The Death Row Complex (14 page)

“Then he became comfortable and a little arrogant. He trusted that those discoveries would keep him going, and he became very lazy about keeping up on the latest and the greatest.

“Wong says that science is a fast-moving field and young researchers pass older ones who aren’t keeping current. Johnson did his training long before the arrival of many modern advances that are now commonplace. Like many of his generation, Johnson relies on tried and true methods. But many younger scientists believe him to be somewhat out of touch and even a bit fearful of technology. Evidently, he has made relatively few major contributions in the past ten years or so.

“Of course, this is all from the mouth of Wong, who smugly educated me that ‘conscience’ means ‘con science,’ which means ‘with science.’ Wong doesn’t seem to think scientists can do any wrong, so I don’t trust his opinion any more than I trust Stone. But there’s even more.

“Johnson is seventy-five years old. Wong says that when a committee is reviewing a grant application in which the researcher asks for several years of funding to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, the committee has to consider the possibility that the researcher might retire before the work is done. Or worse. So in a nutshell, Johnson’s funding has been progressively drying up for a while.”

“What does all of this have to do with Katrina Stone?” McMullan asked.

“Her grant application. After the NIH committee reviewed the application, Johnson told Wong point blank that it was originally
his
idea to use the types of molecules she was proposing. He suspected that Stone had previously reviewed one of his earlier applications and taken the idea for her own.”

12:03 P.M.
PDT

Jason Fischer faced a hospital room wall, mindlessly re-reading a wall poster he had already memorized. Over the last nineteen hours, his diagnosis had become all too obvious.

Visions of playing guitar, liters of booze, and late nights spent with one morally devoid groupie after another flooded his thoughts, and he realized he had been lucky to dodge this particular bullet for as long as he had.
What was I thinking?

The door opened and Jason turned to see the young doctor with the tongue ring.

“OK, Jason, let’s see the boys,” the doctor instructed.

Jason lifted his hospital gown and revealed a grotesque mess of red sores. They were just beginning to crust over, and the pain was giving way to an intolerable itch. For the first time in distant memory, Jason was horribly embarrassed. He looked away from the doctor as he replaced the gown.

“I assume you have already figured this out,” the doctor said, “but you definitely don’t have anthrax. Those tests came back negative. Your sterile technique—in the
lab
, anyway—is fine.” As he spoke the last sentence, the doctor peered knowingly over the tops of his glasses. Then he continued. “All you’ve got here is a hangover on top of a vicious case of genital herpes.”

Jason tried to push aside the notion that he might have preferred death by anthrax.

N
OVEMBER 1, 2015
7:30 A.M.
PST

A San Quentin guard watched as visitors to the minimum-security wing filed through the metal detector. His eyes fell upon one woman, and he frowned.

Her long black headscarf flowed over a black robe so seamlessly that the guard could not tell where one ended and the other began. She stepped through the metal detector and then began following the others down the corridor toward the visitation room. Her dark face was downcast, shielded by the headscarf.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the guard said. “I’d like you to come with me.”

“Is there problem?”

“No, ma’am, I am sure there is not. But we will need you to remove your headscarf for a moment. It’s only a routine check.”

The visitor’s heavily accented voice remained calm and low, almost submissive. She did not look up. “It is my right to wear hijab in the prison. I read the rules the first time I come here.”

“And it is our right to ask you to remove it, in private, for security reasons, at our discretion. Step into the room over here, please. A female guard will join you shortly.” He motioned toward a small room to his left. The visitor shook her head and stepped toward it.

In Dulles, Virginia, a phone was ringing. USPIS Assistant Director of Forensics Teresa Wood engaged her speakerphone without looking up from her paperwork. “Wood here.”

“Teresa, hi, it’s Mason,” said her colleague.

“Hi, Mason. Have you got something for me?” Mason had been tasked with tracing the IBI—a barcode applied to mail entering the system—on the greeting card from the White House. It is the IBI that permits the USPIS to determine where a document was mailed.

“Very little,” Mason said. “I traced your greeting card, the one with the Arabic writing on it.”

“Yeah, I know the one,” Teresa said. A photocopy of the Arabic text was sitting on the desk in front of her. She had just been examining it.

“Well, whoever mailed the card was smart enough not to go to a post office or mail it from any other business. All we know is that the card entered the system somewhere in Phoenix, Arizona. The stamp came from a public stamp kiosk with no camera—also in Phoenix.”

“Hm.”

“What about the handwriting?” Mason asked. “Any luck?”

“We haven’t found a match with any known members of ISIL or with anyone else from whom we have an Arabic handwriting sample. The White House interpreter who first read this document made the observation that the handwriting is, in fact, very odd. It looks like it was written by someone who does not speak Arabic.”

