the Devil's Workshop (1999)

by Stephen Cannell

  "Okay," she said, "okay. It's just..." And she fell silent.

  "Just what?"

  "I wish I knew what Max was working on, what was on his computer. You know how he was, how he wrote everything down, kept duplicate files. If he was killed because of something he knew, then a copy exists somewhere, believe me. What they erased off his hard drive wasn't the only record of his research."

  "I'm afraid we'll never know," Wendell said.

  They arrived back at Max and Stacy's apartment, and Joanne took her bag out of the trunk and put it in her VW. She was still too quiet, off someplace else, and had said almost nothing all the way back from the airport. Before she got into her car, she held Stacy's hand. "Stace," she said, "I'm afraid. I don't think you should mess with this."

  "I know you don't," Stacy said, and she gave her sister-in-law a kiss on the cheek, then watched her drive away.

  After Wendell left, she went up to her apartment, unlocked the door, and dropped her bag in the living room. She looked at the sad little three -room flat that had once been such a happy love nest. Now all she saw was how small it was, how tired and threadbare the sofa looked, the stains on the worn carpet. She moved into her pantry office, slumped down and looked at her computer. She turned it on to check her e-mail...

  There it was! "Dearest Stacy," it began, "all is not well at Fort Detrick, so I want you to read this attached file, then hide it in a safe place."

  Sometime after they talked two nights ago, and before he died, Max had e-mailed her. On the computer screen before her were Max's letter and his attached research files. The e-mail contained everything he suspected was happening at a secret facility at Fort Detrick, called the Devil's Workshop. Max's notes discussed Dexter DeMille and Pale Horse Prions, and described the horrible human experiments that were about to take place inside an old prison at Vanishing Lake, Texas.

  Part Two

  VANISHING LAKE

  Chapter 6

  GUINEA PIGS

  They were housed in separate cells on the old death row unit, which was located in the windowless center pod at Vanishing Lake Military Prison. The fortress-style structure was oppressive, and underlit. It had been built in the fifties and had long ago outlived its design as a penal institution. The prison sat on the east side of a picturesque crater lake, almost directly across from a small fishing village, high in the Black Hills of East Texas. The cells, like most of the old prison, were built out of gray concrete blocks. The tiers were old-fashioned narrow rows of windowless rooms stacked one above the other with no center atrium. The two men had only been there for a few days and, although just forty feet separated their cells, Troy Lee Williams and Sylvester Swift had never laid eyes on one another.

  "You listening to me down there?" Troy Lee called out in exasperation. "I wanta know what the fuck they're doin' back there on that fuckin' wall. All that hammerin' an' shit's drivin' me nuts."

  Sylvester Swift said nothing.

  Troy Lee Williams was redheaded and skinny. His too-white skin was covered with an assortment of tattoos. Across his shoulder blades, in two-inch-high block letters, was "MOTHERFUCKER." The rest of his body read like the back wall of a skid-row liquor store. Troy Lee was a sixth-grade drop-out who had chosen the Army over a civilian jail, but had ended up in a cell anyway after raping, then killing a waitress while he was on a weekend pass in Rosemont, California. He'd been court-martialed and had barely escaped a firing squad. Troy Lee had no friends, because he was a diagnosed schizophrenic, and when he was hearing voices, he spooked the shit out of everybody.

  "Hey, dickwad! I'm talkin' ta you!" Troy Lee shouted again.

  "Shut the fuck up," Sylvester Swift said, his deep bass voice coming out of the cell, two down and one across on the narrow tier.

  Sylvester Swift had been doing natural life at Leavenworth for attacking two soldiers in the enlisted men's mess at Fort Dennis with a stolen kitchen knife. The unprovoked assault had been over the theft of some candy bars taken out of Sylvester's footlocker. Both soldiers had died before they made it to the base hospital.

  Williams and Swift were the only two prisoners incarcerated at Vanishing Lake Prison. The outdated Texas penal facility had been shut down a year ago, and then given by the state to the Science Department at Sam Houston University, which rented it to Fort Detrick.

  Three days ago Troy Lee Williams and Sylvester Swift had been secretly transferred there.

