Fort Detrick is the United States Army installation in Maryland where Stephen Corwin, a Seventh-Day Adventist drafted five years before the novel's present, was sent after claiming conscientious objector status, and where he became part of a secret biological experiment known as Operation Whitecoat. The base is the hinge of the novel's central mystery: it is the place Corwin himself invoked in his second letter to Maddie Schwartz, the place where the state dosed a religious objector with bacteria, and the place whose name, once published, ripples outward through the world without changing anyone's mind. More than a setting, Fort Detrick is the novel's emblem of institutional violence — a government program that turns a man into a killer of little girls, or at least into a man who claims that it did.