the Devil's Workshop (1999) (47 page)

"Wendell, did you see the news?"

"Yes."

"Did you do a test on the canisters I sent you?" Her voice was clipped. She was holding herself in tight control.

"Yes ... The foam rubber had some ink transfer. From what we could read, the canisters contained Prions, but they were not genetically targeted. They--"

"You still have them? You didn't turn the canisters over to the C
. D. C
.?" Stacy asked.

"I still have them," the old scientist said softly. "Stacy, where are you? I'm worried. You don't sound right."

Cris had moved closer. He was looking at her profile from over her shoulder, watching her strained expression, lit by dim light coming through the faded yellow lampshade.

"Was Max involved in this?" she asked bitterly.

When she said it, Wendell flinched, then took a deep breath, and waited too long to answer.

"So he was," she concluded. "He was helping Dr. DeMille design this stuff." Her voice was so tortured that Cris couldn't bear the sound of it, as if pieces of her were being torn away.

"Stacy, it's not an easy equation. You don't want to make judgments; it's way too complex."

"It's fucking genocide, Wendell! Genocide! These assholes at
Fort Detrick were arming Prions to attack genetic groups of people. Max was working at the Devil's Workshop! His handwriting was on the acid-base vials that altered the pH to arm the weapon. He was working down there with DeMille, targeting this stuff." Her voice was shaking.

"If that's true, theh why would they kill him?" Wendell asked calmly.

"I don't know. Maybe he got cold feet. Maybe he tried to pull out. How do I know why they killed him? But I was in that lab six hours ago. I saw his handwriting. He told me he was just doing work at the think tank, reading notes and creating hypotheses, but that was bullshit. He was in that lab helping to design it, to genetically target it. Why didn't you stop him?"

Again, Wendell was quiet. The two of them listened to each other breathing.

"God damn you, Wendell, you were in on it too, weren't you?" She was stunned by his silence. "We're supposed to be curing people, not killing them!" she shouted. "Science is supposed to discover and heal. You and Max perverted it all, destroyed everything we all believed in!"

"You don't understand," Wendell said softly. "To get funding we had to--"

Stacy didn't hear the rest, because she hung up on him. She sat on the bed and began to cry. She sobbed deeply, and Cris didn't know what to do or how to comfort her.

Finally, he sat on the bed and put a tentative hand on her shoulder.

She bucked at his touch, arching her back as if hit with a jolt of electricity. "Don't!" she said sharply.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, and started to rise, but she reached out and stopped him. They sat side by side on the edge of the bed in their underwear.

"Oh God, Cris. Oh God... I loved him so much. How can this be happening?"

Cris said nothing, and she continued to sob. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, trying to give her some measure of human warmth. He could feel the racking sobs undulating through her body, shaking her to the core. Each sob was followed by deep, painful breaths. They sat on the bed for a long time.

Stacy was crying, but she also could barely contain her rage, rage at the betrayal of everything she had loved about her dead husband. She was crying, but she was also remembering Max ... remembering his soft touch and the way he would lovingly caress her, with gentle abandon.

As she cried, somewhere in her mind she was aware of Cris's hands on her back, rubbing her, trying to comfort her as Max had often done. Her rage flickered, like a candle guttering in the wind. She couldn't tell where her emotions were taking her. As Cris rubbed her back and talked soothingly in her ear, she could feel his rhythmic heartbeat. Then she sensed something else. It was unmistakable. She felt the heat of passion coming from him. It suddenly turned her anger into lust. She needed to smash everything that was left of Max, to set herself free from his corruption and dishonesty. Now, without questioning it, she felt herself responding to Cris's gentle caress, felt her own sexuality coming alive. She knew she was jumbled up inside, but something suddenly felt right about this. She tilted her mouth up to his face and brushed her lips against his cheek, then as he turned toward her, she found his mouth and kissed him softly.

Cris moved so fast it startled her. He pushed her back. "What are you doing?" he asked, a strained, anguished look on his face.

"I need something. I need you," she said, tears still brimming in her eyes.

"No..." he said, pulling away, disengaging himself.

"You find me attractive, I know you do," she said. There was defiance and displaced anger in the remark. It was a challenge, but sounded to him like a curse.

4'I think you're one of the most attractive women I've ever met," he answered softly. "But this is wrong, Stacy. You can't get back at Max by using me. He's dead. I won't let it start this way. It would end up making you feel cheap. You'd hate yourself, and me afterward."

Her expression changed. Now she seemed small and dejected.

"He was human, Stacy. He made bad choices ..
. J
ust like me.

Just like Captain DeSilva. People aren't perfectI tried to b
e p
erfect, and I fell way short. We all just have to do the best we can." In that moment, Cris suddenly felt a strange measure of peace inside. While trying to make her feel better about Max, he suddenly understood something about his own emotional sickness.

The moment between them had passed, so Cris slowly took her back into his arms. She laid her head against his shoulder, and he felt a deep shudder run through her. Then her muscles relaxed, and she quieted in his arms.

"I expected so much more," she whispered softly.

Chapter
52

Admiral Zoll's post living quarters were in the old Nallin Farmhouse. The property had been sold to the U
. S
. Army in 1952, but the house had originally been built in 1772. The farm had been part of a pre-Revolutionary War English land grant. The rectangular, two-story brick structure had eight rooms and two bathrooms. It stood like a dowager princess on the southeast edge of Fort Detrick; its double windows and large front porches were overhung by a pitched, gabled roof.

Admiral Zoll found the house architecturally pleasing, but hard to live in. His ambling gait and huge frame were ill suited to the small rooms. Still, the farmhouse had served as the Fort Detrick Commander's personal quarters for almost half a century, so, in keeping with tradition, Zoll had quartered himself there for over six years, ever since his wife died.

