The Death Row Complex (8 page)

“It is,” McMullan said and shuddered slightly.

Katrina glanced down at the rejected grant application on the desk before her. When she looked back up, she was scowling slightly. “What do you want with
me?
I have recently been reminded once again by the NIH that many other researchers worldwide are working on the anthrax problem, and that most of them are more experienced and better equipped than I am.”

McMullan and Gilman exchanged a glance. “One of our scientific consultants was on the review committee for your last grant application to the NIH,” McMullan said. “The preliminary data for inhibitor compounds generated in your lab stood out in his mind as exceptionally promising.”

“He wasn’t impressed enough to fund the project,” Katrina said bitterly.

“Actually, he did want very much to fund it. He was overruled by others on the committee.”

Katrina thought back to the critiques and realized that McMullan was referring directly to the two reviewers who had provided the comments for her grant application.

McMullan continued, “Anyway, that was before the discovery of this new strain. Your grant application has now been reviewed once again in light of the discovery of the new strain of anthrax. And the NIH committee believes that your compounds have the potential to be developed rapidly into effective therapeutics. So the government has decided to offer you whatever you need in terms of funding, equipment, and staff, to complete the project detailed in your proposal as quickly as possible.”

Twenty minutes later, Gilman and McMullan stood to leave Stone’s office, and each of them shook her hand politely.

“It is a lot to consider,” said McMullan. “Your lab will be effectively turned upside down. It will be a very large intrusion into your life and the lives of your staff. However, we
will
need your decision as quickly as possible.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. “We’ll be in touch.” He handed her the card. “And, again, please do not discuss this matter with anyone except Agent Gilman or me. Do not discuss it over the phone or the Internet with
anyone
.”

“OK, I understand,” Stone said. She took the business card and peered at it quickly before opening her top desk drawer to tuck it inside.

Gilman was glancing absently at the framed degrees on the wall behind her. There were three of them, all from different schools across the nation.

Next to the diplomas was a full-sized poster of what looked like a subway map. The subway stations were nonsense words, such as “mTOR” and “p53.” The caption at the top of the map read, “A Subway Map of Cellular Pathways.” Another full-sized poster on the wall to the left was a jumbled mess of overlapping, zigzagging, crossing and merging arrows and brightly colored shapes. It was entitled “Apoptosis Signals.”

Gilman shook his head and turned to leave, but then he stopped short. For a few moments, he could only gape in disbelief at the large poster on the wall next to the door that had been at his back through their entire conversation. He turned to his partner who was also staring at the artwork.

Wordlessly, Gilman reached into his briefcase and took out a document. It was his copy of the greeting card from the White House. The one with the funny bouquet on the front.

The high-resolution poster on Katrina Stone’s wall was in full color. The small picture in Gilman’s hand was the smeared black and white of a cheap photocopy. Otherwise, the two images of the bouquet were identical.

The agents whirled back around in unison, guns drawn.

“
Get your hands up, NOW!
” yelled McMullan.

4:56 P.M.
EDT

In Washington, D.C., United States Postal Inspector Teresa Wood stepped out of an underground Metro station. A tall black-and-white pillar announced that she was at the Archives/Navy Memorial station.

In Teresa’s right hand was her briefcase; with her left she was shoving the entire second half of a hot dog into her mouth. A fierce gust of wind blew past her at exactly the wrong time, sending a shoulder-length tuft of her fine straight black hair directly into her mouth along with the food. Rubbing her face onto her shoulder to detach the hair from her mouth, she crumpled the foil wrapper from the hot dog and tossed it into a trashcan on the sidewalk as she passed. She did not stop walking.

Still chewing the large bite, the USPIS Assistant Director of Forensics progressed briskly up the familiar stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, her long legs taking half as many strides as those of a man walking nearby to cover the same distance.

The Navy Memorial was spread out on her right beyond the fountains separating it from the sidewalk. A former Navy girl herself, Teresa liked to refer to the memorial as proof that the US is at the center of the globe. The joke was a tongue-in-cheek jab at the large map of the world stretching across the concrete, with North America clearly defined in the center and the other continents fading out around it. And at
The Lone Sailor
—a Navy
man
, of course, standing over it.

West of the memorial, Teresa ignored the signal at Ninth Avenue and dodged traffic as she headed across the street toward the main entrance of J. Edgar Hoover Building. As she did, her cell phone rang.

“Shit,” Teresa muttered through the half-masticated food in her mouth. Hurrying to swallow, she absently wiped her face as if her caller could see her. When she could speak somewhat clearly, she answered the phone, “Wood here.”

“Teresa!”

Her caller sounded a little distressed. “Ken?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s me,” said her colleague from the graphics department. “You’re not going to believe this.”