  "... Then after, nobody tells me shit. This bushy-haired fuck asks me if I'm a goddamn Jew. Me, he asks me, if I'm some ethnic mistake. Fuckin' pissed me off.... Hey, answer me, will ya? I'm talkin' ta you!"

  Sylvester Swift tried to ignore him. He was also wondering why he'd been transferred all the way here from Leavenworth Prison. He too was worried about the sound of electric drills and saws coming from behind the steel door. One of the M. P. guards had told him the old gas chamber was back there.

  Sylvester thought the last ten days had been weird, from the thorough two-day medical exam he'd been given at Leavenworth, to the flight in the unmarked military C-141 Starlifter. He'd been cuffed and seated with two armed guards, neither of whom had any rank or unit designation on his uniform.

  They had sat in the back of the huge cargo plane, amid cartons of medical supplies, and flown nonstop all the way to a military landing strip south of Waco, Texas. Then they switched planes, getting into a light amphibious Caribou. They took off again and flew into the mountains. Staying low under the radar, they flew through canyons, eventually making a water landing on a crater lake. As Sylvester got out of the plane, the mountainous wooded beauty of the place struck him. Tall Pines rimmed a clear blue lake, which was almost five miles in diameter, marred only by a huge, gray concrete block prison that loomed at the water's edge like a Transylvanian castle.

  After Sylvester was admitted to Vanishing Lake Prison, they examined him thoroughly again, collecting blood and skin scrapings. It was then that he met the strange, skinny doctor with the bushy hair who examined Sylvester's ebony body, looking for physical defects. The plantation-style inspection pissed him off. The skinny man wore no military uniform; instead, he was in a lab coat over civilian clothes. He had piercing green eyes, and Sylvester judged him to be about forty-six or -eight.

  The man didn't give his name, but asked Sylvester the same questions they had asked him numerous times at Leavenworth. Did he have any family or friends? If so, would he please list them? Did he know his genealogical history?

  "I got nobody," he had growled impatiently, pouring out racial hatred with his best street-corner eye fuck.

  Dr. Dexter DeMille looked at the clipboard in his hand containing Sylvester Swift's entire service and medical record. "Your file says you've been incarcerated at Leavenworth for three years, without any personal visits. Do you really have no friends, Sylvester?"

  "Got no friends," Sylvester growled. "Want no motherfuckin' friends. Jus' do shit my own self."

  After his check-in at Vanishing Lake Prison, Sylvester had been led in chains across the empty compound. He was taken to the fifth tier of the center pod. As he walked down the corridor in the old death house, he heard the loud voice of Troy Lee Williams for the first time. Sylvester was locked in his cell and had been forced to endure Troy Lee's babble and the sounds of constant construction in the nearby gas chamber ever since.

  The drill stopped whining and a hammer started banging at the end of the corridor behind the steel door. "Whatta you suppose them fucks is building in there?" Troy Lee said.

  Dr. Dexter DeMille knew he was on the verge of a historic, strategic military breakthrough. Despite this sense of impending victory, his nightmares had intensified. They had been throwback dreams about his work with Carleton Gajdusek in New Guinea in the early seventies. The dreams were always in black and white. He and Carl would be brutally killing the aboriginal women instead of heroically saving them. Then in the dream he was hacking their heads open like pineapples and emptying their liquefied cerebral tissue onto the
dusty ground, watching their brains splatter in the dirt. Every night for a month, he had been waking up in terror, his body drenched with sweat. He was convinced the dreams were ominous warnings from his subconscious.

  When he thought of those two men, recently transferred onto the center block, God help him, his mind did a strange emotional pirouette. Thoughts of guilt about their fate were immediately followed by an overpowering thrill of impending discovery.

  He moved around his lab, collecting the DNA and genome charts for Troy Lee and Sylvester. The protein markers were so specific that both men's exact genealogical makeup and weaknesses in their DNA were displayed, as if pinpointed on a map.

  Dexter knew Admiral Zoll now considered him a security risk. His bouts with insomnia and depression were getting worse. Twice in the last year he had attempted suicide. He had also flown into unexplained and uncontrollable rages, breaking up his own lab. Military guards, clean-cut men in pressed uniforms with ordinary backgrounds and intelligence, were posted to watch him constantly. Once he was finished with the human testing, he suspected, Admiral Zoll's plans for him would not include popping champagne corks. Dexter was running out of rope.

