Science Takes a Turn for the Venal in Cannell’s Thriller

Bad news is impartial in Stephen J. Cannell’s latest thriller--at least as far as the Pac-10 is concerned. Stacy Richardson, a doctoral candidate in microbiology at USC, hears that her husband, Max, a professor on sabbatical at a secret bio-weapons lab at Ft. Detrick, Md., has committed suicide. Across town, ex-UCLA quarterback and Gulf War hero Cris Cunningham slides into alcoholism after his 3-year-old daughter dies of a gruesome disease he brought back from Iraq.

Stacy is sure levelheaded Max would never have killed himself. She visits Ft. Detrick and discovers that his body has been hastily cremated. Neither soothing words from Max’s immediate boss nor blatant intimidation by the base commander, Adm. James G. Zoll, deter her from asking questions. And because Cannell (“King Con,” “Riding the Snake”) makes Stacy one of those hitherto ordinary civilians in whom righteous indignation elicits an arsenal of secret-agent skills, she finds a way to get hold of the autopsy report.

Max, it seems, may have been murdered. Back in Los Angeles, Stacy finds a last e-mail from him that confirms her suspicions. Appalled by what was going on in the “Devil’s Workshop”--the development of certain simple proteins into quick-acting, brain-eating plagues that can target particular ethnic groups, and the testing of said proteins on human guinea pigs at a former prison site in Vanishing Lake, Texas--he was about to blow the whistle.

Thriller protocol demands that the bad guys, no matter how smart and ruthless they may be, suffer odd lapses in concentration. When a mosquito-borne disease escapes from the prison and infects citizens of Vanishing Lake, Zoll and his henchmen don’t hesitate to cordon off the village and try to kill all witnesses. They are unaware, however, that Stacy has taken a job as a waitress there. She sees the entire disaster, including the kidnapping of chief researcher Dexter DeMille by a rail-riding gang of white supremacists led by Fannon Kincaid, a preacher who wants to use the lethal proteins to wipe out African Americans and Jews.

Two bums who happened to be kicked off a train in Vanishing Lake are exposed to the disease, and good guys and bad race to find them first. Are they the generic down-and-outers they appear to be? No way. One is the estranged son of a Hollywood producer, Buddy Brazil, who rouses himself from a life of drugsand bimbos to mount a rescue expedition. The other is none other than Cris Cunningham, who is still mourning his daughter’s death and is just one drink away from the DTs but hasn’t lost his Special Forces expertise.

If a thriller is propelled by two engines--the authenticity of its detail and the scariness of the events it imagines--all too often in “The Devil’s Workshop” the thrusts are unequal. Cannell has done prodigious research; he tells us about everything from guns to locomotives to PhD oral exams to the interior of the vice-presidential mansion to the hieroglyphic messages hobos leave for one another beside the tracks. Yet nothing in “The Devil’s Workshop” is truly believable.

We’re left with consolation prizes. First, some of the characters have their moments: Brazil; DeMille; the deranged Kincaid; the operator of an L.A. mission who tells Cris that vengeance can serve as well as God to be the higher power in a 12-step program; even Zoll, who fancies himself a patriot because he’s developing “cleaner” alternatives to nuclear warfare. Second, our cynicism is confirmed: If the government were doing illegal work on biological weapons, we might not be surprised, but more shocking is Cannell’s picture of how the scramble for funding from defense agencies and corporations perennially threatens to turn good science diabolical, even on venerable and respected campuses close to home.