the Devil's Workshop (1999)

by Stephen Cannell

  "That's what happened to Mike," Cris said softly.

  "Mosquitoes were the delivery agents up there," she said. "I think Mike was bitten by escaped mosquitoes that got away from them at Vanishing Lake. It's possible you were bitten too."

  "Wouldn't I have it by now? He's been dead two days."

  "You may have antibodies in your system that are able to slow it down. You might be somehow immune, or you could become a carrier without exhibiting any of the symptoms yourself. If that's the case, your blood could be invaluable in helping us develop an antibody."

  The hamburgers and shakes were delivered, and the waitress left. In the few seconds it took for this to happen, Cris seemed to change slightly. His posture straightened; his chin came up; anger now burned in his blue eyes. "My daughter, Kennidi, died from something I picked up in the Gulf, some chemical mix," he said. "I was a carrier. It didn't affect me at all, but Kennidi was born with her body full of..." He stopped, took a deep breath. "Tumors. She had hundreds of tumors. They grew everywhere inside her, until finally they killed her."

  "I'm sorry," Stacy said gently. He nodded, and seemed momentarily overcome by the memory.

  As Stacy waited for him to regain his composure, she suddenly remembered something Max had once told her about a strange incidence of Gulf War Syndrome. It defied all current explanation. "In Huntsville, Texas," she began slowly, "there was an outbreak of what looked like Gulf War Syndrome. Over twenty people were infected. There was a prison there, just like at Vanishing Lake, and there was also a science pod that was funded by Sam Houston University, just like at Vanishing Lake. According to the news articles that I read, the prison medical personnel were suddenly moved out, and doctors from Sam Houston University restaffed the prison overnight. These new doctors were all former military personnel. Apparently, some top-secret scientific tests were performed on the prisoners. All of this would have gone unreported except quite a few of the civilian workers at the prison started coming down with the same symptoms as the prisoners and had to be rushed to local hospitals. Several civilians died. The disease they all had tracked exactly like Gulf War Syndrome: muscle aches, vomiting, malaise, and fatigue. Some had horrible rashes and body sores. What makes this so strange is it happened in 1985, a full six years before the Gulf War."

  "How could that be?" he asked.

  "In 1985, Saddam Hussein was our ally. Iraq was at war with Iran, and Iran was holding our hostages. We know there were ex-military types in Iraq serving as 'advisors.' Maybe we also shipped chemical weapons to Saddam, for use against the Iranians. Six years later, he could've turned around and used them on us. At the very least, we know Pentagon higher-ups had our troops blowing up Iraqi bio-weapons depots at the end of the Gulf War, then claimed ignorance when they came home with Gulf War Syndrome."

  He seemed to consider that for a moment. He had only eaten one bite of his hamburger, and now he put it down and pushed the plate away. "Let's get this food wrapped to go. I'm not really hungry," he said, wishing he could get a drink to calm his nerves.

  She waved a waitress over, and the burgers were whisked off the table and back to the kitchen for packaging.

  "So, who are you? You're obviously not just some little country girl flipping burgers in a mountain restaurant. You a government spy or something?"

  "No," she smiled. "I was almost a doctor of microbiology." She held up her thumb and index finger. "I came that close."

  "And didn't finish?" he said.

  "Long story," she said curtly.

  He didn't speak or pursue it. Instead, he sat in absolute stillness, a thousand-yard stare in his eyes. He was very far away. Suddenly, Stacy remembered Dr. Martin Due at Fort Detrick and the autopsy he was performing on the baby female chimp with the clusters of hemangiomic tumors. "We're testing pyridostigmine bromide with some of the Gulf War insect repellent we used. I think, by mistake, there was a bad chemical cocktail over there. ... It resembles a condition we're studying in children of Gulf War vets," he had told her.

  The waitress returned with the wrapped hamburgers and put them down in front of them. Stacy paid the bill, and they stood.

  "Let's go," she said. "We've got a lot to do."

  Wendell arrived at the Santa Monica morgue at a little past nine.

