the Devil's Workshop (1999) (44 page)

"It must be nice to view the world from such a morally lofty position," Zoll said.

"The men who broke into your neurotransmitter lab are White power survivalists. They have samples of armed Pale Horse Prion, and they're going to use it against segments of the population. You're about to be exposed anyway," Stacy said.

"Are there any missing samples of that protein?" Zoll asked, looking at Chittick.

"All accounted for," Chittick responded.

"Dexter DeMille had two vials in marine depth containers at the bottom of Vanishing Lake. They took him back there after the fire and retrieved them," Stacy countered.

"Dexter DeMille is dead," Zoll answered, his demeanor changing slightly; some of his blustery command presence left him as the beginnings of doubt took hold.

"He's alive, and he's certainly not going to defend you or the Devil's Workshop after what you've told the media about him," Stacy said.

"That still doesn't change my responsibilities with respect to you and Captain Cunningham. You two are out of the equation." He looked at Nino DeSilva, who had once again regained his stoic expression. "You know what to do," Zoll told DeSilva, who nodded. Then the Admiral moved around the table to where Cris was being held down on the floor. "I'm sorry about your daughter," he said. "But the course we've chosen here is the right one. Your record says you were a brave soldier. Unfortunately, sometimes brave soldiers have to be left behind."

"Go fuck yourself," Cris growled. "Your apology and bullshit sentiment are not accepted."

They were in the back seat of the Provost Marshal's sedan being driven to their own executions. They watched in dismay as Nino DeSilva turned left off the rutted road and jounced out across the dark, uninhabited part of the Fort, where their graves would be lost forever.

DeSilva slowly brought the car to a halt, and sat behind the wheel with the engine idling. He rested his right hand on his nine
-
millimeter Beretta, which was bracketed in a gun rack next to the radio. The three of them sat in silence.

Nino DeSilva momentarily shifted his gaze to the rearview mirror and studied his prisoners. Cris and Stacy were force
d t
o hunch over slightly because of the chains shackling their hands to the metal rings in the floor. "You got a good military package," Nino finally said to Cris.

"Yeah. Big deal. And the medal you're about to give me comes shaped like a bullet."

Again they sat in silence. Nino turned around and looked directly at Cris and Stacy through the metal grate. "That shit you were saying about Huntsville Prison and us making Gulf War sickness in the eighties--is that really true?"

"You didn't hear Zoll deny it, did you?"

They listened to the motor idling until DeSilva said suddenly, "I didn't join up to kill our own guys."

"None of us did," Cris said.

"My older brother was in Desert Storm. He got the sickness. He can't do shit anymore. Lays around, no energy, got rashes. Even his wife quit him. The V
. A
. tells him it's in his head, y'know, that he's got a psychosomatic illness like P
. T. S
., like he's fucked up in the brain, which is just plain shit, y'know?"

Stacy could see DeSilva hated what he was being asked to do.

"This bio-weapons program helped destroy your brother, Captain," she said. "Now it's in the hands of fanatic White supremacists who won't hesitate to use it."

But DeSilva didn't seem to be listening. He was reliving something else. When he next spoke, his voice was soft, almost a whisper. "I killed this Indian in Badwater, Texas ... a deputy or something. He was just in the way. I had orders, so I killed him. Haven't slept good since." He was looking down now, at the front seat, his eyes fixed on nothing. "And I stole that kid's body. Now I gotta take you out, a Silver Star winner, a Marine like me, and a woman. It doesn't make sense I gotta do this."

"Let us go, man. Zoll won't know. He won't find out till it's too late."

"I'm in this up to my nose." Nino sat in silence. "Nothing's been the same since I killed that Indian. Nothing." He sat fo
r a
nother half minute, then turned off the engine and pulled the Beretta out of its bracket. He opened the driver's door, stepped out, and threw the keys to the handcuffs through the open window onto the back floor.

"What're you gonna do?" Cris asked.

