The First Horseman

by John Case

  So he didn’t. He stayed away from it. They talked about the politics of disease, and after a while she warmed to the conversation.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ she said. ‘You get outbreaks of cholera, typhus, diphtheria – whatever. Even plague. And they get reported to WHO and the CDC and everyone else. But does the State Department tell anyone? Hardly ever. Because if you say Thailand’s crawling with VD, or there’s cholera in Bolivia, it’s seen as a political act – an attack on the country you’re talking about.’

  ‘You’d think they’d be more worried about people’s health.’

  ‘And the other thing is: every disease has its own lobby. So funding research has less to do with the-greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number than it does with . . . I don’t know . . . skill at working the P.R. angle.’

  ‘You think that’s bad?’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s just the way it is. You can’t blame people. They feel passionately when the people they love are hurting. And at the same time, there’s only so much money to go around, so . . .’

  She had thoroughbred lines, long legs, and a dancer’s posture. She was pretty enough so that when she maneuvered past the crowded tables on her way to the ladies’ room, Frank’s eyes weren’t the only ones that followed her progress. And yet, within fifteen minutes of meeting her for the first time at the NIH, he already knew that she didn’t have a pretty woman’s psyche. She was embarrassed by compliments, and incapable of flirtation, or so it seemed. She was skittish and shy, and drew back from the slightest physical contact.

  There was a naiveté about her that was all the more surprising because it coexisted with what Frank knew was her brilliance. On the one hand, she was probably a genius, and on the other, she wasn’t even as wised-up as the sixth graders he’d talked to at the Hine Middle School (this, as a part of the Post’s ‘outreach’ program).

  But as uncomfortable as she was with small talk, she had a sense of humor and loved to talk about her work. And her laugh was promising: a reckless giggle that sometimes got away from her.

  So he played to the things she was comfortable with, listening attentively to what she said, and steered clear of everything else. And it worked. He could feel her relaxing toward him, softening as the tension disappeared. This was something that he shared with his father, the flexibility of character that enabled him to become the perfect foil for anyone he was with, whether his aim was to seduce or elicit information. It worried him sometimes. This ‘gift’ he had.

  But not even the thought of his father – from whom he’d been trying to distance himself all his life – could deter him from working on Annie Adair. When she returned to the table, he leaned forward and took her hand in his. There was a moment of awkwardness in which she tried, reflexively, to pull away, but he held on.

  ‘Wait a second,’ he said. ‘I’m not getting mushy. I just want to look at your palm.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, radiant with the suspicion that he might be making fun of her.

  ‘So I can read your future.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said – but her hand relaxed in his.

  He stroked her palm, and then each finger. ‘So you don’t think I can tell the future?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I can.

  She giggled. ‘And how did you come by this ability? In palm school?’

  ‘Please,’ he said in an officious tone, ‘we don’t call it “palm school.” It’s the American School of Chiromancy. “Palm school” is where you learn to tell a coconut from a date.’

  A giggle.

  ‘And no, I didn’t graduate. But I did write a magazine piece about a palmist.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. You’ve seen the signs, right? There’s like a big red hand with numbers on it, and it’s usually in the window of a little white house, right next to the highway, in between a place that does flag repair and another place that does fish grooming. And I thought, ‘Who actually goes to these people?’

  ‘People with fish, I should think. And flags.’

  ‘And palms,’ Frank agreed. ‘Anyway, I approached a certain Madame Rurak – the Oracle of Hyattstown. And with her permission, I talked to some of her clients. And it turns out, the clientele is really diverse. They’re the same people who go to chiropractors, only what she “adjusts” is their psyches, not their backs.’

  ‘And was it all—you know – just a lot of baloney?’

  He shrugged and continued to stroke her palm and stare at it. ‘I don’t know. It wasn’t as if she was handing out lotto numbers. She was intense, you know, really focused, but everything she said was kind of general.’

  ‘Like fortune cookies.’

  Frank winced. ‘Ouch.’

  She laughed. ‘Well, what do you think they got out of it? The people who went to see this woman?’

  ‘They always seemed to leave in a good mood. I had the impression that she was providing some kind of solace for the way their lives had turned out. She was saying, you know, it’s right there, it’s in your palm, it’s already written. No matter what you did, it wouldn’t have made any difference. You could have bought Intel at ten, you could have learned to play the guitar, you could have asked Sherry Dudley to the prom – and none of it would have mattered. Because it was all laid down ahead of time: the life line, the love line. People liked that. It seemed to take the pressure off.’

  She laughed. ‘And who was Sherry Dudley?’

  ‘I can’t talk about that,’ he muttered.

  She giggled again. ‘But you don’t believe in it, do you?’

  ‘In what?’ He curled up her fingers one at a time and then stroked them back out again, flat. ‘You mean fate?’ He leaned over her hand and peered intently at it. ‘Of course I do. I seeee . . . someone . . . new! Someone new in your life.’

  ‘Really?’ she said, her voice thick with skepticism.

  ‘Yes. And it’s going to be wonderful. You should do whatever this person says.

