The Death Row Complex (18 page)

It was six days before Christmas when Katrina and Jason Fischer stood over the bodies of three dead monkeys.
“Why, Jason?!”
Katrina was practically crying. “Your compound was completely effective in mice! Why isn’t it working in monkeys? What’s the difference in the primates?”

Jason shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said. “It could be one of any number of things. Primates aren’t mice—we’ve rediscovered this inconvenient fact a million times. But if the drug doesn’t work in monkeys, I bet my life it’s not going to work in humans.”

“I know that, Jason!”

Jason raised a palm toward Katrina in a gesture for her to calm down. “I have an idea about what might be causing the discrepancy,” he said. “But I need another few days to confirm or disprove it.”

“Another few days is literally
all
you have,” Katrina said.

D
ECEMBER 23, 2015
8:23 A.M.
PST

Four days later, Jason had the answer.

It was the day before Christmas Eve, and Katrina was standing with Gilman and McMullan in the break room outside of her laboratory. Although they stood close together, nobody spoke. All three were gulping large cups of coffee and staring absently at the floor, all three absorbed in their own concerns, all three ultimately consumed with the same thought.
The day after
tomorrow.

Jason burst into the room. “There you are!” he said as he rushed toward Katrina. “I’ve got it.”

Katrina sank into a chair at the break room table. Her hand was shaking as she set the coffee cup loudly onto the table. “What is it then?”

“The inhibitor only blocks TEM8 on primates.”

Katrina looked up at him. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. I’ve used three different assays.”

Gilman and McMullan exchanged a glance. “What does that mean?” McMullan asked.

Jason turned to face McMullan. “There are two receptors that anthrax proteins interact with—they are called CMG2 and TEM8. The toxin can get into the cell through either one of these receptors, and it has to get into the cell to kill the cell.

“My lead compound works beautifully in mice. But it failed in monkeys. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out why. Now, I have done some cell-based testing and confirmed that it only blocks one of the receptors in the monkey cells, but it blocks both in mouse cells. From those pieces of data, I can easily conclude that the reason the monkeys died was that they were still vulnerable to an infection. We need to block both receptors to block the complex.”

“What about humans?” Gilman asked.

“It was probably a safe assumption that if it didn’t work in primates, it wouldn’t work in humans either.” He turned to Katrina before adding, “but we don’t have to make that assumption. I have confirmed it. I tested the compound in human cells to see if it would block both receptors. It doesn’t.” Jason turned from Katrina to McMullan, and then to Gilman. “The monkeys have taught us definitively that there’s no way our lead compound will be effective in humans.”

Gilman went pale. For a moment, he stood breathing quick, shallow breaths, until McMullan stepped forward to guide him to a chair next to Katrina’s. Then McMullan sat down as well. “What can you do now?” McMullan’s voice was soft as he asked the question to which he already knew the answer.

“We can redesign the compound,” Jason said. “But not in two days.”

Part II: Redesigned

D
ECEMBER 25, 2015
12:00 A.M.
EST

It was midnight in Washington, D.C. when Gilman placed the video call to his wife. Between midnight and 5:00 a.m. East Coast time, he and his wife shared the intimacies of life-long sweethearts facing the last day of a terminal illness. Every second was more painful than the last, every instant another sliver of borrowed time. Nobody knew when the attack would happen. Or how. Or where.

No longer concerned with the national security he had failed to provide, Gilman’s only thought now was that he should have gone home—and, so be it, to hell with his job—when he still had the chance. But now, all U.S. flights were grounded. So it was Skype that would allow him to talk to his wife, Skype that would allow him to be with his family even if the apocalypse crashed down upon them as they spoke.

At 6:15 a.m., the children began to wake up. It was still the middle of the night in San Diego, and Gilman glanced between the black sky through his hotel room window and the oasis of life projecting from his cell phone. Dawn’s phone jiggled as she trotted to the living room to watch their children dive into the mountain of gifts that was over-the-top lavish this year.

About 8:00 a.m., the children began to ask about breakfast and church. It was Gilman, and not his wife, who explained that this year—this year only—the family would stay home and pray privately rather than attending Christmas mass. He asked his children to pray hard.

After breakfast, Dawn left her phone charging on the kitchen table, propped up against a book so the video could continue to run. Gilman watched his family careen through their daily affairs until he fell back asleep.

It was 2:35 p.m. in San Diego when Gilman woke up. His phone had died. Consumed with an instant feeling of panic, he dug through the clutter in his hotel room until he found his charger, and then stood impatiently by until the phone picked up enough of a charge to be used again. Immediately, he resumed the video call.

His children were in the midst of a lazy Christmas afternoon, seemingly normal except for the fact that Daddy was away. Dawn was preparing dinner for the eight of them, and Gilman once again found himself sad beyond measure that he had not abandoned his duty to the FBI to be home for this day.

As the evening wore on, and the children began winding down, a surreal sense of calm began to creep in, and the nightmare in which he had been living began to feel as if maybe—just maybe—it had been exactly that. A bad dream.

