the Devil's Workshop (1999) (7 page)

Admiral Zoll looked at her almost as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You have a remarkable imagination, honey," he said.

"I'm not your honey." She had lost all sense of caution, and her anger over what had happened to Max was spilling over everything. But the anger was at least therapeutic. For the first time in two days, she felt the knot in her stomach unclench.

"You have no idea what kind of problems we can make for you," he hissed.

"You got it backwards, Admiral. It's me promising to make problems for you."

"We fund that fucking university where you were about to get your doctorate. This program at Fort Detrick gives millions a year in research grants. Why do you think we picked the head of the USC Microbiology Department to come here? If you. pursue this, you will never get your doctorate. I personally guarantee it!"

"I personally don't give a shit," she said, washing out four years of exhaustive study with one cathartic sentence.

Finally, Admiral Zoll pushed back from the table. Something splashed up on his sock. "What the fuck is under here?" he said, reaching down under the table and feeling the puddle of moisture.

"I wouldn't put my hands in that," Stacy said mildly.

Admiral Zoll pulled up his wet hand. Realization dawned, and his face went red with anger. He got out of his chair, shook the urine off his fingers and both of his wet shoes, then, holding his hand away from his side, walked across the floor, his rubber soles squishing as he went. Colonel Chittick and the two pet Captains followed.

They closed the door and again she was alone.

Stacy sat in the empty room. Nobody came back. She tried the door, but it was locked. She realized that anger had induced her to badly overplay her hand.

Roughly another two hours went by, and she sat there, looking at the blank, windowless walls in the huge concrete room. In her mind, she played out some ghastly fantasies. Would they just kill her anyway? The Provost Marshal could be in on it. What if they rigged it to look as if she were despondent over Max's death and had taken her own life? Would they use some bio-weapon on her and say she had wandered into a "hot" lab? Would they arrange a traffic accident? She had no way of knowing. There was nothing she could do but wait. Exhausted, she lay down on the table and finally got an hour of deep REM sleep.

She awoke with somebody shaking her shoulder. She sat up abruptly and found herself looking at a middle-aged woman in civilian clothes.

"There's a car waiting for you out front," the woman said. Then she led Stacy out of the room.

They walked down the hall and out into the darkening afternoon. It was after four. She estimated she had been there for over six hours.

The car was a brown military sedan with a uniformed woman driver. Stacy got in the back seat and the car took her out the same way she had come. It passed through the front gate and parked at the curb outside on Military Avenue. Then the female Corporal behind the wheel handed Stacy an envelope and, once Stacy was out of the sedan, drove back inside the Fort.

Stacy stood on the curb with the flapping flags of Fort Detrick behind her. She opened the sealed envelope.

The message was typed on plain paper. "Be very careful," it said. "The distance between courage and stupidity is exactly nine millimeters."

The note was unsigned.

Chapter
5

They took Exit 56 from Maryland I-70 East. It was ten the next morning and Stacy was driving a Mitsubishi from Budget Rent-A-Car. Joanne was slumped in the seat beside her. They pulled up to the Information Center at the Spring Ridge housing development, which was just inside a massive brick wall, with the name of the tract in foot-high brass letters. The guard at the gate had the key ready. He handed an envelope to Stacy and told her how to get to the house that Max had rented.

They drove through the beautiful development that Max had described to Stacy on the phone after he had rented the house from an Army Major who had been transferred.

The house was at the top of Kettler Road, a two-story with Colonial pillars, a brick front, and slate-gray roof. There were trimmed lawns and flowerbeds. A fresh coat of black paint glistened on the front door. Stacy opened the envelope and took out the key, then she and Joanne moved up the driveway to the house. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, but was somehow being drawn to the place where Max had died. She also wanted to try to find a way to say good-bye, but was having trouble getting closure and now wished she had taken Max's ashes from the shitbird ColonelAt least she'd have an urn to look at and hold.

Joanne had stopped crying and was now in some kind of zombie-like trance. She had been frantic when Stacy had been two hours overdue. She had called Wendell and faxed him the autopsy. They had just about decided to call the Frederick police when Stacy walked into the room at the Holiday Inn. The next morning, they'd rented a car at the desk, thrown their bags in the trunk, and, after a call to the Spring Ridge development, headed up there.

Stacy unlocked the large wooden door, which groaned loudly on cold hinges as it swung open to beckon them in and, at the same time, warn them away.

They entered a large, sunny entry hall lit from above by a skylight. Stacy looked at the mail on the front table. Most were flyers or bills for the long-gone Major. Then she moved slowly through the house.

She went into the bedroom and looked at Max's clothes. His suitcases were on the top shelf of the closet, but she couldn't bring herself to do the mundane task of packing his things. What would she do with them, anyway? Should she keep his old clothes to remember him? She decided to put off the decision.

She checked the bathroom. She saw his toothbrush, his razor, and his pillbox of vitamins. She looked at all of Max's orphaned objects and fought the tears.

Then Stacy moved into the den. There, on his desk, was his computer. She wondered what he had been working on when he died, so she sat down and booted up, staring at the glowing screen. Instead of displaying a dialog box for Max's password, the words "preparing to run Windows 98 for the first time" were eerily crawling across the bottom of the screen. "The bastards swept his computer," she said to Joanne, who was now standing beside her, looking down at the screen.

"We'd better get going," Joanne said dully. "The plane takes off in an hour and forty minutes."

Stacy was staring at the computer. "Max, where did you put it?" she said, softly.

"Put what?"

"He always backed up everything. He was fanatical about it. There's gotta be a back-up disk somewhere with all his important documents and research on it."

