In the earliest drafts of Access, I filled the pages with scraps of research scavenged from late-night dives into electronic bulletin boards and obscure government documents. This was the mid-90s, when the “information superhighway” was more like a gravel road, and part of the fun was seeing what strange, unsettling things you could turn up in the wee hours of the night.
One of those finds was this:
“Not later than thirty days after final approval within the Department of Defense of plans for any experiment or study to be conducted by the Department of Defense, whether directly or under contract, involving the use of human subjects for the testing of chemical or biological agents, the Secretary of Defense shall supply the committees on Armed Services of the Senate and House of Representatives with a full accounting of such plans for such experiment or study, and such experiment or study may then be conducted only after the expiration of the thirty-day period beginning on the date such accounting is received by such committees.”
— 50 USC 1520(a)
From the Bookshelf
The Book of Heroes — a paranormal thriller where books are alive and the librarian is not what she seems. Available direct from the author → Or read it free in my online Library.
When I first came across this, sometime around 2:30 in the morning, I didn’t stop to analyze legislative intent or amendments. I simply thought: this sounds like something straight out of a conspiracy thriller. And so, it went into mine.
What I didn’t know then is that this law was born in 1974, out of an era of reckoning. After years of questionable military research practices—chemical exposure tests, radiation studies, experiments where “informed consent” was more of a legal afterthought—Congress decided they wanted more oversight. 50 USC 1520(a) was a response: a requirement that the Department of Defense couldn’t just green-light human testing of chemical or biological agents behind closed doors. They had to notify Congress, provide a full accounting, and wait thirty days before proceeding.
In other words, the law wasn’t a “green light” for secret experiments. It was an attempt to stop them from happening in secret. By mandating oversight, Congress was saying: “Not without us knowing about it.” Later revisions in the 1990s tightened the rules further, requiring informed consent and restricting what agents could ever be tested on humans.
But at 2:34 AM in 1994, what I saw was the aesthetic of conspiracy. A government document that admitted—at least in my night reading—that human testing on biological and chemical agents had happened, might still happen, and would happen under a veneer of legality. For a conspiracy theory novelist, that was a gift. It was shadowy, it was chilling, and it made the fictional world of Access ring with a kind of terrible plausibility.
I wasn’t concerned when I wrote it, honestly, that anyone would consider it to be a real conspiracy theory in the mid-1990s because there just wasn’t a conspiracy theory on every corner or online or in the news. Conspiracy theories were escapist, not real life.
What I recognize now is that these fragments of real-world legislation and testimony can live double lives. In fiction, they build atmosphere and plausibility. Out in the wild, stripped of context, they feed rumors and fears.
As I bring Access back into print, I find myself thinking about those double lives. I can’t untangle the fact that I drew on documents like this one to write a better thriller. But I can be clear now: what I wrote was always a novel, a work of imagination fueled by late-night research and an eye for ominous detail.
And sometimes, the scariest details are the ones lifted straight from the law books.
A stolen bioweapon, a conspiracy that travels through time, and a framed agent who must save the world to clear her name.
Visit the Book Page →
For more on the stories behind my books, visit the Book Talk page.
A paranormal thriller where books are alive, knowledge is dangerous, and the librarian is not what she seems.
Visit the Book Page →
Read it free in my online Library →