The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (5 page)

She is right
, I began to admit to myself.
Nature precedes science, and science precedes medicine…

Penicillin is a mold. The medical uses for leeches and maggots, once thought archaic, were revived in the twentieth century after the organisms’ legitimate therapeutic properties were brought to light. A drug once marketed worldwide for morning sickness induced devastating birth defects in thousands of babies—but was later revived as an effective cure for leprosy, and is currently standard of care for multiple myeloma.

“You are talking about a cure for cancer,” I said. “Not just a treatment—a cure. These women were cured.”

“Yes,” said Alyssa. “They were. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. What we are talking about.”

She and my husband.

I turned away for a moment, pretending to examine a small sculpture in the corner of the office. It was a figure of a woman in a sheath dress, a crown upon her head displaying two large horns. Between them was an orb.

Then I turned once again to face the beautiful woman Jeff had been collaborating with instead of me. And I wondered if I was looking into the face of his killer.

“Cancer drug discovery and new chemical elements are pretty far outside of your field, aren’t they?” I asked.

“They are entirely outside of my field,” she said. “That is why I consulted your husband.”

It is the day after we spoke for the first time. The lecture hall is packed for a presentation by the handsome Nobel laureate chemist Jeffrey Wilson. I am sitting front row center, as he had been during my own talk. Jeff mounts the podium and winks in my direction.

“Good morning,” he says. “In 1984, Barry Marshall demonstrated that stomach ulcers are caused by the bacterium
H. pylori
. He did this by drinking a vial of it. Vile indeed.”

A chorus of chuckles sweeps through the room, along with a few groans of disgust.

“Today,” Jeff continues, “my lab has developed an antidote to
H. pylori
infection. As I had no desire to drink a beaker
of bacteria, we chose to use chemistry instead.”

An image projects on the screen above him. He focuses a laser pointer upon it.

“As you know, many chemical elements on the periodic table can exist as several variants, or isotopes. My lab has developed a brand new class of therapeutics using isotopes of the so-called superheavy elements.

“These are named as such because they are formed by a combination of two smaller elements—which makes them, well, super heavy. We have learned how to force the collision of natural elements to create these from scratch. The trick is in creating those with medicinal properties, and the even bigger trick is in harnessing the best isotope before it decays.

“Superheavy isotopes are unstable. They are generated very rapidly, and they decay almost instantly into inert ingredients. But it is also this very transience that lends enormous therapeutic potential to the superheavy isotopes as a class. It is this transience that permits us to target a specific biological or pathological niche without any off-target activity.

“An example is the drug we have developed against
H. pylori
. When an ulcer patient swallows our pill, the drug is converted by stomach acid into a new superheavy isotope, which specifically targets the bacteria and then disperses into its inert ingredients. The result is a highly powerful therapeutic with virtually negligible side effects…”

I blinked to make my eyes refocus upon the ancient text. My hands were trembling as I read and re-read its message.

… the wine soured and the nardos by the bedsides turned from green to red.

… “The nardos have quickened!”

… When I touched one of the nardos, a gentle warmth ran from my fingertips to my heart… And then, the sensation was gone.

… in those four, it was as if the crabs never existed.

I looked up at Alyssa Iacovani. “Do you realize the consequences for the person who brings this discovery to light?” I asked. “Whoever scientifically proves whatever happened in these nardos will never need to work again. He or she will have cured the plague of our time.”

Alyssa’s intelligent eyes shone with the electricity of pure ambition, a vulgar neon green against the blood red backdrop of my mind. “Yes,” she said, smiling. “You are correct about all of those things. So do you want to be a part of it? Your husband certainly does.”

[F]or some of the Egyptians the crocodiles are sacred animals… and each of these two peoples keeps one crocodile selected from the whole number, which has been trained to tameness, and they put hanging ornaments of molten stone and of gold into the ears of these and anklets round the front feet, and they give them food appointed and victims of sacrifices and treat them as well as possible while they live, and after they are dead they bury them in sacred tombs, embalming them.

-The Histories

Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE)

[T]he Romans pitied, not so much her, as Antony himself, and more particularly those who had seen Cleopatra, whom they could report to have no way the advantage of Octavia either in youth or beauty.

-Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

Plutarch (ca. 46–120 CE
)

Chapter Five

A new slide appears on the projector screen, and Jeffrey Wilson aims a laser pointer at the grotesque image. From my seat at front row center of the auditorium, I hear the collective gasp of the audience behind me.