  ‘And would this person be tall, dark, and handsome?’

  He scrutinized further. ‘Well, yes – he’s definitely tall and – hmmm – not bad-looking! Not bad at all. But . . .’ He shook his head and frowned. ‘Not very dark. More . . . oh, I don’t know – Irish, or something. Blue eyes. Heart of gold. Never mentions Kopervik. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘There’s more. It’s an incredibly detailed line. Turns out, this guy has a sentimental attachment to his car, which he should trade in.’ He looked up at her.

  ‘And would the car be a Saab?’ She giggled. ‘By any chance?’

  He glanced at her palm. ‘I think it is a Saab! Amazing. You should try this! I mean you don’t even have a hand to work with – and, my God, you’re a natural.’

  They went to Bob’s for ice cream. The talk turned to family. Hers couldn’t have been more different from his, a sprawling back-to-the-Mayflower New England clan, heavy on academics and ‘Wall Street.’

  ‘They spend quite a bit of time arranging charity balls. It gives my mother the chance to spend really a lot of money on clothes and still feel good about it.’

  ‘This would be your legendary “old money”?’

  ‘Kind of old. But not so legendary. Granddad made a killing on the Depression. Puts and calls. He “called.” What about you?’

  ‘Actually . . . I don’t have a family I mean, not really.’

  Annie frowned. ‘Everybody has a family.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ve got some aunts and cousins, but I don’t see them. No brothers or sisters. Mom’s dead. Dad and I had a falling out.’

  ‘That’s sad.’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Not if you knew the Old Man.’

  They walked back to her town house. It was cooler, and a thunderstorm was rumbling on the horizon. She was easier with him now, more relaxed, leaning into him on occasion, touching his arm to make a point.

  Even he found his restraint amazing. Not a word about Koperv
ik, except once, and that was in fun, And then, when they reached her door and she stammered an invitation to come in – ‘I could make some coffee’ – he declined. If he went inside, he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off her. And that could be wonderful, or that could be trouble.

  So they stood in the doorway, a little awkwardly, until he said, ‘Well, it was great, I’ll give you a call’ – and with a little wave, turned and went down the front steps to the Saab.

  As he drove back to Adams-Morgan he listened to jazz on WPFW and thought about his evening with Annie Adair. He knew that restraint would pay off with her, but what he didn’t know was what the payoff was. Was it Annie he wanted – or Kopervik? He couldn’t be sure. He was attracted to her, but then again, he was attracted to lots of women. And then again – again – he wasn’t just attracted to her. He liked her. She was sweet and smart and funny . . .

  He wanted it both ways: Annie and Kopervik. Kopervik and Annie. In no particular order.

  In the week that followed, Frank received form letters from half a dozen agencies, acknowledging receipt of the FOIA requests that he’d made. Soon afterward he received yet another reply, and this one had heft.

  The packet, which came from the NSF, was about half an inch thick, and Frank knew, even without opening it, that the material inside would be a disappointment. Otherwise, it would not have been processed and mailed so quickly.

  Still, it was his to read, and as the blues man said, One never knows, do one?

  Seating himself at the kitchen table, he opened the envelope and found sixty pages of documents. The first of these was a cover letter that said the enclosed should be considered a complete response to his request, and that there would be no follow-up. Attached to this was a two-page sheet explaining the various exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act.

  The remaining fifty-seven pages consisted, mosily, of the original grant proposal that Kicklighter and Adair had made to the NSF some two years earlier. Frank scanned the proposal from its title page to its endnotes, but there was nothing in it that he hadn’t seen before.

  That left three pages.

  The first was a rejection letter, written under the letterhead of the National Science Foundation. Addressed to Dr. Kicklighter, it was dated January 11, 1997, and began:

  We regret that the Foundation is unable to extend support for your recent grant application (Ref. #96–14739). Should research priorities change, or additional funds become availabile . . .

  Nothing new there.

  The next page in the packet was also a letter, albeit a more recent one. Dated February 17, 1998, it was addressed to the Director of the NSF, and was signed ‘Cordially.’ But that was it. Nothing else could be read because every line of text – and the letterhead on which it was written – had been blacked out with a felt-tipped marker. In the margin, the redactor had written B(1).

  Bingo.

  Even without looking at the explanatory sheet, Frank knew that the B(1) exemption was reserved for matters of national security. Which confirmed what Neal Gleason’s presence in Hammerfest had suggested – that there was more to the Kopervik expedition than ‘pure science.’

  And that, in turn, suggested a reason for Kicklighter’s sudden unavailability, and Annie’s unwillingness to discuss Kopervik or what had happened there. If this was a national security matter, they’d probably been made to take an oath of secrecy.

  But why? The grant proposal was right in front of him, released in full, without a word redacted. The proposal described every aspect and goal of the expedition. It was what the expedition was all about. So what was the point of a secrecy oath – unless there was something else involved, something that was not in the proposal?

  Frank stared at the blacked-out letter. It might have come from anywhere: FBI, CIA, the Pentagon – there was no way to know.

