by Ben Mezrich
Scully took the pictures from him, looking them over. She had never seen anything like it before. There was no edema, none of the cerebral swelling she would have expected from encephalitis lethargica—but Stanton’s brain was anything but normal. She reached forward with a finger and traced a large, dark gray spot near the center of the picture. It was the hypothalamus, the gland that regulated the nervous system—but it was enormous, nearly three times as large as normal. Surrounding the engorged gland were half a dozen strange polyp-type growths, arranged in a rough semicircle. In all her time spent in pathology labs, she had never seen such a manifestation.
She rose quickly from the leather chair, the pictures tucked under her right arm. She wanted to get to that autopsy room as soon as possible. She watched as the tech hit a few computer keys, sending the viewing screen back to its original green. “We’ll keep the pictures on file for as long as you’d like. Just ask for me if you need a second look.”
The young man winked from behind his thick glasses, but Scully was already moving out into the radiology wing. Her thoughts were three floors away, in a basement lab filled with plastic organ trays and steel fluid gutters.
Scully never made it to the autopsy room. She had taken three steps out of the elevator when she heard Mulder’s angry voice echoing through the cinder-block pathology ward.
She found her partner blockaded in the long central hallway that ran down the center of the ward by three red-faced men wearing white lab coats. All of the coats had name tags, with tiny red seals that Scully recognized from her previous dealings with the CDC. Mulder’s focus was the tallest man, a mid-fifties African-American with thick eyelids and speckled gray hair. The man had his arms crossed against his chest, a disdainful look in his eyes. His name tag identified him as Dr. Basil Georgian, a senior infectious disease investigator. Scully caught the tail end of Mulder’s heated interchange as she arrived at his side.
“This isn’t merely an infectious disease scare.” Mulder was near-shouting. “It’s an FBI investigation. You don’t have automatic priority or jurisdiction.”
Georgian shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. We’ve got two reported cases of encephalitis lethargica. That’s all the jurisdiction we need. Your murderer is dead, Agent Mulder. He’s not going to go anywhere. Our virus is still very much alive—at least in one coma victim. We’ve got to make sure that’s where it stays contained.”
Mulder turned to Scully. “These guys seem to think they’re going to run off with our body.”
Scully looked at Georgian. Georgian shrugged. “Our superiors in Atlanta have already spoken to your superiors in Washington. Everyone agrees that it’s more appropriate for us to handle the autopsy in our biocontainment lab in Hoboken—where the microbe can be properly studied, handled, and contained. We’ll send you the reports when we’re finished. Lethargica doesn’t come around often, and we intend to figure out what it’s doing in New York.”
Without another word, Georgian spun on his heels and headed down the hallway, flanked by his two associates. Scully could see Stanton’s stretcher being wheeled through a pair of double doors another ten yards beyond them—most likely to an underground garage, where an ambulance was waiting. Mulder started after them—but she stopped him with an outstretched hand. “They aren’t going to change their minds. And they do have priority. From an official standpoint, our investigation is finished. Our perp is in custody—so to speak.”
Mulder sighed, shaking his head. “They’ll send us their report? That’s ridiculous. This is our case.”
“But the infectious disease makes it their concern. Mulder, I don’t think we have much choice.”
“So we just let it go?”
Scully didn’t like the idea any more than he did. But they had to let the CDC scientists do their job. In the meantime—Scully still had the MRI scans. She pulled them out from under her arm and showed one of the views to Mulder. “While we’re waiting for their autopsy report, we still have a lead to work with. This is one of the strangest MRIs I’ve ever seen. You see these polyps surrounding the hypothalamus?”
Mulder squinted, following her finger. To an untrained observer, the idiosyncrasy was fairly obtuse—but to Scully it was like a massive neon sign. “Given Stanton’s sudden onset of psychosis, my guess is these polyps might have something to do with excess dopamine production. That would involve the hypothalamus—and explain the violence and disorientation.”
“Dopamine,” Mulder repeated. “That’s a neurotransmitter, right? A chemical used by the nervous system to transmit information?”
Scully nodded. She wouldn’t know for sure until she saw the CDC autopsy report, but it seemed a viable possibility. Still, it wasn’t an explanation. “I’d like to run these pictures through the hospital’s Medline system, see if anything like this has been reported before.”
Mulder was still looking longingly in the direction of Stanton’s body. “Scully, how many times have we worked with the CDC before?”
Scully raised an eyebrow. “A half dozen. Maybe more. Why?”
Mulder shrugged. “First the John Doe. Now Perry Stanton. It seems that people are going to great lengths to keep us from getting our hands on anyone involved in that skin transplant.”
Scully resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Mulder, I called the CDC about the lethargica—not the other way around.”
Mulder gestured toward the MRI scans. “Does that look like lethargica?”
Scully paused. “The truth is, I have no idea what this is. That’s why we need to find out if it’s ever happened before.”