“Could someone have put the sentences together from a dictionary or an online translator?”

“Not if their reference language was English. The sentence structure is just too different, and no online translator on the market can reproduce it. Whether you entered the English text word for word or as a whole sentence, the Arabic translation would still come out as gibberish. Especially given the content. This text is strange, but it
is
real Arabic. It didn’t come from online translation.

“So the FBI linguistics department is working on it as well. They are trying to pinpoint a dialect. Even that task has proven elusive.”

A few moments later, the prison guard’s female colleague approached. “What now, Fred?”

“Just a routine check. Muslim woman. Bulky headscarf. I want her to remove it. And I want her frisked.”

His colleague rolled her eyes. “I’m sure she’s a terrorist, just like the seventy-five-year-old grandmother you had me frisk earlier this morning. Do the words ‘racial profiling’ mean anything to you?” She walked away without waiting for his answer.

Once inside the room, the annoyed female guard closed the door behind her. “Please remove your headscarf,” she said to the woman while examining her own manicure. “You may use the mirror.” She motioned toward a small mirror mounted on the wall.

The visitor consulted the mirror to reach up with black-gloved hands and remove the hijab. Long thick ropes of equally black hair cascaded over the loose robe. “You touch my body now to check for bomb? Why? Because I am Muslim?”

The guard sighed without looking up from her fingernails. “No, ma’am. Thank you for your cooperation. You may go.”

N
OVEMBER 6, 2015
3:48 P.M.
EST

Linguistics analyses were fruitless. Five days after learning that the greeting card was mailed in Phoenix, Teresa spoke to the linguistics specialist from the FBI.

“The card was written in a mixture of Egyptian, Levantine, and Iraqi Arabic,” the specialist said, “with a smattering of language from Modern Standard—a dialect that nobody in the Arabic-speaking world actually uses in day-to-day speech.”

“What do you mean, a dialect that nobody uses? Is it an old dialect, like Shakespearean English? Then why call it modern?”

“It’s modern, but it is only used in official or professional documents, newscasts, and the like.”

“Great. So our terrorist is a newscaster from anywhere in the Arab world. How close are the different dialects to each other?”

“Distinct enough that Arabs don’t always understand other Arabs.”

N
OVEMBER 9, 2015
3:48 P.M.
EST

Three days later, Teresa withdrew the card itself from a sealed envelope with gloved hands. She spread it out on the sterilized metal table before her and drew the head of a CrimeScope toward it. She flicked the scope’s power switch and began directing intense light of various wavelengths at the card in hopes of picking up objects or substances that would otherwise be invisible.

Teresa inched the light source across and down the card in a grid pattern. Seeing nothing, she adjusted the filters to change the wavelength of light produced and then retraced the same motion again.

No semen present. No blood. No surprise. It was a piece of mail. There also did not seem to be any ink-to-ink variations that would indicate that the card had been doctored.
Think, Teresa. What would be on this?

She changed wavelengths again. With painstaking diligence, she ran the beam of light over every square centimeter of the front of the card. A gloved hand tenderly opened it, and she ran the light over the inner leaflets. Nothing.

Teresa ran the CrimeScope’s beam over the outside of the envelope. Nothing. She held the envelope open with one hand to direct the light inside. And two new lines became visible.

The first was long and narrow.
Microscopic hair fragment?
The second was fuzzier. Probably a fiber of some kind.

Without deflecting the beam, Teresa reached into the top drawer of the lab bench upon which the scope was sitting. She retrieved a long glass cylinder from the drawer and uncapped it one-handed. Then she withdrew the sterile micro-forceps inside. Without allowing
anything
to touch the sterile tip, Teresa smiled as she reached in with a steady hand to collect the evidence.

N
OVEMBER 26, 2015
5:35 A.M.
PST

Sean McMullan parked his government-issued unmarked car in the dirt lot at the Torrey Pines Gliderport in La Jolla, California. It was 5:35 a.m., Thanksgiving Day, and the lot was mostly empty. McMullan’s immaculate black sedan contrasted starkly with the two dusty SUVs parked nearby.

As McMullan stepped out into the early morning mist, a pair of surfers came into view over the crest from the beach below. Both wore full wetsuits, currently stripped to the waist, and carried short boards. Neither wore shoes. They approached the SUVs in the parking lot and waved at McMullan, and he nodded politely.

McMullan briefly wondered if the surfers would go to work that day, or if they even had jobs. He had no idea that one of them was Jeffrey Wilson, a world-renowned chemist from the nearby Scripps Research Institute, or that Wilson had just been awarded the Nobel Prize.