The Death Row Complex (34 page)

“OK,” she said. “Listen, McMullan. I wish you had your infectious disease experts here right now. They would back up the science of what I’m saying.”

“Well, then you won’t mind my recording this conversation and playing it back for them?” he said and clicked into the voice-recording app on his cell phone.

“Jason and I
did
make the activator.”

McMullan stared at her without speaking.

“It was an accident,” Katrina said. “Look McMullan, you know that my research involves screening for inhibitors of anthrax lethal factor. We have a very simple enzymatic assay. We program the robots, and the robots run hundreds of thousands of molecules through that assay. Inhibitors are found because the assay produces a fluorescent signal. When an inhibitor is in the mix, the signal is decreased. That’s all there is to it.

“Sometimes the assay can pick up activators as well. It’s not like we are looking for them—they just pop up. We see them in our data because all of a sudden, there’s an
increase
in the fluorescence produced by the assay when that particular molecule is tested.

“Activators are rare. But yeah, in hundreds of thousands of molecules screened, we do find a few. Jason found one a while back that was exceptionally good. He brought the data to me and asked me what to do with it. I told him to just hang on to it.”

“Why?” McMullan asked. “Why would you want to keep it, and more importantly, why did you try to hide it from us only to dig it out later?”

“I kept it because activators of an enzyme can be changed to convert them into an inhibitor. And I convinced Jason to help me hide the data because I knew that an activated strain of anthrax had been discovered. And we wanted to avoid this exact scenario—our lab being linked to that strain. And I dug it out to get rid of it when I didn’t think we needed it anymore.

“There are monkeys in our BSL-3 facility being inoculated as we speak. Those monkeys will be given the drug that we’ve redesigned since Christmas. I’m confident that it will work this time—so confident, in fact, that I’ve already scaled up the production of it. We’ve got a shitload of this drug. It’s the right one. I know it is.”

McMullan smiled. Even with her career and life falling apart around her, she was still focused on the cure. But then his smile faded. “I want to believe you,” he said. “But we still have a problem, Katrina. The DNA sequence is the same. The Death Row strain of anthrax doesn’t just have an activator in it. It has
your
activator in it.”

Part III: Con Science

F
EBRUARY 9, 2016
7:30 A.M.
PST

Jason Fischer stepped into Katrina Stone’s SDSU laboratory on the first day of the biotechnology convention. He had expected the lab to be abandoned, all of its normal occupants already en route to the convention. Instead, he was greeted by Joshua Attle, who was working frantically at a lab bench. “Hey, what are you still doing here?” Jason asked.

“I’m just getting an experiment going, and then I’m getting down to the convention,” Josh said. “What are
you
doing here?”

“I’ve got to get something off Katrina’s computer.” Jason walked through the main laboratory space and into Katrina’s office. He jumped when he saw Roger Gilman sitting behind her desk. “Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me.”

“A little jumpy, Dr. Fischer?” Gilman asked.

Jason ignored him. “Look, dude,” he said. “I need to get on that computer. So you mind moving your pudgy ass out of my way for a minute?”

“Actually, I do,” said Gilman. “I’m taking this computer. Sorry.” He feigned a sad face.

“I can get what I need off the Cloud, douchebag, so why don’t you just make it easier and move?”

Gilman scoffed. “Fine.” He stood from the desk and moved to a chair across the office. Then he changed the subject. “You and your advisor have a pretty close relationship, don’t you, Jason?”

Jason sat down at the computer monitor and began browsing. “Um, yeah,” he responded absently. “I guess so… we’ve been working together for years.” He found the file of Katrina’s presentation on her computer desktop and opened it, then scrolled quickly through the slides. Satisfied that the presentation was intact, he closed the file again and saved it to a portable memory stick, which he popped out and dropped into his pocket.

As he stood up, Jason was overwhelmed by a dizzy spell. He placed both hands onto the desk and stood quietly for a moment until it passed. A fever was coming on. Again. When he was certain he could walk normally, he brushed past Roger Gilman and walked out into the hall.

Gilman followed. “You’re looking a little unwell,” he said loudly as he walked closely behind Jason out of the office and toward the door to exit the laboratory. “Another impending herpes outbreak? You gotta watch out for those groupies, you know.” Gilman clicked his tongue and turned to Josh as he spoke, who had looked up at the goading remarks and was now gaping, slack-jawed, back at Gilman. Gilman grinned at him, and Josh shook his head and returned to his work.

Jason stopped walking and turned. He walked back toward Gilman and stood inches from his face, his chest puffed out, his jaw working, his fists coiled.

Josh slipped quietly out of the laboratory.

Gilman recoiled as if preparing for a blow.

Jason only smiled. “Have you figured out yet that Oscar Morales spent six months as a research assistant in biology?” he asked.

Gilman paled.
“What? Where? When?”

Jason stepped backward. Still smiling, he ignored Gilman’s question and turned to glance at his own reflection in the glass of one of the laboratory’s cold cabinets. He reached into the pocket of his pants and found a small band, with which he tied back his shoulder-length hair, smoothing the sides and the top until he was satisfied with it. “How do I look?” he asked, batting his eyelashes dramatically.

The truth was that he looked strikingly handsome and unusually professional. In contrast to his normal attire of ragged blue jeans, black t-shirts with band logos, and combat boots, Jason was currently dressed in a suit and tie. His loafers looked as if they had never before been worn. The fever Jason was battling lent a hint of color to his normally vampire-pale cheeks. The result was a healthy-looking glow on a face that rarely saw daylight. With his jet-black hair clean, combed, and now tied back at the nape of his neck, Jason looked every bit the respectable scientist.

