"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.
"What about the secret rooms discovered at Fort Detrick in the eighties?" Stacy continued. "That was well after the end of our bio-weapons program. Those rooms were loaded with sarin and different strains of anthrax."
"R and D," he said.
"Research and Development of what?"
"Anti-toxins."
"There was enough shit in there to kill the entire population of the world two or three times over. They faced Congressional oversight hearings on that. The program was censored. Who are they kidding? They were manufacturing and stockpiling that stuff. And what about those mosquito tests by the CIA, where they dropped female mosquitoes with dengue fever and yellow fever on Carver Village, that black town in the Florida swamps, where thirteen people died? The government ended up paying millions in damages to shut the story down. What about airborne bacteria dropped on San Francisco and the subway tests in New York in the mid-seventies to late eighties? The government has already admitted to all that. Innocent U. S. citizens died, so the CIA assholes at Fort Detrick could study aerobiology."
"Look, Stacy, I'm not saying that our program is without horrible ethical lapses, or that there aren't some rogue scientists, or military and CIA people who are devoted to staying in this field at all costs. But our government is not knowingly pursuing this course of strategic weaponry," he said hotly.
"Okay," she said, "okay. It's just…" And she fell silent.
"Just what?"
"I wish I knew what Max was working on, what was on his computer. You know how he was, how he wrote everything down, kept duplicate files. If he was killed because of something he knew, then a copy exists somewhere, believe me. What they erased off his hard drive wasn't the only record of his research."
"I'm afraid we'll never know," Wendell said.
They arrived back at Max and Stacy's apartment, and Joanne took her bag out of the trunk and put it in her VW. She was still too quiet, off someplace else, and had said almost nothing all the way back from the airport. Before she got into her car, she held Stacy's hand. "Stace," she said, "I'm afraid. I don't think you should mess with this."
"I know you don't," Stacy said, and she gave her sister-in-law a kiss on the cheek, then watched her drive away.
After Wendell left, she went up to her apartment, unlocked the door, and dropped her bag in the living room. She looked at the sad little three -room flat that had once been such a happy love nest. Now all she saw was how small it was, how tired and threadbare the sofa looked, the stains on the worn carpet. She moved into her pantry office, slumped down and looked at her computer. She turned it on to check her e-mail…
There it was! "Dearest Stacy," it began, "all is not well at Fort Detrick, so I want you to read this attached file, then hide it in a safe place."
Sometime after they talked two nights ago, and before he died, Max had e-mailed her. On the computer screen before her were Max's letter and his attached research files. The e-mail contained everything he suspected was happening at a secret facility at Fort Detrick, called the Devil's Workshop. Max's notes discussed Dexter DeMille and Pale Horse Prions, and described the horrible human experiments that were about to take place inside an old prison at Vanishing Lake, Texas.
Part Two
VANISHING LAKE
Chapter 6
They were housed in separate cells on the old death row unit, which was located in the windowless center pod at Vanishing Lake Military Prison. The fortress-style structure was oppressive, and underlit. It had been built in the fifties and had long ago outlived its design as a penal institution. The prison sat on the east side of a picturesque crater lake, almost directly across from a small fishing village, high in the Black Hills of East Texas. The cells, like most of the old prison, were built out of gray concrete blocks. The tiers were old-fashioned narrow rows of windowless rooms stacked one above the other with no center atrium. The two men had only been there for a few days and, although just forty feet separated their cells, Troy Lee Williams and Sylvester Swift had never laid eyes on one another.
"You listening to me down there?" Troy Lee called out in exasperation. "I wanta know what the fuck they're doin' back there on that fuckin' wall. All that hammerin' an' shit's drivin' me nuts."
Sylvester Swift said nothing.
Troy Lee Williams was redheaded and skinny. His too-white skin was covered with an assortment of tattoos. Across his shoulder blades, in two-inch-high block letters, was "MOTHERFUCKER." The rest of his body read like the back wall of a skid-row liquor store. Troy Lee was a sixth-grade drop-out who had chosen the Army over a civilian jail, but had ended up in a cell anyway after raping, then killing a waitress while he was on a weekend pass in Rosemont, California. He'd been court-martialed and had barely escaped a firing squad. Troy Lee had no friends, because he was a diagnosed schizophrenic, and when he was hearing voices, he spooked the shit out of everybody.