He was dead tired when he arrived home at nine P
. M
. After giving the order to eliminate Stacy Richardson and Cris Cunningham he had stopped by the base hospital to have his eyebrow stitched. Then he had personally gone to inspect the neurotransmitter lab. Nothing had been stolen that they could identify. Still, he worried about Mrs. Richardson's claim that DeMille had retrieved a sample of PHpr that had been hidden at the bottom of Vanishing Lake.

It had been a long harrowing day. Aside from dealing with Stacy Richardson and Captain Cunningham, he had supervised the removal of thousands of gallons of deadly bio-weapons that had been sucked from old leaking drums and casks up into the White Train's specially designed toxic waste hopper cars. Once loaded, the deadly cargo would travel through Maryland, over the Appalachian Mountains, and across the South to Texas, where it would eventually be pumped into the earth's core and be lost forever.

Earlier in the day, as the storage room was slowly emptied, Zoll had brought in a team of Torn Victor HAZMAT volunteers wearing canvas suits and HEPA filters, who recapped the empty barrels, then covered them with industrial waste vacuum bags. The air was then sucked out of the bags until the heavy plastic clung to the empty barrels and casks like latex skin. The empty containers were loaded onto trucks, then were driven to the east side of the Fort and dumped into a deep hole that had been dug in preparation two days before.

From his upstairs bedroom window, he could hear the distant rumbling of the John Deere bulldozer a mile off as the hole with the old barrels was bladed over and the bio-containers buried forever.

The bell at the front door bonged, and he moved across the upstairs hallway and down the narrow, curved staircase. The old pine floors creaked under his heavy footsteps. He opened the front door and found Colonel Chittick standing there in a fresh uniform, a tired smile on his recently shaved face.

"I just got the call. Investigating subcommittee is going to be here at oh nine hundred tomorrow morning. Two Senators and some cowboys from C
. D. C
. in Atlanta."

"Not our people, I assume."

"No sir. We're pretty much out of the Atlanta C
. D. C
. operation. That unit now functions strictly according to its mission statement."

"Let's pour a stiff one," Admiral Zoll said. "This has been a tough day." Chittick nodded. Neither of them wanted to discuss the lab break-in, or the disposal of Mrs. Richardson and Captain Cunningham. It was a defining moment in their relationship. They were now even more dangerous to one another.

Chittick followed Zoll off the slanting porch into the old farmhouse with its framed oil paintings of American farm scenes. Zoll walked across the sloping floor, dropped some ice into two chunky glasses, then poured a shot of Scotch for each of them. He crossed back to his Chief Medical Officer and handed him the heavy crystal glass, and they touched rims. The two men stood a few feet apart and exchanged hooded looks as they sipped the blended twenty
-
five-year-old Macallan Scotch.

"Whatta you think of that mess up in Harrisburg?" Chittick said, looking for neutral ground. "Four F
. T. R. A. S
died, so it had to be connected to what happened here."

Zoll set down his heavy tub glass on an Early American spindle
-
base table. The weighty silence in the room was sliced evenly by a tick-tocking grandfather clock.

"Depends on what our guys up in Harrisburg find in those milk tanker cars. Whatever happens, we're gonna stonewall through it."

Chittick put down his empty glass and smiled at Zoll. "I think we dodged a bullet today," he said hopefully.

Zoll grunted. Then he moved to the door and opened it. Colonel Chittick stepped outside, but then turned to face Zoll on the front porch. "We're shut down at Vanishing Lake. Now, more or less, we're shut down here. That means the Devil's Workshop is out of business."

"Not for long, Colonel. The political climate is changing. God bless that crazy bastard Saddam. The more he threatens us with bio-weapons, the more likely it is our government will reopen the front door to its research again. In the meantime, I've got a few university labs who wanna play ball, and a marine research facility on an island in the South Pacific that I think might make a good base of operations. This is too important for our nation's survival. These are the only tactical strategic weapons that make sense in the new millennium. We've got to man this operation until the fucking Congress and the President come to their senses."

"Yes sir," Chittick said. "I'm with you on that." But he was thinking it was time to request a transfer. He had a strange feeling that Zoll had run out of political highway. "Good night, sir," he smiled.

"Yeah," the Crazy Ace growled in his unfriendly sandpaper voice, and then he shut the door directly in Colonel Laurence Chittick's face.

The hundred-car manifest train was on the CSXT track, heading through the Appalachian Pass. The track was a two-way narrow switchback that climbed up the side of the mountain and then, after cresting the summit, made its long downhill run into Georgia, Arkansas, and East Oklahoma, finally ending in Texas. The engine was a full-width, high-nosed Canadian Bombardier HR616, which was fronting a three-diesel unit. The engineer was an old-timer named Calvin Hickman who had been working the Appalachian run for almost two years. He knew every bend in the track, and had a tendency to push the forty-eight-cylinder, three-hundred-ton power package a little too fast.

The hundred cars he was pulling were mostly farm produce, some pipe fittings and building supplies; all of it was heading to Atlanta. He had just finished the last switchback, cresting the pass onto the west side of the mountain, and was now heading downhill. He had his right hand on the dynamic brake control handle, and one eye on the train line-pressure gauge. He was looking down and missed the first red warning flasher, which indicated that the switch up ahead had just been opened. He didn't hear it either, because the warning bells from the cab signal system had been disconnected. Even if he had seen it, he might have been going too fast to stop. He had way too much weight behind him, all of it hurtling downhill.

A mile farther on he was jolted by the sight of the second warning light. He immediately threw the lever on the automatic brake valve; exhausting air underneath each car instantly operated the pneumatic brakes. The brake levers activated. The shoes slammed hard against the metal wheel tread. Tortured metal screamed as the brakes engaged.