The Devil_s Workshop

Chapter 2

The cab turned off Military Road, past a huge monument sign that read:

The letters were electrified, and the monument sat on a manicured front lawn by the stone-pillared main gate like a misplaced theater marquee. Three flags whipped in a cold April breeze. The American flag stood tallest in the middle; next to it the flag of Fort Detrick and the state flag of Maryland. The main post sat on four hundred acres at the corner of a twelve-hundred-acre government site. The taxi stopped at the gate while a uniformed Marine M. P. with a white helmet and webbed pistol belt told them that Colonel Chittick was officed in Building 810, one block east of Doughton Drive. He handed the driver a map and let them pass.

The buildings that made up the old section of the Fort were four-story dark brick structures that had been originally built in the late forties. They were blocky and rectangular with no design significance. Over the years as the Fort expanded, a startling variety of architectural styles had surfaced: boxy stucco buildings from the fifties, concrete tilt-ups popular in the sixties, followed lately by the steel and glass of the eighties and nineties. Fort Detrick was a huge, grassy, campus-like facility with thousands of personnel, both military and civilian. Max had told her that most of the Fort had been demilitarized in the seventies, when President Nixon had shut down the U. S. bio-weapons program. The Army still maintained a defense bio-research facility that was under strict military controls. There were officers, both men and women, in every uniform of the U. S. Armed Services moving briskly along the cement walkways. There were an equal number of people in white lab coats.

The taxi pulled up in front of Building 810, which was one of the old brick-faced structures. Joanne and Stacy got their bags out of the trunk.

"Thanks," Stacy said, paying the driver, who promptly drove off. She was surprisingly calm, in what she had come to realize was one of her "disconnect" stages. During a disconnect, her mind could deal with Max's death as an abstract fact, as something that had simply happened: Max is gone. I loved Max. He was my reason for being. I'll deal with it. I'm functioning. In this state, these were just thoughts, not devastating downdrafts that threatened to blow her against untenable realities. During her disconnects, she was strangely detached from all of it. Then, just as suddenly, her mind would swell with anguish and those same concepts would threaten to drive her to her knees.

She suspected her disconnects were part of the protective mechanism built deep in her psyche that allowed her to deal with only so much grief at one interval. Then she would click into abstract mode, where, for a few minutes or an hour, she was able to break out of the black and get a few breaths of air before she would be pulled down again.

After the cab drove off, the two of them stood uncertainly in front of Building 810. Now that she was here, looking at the huge military medical facility, her idea that she would go kick ass and find out why Max was dead seemed foolish, if not impossible. Somehow, in her mind, when she had envisioned Fort Detrick, she'd made it small and insignificant, like the wooden fort in F-Troop. The real Fort Detrick was a huge, menacing facility, with monument signs and flags, full of dedicated, bustling professionals. More than a fort, it seemed a fortress.

"So, let's go talk to this guy," Stacy finally said, gathering her resolve as she and Joanne picked up their overnight bags and moved past the monument sign that read: