The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (31 page)

As I approached the exit, I felt my smile fade into a frown. How badly I had misjudged Alyssa. I had come to Italy on a pre-conceived notion that she was, or was somehow connected to, Jeff’s murderer. And that she and my husband had possibly been lovers. How mistaken I was.

She had lost her husband, too. She had lost her entire family.

I could have believed Alyssa guilty of murder if there had been an illicit affair between her and Jeff. She could have been motivated by passion gone awry, by jealousy of me, or by scorn if he had changed his mind and dumped her. But there was no such motive. I had read private e-mails between them. Their relationship had been strictly professional. She had solicited his help as a scientist, and as a scientist he had offered it.

Why, then, would she kill him before the mystery she had solicited that help for was solved? There was no reason. She wouldn’t. It didn’t make sense.

I had nearly made an enemy of an ally, one Jeff had trusted. His message to me—“
Trust nobody. Her 2
”—clearly could not have been a reference to Alyssa.

I wondered again what my husband had meant by his message.

Was he referring to Alexis? Was he warning me that the cancer ransacking his body had infected her, too?

And then suddenly, there he was before me.

I halted in my tracks. For a moment, I stood motionless in the middle of the restaurant’s dining hall. Then I felt myself start to sway on my feet. With trembling hands, I clutched the nearest table, which mercifully was empty. I sat down quickly and hard on the chair beside it. And I continued to stare.

On the TV over the door was a full-view, still image of Jeff. I watched in disbelief as the image changed to a newscast.

What is he saying?
I wondered desperately as the news anchor rambled in Arabic, the image of my husband now confined to a small corner of the screen.

The screen changed again, and this time it was my picture on the TV. I did not need a translator to understand what the image meant. Jeff’s body had been found, and now I was wanted.

I glanced around the restaurant.

They can’t see you. They can’t see you. They can’t see you.

I mentally repeated the words over and over, struggling to remain calm and, more importantly, to stay in control of my breathing. I tried to envision myself at this moment from an outsider’s perspective, sitting in this café in my black niqab, black hijab, black galabia, with bags at my sides that made me look chubby. Nobody would ever guess that I was the woman on the TV. I had to believe that.

I glanced around the café again and saw a few patrons looking up at the TV nonchalantly, but none appeared to pay much attention. I felt myself calming.

It’s OK. It doesn’t mean anything. Except what you already knew. You knew Shuman would turn you in. Now he has.

Then the image on the screen changed again, and my breath caught in my throat.

My stomach protested in a sickening gurgle, and the ominous paragraph from my guidebook about Egyptian food and Western stomachs came back to me. Trying not to imagine the act of vomiting while dressed in niqab, I closed my eyes and swallowed hard. The moment passed.

I looked back up at the TV. The image now on the screen was one quite familiar to me. It was a laboratory. But this particular laboratory had been ransacked. A few reagent bottles appeared to have crashed to the floor, but, in general, the wet lab spaces themselves were intact.

The break-in had focused on the offices. Computer cables lay like severed limbs across barren desks where the machines and monitors had been. File cabinets were gutted, their drawers yanked out, their contents strewn about wildly.

I instantly recognized the office that the camera had focused in on. It was Jeff’s. It was not the office space in Naples, which I had personally invaded with the help of Aldo de Luca. The burglarized office now on the screen was Jeff’s office in our building in San Diego.

The news camera panned through the office space, and I recognized one of the file cabinets. One of its drawers was open and tilting downward, just inches from teetering off its tracks and out of the cabinet. Where its collection of files had been, there was now just a large empty space.

It was the drawer that had contained Jeff’s files for our secret HER2 project.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

-Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)

Chapter Twenty-One

Why did the gods spare the women through magic plants? Is it because women do not make war, as men do? It is not for us to know, but in those four, it was as if the crabs never existed.

I tore my veiled eyes away from the television screen and glanced quickly around the café one last time. Its patrons appeared engaged in their own conversations, their own meals, their own lives. Nobody seemed to notice that the woman sitting near them was the American murder suspect being talked about on the TV. I stood and walked as nonchalantly as possible out of the restaurant.

