lined lab using state of the art containment practices and protective clothing made to a higher specification than what NASA had commissioned for its manned spaceflight missions.