The Third Twin - Ken Follett [56]
“You’re her boss, aren’t you?”
“It’s a university, Jim, it’s not the fucking army.”
Preston said nervously: “Let’s keep our voices down, fellas.” He wore narrow glasses with a black frame: he had been wearing the same style since 1959, and Berrington had noticed that they were now coming back into fashion. “We knew this might happen sometime. I say we take the initiative, and confess everything right away.”
“Confess?” Jim said incredulously. “Are we supposed to have done something wrong?”
“It’s the way people might see it—”
“Let me remind you that when the CIA produced the report that started all this, ‘New Developments in Soviet Science,’ President Nixon himself said it was the most alarming news to come out of Moscow since the Soviets split the atom.”
Preston said: “The report may not have been true—” “But we thought it was. More important, our president believed it. Don’t you remember how goddamn scary that was back then?”
Berrington certainly remembered. The Soviets had a breeding program for human beings, the CIA had said. They were planning to turn out perfect scientists, perfect chess players, perfect athletes—and perfect soldiers. Nixon had ordered the U.S. Army Medical Research Command, as it then was known, to set up a parallel program and find a way to breed perfect American soldiers. Jim Proust had been given the job of making it happen.
He had come immediately to Berrington for help. A few years earlier Berrington had shocked everyone, especially his wife, Vivvie, by joining the army just when antiwar sentiment was boiling up among Americans of his age. He had gone to work at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland, studying fatigue in soldiers. By the early seventies he was the world’s leading expert in the heritability of soldierly characteristics such as aggression and stamina. Meanwhile Preston, who had stayed at Harvard, had made a series of breakthroughs in understanding human fertilization. Berrington had talked him into leaving the university and becoming part of the great experiment with him and Proust.
It had been Berrington’s proudest moment. “I also remember how exciting it was,” he said. “We were at the leading edge of science, we were setting America right, and our president had asked us to do this job for him.”
Preston toyed with his salad. ‘Times have changed. It’s no longer an excuse to say: ‘I did it because the president of the United States asked me to.’ Men have gone to jail for doing what the president told them.”
“What was wrong with it?” Jim said testily. “It was secret, sure. But what’s to confess, for God’s sake?”
“We went undercover,” Preston said.
Jim flushed beneath his tan. “We transferred our project into the private sector.”
That was sophistry, Berrington thought, though he did not antagonize Jim by saying so. Those clowns from the Committee to Re-elect the President had got caught breaking into the Watergate hotel and all of Washington had run scared. Preston set up Genetico as a private limited corporation, and Jim gave it enough bread-and-butter military contracts to make it financially viable. After a while the fertility clinics became so lucrative that its profits paid for the research program without help from the military. Berrington moved back into the academic world, and Jim went from the army to the CIA and then into the Senate.
Preston said: “I’m not saying we were wrong—although some of the things we did in the early days were against the law.”
Berrington did not want the two of them to take up polarized positions. He intervened, saying calmly: “The irony is that it proved impossible to breed perfect Americans. The whole project was on the wrong track. Natural breeding was too inexact. But we were smart enough to see the possibilities of genetic engineering.”
“Nobody had even heard the goddamn words back then,” Jim growled as he cut into his steak.
Berrington nodded “Jim’s right, Preston. We should be proud of what we did, not ashamed. When you think about it, we’ve performed a