  He hurried to the elevator and took it to the third floor, exiting into a bland waiting room with picture windows overlooking the ocean. He had never been in this facility before, and he looked around for someone to tell him where he could get scrubbed. Because he had sounded the first alarm, he had been cleared by Dr. Welsh to observe the autopsy. He saw a tanned dark-haired man dressed in an Armani suit and T-shirt looking out the window at the ocean. The man didn't turn when he moved past.

  It took Wendell Kinney ten minutes to get scrubbed, gowned, and gloved. A female lab assistant then led him down one flight of stairs to Autopsy Room C. He quickly entered and found the autopsy already in progress. The Y-cut had been made. Dr. Welsh was acting as the prosector, or lead physician. He was looking down and sawing the breastbones with a Stryker vacuum saw.

  The vacuum saw was the right tool, Wendell thought as he approached. It sucked up the bone particles and tissue before they could accidentally fly around, possibly into the eyes of the assisting autopsy doctor, known as the diener. There was one other man in the room; he had new, angry-looking hair plugs, and his disposable smock was belted over torn blue jeans. They were all wearing plastic goggles and plain plastic nose masks instead of the correct full-face, filtered HEPA masks that Wendell had suggested.

  "We should have maximum containment," Wendell said.

  "How ya doing, Dr. Kinney," Welsh said. "We don't have a Level Three facility here. Grab a spot at the table. Don't worry, we're going slow and being very careful."

  Dr. Welsh now started to remove the heart. They all watched as he put his rubber-gloved, scalpeled right hand into the open chest. Holding the heart with his chain-mail glove, which protected his left hand from an accidental knife cut, he began the procedure, severing the left subclavian artery at the aortic arch.

  Wendell Kinney watched as Dr. Welsh carefully and methodically separated Michael Brazil's heart from the remaining ten coronary veins and arteries.

  Nino DeSilva was already on the third floor when the autopsy began. It was Sunday night, which was not normally a working night at the morgue. Only emergency autopsies took place on weekends. This bio-hazard constituted such an emergency, but there were very few people on duty. DeSilva had divided his four-man squad: He kept Luke Peterson with him; Calvin Watts was already outside the autopsy room with Tommy Sparks. The hall was empty, so DeSilva quickly moved out of the stairwell and subdued the one nurse on duty in the nurses' room. Silently, he choked her out. Once she was unconscious, he gagged and tied her, using plastic riot cuffs, then DeSilva and Peterson moved down to the second floor.

  Sergeant Watts had found a medical gurney, and they parked it outside the door of Autopsy Room C. All of the Torn Victor commandos were wearing HEPA masks, and now removed MP5 submachine pistols from their backpacks.

  Nino DeSilva kicked the door open and moved into the autopsy room. The four men inside turned as one at the intrusion.

  "What the hell..." Dr. Welsh sputtered through his surgical mask.

  "Everything goes back in the body bag. Everything!" Nino demanded.

  Dr. Welsh stood dumbfounded along with the others. "We're performing an autopsy here. What do you think you're after? This man is dead."

  Wendell Kinney knew exactly what they were after.

  Nino DeSilva walked toward Dr. Welsh and slammed the butt of his MP5 into Welsh's mouth. The doctor went down like cut lumber. Blood started to seep out from under his plastic nose mask.

  For some reason that Gary Iverson would never understand, he was considering trying to grab the gun out of the hand of the man nearest him. Gary had never been in a fight in his life. He was the last one to try to be a hero, but the armed man standing directly in front of him was
paying no attention. Gary saw the gun dangling from his right hand. It looked tantalizingly easy.

  Without knowing why, or even debating the odds, he made a grab for the weapon. The commando sensed the motion behind him, and with lightning reflexes, he spun, grabbed Gary Iverson's arm, and hurled him across the room toward the autopsy table and the cut-open body of Michael Brazil. Gary threw his hands out in front of him to block his crash, but one of Michael's freshly sawn ribs went through the rubber glove on his right hand, puncturing him. He screamed in pain and scrambled away from the table. Four machine pistols were now trained on him. He was seconds from death. "I'm sorry, I'm sorryPlease," he whimpered. "I'm sorry, don't shoot me."

