THEN
FORT DETRICK
FREDERICK, MARYLAND
DECEMBER 18, 1986
“The Pentagon is extremely impressed with your primate trials, Doctor LaVelle,” said Benjamin Greve from his usual position behind the desk in the back office.
Maureen sat stiffly in her chair. After dozens of meetings with the man over the past two-plus years she remained uncomfortable in his cold, serpentine presence.
“The Pentagon? The whole Pentagon? I thought this was hush-hush.”
Greve’s laugh sounded more like a cough. “Of course not the whole Pentagon. Only a handful of higher-ups are even aware of the existence of melis; even fewer know what it can do.”
Well, she was a long way from knowing all it could do, but Maureen had proven beyond a doubt that it increased the intelligence of the offspring of melis-treated squirrel monkeys and macaques. Thirty percent increase in the former, and a good fifty percent in the latter.
“We’ve still got a ways to go.”
She’d spent over two years now working with melis and monkeys. Their gestation and developmental periods were so much longer than rats and mice and she found that frustrating. Too much waiting around before the monks were ready for testing.
“A ways to go till when?” Greve said.
“Well, I assume human trials are dancing in someone’s head down there in Arlington.”
“Like visions of sugarplums.”
Knew it. She’d suspected all along where melis was headed and wasn’t sure she wanted to be a part of it. Making monkeys smarter, fine. Making children smarter, fine, but not without knowing the mechanism of how their intelligence increased. They’d done all sorts of scans, and even sacrificed a number of the melis offspring without finding any discernible changes.
“Well,” she said, “they’ll all just have to wait until we do chimp studies, and we haven’t even started those.”
Greve tapped the desk. “We’re bypassing chimps and going straight to humans.”
Maureen stiffened in her chair. “You can’t do that! It’s too soon.”
“The higher-ups are impatient. We’re all primates and since there’s been not a single complication with the monkeys—”
“Moneys and humans occupy two entirely separate branches of evolution. You can’t extrapolate.”
“Well, it’s not your decision. A small trial has been set in motion. We will be using federal prisoners.”
“You mean pregnant federal prisoners.” Maureen felt queasy.
“Of course. That’s the whole point.”
“How are you going to get them to agree? Shorten their sentences?”
His eyes widened behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Agree? Only a handful of people will know about this, certainly not the prisoners.”
Maureen couldn’t believe this. “They won’t know they’re being dosed?”
Greve gave her an are-you-crazy? look. “Tell them we’re going to try to change the brains of their unborn babies? Of course not. Some of them wouldn’t care, but none of them can be trusted to keep their mouths shut.”
“But what if something goes wrong?”
“Nothing will go wrong.”
“But what if it does?”
A wry twist to his lips. “Well, it’s hardly a big loss, if you know what I’m saying.”
Maureen shot from her seat. “I know exactly what you’re saying, and I’m out of here.”
“That’s not an option,” Greve said as she marched toward the door.
“Watch me.” She pulled it open and found the hulking, ever-lurking MP blocking her way. “Let me by!”
Behind her, Greve said, “You can’t opt out, Doctor LaVelle. You’re in too deep. You may be an independent civilian contractor, but that doesn’t mean DoD can’t ruin your life. You have no idea how miserable your future can be.”
She kept her back to him. “I’ll deal with it.”
“Come, come. I don’t like to use threats. I much prefer the carrot to the stick.”
“You haven’t got a carrot for this.”
“How about the origin of Substance A … your melis?”
She turned to face him. “Don’t try lying to me. You said I wasn’t cleared.”
“You weren’t, but I anticipated resistance on your part, so I finagled a clearance for you. I told the powers that be that you already knew more about the substance than anyone on the planet and so it was only right you be apprised of its origin.”
She wanted so much to know. However …
“That’s all well and good, but it won’t make a difference.”
“Ah, but it will. Once you know, you’ll change your mind.”
Maureen very much doubted that. Even if melis came from Mars or the Moon, she wasn’t going to test it on unborn children.
She folded her arms across her chest. “Okay. Tell me.”
“Oh, I can’t tell you. Words are completely inadequate where Substance A is concerned. I’ll have to show you.”
