The Death Row Complex (43 page)

From his seat in the auditorium, recent Nobel laureate Jeffrey Wilson stood up in the middle of watching a presentation. The speaker droned on, but Jeff had lost interest, the growing sensations of fever and nausea distracting him. As quickly and quietly as possible, Jeff gathered his belongings and exited the lecture.

11:18 A.M.
PST

On a private plane from San Francisco to San Diego, Roger Gilman stared absently out the window and watched the sprawling California coastline slowly inch by. His brow was furrowed as he struggled to connect the pieces of a convoluted puzzle.

Oscar Morales had released the death row strain of anthrax into the rice in San Quentin’s death row several months before. He had been sought out for his knowledge of safe laboratory practices and had turned the occasion into a lucrative blackmailing situation for himself—for a while. The unfortunate late Chuck Morales had been dragged in by his brother to dispose of Katrina Stone, because Stone was the one who had known of Oscar’s involvement.

But it was
not
Stone who had involved Oscar. Nor was it Stone whom he had been blackmailing. The video was crystal clear proof of that. It was a member of her staff. A male member. And it was possible that he, or Stone, or
any
member of her staff, had actually planted the Death Row strain of anthrax on Chuck Morales in the lab.

How far would she go to manipulate them? Gilman thought back to a conversation—could it really have happened that very same morning?
“You and your advisor have a pretty close relationship, don’t you, Jason?”

“Um, yeah. I guess so… we’ve been working together for
years.”

The train of thought brought Gilman’s mind to McMullan—another person with whom Stone seemed to have developed a closeness over the last several months. Gilman had not spoken to his partner all day, and not entirely because he was too busy to call him. Gilman reached absently for the small gold cross that hung around his neck from a thin chain, a habitual gesture he employed when in the throes of an ethical dilemma.

As the plane slowed and then came to a halt on the runway, Gilman pulled out his cell phone to call McMullan. And then, for the third time that day, he decided against it.

11:21 A.M.
PST

In the back of her ex-husband’s Jeep, Katrina felt almost airborne as the Jeep flew eastbound on the 8 freeway at more than one hundred miles per hour. She had no idea if there would be highway patrol after them, and she didn’t care. Her only concern was getting Alexis to the lab.

Sean McMullan broke a long silence abruptly. “Where in the
hell
does Guofu Wong get off being our killer?” he shouted. “All this time, I was sure it was Johnson.”

Katrina looked at him. “Wong framed Johnson,” she said. “He convinced you that I had plagiarized his data. That’s why you thought it was him all along.”

McMullan paused for a moment, and then mused, “Wong certainly had the resources to orchestrate the attack at the prison. But there’s no way he worked alone. He had an accomplice.” He turned to Katrina. “It had to have been someone from your lab who started this whole thing. I still can’t imagine why.”

“We were assuming he was going to poison the
scientists
at the convention,” Katrina pointed out. “But Wong was going after the protestors. It does make sense. You told me Wong wanted to fund my initial grant application a year ago because he was so in favor of biotechnology. He worked for the CDC and within the NIH. He knew how under-funded this type of research is. He knew how vulnerable to a biological attack our country really is, and how little is being done to promote the research that can stop one.”

The Jeep approached the exchange for the 15 freeway, and a highway patrol car parked along the shoulder came into view. Tom quickly hit the brake to reduce his speed and then passed the officer, glancing into his rearview mirror. The highway patrolman did not follow.

“That’s right,” McMullan said. “In the greeting card, he wrote, ‘when I have been martyred for a cause you can never appreciate any other way.’ Wong considered himself some kind of warrior for science. And a long time ago, he told Gilman that the word conscience means literally ‘with science.’ He must have thought he was really doing the right thing—making a necessary sacrifice for the greater good.”

“Something a jarhead can relate to,” Tom chimed in.

“Me too,” Katrina agreed. “Despite what Lexi thinks, I always felt that way about animal research.”

Alexis had been staring through the window. Katrina had thought that she was not listening to the conversation, but when her name was mentioned, Lexi spoke up. “He said something else, too,” Lexi said weakly. “He said to me, ‘These fools down here, they’re just ignorant. They’ll get the cure and they’ll learn. But
you
should have known better.’” Looking pained, Alexis turned her head slowly to look at her mother sitting behind her. “He was counting on you to save the other protestor’s lives,” she said weakly, “but not mine.”

Katrina looked at her daughter and understood Wong’s strategy. The others had ingested the bacterium. Their illnesses would be slower to manifest. But Alexis had been injected. The distribution through her body had been immediate. Alexis had much less time.

11:26 A.M.
PST

In 1954, Jonas Salk changed summertime forever.

Prior to the release of Salk’s vaccine for poliovirus, parents of young children spent the season in a state of panic. Would their children come down with the crippling disease while they stood helplessly by, or would they escape it for another season?

As the vaccine became commonplace, the nation reveled in relief, and the summer season once again became a time of enjoyment for children and parents alike. Polio was all but eradicated.

A common myth is that Salk injected one of his children with the vaccine in order to prove its efficacy and safety to the public. The truth, however, is that he injected all three of his children. And his wife, his laboratory staff, and himself.

As Katrina opened the freezer in her laboratory space at San Diego State University, she was wishing for Jonas Salk’s confidence. Despite the assurance she had offered McMullan at the jail just the previous day, and despite the fact that she had already stockpiled the formulation, Katrina was terrified.

The antidote had been developed way too quickly. There had been no time for proper trials—not even in primates. There was no way to know the drug’s effectiveness, and there was certainly no way to know its long-term safety. The first human subject to test the antidote for the Death Row anthrax strain would be Katrina’s only daughter. The only child she had left. Alexis would be the guinea pig.