Ten minutes later, Scully and Mulder huddled together in the corner of a cramped administrative office located one floor above the pathology ward. They had borrowed the office from a human-resources manager, bypassing any questions or possible red tape with a flick of their federal IDs. The office was sparse, containing little more than a desk, a few chairs, and an IBM workstation. In other words, it was a no-frills window into cyberspace.
The computer whirred as the inboard modem connected the two agents to the nationwide medical data base located in Washington, DC. Scully was closest to the screen, and her face glowed a techno blue as she maneuvered a plastic track ball through a half dozen menus loaded with options and navigational commands. Mulder had already placed one of the MRI pictures into the scanner next to the oversize processor, and in a few minutes they would begin to search the hundred million stored files for any possible match.
“This search should cover any MRIs, CAT scans, or skull X rays with similar manifestations,” Scully said. “The Medline system is linked to every hospital in the country, and many throughout the world. If there’s an associated syndrome, we’ll surely find something—”
She paused, as the screen began to change. Suddenly, her eyes widened. Mulder read the notice at the top of the file that had suddenly appeared. “One match. New York Hospital, 1984.”
Scully immediately realized the significance of the notice. As she skimmed the first paragraph of the file, her shock grew. The MRI scan had matched a pair of CAT scans taken on two inmates of Rikers Island in New York, shortly before their deaths. Both inmates had been part of some sort of volunteer experimental study performed in the early eighties. Even more stunning, according to the file, the study was conducted under the auspices of a fledgling biotech company located just outside Manhattan. Scully immediately recognized the company’s name.
“Fibrol International,” Mulder stated, his voice characteristically calm. “The same company that manufactures the red powder I found at the accident scene.”
Scully didn’t know what to say. She scrolled further down the file and found the two CAT scans that had heralded the match. In both images, she saw the same unmistakable pattern of polyps surrounding an enlarged hypothalamus. At the bottom of the file she found a link to an attached file. She hit the link, and the CAT scans were replaced by a single page of official-looking text.
“It’s a pros
ecutorial assessment,” she said, reading the heading. “There was a criminal investigation into the man behind the experimentation—Fibrol’s founder and CEO, Emile Paladin. But it looks as though it never came to trial. According to this, the experiment had been conducted with full permission from the inmates. There’s no explanation of the cause of death—just that it was accidental.”
“Look at this,” Mulder said, tapping a paragraph lower down in the assessment. There was a brief description of the nature of the experiment. “Skin transplantation, Scully. The experiment had to do with a radical new method of skin transplantation.”
Scully rubbed her scalp with her fingers. It was hard to believe. Perry Stanton’s brain had been ravaged by the same polyps that had killed the two inmates. But Stanton had not been the subject of an experimental transplantation.
“The red powder,” Mulder continued. “It’s the link—and Fibrol is the common denominator. We’ve got to find this Emile Paladin.”
“This happened fifteen years ago,” Scully responded. “And Perry Stanton wasn’t part of any radical experiment.”
“Not directly. But the John Doe might have been. And Stanton’s wearing his skin.”
Scully shook her head. What Mulder was implying was extremely unlikely. What sort of mechanism could transfer such a fatal cerebral reaction—through nothing more than a slab of harvested skin? It didn’t make medical sense.
Still, she didn’t know what to make of the connection to Fibrol. They needed to find out more about the experiment that had killed the two prisoners. And Mulder was right, they needed to track down Emile Paladin.
Maybe he could tell them how a skin transplant could ravage a man’s brain from the inside—and what any of this had to do with the encephalitis lethargica that had felled the two med students.
Maybe Emile Paladin had some idea what had really happened to Perry Stanton.
12
The huge crimson atrium spilled out in front of the electronic revolving door like blood from a gunshot wound. Mulder paused to catch his breath as he and Scully stepped from inside the moving triangle of smoked glass. Twenty yards ahead stood an enormous black-glass desk, staffed by three men in similar dark blue suits. Behind the desk, the walls curved upward in magnificent swells of stone to the paneled black ceiling lined with more than a dozen miniature spotlights, a synthetic night sky gazing down upon a mock vermilion desert carved out of imported marble.
The interior of the Fibrol complex was nothing like the nondescript, blank-walled three-storied boxes he and Scully had seen from the highway. Even when they had passed through the twin security checkpoints on the way into the parking lot, Mulder had not realized the extent of the building’s architectural deception. From the outside, Fibrol’s main offices seemed no different from the hundreds of other corporate headquarters lodged in the grassy foothills that surrounded New York City. But the interior decor told a story more in line with the S&P reports the agents had scoured after leaving New York Hospital. Fibrol had grown wealthy during the biotech boom of the late eighties, burgeoning into one of the nation’s largest suppliers of burn-transplantation materials. Along with their most recent product—the antibacterial Dust—Fibrol held over three hundred patents on products in use at major hospitals and research centers. The company operated a half dozen burn clinics in the Northeast, and satellite offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Rome.
