Vitals Page 18

  “You’re working with him?”

  “I don’t know what the relationship is, exactly.”

  Cousins seemed nervous but stable. The crickets had fallen silent. The house timbers creaked as they shrank. I thought I heard footsteps in the kitchen. I often hear footsteps in the kitchen at that time of night.

  It was good to have somebody to talk to.

  “Rudy’s books were pretty good once,” I said. “He had a knack for sniffing out rare documents. But something happens after you dig into the thousandth official archive of intolerable brutality. Spiritual evil, as they say. But it’s not demons, it’s flesh-and-blood people doing the unimaginable, then recording it like you and I balance our checkbooks. You come to mistrust everyone, and finally the paranoia kicks in. It can always happen again, you know. Ordinary people are out there waiting for the orgy to start. They lick their lips, waiting for the hate to flow. You study the twentieth century long enough, you want to pack a gun.”

  I stretched out my arms and flicked off a mosquito. The neighbors had a stagnant koi pond about three hundred yards down the road, and old folks have thin skin. “Anyway,” I said, reaching my point, “Banning is possessed by the specter of Adolf Hitler. Figuratively speaking.”

  “I think he’d agree with you,” Cousins said. He had brought in a blue backpack stuffed full. He reached into it.

  I looked at the backpack with vague longing, but I already knew he wasn’t the type to put an end to my troubles. He removed not a Luger but a picture book, Blondi, Dog of Destiny. I had seen it before—in the bargain bin of Wahrenbrock’s in San Diego, marked down to twenty-five cents.

  “This is what Silk did to Banning,” Cousins said. “He doesn’t know how crazy he actually is. Neither do I.”

  I read the publisher’s address. “White Truth Press, Ojai, California. UFO abductees and would-be-Aryans. Pitiful.”

  “But what I’m after is serious,” Cousins said. “Banning found some files in the National Archives in the 1990s, and when he read about my research in a magazine, he got in touch with me. His material was interesting, so I went to see him. Ever since, a lot of peculiar stuff has been happening.”

  I stared at him for a few seconds, long enough to make him feel uncomfortable.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ve read The Odessa File. I wish I had written it, this house would be a lot nicer.” And maybe I could have gotten better medical care for Janie. “But I’m not much for Nazi conspiracies. I don’t believe in trivializing real horror with skinhead fantasies.”

  Cousins looked dismayed, but he was resilient. He said, “It’s not Nazis and it’s not just Communists. It’s biologists, some of the smartest people in the world. Pioneers, in their way. And it’s really important to me, Mr. Bridger.”

  “Ben,” I said.

  “I need confirmation. That’s all I’m asking. A little help from someone who taught me history when I was a kid.”

  He was so sincere, and his voice so level. I didn’t want to be in the house alone. The kitchen was definitely haunted. Maybe I was the crazy one here. Besides, Cousins reminded me of my son. I really missed my son.

  “Okay,” I said with a sigh. “We got half an hour, then it’s my bedtime.”

  Cousins told me he was doing research on life extension—indefinite life span. He had published a few papers and had contracts with two pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs that replenished skin collagen. It sounded legitimate. Biology is sexy, I hear.

  Then Rudy Banning came into his life. Banning sent Cousins a letter asking if he had heard about research conducted in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

  “I wrote Banning and asked him what he knew. He said that scientists in Russia had stumbled onto a kind of human immortality, using substances extracted from primitive organisms. Coincidentally, they discovered some very effective methods of controlling human behavior. All this before we had more than an inkling about DNA and genes.”

  That was too large to swallow all at once. I took a chunk and chewed it: “How could immortality lead to mind control?” I asked.

  “Let’s concentrate on mind control,” Cousins said. “Bacteria are wonderful little factories. They can make almost any substance you program them to. And you program them by providing them with the appropriate genes. In the early 1930s, at Irkutsk University, a biologist named Maxim Golokhov was studying huge, primitive, single-celled organisms he had found in Lake Baikal. To his astonishment, he discovered that the big cells had recruited an unknown type of bacteria to help create a primordial immune system. Even more amazing, Golokhov discovered that the system was adaptive—ingenious and flexible. The bacteria sensed the presence of invading organisms and made negative peptide molds that precisely matched a target molecule, immobilizing and killing the invader.”

