The Death Row Complex (4 page)

A squat, balding man raised his hand.

Wong acknowledged the man. “Yes, Mr… ?”

“Special Agent Roger Gilman. Can you explain that again, please, and leave out the scientific gibberish for those of us that work in law enforcement?”

“Certainly,” Wong said. “The anthrax that infected the prisoners is genetically enhanced. Its DNA encodes an additional protein that activates its major toxin. This makes the Death Row strain much more potent and much more rapidly acting than your garden-variety anthrax. The strain would not have been very difficult to engineer in a laboratory.”

“If you say so,” Gilman said, “but I don’t understand why someone would bother genetically engineering a strain of anthrax in the first place. Can’t we treat anthrax with antibiotics? Do we not have vaccines against it?”

“Those are good questions,” Wong said. “Unfortunately, vaccination against anthrax is strictly prophylactic, and antibiotic treatment is only effective at the very beginning of exposure.

“The issue is that once anthrax has been in your body for a while—a short while—it begins to release the deadly toxin known as lethal factor. Vaccines can potentially block an infection, and antibiotics can kill the bacterium, but neither can neutralize lethal factor. So ultimately, if you’re not treated essentially
before
you ever have symptoms, it’s already too late.”

A wavering voice from the back of the room all but whispered, “Is this new strain contagious from person to person?”

Agent McMullan cleared his throat. “If it was, the entire prison would be dead by now.”

Eight miles away, at the Naval Medical Research Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, a distraught research technician was faithfully recording his final analysis of data from the San Quentin outbreak. He could not believe what he was seeing.

Once the corpses had been documented and removed for disposal, a HazMat team had swarmed the facility. An average of fifty locations in every cell of the quarantined wing had been swabbed, as well as all of the facilities that served North Seg inmates. The swabs were used to inoculate Petri dishes for bacterial cultivation.

Normally, anthrax inoculated on a Petri dish is only detectable after overnight incubation. These cultures were flourishing within an hour after the swabs were taken.

That’s impossible,
the technician thought.

But what disturbed him even more was the source of the contamination. It was the swabs collected near the kitchen that yielded the highest titers of anthrax. The bacteria were most concentrated in the outside dumpster, within the remains of the trays of rice that had been served with the inmates’ lunch.

Someone had deliberately poisoned the death row inmates.

As Wong finished speaking, the conference room fell silent for several moments. At last, BCU Director Bob Wachsman spoke. “Next agenda item?”

A man who had not yet spoken stood and cleared his throat. “I’m Jack Callahan from the White House Office of Correspondence. I was cc’d on this meeting because the prison outbreak cross-referenced with a piece of information I had placed into our database. It was a piece of mail received at the White House with a very vague reference to a prison in the text. It also contained a terror threat of cataclysmic proportions, to be carried out on Christmas Day of this year.

“The original document was written in Arabic. I’m circulating copies of the English translation for each of you. Upon initial examination, certain elements suggested that this document could be a hoax. The Arabic is very, uh, dodgy. And while the author claims to represent ISIL, the text is highly inconsistent with normal ISIL methods of operation. Of course, the reference to imprisonment, and to prisoners, has lent much more credibility to the threat in light of the outbreak at San Quentin. I’m concerned that the prison anthrax outbreak might have been the ‘small taste of pain’ that they ‘promised.’”

“Where is the original document now?” The question was from Guofu Wong.

“I’ve sent it to the US Postal Inspection Services lab for tracking, forensics, and graphics analysis.”

“Graphics analysis?” Wong pressed.

“Yes. The message was handwritten inside a greeting card. There was also a picture on the front of the card.”

“Of?”

“Flowers.”

“Flowers?”

“Flowers.”

“Interesting.”

A lengthy pause ensued as the task force members read their copies of the document translation and considered the incongruous image.

Director Wachsman finally spoke. “It is physically impossible for us to vaccinate the entire country against anthrax before Christmas Day,” he said gravely, “or to stockpile a sufficient supply of antibiotics to treat a nationwide outbreak. And even if we could do either of those things, the evidence I have heard here today suggests that antibiotics and vaccines developed to treat normal anthrax might not even work on the genetically engineered strain.”

Wachsman looked up at Wong, an unspoken plea for contradiction. To Wachsman’s dismay, the epidemiologist nodded solemnly.

