Capitol Reflections (52 page)
“Are you going to explain?” asked Mark.
Peter ignored the question. “There!” he proclaimed triumphantly. “I’ve got the complete password. I’m going to copy the files to an old floppy—the Apple certainly can’t handle a CD—and I’ll examine them from my laptop while we’re en route.”
“En route how?” Mark said insistently.
Peter looked at him as though Mark were spoiling a surprise party.
“I spotted a pasture behind the house last night. That’s probably when the old man saw my flashlight beam. It’s big enough for a helicopter to land.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Mark. “You produce Jeeps and jets out of thin air, and now a helicopter as well?”
“Precisely. If my company has its own jet and private landing strip, there’s nothing unusual about a helicopter or two now, is there? Security is a very exacting field, Mark. I’m in demand not only because I’m good at what I do, but because I’m accessible.”
Peter turned to face the old man. “We apologize for your discomfort, sir. I can guarantee people searching the woods’ll discover you later this morning. Just sit tight.”
The group made their way to the pasture. Peter carried the Apple II in case he needed direct access to the files. Copying twenty-nine-year-old files was, in his estimation, pretty much a crapshoot.
The helicopter arrived half an hour later. A Bell Jet Ranger was relatively small, its cockpit designed to carry a pilot, three passengers, and a small amount of cargo. Being the smallest, Jan crouched in the cargo well behind the seats.
“Take us to the helipad at the NIH,” Peter instructed the female pilot. “Radio ahead for clearance. If you encounter any resistance, tell the radio dispatcher to contact David St. Germaine’s office and inform anyone who answers that our remote monitoring station has discovered a breach in their backup computer systems. Tell them it’s probably just a false alarm but that my team needs to check it out.”
“Roger that,” said the pilot. She banked sharply and guided the helicopter over the pine trees below.
Gregory Randall picked up his phone at 11:15 a.m.
“Good morning,” said Randall, sipping the steaming cup of Pequod’s coffee placed on his desk moments earlier by an Asian secretary.
“I’ve got disturbing news,” said the raspy voice.
“Yes?”
“I received a call from one of our chemists in Central America. Our competitors’ beans from several plantations across South America are now registering d-caffeine.”
“With all due respect,” Randall said, “I don’t see how that’s possible. Unless Henry has started growing elsewhere without telling us.”
“Henry knows better. Carl Richey is sending a team into the field to investigate. Even though shipments are now going straight from Hawaii to Seattle, we’ll maintain a presence in Costa Rica for the time being, especially in light of this new development. Transpac files have been purged or altered. I assume you’ve done the same with those at Randall, Inc.”
“Of course. QuantumSheet has updated the files, both at Pequod’s headquarters and at our main offices in New York.”
“Good. I’ll call when Richey checks in. By the way, I can’t get in touch with Henry. Where is our Senator?”
“I don’t know. His office says he was in briefly this morning and then left.”
The raspy man coughed, then sighed. “He is very aggravating.”
“I agree, but we need him.”
The loud click on the other end was the only response.
Eddie Karn was dead. His body was missing, but they’d found his car submerged in a lake near his home. Gwen could hardly believe what she learned when they arrived at the NIH. David St. Germaine had delivered the group to Ted Gallagher and one of the first things Gallagher had said was, “A shame about Karn,” as though everyone in the world already knew about it. Actually, most of the world probably did know about it already—according to Gallagher it was the lead story on all of the news shows—but it had been an utter shock to Gwen and her colleagues.
They had all taken it badly. Mark had been more broken up about it than Gwen would have guessed. But she had felt overwhelmed by a combination of sadness and guilt. This had happened because she let him go off on his own. If she’d been more insistent, more responsible, Eddie would be alive now.
A part of her wanted to curl up into a ball. The stakes had gotten too high. She’d started something she couldn’t stop. But another part of her—the stronger part—told her that she needed to see this through to the end. Eddie had died for this. She’d make sure the people responsible paid for that.
Everyone had needed a few minutes to pull themselves together after hearing the news. Now, though, it was time to learn what Gallagher had discovered.
“Pequod’s has d-caffeine, all right,” Gallagher began. “No doubt about it. And yet it’s having no effect on lab rats. They should be seizing like crazy—maybe dying considering their weight as compared to even very small concentrations of d-caffeine.”
“It has to have an effect!” said Gwen. It struck her that since Karn’s mention of optical isomers she had completely reversed her position.
“Now I didn’t say that the rats were sitting around reading Charles Dickens,” said Gallagher. “No, they’re going absolutely crazy. Their metabolism is amazingly high. It’s like they’re on speed. Stevens thinks the d-caffeine is binding to receptor sites that usually accept amphetamines or amphetamine-based substances. We’ll have to cross-section rat brains to see if this is actually what’s happening, but it’s the best working theory we’ve got.”
“Damn,” said Jan. “That’s incredible.”