I strolled down the Corniche along the Nile, with the final three sentences of the nardo document mocking me.

HER2 is a breast cancer gene. While its presence has been confirmed in tissue other than breast tissue, and its relevance in other types of cancer has been explored, the effectiveness of HER2-targeted medications was demonstrated in a subset of breast cancers, the subset with the highest quantities of HER2.

The patients that had benefited from the nardo’s effect were all women. I had assumed this to be merely an experimental artifact—an error—because the women and men were housed in separate rooms of the hospital, and only the plants near the bedsides of the women had been observed by the document’s author. One woman had noticed a change in the plant and then reached forward to touch it. The other three and their caregiver had quickly followed.

Damn it!

I had no way of knowing what had—or had not—taken place in the other room, the room housing the men. Were there nardo plants at their bedsides? Or were those in the women’s room only there as a feminine gesture? Assuming the men
did
have a nardo plant next to each bed, did the same phenomenon strike those plants as well? Did the men simply fail to observe it? Did they lack the interest of the women—the need to reach out and touch the plants during that transient moment? Or was the phenomenon ineffective on their diseases? One thing was certain—the men had not been spared. The document clearly stated as much.

Trust nobody. Her 2
.

The text message was a warning, on so many levels. The HER2 gene itself, to a frustrated scientist, epitomizes the double-edged sword. HER2 treatments are toxic. They can lead to cardiac malfunction. The oncologist must perform the precarious balancing act of freeing his delicate patient from the cancer while not murdering her with a heart attack.

Could I be on the wrong track with HER2? Could Jeff be warning me not about the gene itself but about duplicity? Could the latter half of the text simply be underscoring the former? Reminding me that someone I’m inclined to trust might be exactly that—a double-edged sword? A wolf in sheep’s clothing?

John.

I found another Internet café. This time, my story ranked Number One among trends on the web.

I clicked into one of the news videos.

“A world-famous biotechnology company in San Diego, California, has been robbed, and its husband-and-wife owners are both missing. Security was breached at Collisogen Research, and the theft of large quantities of research data has been reported. The co-founders of Collisogen are prominent scientists Jeffrey Wilson and Katrina Stone. Wilson and Stone, who serve as the company’s chemistry and biology department heads respectively, have both disappeared…”

I clicked out of the newscast and then scrolled through several more stories. My racing heartbeat began to slow, and my breathing became steadier. There was no evidence that Jeff’s body had been turned in, or that I had been reported by Larry Shuman. But authorities were seeking any information concerning our whereabouts.

An unrelated news story detailed the emergence of a new, aggressive form of pancreatic cancer, to which three patients had now succumbed worldwide.

My face felt hot beneath the niqab.

With trembling hands, I clicked into Jeff’s secret e-mail account.

There was a response from Romano Moretti, the Naples chemist Jeff, and now I, had employed under the table, on conditions of secrecy. Moretti asked no questions about the publicized disappearance of his employer or his wife.

Instead, he simply offered the latest lab results. Moretti and his team had spent the previous day completing the processing of the biological samples that Alyssa and I had collected. They had found nothing of interest.

There was no response from John.

Please hurry. The first patient just died
.

The message had come in two days earlier.

He has dozens… maybe even hundreds of patients…

Now, there were two more deaths.

Which meant that additional deaths within the cluster of cancer patients John had been treating were now imminent. And that Lexi may have very little time left as well. Perhaps, so did I.

I felt sick again.

The Luxor sun was already nearly unbearable. Even at five in the morning when my train had arrived, I had stepped out into a hot, sweltering Upper Egypt. Now, at seven thirty, I was certain the temperature was already well over one hundred ten or even one hundred twenty degrees. There was no hint of a breeze.

It was to be my first full day in a black galabia and niqab, and I knew that I could not possibly travel through Luxor and Thebes without a car. In addition to the prohibitive heat already upon me, I had learned from my guidebooks that the sites I needed to visit were spread too far apart to walk, even in the most pleasant of circumstances.