“Director Wachsman is right,” Wong said. “Against the Death Row strain, our current treatment arsenal is likely to be utterly useless.” Wong clicked into his laptop to close the file for the slideshow he had just presented. Then he closed the laptop and dropped it into his briefcase. The rest of the task force sat immobile, most of its members staring vacantly at the conference table. Agent McMullan sighed.

“I may have an alternative solution,” Wong offered then, and all eyes looked up to focus upon him. “There is a scientist in San Diego who may be able to kill this bug.”

10:31 A.M.
PDT

Professor Katrina Stone stormed out of her office at San Diego State University and slammed the door behind her.

From behind a large machine in the main laboratory, the perfectly greased head of Joshua Attle appeared. Thick glasses seated low over his nose, Josh watched over their ponderous frames as his graduate advisor darted through the lab, her volatile blue-gray eyes scanning for something that they did not appear to find.

“Where’s Jason?” Katrina demanded when she saw Josh.

“Uh oh,” Josh said. “You have that ‘I just got another shitty grant review’ look on your face.”

Katrina sighed. Her face softened as she walked toward Josh and the machine he was operating. “That’s because I just got another shitty grant review. I need to talk to Jason about the revisions and they need to happen fast. If I’m going to resubmit, I have to do it by the first of February. Have you seen him today?”

Josh shrugged. “Maybe he had another court appointment?”

Katrina shook her head and sighed again. “I know his divorce is dragging on, and believe me, I can sympathize—but between you and me, I wish he’d get it done. I need data from him. Badly.”

For a few moments, she stared absently at the whirring machine, apparently deep in thought. Josh stole cautious glances in an effort to read her.

Only when he was standing right next to Katrina did Josh notice that she had visibly aged in the four years he had been her student. The vertical crease that always appeared between her eyes when she was annoyed or in deep concentration had finally begun to form a permanent wrinkle. He could now see a few sporadic, defiant white hairs in her reddish waves. Moreover, Josh thought she looked really tired.

Katrina Stone was only thirty-four years old.

Four years earlier, Josh had been pleasantly surprised when Katrina—back then, he still called her Dr. Stone—walked into Molecular Biology 610 and he saw her for the first time. He was not alone. Among the two-dozen first-year graduate students enrolled in the beginner course, several immediately took notice. In a field heavily dominated by middle-aged men, attractive young women were rare. It was only when she approached the podium at the front of the room that Josh realized the woman he had just been thinking of asking out was actually the professor.

“Good morning,” she said and flashed a friendly smile to the room. Behind the smile was a sadness that Josh could not place. “Who has worked in a lab before?” Five or six hands went up, and she continued. “For those of you who have some experience, what would you say is the molecular biologist’s best friend?”

“Um, a pipette?” one of the students offered.

“Enzymes?” suggested another.

“Well, those things certainly
are
very important in the molecular biology laboratory. But I’d like to suggest that
the
most important things are—bugs. Bacteria. We can’t live without them.” Two of the students who had raised their hands were now nodding.

“For those of you less familiar with the significance of bugs, don’t worry. You’ll get to it. But to begin with, let’s talk for a moment about what amazing things we can do in a molecular biology lab because of these little guys.

“In short, we can make anything we want. And lots of it. Because bacteria have two qualities that are essential to molecular biology.” She picked up a thick marker and wrote on a white board behind her as she spoke. “Number one: we can easily manipulate their DNA. We can drop a small piece of DNA, called a plasmid, into a population of bacteria, zap the bacteria with an electric shock, and they’ll open up and take the plasmid inside of themselves.

“Number two: they replicate like crazy. So we pop our DNA plasmid, encoding any molecule we want to generate, into bugs, and as the bugs reproduce, they will make copy after copy of
our
molecule of interest. And we can harvest it and use it however we choose.

“For those of you who pull the short straw and end up in
my
lab,” she said, and a few chuckles followed, “you’ll be using this technology to bite the hand that feeds you. Because we use molecular biology and these helpful little bugs—to work on killing other bugs.

“The focus of my lab is anthrax research. We are dedicated to identifying molecules that can bind anthrax toxins, forming a larger molecular complex that can inhibit those toxins. Specifically, we want to block a protein toxin called ‘lethal factor.’ This aptly named molecule is
the
business end of anthrax. If we can inhibit lethal factor, we can reverse the effects of an anthrax infection… ”