Capitol Reflections (14 page)
As morning broke, Gwen felt renewed, invigorated. Adrenaline flooded her bloodstream as she put on her PHS uniform while Jack slept peacefully in the gray dawn. She left his favorite cereal on the counter—Cap’n Crunch (boys will be boys, she figured)—and was out the door by 7:30.
Gwen flipped on the fluorescent lights of her office at exactly 8:15. She hastily reviewed some trivial reports littering her desk, grabbed a cup of coffee, met with a coworker to discuss projected flu stats for the coming winter, and then impatiently waited for the digital clock on her desk to register nine o’clock in green block letters.
A few minutes before nine, her phone rang unexpectedly.
“Gwen? Dardenoff here.”
“How are you, Dave, what’s going on?”
“Something a bit puzzling at this end. Not quite sure what to make of it … After we spoke, I decided to run some of your friend’s brain tissue for advanced testing in the hopes of finding something.”
“And?” Gwen asked.
“No other traces of foreign substances, but the cyclic AMP level in the brain was off the charts. I see that sometimes in cocaine-related seizures and the crystal meth that those bikers like to cook up. I haven’t seen it before in a plain old overworked smoker.”
“What do you make of it, Dave?”
“I’m kind of at a loss here. It’s not a test we do very often because it doesn’t really help establish any kind of cause. On the other hand, it’s a pretty unexpected finding and I thought you would like to know.”
“Do you think there was some sort of foul play?” asked Gwen.
“I really don’t know what to think. I’ll call again if anything comes up.”
Dardenoff ’s call shook Gwen to her core. There was just no way she was going to leave this one alone. Marci deserved more of an explanation than “worked herself to death.” It was time to play her strongest card.
Gwen’s fingers practically dialed by themselves. “Is Jan Menefee in?” Gwen asked.
“One moment please,” replied the passionless voice of a receptionist.
Gwen nervously tapped a ballpoint pen against a coffee cup with PEQUOD’S glazed around its surface in large letters. In the thirty agonizing seconds before a familiar voice announced its presence at the other end of the line, she pictured Jan in her mind—brilliant scientist by day, flirt and party girl by night.
“Menefee.”
“Hi, Jan. It’s Gwen Maulder. How are you?”
“Other than shocked, fine. I haven’t heard from you since last year when you called about that botulism hoax. What kind of deadly disease warrants a call from my old friend today?”
“Okay, guilty as charged, Jan. Sorry I’ve been out of touch. Can I blame my lack of social graces on my husband by any chance?”
“Is he being a pain?”
“Not really, but I thought it was worth a shot.”
“Then what can I do for ya this time, Cap’n?”
Gwen paused and closed her eyes. She would lay out the story as best she could and hope that Jan would understand the urgent nature of her call. “A good friend of mine died in May. Marci Newman.”
“You talked about her a lot in medical school. Your undergrad roomie, right? That’s pretty awful.”
“Thanks. It was very … unexpected. There was no history of disease whatsoever except for mitral valve prolapse.” Gwen related the details to Jan, as few as they were, anticipating the response.
“Sounds like another victim of stress in the twenty-first century,” lamented Jan. “At Marci’s age, I doubt smoking contributed to her death, but then hey—I don’t think Big Tobacco has come clean yet on what kind of additives go into cancer sticks. I don’t know what to think about those cyclic AMP levels. It’s not the kind of thing that gets measured routinely at autopsy and you sure can’t take brain samples in normal healthy living people for comparison. I can understand why you might be a bit suspicious, though. Hey, on a different subject, it’s a shame that Eddie Karn wasn’t taken seriously as a candidate for your front office. I heard the word ‘additives’ causes him to bristle, which didn’t play well at his confirmation hearings.”
Gwen scratched the words, “cigarettes/additives” on a memo pad. Upon awaking that morning, she’d decided to make a list of any and all possibilities. Fitz Rule Number Three: Leave no stone unturned.
