The Death Row Complex (27 page)

He glanced up at the hotel room alarm clock and was reminded that he couldn’t read it. Over its face, Gilman himself had taped a computer printout. On it was the puzzle that sliced away at his nerves, day in and day out, and would stifle all meaning of time until he could solve it.

Taped over the alarm clock was the text from the White House greeting card. It was not the message that had been written in Arabic, which made no sense even to speakers of the language, but the English trace picked up by Teresa Wood’s ESDA analysis.

WHO1315

DR1630

AL1800

The text still meant nothing to Roger Gilman. And right now, he just wanted to know what time it was. He tipped back a shirtsleeve and glanced at his watch.

It was 6:15 p.m. in San Diego. Dawn would still be awake. Gilman picked up the receiver of his hotel room phone and made the call. Dawn’s voice was like heaven.

“Hi, honey,” Gilman said when she answered the phone. “How are things?”

“Oh, the usual around here,” Dawn said cheerfully. “We miss you to pieces, but I’m sure that isn’t news. How’s sunny So Cal?”

“It’s overrated,” Gilman said, but he was smiling. “Tell me what’s going on at home. I want to hear something normal.”

“The cable bill went up this month,” Dawn said. “That’s normal. I called the company to complain, but they said it’s a standard price increase. The crooks!” She laughed, and he laughed with her.

“Oh yeah, that reminds me,” Gilman said. “I talked to Bill Richards a few days ago, and he said he had just mailed us an invitation for his daughter’s wedding. I forget the date. Did you get it yet?”

“Um, no,” she said. “But now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve picked up the mail today. I’ll check it out. But for now, I have to go. If I don’t put the little ones to bed soon it’s going to be a problematic day tomorrow.”

Gilman smiled. “OK, sweetie. I’ll call you soon.”

“I know,” Dawn said. “I love you.”

Dawn put the children to bed, and they were excited to hear that Daddy had just called to say he loved them and would be home soon. The older ones knew that “soon” was poorly defined, and they had learned to accept that.

To the youngest, five-year-old old James and three-and-a-half year old Mary, time was a bit more wobbly. When Gilman finally arrived home, they would not really seem to have noticed that he had been gone at all.

After putting the kids to bed, Dawn reminded herself to get the mail before she could make a cup of tea and settle in with the novel that was her current guilty pleasure. She stepped out to the curb and pulled the stack from the mailbox, sorting as she reentered the house. Junk, bills, stuff worth reading.

There was a card, as her husband had thought there would be. Dawn opened the envelope and frowned.

The image on the front of the card was unlike any wedding invitation she had ever seen, but Dawn was not thinking about this as she flipped the card open to read what she thought would be the wedding date.

And then she was just confused. And after a moment, a bit uneasy.

6:39 P.M.
PST

The Bitch caught his movement out of the corner of her eye, and when she turned to look, it was obvious to Chuck that she recognized him. For a moment, the two stood immobile, only staring at one another.

She was standing next to a countertop on which stood a computer and a piece of equipment Chuck could not identify. She had a rack full of test tubes and had been feeding them into the machine. Behind her, on massive workspaces that stood detached from each other in the center of the room, several huge machines hummed with activity as their moving arms picked up items and relocated them, while other arms transferred liquids from one plastic container to another.

Slowly, she took a step backward, and then another. And then she ran.

Chuck aimed his pistol toward the fleeing target, but then hesitated. The laboratory was a 360-degree funhouse of unidentifiable equipment, and he knew that the Bitch worked with live anthrax. There was no telling what a bullet could set in motion.

Chuck pocketed the pistol and bolted forward. The Bitch sprinted behind a central island containing a large machine with moving robotic arms. And then they were at a standoff.

From the opposite side of the island, Chuck instinctively weighed his options. He could not leap over the island without colliding with the machine, and who knew what the machine was handling. Like a basketball player trying to anticipate an opponent’s next move, he watched for signs of body language that would tell him whether she would duck to the left, back toward the main lab, or to the right, and into another space. Chuck guessed that the room on the right would lead back into the hallway.

The Bitch’s eyes were locked on his, her blue-gray stare burning into his coal black one, and Chuck was briefly reminded of the same terrified fire in her eyes upon their first encounter on the hill near the ocean. But this time, there was something else behind them. It was rage.

Chuck glared into that rage and realized that he had used up his one opportunity to benefit from the element of surprise.

