True Evil

'I don't give a shit.' Alex reached for her door handle.

Will caught hold of her wrist. 'Hold on, now. Let's don't get you in worse trouble than you're already in.'

She pulled her arm free. 'The bastards have already fired me. What else can they do?'

Will lowered his head and looked at her with seven decades of accumulated wisdom. 'Well, honey, there's fired, and then there's fired fired. You just got off the phone with a special agent of the FBI. If you were fired fired, he wouldn't be talking to you at all.'

Alex forced herself to sit back in the Explorer, anger boiling in her gut. Immediately after Grace's death, she had felt she was at a great disadvantage in her quest, but not powerless. She may have acted irresponsibly, but at least she'd been doing something. Now she was being restrained by the possibility that the agency that should have been investigating all along might finally get off its ass and do something.

She grabbed her computer from the floor and took it out of hibernation yet again. This time her toolbar showed a three-bar data connection. She'd already searched the names Eldon Tarver and Noel D. Traver so many times in the past few hours that her eyes blurred when she looked at the Google search page.

'I'm missing something,' she said.

Will grunted.

She checked MSN Messenger, but Jamie wasn't logged on.

'What did Kaiser tell you?' Will asked.

'Not much.' She thought back to Kaiser's brief biography of Eldon Tarver. 'He said there was a gap in the years when Tarver was in college or grad school. During Vietnam, I guess. When did the Vietnam War end?'

'They scraped the last chopper off the roof of the embassy in '75, but for all practical purposes, the big show was over by '73.'

Vietnam…

'Late Vietnam,' Alex murmured.

'What?'

'Something Dr. Tarver said to me in his office. It was about a research project he worked on…something about combat veterans and cancer.' She closed her eyes and saw the photograph on Tarver's office wall again, the black-and-white snapshot of the blonde bookended by Tarver and the military officer. 'VCP,' she said, scrunching her eyelids tight. 'Those letters were embroidered on Tarver's lab coat. Also painted on the building behind him.'

'What are you talking about?' asked Will.

'An acronym,' she said, suddenly recalling Tarver's explanation. 'The Veterans' Cancer Project.'

Alex typed 'Veterans' Cancer Project' into the Google search field. Google returned over 8 million links, but not one in the first fifty referred to a formally named Veterans' Cancer Project. Most of the links led to sites dealing with various types of cancer in Gulf War or Vietnam veterans. But the Vietnam links dealt almost exclusively with Agent Orange, which Tarver had said his group had not looked into.

'There's not a Veterans' Cancer Program,' she said, puzzled. 'Or at least it wasn't a big enough deal for anyone to remember it.'

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. 'But Veterans' Cancer Project isn't what I saw,' she thought aloud. 'I saw VCP.'

She typed 'VCP' into the search field and hit ENTER. What appeared was a plethora of results related only by their sharing the same acronym. Next she typed 'VCP' plus 'cancer.' The first few hits concerned a research project in India. But the fifth started her pulse racing. The first words following the acronym were Special Virus Cancer Program-not Veterans', as Tarver had claimed-which the link description defined as a scientific program that had begun in 1964, consumed 10 percent of the annual budget of the National Cancer Institute for some years, then was renamed the Virus Cancer Program in 1973. Alex bit her bottom lip, clicked the link, and began to read.

The VCP was a massive research effort involving some of the most distinguished scientists in the United States, all probing the possible viral origins of cancer, particularly leukemia….

'My God,' Alex breathed.

'What is it?' asked Will.

'Wait,' she said, reading as fast as she could.

A small but vocal number of physicians have suggested that simian-related retroviruses like HIV and SV 40 (which has been proved to have contaminated batches of human polio vaccine) were in fact created by the scientists of the Virus Cancer Program. While this is disputed by the medical establishment, government records confirm that tens of thousands of liters of dangerous new viruses were cultured in the bodies of living animals, primarily primates and cats, and that many of these viruses were modified so as to be able to jump species barriers. In 1973, a significant part of the Virus Cancer Project was transferred to Fort Detrick, Maryland, the home of the United States biological warfare effort. No one denies that the VCP involved an active alliance between the NIH, the U.S. Army, and Litton Bionetics….

'This is it,' said Alex. 'Holy shit, this is it!'

'What are you yelping about?' Will asked, staring hard at her screen.

'Dr. Tarver lied to me! He told me that VCP stood for Veterans' Cancer Project. It doesn't. It stands for a government project that researched the links between viruses and cancer, especially leukemia. It took place during the Vietnam era. And Eldon Tarver worked for them!'

'Jesus.'

'He's killing people,' whispered Alex. 'He's still doing research. Or else he's using what he learned back then to make money off of Andrew Rusk and his desperate clients.' Her chest swelled with fierce joy. 'We've got them, Will.'

'Look!' Will said, gripping her wrist. 'Son of a bitch!'

Alex looked up. The panel truck and the van had disappeared, and the big aluminum door was sliding back down to the concrete slab.

'You know what I think?' said Alex.

'What?'

'Tarver is shutting everything down. I went to his office and declared myself as an FBI agent. I went to his so-called free clinic. I even gave him a list of the murder victims, for God's sake. Nobody on that list surprised him, either. Christ, I even asked him about the VCP picture! He knows I'm going to figure it out eventually. He's got to run, Will.' She laid her computer on the backseat and reached for the door handle again. 'I'm going down there.'

'Wait!' cried Will, restraining her. 'If you've got him nailed with evidence, there's no point in screwing the pooch by going in without a warrant.'

'I'm not going into the building.'

'Be sure, Alex,' he said gravely.

'Are you coming or not?'

Will sighed, then opened the glove box and took out his.357 magnum. 'I guess.'

As she got out of the Explorer, Will said, 'Wait. The gate's open, ain't it? We're better off driving up to the front door and telling them we're lost than sneaking in there with guns shoved down our pants.'

Alex grinned and climbed back into the Explorer. 'I knew I brought you for a reason.'

Will cranked the Ford, pulled across the street, and drove down to the gate of the old bakery. As he slowed down to nose through the fence, Alex dialed John Kaiser's cell phone.

'Hey,' said Kaiser. 'What's up?'

'I've cracked it, John! The whole case. You need to check out something called the Virus Cancer Program. It was a big research project in the late sixties and early seventies. It involved cancer, viruses, and biological weapons. Tarver was part of it.'

'Biological weapons?'

'Yes. There's a photo in Tarver's UMC office of him wearing a lab coat that says VCP. The building behind him has the same acronym.'