Charles pushed the ashtray over to Pépé. “Be my guest. Juliette doesn’t come here. She’s absolutely against tobacco, and don’t get her started on hunting.”
He smiled without amusement and raised his glass. “Thank you both for indulging me.”
Pépé and I raised our glasses in silence. The wine was out of this world.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and I’d appreciate it if you would let me tell it my way. I promise I’ll answer all your questions when I’m finished.”
Pépé snapped his lighter shut and it made a little metal clink. He slipped it in his pocket and took a drag on his cigarette, closing his eyes. I kicked off my sandals, tucking my feet under my long dress and laying my pashmina across my lap like a blanket. Pépé’s jacket was still around my shoulders and I pulled it close. Charles settled back into his chair and receded into the shadows.
“In 1970, Nixon was still in the White House,” he said, “but it wouldn’t be long before he got mired in Watergate and it brought him down. We were still in Vietnam, the ’68 riots had ended but they still left vivid scars on the national conscience, and the war, which had ended Johnson’s presidency, was more unpopular than ever. Nixon wanted to get us out of there and he did, calling it ‘peace with honor.’ Our worst enemies were the Sovs and it was the height of the Cold War.”
Pépé crossed one leg over the other and exhaled a stream of smoke. Like Charles, he’d lived through these years. The history lesson was clearly for my education.
“I was a history major in college,” I said. “So I did read about all this, you know.”
Charles made a small noise and Pépé chuckled.
“Ah.” Charles’s voice was dry. “Ancient history?”
“Prehistoric.”
“I see,” he said after a moment. “ ‘I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.’ Do you know who said that, history major?”
“You?”
“Patrick Henry.”
“ ‘Give me liberty or give me death’?”
“The same. A Virginian. A Founding Father. The lesson applies now, too.”
“You’ll explain that?” I said. “I won’t need to.” He sipped his wine. “In 1970, I was the Deputy Director for OSPR.”
“English, please,” I said. “For the uninitiated?”
“The Office of Strategic Programming and Research. Later it went under the Pentagon’s umbrella, so it became DOSPR.
“How convenient,” I said. “What exactly did this organization do?”
“Oh, remnants of it still exist. But the original program was started in the late fifties, when the Sovs caught us off guard with Sputnik. They beat us in the space race and we had no clue what was up their little Commie sleeves. You can’t imagine how devastating that was.”
Pépé nodded and I stared at both of them, wondering what it must have been like during the years when our former World War II ally had become the “Evil Empire” and people like Charles called the Russians “Commies” and “Sovs” like something out of an old spy movie.
Charles drank his wine. “So in order for us never to fall behind, and for that never to happen again, we set up a sort of freewheeling think tank of creative people who spent their days playing military what-if and then figuring out how to invent the technology. You’ve benefited from some of the results … advancements like global positioning systems, voice-recognition software, things like that. It wasn’t just building things that went boom or the next James Bond–type toy to put in the arsenal. The sign on the door to my office was a quote from Einstein: ‘If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.’ ”
He shifted in his chair. No one laughed.
“The wine is really opening nicely, isn’t it?” He stared into his glass. “Still got some life in it after all these years.”
I nodded, wishing he’d get on with it. Charles was leading up to something important, but at this rate we’d still be here tomorrow morning.
“You were saying about your position with OSPR?” I asked. “Or DOSPR?”
Charles fixed his gaze on the fire. “I’m getting to that, what I did. R & D is the heart of playing what-if. You have conventional warfare—soldiers fighting each other on a battlefield—and then you have unconventional warfare,” he said. “Both are as old as time. People have been using some variant of biological and chemical weapons in wartime as far back as the ancient Greeks.”
Pépé sat up straighter in his chair. I’d been about to take a sip of my wine, but I stopped and uneasily waited for him to go on. Charles had changed the direction of this conversation with as much subtlety as shifting tectonic plates.
“Unconventional warfare took a different direction in the twentieth century, gassing troops in the trenches during the First World War to name one of the most graphic examples,” he said. “Then during World War II the use of airplanes to drop bombs that would cause widespread destruction took what-if to the next level. What if you could fill a bomb with some pathogen or crop agent and drop it over a city or farmland? You wouldn’t destroy buildings, but the damage would be incalculable. Think of how many people you could sicken or kill, wiping out food supplies for decades because you’d poisoned the soil, how paralyzing it would be to a country.”
He saw my eyes widen. “I’m not talking about the good guys, Lucie. Imagine the Nazis with that technology and you live in Paris or London in the 1940s knowing there’s a goddamn bull’s-eye painted on your back on a war room map in Berchtesgaden.”
“Go on, Charles,” Pépé said. “Lucie and I are listening.”
Charles sipped his wine. “Where was I? Oh, yes, the U.S. had its own programs—biological and chemical warfare—all conducted in the utmost secrecy. Then the war ended and things started to wind down. I’m going to fast-forward through some of this, but in the aftermath of the war there was a massive ethical and moral debate about whether to continue or abandon something so heinous, so reprehensible to the American psyche. That was what the politicians and civilian leaders wrestled with. So the military decided to move the program under its own tent, though by then we had field-tested the A-bomb and discovered that it worked.”
I was glad to hear the small note of irony in his voice.
“Weren’t plans for the atomic bomb drawn up at the Bohemian Grove?” Pépé asked.
“The Grove is rented out all the time to people who want to use it when the members aren’t there.” Charles sounded irritated and a little peevish. “It’s true there was a planning meeting held there for the Manhattan Project, which led, of course, to the A-bomb—but it wasn’t a plot concocted by the Bohemian Club, I can assure you.”
Pépé set his glass down on the table and reached for his cigarette pack. “I see.”
Charles shot him an inscrutable look. “Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on where you stood, the Cold War ramped up and that breathed new life into BW and CW research, saved the programs. We couldn’t afford to fall behind again.”
“You mean biological weapons and chemical weapons?” I said.
He nodded. “Some of it was run out of a small installation—Fort Wilton—just down the road in Maryland. We built on what was accomplished during the war: germ warfare, chemical warfare, plant and animal toxins, it’s a long list. But with any kind of research comes field testing. To be blunt, testing on animals only goes so far.”
He paused and now I was starting to guess where this was going.
“The Japanese did the most experimenting on human subjects during the war, and in return for us not prosecuting them for war crimes, we got a peek at their results. It was a Faustian pact, but it happened.” He shrugged. “Hell, we did our own testing here at home—open-air tests using simulants and then monitoring the results. No one knew at the time, of course. It wasn’t the sort of thing where you sent out permission slips door- to-door.”
I choked on my wine. “You’re talking about our government testing biological and chemical weapons on its own citizens?”
“Lucie, there were hearings on this in the late seventies. It
