by Greg Iles
“Oh, God.”
“He tried to take a swing at me, so I took him down.”
“Took him down? Is he hurt?”
“Maybe. But no cops have showed up to arrest me yet.”
“I doubt they will.”
“I hope I didn’t screw you up too bad. Your investigation, I mean.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just try not to do anything else, okay?” The Lear was steadily approaching. “I don’t have long. I just wanted you to know that you might not see me for a while.”
“How bad could this be? Washington, I mean?”
Her laugh had a touch of hysteria. “Bad. Remember my screwup at the bank? When I got shot?”
“Yes.”
“I went back into the bank because I thought I was right, but a deputy director ordered the HRT in on top of me.”
“Right, I remember.”
“That’s who called me today. His name is Dodson. And the thing is…I turned out to be right that day. The bank robber wasn’t a terrorist, he was a disaffected employee. I made a terrible procedural mistake that day, but when the truth came out, my instinct was proved correct. I was right, and Dodson was wrong. And he’s never forgiven me for that. He’s been after me ever since, and today is payback.”
The approaching jet swallowed almost all sound in the whine of its turbines.
“What?” Alex yelled.
“I said, I put in a call to my friend at Sloan-Kettering!” Chris repeated. “I’ll let you know what he says. Look, somebody up there has to know they need you. Focus on that.”
“I’ve got to go. Bye.”
Chris’s reply, if he made one, was lost in the roar.
Alex hit END, set the phone to SILENT, and slid it into her pocket as the Lear stopped and its side door opened. A stereotypical FBI agent walked down the little stair. Blue suit, dark sunglasses. Even with his jacket cut a little full, she could make out the butt of his weapon beneath the cloth under his left arm.
“Special Agent Alex Morse?” he called.
“I’m Alex Morse.”
As the clean-cut, blond agent drew closer, Alex suspected that he was part of one of the most exclusive agent cliques in the Bureau: the Mormon Mafia.
“Special Agent Gray Williams,” he said. Williams did not offer his hand. “Are you carrying a weapon, Agent Morse?”
“Yes.” Alex was afraid he would order her to surrender her sidearm.
“Do you have any other bags?”
“Nope.” She bent to lift her soft-sided suitcase.
“Let’s get aboard then.”
Williams’s tone indicated extreme reluctance to talk to her—a sure sign that she was known to be an official leper. She tossed her suitcase through the hatch, then climbed in after it, bent low, and took a forward-facing seat. She expected Williams to take the seat facing her, but he sat two seats behind her. Alex could hear him talking softly on his cell phone, confirming that she was aboard and soon to be bound for Washington. After gripping the armrests for takeoff, she took out her private phone, plugged it into an outlet beside her seat, and checked her voice mail. A ragged male voice came through the ether.
“Alex, this is Uncle Will.” She clicked the volume down to minimum level using the side button. “Your mom’s the same as she was last night, alive and not quite kicking. You did the right thing getting some rest. I’m calling because I got a report from my guy at the Alluvian Hotel. He couldn’t find out which floor Thora Shepard was staying on, but his wife talked to her in the wet area a couple of times. Thora’s girlfriend was with her, and everything seemed legit. But around five thirty this morning, my guy’s wife happened to look out her window, which overlooks the main courtyard that leads to the back parking lot. She saw a guy carrying a small suitcase out to the lot. He was in a big hurry. It was fast and in poor light, but she thinks it could have been Dr. Lansing. She couldn’t be positive. Said she’s sixty percent sure. I’m going to check out the possibility that Lansing could be commuting back and forth to get his poontang from Mrs. Shepard. You call me as soon as—”
The line had not gone dead; voice mail had cut Will off before he finished his message. There were no more messages. Alex wondered if a few hours in bed with Thora was worth commuting four hours both ways. Most men she knew would undoubtedly say yes. She saw no point in calling Chris to pass on an inconclusive report, but she was likely to have real evidence soon. If Chris had attacked Dr. Lansing based on suspicion, what would he do if Will provided the kind of graphic evidence that he frequently obtained in his business? Alex had not expected a violent reaction from Chris. Yet he was a Southerner, and in matters of this kind, direct action was the rule among them rather than the exception.