  It was time to check the mosquito larvae boxes, so he moved out of the main lab down a corridor to the adjoining room where the mosquitoes were bred. He paused to put on the heavy canvas jumpsuit, gloves, and HEPA filter mask before opening the door stenciled with big red letters:

  DANGER BIO-CONTAINMENT AREA LEVEL 3

  Once he was suited up, he entered the smaller lab. He moved across the room and looked into the two glass boxes that were positioned on the center island. From a distance they almost looked as if they contained swirling smoke, but once you got closer it became apparent that the boxes really contained hundreds of newly bred, swarming mosquitoes. Some were still on the floor of the boxes, sitting on a tray of blood jelly, feasting on his newly designed Pale Horse Prion, PHpr: the deadly rogue protein that he had injected into the blood gel.

  He looked in at the young, freshly hatched females still poised on long spindly legs over the gel, sucking up the Prion with their needle-nosed tubular labrums.

  There were only a few of them left on the bottom of the glass box. Most were now blooded with his gruesome cocktail, flying around, desperately looking for a warm body to attack. He picked up the phone in the windowless bio-containment room and dialed the number for the gas chamber. Dr. Charles Lack answered the phone. Before he spoke, Dexter DeMille took a deep breath.

  "I guess I'm ready," he said.

  Troy Lee was screaming obscenities as they dragged him up to the old gas chamber, located in the tower of Center Block.

  The door to the chamber was opened and Troy Lee's T-shirt was ripped off, then he was thrown into the small enclosure. He hit the far wall hard and slid to the floor. "Whatta you doing? Okay, please ..." he was pleading now. "I'm sorry ... okay? I'm sorry."

  Two M. P. S in white helmets, armbands, and jumpboots grabbed Sylvester, removed his shirt, and walked him into the chamber. Then the door was closed and bolted.

  The air lock hissed.

  Troy Lee was screaming again, but nobody in the tower area outside the chamber could hear him, because the gas chamber was constructed out of two heavy glass boxes, one air-locked inside the other.

  Then Dexter DeMille stepped forward. Dr. Charles Lack was adjusting two tripods with cameras that were placed where they could videotape the procedure. Lack was a young, new addition to the staff at Fort Detrick, recently recruited from MIT. He and Dexter DeMille had been clashing over several important aspects of the Pale Horse Program. One area of intense disagreement was whether to use mosquitoes as the vector agent. Dr. Lack preferred the more primitive methods of ingesting the cocktail, by corrupting water supplies or foodstuffs. DeMille couldn't convince the cocky younger doctor that mosquitoes offered a much better delivery system. If the enemy found out the Pale Horse Prion had been placed in water or food, they could just stop consumption. In order to avoid mosquitoes they would need to put every soldier in Level Three bio-gear, almost impossible under attack time frames. Also, mosquitoes were territorial and didn't migrate to new areas. Most important, they had short life spans and died in about three days, clearing the area of dangerous infestation. Despite the logic of this, Dr. Lack continued to object, saying mosquitoes were cumbersome and hard to deliver, and could be swept to new areas by strong winds.

  Dr. Lack finished his adjustments to the video equipment, then two M. P. S moved up and stood behind each camera. Dr. DeMille picked up the "Governor's phone" nearby.

  "Can you see that okay, Admiral?" he said.

  "Yes. Go ahead." Admiral James G. Zoll's rough voice came through the line from the communications room at Company A, First SATCOM Battalion Headquarters at Fort Detrick.

  Now Troy Lee was on his feet, screaming silently at them through the soundproof glass. His too-white skin was turning red with the effort.

  Dexter DeMille walked over to the two boxes affixed to brackets on the side of the gas chamber. He removed the canvas covers, revealing the newly hatched, swarming female mosquitoes.

  Then he pulled up the air lock on each of the boxes, allowing the x-ray-sterilized and Prion-primed female mosquitoes to fly through a small one-way filter valve into the gas chamber. First one, then three, then fifty entered the enclosure. In a few moments, most of the deadly insects were in the gas chamber.

  Quickly both Sylvester and Troy Lee had dozens of mosquitoes on them. They danced around in the gas chamber, trying to get them off, slapping at them with their hands, rubbing against the sides of the glass chamber, smearing specks of blood on the chamber walls.

