...The shoot-out took place at the wild animal market which has been reported as the location of the "animal to human" transmission that started the outbreak. But of course there was no such transmission; it was just the location where the CIA was supposed to receive the sealed vial containing the Agent. The vial shattered when it was dropped by the traitor who had agreed to sell it to the Americans.

By now I understand you will be sceptical. If I really am who I say I am, why would I be sharing this information on the internet? Let me assure you that I am no friend of the Western system of governance. I love my motherland and I am loyal to the Communist Party. It has lifted hundreds of millions of my compatriots out of squalor and poverty. However, I am also a human being and I have a conscience.

Most importantly, I have a wife and a son.

Once we realised that the Agent had escaped and would start to spread, we swiftly put all of Wuhan into lockdown. I was one of those tasked to manage the fallout of the contamination. Of course we could not keep such a huge undertaking secret, so we decided to order our state media to report that a "coronavirus" had broken out in Wuhan.

In reality, of course, there is no "coronavirus". It was all made up.

It was one of my colleagues who came up with the genius idea of pretending that people with the common flu suffered from the coronavirus. This allowed us to hide the true nature of the disease. Let me explain.

It is currently flu season in China. When we realised that we could no longer control the spread of the Agent, we sent our men to all the hospitals and instructed all doctors to diagnose every case of the common flu as "coronavirus". We came up with a new name — 2019-nCoV — and handed out "factsheets" that described a made-up illness.

The result of this decision was that tens of thousands of individuals who were simply suffering from a cold or flu were now diagnosed as having a mysterious coronavirus that, although infectious, was not often lethal. While this frightened the public, it allowed us to push the narrative that the disease was not that deadly; it also gave us time to prepare for the catastrophe that was sure to come by imposing a lockdown on Wuhan and other cities in Hubei Province.

You have not heard this in the news — and given the size of Wuhan, with its population of 11 million, it is not known even to many of the residents — but within days thousands upon thousands were infected and before long they suffered the agonising deaths that I have already described. Within a week, there were so many corpses that we did not know what to do with them, so we ordered the surviving social credit prisoners to drive the bodies into the countryside and bury them in mass graves. But it was very difficult to keep this activity secret, and we could not even keep up as there were so many corpses. We planted a story that five million residents had "fled" Wuhan. In reality, of course, many of those people had died from the Agent.

I was working around the clock helping to orchestrate this cover-up. When I think back to my actions now, I feel great shame. At the time I still believed that I was fighting for my motherland and that the rule of the Party was right and just. But deep down, I had already begun to have doubts.

My faith in the Party was shaken even more deeply when I learnt what had happened to Dr Li Wenliang. He was one of the few doctors who refused falsely to diagnose flu patients with the "coronavirus". As a punishment, he was sent to help transport dead bodies to mass graves. The expectation was that he would be infected with the Agent and die an agonising death, but to our great surprise, he did not contract the illness.

You have of course read that he died of "coronavirus". You have been misinformed. A sergeant of the People’s Armed Police injected him with a mixture of heroin and mercury that caused his lungs to deflate.

When I found out about this I became unsure whether or not I was doing the right thing. While I believe that it is appropriate for a government to rule with a severe hand, I do not think that it was right to kill Dr Li. He was a compassionate and kind man and he cared about his patients; how can our motherland not benefit from having such a doctor?

I shared my concerns with my wife, but she convinced me that I should not say anything to my superiors. She said that it was too dangerous; that they valued loyalty above everything else; and that I would only find trouble if I admitted to my doubts about their practices. She also pointed out that we benefited from priority medical treatment. As senior officials, we received regular supplies of the highly-sophisticated hazmat masks that are the only known technology that can prevent infection. She implored me to think of our son, who is still small. If I spoke out and were caught, our lives would be at risk.

Around the same time, it became clear that the Agent was entirely beyond our control. It was spreading like wildfire throughout Hubei Province and beyond, infecting tens of millions and causing them all to die.

I understand that what I just said is difficult to believe, because you have been told that there have been only about 50,000 infections, and far fewer deaths. But these are the influenza infections that have been falsely passed off as the non-existent "coronavirus". The Agent is far, far more contagious than that, and its fatality rate, unlike the "coronavirus", is not 2%.

No, its fatality rate is 100%. Nobody recovers from it. Everybody who contracts it dies.