  Frustrated, he turned to the last page in the packet, which was also a letter. Dated February 23, 1998, it, too, was addressed to the Director of the NSF

  In three short sentences the writer thanked the director for his help and announced that the foundation was ‘happy to report that it had decided to underwrite the Kicklighter-Adair expedition to Kopervik.’ The letter was signed:

  Very truly yours,

  A. Lloyd KoIp

  Exec. Dir.

  Frank glanced at the letterhead:

  THE COMPASS TRUST

  Its offices were in McLean, about three traffic lights from the CIA. Which didn’t mean anything, of course. Or at least, it didn’t mean anything – necessarily.

  But A. Lloyd Kolp? Who was he when he wasn’t running the Compass Trust?

  Frank leaned back in his chair, with the letters on the table in front of him, arranged chronologically from left to right. First, the NSF rejects Kicklighter’s proposal. Then, a year and a half goes by and, suddenly, someone from the intelligence community gets involved. How, we don’t know. To what end, we don’t know. But he gets involved. And a week later a letter arrives at the NSF thanking the director for his help (what help?), while announcing the foundation’s decision to underwrite the expedition.

  Was the second letter connected to the third? One never knows . . .

  This was how you went crazy, Frank thought. It was like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.

  He sat back and looked at the ceiling. The fan was turning slowly. His eyes fell on the calendar next to the telephone. The days he’d gone running had circles around the date. Maybe he should go running, but . . .

  He didn’t feel like it. The sky was overcast, and he could tell it was going to pour. The only question was when. Crossing the room, he went to his desk and booted up the computer.

  He still had access to Nexis, thanks to the Post (or, more accurately, thanks to his ability to hack the password in the Setup file on his office computer). And he was glad that he did because the service was amazingly expensive, and the Internet was anything but a useful substitute. Using the Internet to find out about the Compass Trust, he’d probably have to sort through reams of information about Orienteering.

  With Nexis, you went right to the heart of things – and only to the heart.

  The database was massive – basically, every newspaper and periodical in the world, from the Times to the Journal of Robotics, going back twenty or thirty years. All he had to do was select the part of the database that he wanted (‘News’), and key in the phrases he was looking for: Compass Trust and foundation. Thirty seconds later he had a list of every article in which those phrases occurred.

  There were eleven cites, going back to 1981. Several of the cites were duplicates of one another, or reprints of wire service stories. But the relevant information boiled down to the fact that the Compass Trust had been endowed by J. Kendrick Mellowes, ‘a conservative philanthropist.’

  Frank smiled at the identification. Mellowes was unquestionably that, but he was also (and in particular) an ‘intelligence groupie’ who’d paid through the nose for an appointment to PFIAB – the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

  Frank went back to the main screen and ran another search – this time for ‘A. Lloyd Kolp.’ Moments later the screen shivered and a list of five articles appeared.

  The most recent of these was three years old. It reported that Gen. A. Lloyd Kolp was leaving his post as head of the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (AMRIID). After a holiday with his family, the general was expected to take over as executive director of the Compass Trust.

  Frank sat back in his chair and heaved a sigh. He knew who KoIp was. And even without looking at the other stories, he knew what they said. He glanced at the headlines to see if he was right, and saw that he was:

  AMRIID CHIEF CLAIMS MONKEY VIRUS NO THREAT

  Reston Facility Disinfected: Kolp Visits Site

  The general had been famous for a week or two when AMRIID was called in to lock-down and disinfect a privately operated primate research facility in Reston, Virginia. M
onkeys had been dying by the dozens, and it was feared that some terrible disease might be loosed.

  Kolp and his troops had gone in. They’d behaved heroically. The public’s fears had been calmed. And, eventually, a book had been written about the incident.

  But Frank knew that AMRIID had a darker history. Behind the polysyllabic institute with its awkward acronym was an older and simpler name: ‘Fort Detrick.’ Only a few miles from Camp David, and very close indeed to rows upon rows of newly constructed town houses, Detrick had been action central for the Pentagon’s research on biological weapons.

  This was, of course, a purely defensive effort – or so the public was told. But the reality was that no nation could develop defenses against these weapons if it failed to understand what the weapons were, how they worked, and what their limitations might be.

  Which meant building and testing the weapons themselves.

  And so the Pentagon’s researchers worked with some of the most dangerous toxins and viruses on earth: botulin, ricin, pulmonary anthrax, pneumonic plague.

  Resources had been poured into what was known as the ‘weaponization’ of biological agents. Teams of scientists explored different methods of ‘aerosolization,’ trying to identifr the one method that guaranteed maximum dispersal. Others worked on microencapsulation techniques, looking for ways to prevent the deterioration of biological agents exposed to water, heat, and air.

  Still other researchers applied their talents to increasing the lethality of bacterial and viral agents, searching for MEFs – mortality enhancing factors. Others used recombinant DNA technology to create new and more dangerous germs.

  All this in the name of self-defense. Since other countries might be developing biological weapons, the U.S. had been obliged to do so as well, so that it might devise antidotes and be ready in case of attack. Some thought the research was still going on, despite treaties prohibiting it, but who could tell?