I do not gasp; it is an image I have seen a thousand times.

On the slide is a full-frontal photograph of a small naked boy, his eyes covered to protect his identity. The boy’s body is covered with coal-colored sores, sores that appear somewhat like black mold. The sores are the unique, distinctive signature of the bacterium
B. anthracis
, the trademark that gives rise to the name anthrax—derived from the Greek word for coal.

“This little boy exemplifies the desperate need for better medicines to combat modern diseases,” Jeff is saying, “and current efforts in my lab are aimed at expanding the potential of superheavy isotope technology to address this need. As an example, we are developing a treatment for weaponized inhalational anthrax, which will combine our superheavy isotope technology with the high levels of oxygen present in the lung…”

Alyssa stood and retrieved a large set of keys and a purse from her desk. “Let’s take a walk,” she said. She then led me from the private offices, and we began strolling through the museum like tourists.

“I know that you and Jeff are a team,” she said. “He raves about you. He says you each act as the other’s sounding board, voice of reason, and muse.”

Except for this time
, I thought.

“So I would really love your input on this,” Alyssa said.

I could smell her perfume. I had not noticed it earlier, but now she walked so closely next to me that our shoulders were nearly touching. The scent was subtle and delicate, but the weight of her presence and her scent in my personal space made me feel sick again. I was glad to be walking through the museum rather than confined to her office.

Her voice was nearly a whisper. “There is something I have been seeking since I entered graduate school,” Alyssa said. “As I mentioned, my dissertation project was conducted at the Fayoum Oasis outside of Cairo. I went to the Fayoum in hopes of recovering an important fragment of the historical record that has been lost for centuries.”

“Ambitious project for a student,” I said softly.

“Indeed. When I selected my project and began to flesh it out, I knew I was embarking upon something risky. What I could never have predicted was the magnitude of what I would eventually find.

“I had developed an hypothesis that a large critical piece of history had either inexplicably disappeared or, more likely, been deliberately hidden just before the birth of Christ. You asked me earlier what sparked the shift in thinking during that era from superstition to true science. The truth is, we don’t know. Nobody knows. That is what I went to the Fayoum to find out.

“I decided to go into field work at the oasis after poking around in a microfiche database at my university library. I stumbled upon an article in a turn-of-the-century American newspaper. The story was about an accidental find in the Fayoum.

“In the year 1900, an expedition was led by the Hearst Foundation and the University of California, Berkeley, into the Fayoum to excavate an archeological site. What they found was an ancient crocodile nursery and a cemetery full of mummified crocodiles.

“The workers were furious. They were being paid to excavate human mummies, not animals. To them, this mishap was just a job they would lose money on. So one of the workmen took a machete and began hacking into one of the mummified crocodiles out of anger. Guess what was inside it.”

“I give up.” I shrugged.

“A hidden collection of papyrus scrolls, dating to 49 BCE.”

“Interesting.”

“Indeed. Evidently this site was used by the Egyptian rulers to raise crocodiles to adulthood and then use their mummified carcasses to archive documents indefinitely. Of course, the opportunity to explore it was a dream come true for me. Like browsing through a library of six-foot-long organic vaults containing buried treasure from Atlantis. And since my hypothesis dated to the same era, the Greco-Roman period, I thought that this burial ground might contain the information I was looking for. I went to the Fayoum to complete the excavation of the cemetery and to translate the texts inside the crocodile mummies.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, no. I had to change my entire doctoral hypothesis. But after I graduated, I came to Naples to resume my search. It was here that I finally found two examples of the documents I had been searching for. Five weeks ago. The documents you hold in your hand. I believe there are dozens, maybe hundreds of additional medical texts from the same era yet waiting to be discovered.”

I glanced down at the texts I was still holding in my hands: the first, a case study of ten cancer patients; the second, a vague description of the healing of four of them. “What made you so sure that this type of medical writing would exist at all?”

“Everything we know about the era,” she said.

“We know a great deal about the author of these documents in particular. This was a public figure—a reigning queen, in fact. She was an exquisitely well-educated woman. She spoke and wrote fluently in nine languages. She had a well-documented, very sophisticated flair for the sciences. She loved her secrets, and she manipulated public record to suit her interests. She had both the means and the motive to store secret documents in the Herculaneum Villa dei Papiri because the library’s owner was Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. And Caesar was her lover.