  My eyes must have looked sleepy. Cousins’s response was to talk faster and wave his hands.

  “But when their work was finished and they cleaned up the leftovers, these same bacteria could also make molds of the molds, re-creating a positive with the same qualities as the original. They could reverse-engineer almost any organic substance and encode a gene to reproduce it. Theoretically, that was fantastic—Nobel prize material. But Golokhov was more interested in surviving in his own harsh political world—neutralizing the forces that were targeting him and his wife. If he wanted to make something useful to the human monsters of his time, he had to think of a practical application for his discovery. He came up with an astonishing scheme . . . something really dreadful. He decided he would reprogram bacteria commonly found in humans. His first problem was to transfer the necessary genes. He used phages—”

  I asked what “phages” were.

  “Viruses that attack only bacteria.”

  “Make them sneeze?” I asked.

  Cousins did not smile. This was his stuff, his meat and drink, and it wasn’t funny. “Some phages ferry host genes from one bacteria to another. Golokhov infected E. coli bacteria—”

  “Like in the wells out here?” I asked.

  Cousins did not enjoy being interrupted. “Ordinary gut bacteria. Yeah, sometimes they’re a sign of sewer pollution. Using phages, Golokhov gave his bacteria genes reverse-engineered from psychotropic chemicals in hallucinogenic mushrooms. He sprayed the altered bacteria on vegetables and served them raw to student volunteers. About a week later, the students got high. They stayed high for months.”

  “So in the sixties he moved to California and turned into Timothy Leary,” I said.

  This time Cousins gave me a weak and tolerant smirk, about what my crack deserved. In fact, so far, he had my attention. “Before we go any further, I’d like to see what kind of documents you have. No sense wasting our time if Banning’s put together a farrago.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Cousins said.

  “Just show me your stuff.”

  He pulled out three fat envelopes. With all the deliberation of a young stripper feeling the shys, he spread their contents on the wrought-iron patio table beside a citronella candle.

  The bug lights gave everything a jaundiced glow.

  I read a fair amount of Russian. It took me about ten minutes to come wide-awake. The imprimaturs and typewriter fonts, the stamps and signatures (I saw “Beria” about thirty times in as many pages), all looked very, very correct. I had never known Banning to fake documents, nor had anybody else, to my knowledge. It was the conclusions he had been drawing since the early 1990s that sank his career, not the validity of his sources.

  “Where did he say he got these?” I asked.

  “Actually, we’ve both been digging in old archives,” Cousins said. “I went to Irkutsk last year.”

  “So . . . it isn’t just Banning, it’s you, too?”

  He nodded nervously.

  “A lot of stuff from Irkutsk University,” I said.

  “They’re opening old files,” Cousins said. “Glasnost still lives.”

  “All right. I see the names Golokhov and Beria on a wh
ole bunch of documents having to do with a secret research project. What’s the context?”

  “Golokhov started off as an idealist, like so many of us. But he and his fiancée were Jewish. There was trouble, we don’t know what kind exactly. They were going to be arrested and deported even farther east. In 1937, Golokhov approached Beria, the future head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, and told him what he had learned. Beria saw it as his ticket to bigger things.” Cousins pulled out a copy of a letter requesting that meeting. “Beria handed the matter up to Stalin a week later. Golokhov made his pitch and showed Stalin some movies. Comrade Stalin financed Silk right then and there, and Beria gave it a cover story, hiding it behind a program to discover—”

  “How to synthesize silk.”

