The Sauvignon Secret

Chapter 21

Pépé was uncharacteristically irritable on the drive home from the Inn so I dropped the subject of Charles until later that evening when we were sitting outside on the veranda after dinner. The idea to visit Noah Seely, an old family friend and one of the Romeos, at his eponymous garden center had been rattling around in my head ever since yesterday when we got home from the airport. Indirectly, I had Quinn to thank for it. He’d left another message on the answering machine at home. I saw the flashing light the moment I walked through the front door.

“I need to talk to you. Call me or else.”

Two nights ago Quinn and I had been together. The next night he’d traded me for Brooke. I punched Delete harder than I needed to, knocking over the mail that had accumulated on the hall table while I was away.

Noah’s slick-looking brochure had landed on top of the pile of bills, catalogs, and credit card offers that skidded across the floor. It was chock-full of news about what he’d been doing on behalf of the good people in our part of the Commonwealth of Virginia as our newly elected state senator in Richmond. There was also a survey, because my opinion mattered to him. I’d set it on the table to fill out later, but that brochure jogged something in my memory this afternoon as we left the Inn after the meeting with Charles.

During World War II, Noah had worked as a government researcher before joining the family business. He’d been in intelligence. It was a long shot, but maybe he knew Charles back then.

I brought it up with Pépé as we were finishing off another bottle of wine and watching the moonrise over the mountains.

I couldn’t recall ever seeing my grandfather drunk—he could hold his liquor better than anyone I knew—but tonight he’d set out to get good and stewed and I left him to it. Hope was upstairs asleep and Eli had gone out to the carriage house to finish some drawings for a client, so the two of us sat there, while the flickering candlelight from the hurricane lamps cast a viscous glow over us like a spell as Pépé smoked cigarette after cigarette, refilling his wineglass as soon as it was empty. Later he switched to cognac. I quit keeping pace with him long before then.

“Maybe Noah knew some of the members of the Mandrake Society,” I said. “He was also involved in the kind of hush-hush medical research they were.”

“Lucie, when you’re part of the intelligence community, the unbreakable rule you learn from day one is that everything is absolutely need to know,” he said. “Even if Noah had the same top-secret clearance Charles and the others did, you don’t discuss your latest project in the staff cafeteria over lunch. In English, it’s called SCI, sensitive compartmented information.”

“Fair enough, but I don’t care who you are and how many walled-off secrets you keep, who is sleeping with whom—especially if one of the people involved is married—is definitely fodder for gossip. And that does get discussed in the cafeteria or around the office coffeepot or in the bar after work.”

“It was a long time ago.” He stared into his wineglass. “And you can be sure Charles did his absolute best to keep it quiet. Even Theo didn’t know about him and Maggie.”

The wine was making him morose, melancholy.

“It’s worth asking Noah.”

“If you like.”

He was lost in his own thoughts, barely aware of my presence.

I dropped the subject and went to bed at midnight, planting a kiss on his head and telling him with as much tact as I could that I hoped he wouldn’t be up too late. At two I came back downstairs to check on him. From the doorway I could see his elongated shadow in the diminished light of the guttering candles and the white curl of smoke from yet another Gauloise. A glass clinked against another glass and I knew he was probably pouring more cognac. I nearly went outside to try to coax him into calling it a night, but I wasn’t sure I could bear seeing him as anything less than my strong, resolute grandfather—not shattered and grieving as he was now. Not for Charles, for whom I think he now had nothing but angry contempt, but for Juliette whom he loved but couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell her what he knew about her husband.

Much later I heard the creaky treads on the spiral staircase—only Eli, Mia, and I knew how to avoid the noisy ones, a skill honed as teenagers sneaking in or out after our curfews—and the faint crack the walnut banister made when someone leaned too heavily on it, as he slowly climbed the stairs in the dark. I lifted my head off my pillow so I could see the clock on my bedside table: four fifteen. Then I heard the click of his bedroom door closing, and not even the thinnest blade of light shining through the cracks into the hall.

After that, silence.

I drove over to Seely’s Garden Center Friday morning first thing after breakfast, hoping to catch Noah in his rabbit-warren office in the alcove behind the customer service desk. Later he’d probably join up with the Romeos for lunch or happy hour at one of their many watering holes, and in between he’d drop by a senior citizens’ center or visit some local business in his post-retirement job as our state senator. But I needed to talk to him when he was alone, not knee-deep in Romeos or constituents.

Virginia is a state that invokes the death penalty, and I’m not going to go into the politics and morality of how and why my home state—the place I grew up in and love fiercer than anywhere on earth—got there; it just is what it is. Noah was staunchly against capital punishment; an integral part of his campaign platform had been his promise to work to get it revoked in the Commonwealth.

I didn’t find out the real reason behind his passion and commitment until a couple of the Romeos explained it one night in the bar of the Goose Creek Inn. During the war, Noah’s research had involved testing the effectiveness of newly discovered antibiotics on human subjects. It later came out that some of the “volunteers”—prisoners and inmates in mental institutions—had been deliberately infected with awful diseases and, in the case of sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, prostitutes had been used in the government’s service.

Noah finally couldn’t take it anymore—playing God and sacrificing one life to save others was wrong to him, whatever the noble motivation, so he left to take over the nursery from his father, a world of plants and trees and flowers that grew and flourished with the seasons, things that lived and brought beauty and pleasure. At Christmas, he dressed up as Santa Claus for as long as anyone could remember. Everyone under the age of fifty who lived in Atoka, Middleburg, and Leesburg, including Eli, Mia, me, and now Hope, had sat on his lap as a child, confiding our wished-for gifts, promising we’d been good all year.

Seely’s Garden Center is a sprawling, luxurious place located at the intersection of Sam Fred Road and the Snickersville Turnpike in Middleburg, not far from where Goose Creek continues its meandering path toward the Potomac River. Even at nine o’clock in the morning, it was alive and busy with a few early-bird customers and staff taking care of the ritual morning chores of watering and dead-heading bedding plants, weeding display gardens, and sweeping the flagstone patios and walkways.

The main building looked like a cross between a log cabin and a barn, a big airy place that smelled of the tang of fertilizer and the steamy, vaguely tropical odor of hundreds of hothouse plants in the large adjacent greenhouse. A young girl working at a cash register told me Noah was in his office doing paperwork. His door was ajar so I knocked.

“Come!”

He pushed up a pair of reading glasses so they rested on his tanned, bald head and sat back in his chair as I walked in. “Lucie, my dear, how nice to see you. It’s been awhile. What can I do for you?”

Noah and my mother had worked closely together many years ago when she set out to restore the blighted gardens at Highland House, and later when she tackled more substantial landscaping projects at the vineyard and the Ruins. With the tens of thousands of dollars we’d spent at Seely’s over the years, anytime anyone in my family or a vineyard employee came by, we got VIP treatment. But asking Noah to talk about the painful subject of his involvement in carrying out gruesome lab experiments on prisoners, albeit in the name of medical advancement that would prevent future deaths and suffering, wasn’t the same as asking for advice on the color palette for the summer flowers in the courtyard.

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.”