"I let you go, I'm a dead man. Either that or I go to jail for life," DeSilva said. "I gotta do like I was ordered. Unhook yourselves and get out." Cris and Stacy exchanged looks in the back seat of the car. The glance told Stacy to be ready, that Cris was going to try something. She nodded subtly.

They unhooked the chain and got the cuffs off. Then DeSilva opened the rear door and motioned them out while aiming the gun at them.

As Cris stepped out, he tried to move as close to DeSilva as he could, but Nino was combat-trained and instantly backed off. "Stay where you are. Get down on your knees," he commanded. "I can do this so ya won't feel a thing." Cris and Stacy did as they were instructed.

"Like you did with Max Richardson?" Stacy said.

"I don't know nothing about that. Nick Zingo told me he committed suicide."

"He was murdered," she shot back.

"I didn't wanna kill the Indian," DeSilva said softly. "I can't stand it that I killed that guy."

Cris watched as Nino brought the gun up to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel. Cris had reached the end. He had nothing more to lose. He decided that he would lunge up off his knees, directly into the muzzle of the Beretta and almost certain death. He hoped Stacy would use his charge to get away into the night. But just as Cris was about to make his move, Nino DeSilva lowered his weapon.

"Can't," he said softly. "Can't do it again." He stood ten feet away, staring at them. "Get out of here," he finally said.

Cris nodded. He took Stacy's hand, pulled her up, and started to lead her away into the darkness. Then Cris turned and looked back at Nino DeSilva. He was standing with the gun at his side and his chin on his chest. "Sometimes men fall, but the good ones can stand again," Cris said.

Then he turned and moved away, holding Stacy's hand.

Nino DeSilva watched until he could no longer see them in the dark.

Chapter
48

You make movies about milking cows and picking flowers and I'll make movies about fucking and getting loaded and we'll see who puts more asses on theater seats," Buddy growled at Alicia Profit from the motor home's command chair.

She had been talking about a movie she loved, made by some fruity Italian director. The flick had died in the art houses, and Alicia's enthusiasm for it pissed Buddy off. He demanded a little more allegiance from a Brazil Nut. Still, Alicia, who Buddy thought was too pretty and too young to be as smart and self
-
assured as she was, didn't back down.

"Is it just about money, Buddy? You've got money. Is it just about seeing how high you can pile the greenbacks? How many Testarossas can you drive at once? I don't know why you never made The Prospector. That could have been a beautiful movie-- a man's search for himself before death. It was full of pathos and humanity. You shoulda fought for it."

"Pathos? What's that, a Mexican restaurant? That script was
a b
oring piece of shit. An old guy who's dying? Who the fuck cares? What kinda rock 'n' roll score you gonna put under that snore?"

In fact, Buddy had loved the story, but had been talked out of it by the studio after he signed his new big deal. They wanted six high-budget kick-ass movies. The press release on the deal called it "The Buddy Brazil Action Pack." Buddy still pulled out the script of The Prospector and read it occasionally. Why the hell hadn't he fought for it?

"I think it would have made a difference in the way people perceive you," Alicia defended, "like after Spielberg did Schindler's List He reinvented himself with that movie."

They were rolling through Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. John Little Bear was driving the big blue-and-white coach. Billy Seal was sitting with Alicia and Rayce at the fold-out table. Buddy could feel both a heavy weight on his shoulders and a tired weight on his eyes. He knew it was the beginning of a bout of depression. He had snorted a few more lines to try to stave it off, but his body was burning the coke like factory furnace fuel. He was going deeper and deeper into a funk, and it wasn't helped by this conversation with Alicia, and the fact that they were in Gettysburg.

The last time he'd been here he was only twenty-two years old, just out of film school and full of great ideas for redesigning the film business. He'd been in this historic town which had hosted the turning point of the Civil War, shooting a documentary, using five thousand dollars he'd saved up from summer jobs. It was every cent he had, but he had thrived on the challenge. The film was called The Two Hawks of Gettysburg and was about the Civil War, then and now, dealing with the socioeconomic and racial factors of American life one hundred years after the battle. He had tracked the lives of two people in the film: a black Union soldier named Evan Hawk, who died protecting a dream that was meager but filled with hope, and the black Union soldier's great-grandson, Reuben Hawk, a current Gettysburg factory worker. Reuben's lif
e h
ad fulfilled none of the hopes of his great-grandfather. "Seventeen minutes of pretty remarkable filmmaking," Sid Sheinberg had called it, comparing the work to Amblin, the film he'd seen by Steven Spielberg, which Sheinberg had loved and which had gotten Spielberg his first directing jobs in television. But Buddy had been afraid to ever direct again. It was his first bad Hollywood compromise, choosing instead to produce. Somehow, even at twenty-six, he had already started playing safe.

Producing a big studio hit was still a huge long shot, but Buddy found he liked not having to take the full responsibility for what he made. When you were a director, if a movie failed it was "on you." When you were a producer, there were plenty of people to put the blame on. The writer was always the best and easiest target. Buddy had fucked over more writers than Kirkus Reviews. Of course, the director was easy to pin it on, or the studio, although that was trickier politically. Sometimes on his flops, Buddy was so busy running around behind the scenes making shit fall on colleagues that he felt like the Wizard of Beverly Hills, pulling levers behind a big velvet curtain.

Slowly, over the years, he had slipped into the outlaw Buddy thing, with the black outfits and pimp accessories, his "McDaddy props," as Jack Nicholson called the hookers from Heidi's stable. There had been the endless stream of beautiful MAWs, who styled and profiled in his Malibu house. Munchable, long-stemmed wannabes: Models, Actresses, Whatevers, who perched on his sofa with their shoulders back, smiling, flirting, hoping for stardom. He had sampled these pleasures abundantly, but almost always felt horrible afterward, as if in all this luscious beauty there was also some hidden contamination, unrecognizable in its soul-destroying depravity.

All of these feelings confused him, so he did more lines and shot more drugs and tried to make any painful introspection go away in a haze of lost weekends. He had left the twenty-two-year
-
old filmmaker with a camera and a dream way back there on the side of the rocky Hollywood road.

Jack Nicholson, whom Buddy more or less idolized, called him "the Werewolf" because of Buddy's dark looks and nocturnal habits. In fact, Buddy was not much of a werewolf. Inside, he was more of a lost child, and in the moments before his depressions hit, he could see it all very clearly, could read his own uselessness like tea leaves in a Gypsy's cup. He knew that he was heading nowhere and accomplishing nothing. His mega-hits would not be watched by anybody when the cutting-edge sound-track music and trendy clothes were no longer popular. Like the Bee Gees and bell
-
bottom trousers, his material was caught in the moment in a way that defined him as temporary and unimportant.

"Alicia, crank me up," he shouted, and out came her little compact. The lines were chopped and Hoovered up by Buddy, then the little black plastic emergency kit was returned to Alicia Profit's purse. Buddy never carried his own drugs. He couldn't take another possession bust.

"Turn on the TV," he ordered, to change the subject and the memory. Buddy knew he was never going to make The Prospector, as much as he loved it, because he was afraid it wouldn't make any money. He couldn't stand the idea of producing a flop. Buddy was about flash, about winning. He was an end-zone dancer in a black shirt and vest, with three-inch-heeled ostrich cowboy boots. He was an outlaw.

"The bodies inside Fort Detrick have yet to be identified," a beautiful news anchor said, her dyed blond hair cut to helmet length. "But early reports say that the individuals who were shot apparently infiltrated the Army medical base by riding on a supply train. What they were doing in the lab of Building 1666 is still a mystery to the doctors there, but sources close to the investigation say that Army scientists are trying to reconstruct the reason from the chemicals and products used in the lab. The intruders killed two soldiers and left four accomplices dead before they stole a jeep and crashed out through the main gate of Fort Detrick. The Army still runs a medical facility at the Fort, but most of the property was decommissioned ten years ago ..."