She sat back in her seat. Summoned by the roar of the engines and the shuddering airframe, a hundred memories assailed her. How many times had she been rushed to a jet like this one and ferried to some strange city where a man with a gun held innocent people under his power? Being the person that the Bureau counted on in those situations had engendered its own sense of power within Alex. And she had justified their faith time and time again, the faith of her tribe. But now she had broken that faith, at least in their eyes—their being an all-inclusive euphemism for the quasi-military, superpatriotic culture known to outsiders as the FBI. It had destroyed a part of her to break that faith, to forge daily reports, to ask fellow agents to cover for unauthorized absences. What would it do to her to be expelled from the Bureau altogether? She felt hollow and afraid, like someone about to be driven out of her village and forced alone into the bush. But there was a higher duty than that owed one’s tribe—the obligation to one’s family. To blood. And no matter what it cost, she would not break faith with them. After her mother died, Alex would be the only Morse left, save Jamie Fennell. Like Alex, Jamie had no one else. Why couldn’t the Bureau understand that?
Fed up with being passive, Alex took out her cell phone and clicked into text-messaging mode. If she had to sweat out the next twenty-four hours, she wasn’t going to do it alone.
Andrew Rusk was surfing an Internet porn site and thinking about calling Janice into his office for some personal attention when his cell phone emitted the brief chirp that signaled an incoming text message. He looked away from the ménage à trois on his screen—two girls on a guy, his fantasy since high school—and pressed READ on his cell phone. His heart began to race as he saw the words outlined in blue:
You’re going to pay for what you did. I don’t care how long it takes. You’re going to ride the needle, Andy. For Grace Fennell, for Mrs. Braid, for all the others. I don’t care what happens to me. Nothing will stop me. Nothing.
Rusk stared at the message with a sense of unreality. The letters seemed to shimmer before his eyes, like blurry waves of heat over desert sand. He checked the source of the message, but no number showed up. It didn’t matter. He knew who had sent it.
His first instinct was to get up and tape two squares of Reynolds Wrap to his northeast window, but his good sense stopped him. For one thing, Dr. Tarver might not see the foil until the end of the day. For another, Tarver was already upset enough about Alex Morse. This new development would only add fuel to the fire. And the hotter that fire got, the less Rusk’s life was worth.
“What the hell is she doing?” he thought aloud. “Why would she send this?”
She’s trying to provoke me. It’s like throwing a rock into a thicket to try to make your prey move into your sights. That means somebody’s watching to see which way I jump. Waiting for me to lead them somewhere.
“Just stay cool,” he murmured. “Stay cool.”
Rusk toyed with the idea of sending Dr. Tarver one of their Viagra spam messages. Tarver would likely receive this within the hour, and it would prompt him to head for the country club where Rusk normally dropped off the operational packets. Annandale was exclusive enough that he could even risk a conversation with Tarver there. But he could not know how the doctor would react. He needed to think b
efore he did anything. If Alex Morse was working with the full backing of the FBI, the usual drop point would afford no protection whatsoever.
“Stay cool,” he said again. Then, in a much lower voice, he said, “‘Do you have the patience to do nothing?’” Rusk was no scholar, but he had read the Tao Te Ching during college—mostly to please an English major he was screwing—and that line had stuck with him. The best time to do nothing, of course, was when your adversary was about to make a big mistake—or had already made one. But Alex Morse hadn’t made any recent mistakes that he knew about. “That I know about,” he said thoughtfully.
He picked up the phone and dialed the number of a detective agency he sometimes used. They were expensive, but they boasted several former government agents among their operatives. Some had been IRS agents, others had worked for the DEA or BATF, while a highly paid few were former special agents of the FBI.