Katrina reached into the freezer and pulled out a box, from which she removed a small glass vial. As if in a trance, she stepped away from the freezer, leaving the door open behind her. Ice-cold sublimation billowed outward.

Tom exchanged a glance with Sean McMullan, who wordlessly stepped to the freezer and closed the door.

Katrina walked to the cold room as if to a gallows. Once inside, she rummaged mindlessly through a shelf until she found an unopened bottle of solvent. She tore the protective wrapper from its cap and dropped it to the floor as she left the cold room. Again, the door left open. Again, McMullan behind her to close it.

Alexis was sitting on a lab bench with her head in her hand. She was shivering.

As she approached her daughter, Katrina reached into a cabinet and found a sterile needle and syringe, which she unwrapped and connected while walking. Standing in front of Alexis, Katrina brushed the condensation from the sides of the glass vial. It had finally begun to thaw.

For what seemed like hours, she rubbed the glass vial between her trembling hands to thaw its contents completely. Then she filled the needle. Her hand was cold as she reached for her daughter’s arm.

Katrina brought the needle forward, but could not still the shaking of her own hands sufficiently to administer the injection. Her breathing shallow, she closed her eyes and swallowed hard, then stepped backward. A tear rolled down her cheek.

Tom reached forth and took the needle gently from his ex-wife. “IV or IM?” he asked softly.

Katrina’s response was barely audible. “IV.”

Tom turned Alexis’ arm to reveal the soft inner flesh. He tapped the skin in the crook of her elbow to locate the vein. Tom’s eyes met Lexi’s and held for a moment as he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. After a final glance at Katrina, with the expert precision of an experienced combat medic, he pressed the needle into Lexi’s vein as lovingly as possible and depressed the plunger.

Katrina could not look away.

A few moments later, the silence was broken by Sean McMullan. “We have to… ” His voice cracked slightly, and he cleared his throat and began again. “We have to get you to the hospital,” he said. “And I’ll get a courier from the FBI to transport the rest of the antidote there, too.”

As the three others began slowly guiding the weakened girl toward the door, Alexis shook her head gently. Then she reached over and laid an arm onto Katrina’s as if to detain her. Katrina stopped walking and turned to face her, leaning in close to hear the feeble voice. “Go get the bastard who did this to me,” Alexis whispered.

Katrina looked into her eyes, and then toward McMullan, and then Tom.

“I’ll take her,” Tom said. He put his arm around Lexi and scooped her up into his arms for the third time that day, then carried her out of the lab.

When McMullan turned back around, Katrina was gone.

11:28 A.M.
PST

Katrina wandered through the empty office spaces adjacent to the lab, not knowing what she was looking for. In the absence of Tom and Christopher, her staff members had become like her family. She could not believe, could not
imagine
that any of them would have done this. But McMullan was right, and Gilman had been right all along. It had to have started here.

Guofu Wong’s dying words rang through her mind once again.
It was your activator
. It was indeed.

Katrina walked into the office shared by Li, Oxana, and Jason and scanned the tall bookshelves and workspaces. Each of the desks was piled with its own stacks of loose journal papers. She walked over to Li’s.

Li was the most organized person Katrina had ever known. The three-ring binders and lab notebooks on her bookshelf were clearly labeled and ordered, first by function and then by date. Except for one small picture of her husband and infant daughter in Beijing, Li’s desk was devoid of personal effects. Katrina pulled Li’s most recent notebook from the shelf and thumbed through. All of her data was scanned, her notes typed. Each experiment was clearly catalogued in a table of contents and detailed according to classic scientific method: objective, materials and methods, results, and conclusions.

No way
, Katrina thought.
This is the most well-behaved girl on the planet.
She slid the notebook back into its slot and looked over at Jason’s desk.

In sharp contrast to Li’s meticulous style, Jason was, and had always been, a total pig. Katrina had never complained, as Jason’s work itself was meticulous and he had always been an exceptionally prolific young scientist. Everyone seemed to agree that his promise was endless. His eccentricity reminded Katrina of Richard Hoffman, the chairman of biology at SDSU. Or Einstein.

In addition to the haphazard collection of unlabeled notebooks and creased, well-worn journals, Jason’s bookshelf held CDs, empty liquor bottles, and dirty coffee cups. The wall above his desk was plastered with photos, mostly of large, rambunctious parties. A computer printout on the left wall next to his chair showed a smiling man holding a steaming beverage cup. The caption beneath read “How about a nice warm glass of shut the fuck up?”

Katrina pulled a notebook down from the shelf. A stack of loose paper, films, printer paper, and bar napkins with notes scrawled in Jason’s barely legible writing fell out. Katrina flipped through some of the data, decided nothing looked out of the ordinary, and quickly gave up trying to decipher his madness. She stuffed the wad of information back into the binder and returned it to its spot.

As she shoved it between two other books on the shelf, an item fell onto the desk below. Jason’s CD. She had seen it before. She had even been to a couple of Jason’s shows over the years in the spirit of support, although she could not stand heavy metal.

The front of the CD case showed a topless, blindfolded woman. Her arms were raised and stretched as though she were being crucified. The album was self-titled, and the name “Lethal Factor” was displayed over the woman’s bare breasts. Two years earlier, Katrina had laughed when Jason told her that he named his fledgling band after his work.

She picked up the CD to return it to its shelf, but then paused as a line of text on the back of the square case caught her eye. She looked again, and her breath caught in her chest.