Demons (30 page)

“You see that license plate?” Glyneth asked casually. “That sequence—G-two-four-four—that’s typical of certain kinds of government vehicles. Pentagon research.”

Stephen looked at her. “How do you know that?”

She shrugged. “I did some checking once, about military research programs, for a paper I was writing. The information cropped up on the Internet. I almost went in to government research chemistry instead of private.”

She said it, then looked quickly away, and Stephen thought,
She’s lying.

But that lie had been seamlessly delivered. Why was he so sure of it?

He heard a slam, and glanced out the window to see that the back doors of the van were closed now, the van moving away down the alley, and Dickinham was returning. He opened the passenger-side door and reached past Stephen to the glove compartment. “Just need my cell phone a second . . . here it is.” He hit a speed-dialed number and put the phone to his ear. “Crocker? Why are the boys in green here already? Well, it’s broad daylight, for one thing, and they’re taking subjects for—” He paused, seemed to feel Stephen listening. Shot a cold look at him, then closed the car door and walked away, talking on the cell phone, gesturing vigorously.

“Something confidential,” Glyneth murmured. “We speak no evil if we hear no evil, I guess. We learn not to see it. I wonder if we can
feel
it.”

Stephen looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“Just thinking out loud. Anyway, there was a rumor going around the observatory . . .” She looked at him blankly. “The rumor is that Dirvane 17 wasn’t really developed as a pesticide.”

“What, then?”

“I’m not sure. The people who were hinting about it were pretty mysterious themselves. But, you know, lots of pesticides are chemically related to nerve gas. Some of them were basically nerve gas
first
: Diazinon, for example, which people’ve used since the last century, is an organophosphate—one of the neurotoxins developed during World War II. I thought maybe . . .”

Stephen stared at her, then turned to peer around at the interior of the Hummer.

She raised her eyebrows. “What are you looking for?”

“Cameras, maybe one of those flying cams . . . they make them so small now.” He turned back to her, a little sheepish. “I thought you had to be pulling my leg, and Winderson was going to appear again, projected into the car—‘You bought that one too, huh, Stephen?’ Or maybe he’d just be watching.”

She stared, then shrugged and turned to watch Dickinham, who was returning. “I wasn’t kidding, but I was just speculating. I mean—people talk. I don’t worry about it. This job is all about going with the flow.”

“Go with the flow? But—people would be dying in the streets if Dirvane 17 were nerve gas. They—they’ve sprayed the stuff all around the town.”

“I don’t think it’s nerve gas
exactly
. They also experiment with— Actually, we shouldn’t be talking about this.” She changed the subject. “So, how do you like your new office?”

“What office would that be?” Stephen asked, as Dickinham got back in, looking grim.

“Oh, that’s right,” Glyneth said blithely. Her manner changed around Dickinham. She smirked at Stephen, “You haven’t seen your executive suite yet.”

“No need to be sarcastic, young lady,” said Dickinham, buckling his seat belt. “It’s just a cubby in the building attached to the observatory, Steve. Just temporary, but this whole operation out here is temporary.”

“So what was up with the van?” Stephen asked.

Dickinham waved dismissively. “Just . . . one of our teams, jumping the gun.”

“It looked like there was someone—the guy with long hair—trying to get out?”

Dickinham started the vehicle but didn’t put it into gear. “Him? Oh, he’s one of the local yokels, ran into the D17 seepage pond. We’re going to detox him just to be on the safe side. Wouldn’t want anyone . . . you know. He was drunk, is all—not really trying to get away. Listen—hand me my fries, will you? And, uh, when we get back, speaking of detoxing, we all ought to go through the regimen—special shower, the whole trip.”

“Special shower?” Glyneth said, straight-faced. “That sounds kinky.”

Dickinham snorted and shook his head. “One in every crowd.”

“Have we been exposed to anything dangerous?” Stephen asked, trying to sound as if he weren’t really worried about it.

“No, no . . . It’s in the nature of a drill. Part of the experience you’re supposed to be getting . . . all part of the program . . . We—” He broke off.

A group of people marched toward them through the park. They were led by a man in a long black coat and muddy boots, who was gesticulating wildly: a man with a bubble instead of a head.

As they got closer, Stephen saw that the bubble was a transparent helmet, like the toy space-suit helmets little kids sometimes wore. But this wasn’t a toy. He’d seen other models before, in highly polluted areas. There was a filtration unit located just below the chin; toxins were separated from air, excessive water vapor was vented, keeping the inside of the helmet from misting over. There was a voice-amplification device of some kind so you could hear the wearer clearly.

“Is that one of those new helmet cell phones?” Glyneth asked.

Stephen knew what she meant. People who wanted cell phone privacy sometimes wore helmets. Heads-up displays showed e-mail and the like.

“No,” Stephen said. “I’m pretty sure that’s an air-filtration helmet.”

The man also wore rubber gloves. The five people trailing along with him—two old women, an elderly Hispanic man, a young teenage couple—wore gloves and other, more-compact filtration masks.

The man in the helmet seemed to notice the hydro Hummer, and he changed course, making a beeline for it. “It’s that lunatic, Reverend Anthony,” Dickinham muttered.

“If he’s a lunatic, perhaps we should beat a strategic retreat,” Glyneth suggested.

“No. I want to know what the son of a bitch is up to.”

Stephen glanced at the frowning Dickinham. Why should he care what some street crazy was doing?

