Michael Baden - Remains Silent

The movement of her hands had gone from the rpm of a propeller to the speed of a failing engine. “Manny, what’s the matter?” asked Jake.

“I’m fine. Do you get yourself checked for diseases?”

He looked down at her. She’s serious. “Everyone I autopsy is tested for AIDS.”

“That’s comforting,” she chirped, trying to restart the moment. But there was that autopsy image again, in front of her, as if she were hallucinating. “Aren’t you a little old for me?”

“You won’t be able to keep up.”

I love a challenge. “Okay,” she whispered, but he didn’t hear her.

She was awakened by the ringing of his cell phone. Jake leaped out of bed and grabbed it.

“Hello?… Hans… Yes, I’m fine… Now?… Brooklyn?… Can’t you tell me on the phone?… Okay, okay, I understand. The diner near the lab… Give me an hour… Bye.”

He sat next to Manny and kissed her hair, grateful to her in ways he knew he could never express. “How would you like to go to Brooklyn for breakfast?”

HANS GALT was seated at a back booth in the diner, drumming his fingers impatiently on the tabletop. He was a tiny man with fierce eyes under steel-rimmed glasses, a face like a ferret, and graying black hair. He grunted a hello to Jake and glanced suspiciously at Manny, even when Jake said he could trust her with any secret. Before he spoke, he glanced around the room; it was deserted save for a waiter who took their orders for coffee.

He leaned toward them, a finger to his lips. “Experiments,” he said.

“What?” said Manny.

“The radioactivity,” Jake said, feeling a swell of anger. “Someone was using live people?”

Hans nodded. “It’s not just the radioactivity. There’s a lot more. But let’s start with the humerus.”

Jake looked at Manny, who was sitting with her mouth slightly open, breathing rapidly, entranced by this brilliant little man who had shared secrets with him on so many cases in the past. She’s beyond beautiful. “Okay, start there.”

“You know I worked for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The humerus contains a higher level of radiation than anything I saw there: strontium ninety. By the nineteen fifties we knew it was one of the most deadly carcinogens on the planet. It still is. Even a minuscule amount can cause bone cancer, leukemia, and soft-tissue malignancies called sarcomas.”

He addressed this last to Manny, professor to student. “And the humerus?” she asked.

“Contains more than a minuscule amount. It has a half-life of twenty-nine years, but it can be active in the body for many decades.”

“Terrifying,” she said. “Where would it come from?”

“Terrorists,” Jake answered, “governments-”

“And scientists who make bombs,” Hans finished. “It’s in the fallout of exploded nuclear devices.”

Manny was mystified. “But they weren’t making nuclear devices at Turner. It’s a mental hospital.”

“They weren’t making them there,” Hans said, “but maybe they were testing their effects.”

“Human guinea pigs,” she breathed.

Hans seemed almost pleased. “It gets worse. We found other things in the samples. The hair of Skeletons Two and Three contained mescaline- again, high levels- and also lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD. And in the hair of Skeleton Four, the woman, there was no LSD but there was mescaline in an amount a hundred times greater than in the other two.”

Manny had some expertise. “I know mescaline occurs naturally in the peyote plant and can be synthetically made, and its mind-altering effects can be enhanced by the use of other chemicals. But why at Turner?”

“How do you know so much about drugs?” Jake asked.

“Represented a Native American in a freedom-of-religion case. Used drugs in their rituals.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” He turned to Hans. “Did you do a segmental analysis?”

“What’s that?” asked Manny.

“Body hair is a storehouse for drugs,” Jake explained. “Head hair grows about half an inch a month, so we can determine not only if there are drugs or poison present but also when and how many times the substance was taken and in what quantities.” He picked off one of her long hairs from her sweat suit and held it to the light. “With this, I could find out every drug you’ve taken in the last two years.”

She threw up her hands. “Innocent!”

“The segmental analysis revealed that Skeletons Two and Three had been getting mescaline for months,” Hans continued, oblivious to the byplay. “But Skeleton Four only started receiving it within the last few weeks of her life. She must have been given massive doses.”

Manny shuddered. “Poor, poor woman. I’m calling Patrice. She’s got to let me go on with the investigation.”

“If she doesn’t agree, we have enough to go after them ourselves.”

“You have more,” Hans said. “In Skeleton One: osteomyelitis in the hand bone.”

“Bone infection,” Jake said.

“The DNA obtainable from the osteomyelitic cavity is from bacteria, Serratia marcescens, but a very virulent type of Serratia, one I’ve never seen before.”

“Holy shit!” Jake’s eyes were wide.

“Explain,” Manny said.

“It’s a natural bacterium. Scientists like to play with it in the laboratory, because it’s red when it grows in the laboratory and you can easily distinguish it from other bacteria.”

There was no pleasure left in Hans’s demeanor. “The American government played with Serratia bacteria during the forties and fifties to see if it could be used as a weapon. Sprayed it secretly over areas of San Francisco, painted it on doorknobs and banisters. Spraying didn’t work because too little was inhaled by people on the ground-”

“One of the reasons the anthrax scare is overblown,” Jake interrupted.

“- but over the years it’s sickened some people who inhaled it. One even died. It’s much more prevalent now than it was before the spray.”

“It was Serratia that infected the flu vaccine at the Chiron plant in England in 2004,” Jake pointed out. “They had to destroy the stockpile and couldn’t send any over here. Hence our shortage.”

“Some people think the Chiron contamination was part of another experiment,” Hans said, “but that’s conjecture. What we do know is that Serratia marcescens, the type in Skeleton One, is far more aggressive than the strain used in San Francisco. It’s a superbug, Jake, enhanced by humans, the kind that’s not supposed to exist. But it does. I saw it yesterday in my petri dish. My guess is the government was using Turner as a lab, with humans for rats. And they sometimes slipped up- hence the bones.”

The enormity of what she was hearing set off explosions in Manny’s brain. She vowed revenge- legal revenge.

“And it wasn’t just at Turner,” Hans continued. “The man who oversaw future testing, Sidney Gottlieb, testified about other tests- in secret and under a pseudonym- before the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee in 1975. A lot of doctors were involved, including many of the best-known psychiatrists of the day. The top New York State Health Department doctor approved the mind-control experiments, some done in conjunction with other countries. We know of at least two people who died as a result of these experiments: a CIA agent who had been given surreptitious doses of LSD and jumped to his death from a hotel window, and a tennis pro who was given huge doses of mescaline after checking himself into a hospital for depression. Doctors’ notes show he never consented to anything. He was clearly being experimented on against his will.”

“I remember the case!” Manny said. “The family sued the government, claiming it withheld the information that their son had died because of what they’d done to him.”