The Death Row Complex (9 page)

“Why would the cell do that?” Gilman asked, incredulous. “It’s as if the cell commits suicide by bringing these toxins inside, right?”

“For lack of a better way to say it,” she responded, “the cell doesn’t know any better. The receptor is a normal cell surface protein. Its job, so to speak, is to bring beneficial molecules inside. The anthrax proteins infiltrate by hijacking the machinery, so the cell brings the toxin inside instead.”

“What do the toxins do to kill the cell?” McMullan asked.

Katrina shook her head and looked down at the floor. “We still don’t know,” she said. “Despite all the research that has been conducted since 9/11, we still don’t know
exactly
how anthrax kills people.”

In Washington, D.C., Teresa Wood sat with White House Postal Operator Jack Callahan and FBI Case Director Bob Wachsman. The three of them were reviewing her colleague’s brief for a second time.

“It was never flowers at all,” Teresa said.

Jack nodded. “And I think we can be assured of three things: that the greeting card was not a hoax, that the activated anthrax strain is the threat referred to in that card, and that what happened at San Quentin four days ago is going to happen to the rest of us on Christmas Day.”

2:56 P.M.
PDT

After the two FBI agents left her office, Katrina sat at her desk waiting for her heart rate to return to normal. The words of Agent Sean McMullan were echoing through her mind.
A new strain of anthrax has been discovered, and this strain contains an unusual element.

Katrina took several deep breaths and let them out slowly. She grabbed a Kleenex from the box on her desk and blotted her perspiring face.
There is a plasmid incorporated into its DNA that encodes a potent activator of anthrax lethal factor.
She stood and stepped out of her office. It was Jason she needed to see.

Oxana was still in the main lab. Katrina approached her and spoke with her quietly for a few moments. Then she passed through the main lab and entered the robot room. As if to say hello, Octopus swung an arm toward her. It picked up a reaction plate and filed it away into the incubator as Katrina swerved around it and walked through to the cell culture room.

Jason Fischer and Todd Ruddock were inside. Jason sat before a laminar flow hood, dousing every square inch of its workspace with ethyl alcohol from a squirt bottle.

Katrina came up behind him. “Fischer! You
are
an alcoholic!”

“Heh heh. Well, if I’m not at the bar, I’m sterilizing something.”

“It
is
good for all occasions that way.”

“What’s up?” he asked without turning around. He wiped up the ethanol with stack of paper towels and then threw the towels into a bright red Biohazard Waste can.

“I was wondering how late you’re planning on working tonight and what you have planned when you’re done.”

“I still have to feed my cells,” he said and uncapped a bottle to begin transferring liquid into a small plastic dish. “I’m just getting started and it’ll take me, um, probably about an hour.”

“And then?”

“Hmm,” he stuck his nose in the air and mused in a horrible British accent, “I think maybe I’ll take the yacht out for a spell.”

Katrina chuckled and poked her finger through a gaping hole in his faded black sweatshirt. “Maybe you oughta sell your yacht and buy some clothes, dude,” Katrina said.

“Actually, I’m going home afterward,” Jason said, dropping the British accent. “I feel crap-tacular. And I like my clothes just the way they are, thank you! They dispel the grossly unjust myth that everyone with a Ph.D. makes a shitload of money.”

“They also dispel the myth that everyone with a Ph.D. is a stuffy geek,” Katrina commented.

“As do you,” Jason said with a smile.

Katrina thought Jason looked pale, and his face was covered with perspiration despite the cool temperature in the room. “Now that you mention it, you
look
crap-tacular,” she said.

Jason looked up at her and raised one eyebrow.

“No offense,” she added.

“None taken.”

“Rough night last night? You had a show, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but if this is a hangover it’s the worst one I’ve ever had in my life. I think I have the flu. I woke up with it this morning. I’m getting some serious rest this weekend.”

Todd Ruddock stood up from where he had been sitting at the adjacent hood and took a tray out of an incubator. He laid the tray on the counter next to the microscope and began picking up culture plates one at a time to inspect them under the scope.

Katrina kept talking to Jason. “Damn. I need to talk to you. I was hoping to take you out for a beer.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Haha, no. Actually, I want to talk to the whole lab. There’s been a bit of a development. It’s a long story; hence the beer idea.”

She posed the same question to Todd. “Hey, Todd, are you free in about an hour for a beer?”

“You buying?”

“Yep.”

“Um, let me think. Yes.” Evidently satisfied with what he saw under the scope, Todd returned the tray of culture plates to its shelf in the incubator, nodded at Katrina, and breezed out of the room.

Katrina watched Todd walk through the robot room and back into the main lab. Then she closed the door. “Jason, listen,” she said.

