Better Dead (27 page)

“That's how spying works.”

He shrugged. “Well, I do understand that need … and I certainly wouldn't call out any active agent except in executive session, and put their operations or even their lives at risk. But this is
our
country's baby, and
our
dirty diapers, and we have
got
to wash them … and I'm in favor of washing them in public as much as possible.”

“Dangerous line to walk, Joe.”

The nasal public speaking mode was in full sway again: “Nate, the CIA is riddled with
Commies
and security
risks
. Right now we know of a homosexual forced to
resign
from the State Department who is currently a
top-salaried
man with the CIA. We have so many
normal
people, so many competent Americans, must we employ so many …
unusual
men … in government service?”

I made this as gentle as I could. “Joe … meaning no disrespect … but you have been accused of being ‘unusual' yourself, and so has Roy Cohn. Not that I give a damn, but I think Cohn is queer as a three-dollar bill. But that's not the reason you'd be wise to get rid of him.”

He was shaking his head as if flies were buzzing around it. “Ludicrous. He's all
man,
our Roy. I can't believe you'd make such an unfounded, scurrilous accusation.”

Said the king of unfounded, scurrilous accusations.

“But,” he said, “that kind of thing does relate to why I asked you to stop by.”

I wasn't “stopping by.” I had been hired, at double my day rate, to fly at McCarthy's expense to D.C., where I was being put up at the Mayflower.

“Why
did
I stop by?” I asked.

The small mouth sneered. “These CIA spooks are ruthless bastards who will stop at nothing. They assemble secret files on people to buy their silence and cooperation. They're a lousy damn pack of blackmailers.”

“I hear J. Edgar does the same thing.”

“Hoover is not my concern. It's come to me secondhand that the Agency has a file on me, if you can believe that.…
Ernie, great to see you!
… with information of a, uh, damaging nature. Don't ask me what's in the file, and whether it's true or not—I don't know. Just get your hands on that goddamn file, Nate. I can't go into a full-scale investigation of the CIA without knowing what they … what they
think
they have.”

“Joe, I don't exactly have a horde of snitches in the Central Intelligence Agency.”

I didn't mention that I had a fairly high-up contact in the form of Edward “Shep” Shepherd, since that was none of McCarthy's business, and anyway, I wouldn't dream of approaching Shepherd about this.

“Nor do we, Nate. They're a closed-ranks bunch. But I have a good solid lead that I'd like you to check out—an unhappy civilian scientist at an army base, working for the Agency. He's a constituent and a supporter of mine from back home.”

“I'm to go to Wisconsin for this?”

“No. He's an hour from here, in Frederick, Maryland. You can take a train or rent a car.…
Lyndon, we need to talk later!
… All on expense account. My office can set up a meeting, probably tonight. If he's not available this evening, you'll stay over a day or two till he is. I'll write you out a check upstairs for a thousand-dollar nonreturnable retainer.”

“You've talked to this scientist?”

“Twice on the phone. Briefly. He appears to have a lot to report on the Agency's misbehavior, and you should gather that information, of course. But also pursue him as a source for getting your hands on that file. I can't go forward in confidence against these people unless I know where I stand.”

“Why me?”

“I'm shorthanded with Schine drafted. Anyway, Nate, I need someone who's not from D.C. circles to do this thing.”

This sounded straightforward enough. Turning the senator down might make an enemy out of him, particularly considering how Cohn and I didn't get along. And I preferred McCarthy thinking we were friends.

“All right,” I said, getting out my notepad. “What's the scientist's name?”

*   *   *

Dr. Frank Olson lived in a new-looking ranch-style house on a quiet wooded lot outside Frederick, Maryland, nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians, a little over an hour's drive southwest of D.C. I arrived, as arranged, at around 7 p.m., pulling my rental Ford into the driveway behind a nonrental Ford, then crossed the lawn to the front door of a cozy nest worthy of TV's Ozzie and Harriet. I was met at the door by a tall, slender woman in her late thirties, her dark hair in a short perm; she bore a strong, pleasant resemblance to actress Patricia Neal. The smell of a recent meal of liver and onions combined with the warmth of inside came out on the stoop to greet me.