  "Bag this body!" Nino yelled at the Torn Victor commandos.

  They took Michael's heart, which was already safely inside a plastic container, and set it in the body bag. Then two of them put on heavy rubber gloves and slid Hollywood Mike into a double-zip bio-containment bag they had with them. They closed it up, carried him out of Autopsy Room C, and flopped the bag down on the rolling gurney.

  Nino DeSilva pulled the phone out of the wall and turned to face them. "One of us is going to hold a position outside this door for five minutes. Anybody sticks his head out before then is gonna eat it." Then he backed out of the room and was gone.

  Gary stood there, blood dripping from the puncture wound in his hand. Dr. Welsh was conscious, but still bleeding beneath his mask. They watched the clock on the wall, like obedient schoolchildren waiting for recess. Nobody said anything.

  When three slow minutes had passed, Dr. Welsh grew impatient. He got off the autopsy room floor and exited the room. One by one, they all followed. Wendell Kinney was the last to leave the room. He looked around and saw Dr. Welsh's autopsy scalpel still lying on the table. Wendell reached over and got an organ bag, then carefully retrieved the bloodied instrument, dropped it in the bag, and sealed it. Then he slipped the bag into his pocket, and he too exited the room.

  The hall outside was empty except for a lab assistant tied up behind the counter. Dr. Welsh cut the plastic cuffs and released her, then dialed the police.

  Gary Iverson made his way up one level to where Buddy was waiting.

  "Is it over?" Buddy asked. "Does he still look okay? 'Cause I wanna do this right. The rabbi says the body has to be buried within twenty-four hours."

  "Let's get the fuck outta here," Gary hissed, entering the elevator.

  "Did they find out what killed him? Do they know yet why he died?"

  "Let's go," Gary said, and pulled Buddy into the elevator, stabbing at the button for the ground level.

  As they rode down, Buddy saw the blood seeping from Gary's palm and dripping off the end of his fingers. "What the hell happened to your hand?" he asked.

  Chapter 21

  DON'T GIVE UP ON THE MASKED RODENT

  Augie, the ceramic raccoon, lay on the floor in at least fifty pieces. Stacy kneeled and started to gather him up. "Shit," she said. "How did this happen?"

  Cris Cunningham was standing behind her. "Maybe the earthquake," he volunteered. "We had a four point one, day before yesterday."

  She hadn't even heard about an earthquake. She had been in Badwater and missed it. She suddenly felt tears coming to her eyes as she looked at poor broken Augie. Carefully, she started putting the pieces of him on the table in the dining room.

  Cris looked at the shattered ceramic raccoon, and at the silent tears coming down Stacy's cheeks. "Get all the little ones," he said. "I can fix him if you've got glue."

  She looked up. "That's okay," she answered, and then unexpectedly changed her mind. "I've got nail glue."

  "Get it. I did all of the dish and vase repairs at my house, growing up. I have a knack for this."

  She left to go into the bathroom to look for the nail glue, and as Cris picked up the remaining pieces, he took a look around the living room. There was evidence of a man's presence in the apartment: a football leaning against the TV; a rowing machine in the corner with a Stanford boxing sweatshirt draped over the seat; a punching bag visible through the bedroom door. He looked at the bookshelf. Several of the books were by Dr. Maximilian Richardson. Cris wondered if that was her father, or brother, or if Stacy was married. He saw a bar set up in the living room and moved over to look, studying the bottles: Kahlua, Drambuie, Grand Marnier ... all liqueurs. It was a damn candy counter. Then he saw a bottle of sherry, and poured himself a glass.

  At the emergency room at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, both he and Stacy had given blood and skin scrapings. Stacy said that Dr. Kinney would collect samples from the hospital tomorrow for study at the USC lab. Cris realized when they weighed him that he had lost fifteen pounds.

  He had decided to get his father's car and drive her back to her apartment. He wanted to talk to Wendell and find out what had really happened to Hollywood Mike. They had cabbed to his father's house; Cris had gone inside for a coat while Stacy waited in the car. On the way out, he stopped at his father's bar and took a hit of vodka straight from the bottle. That had been an hour ago. Now he knocked back the shot of sherry, feeling its warmth. He quickly poured another and took it back to the project on the dining-room table. Like most alcoholics, he was an expert at "riding the buzz." He could drink just enough to stay loose, but not so much he became a fall-down. Mornings brought hangovers, but he would quickly flush them away with a shooter.