  “Yeah. The operation had two components. First, Golokhov had to alter gut bacteria to accept genes from his phages. He gave them the equivalent of standard electrical outlets that new genes could plug into. Then, he had to make sure everyone—and I do mean everyone—had the new bacteria in their bodies. Silk began with Golokhov releasing altered E. coli into the general population. There are lots of ways to do that—spraying fruits and vegetables, in the air, doorknobs, money, clothing . . . handshakes. Bird droppings. Even animal feed. No doubt he had the assistance of agents who thought they were engaging in some sort of Communist subversion. Some might have even guessed at germ warfare.”

  “When was that?”

  “The first phase started in 1935. Golokhov began experimental operations first in Russia, then in Germany, Japan, and China. He wanted to create a firm foundation for later plans. Some populations took up the new coliforms quicker than others, especially where sanitation was spotty. The altered coliforms had spread across Russia by 1939, I would guess, and worldwide by the end of the Second World War.”

  “We’re born with them, now?”

  “No, but we acquire them a short time later from our parents, animals, the environment,” Cousins said. “You have to understand—Golokhov chose hardy strains likely to dominate. Now, they’re all over the Earth. Every one of us carries bacteria that can be programmed from outside. Programmed to make chemicals that change how we think.”

  “Like a bomb in two parts,” I said. “We carry one half, they carry the other.”

  “Exactly,” Cousins said.

  “Why stay in Irkutsk? Why not just move straight to Moscow?”

  “It was isolated. It was his home. And besides, Irkutsk was on the main rail line to Siberia,” Cousins said. “Beria supplied the lab with trainloads of political prisoners. Golokhov picked out those who were mentally ill, took samples of blood and lymph, stomach fluids, chyme, and so on. After they were shot, he ground up their brains. Using all his samples, he isolated peptides and enzymes and other fractions he suspected could alter human behavior, and fed them to his reverse-engineering bacteria. The bacteria were then programmed to induce a variety of psychotic states.”

  By eleven-thirty, after I had ventured into the kitchen twice to make coffee and didn’t even think about Janie, we had worked our way up to Lydia Timashuk and the Doctors’ Plot of 1952, followed by the “expatriation” of two million Jews to Siberia, then the death—some called it murder—of old Joe Stalin. I was more than hooked, and we hadn’t reached the end of 1953.

  It was the biggest thing I had ever encountered in all my days of doing history. The documentation was exquisite—copy after copy of state papers, memos, letters. There must have been quite a hemorrhage from the old University of Irkutsk.

  And it was pure nightmare.

  “No wonder Banning went cuckoo,” I said. “Makes me sick just thinking about it.”

  “It gets worse,” Cousins said. “By the late 1930s, Golokhov had established centers in Moscow, Paris, and London. He even managed to get around Lysenko’s destruction of genetics in Russia. Beria probably protected him, and I guess he knew where to be successful, and where to just shut up. By 1950, it’s possible he was conducting secret research in the United States. There are five towns across the continental U.S. where he may have set up operations. I’ve been to one of them, in the hills east of Livermore.

  “In 1953, Rudy thinks Golokhov opened a laboratory in Manhattan, under the guise of an international organization trying to create vaccines for polio, malaria, and dengue fever.”

  I’d had dengue—we called it breakbone fever—in Laos in 1970. I had nearly died and couldn’t remember most of those weeks. “False front?”

  Cousins nodded. “They were creating Manhattan Candidates, all over the U.S.”

  “Jesus,” I said. I felt goose bumps go up my arms. “And because we all have the altered germs . . . we’re all potential Manhattan Candidates?”

  Cousins nodded. “My guess is that in the thirties and forties, only about a third the people in the world could be reliably programmed by Silk. Their operations were pretty fragmented. Thank God for that. Orwell might never have finished 1984.”

  I let out a whoosh of breath. “Why just a third?” I asked.

  “Because we’re all custom built. We don’t use our hormones, enzymes, peptides, neurotransmitters, all the necessary chemicals in our bodies and brains, quite the same way. That puts a roadblock in the path of creating new operatives. But I’m sure they’ve refined their techniques. My guess is they now have 80 or 90, possibly even 100 percent success, especially if they choose their people carefully. And of course it all depends on the dose you can deliver. When you start an operation, you send three or four handpicked people, with the necessary supplies, into the target area. They lay down some phages in nearby supermarkets, or deliver them right to the home, and wait a couple of days. How often do salesmen come knocking? Seventh Day Adventists?”