“Mr. Haller?” she asked, her smile wide, her eyes kind. She wore a navy housedress with white trim.

“It's ‘Heller,' ma'am,” I said, returning the smile, taking off my hat. I had a Burberry trench coat on over my Botany 500.

She gestured graciously. “Well, please come in. Frank's in the den. I'll get him for you.”

I stepped directly into a living room furnished in atomic-age modern, my presence of no interest to three children—a boy nine or ten, a girl eight or so, a boy maybe five—sitting like Indians with their backs to me before a video hearth just to one side of an unlit flagstone fireplace.
Mr. Wizard
was on.

The Olsons seemed to be getting a jump on Christmas—Thanksgiving wasn't here yet, but in front of the picture window, a tree with twinkling lights stood guard over an array of brightly wrapped presents.

“Mr. Heller!”
a mid-range male voice called. “Frank Olson.”

From a hallway came a medium-size suburbanite with a ready smile and an outstretched hand. His dark blond hair was thinning, which conspired with a weak chin to emphasize the elongated-egg shape of his head; but his pale green eyes were sharp in slitted settings, his nose long and somewhat flattened, as if he'd been a boxer in his youth. He was in the off-the-rack brown suit he'd likely worn to work, but the collar was loose, no tie in sight.

We shook hands. I was still just inside the door and Olson's wife came up alongside him and said, “There's coffee in the kitchen,” but her husband shook his head, his full-lipped smile fading.

“I think Mr. Heller and I will take a walk, dear,” he said.

“Oh. Well, all right.” She seemed surprised. I was, too—it was a chilly evening. She beamed at me and said, “Then I'll have coffee for you when you get back. I'm Alice, by the way.”

“Alice,” I said, shaking the hand she stretched out to me. “And I'm Nate. That coffee will be welcome.”

Olson had slipped away to get a topcoat from the front closet. He stuffed a hat on his head in a half-crushed Jimmy Durante manner and gestured for me to step back out. His smile had returned, though on the porch he whispered, “You never know who's listening, inside.”

We didn't walk far, just to a stand of high trees on the lot, the night clear but dark with a slice of moon fingering through mostly bare branches. We stood between cedars and he offered me a cigar from a steel case. I said thank you, no. He lighted up with a match, turning his face orange in the darkness, and puffed till it really got going. The evening was cold enough that you didn't need a cigar to make smoke, though, your breath doing that just fine.

His smile was winning and wide; he looked a little goofy with that jammed-on hat. “I'm really kind of tickled to meet you. When Mrs. McCarthy called and said you'd be coming, that you were representing the senator? Well, I recognized your name right away.”

“That's flattering.” Not really surprising that McCarthy had used his wife among his office staff to make the call.

He wet his lips. “Saw you in
Life
and a bunch of other places. Which is why I didn't ask to check your ID; I mean, why bother? Brother, have
you
met everybody and his duck. His
Donald
Duck!”

“I suppose I have.”

“You know, you might think that scientists are a bunch of stuffed shirts, Nate, but you'd be wrong. Take me—I'm known around the lab for practical jokes. It's okay I call you ‘Nate,' right?”

“Right,” I said, hoping this wasn't one of his jokes. “And you're Frank.”

“I'm Frank. The one and only. Guys I work with at Fort Detrick, they're real cards. Wild men. I always kid 'em, saying, ‘You're all just a bunch of thespians!' A ‘thespian' is an actor. It's different from ‘lesbian.'”

“Sometimes.”

He grinned. In the jammed-on hat he might have been a burlesque comic. “That's a good one! It's just kind of funny, you know … ‘thespian,' ‘lesbian.' You grab any laugh you can in my kind of work.” His smile became strained. “Because it's not all fun and games, believe me.”

His life-of-the-party manner did a poor job of hiding his anxiety.