“And when will that be?”
He rose behind his desk and gathered his papers. “Today. Right now, in fact. I have a car ready.”
Nonplussed, Maureen took a step back. “Wait … what … now?”
“Yes. I’m not letting you out of my sight until you’ve seen the source. After that, you’ll be on board.”
Don’t count on it, buster. She’d play along, see the source, and then it would be sayonara, Fort Detrick and USAMRMC.
Greve did indeed have a car ready—a big black Suburban with tinted windows. The driver held the door for her; Greve let himself in on the passenger side. When the doors were closed, the dark tint reduced the bright daylight outside to a moonlit night. A similarly tinted privacy glass had been raised between the front and rear seats.
“Where are we going?” she said as they started rolling. “The Pentagon?”
“I can’t tell you,” Greve said and handed her something. “Put this on.”
“A mask? No way.”
“Cooperate and graduate, Maureen.”
He’d never used her first name before. It put her off balance. And on edge. Her few friends called her Moe. No one called her Maureen.
“You have such a way with words, Agent Greve.” She hit the designation extra hard.
“I’m not playing games here. You’re cleared to see the source but not to know where we keep it.”
She wondered what he’d do if she tossed it back at him and told him to shove it. But she’d never been the rebellious type. And she wanted to see the source of melis—needed to know its origin.
“Oh, all right.”
She slipped the padded sleep mask over her head and adjusted it. Not so bad.
“Lean back, relax,” he said. “Catch some shut-eye if you want. We’ve got three hours to kill.”
She was too wired to sleep.
Three hours from Frederick, Maryland … that covered a lot of ground, especially if she couldn’t tell which direction they were headed. Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Richmond, West Virginia, Ohio—could be anywhere.
“I’m too wound up to sleep.”
“All right, then. I’ll use the time to tell you what we’re planning—what we started planning as soon as we heard about your results with the maze rats. I’m talking about big, intricate plans, and the need to keep everything secret—funding, personnel, locations—only complicates the process.”
Secret … in her years at Detrick she’d heard whispers of rogue operations financed by so-called black funds. This was probably one of those, or maybe a mix of black and legit. How could it be anything but rogue if they were messing with the brains of unborn babies?
“The operation has been dubbed ‘Synapse,’ ” Greve said.
“Synapse—as in the connection between neurons?”
“Exactly.”
It made a weird sort of sense, especially since melis had improved rat brains, and what were brains but networks of synapses? But that made it a lousy name for a covert operation.
“ ‘Synapse’ gives away the farm, don’t you think? Anyone who hears it is immediately going to think nervous system or brain.”
“You and I think alike, LaVelle.”
Well, at least he wasn’t using her first name. She did not want to be on a first-name basis with this man. And, truth be told, she wanted even less to think like him.
“Oh?”
“I had the same objection, but those above me are locked into the name. Apparently the more dramatic the name, the easier the funding.”
“ ‘Operation Synapse’ ” she said, not holding back on the sarcasm. “Someone’s been reading too many spy novels.”
“So it would seem. The project, along with most of its funding and personnel, is buried within another bigger, older project. But nothing is untraceable. With ARPANET and DDN growing by leaps and bounds, the name can’t help but get out there. If the wrong somebody gets wind of ‘Synapse’ and decides to investigate, some sensitive information might come to light.”
“Like this mysterious source I’m going to see?”
“Exactly.”
What the hell was the source? The anticipation was killing her.
“Plus other experiments down the road,” he added.
“Like what?”
“We’re taking it all step by step. But I came up with a solution.”
Something that felt like a business card was shoved into her hand.
“What’s this?”
“Lift the lower edge of your mask and take a brief look.”
Maureen did as she was bid and saw …
“I get it,” she said, readjusting the mask into place. “A graphic for a synapse.”
“Precisely. But would you have guessed ‘synapse’ had we not been discussing the term?”
“Doubt it.” It looked like a spoon.
“Neither would anyone else. After talking myself blue in the face, I managed to convince the higher-ups to limit all communications about Synapse to paper—absolutely no Internet—and even on paper to use only the symbol, never the word. Therefore, in the future, when you receive a file or any sort of communication marked with that symbol, you’ll know what it references.”