  Dexter waited until he was sure both Sylvester and Troy Lee had been thoroughly bitten, then he released an insect spray into the chamber. It flowed from newly installed valves in the ceiling, and quickly a fine toxic mist settled over Troy Lee and Sylvester, turning their shoulders wet and shiny.

  One by one, the mosquitoes in the gas chamber died, falling off the two prisoners and off the walls where they clung. Hundreds landed dead in black clusters on the floor. Then one of the white-helmeted M. P. S turned on an overhead shower nozzle that drenched the chamber with water. The dead mosquitoes were washed from Troy Lee and Sylvester, rinsed off the glass walls and floor. Finally, they all disappeared down a drain, into a bio-container that was affixed under the scaffolding.

  Dr. DeMille picked up the second intercom phone and dialed three digits. "Okay," he said softly.

  The door opened downstairs and four M. P. S in full HEPA gear climbed the metal steps. The soldiers left their cameras, and everybody exited the tower for their own protection. The M. P. S in HEPA gear moved to the gas chamber door. They looked like visitors from the space program in their canvas suits and oxygen helmets.

  They opened the air-locked door and dragged the confused prisoners out of the gas chamber.

  Dexter DeMille went back to his quarters to begin what he assumed would be a three-to four-hour wait.

  It began at 1156 A. M.

  Suddenly, without warning, Troy Lee Williams got up off his bunk on the fifth tier and hurled himself at a passing guard, crashing headfirst against the steel bars of his prison cell, splitting his forehead open. The M. P. had passed too close to the cell, and Troy Lee managed to grab his hand, jerking it through the bars. In a homicidal rage, he clamped his mouth over the guard's hand, biting hard, snarling and tearing the soldier's flesh.

  "Get the fuck off me!" the soldier screamed, as he snatched out his side arm and fired into the cell, hitting Troy Lee in the leg, throwing him back. Then the startled M. P. pulled his bleeding hand back through the bars and looked at the wound in horror. Troy Lee, with his own blood from the bullet flowing down his leg and the guard's blood running from his chin, stood in the center of the cell, screaming and drooling like a rabid animal.

  Dr. DeMille ran up the stairs and onto the death row tier. Video cameras had also been set up in the cellblock, to record
both Sylvester and Troy Lee. Dexter had been watching a monitor in his room and had seen the attack. Sylvester Swift was standing at his cell door, unchanged, but looking worried.

  "Troy Lee, can you hear me?" Dexter asked the wild-looking murderer, who was in the center of his cell, blood and spit foaming at his mouth, his breath coming in gasps. "Tell me, tell me what you're feeling. What's it feel like? The rage you feel--is it uncontrollable?" He had a tape recorder out and pushed toward the bars.

  Troy Lee's mind was somewhere else; he was homicidally insane. He charged Dexter DeMille and smashed against the metal bars, grabbing for Dexter's hand holding the tape recorder. Blood from the deep cuts on his forehead splattered out into the corridor. The microbiologist had been ready, and jumped back, avoiding the lunge.

  "Get this soldier to sick bay," Dexter ordered.

  They took the M. P. with the bleeding hand away. For almost twenty minutes more, Troy Lee raged in his cell.

  It was worse than anything Dexter had ever seen among the Fore Aboriginal tribe in New Guinea in '73. They also had rages in the early stages of the disintegrating brain disease they called "Kuru," but it was nothing like this. He and Carleton Gajdusek had tried to save them, but one by one, the Aborigines first went mad, then died. It took the microbiologist a year of doing autopsies in grass huts to isolate and identify the likely cause as a rogue protein that was eating away the mood control center in their midbrains.

  After he returned from New Guinea, Dexter had not been able to find funding to continue his Prion research. While he was teaching microbiology at Sam Houston University he was approached one evening by the head of the department and offered a research sabbatical at Fort Detrick, Maryland. It was there that he met the frightening Admiral Zoll, who surprised him with a thorough knowledge of his work in New Guinea. He was introduced to Zoll's bio-weapons program at the Devil's Workshop. There he began experimenting with mixing Kuru and mad cow disease, a similar protein-based illness that had recently surfaced in English cattle, making them crazy by also attacking the mood center in their brains.