The Death Row Complex (3 page)

The interpreter paused and looked up, his dark eyes a question mark.

Jack Callahan seemed relatively unconcerned. “We get messages like that all the time,” he said, shrugging. “They almost always turn out to be a hoax.”

“This one might be too,” his colleague concurred. “The Arabic is unusual. I was paraphrasing, of course—most of what is here doesn’t translate directly, including the abbreviation ‘ISIL’ itself. But… this reads like it was written by someone who might not be a native speaker. I don’t know exactly. Also, the handwriting. It is sort of, ah, overly meticulous. Like someone who doesn’t speak or write Arabic is trying to copy something he saw written… it’s not like how someone writes in his native language.”

Jack made a related point. “It does seem strange to me that the ISIL organization is mentioned but the author gives no other details. Usually, when we get a direct threat from ISIL, or they claim responsibility for an attack, there are very specific references, things that had to have come from them in order to lend credibility. And since when does ISIL send a greeting card to general White House mail, instead of making some kind of grandiose announcement over international airwaves? Those bastards thrive on publicity.”

A moment of silence passed as each man considered the card again. Then Jack mused aloud, “So, there’s allegedly something about to happen. And then something else on Christmas Day…

“E-mail the translation to me when you’ve completed it. I still need to log it into the database, and I’ll send the card to the Postal Inspection office for analysis. But I assume if no shit hits any proverbial fans in the next couple of weeks, then we’re probably fine.”

Twenty hours passed, and death row was redefined. Convicted murderer Nathan Horn struggled for air as he lay dying on his bed. Every feeble breath felt like lightning in his chest.

Much of Horn’s present state was ironically akin to the once-familiar sickness of heroin withdrawal—a sensation he had not experienced in twenty-two years. His lungs had become increasingly weak over the last hour, and he now continuously felt light-headed and nauseous. There was nothing left to vomit, but he was vaguely aware that he had soiled himself again. Horn had stopped getting up a few hours ago, after he had fainted in the throes of a violent retching spell and hit his head on the concrete floor hard enough for blood to trickle down his agonized face.

Too weak to care that his body was shutting down, he could only be grateful that the violent illness he had been engulfed in throughout most of the morning had finally subsided.

The rotten meat smell of the sores was everywhere. Someone was screaming. Someone else—or maybe it was the same man—was vomiting.

Horn had no choice but to lie in misery and absorb the sounds and smells of the mortally ill. Mercifully, his vision was totally gone. He could not see the disgusting mess that had become of the six-by-eight cell where he had spent the last eighteen years of his sentence. He was also unaware that Buzz, the child molester on the other side of the wall, had been dead for three hours, or that Sam—who two years earlier had raped and murdered his own sister at the age of nineteen—was now on his hands and knees as he sobbed, mumbling an inarticulate prayer to a God that had never existed to him until that morning.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, Horn’s ravaged mind was a collage of people and events from his past. His mother. His parole officer. The sixteen-year-old girl he had shot in the chest in her apartment because it turned out that she didn’t have any dope after all. A parade of lawyers. The judge who had asked God for mercy on his soul. Horn had laughed out loud.

The sores were like fire, and their flames were spreading. He could no longer feel the distinct patches of corroded flesh; they were all melting into one surreal torture. Internally, he was being slowly devoured. Externally, he was burning alive. His last semi-lucid thought was a forlorn one.

They had all been right. Nathan Horn finally believed in Hell.

O
CTOBER 13, 2015
6:01 P.M.
PDT

“What
in God’s holy name happened in
here?!
”

The faint Southern drawl of Special Agent Sean McMullan echoed as his rich voice boomed through the concrete corridor of San Quentin’s North Seg. The corridor had otherwise fallen silent. It was a first for the prison’s original death row wing, the wing eternally cacophonous with the rage of dead men walking.

Now? Men, yes. Dead, for sure. None walking. Two tiers of thirty-four cells. Sixty-eight dead men, not walking. Death row indeed.

Treading gingerly down the hallway with an ashen prison director on his left side and the CDC Associate Director of Epidemiology on his right—all three men in full-body, air-supplied, positive-pressure biohazard suits—the veteran agent silently counted to ten to maintain his composure.

Sean McMullan had been a special agent with the FBI Biological Countermeasures Unit—the BCU—for ten years. But he had never seen anything like this.

Each private cell was a new stage set with another scene of the macabre. A few of the bodies were lying next to steel toilets, but most had died in their beds. IV poles stood at many of the bedsides, and needles, still plunged into stiffening flesh, attached clear tubing to half-empty fluid bags. Some of the bodies were in oddly contorted positions, and most were lying in one form of bodily discharge or another. Some exhibited the sores; others did not. All of them had expressions of terror and agony frozen to their faces.

McMullan turned to the pallid man walking next to him and asked how the deaths of sixty-eight inmates could possibly have gone unattended.