“It’s time to find out what Agent Alex has really been up to,” he said.
Chris was in an examining room checking a prostate gland when Jane called him out to take Dr. Connolly’s call. He ripped off the glove, hurried to his office, and picked up the phone.
“Pete? It’s Chris Shepard.”
“Hey, boy! What’s it been, seven years?”
“More.”
“The last I heard, you were playing Albert Schweitzer in the Mississippi Delta.”
“Just a phase.”
“I know better.”
“How’s your wife, Pete?”
“Anna’s good. And my daughter’s starting at UVA med next fall.”
“God, is she that old?”
“No, I’m that old. Now, what’s all this about giving people cancer on purpose? That was a pretty strange message you left me. Have you switched from making documentaries to horror movies? Or did somebody get murdered down there?”
“To tell you the truth, Pete…I can’t talk about it.”
There was a long pause. Then Connolly said, “Okay, well, I did some thinking about it during what passed for my lunch. You ready?”
“Shoot.”
“As for chemical agents, multiple myeloma can be caused by a spectrum of carcinogens. Herbicides are particularly damaging. But you’re talking about a twenty-year incubation period before the cancer hits. Toxins could work much faster, but virtually all are detectable using gas chromatography and a mass spectrometer. The CSI guys would bust you in a hurry.”
“On TV they would. I’m finding out that the real world is different.”
“What the heck are you into, Chris? No one’s going to be mixing this stuff up in his kitchen sink. Not even in an average university lab.”
“I hope you’re right,” Chris replied, ignoring the question.
“Radiation is another obvious choice,” Connolly went on. “There’s no doubt you could induce leukemia with it.”
“But could you do it undetectably?”
“Not easily. But it might be possible.”
Chris felt a strange thrumming in his chest.
“X-rays would probably cause all sorts of side effects, both local and systemic, so forget that. Radiotherapy pellets would probably cause burns, skin tumors, maybe nausea early on. Although there are some alpha emitters whose effects aren’t dose-related at all. Even the smallest exposure is oncogenic.”
“Really?” Chris grabbed a pen and scrawled this on a notepad.
“It would take a real specialist to know that kind of thing, of course. The most interesting radiation option isn’t pellets, though.”
“What is it?”
“Against some tumors, we use irradiated liquids that have very short half-lives. I’m talking twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
Chris felt a chill of foreboding.
“Take thyroid cancer. We put radioactive iodine into the bloodstream. The iodine collects in the thyroid, kills the cancer cells, then is harmlessly excreted from the body. A sociopathic radiation oncologist could probably figure a way to induce cancer like that without leaving any measurable trace.”
Chris wrote rapidly; his time with Connolly would be limited. “Go on.”
“I know about an actual case where somebody used irradiated thallium to attempt an assassination in Africa. The radiation broke the thallium into microparticles that dispersed throughout the body. The victim nearly died, but at the last minute they shipped him here. Our best doctors treated him for over a week. He ultimately survived, but anywhere else in the world he would have died. And I seriously doubt whether anyone else could have traced the cause of death.”
“I had no idea. I’ve been going through my oncology books, and I haven’t found anything like that.”
“Not everything is in the books, Doc. You know that. But listen, if I really wanted to give someone cancer with zero risk of being caught, I’d explore one of two avenues. The first is viruses.”
“I’ve considered that myself, but I don’t even know enough to be dangerous.”
“You’d have to be willing to wait a while for your victim to die.”
Chris nodded to himself. “Up to a point, time isn’t a factor in these cases.”
“Well, then. You know that HTLV has been implicated in at least one form of leukemia. The Kaposi’s sarcoma associated with HIV is the result of infection with herpes eight. Epstein-Barr can cause Burkitt’s lymphoma, and of course, human papilloma virus is known to cause cervical cancer. Herpes eight may also be a factor in multiple myeloma. I think that over the next ten years, we’re going to discover that viruses are responsible for all sorts of cancers that we don’t yet suspect have a viral etiology or mediator. Other diseases as well.”
