“I saw a wineglass with the same design on it the other day, but you know that already, don’t you?” I said in a curt voice. “Where did you get these? They look like old glasses, not the inexpensive ones we give out as souvenirs at the winery.”
“Lucie—” Pépé cautioned me.
“They are,” Charles said. “I haven’t used these glasses in more than forty years.”
“Why tonight? A celebration? Or is it in memoriam? And shouldn’t we be drinking Sauvignon Blanc?”
Charles’s mouth tightened. “You’re right,” he said. “The Margaux will have to do. It’s from the correct year.”
I looked at the bottle. “What happened in 1970?”
“I’ll get to that. Now, please, have a seat.”
He waited until Pépé took one of the leather chairs and I sat on the sofa before he sat down in the other wing chair. The fire flickered merrily.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” My grandfather indicated a large glass ashtray on the coffee table.
I’d noticed it earlier. The White House logo was etched into the glass, probably a souvenir from another era, in the days when nobody minded if the president lit up and dinners ended with brandy and cigars in one of the formal state rooms.
Charles pushed the ashtray over to Pépé. “Be my guest. Juliette doesn’t come here. She’s absolutely against tobacco, and don’t get her started on hunting.”
He smiled without amusement and raised his glass. “Thank you both for indulging me.”
Pépé and I raised our glasses in silence. The wine was out of this world.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and I’d appreciate it if you would let me tell it my way. I promise I’ll answer all your questions when I’m finished.”
Pépé snapped his lighter shut and it made a little metal clink. He slipped it in his pocket and took a drag on his cigarette, closing his eyes. I kicked off my sandals, tucking my feet under my long dress and laying my pashmina across my lap like a blanket. Pépé’s jacket was still around my shoulders and I pulled it close. Charles settled back into his chair and receded into the shadows.
“In 1970, Nixon was still in the White House,” he said, “but it wouldn’t be long before he got mired in Watergate and it brought him down. We were still in Vietnam, the ’68 riots had ended but they still left vivid scars on the national conscience, and the war, which had ended Johnson’s presidency, was more unpopular than ever. Nixon wanted to get us out of there and he did, calling it ‘peace with honor.’ Our worst enemies were the Sovs and it was the height of the Cold War.”
Pépé crossed one leg over the other and exhaled a stream of smoke. Like Charles, he’d lived through these years. The history lesson was clearly for my education.
“I was a history major in college,” I said. “So I did read about all this, you know.”
Charles made a small noise and Pépé chuckled.
“Ah.” Charles’s voice was dry. “Ancient history?”
“Prehistoric.”
“I see,” he said after a moment. “ ‘I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.’ Do you know who said that, history major?”
“You?”
“Patrick Henry.”
“ ‘Give me liberty or give me death’?”
“The same. A Virginian. A Founding Father. The lesson applies now, too.”
“You’ll explain that?” I said. “I won’t need to.” He sipped his wine. “In 1970, I was the Deputy Director for OSPR.”
“English, please,” I said. “For the uninitiated?”
“The Office of Strategic Programming and Research. Later it went under the Pentagon’s umbrella, so it became DOSPR. D for ‘Defense.’ Dosper was one of the most nimble and competent agencies in the federal government. The jewel in the Defense Department’s crown. You wanted something done, that was the place to go. No bureaucratic red tape to snarl you, no congressional hearing to ask permission first. We had carte blanche to make it rain.”
“How convenient,” I said. “What exactly did this organization do?”
“Oh, remnants of it still exist. But the original program was started in the late fifties, when the Sovs caught us off guard with Sputnik. They beat us in the space race and we had no clue what was up their little Commie sleeves. You can’t imagine how devastating that was.”
Pépé nodded and I stared at both of them, wondering what it must have been like during the years when our former World War II ally had become the “Evil Empire” and people like Charles called the Russians “Commies” and “Sovs” like something out of an old spy movie.
Charles drank his wine. “So in order for us never to fall behind, and for that never to happen again, we set up a sort of freewheeling think tank of creative people who spent their days playing military what-if and then figuring out how to invent the technology. You’ve benefited from some of the results … advancements like global positioning systems, voice-recognition software, things like that. It wasn’t just building things that went boom or the next James Bond–type toy to put in the arsenal. The sign on the door to my office was a quote from Einstein: ‘If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.’ ”
He shifted in his chair. No one laughed.
“The wine is really opening nicely, isn’t it?” He stared into his glass. “Still got some life in it after all these years.”
I nodded, wishing he’d get on with it. Charles was leading up to something important, but at this rate we’d still be here tomorrow morning.
“You were saying about your position with OSPR?” I asked. “Or DOSPR?”
Charles fixed his gaze on the fire. “I’m getting to that, what I did. R & D is the heart of playing what-if. You have conventional warfare—soldiers fighting each other on a battlefield—and then you have unconventional warfare,” he said. “Both are as old as time. People have been using some variant of biological and chemical weapons in wartime as far back as the ancient Greeks.”
Pépé sat up straighter in his chair. I’d been about to take a sip of my wine, but I stopped and uneasily waited for him to go on. Charles had changed the direction of this conversation with as much subtlety as shifting tectonic plates.
“Unconventional warfare took a different direction in the twentieth century, gassing troops in the trenches during the First World War to name one of the most graphic examples,” he said. “Then during World War II the use of airplanes to drop bombs that would cause widespread destruction took what-if to the next level. What if you could fill a bomb with some pathogen or crop agent and drop it over a city or farmland? You wouldn’t destroy buildings, but the damage would be incalculable. Think of how many people you could sicken or kill, wiping out food supplies for decades because you’d poisoned the soil, how paralyzing it would be to a country.”
He saw my eyes widen. “I’m not talking about the good guys, Lucie. Imagine the Nazis with that technology and you live in Paris or London in the 1940s knowing there’s a goddamn bull’s-eye painted on your back on a war room map in Berchtesgaden.”
“Go on, Charles,” Pépé said. “Lucie and I are listening.”
Charles sipped his wine. “Where was I? Oh, yes, the U.S. had its own programs—biological and chemical warfare—all conducted in the utmost secrecy. Then the war ended and things started to wind down. I’m going to fast-forward through some of this, but in the aftermath of the war there was a massive ethical and moral debate about whether to continue or abandon something so heinous, so reprehensible to the American psyche. That was what the politicians and civilian leaders wrestled with. So the military decided to move the program under its own tent, though by then we had field-tested the A-bomb and discovered that it worked.”