“They did not go unattended,” the prison director asserted. “Death row inmates are checked routinely throughout the day and night. These inmates were all fine yesterday morning.

“At one p.m., a guard checked on them and made a note that an inmate had vomited. That inmate indicated he thought it was the food, and he declined to go to the infirmary. By nine p.m., there were two dozen sick men. Vomiting. Diarrhea. Fevers. Chills. Stuff like that. They were unanimously blaming the chicken from lunch.

“When the guards began bringing sick inmates to the infirmary, the doctor on duty assumed he was seeing an outbreak of food poisoning or stomach flu. He sent some swabs to the lab to be tested for
Salmonella
and
E. coli.
He gave the sick inmates fluids, began antibiotic regimens, and prescribed anti-nausea medications. There are no appropriate treatments beyond that, and we had insufficient space in the infirmary. So the doctor began returning them to their cells and prescribing bed rest.

“He also called in our entire medical staff to attend to the sick inmates through the night. Then, at about seven o’clock this morning, some of them began to break out in sores. That’s when we called the CDC.”

Even before the CDC team arrived, inmates were already dying. It had taken only a cursory evaluation of the situation before the CDC had solicited assistance from the FBI BCU. And by the time Sean McMullan arrived in the evening, San Quentin’s North Seg death row wing had been completely depopulated.

It had only been thirty hours since the first inmate became symptomatic.

McMullan stopped in front of a still-locked cell and peered through its bars. The man lying dead inside the cell must have been in his early thirties. His muscular, tattooed arms were clearly the product of extensive weight-lifting. McMullan had every reason to assume that the inmate had been healthy before yesterday.

“OK,” he said. “I’m going to need someone to draw a map of this cell block. I want each dead inmate pinpointed on that map, showing where he died and whether or not he had made it to the infirmary for treatment. I want to know who was puking at one p.m., which ones were sick at nine p.m., and the order in which they began getting sick after that. I want to know the order in which they died. I want notation of which ones have the sores. And I want to talk to the infirmary. Is the infirmary doc sick?”

“No, but he’s quarantined. And three inmates from other wings of the prison are also dead. Those bodies are still in the infirmary.”

McMullan dismissed the prison director, and, when he was gone, turned quietly to the CDC epidemiologist. “Dr. Wong, is there anything else about this that I’m missing?”

Guofu Wong blinked and cleared his throat. “No, sir,” he said. “Unless you’re missing the fact that this is the most virulent biological weapon the world has ever seen.”

O
CTOBER 15, 2015
1:00 P.M.
EDT

Two days later, CDC Associate Director of Epidemiology Guofu Wong stood at the head of a conference table in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. Behind him, a large screen projected a slide from his laptop computer. Sean McMullan and several additional FBI agents were among the audience, scrawling into notebooks and punching laptop keys as the doctor spoke.

“The sixty-eight death row inmates at San Quentin State Prison died from anthrax poisoning,” Wong said.

Someone gasped. The man sitting nearest to where Wong was standing shifted his chair backward as if to physically distance himself from the epidemiologist who had been at the prison.

“The skin lesions that many of the inmates developed,” Wong continued, “were in some ways indicative of textbook cutaneous anthrax. They exhibited the classic black moldy appearance from which the name
anthrax
, which means
coal,
was derived.”

Wong projected a slide upon which two photographs were displayed side by side. Each photograph showed a section of human skin blemished with the black sores of which he spoke. One image was labeled “Normal Anthrax Lesions” and the other “Death Row Anthrax Lesions.” The sores on both photographs were similar in appearance.

“But anthrax lesions are usually painless,” Wong continued. “The prison staff said that these men were screaming in pain. Furthermore, cutaneous anthrax is rarely fatal, and the lesions are typically small and few. Gastrointestinal anthrax could have caused the nausea and vomiting, and inhalational anthrax would definitely result in the shortness of breath some of the men were experiencing. But it sounds like a number of the inmates had all of these symptoms.

“Moreover, the symptoms of normal anthrax occur slowly, over the course of several days or even weeks. This infection was one hundred percent fatal within little more than a day.”

Wong clicked a laptop key and a new slide appeared. On it was a small square, slightly glowing in a light lavender hue. Several haphazard patterns of unevenly spaced fluorescent lines trickled down the square like a collection of old ladders missing multiple rungs.

“So we conducted an analysis, called PCR, of the anthrax from the prison. What we learned is that an additional gene has been incorporated into its DNA. The new gene”—Wong circled one of the fluorescent lines with a laser pointer—“comes from a small, mobile DNA molecule called a plasmid. The plasmid encodes a small protein. Computer-based molecular modeling analyses suggest that this new protein can interact with the dominant toxin produced by the anthrax bacterium, a protein called ‘lethal factor.’ This interaction results in the formation of a larger complex—meaning, a group of proteins that function together as one molecular machine. The presence of the genetically engineered element in the larger complex potently activates the toxin, leading to dramatically increased virulence… ”