As Chris jotted down Connolly’s words in the shorthand he’d invented during medical school, he talked to keep the hematologist on the line. “I knew that one of the herpes viruses had been implicated in multiple sclerosis.”
“Herpes six,” said Connolly. “And there are indications of a viral component in juvenile diabetes. But let’s get back to cancer. There’s no doubt that viruses can cause cancer. But you have to remember, getting cancer isn’t a one-step process. Millions of women carry HPV, but only a few develop cervical cancer. Millions of people smoke without getting lung cancer. It wouldn’t be enough to isolate and infect someone with an oncogenic retrovirus. You’d have to solve several other riddles, too. How to switch off tumor suppressor genes, how to increase cellular growth factors. It would take a massive research effort.”
Chris’s thoughts were already shooting ahead. “So we’re talking about something beyond the reach of present-day technology.”
“Not at all. I’ve already done it myself, right here in my lab.”
Connolly’s words hit him like a body blow. “What?”
“It’s amazing, really, but we did. In trying to understand the cause of chronic myelogenous leukemia, my team and I basically carried out gene therapy in reverse. We attached a leukemia-inducing gene to a retrovirus, then infected a mouse with the virus. The oncogene was incorporated into the mouse’s genome, and within weeks the mouse had developed the rodent version of CML.”
Chris was literally speechless. After several moments, he asked, “Was this mouse immune-compromised?”
“No. Perfectly healthy.”
“Christ, Peter!”
“What?”
“You basically murdered this mouse by giving it cancer.”
“Absolutely. And thousands of human lives will one day be saved because of that murder.”
“You’re missing my point. What I asked you about on the phone…it’s possible.”
“Well, in theory, I suppose.”
“What about in the real world?”
Connolly took a few moments to consider the question. “I suppose if you had some higher primates to test your work on—or, God forbid, human beings—then, yes, it’s possible.”
Chris gripped the phone in stunned silence.
“I might be worried,” said Connolly, “if it wouldn’t cost someon
e millions of dollars to reach the point where they could murder someone using that method. Not to mention that they’d have to sit pretty goddamn high on the intelligence curve.”
“But if they did use that method, they could be sure of getting away with murder?”
Connolly’s voice took on a clinical coldness. “Chris, if I used this technology against a human being, I could kill whoever I wanted, and the greatest pathologist in the world wouldn’t even realize that a crime had been committed. Even if I told him, he couldn’t prove it with the science at his disposal.”
A deep shiver went through Chris.
“Hey,” said Connolly. “You don’t think…”
“I don’t know, Pete. You mentioned two possible scenarios in this line, didn’t you?”
“Right. The second scenario is far scarier to me, because it requires much less expertise. All you’d need is a hematologist or oncologist with the ethics of Dr. Mengele.”
“Go on.”
“All you do is modify the process of a certain type of bone marrow transplant. Remove marrow cells from your patient; irradiate or otherwise poison them in the lab, causing your malignancy of choice; then reinject them into the patient.”
“What would be the result?”
“A cancer factory powered by the victim’s own bone marrow. Exactly the kind of thing you described to me, in fact. A spectrum of blood cancers.”
“And no one could ever prove what had been done?”
“Barring a confession, no way in hell.”
“Jesus.” Chris analyzed this scenario as rapidly as he could. “Would you have to use marrow cells for that? Or could you use cells that are easier to get?”
“Hmm,” Connolly mused. “I suppose you could use just about any kind of living cell, so long as it contained the patient’s DNA. A hair root or a scraping from the mucosa, say. But marrow cells would be best.”
Chris had received too much information to process it efficiently. “Pete, can you tell me anything about the hematology and oncology departments at UMC now? Do you know anything about your replacement?”
“Not much. It’s been six years, you know? I left there in a hurry, so they made Alan Benson acting chairman until they recruited a new chief.”