“But then, because her life was cut short, she ran out of time to reveal her work on her own terms. This is why her legacy, her
true
legacy, has been lost to us. And why we have never found a single document of hers. Until now.

“The nardo document is the first writing in existence in the hand of Queen Cleopatra the Seventh. I believe it reveals the true source of her power over the most influential men of her era.”

After his lecture, Jeff steps down from the podium. The audience begins exiting the lecture hall, buzzing with conversation about the rapid advances the Nobel laureate has recently made in superheavy isotope technology. Several eager audience members approach Jeff to shake his hand and express their interest in his work.

“Impressive,” I hear a man say as he walks past me. “Wilson can’t possibly be very old.”

“He’s forty,” another voice responds.

An elderly woman approaches Jeff and lays a hand on his shoulder. “You should start a biotech company, son,” she says.

Jeff smiles politely and shakes her hand. “Thank you, Dr. Bower.” A number of heads turn to witness the dialog between Jeffrey Wilson and Sara Bower, who has just cured HIV.

But Jeff’s smoky blue eyes are on me. He steps away from Sara Bower and approaches me.

“So what did you think, Doctor?” he asks.

“Brilliant,” I say, and I cannot control my grin. “Except for the colossal fuck-up.”

“Excuse me?” Jeff exclaims, drawing back in surprise. His face is bright red, but he is smiling. “What colossal fuck-up?”

“I know you’re a chemist and all,” I say, “but I have to assume you at least have a couple of biologists on the payroll. They should know better than what you just said.

“Tell me something,” I say with a cocked head. “How are those anthrax studies coming along?”

Jeff frowns. “We’ll get there.”

“I know a thing or two about anthrax,” I say.

“Um, yeah, I realize that.”

“How are you targeting a specific biological and pathological niche when no specific biological and pathological niche has been defined?” I ask.

Jeff pulls me aside and lowers his voice. “You’re right! The cells are killing me. Or rather, I can’t kill them!”

I laugh. It is the most confusing paradox in anthrax research. Despite the devastating effects of anthrax in the body, there are really very few human cell types that can be killed by anthrax. Until only somewhat recently, the only cells known to be susceptible to infection were a few types of immune cells that in no way could produce the symptoms of anthrax when infected.

The biological terrorist attacks of 2001 and beyond triggered a massive increase in funding for anthrax research. This increase in focus led to the demonstration that additional cell types can respond to anthrax infection, but research in these cell types is still incomplete. The total picture is still a mystery.

Except to me.

“You just bluffed to an audience of five thousand scientists,” I say, grinning. “Ballsy.”

“I didn’t bluff!” Jeff says. He is still red in the face, but laughing. “I said we’re working on it, and we are. We’ll get there! Just wait!”

I shake my head. “So your lab is going to single-handedly solve this puzzle that the Department of Defense has been struggling to solve since 2001?”

“YES!”

“You’re one of those guys who won’t ever ask for directions, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just that you’re the type of person who won’t accept anyone’s help.”

“How do you know that? You don’t know me!”

“Oh, I think I do. It’s like looking in a mirror. But what if I told you I already know the answer? What if I said that I have proven the complete mechanism of action for anthrax in an entire panel of new cell types?”

“I’d think it’s a huge bummer that the woman I was just thinking of inviting out to dinner turned out to be a total crackpot.” This time, he is the one with the smug grin on his face.

“Oh, really? So then, you’re convinced that you can solve it, but it’s absolutely impossible that I could have?”

“Pretty much,” he says, but he jumps back as if I might hit him.

“OK,” I say. “I’ll make you a deal. Take this crackpot to dinner, and I’ll bring some of my recent data with me—the stuff I am not yet discussing in public. But first, what are the stakes? What do I get if I’m right?”

“Dessert?” he offers, and I refrain from asking what delectable treats are on the menu.

Alyssa Iacovani’s intelligent green eyes were unblinking as she waited for my response to her revelation.

“So you’re telling me,” I finally said, “that
Cleopatra
was the person who wrote this? That she was the person who discovered this… medical phenomenon? That she was some kind of doctor? That’s ridiculous!”

“Is it?” Alyssa smiled, and she motioned with her arm to direct me toward an exhibit room. As she pushed the door open and we stepped inside, she gestured broadly around the room.

“Allow me to introduce you to the queen,” she said.