  Stacy returned from the bathroom with the glue and sat down across from him. Cris started to separate the slivers and chips by color. "The trick is to start with the small ones. The big pieces are easy."

  She watched him sort. "I wonder where Wendell is," she said, looking at her watch. "It's eleven-thirty. The autopsy should be over. He should be here by now."

  "It probably took longer than you thought."

  She nodded, and started to help him sort. Her eye fell on the glass of sherry at his elbow. She decided not to comment. "I saw the picture in your father's den"

  He didn't answer, just kept looking down at the broken pieces of Augie.

  "You were the UCLA quarterback?"

  "And you were almost a doctor of microbiology," he answered.

  "Don't want to talk about the good ol' days?"

  "Same as you," he said, taking another slug of sherry. "Gimme the glue."

  She handed him the nail glue, and he uncapped it, put a few dabs on a white sliver, then stuck the sliver on the edge of what would soon be Augie's reconstructed left ear. "This is gonna take me a while."

  "Don't give up on the masked rodent," she said, and her voice caught as she said it. He heard her sob once, and looked up.

  "Who's Maximilian?" he asked bluntly.

  "He was my perfect fit," she said after a few seconds. "He made me complete. Before Max, I was doing everything for the wrong reason. Max showed me what I could be. He wanted things just for me. I'd never had that before."

  "Where is he now?" he asked.

  She bit her lip and pushed some brown chips over at him. "Work on finding a home for these."

  "Stacy," he said slowly, "back at the restaurant, you said something about Gulf War Syndrome showing up in the eighties. I'd like to read those articles about Huntsville, Texas, if you have them around."

  His long fingers were turning a broken piece of Augie's hindquarters. He put it aside and picked up another piece, turning it, looking for a match in the pile of chips. "Do you still have the articles? Could you loan them to me?"

  "Yeah, somewhere in my files in there." She stood and moved into her pantry office and started to rummage around in drawers. "Nobody will ever be able to prove Gulf War Syndrome was our concoction, first designed and tested in Huntsville, Texas," she said. "It's just a theory supported by some very strange occurrences."

  "That's okay," he said, knocking back the rest of his sherry. "I want to read it anyway."

  "The only reason I mentioned Huntsville was because it so closely resembles Vanishing Lake." She returned, carrying a folder, and dropped
it beside him on the table. "Here."

  He was holding a piece of Augie's broken nose in place, while the glue dried.

  "There was something called 'TRIES' at Huntsville," she continued. "It stands for the Texas Regional Institute for Environmental Studies, and I found out that same outfit was funding the bio-research at Vanishing Lake. The Huntsville operation got its money through Sam Houston University. When you trace the cash back, it comes from a Washington think tank that's funded by the Pentagon Special Projects Division, which at the time was run by Admiral Zoll." She watched as he found another piece and glued it on, but his face had suddenly hardened.

  "One of the people who got the disease in '85 was a woman named Julie Medely," she continued. "There's an article in there about it. Her husband, Clayton, was a food worker at the prison in Huntsville, and they think he passed it to her. The left side of her body started wasting away like polio. The story of the strange illness started getting into the press: 'Mystery Disease,' stuff like that. Some TV station in West Texas picked it up. Several other civilians with ties to the prison came down with the same symptoms. The doctors at Huntsville took blood samples and claimed to have isolated a strange unknown microorganism, which was sent to Walter Reed Hospital to be studied. Somebody there leaked the result."

  "Which was...?"

  "The microplasma found in Julie's blood had a very unusual DNA sequence, indicating that the microorganism was probably genetically engineered. Seven years later that identical DNA sequence turned up in the blood of veterans suffering from Gulf War Syndrome."

  Cris looked up at her, his eyes intense now, anger glinting, as he held two pieces of Augie's hindquarters in his hands while the glue set.