The woman’s eyes flashed away from his for a moment. When he glanced in the direction they had gone to determine what she could be looking at, he found himself staring at a computer monitor connected to the machine between them. On it scrolled a continuous collection of mathematical and written instructions that Chuck could not decipher. The woman’s eyes darted once, and then again a moment later, between Chuck and the computer screen. And he realized that she was waiting for something specific to appear on the screen.

Chuck ducked quickly to the left, as if to circumvent the island between them and catch her. She followed suit and ducked away as rapidly, and then snatched a final glance at the computer screen. Her breathing escalated and a labored moan escaped her lips as she dropped quickly downward to the floor, and out of Chuck’s field of view with the island between them.

Without pausing to consider the machine, he stepped forward to locate her again. And at that moment, the robotic arm swung rapidly around behind him and smashed into the back of Chuck’s head. And then locked.

The force of the blow was sufficient to throw dancing spots before Chuck’s eyes, and he was distantly aware of blood trickling down the back of his shirt. But even worse, he was now trapped between the metal claw and the bulk of the machine, and the grip was tightening.

The airy, whirring noise characteristic of computer malfunction arose next to him as the robotic arm pushed stubbornly to follow its pre-programmed path, but it was hindered by the presence of Chuck’s cranium where an empty space belonged. He felt his head being squeezed as if in a vice, and wondered what it would feel like when his skull popped open and his brains were squeezed out from the top like a pimple.

But just before it happened, the arm let go.

As if nothing had gone wrong, the robot continued its tireless repetitions. At the moment Chuck realized he was free from its grip, the woman bolted back toward the corridor to the main lab. He tore away from the machine and chased after her.

As she ran, she passed a bench containing two bottles of clear liquid. Both were uncapped. With lightning speed, and without slowing the pace of her dash across the lab, her right arm thrust outward and she quickly gripped one of the bottles, which she then carried with her like an intercepted football as she ran.

This is bad
, Chuck had time to realize when she whirled mid-stride and threw the contents of the bottle in his direction like a priest exorcising a demon with holy water. And like the proverbial demon under holy water, Chuck began to flail and thrash about as the highly concentrated acid began to devour the flesh on his face.

Chuck began to scream, and his hands flew instinctively toward the source of the torture. He began clawing at his own skin, as if he could wipe off the acid that was searing him. It was the wrong instinct. There had initially been only a minor splash to his left eye, but the sudden hand movement smeared the liquid quickly and indiscriminately. Chuck realized, too late, that he had just blinded himself. Probably for life.

Katrina fought the burning sensation that was growing over her right thumb and the inner part of her first finger while she watched her assailant flailing before her. When his hands struck his face, and she watched him smear the acid into his eyes, she knew she was safe.

She raced to the sink and began the process of flushing the liquid from her skin. The golden rule was fifteen minutes of uninterrupted flow of cool, clear water to quench an acid burn. Fifteen minutes was not going to happen here today. But Katrina was confident, as her attacker squirmed and writhed on the floor before her, that she at least had time to rinse her hand for a moment.

Since the inception of the Stone lab at San Diego State University, Katrina had been constantly chastising her staff for leaving the caps off of the acids and bases that resided next to the pH meter. Today, she was grateful for her staff’s lack of attention to safety. The acid had just saved her life with the help of Octopus, the lab’s original liquid handling robot. Like an old friend.

With her right hand still under the running faucet, Katrina pulled the cell phone out of her pocket with her left and dialed 911. After a moment of reconsideration, she hung up and then speed dialed Sean McMullan instead. A final glance at the man writhing on the ground led her to conclude that she probably had time to wait for police assistance, but she was not interested in risking it. She had struggled with this man once before. He was exceptionally strong.

Katrina turned off the faucet and walked through the corridor toward the main lab space, still holding the ringing cell phone to her ear with her uninjured hand. At the moment Sean McMullan answered, Katrina’s eyes fell onto the floor just inside the main laboratory door. She let out an ear-shattering scream into the phone, and then dropped it.

9:46 P.M.
EST

Dawn Gilman stood in the living room of her Washington, D.C. home and read the greeting card in front of her for a third time. At first merely silly, its tone became increasingly disturbing to Dawn, who was accustomed to being on the alert for suspicious findings as a side effect of her husband’s career. This was one of those findings. It read:

Mr. Gilman –

How unfortunate that you do not speak my language.

The
Doctor

After only a momentary hesitation, Dawn picked up the phone and called her husband back.