"I'm going with you," Joanne said.
"I can do it, honey… really."
"He was my big brother. I wanna go with you. I need to go with you."
"I'll book us a flight."
"This is not smart," Wendell said. "The doctors at the Fort can make arrangements to ship Max back here."
"I'm sure they can," Stacy said, spitting the words out like fruit seeds, "but I'm not going to give 'em the chance."
She moved into the pantry, booted up her computer, used her search engine to get to "Airlines," then to "Travel Schedules." She found a nine-p. M. Delta flight that arrived at five A. M. at Dulles Airport in Virginia, which was forty miles from Fort Detrick. She accessed reservations, booked two seats for that evening, typed in her credit card number, and downloaded her confirmation. Then she went into the bathroom, closed the door, sat on the toilet, and stared at herself in the mirror.
She looked drawn and frightened. She studied her eyes and mouth. The reflection didn't look like her. It was a new mask, as if her face had melted, then stretched and dried differently in the heat from this disaster. When the anger left her, she felt the hopeless grief. "Max… Max," she said, wailing at her reflection, "why did you leave me?"
Wendell knocked on the door and called to her.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine," she choked out bravely.
Why do people do that? she wondered. A stupid question followed by a lie.
Ten minutes later, she steeled herself again, then got up off the toilet and moved back into the bedroom, looking at her watch, then at Joanne.
"We'd better hurry if we're going to get all the way to your house, get you packed and back to the airport by eight."
Joanne got up off the bed and they all left the bedroom. Stacy was the last to exit, and she paused for a minute in front of the punching bag. She could picture Max in his pajama bottoms in front of the bag, smiling. "If I hit this thing hard enough everything seems to make sense," he had once told her. So Stacy put down her suitcase and faced the bag. "I'm gonna go kick us some ass, baby," she whispered to his memory. Then she hit the bag as hard as she could.
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:
BUILDING 810
Colonel Chittick's office was on the fourth floor in the corner, and was a large, square room with wood floors, rectangular windows, and a huge desk. His assistant, an Army Captain with red hair and a mustache, showed them into the empty office. On the walls were pictures of different units that Colonel Chittick had been assigned to. In the shots, the men were arranged in rows like football teams. Under each picture were the unit designations.
Stacy was looking at one, labeled:
She was wondering which of the hundred or so men in the shot was Colonel Chittick, when the door opened and a surprisingly handsome fifty-year-old man in an Army Colonel's uniform entered the office. He had silver-gray hair, a square jaw, and beautiful rows of even, white teeth. On his lapels were the winged medical insignias. He was a recruiting poster doctor, she thought, who now wore an appropriate look of troubled sympathy and grief.
"Mrs. Richardson? I'm Colonel Chittick, and I'm so sorry to meet you under these tragic conditions," he said softly, shaking her hand.
"Thank you," she said, and then motioned toward Joanne. "This is Max's sister, Joanne."
The Colonel shook her hand, then nodded his head, a silent genuflection to their grief. "May I offer you a seat?" he said, and led them to the sofa on the far side of the room, which sat under a huge framed Medical Battalion flag.