“Might explain the full-moon madness I was tracking before Gwen called me,” Mark said. “People in various cities were getting hypomanic. I have dozens of news clippings on people behaving like speed freaks.”
“Still,” said Jan, “we can’t explain the seizure deaths.”
There was silence in the room for almost a full minute before Gwen shouted, “Nicotine!”
Everyone turned to look at her.
“Explain,” requested Mark.
“People who use amphetamines are chain smokers. Nicotine causes a large release of neurotransmitters in the brain. That’s why it’s so addictive. It gives amphetamine users a little extra jolt, both when they’re using and when they’re not. It helps keep the metabolism up and satisfies the body’s craving for norepinephrine to a certain extent.”
Gallagher was already nodding his head.
“Administer nicotine and d-caffeine to the animals simultaneously,” Gwen told the lab director. “I guarantee they’ll start to seize. Do the cross-sections on the others as planned to confirm the receptor site theory. Then measure the cyclic AMP level in their brains. It’s going to be off the charts, just like Marci.”
“Agreed,” said Gallagher. “And if the seizure spikes occurred in various cities at different times, we need to take samples of Pequod’s coffee from around the country.”
“From both existing markets and areas that they’re just moving into,” said Mark. “I can supply that info.”
“Not a problem,” said Gallagher. “We have field units in several locations.”
“But where did the d-caffeine come from in the first place?” asked David St. Germaine.
“I think I can shed some light on that,” said Peter. “The answer was sitting in Jamie Robinson’s thesis proposal in Kucherlapati’s old files. Even though he never finished his thesis, thanks to our friend Henry, the answer was there all along. Jamie was fascinated by a newly discovered mechanism by which agrobacterium tumefaciens, a bacterium that causes tumors in plants, could be used to transplant genes into plants. The finding had just been published by Montagu and Schell the summer before and Jamie saw it as analogous to Kucherlapati’s work with somatic cell hybridization, except that improved plants would benefit all humanity, not just those with rare diseases.”
“Jamie was fascinated by coffee because different varieties have different numbers of chromosomes, even though they appear to be the same family of plant. He was conducting numerous experiments in his dorm room because he couldn’t grow enough plants in the laboratory. In one experiment, Jamie was using agrobacterium to transplant the caffeine genes from Robusta beans to Arabica. Robusta has only twenty-two chromosomes as compared to Arabica’s forty-four, but it has twice the caffeine levels. He didn’t succeed, but he did produce d-caffeine in Arabica. His notes describe a dark band on chromosome number two of Arabica.”
“Just like the plant and the bean,” commented Mark.
“Jamie knew he was onto something,” Peter continued. “He started chewing the leaves, almost like the natives in South America, and noticed he got a slight buzz. He analyzed his plants more carefully in Kucherlapati’s lab and found out why he was feeling so energetic. From then on, his passion was optical isomers. He wanted to refine his research and then offer his findings to the private sector.”
“The private sector found him instead,” said Mark, “in the form of Henry Broome.”
Mark’s cell phone rang. Whatever Mark was hearing caused him to break into a wide smile. His part of the conversation amounted to “Yeah … I see … that’s incredible … okay.”
“Well?” Gwen and Jan said simultaneously.
“That was Rick,” Mark said. “He’s safe and sound and—get this—was calling from the office of the attorney general. He said he’ll explain everything to us when we get there. There’s an SUV downstairs with four U.S. marshalls in it. We’re now under the protection of the attorney general himself.”
Peter let out a low whistle. “Can’t wait to hear Rick’s story.”
“You folks go ahead now,” said Gallagher, shooing his visitors away with a flick of his wrists. “Stevens and I will continue to work on the coffee and nicotine. I’ll let you know when we’ve got something.”
Gwen’s head was still spinning when they got outside. This thing had ratcheted up to levels she never would have imagined. Maybe that meant it would be over soon. She could go back to Jack. She could put the mystery surrounding Marci’s death to rest. She could get back to her job, whatever that might be at this point. And she could spend a lot more time thinking about decorating the nursery.
They got into a black, unmarked SUV. Another black SUV—an escort—was parked behind the first, its engine idling.
The two vehicles exited the NIH campus and vanished into the traffic, a sure sign that in Washington it was business as usual.
74
Mark thought the stress had finally gotten to him when he saw the “ghost” of Eddie Karn sitting in the attorney general’s office.
“It appears I’m not quite as dead as the news networks seem to think,” Eddie said to the dumbstruck group.
“Funny,” he added, looking directly at Mark, “the news media rarely makes mistakes.”
Mark was tempted to go to hug the man. Instead, he blurted, “What the hell happened?”
Dr. Karn sat in a leather chair next to Rick Mecklenberg in the well-appointed office of Lane Chase, attorney general of the United States. Karn’s right arm was in a sling.
“Broke my wrist and I have some pretty colorful bruises up and down the right side of my body, but otherwise, I’m intact.”
Gwen did hug Karn. “But the news of your death … I mean, how … what happened … did you—”
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