Still, he stayed on the call with his wife after the children were sleeping. When midnight approached once again, and Dawn was dozing off in their bed, Gilman found himself also beginning to relax, as it began to seem more and more likely that the day he had been dreading for months would conclude without incident.

J
ANUARY 8, 2016
11:24 A.M.
PST

Christmas Day came and went without incident. The nation breathed a collective sigh of relief, and the frenzied bicoastal investigation began slowing from its breakneck pace to a manageable one. But Operation Death Row was far from over.

Katrina Stone and her staff were still committed to redesigning the inhibitor of the Death Row Complex, and the turmoil surrounding her laboratory had not waned. On January 8, she was sitting once again at the break room table with McMullan and Gilman, talking them through the latest data updates from her staff, when a voice echoed through the laboratory toward them. “Get your hands off my willie! I have an ID badge!”

The door to the break room burst open and a pudgy man who appeared to be in his late sixties shuffled into the room. The man wore wrinkled slacks and a button down shirt; the buttons did not align correctly with the buttonholes, and one un-tucked shirttail was longer than the other.

Behind him was one of the armed guards on duty. “He’s clean,” the guard said to McMullan and Gilman. “I frisked him.”

“Thanks,” McMullan said, looking amused.

Katrina looked up apologetically but did not speak.

“Oh, Jesus, Katrina,” the elderly man began and then stopped when his eyes fell upon the cookie jar next to the coffee pot. He reached in and pulled out a large handful of broken cookies, which he shoved absently into his mouth before continuing to speak. “This is ridiculous! I can’t even do my work anymore!” The pronunciation of the word “can’t” was forceful enough to send a fragment of cookie flying out of his mouth and onto the floor in front of him. Noticing the fallen morsel, the man paused to reach down and pick it up. He shoved it back into his mouth and continued. “Please tell me this is almost over!” Another chunk of cookie escaped on the word “please,” but this one stayed on the ground. McMullan and Gilman pulled their eyes away from it to exchange an amused glance.

“Richard, I’m doing everything I can to make this all go away,” Katrina said. “We have figured out what was wrong with the compound, and we think we know how to correct it.”

“Do it, then,” he responded. “I’m not running a circus here, and I’m not the least bit amused by all of this. I’m fending off negative press every day. So when this is all over, there had better be some payoff in the way of good publication to compensate for the damage you’ve done to our department’s reputation.
Science
or
Nature
. I’ll accept nothing less.”

He reached and grabbed another handful of cookies, then shoved them in to join the partially chewed previous batch. He then turned and left the room, shoving his hand down the back of his pants to scratch an unmentionable itch as he went. The two agents looked at one another again and then both burst out laughing.

“Who was
that
clown?” McMullan finally asked when he was able to speak.

“That’s the chair of the biology department,” Katrina answered.

“What a wing nut!”

Katrina’s frustration dissipated slightly and she allowed herself a giggle. “The truth is, he’s a genius,” she said. “Molecular cardiology is his specialty, and he has made some of the largest advances in the field. But yeah, in the tradition of many true geniuses, he’s a bit socially inept.”

“I don’t get it,” McMullan said. “
You’re
not that clueless!”

“Oh,
thanks
, Sean!” Katrina laughed. “Well, the truth is, I work very hard, but I certainly don’t have his level of scientific brilliance either. Richard is on the same plane as Einstein. A man who, by the way, was a kleptomaniac, was known for forgetting to wear socks, and often forgot where he was entirely.”

J
ANUARY 15, 2016
5:37 P.M.
PST

As the second full week of January was wrapping up, Roger Gilman sat in his office adjacent to Stone’s laboratory. It was Friday evening. Gilman glanced up from his paperwork to polish off a long-forgotten doughnut with the last cold bit of his coffee from the morning. He grimaced. Then he dropped the document he had been reading into the wastebasket by his desk before grabbing his coat to leave.

Gilman glanced out the window and then tossed the coat back onto his chair in disgust. Even in January, San Diego was too warm for a jacket. The fact that he was trapped in one eternal season seemed fitting for this endless assignment. He stepped out of the office to pass through the lab on his way out.

Katrina Stone was alone at a computer, using a mouse to scroll through something. The connected printer was spitting out page after page.

Gilman approached her. “You know what I still can’t figure out?”

“What?”

“I still can’t figure out how your unpublished data could be so closely linked to the activated anthrax strain with no prior knowledge of it.”

Katrina stopped working and glared at him. “Agent Gilman, what exactly are you implying?”

“Nothing, nothing. It’s just that there are scientists out there who wonder if you engineered the Death Row strain. Maybe even sent it off to San Quentin to make sure it would work. Of course,
I
would never believe that of you. But, wow”—he sucked air between his teeth dramatically and gestured sweepingly in all directions—“you sure do seem to have made out like a bandit with all this. Shiny new lab, plenty of money to do your work. Not to mention you seem to be some kind of a hero for all this. I hear you’ve even been invited to speak at the upcoming biotechnology convention? Must be nice.