The Sauvignon Secret (30 page)

There was no point being coy with Noah, and I hadn’t rehearsed how I was going to bring this up, anyway.

“I got your latest brochure about the spring legislative session in Richmond,” I said.

He sat up and folded his hands on top of what looked like a daunting pile of constituent mail and paperwork spread out across his old metal desk. Noah’s office was even more cluttered than it had been when he ran the nursery full-time, with stacks of papers heaped in a semicircle on the floor around him and shoved into empty corners on the tiered shelf where he grew his prize collection of African violets.

“You fill out that survey, you hear? I presume you want to talk about my vote on the transportation bill?” he asked. “Believe me, I’ve been hearing about it.”

I smiled. “I’ll fill it out and no, it’s nothing like that. I came to ask if you knew Charles Thiessman when you both worked for the government.”

I waited for his reaction, which I figured could range from telling me he didn’t discuss that period of his life anymore, so mind my own business, to stunned silence.

“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
save
lives from some of the worst, most wretched diseases in the world. Those guys were military. What they developed were new and creative ways to use bacteria, germs, chemicals, things in nature, or stuff they created in test tubes as weapons. It was a different mission.” He paused. “Of course we had our ethical lapses, too. Things we did in the name of research.”

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.”

“Please tell me you’re not serious.”

“’Fraid so.” He finished the last of his coffee and crushed the cardboard cup with his big hands. “You use
Bacillus thuringiensis
on your grapes. I know you do since you buy it from me.”

“We try. It doesn’t do much against some pests, so we resort to the more toxic sprays, unfortunately.”

“You know Bt comes from the same family of bacteria that causes anthrax, don’t you?” he said.

“That’s right, it does.” I stared at him. “Oh, come on, Noah!
You’re not saying someone could take Bt and produce anthrax by making it … what’s the term … mutate?”

“So far that’s never happened, either in a lab or in nature. But with modern technology and a bit of luck, you could take the toxinproducing genes from anthrax and transfer them into Bt. So you’d get a Bt that could cause anthrax.”

“Surely that’s not very easy.”

“Not for your average bear, no. But a scientist who knew what he was doing could find the necessary gene sequences on the Internet and reproduce them in the laboratory. It’s a fairly common way to study genes and it should work just as well with toxin genes. You use short segments of a strand of DNA called oligonucleotide primers to replicate the gene from a fragment.” He shrugged. “Order the primers online and do a PCR—sorry, polymerase chain reaction— meaning you make more of it. Then you clone those genes into a plasmid, put it in Bt, and voilà, you’ve got Bt that could be as lethal as anthrax.”

“Maggie and the scientists she worked with were replicating anthrax bacteria?” I asked. “Making it multiply?”

“Let’s just leave it that they understood the process.” He folded his arms across his chest to let me know that was all he planned to say.

“All right, whatever they did or didn’t do, they needed animals or, better still, humans who were infected in order to test the vaccine. Or they themselves needed to infect rats or sheep or people since anthrax isn’t one of those diseases with a long survival rate where you can round up a test group.”

“It’s true you need to do field tests to find out if something is effective or not.”

Had Stephen Falcone died from coming in contact with anthrax because he’d agreed to be tested for the vaccine? How could he have understood what he’d agreed to do?

“Isn’t that incredibly risky, if we’re talking about real people? Not to mention life-threatening for anyone who volunteers?”

“Of course it’s risky, but the point is to administer the vaccine quickly enough for it to be effective.”

“And how fast is ‘quickly enough’?” I asked. “Did they also experiment to see how long they could wait before it was too late?”

Noah’s face darkened. “Sorry, Lucie, we really have reached the end of the line about what I can discuss.”

We stared at each other.

“What do they call that?” I said. “A nondenial denial?”

“I’ll walk you back to the parking lot.” He wasn’t going to back down.

I shrugged. “Okay. Thanks for your time.”

“I’ve got one final question for you,” he said. “About Maggie. The newspapers reported exactly what you said Charles told you— the car she was driving went off a bridge into the water off Pontiac Island. She’d been drinking and she shouldn’t have been behind the wheel.”

“That’s right.” We’d already discussed this.

“It wasn’t her car. Couldn’t have been,” he said. “Didn’t Charles ever mention that Maggie didn’t drive, didn’t know how to, didn’t have a license because she grew up in Manhattan?”

“No.”

“Well, there’s your problem right there.” Noah made a clicking sound of disapproval with his tongue. “You ask me, someone else had to be in the car with her that night, even if the police never found any evidence to prove it—the car’d been underwater for hours, anyway. She didn’t drive off the bridge herself because she was too drunk. I think the driver managed to escape but left her there and she died. Either he or she was too scared to report what happened, too drunk, or it was deliberate. Jealousy can be a powerful motivator, my dear, enough to make someone take leave of his senses if he’d been drinking. Wouldn’t be the first time a person was pushed too far when there was a love triangle.” He broke a small dead branch off the dogwood.

I felt like he’d knocked the wind out of me. “You think it was Charles?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she did get in that car and take off. We’re talking about a semiprivate island, not the streets of D.C. The police never charged Charles with anything, so I could be all wet. Or maybe I’m right and Charles Thiessman got away with that, too. I told you, Lucie. The guy is made of Teflon.”