Dragonfly

With McAlister, of course, there were no digressions. He recited the facts with so few hesitations and with such economy of words that he might have been retelling a short story that he had committed to memory.

It began with Dr. Olin Eugene Wilson — product of a strict and extremely religious family, witness at the McCarthy Hearings, where he testified against alleged Communists in the Pentagon, John Bircher, and self-styled fascist — who believed implicitly in Shockley's theories of Negro inferiority and the supremacy of the White Race.

Although he had not conceived the specific operation that was now known as the Dragonfly project, Dr. Wilson was the one man without whom the scheme could never have been realized. For thirty years Wilson had worked for the Department of Defense. He was a research biochemist, one of the most brilliant men in his field. The greater part of his important work had been done at Fort Detrick, in Maryland, where he supervised the development of half a dozen chemical and/or biological weapons that could topple an enemy government within seventy-two hours of the declaration of war. In 1969, when President Nixon announced that the United States would no longer engage in research for offensive biological warfare, Wilson was so infuriated that he presented his resignation to the chief of staff at Detrick. Certain highly placed civilian and military officials quickly assured Wilson that the President's speech had been more of a public-relations gimmick than a genuine commitment. Yes, Detrick's labs would be converted into facilities for cancer research. Yes, only weapons projects labeled “defensive” would be developed from this day forward. However…

Fort Detrick had already become too much of a target for crusading journalists and peace demonstrators; therefore, it was time to move the CBW program into more modern and less well publicized quarters. As to whether or not the doctor would now be limited to defensive-weapons research… Well, they had a qualification of the President's statement which satisfied Wilson. They explained that once the United States was attacked with a chemical and/or biological weapon, it would have to strike back immediately; and then those weapons which might have been labeled offensive when used for a first strike became defensive the moment they were used for retaliatory purposes. Thus educated in semantics, Wilson returned to work, happy and relatively secure. Within days of the President's speech, Olin Wilson launched a program to study the feasibility of encapsulating anthrax, plague virus, and other disease strains and implanting them within the human body to create a walking biological time bomb that could be triggered either ten minutes from now, ten years from now, or at any moment in between.

“Naturally,” Canning said, “Wilson was successful. The agency heard about it. And the Committeemen made Wilson an offer to come over to them.”

“Which he did.”

Canning frowned. “And Army security, Pentagon security, the security forces at the lab — none of them tumbled to the fact that he was farming out his data?”

“None of them.”

In late 1972, loudly professing his disenchantment with the current U.S.-Soviet detente, Olin Wilson resigned from his position with the Department of Defense. By that time his absolute disgust with Nixonian foreign policy was widely known. He was one of a group of five hundred prominent scientists, teachers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other professionals who sponsored a series of anti-Communist advertisements in The New York Times. For the Sons of Truth, an up-and-coming right-wing organization similar to the John Birch Society, Wilson wrote a pamphlet entitled Communism, Richard Nixon, and the End of the American Dream. When he quit his job he said he was leaving because of his disillusionment with government policies and because of his despair over new national defense guidelines. He retired on a comfortable pension and on the income he received for speaking before any organization that would have him. For six months he jetted all over the country, addressing as many as five and six groups a week at a fee of seven hundred dollars plus expenses. Gradually, he was called to fewer and fewer podiums, until he began to spend most of his time at home in Alexandria, where he puttered in his garden and wrote angry letters to newspapers and magazines that supported or even gave voice to a liberal cause. A year after he resigned from government service, Wilson was leading such an uneventful life that any government security force that might have been watching him certainly must have decided to pack up and go away and leave him to his retirement. That was when Dr. Wilson went to work for The Committee.

“You mean they have a laboratory all their own?” Canning asked incredulously.

“That's correct.”

“But the sophisticated machinery, the maintenance… It would cost millions!”

After he had taken time to relight his pipe, McAlister said, “Nearly all its life the agency has not been held accountable to anyone for how it spends its funds. Not to the Congress. Not to the President. No one. Furthermore, it receives considerably more money from the federal budget than is readily apparent. Attached to the largest appropriations bills like Defense and Government Operations, there are dozens of smaller appropriations — five million here, two million there — for programs which are seldom if ever scrutinized. Some of these programs don't even exist. Their appropriations are tunneled directly to the agency. Once the agency has the money, it disburses it to a couple of hundred companies all over the world, firms that are nothing more than CIA fronts. No one man within the agency ever knows where all the money goes. So… It would be quite simple for these Committeemen to siphon off a couple of million a year for their own, private purposes. I'm sure that's what they've done — and are still doing.”

“But a laboratory devoted to chemical-biological warfare research is going to employ hundreds of people.”

“As recently as a week ago,” McAlister told him, “I'd have said the same thing. But since I learned about Dragonfly, I've been doing my homework. For Olin Wilson's purposes, a laboratory can be rather small. It can be staffed by as few as twelve specialists who are willing to be their own assistants. This kind of work is nowhere near as complicated as, say, searching for a cure for cancer. Any virus or bacterium can be cultured for pennies. For a few dollars you can grow enough plague virus to kill nine-tenths of the Russian population. Then you hit the remaining tenth with anthrax. Or worse. It's the delivery systems that pose the real problems, but even that kind of experimentation isn't prohibitively expensive. Biological warfare is cheap, David. That's why most all of the major world powers deal in it. It costs substantially less than the money needed to build more and more and more nuclear missiles.”

In the courtyard below, a young couple, sheltering under a newspaper, ran for an apartment door. Their laughter drifted up through the rain.

Cherry-scented tobacco smoke hung in the humid air in Canning's kitchen.

“If the lab employs only a dozen men,” Canning said, “there'd be no trouble keeping it a secret.”

“And if one of the wealthy businessmen who sympathize with the Committeemen happens to be the owner, director, or president of a chemical company, he could help create a plausible front for Wilson's work.”

“There ought to be records of some sort at this lab, something that would identify Dragonfly,” Canning said. “They'll be in code, but codes are made to be broken.”

“But we don't know where the lab is.”

“Berlinson couldn't tell you?”

“He'd heard of it. He'd been associated with Wilson. But he had never been to the lab.”

“And you haven't put a tail on Wilson?”

McAlister laid his pipe in the ashtray and smiled grimly. “Can't do that, I'm afraid. He's dead.”

“I see.”

“He was electrocuted while making his breakfast toast.”

“Quaint.”

“Seems there was a nasty short in the toaster's wiring. Brand-new toaster, too.”

“The Underwriters' Laboratories would be surprised to hear about that,” Canning said.

“I daresay.”

“When did this happen?”

“The day after Roger Berlinson came to my home and offered to tell me what he knew about The Committee, exactly sixteen hours after I first heard Olin Wilson's name.”

“How coincidental.”

“It's for Ripley.”

“And convenient.”

“Of course, Berlinson couldn't give me the names of any of the other scientists who are working at this lab.