These spooks … they loved their games.
“No worry,” she told him. “I’m not going to be involved in Synapse.”
They fell into silence and time dragged. Maureen tried to figure if they were heading north, south, east, or west, but the car had made too many turns. Then she had an idea.
“If I can’t watch the scenery, can we at least have some music?”
“No.”
“Hey, I’m the one in the mask.”
“First, I’ve experienced your top-forty taste on visits to your lab and don’t share it. Second, the call letters of the stations will let you know our route.”
Damn. Greve was no dummy.
The trip seemed to last a lot longer than three hours in subjective time. But finally the car stopped and the engine turned off.
“Not yet,” Greve said as she reached for the mask.
She was helped from the car—by the driver, she assumed—and told to walk ten feet straight ahead and stop. She felt a breeze and heard rustling tree branches all around. She smelled pines. She was in the woods somewhere. Not a terribly specific locator, but something. After the ten steps she heard doors latch closed behind her.
Greve said, “Okay, you can remove the mask.”
Even though the overhead fluorescents weren’t all that bright, she blinked in the unaccustomed light. She found herself in some sort of Quonset hut, maybe twenty by forty. Greve, the driver, and two burly men in grease-stained coveralls stood watching her. The new guys were trying to look like mechanics but had security written all over them. A huge cabinet labeled PARTS dominated the center of the hut that was otherwise littered with fenders, engines, transmissions, and such.
Was Greve going to tell her they’d found melis in a Ford crankcase?
“This is it?” she said.
“Hardly.”
Greve signaled to one of the security men, who pulled opened the doors on the cabinet to reveal another set of doors. He pushed a button and they slid back to reveal …
“An elevator?”
Greve motioned her forward and followed her inside. The control panel had two unlabeled buttons. He hit the lower one. The doors closed and they began to descend.
“Can I at least know what state I’m going to be under?”
“No.”
“Okay, how about how far under?”
“Fifty feet.”
The elevator cab stopped and they stepped out into a damp concrete corridor that seemed to go on a long, long way. A single row of solitary incandescent bulbs, one hung every twenty feet or so, trailed along the ceiling into the distance. The tunnel had an old feel, like it had been built during the Cold War or before. The ceiling was only eight feet high, lending it a cramped feel despite its length.
Greve indicated one of the four golf carts parked to the side. They got in and he drove them a good half mile to a set of doors where more carts were parked.
“Another elevator?”
“No. This is the bunker for a project you will learn about on a need-to-know basis. Right now you don’t need to know.”
He tapped a five-digit code into a keypad and the doors slid open with a low rumble. He ushered her through, then, after another tapped code to close the doors, he led the way down a well-lit, low-ceilinged hallway lined with rows of doors standing open on empty rooms.
“This used to be quite a bustling project but much of the original research here ground to a halt when …” His voice trailed off.
“When what?”
“Since they discovered the source of your melis … Substance A.”
At the far end of the hall they stopped before a heavy steel door with a small window of very thick glass. Black and yellow chevrons surrounded an ominous sign:
WARNING
RESTRICTED AREA
NO ADMITTANCE
Maureen couldn’t help a sense of foreboding. She pointed to the door. “And the source is in there?”
“Yes. Prepare yourself. Whatever you’re expecting, you’re wrong.”
Now her gut was crawling. “It’s something horrible?”
“Depends on your frame of mind. It’s simply … different.”
He pushed open the door and led her into a large rectangular space with a higher ceiling—fifteen feet at least. On her right, a bank of ancient, inert electronic equipment jutted into the room. Were those really vacuum tubes? The walls straight ahead and to her right were lined with banks of more modern equipment blinking various colors.
Greve led her around the bank of antique electronics and pointed to a square, floor-to-ceiling, glass-walled chamber, maybe ten feet on a side. And within …
Maureen didn’t know what she’d been expecting. Melis was the most confounding substance on this and perhaps any other world. She’d been expecting the unexpected and the inexplicable, but she hadn’t foreseen this. She’d thought she was prepared for just about anything, but she couldn’t help the scream that escaped her.