“Yeah,” Gwen said. “Karn’s a decent guy from what I’ve heard, but I don’t know that it’s feasible to start looking in every box of chocolate chip cookies to see if the chemicals that extend shelf life will cause us all to grow an extra finger. We have to find a happy medium or we’ll all go completely bonkers.”
“Point well taken. But how can I help you with the death of Marci Newman? Is there something you haven’t told me yet?”
“Actually,” replied Gwen, “I was hoping there was something you could tell me.”
“I’m not following.”
“BioNet. Word up here in Rockville is that it can track small trends in large populations.”
“Absolutely. It passed its trials with flying colors, although it really hasn’t had any serious test of its potential, which I suppose is good when you remember that it’s designed to pick up signs of bioterrorism—exposure to powders, gas, viral and nerve agents—things like that. It can also key on symptoms of something out of left field, like SARS. Hopefully, it won’t be detecting anything at all if the supersnoops at the FBI and CIA are getting their act together. At present, we’re just beginning to do regular surveillance runs to see what’s out there.”
“What if you programmed BioNet to look for cause of death in people in the thirty-to-forty age group, people who were thought to be otherwise healthy?”
“I’d say you were casting an awfully big dragnet. Too many young people die everyday, Gwen. I don’t have to remind you of that. BioNet is sensitive, but I can pretty much guarantee that it’s going to spit out a normal morbidity and mortality curve for any segment of the population.”
Gwen leaned back in her chair, fingers laced behind her head.
“What if we narrow it down and look for people who died after a seizure episode?” Gwen realized that if cigarettes were involved, young people wouldn’t be the only ones affected, although teens and twenty-somethings were indeed smoking more than older people during the past decade, with seniors turning to nicotine patches and gum in droves. Tobacco aside, the idea that the mysterious trend for which she was hunting involved only younger members of the population was an unwarranted assumption. She was, after all, trying to look at things from a greater perspective, Fitz Rule Number Two.
“Seizures?” said Jan. “Very doable, since seizure activity, as luck would have it, has already been programmed into the system. Many chemical agents used by terrorists push people right over the seizure threshold, so it’s an integral part of the project.”
“What kind of statistical breakdown can BioNet provide?”
“Let me give you a mundane but very accurate example. Every community in the country with public sewage can measure the volume of refuse processed by its treatment plant on a minute-by-minute basis, providing an extremely accurate measure of toilet flushes per minute. Big deal, right? Actually, a sudden spike in flushing might indicate a possible attack of the runs on a community-wide basis. This might signal nothing more than beef poisoning from a bad fast-food chain, but it could just as easily point to something far more insidious, such as the introduction of a deadly viral agent to the community’s water supply. Thanks to Homeland Security, BioNet is linked to an unbelievable number of information sources, with sewage plants being just one example among thousands. If a threat were to be identified, the system could tell you age, gender, race, geographical location, preexisting medical conditions—could tell you almost anything, in fact, except whether or not a patient attends church regularly.”
“Damn,” said Gwen. “It’s that good?”
“Yep. The joke down here is that it should be able to predict the stock market by next year. Let me give you the short version of BioNet’s capabilities. I already told you that BioNet is first and foremost an amazing data bank that has amassed more information than any previous computer or record-keeping system in history. That alone makes it worth its weight in gold. For starters, BioNet can search its database for routine patterns, such as where certain disease outbreaks usually arise or what age groups are most susceptible to certain kinds of infections, but that’s just the tip of this cyber-iceberg. It can correlate different sets of variables, be they geographical location, ethnicity, symptoms—you name it—and show possible relationships within a matter of seconds, whereas old-fashioned medical research could take weeks, months, or even years to establish patterns. That’s just Level I, however.”
Gwen chuckled. “What is Level II? A computer from Star Trek?”
“Actually, you’re not far off the mark. Level II is what makes BioNet a quantum computer, the very first of its kind.”