“I'm going to guess, Frank, that a lot of what you deal with is classified.”

“Oh, yeah. A-Number-One classified. Top-secret all the way.”

“And yet you got in touch with Senator McCarthy because you've become disturbed by some things you've seen. Is that right? Am I close?”

The smile turned terrible, the eyes squeezed almost tight. He was a clown who gave somebody a hot foot but to his horror burned their toes off.

“Nate,” he said, the full wet lips forming a very sickly smile, “you have no idea.”

He leaned against the tree behind him. He puffed at the cigar as if it were oxygen he needed. His smile was still there but his eyes were focused down.

The life went out of his voice. “I've had ulcers for years. Sometimes I think the damn things will kill me. I'd like to quit my fucking job, become a dentist or something, but…”

“They won't let you?”

“They
say
they will. They say they will.” His eyes found mine and were haunted. “But do you know what we've been looking at lately, over at the lab?”

“No.”

“Ways to alter the memory of personnel who know too much. With drugs, hypnosis, electroshock, brainwashing. And if none of that works?” He swallowed, shivered. “Nate, I'm a biochemist and I know my stuff.”

“I'm sure you do.”

“Well, I'm here to tell you the CIA has more varieties of toxins to kill you untraceably dead than Heinz has soups or Carter has pills.”

The cigar had gone out and he set another lighted match to the tip, puffing it back to life.

“Listen, I hate the Commie bastards as much as the next guy,” he said, eyes glistening, voice strong again. “That's why I turned to Senator McCarthy. But I like to think my efforts for America are
defensive
—the Japs had a biological warfare program, so we needed one, too, right? For a long time I concentrated on counterbiological warfare—vaccines and specially treated apparel, to protect against attack.”

“So you were already at this during the war.” My hands were in my Burberry pockets.

He nodded. “Oh, yes. I've been with the SOD—the Special Operations Division—from the very beginning, back in '43 when Defense Secretary Forrestal started it.”

Something cold went up my spine, and it wasn't the night air. “Forrestal?”

“Yes, and frankly I've always wondered if that jump he took from a high window at the nuthouse wasn't a put-up job. Just another way to get rid of somebody who
really
knew too much.”

Olson didn't know how right he was. Jim Forrestal had been a client and a friend, and I was one of the handful alive who knew he'd been murdered.

“But more and more,” Olson said, “we've been developing poisons and germ strains.” He grabbed his belly, as if struck by a sudden cramp.

“You okay, Frank?”

He nodded several times, still clutching his midsection. “I started really getting twisted up inside over all this about … three years ago, I guess it was. A strain of live bacteria I helped develop was released from planes above San Francisco. The hospitals there got rushed with ‘flu' patients, and a number died. Died! More and more it's become standard operating procedure to perform experiments on people without their consent or even knowledge.”

I frowned skeptically. “A biological warfare experiment, carried out right here in the good ol' US of A?”

He nodded, puffing nervously on the cigar.
Say the secret word and you'll win a prize.
“For a certain type of militaristic mind, Nate, biological warfare is the best thing to come along since sliced bread. With atomic warfare, there's complete destruction of private property. But with bacteriological weapons? Only
people
get destroyed.”

“Which is a plus.”

“Some see it that way, yes. And anyway, it's incredibly cheap, bacteriological attack—the poor man's atomic bomb. With the right virus, you can kill every living human being over a one-square-mile area for about fifty bucks.”

I frowned. “Frank, if the Soviets have biological warfare programs…”

“Oh, they do!”

“… we probably need them, too. Right?”

He held up a hand and waved it, like a kid in the back of class trying to get recognized. “I'd be the last guy to object to research, Nate, although targeting unwitting human guinea pigs goes over the line. Sometimes … sometimes…” He leaned against the tree again. “…
way
over.”

Then he threw up.

I let him finish, took him gently by the arm, and said, “Frank, are you okay?”

“Don't tell Alice. The liver and onions were my idea.”

“Mum's the word. Let's, uh … move upwind.”