Gilman only stared.

“Huh?” Jason said then. “Oh, yeah, that! Morales. Research assistant. Biology. Yeah.” Another long pause. “He was at UCLA in the lab of Qiang Zhao ten years ago. Even got himself co-authored on a paper once. He was fourth author, but still—it was him! His job was to make solutions and reagents, clean glassware, do literature searches for people, maintain cell lines, that sort of thing. He would have learned how to sustain a culture of bacteria, and he would have learned sterile technique. And those are the exact skills one would need to contain and distribute anthrax.

“But then I guess he decided that dealing drugs was a better way to make money. And frankly, he’s right. This career pays for shit. Morales must be smarter than I am.”

Gilman had lost his spunk. “How do you know all that?” he asked miserably.

“Because one of us is actually a competent investigator. And let me give you
another
hint, Gilman. It’s not you.” Jason turned on the heels of his polished loafers and trotted cheerfully out of the lab.

10:42 A.M.
EST

On the other side of the country, Teresa Wood was preparing an ESDA analysis. This time, the experiment would be performed on two greeting cards instead of one.

With gloved hands, she pulled both cards from their respective sealed envelopes and placed them onto the vacuum. She laid a clear, thin film over each card and watched the vacuum suck it down. She held the corona wire over each card independently to deposit the appropriate negative charge to its surface. And in the same order, to maintain her time frame, she filled the indentations with the tiny, toner-covered glass beads. The hand-written text intensified. And then, the traces became visible.

The procedure was one Teresa had performed a thousand times. She was always pleased to find a hidden indentation of some kind in a piece of mail. Usually, it was just a fragment of something. The circle of a keychain, adjacent to a partial indentation from a key itself. A dent from a piece of jewelry or a button from an article of clothing. A change in depth or pressure in a line of text, indicating that the document had been altered after its initial generation. When an ESDA trace produced a new writing, the task was even more cryptic, and even more rewarding to solve. Rarely were more than a few words revealed—a fragment of text copied onto another piece of paper over the questioned document.

This time, Teresa could barely process the information that came to light as each tiny bead occupied its own cavity in the two greeting cards. As the trace became increasingly visible, Teresa’s breath caught in her throat and she began to shiver. It was unlike anything she had ever seen before in an ESDA.

One card was devoid of trace indentations. The other contained an entirely new text. The writing was in English. It was as clear as the original text on the surface. It had obviously been etched deliberately for the ESDA trace to reveal. And it was addressed to Teresa by name.

7:58 A.M.
PST

The crowd that greeted Jason Fischer in downtown San Diego was wildly larger than he had imagined it would be. And it was hostile. Even though the convention center was still several blocks away, clashing lines of biotechnology supporters and protesters stretched down 4th Avenue and spilled into the horizon of Horton Plaza to the right of Jason’s ancient, struggling car.
Damn, I wish my band could draw like this
, Jason thought as he turned left onto 4th Avenue off of F Street.

Jason stopped at a red light and offered a distracted middle finger to a college-aged group dressed as monarch butterflies and bearing signs that read “Biotech is Murder” and “Kill the NIH.” As he did, one of the protestors leaped onto the hood of his car. It occurred to the young scientist that the gradually unraveling Darwin fish on his bumper would probably not be very popular among some here.

“You people are destroying the earth!”
the man on the windshield screamed, and a fine spray of spittle splattered from his mouth onto the glass directly in front of Jason. Without breaking the man’s rabid gaze, Jason smiled sweetly and turned on his windshield wipers, smearing dirt and saliva onto his attacker’s waiting hand, which was promptly retracted.

Before Jason could decide what to do about the angry tree-hugger beating at his windshield, a peace officer in full SWAT attire parted the human wall lining the street and jerked the youngster by the shirt collar. The pair pulled free of Jason’s car just as the light turned green, and Jason crept into the grid-locked intersection. He watched as the cop gripped the protestor by the nape of the neck and roughly pulled him away from the crowd.

Inching forward, Jason turned right onto Market Street off of 4th Avenue, and the pedestrian traffic thickened. As he turned left onto Front Street and again onto Harbor Drive, it became asphyxiating. Harbor Drive ran parallel to the San Diego Bay. And over the bay hovered the San Diego Convention Center.

As Jason pulled parallel to the complex, his mouth ran dry and he sucked air in abruptly. The reflex launched a short but violent coughing fit, and the fever that Jason had been fighting all morning felt as if it had intensified instantaneously. It had just become clear that the public was, indeed, aware of Katrina Stone’s arrest.

No less than a thousand of the protestors lining Harbor Drive were dressed identically, in black-and-white-striped “prisoner” Halloween costumes. Behind them, a long banner stretching down Harbor Drive read “This is the Ethics of Science.” Several of the individuals held smaller signs with a simpler message: “Stone Stone.”

The protestors were feverishly chanting, and out of morbid curiosity, Jason cracked his window in order to make out the words. “Eye for eye! Bone for bone! Execute Katrina Stone!”

Interspersed among the sea of black and white stripes were representatives from every television network Jason had ever heard of. As he continued his slow progress down the street in unison with the other cars, he could catch fragments of the interviews that were being conducted with bystanders.

“… serves her right! These scientists think they’re God… ”

“… nothing short of a self-righteous, over-educated, homegrown
terrorist!”

“I say she’s a
hero!”

Jason slammed on his brakes when he heard the surprising last statement. He rolled his window the rest of the way down and then engaged his parking brake. Then he shoved his head out the window, scanning the crowd to look for the speaker.