“Quantum?”
“Yes. Follow along, and I’ll forego the lecture on Boolean algorithms, which, in a nutshell, give computers the ability to process yes-no and either-or statements. We’ve all seen messages displayed such as ‘Do you wish to quit this application?’—yes or no—or ‘Choose drive C or drive D as file destination’—an either-or decision. Here’s where it gets creepy, though. In a Quatum computer, each bit—or quibit—can have a value of zero, one, or anything in between, exponentially increasing the power of computation.”
“If you say so, Jan.”
“I say so, Gwen. What BioNet is programmed to do at Level II is to decide which probable realities are most likely to exist given a set of variables, and what realities might be expected to exist in the future. It takes the entire yes-no, either-or computer logic to a level of programming based on quantum physics. Theoretically, it can actually predict outbreaks before they happen. Likewise—and here’s the real beauty of the entire system—it can assign a preliminary diagnosis to a set of symptoms and then extrapolate backward to find the agent responsible—environmental, viral, bacterial, what-have-you. Does that mean BioNet is perfect in using quantum probability as its programming foundation? Let me just say this: in simulations, it hypothesized heretofore-unknown viruses as the cause of a disease by deciding on the probability of viral mutations. Yep, I’d say we’re most definitely in Star Trek territory, my dear Dr. Maulder.”
“To say I’m impressed would be an understatement,” Gwen admitted. “I could also ask a million follow-up questions, the answers to which I wouldn’t understand. So the bottom line is this: will you run my data at Level I, Jan? On the q.t.? Depending on results, we can move to Level II.”
“Sure, but no need for secrecy. With seizure frequency built into the program, I can run it at will. Shouldn’t raise a single eyebrow. And since I’m the director, who’s going to tell me I can’t play with my own toy? As far as I’m concerned, this is what BioNet was designed to do. You’re an FDA epidemiologist with a concern. Period.”
“You’re a peach, Jan. I owe you.”
“Hey, I’m a Georgia gal, Gwen. Of course I’m a peach. And all you owe me are a few more calls from time to time. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Gwen hung up and sat back in her seat, feeling a sense of accomplishment that had eluded her for too long. For the first time since Marci died, Gwen felt that she might finally know what happened to her.
Her good mood lasted until 5:15 that afternoon. That was when she got an e-mail from her boss, Ralph Snyder. Gwen had been around the agency long enough to know that no end-of-the-day e-mail was a good harbinger, particularly when it came directly from above rather than through the bureaucratic chain of secretaries and administrative assistants. The note was terse and to the point. It read, “Can we review your current workload, recent accomplishments, and job priorities in my office Monday morning at eleven?”
The seemingly straightforward question was a bad omen. In bureaucratic parlance, “review” was a sure indication that something was going to change. Snyder couldn’t fire Gwen without citing an incident of gross negligence or incompetence, but he could make her life hell by dumping paperwork in her lap, reducing her to nothing more than a secretary compiling stats.
Why would he suddenly be on her case? Gwen knit her brows and tried to recall something—anything—that would have caused the anal-retentive Snyder to single her out for reassignment. No, there was nothing she could think of. Her duties had remained constant except for work resulting from the occasional request from Snyder himself to supervise fieldwork in various cities for limited periods of time. What interest, she wondered, could Snyder possibly have in her “job priorities”?
She left the building and then stopped dead in her tracks. “Oh shit,” she muttered, her legs suddenly feeling weak. She slid into the driver’s seat of her trusted blue Nissan Maxima and lowered her head onto the steering wheel.
The call to Jan Menefee. Snyder must have somehow learned of her request to use BioNet.
“Dammit,” Gwen said, raising her head. “It’s a valid inquiry. It’s what I’m supposed to do.”
Gwen could hear Snyder’s high-pitched, whining voice lecturing her on the need to separate her actions on behalf of the agency from a single case, and one without a great deal of merit, involving a friend.
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