I glanced again at my watch, as if seeing the time again could help me plan my next move. Assuming that Dante had found Alyssa, the two of them would now be traveling to Luxor from Naples and could not arrive before evening. But with my daughter’s tortured wails pushing me forward, I could not afford to lose an entire day of research, especially now that I knew what to look for to help her. So instead of a pagan theologist and an Egyptologist to help me, I had an Egyptian tour guide.

I figured I had two choices: hire a taxi or take a tour. Either way, I would be speaking to someone. In English. I decided it might as well be an English-speaking tour guide rather than another taxi driver like the one in Cairo who accidentally drove me to the wrong location. Or worse, one who might do so deliberately.

I took a deep breath and walked into the office of the nearest tour agency and announced through my veil that I needed a tour of Luxor.

The agent at the desk appeared surprised but then complied with my request. “Would you prefer a woman, madam?” he asked kindly.

“Yes, please,” I said, and a wave of relief washed over me. It had only then occurred to me that I was about to drive out into the Egyptian desert with a complete stranger.

As it turned out, I felt perfectly safe. My tour guide was a friendly middle-aged woman, and a young British couple was my only other company on the tour. The driver did not speak to us, but the tour guide occasionally spoke to him in Arabic.

The air conditioning felt like heaven, and the van itself was surprisingly new and comfortable. As we rolled gently out into the desert, I found myself lulled into a surprising sense of calm. My ingrained intellectual curiosity, coupled with the research nature of the task at hand, almost made me forget my reasons for being there.

I found myself marveling at the landscape. The greenery along the banks of the Nile was stunning. As we followed a frontage road parallel to the river, I tried to pick out different species of plant life that I knew. Some, like the many giant palms lining the road and the river banks, were the same species popular in Southern California. Other plants were unrecognizable to me.

The river itself coursed through a shallow trough, flowing northward from mountainous Sudan, thus leading to the counter-intuitive designations of
Upper Egypt
in the south and
Lower Egypt
in the north. The green trough containing the river met harshly with steep low cliffs on both sides, above which there was only desert. The Nile was a swath of verdant green cutting through a vast sea of brown.

The desert was unlike any I had ever seen. Having driven on numerous occasions through the California and Arizona deserts, I was familiar with deserts containing cacti, snakes, scorpions, and other heat- and drought-tolerant life forms. In contrast, this desert appeared to support no life at all; there was only sand. Dune upon dune of absolutely uninhabitable sand billowed away forbiddingly from the lush, life-giving Nile. The stark and abrupt contrast between the two landscapes was breathtaking.

Our tour guide broke the ice by asking the three of us if we had seen the pyramids. The British couple, who at first seemed a bit afraid to speak to me directly, nodded. I shook my head and lied. “I’m afraid I haven’t been to Cairo yet. I will be heading up there after Luxor.”

The young Brits looked as shocked as the woman on the Cairo Metro had when I had asked her the meaning of the word
zuro
. The tour guide, who knew I had requested an English-speaking guide, was prepared. She continued speaking. “The Old Kingdom built pyramids,” she said simply. “The ancient Egyptians believed in resurrection. They built pyramids to help their kings find their way to the heavens. They built them in the west because the sun sets in the west. The east was for birth, and the west was for death, like the birth and death of the sun every day.

“But the pyramids kept getting robbed. So by the time the New Kingdom came and the pharaohs moved to Upper Egypt, they finally said, ‘No more pyramids. Pyramids get robbed. This makes the gods very angry.’

“So they built the Valley of the Kings. They buried their kings underground instead, where nobody could find them. But they were
sneaky
.” The middle-aged woman smiled at the British woman. “This time, they built the tombs under a rock that is shaped like a pyramid. That way, they could still send their kings to the heavens, but they could also fool the robbers.”

Our van pulled into the entrance of the Valley of the Kings, and I immediately recognized the rock she had mentioned. The tall pyramid jutted out of the sand as if it had been carved there. But it was a natural formation. Had I not been looking for it, I would not have noticed it. The rock blended right into the desert.