“Ken, I’m in D.C. I have a prioritization meeting at FBI headquarters.” She dusted the remaining hot dog crumbs off of her suit jacket where they had come to rest upon her sizable breasts.

“Well, they’re going to want to see this, too. It’s going to change some of your prioritizations. Look at this.”

Teresa’s cell phone clicked as Ken hung up. Bewildered, Teresa stared at the face of the phone for a moment until it began to vibrate. A bubble on the screen indicated a new text message.

Teresa opened the message. The small embedded graphic was one she had seen the previous day for the first time. The little bouquet. How cute, except that it came with the threat of a nationwide terrorist attack by ISIL.

As Teresa began reading Ken’s text message beneath the image, her rapid pace toward FBI headquarters slowed to a standstill. Her heart began to thud in her chest and she sank heavily onto a nearby bench.

“
Holy Christ
,” Teresa said aloud, still staring at the screen of her phone.

Katrina’s hands flew up as she stood wide-eyed behind her desk, panting. “
What!
” she practically shouted, her eyes moving from one agent to the other.

“
Explain this!
” Gilman spat, throwing a sheet of paper down onto her desk.

Katrina slowly and deliberately reached for the page, watching the agents and the guns pointed toward her. She picked the paper up with hands that were now trembling. On one side of the page was a black-and-white copy of the image on Katrina’s wall. On the other was a long message handwritten in Arabic script.

“I can’t explain it,” Katrina said. “I don’t speak the language.” Before laying it back down, she flipped it over to glance once again at the picture.

“Where did you get that?” McMullan asked, jabbing a thumb backward to indicate the poster.

“Nature,” she replied.

“Very funny,” said Gilman. “It’s a computer graphic.”

Despite her trepidation at the guns still pointed in her direction, Katrina suppressed a smile. “I meant
Nature
”—she bent the first two fingers of both hands in the air to simulate quotation marks—“the scientific journal.” She then pointed for emphasis to a printed issue on her desk of the same publication.

McMullan and Gilman lowered their guns. Gilman picked up the journal and flipped through quickly. Katrina gestured to a section of one of the built in bookshelves on the wall next to the desk, where she had three entire shelves dedicated to the same publication.

“What would this…
artwork
… be doing in a scientific publication?” Gilman demanded.

“It’s not artwork,” Katrina said.

McMullan stammered. “You mean,
anyone
who has read this particular… journal… entry, or whatever, would have seen this picture?”

“Of course,” Katrina said. “Any half-decent anthrax researcher will
absolutely
know this paper. In 2004, it was arguably the biggest accomplishment in the field.” Her eyes darted from one FBI agent to the other as they sat down in front of her desk once again.

Gilman reached back into his briefcase and pulled out another sheet of paper. Looking back at McMullan, who nodded his approval, he handed it over to Katrina.

“OK, Dr. Stone,” he said, “this is the English translation of the Arabic text you just looked at. The original image and text came from a greeting card received at the White House on the same day that the activated strain of anthrax was discovered. Now, what does the bouquet on your wall have to do with either of those events?”

Katrina skimmed over the English translation of the card. “Gentlemen,” she said slowly. “This is not a graphic image of a bouquet. It is a crystal structure detailing a molecular mechanism. What you are looking at is the membrane pore formed by anthrax toxins upon interaction with their host cell receptor. This is the structure that allows infiltration of anthrax into a human cell.”

2:07 P.M.
PDT

“If you promise not to shoot me, I’ll show you,” Katrina said with a bit of sarcasm.

The agents finally holstered their weapons.

Katrina sat back down at her desk and clicked into the reference library in her computer, then grabbed a yellow Post-It note and a pen. She quickly wrote “Santelli, E. (2004)
Nature
430: 905.” Then she stood and walked to the bookshelf, from where she selected the appropriate issue of the journal. With both agents looking over her shoulder, she flipped to page 905. Katrina turned two more pages to reveal another full color print of the same image.

“There, you see?” She set the journal on the desk and walked to the wall poster. Pointing at one of the brightly colored clusters, she said, “I know; it does look like flowers. See these seven pieces?”—she encircled each of the differently colored groupings with a forefinger—“the flower heads, if you will? They’re all identical to each other. These are called subunits. Each is one copy of an anthrax protein called protective antigen. It interacts with a receptor produced by the host cell, shown here.” She traced the neatly arrayed hollow cylinder protruding downward. “The receptor is what looks like the stems of the flowers, but it is actually a pore. When the anthrax proteins interact with the receptor, this pore shuttles the lethal factor toxin into the cell, and that is where the toxin’s effects are exerted.”