Reverend Anthony stopped, about five feet away from the car, his back to the part of the cloudy sky that hid the sun. The brightness leaking through the clouds transformed his bubble helmet into a halo as he glowered through the glass at them. He had thinning red hair, a wide, flexible mouth, weariness-smudged blue eyes—a big-boned face that had once been pudgy, Stephen supposed, now looked gaunt. When he spoke, he exposed gapped teeth, and he pointed with a rubber-gloved hand.

“You are here to witness for
your
Lord, are you? Well I am here to witness, as well, friends! I witness for the Good Lord and Him only! Who will you testify for, West Windies?” There was a Southern twang to his voice—maybe Louisianan.

Dickinham snorted, and powered his window halfway down. “Mr. Perry Anthony—I was about to say reverend but then I remembered . . .”

The street preacher became very still.

“That you’ve been—what do you call it?—defrocked, right?” Dickinham went on mockingly. “Got your church taken away. What happened? Get too friendly with the church’s children? Maybe somebody’s wife?”

“They called me a
heretic
, friend,” Reverend Anthony said softly, but his voice was tense and electronically amplified. “Because I said that the demons were not the coming of the End Times . . . because I said they were the works of men. BecauseI said they
were
men, men who were joined with demons!”His voice got louder with each phrase. “Because I said that the Cursed Spirit was clever enough to work through men, and that men were evil enough to do his work, with so little encouragement! And later, when churchfolk changed their story, when they took the government’s money to convince us it was all a hallucination—why, sir, I
denounced
them!

“For a deceit the demons were—but they were also real, raging through this world! I will witness the truth! Many are the false prophets—few there are who speak with the spirit! I told my superiors that they slept—they slept and they sinned in their sleep, friends!” He underscored every phrase with a jab of his fist in the air. “They said I was mad to demand a wakening every morning, that I was mad to shout Wake up! Wake up! through the streets. The day for making the choice is always here, and
EVERY DAY IS JUDGMENT DAY!
”—

Dickinham was laughing now, shaking his head, and then there was a loud thump on the hood of the car. A seagull—they were only ten miles inland—had fallen from the sky. The bird was flapping frantically in death throes, on the hood, its broken wings a sorrowful asymmetry, its cracked beak oozing blood.

“Oh, God,” Glyneth breathed.

Anthony’s followers drew back, gasping, murmuring, as Anthony pointed at the dying bird.

“I witness for the Good Lord!
Behold!
The poisoners serve their dark master and they sicken the world—like the sickness of sin in their souls, they spread poison over the world, and the Good Lord’s blessed creation withers and dies!”

Stephen saw an odd movement from the corner of his eye—a squirrel on a tree trunk in the park. It was hanging on to the trunk by its front claws, the rest of its body was twitching, spasming. It managed to get a grip with its hind paws, went a few feet farther up, stopped, shaking its head violently—then fell, dying convulsively in the grass at the base of the tree.

“Dickinham,” Stephen whispered, “do me a favor: Roll up that window.”

“BEHOLD!”
the erstwhile Reverend Anthony shouted, turning up his helmet amplifier, so his voice boomed and echoed like the voice of God. “ ‘BY THEIR FRUITS YOU SHALL KNOW THEM!’ They sicken the Earth! Behold!”

Dickinham grinned at the preacher—a strained, skullish grin—gave him the finger, put the vehicle in gear, and drove hurriedly away.

It wasn’t until that evening, alone at his laptop in his Bald Peak cubby, that Stephen began to ask himself in earnest why Glyneth had talked so frankly about the Dirvane 17 rumors. She was his assistant—wasn’t she afraid of getting fired, for being loose lipped about such things? Might she have been planted to test his loyalty? Did they suspect he was some kind of bleeding heart?

The questions came seething up in his mind as he skimmed through the material she’d sent him, a file beamed from her palmer . . .

In 1931, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations injected human subjects with cancerous cells. The Institute’s Dr. Cornelius Rhoads later set up the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities. Later still, working for the Atomic Energy Commission, he initiated radiation exposure experiments both on soldiers and civilian hospital patients—the subjects had little or no understanding of what they were being subjected to.

In the 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 200 black men diagnosed with syphilis were not told of the diagnosis and were denied treatment. They were used as lab subjects in a study of the progress of the disease. They all died from syphilis. They could have been successfully treated.

In 1946, patients in Veterans’ Affairs hospitals were utilized for medical experiments. Scientists were ordered to say “investigations” or “observations” instead of “experiments” when discussing the study.

In 1947, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission issued the highly secret Document 07075001, which blandly noted that the agency would begin injecting doses of radioactive substances into uninformed human guinea pigs. . . . Also that year the CIA began studying LSD as a possible weapon. Human subjects were subjected to the powerful drug either without their knowledge or without a clear understanding of the risks—risks known to the administrators of the experiment.

In 1950, the Department of Defense began to detonate nuclear bombs—and to monitor people living downwind for resultant illnesses and radiation-induced mortality. It is assumed the DoD knew there would be a measurable increase of such consequences in the American citizens downwind of the blasts.

In 1950, the U.S. Navy deliberately discharged a cloud of bacteria from ships so that it would drift over San Francisco. The city was monitored by devices, which could be safely checked later, to see how far the infection spread. A significant number of San Franciscans fell sick with apparent pneumonia.

In 1951, the DOD started its own open-air tests of disease-producing bacteria and viruses. The tests continued through 1969. Subsequent investigators believe that people in the areas around the open-air testing were exposed—no one knows for sure how many sickened and died as a result of the tests.

In a 1953 test of chemical warfare capability, theU.S. military sprayed clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide onto various cities including Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia. The long-term health consequences of the tests are not definitely known.