“I did,” he said, after a moment. “Why in the world do you want to know?”
“Because I thought you might know some of the people he worked with.”
“Care to be more specific?”
“A woman named Maggie Hilliard. She died in a car accident a little over forty years ago.”
He didn’t say anything at first, just stared at me—or maybe through me—with a faraway, glassy-eyed look like an old movie reel he’d forgotten about had started playing in his head.
“How did you hear about Maggie Hilliard?”
Not a direct answer to the question, but an answer. And more than I’d hoped for.
“Charles told me about her.”
“Really? And what did he say?”
“That she was part of a team of biochemists working on a classified project and he was their supervisor.”
Noah pushed back his chair. At least one of the wheels needed oil. “Take a walk with me.”
I followed him down a back corridor to the staff break room.
“I could use an extra jolt of caffeine this morning. Don’t tell my cardiologist or she’ll kill me before this stuff does,” he said, patting his Santa belly. “Care for a cup of coffee?”
“Sure, thanks.”
He gave me a to-go cup and poured two coffees from a half-full pot, adding a healthy dollop of chocolate- flavored creamer to his and a couple of sugars. I expected that we’d have our chat at the conference table in the middle of the room, but instead he unlocked a door that opened directly onto the back terrace. Under a large metal awning, massed pots of flowers were grouped by color on stepped shelves or spilled out of planters that hung from the rafters above our heads.
“Come on.” Noah reached over and deadheaded a scarlet and purple fuchsia as we walked through the pavilion, tossing the spent blossoms in a trash can. Old habits obviously died hard. “Hope you don’t mind a little walk.”
He took me to the back lot where hundreds of slender young trees with their root balls wrapped in burlap formed a small, wellorganized forest. The wind was soft and warm; the early morning sunlight made shifting patterns of light and dark through the fretwork canopy of the trees. We stopped in the middle of a small grove of pink and white dogwood.
“Make you a deal. I’ll tell you what I can about what Maggie Hilliard was working on if you tell me what you know about what happened to her—and Charles Thiessman. I still can’t go into detail, but there’s plenty of stuff in the public domain that you could find out on the Internet, if you knew where to look.”
“Why do you want to know about Maggie?” I asked.
“Why else? Your basic human curiosity.” He took the lid off his coffee and swirled the cup around. “There were loads of rumors about that car accident. No one ever found out if any of them were true. Charles kept his yap shut all these years and so did the rest of that group of rebels working for him. I don’t know how he did it.”
“Wasn’t keeping quiet about things the nature of your business?” I asked.
He smiled. “Of course it was. But hell, Charles could have sold the Sovs the combination to the nuclear codes and gotten away with it. He was like Teflon, nothing stuck to him. If he’s finally willing to open up about what happened to that girl, I’d like to know.”
“This needs to stay just between us, Noah. Please don’t say anything to anybody.”
He rolled his eyes. “First, I have some practice keeping secrets. Second, there aren’t too many anybodies left to tell after forty years. And third, when have I ever let you down?”
“I didn’t get that sled I wanted for Christmas when I was ten.”
He grinned. “Once. Big deal. And I’m sure there was a very good reason, young lady.”
I laughed. “Okay, fair enough.”
“Ladies first,” he said. “Please enlighten me. What did Charles tell you about Maggie’s accident?”
I sipped my coffee. “He said she left a party drunk one night and drove her car off the bridge to Pontiac Island and drowned.”
“Huh. The papers said that. That’s nothing new.”
“She was … romantically involved with Charles when it happened.”
“As in having sex?”
My face turned red. “Yes.”
“Want to tell me how you know?”
“A photograph.”
“How interesting. Sets up the possibility of blackmail.”
“Not at the time. The only person who knew about the photograph appears to have been the person who took it. That is, until very recently when the photo resurfaced. And now there’s no one left to blackmail, so it’s sort of moot.”
“I see. Well, either way, it explains a lot, though I can’t say I’m surprised at Charles going after Maggie Hilliard. He had a reputation as a skirt chaser and she was a knockout,” he said. “Still, it’s curious. She was supposed to be pretty tight with one of the other scientists. Rumor was she was sleeping with the guy who ran the project. It was a bigger deal in those days, people went to some trouble to keep that kind of thing quiet. His name was Graf. Theo Graf. Hell of a smart guy, really brilliant. Tore him up something awful when she died. I heard he had a huge row with Thiessman and they nearly came to blows. Then he was gone, and soon after that everyone involved in that project left, too.”
“According to Charles, Theo Graf didn’t know about him and Maggie.”
Noah shrugged. “You wonder. Anyway, that crowd was a bunch of rogues, working on something that should have been shut down after Nixon signed the order stopping all biological and chemical weapons research. It was one thing to be conducting experiments on weaponizing anthrax in wartime when you knew the Japanese and Germans were doing it, but how the hell could you justify it to a bunch of politicians and the American public in peacetime? Obviously not everyone agreed with the president—it was still the Cold War—and Charles found the right people willing to look the other way. The U.S. didn’t sign the international treaty outlawing that stuff for good until 1972.”
“ ‘Weaponizing’ it?” I said, stunned. “Charles’s group was working on developing an anthrax bomb?”
“A bomb is one way to do it, but there are others,” he said. “His gang was working the other side of the coin, ways to neutralize it—trying to improve the anthrax vaccine we developed during the war. Before Nixon shut everything down, the biowarfare crowd tested more than twenty strains of the anthrax bacterium trying to determine which were the deadliest. Then they’d stage mock attacks, see how far it could spread, that kind of thing. What they found out was that it could spread pretty damn far, maybe even as deadly as a nuclear blast. As a result they wanted a better, more effective vaccine.”
Mock attacks with anthrax that had the devastating potential of another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I shuddered. “How did you know what they were doing?”
Noah gave me a long look that made me wish I hadn’t asked. “I worked as a researcher for the public health service. Our mandate was different. We were working to
He pressed his lips together and fingered the leaves on a small pink dogwood. I wondered how much his old ghosts still haunted him, what his involvement had been in the experiments where people had been infected unknowingly or against their will.
“The world’s such a scary place now,” I said. “You try not to think about it, but it’s always on the news or they ratchet up the terrorism level at the airport or someone puts a bomb in some clever new place. Why did we have to weaponize anthrax to begin with? Look at that sick person who sent it through the mail and killed those postal workers in Washington after 9/11. All it takes is some lunatic with a test tube and a grudge—”
Noah scuffed a toe of his work boot, digging a small hole in the dirt. “Lucie, you can find anthrax bacteria living in the soil naturally—you don’t always need a test tube and a lab. Not everywhere, mind you. But it’s out there and it’s part of nature. And a smart scientist could replicate it without too much trouble.”