Jason finally stopped working and turned from the hood to face her, his face questioning. Katrina never closed doors.

She glanced through the window and into the robot room one more time before speaking. “Where is the activator data, and how many people know about it?”

3:12 P.M.
PDT

McMullan and Gilman were quiet as they drove away from Katrina Stone’s lab. When McMullan finally broke the silence, his words seemed out of place. “She’s an anthrax researcher!”

“Yeah, I figured that much out,” Gilman responded. “So?”

“So, Homeland Security has her entire life on file.”

Gilman smiled for the first time since being assigned to this case.

Jason had never seen Katrina so poorly composed. Her face was flushed, and she looked as if she, too, had been sweating. Jason wondered if she could be coming down with the same bug he had woken up with at the annoying groupie’s house. It would be no surprise. Between the close quarters within the lab, the excessive workload, and the lack of rest they were all burdened with, when one person got sick, the whole lab usually caught it.

He did not answer her question right away.

“Well, I
have
talked to people about the data,” Jason finally said, “right after I found the activator. I found it, like, a week before the Keystone conference, remember? So I was sitting with a group of anthrax people at the conference during lunch one day, and something came up that made me think of it.” He paused long enough to raise an eyebrow. “I didn’t think it was a secret.”

Katrina said nothing.

“A bunch of the people at the table were doing inhibitor screens like ours,” Jason continued, “looking at all different types of molecules. I mentioned that we had stumbled upon some activators of lethal factor while we were looking for inhibitors. Some of the other people said they had seen them, too. I guess it’s pretty normal, every once in a while, to come across something that activates the enzyme. But nobody had seen the three-hundred-fold increase in lethal factor activity we saw with the 37B-17 compound.

“I remember this guy from Stanford said, ‘Well, if you ever want to make a biological weapon you’re all set.’”

Katrina visibly bristled.

Jason remembered having made a similar remark the day he found the activator. He had gone to her office to discuss his inhibitor data, and in the course of the conversation he had mentioned the activator as an offhand remark. To Jason’s surprise, she had asked him to elaborate. He told her that there were several, but that one in particular was extraordinarily potent.

“Keep the data and set the compound aside,” she had instructed him. “If we aren’t finding any really good inhibitors, we may want to talk to the chemists. A minor structural change can potentially convert an activator into an inhibitor. So we might still be able to use it… ”

Now, Jason thought that Katrina looked a bit off kilter as she turned to look once again through the window into the robot room. “Anyway,” he said, “the data is at my desk. You want it?”

Katrina took a breath. “OK here’s the deal. I just had a visit—not a phone call, a visit—from two FBI special agents. They described a strain of anthrax carrying an activator. And they showed me a document threatening a bioterror attack.

“They want to fund our research to stop it. But they don’t trust me. At all. At one point in our conversation, they literally pulled their guns on my ass. I think there’s a strong possibility that in the near future, there will be feds crawling all over our lab. They have some rudimentary information about the activator strain that they found. I don’t think we should share anything about
our
activator, because I don’t know how close in structure it might be.”

In his reflection on the sash of the tissue culture hood, Jason could see that he had turned from gray to white. He slumped in his chair, panting. His flu felt worse every second. “Wow,” he said weakly. After a lengthy pause, he swallowed and then sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. What would they think if they found the data?”

Katrina continued, “I still want to keep the data for the same reasons I did before. But it has to be somewhere they can’t find it—even if they turn our lab and our offices completely upside down, which I think they might. I don’t want it at my house, nor do I recommend that you take it home. Who knows if they’ll raid our residences. So what can we do with it?”

Jason shook his head. “Hold on a minute.” He turned off the tissue culture hood and returned his cells to the incubator.

Together, Katrina and Jason walked out into the robot room and began looking around, as if regarding the familiar laboratory for the first time. Other than a few cabinets and the large stations supporting the robot and its incubator, there was not much in the room.

They walked back out into the main lab. Oxana was now gone, and the laboratory was vacant. Jason led Katrina to his desk. He pulled down a jumbled notebook crammed with loose pages of data and flipped through it until he found what he was looking for. He removed the pages of interest and set the notebook down on the desk.

“This is all of it,” Jason said. “None of it is really written up for anyone to read other than me, since we never followed up with these compounds. And I never bothered entering it into the computer database. I can delete the one raw file from Octopus that identified the compound.”

They wandered back out into the lab and continued looking around. Katrina looked up at the ceiling. “You think we could put it in a light fixture?” But then she added, “Oh, duh. It would cut off the light. Nevermind.”

Jason began to consider the option of destroying the data entirely. “You sure you want to keep it?”