"Oh," Joanne said, without interest.

She tried all of the obvious places: the shelf, the briefcases, the desk. Stacy opened a drawer and brushed several CD jewel boxes with her hand. One was a restoration CD, used to restore a system to its original state. Stacy's eyes narrowed. .. This is how they erased all the documents on Max's computer! Still, there would be a back-up. Maybe under the drawers, taped there, she thought. She pulled out all the drawers and felt under them, feeling goofy as she did, like a spy in a James Bond movie. She checked the bedroom, the kitchen, and the den. Nothing.

Stacy finally stood in the middle of the living room with her hands on her hips, looking around in frustration.

"We've gotta go," Joanne repeated.

"Okay," Stacy agreed, then she moved toward the back deck, opened the sliding glass door, and walked out into the backyard.

"What're you doing?" Joanne asked, trailing along behind her.

"I don't know. I... I just..." She was moving in circles, looking down, trying to see where it had happened. Finally, she saw a spot where the grass looked darker. Stacy moved to it, squatted down, and put her palm on the ground. The grass was stiff and hard with Max's dried blood.

"Oh Christ," she said, as a sob caught in her throat. "Why did they do it? Why... Oh Max, why?" She held her hand on his dried blood as if touching that spot could somehow bring her closer to him. She was reaching out to him through the patch of blood
-
dried ground, desperately trying to touch him one more time, but only feeling the stiff grass against her palm. The tears would not stop. She cried until the water blurred her vision.

Finally, Joanne pulled her up. "I know, baby," her sister-in-law said. "I know... I know..." Joanne held Stacy's head against her shoulder. "Let's go home."

"We've gotta do something," Stacy murmured. "We've gotta. We've just gotta!"

They barely made the Delta flight. Four and a half hours later they landed at LAX. Wendell Kinney met the plane, and they moved with their carry-on luggage out to the parking lot and his four-year-old green Ford station wagon. Once they had cleared the airport and were on the Harbor Freeway, heading back toward USC, Wendell looked over at Stacy. "I think you really shook 'em with that autopsy," he said.

"They killed him."

"Maybe," Wendell said, running a hand through his thick gray hair. "What you're suggesting certainly fits the findings of the autopsy, but there could be other reasons for the aspirated blood, so let's not jump to conclusions."

"What other reasons?"

"He could have gotten into a fight in a bar or someplace. Maybe a car accident where he cut his mouth, aspirated the blood, and then an hour later, in a fit of depression or something, killed himself."

"Bullshit. I talked to him at one A
. M
. the night it happened. He was not in a fit of depression. He didn't wreck his car. Stop saying that!"

"Well, I'm just saying..."

"Bullshit," she repeated. "Lemme tell you something else. His computer was erased. It was right back to the way it was the da
y i
t came out of the box. I bet somebody downloaded all the data files and erased them off his hard drive. There isn't even any of his personal wallpaper left, and I know he kept photos of me and his family on there."

"Not a good sign," Wendell said, nodding.

"Those guys at Fort Detrick are up to something, something really terrible. Max became a problem, so they fixed it."

"Something terrible? Like what? It's one of the leading medical facilities on the East Coast."

"Prions," she said, spitting the word out. "You know what they're all about? Proteins. Not viruses, or chemicals. They're the perfect bio-weapon, because they're not alive. You can't kill them with fire or cold. They don't die like Ebola or AIDS, and they adapt themselves to body chemistry, so your immune system doesn't even know they're there, doesn't even fight them. Max said they were the deadliest, most terrifying killer agents on the planet. He told me on the phone about two weeks ago that he thought Dexter DeMille might be developing the first Prion bio
-
weapon."

"Dr. DeMille is a great man, a Nobel Prize winner.... He wouldn't do that. There's no bio-weapons program at Fort Detrick, or anywhere else in the U
. S
. It was all shut down by Presidential decree. All they're doing at Fort Detrick is researching, so if a bio
-
weapon is ever used by terrorists against the U
. S
., we'll be able to quickly produce the anti-toxins to combat it. We've been out of the strategic bio-weapons program since the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1972."

"You really believe that, Wendell?" He didn't answer, changing lanes instead to get around a school bus. "A hundred nations signed that treaty," she said, "and we know now that at least a dozen of them continued to actively develop bio-weapons afterward, including Russia, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Great Britain, Egypt, and who knows who else. With all this illegal science taking place, some of it by enemy nations, you really think the CIA
and the Pentagon didn't know about it? And if they did, you can bet they found a way to keep our bio-weapons program operating."

Wendell Kinney was quiet for almost a minute. "What did you say to those people back at Fort Detrick?" he finally said, changing the subject.

"I told them I thought Max found out something, became a problem, and was disposed of."

"Ugggh," Wendell groaned.

"Well, why not call it like it is?"

"Because since you left town, your Quals have been postponed indefinitely," he said. "The Microbiology Department is putting your doctorate under review."

"Somebody made a call," she said, shaking her head in disgust. "Wendell, how much money is quietly given to universities all across this country by the Pentagon for biological research?"

"You don't wanna know."

"Does USC have some kind of covert arrangement with those pricks at Fort Detrick?"

"Not as far as I know," he said. "After all, Max was the one who ran the program. He was a humanist. I don't think he would have agreed to use government funds to develop illegal research that could be turned against people."

"You're damn right he wouldn't!" she said hotly. Yet he went to Fort Detrick to study Prions with Dexter DeMille, who had been criticized in the past for questionable science that could have military applications.

Both of them were privately exploring these same thoughts, but neither wanted to express them.