  “Not very often, where I live,” I said. But I took his point.

  “How safe are the fresh vegetables in supermarkets?” he asked.

  I cocked my head. “You could run this sort of thing on a shoestring. Free labor, free resources, skim off the top. Jee . . . zusss. What about the Internet?”

  “I think you see the problem,” Cousins said.

  At twelve-thirty, I asked Cousins to stay over and we’d continue later in the morning. He nervously declined.

  “I don’t want to put you in any danger,” he said. “I’m a Jonah, you know.”

  He piled together the papers, stuck them in their envelopes, and slid the envelopes into the blue backpack. “I have a place to stay. I’ll be safe,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Please don’t think I’m being paranoid.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Paranoid” was not the word.

  “But I would like your opinion.” He was like a jumpy doe with a newborn fawn. “Is this stuff legit? Banning isn’t crazy?”

  “It looks promising,” I said.

  “I’m going to Manhattan soon to visit an old building,” Cousins said. “It may have been Golokhov’s main lab in the fifties. I’m looking for proof—and for samples to test. Would you like to come along?”

  That shook me. I had learned to prefer a desktop to the field. I said I’d give it some thought.

  “There’s one more thing,” he said. “You have a VCR?”

  “Yeah. Janie—my wife—loved movies.”

  “Seeing is believing, right?” He reached into the backpack and handed me a videocassette. “From Russia,” he said. “From Irkutsk. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

  After Cousins left, I ignored my fatigue and plugged the tape into our VCR. The tape jumped a lot. I doubted very much that it was the original. Russians use the SECAM video system. We use NTSC.

  With my rusty grasp of Russian, I translated the white Cyrillic letters flashing over the screen.

  University of Irkutsk

  New Student Inquiry for Truth and Justice,

  Anthology Number 5, Secret Indoctrination Camp Films,

  1935–1950.

  It was one in the morning, and as the grainy old films played, the living room filled with ghosts.

&
nbsp; A woman in a long black dress stood smiling on the prow of a yacht, mist shrouding the lake behind her. Mrs. Golokhova? She gave the photographer a somber little wave, then turned left, squinting into the sun.

  Next came a wedding in an industrial-looking shed surrounded by hundreds of men in uniform. Mr. Golokhov (I presumed) and his new bride stood under crossed rifles with mounted bayonets and were toasted by a small, dapper man drinking champagne from a lab beaker. Quick shot of Joe Stalin, his smile frozen, turning this way, then that, as if looking for escape from the jolly crowds.

  The flesh on my neck started to crawl.

  A lean, handsome man with aristocratic features, a short sharp nose, and thin but very black hair, stood over a bathtub and smiled awkwardly into the lens. Swift cut to an emaciated, naked little man walking in circles around a small cell, then jumping up and down, genitals flopping, shaking out his hands and smiling broadly. The aristocratic man watched and directed the naked man, taking notes in a little black book with that serious and awkward expression people wore in the 1930s when they knew they were being put on film.

  The film had not been well preserved. There were scratches and blotches, and in the hiss of the vacant sound track could easily be heard the aching whispers of the dead.

  I watched Mrs. Golokhova and her husband relaxing at play, or hard at work, studying the details of architectural drawings, preparing their empire in the deadly and unlikely world of prewar Soviet Russia. Then, there were no more scenes of Mrs. Golokhova. Just Maxim, looking older and more serious. Supervising workmen on a brick blockhouse, standing by a steaming hot spring, surveying pools filled with milky-looking fluid stirred with long paddles held by hollow-eyed women in nondescript uniforms. Golokhov’s clothes changed little with the years, but his eyes became more vague, his features more drawn.

  Long lines of haggard prisoners in shabby street clothes, some carrying tattered bags filled with their worldly goods, stood in a train yard, being examined by dour guards in cinematic quick time.