And a lot of people are contracting it.

Hubei Province lies in ruins. The various travel restrictions and lockdowns that have been imposed were not created to stop the spread of the Agent — none of them can stop it, not embargoes, not face masks or hand sanitiser — but to stop the survivors from seeing the catastrophe with their own eyes.

I am part of the greatest cover-up in human history: the hiding of the deaths of tens of millions. Very soon, Hubei Province will be no more than a giant mortuary, and the truth will come out.

For me, the turning point came when the Party told yet another lie, and that lie was too dreadful even for me to accept. You may have heard that China built a new hospital, called Huoshenshan Hospital, in Wuhan, in order to provide additional quarantine and isolation facilities for infected patients. You may have heard that they built it in only ten days.

That too is a lie.

Sure, they did build something in six days. But it was not a hospital. The true nature of the building was top secret. Initially, I was naive enough to believe that the Party was demonstrating its compassion and care for the people. But then my superiors sent me to Huoshenshan. I was shown around the installation by a military police officer called Corporal Meng (this is not his real name). It was there that I saw the truth.

As I have mentioned, the only way to protect oneself from the Agent is by wearing a special protective mask that is entirely unlike those available commercially. Even medical professionals do not have access to it. It is available only to biomedical warfare researchers and it contains extremely advanced technology.

These masks need to be kept at a particular temperature to offer full protection, and lose their effectiveness very quickly. As I have also already said, one of the benefits of my position was that both my family and I had access to regular supplies, which is why were safe when compared to civilians, doctors and even lower-level government officials, all of whom wore utterly ineffective surgical masks in the misguided belief that they would protect them.

And so, wearing this special equipment, I went to Huoshenshan with Corporal Meng.

Whatever you want to call that place, it is not a hospital. Sure, the entrance looks like a hospital and in the ward at the front of the complex, there are what appear to be normal medical beds. There, thousands of infected patients lie, all of them in the early stages of the disease. I walked along those long, white corridors next to Corporal Meng, his angular face dispassionate in his military fatigues, and saw hundreds upon hundreds of identical hospital beds on which squirmed the terrified and diseased inhabitants of Wuhan. Their cries and pleas haunt me in the long nights in which I now am unable to sleep.

But this was merely the beginning. Eventually the Corporal took me to the rear of this front section. There, locked metal gates led to what he called the "middle section". The patients in the front are unaware of its existence. It is there that the more advanced cases are kept, in what most closely resembles a mental asylum.

Immediately upon entering this part of Huoshenshan I was struck by the dim lighting and stench of vomit and human waste. Here the unfortunates roamed freely, their minds gradually disintegrating in endless panic attacks and psychotic episodes. Here too there were no more doctors, merely gorilla-faced men in black uniforms who belonged to some secret branch of the military police I had never heard of.

They appeared to have been selected for their cruelty, for they beat and degraded the patients in the most sadistic manner. Many of the inmates had regressed to childlike states and lay on the floor weeping like infants and begging for compassion that they did not receive. There was cruel pleasure in the eyes of these thugs as they brutalised the unfortunates. They beat them with batons, sprayed pepper spray into their eyes and kicked them with their steel-capped boots. As I was from military intelligence, the guards did not even attempt to hide their activities. They even invited me to join; in every way, they treated me as one of them.

Yes, one of them. I stood in the grey staff bathroom of Huoshenshan and looked into a cheap mirror and asked myself — is this really what you are? Are you really like them?

But the violence was not merely an expression of sadism, for the poor inmates were not there to be cared for.

They were there to work.

There was one more set of doors, and beyond them lay what the Corporal called the "Core". And it was there that I saw it — piles and piles of dead bodies, stacked on top of one another all the way to the ceiling. There were men, women and children, elderlies and toddlers, rich and poor, beautiful and misshapen, proud and humble.

They were all of them dead. Our Agent made no distinction between any of them.

I gasped when the Corporal led me to the Core. I cannot count how many there were, but it was many, many thousands. And in the midst of the piles of corpses was a kind of path, and I heard a roaring sound in the distance. The miserable patients from the middle section picked up the dead and carried and dragged them away into the dark, even as the guards beat them with truncheons.

It took me a little while before I grasped what was happening. I simply could not believe what lay at the end of that path in the Core.

It was an enormous furnace, with great fires roaring within.