Mulder’s shoes clicked against the polished marble as he and Scully bisected the huge atrium. He noticed a long glass case running along the wall to his right, containing strange-looking metal and plastic tools; each tool had a plaque explaining its use and date of development, and by the third scalpel-like object, Mulder realized the case was a visual history of the transplantation art. He looked more closely as he reached the last section of the case. He passed what appeared to be microscalpels and needles, lying next to a specialized microscope. To the right of the microscope, he recognized a laser device similar to the machine Dr. Bernstein had used to remove the tattoo. Then he came to the red powder, spread out in three equal piles above a metallic plaque.
He paused, tapping Scully’s arm. The plaque was dated thirteen months ago, and contained a single caption in gilded script:
Antibacterial Compound 1279
EFFECTIVE IN REDUCING CONSEQUENTIAL SEPTICITY AFTER RADICAL TRANSPLANTATION
Mulder was about to ask for a medical definition of “consequential septicity” when a high voice impaled his right ear. “Agents Mulder and Scully? I trust you had no problem following my directions?”
Mulder looked up from the glass case. One of the blue-suited men had risen from behind the black desk. Just a kid, really—he looked no older than twenty-three, with short blond hair and an acne-covered face. His thin limbs were swimming in his suit. Scully nodded in his direction. “Are you the man we spoke to on the phone?”
The kid smiled, coming around the edge of the desk. “Dick Baxter. I set up your appointment with Dr. Kyle, our director of research. He’s waiting in his office. I’ll take you right to him.”
Mulder and Scully shook Baxter’s hand. Enthusiasm leaked out of the kid’s every pore.
“Dr. Kyle?” Mulder asked. He remembered seeing Julian Kyle’s name in the S&P files. Kyle was responsible for a number of Fibrol’s patents, spanning back to the company’s inception. Still, Mulder had hoped their FBI status would get them access to someone higher up than a director of research.
Then again, Mulder didn’t yet know enough about Fibrol’s leadership to complain. He and Scully had been hoping to find Emile Paladin still at the helm of the company—but to their surprise, they had discovered that Fibrol’s founder and CEO had died in an accident overseas shortly after the experiment involving the Rikers Island prisoners. Since then, the company had gone through two acting CEOs, and at present no CEO was in place. Perhaps Julian Kyle was as close to the company’s true leadership as Mulder and Scully were going to get.
“You asked to speak to the person in charge of our East Coast operations, didn’t you?” Baxter continued. “Julian Kyle heads up all new projects at Fibrol. His finger is on the pulse of everything that goes on around here.”
Mulder and Scully followed the young man as he strolled past the desk to an opaque glass door embedded in the marble wall. Baxter paused, pressing his hand against a plastic circular plate next to the door. There was a short metallic whir, and the door slid open, revealing a long corridor with matching crimson walls.
“Pretty high-tech,” Scully commented.
“Infrared imaging,” Baxter said, smiling proudly. “It’s a lot more comfortable than a retinal scanner, and certainly more accurate than a thumb pad. Of course, it’s much more expensive than either technology.”
Mulder glanced back toward the spectacular front atrium. “Doesn’t look like Fibrol is too concerned with expense.”
Baxter laughed. “Not lately. We’ve got a number of major new developments coming down the pipeline. Already, our foreign division has tripled in revenues—just in the past two years. The new board of directors has decided to update our look, to reflect this new level of success. They’ve redesigned much of the complex; you should see the new labs in the basement—we’re talking major high-tech.”
Mulder raised his eyebrows, glancing at Scully as they followed the young man through the security door and into the long corridor. “You seem pretty excited about the changes. Is that why they have you working the door?”
Baxter laughed, pulling at the lapels of his blue suit. “Actually, I’m a Ph.D. student at NYU. I’m working here through the summer—but I hope to be hired full-time after I graduate. Maybe start as a junior scientist and claw my way up in the research department. Beats the hell out of academia, and you get to really see your work transformed into something useful.”
Mulder kept his eyes moving as they sliced through the inner corridors of the complex. The place was built like a maze, and Mulder was reminded of the interior
floor plan of the Pentagon. They passed many unmarked offices, each with opaque glass security doors. None of the doors had knobs. Instead, each was fitted with the same plastic handplate. A very efficient security system, probably routed through a computer center somewhere in the complex. Mulder also noticed closed-circuit television cameras at ten-foot intervals along the hallway ceiling. The cameras were painted the same crimson as the walls. He touched Scully’s arm, pointing. “Fibrol seems to take its security fairly seriously. Cameras, infrared access panels, and the twin security checks on the way into the fenced parking lot.”
Baxter overheard his comment and nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes. We’re very concerned with keeping our work private. You’d be surprised at the sort of thing that goes on in the biotech industry. Theft, sabotage, corporate spying, Internet hacking—just last month we had an incident with the janitorial staff. A cleaning lady on the third floor was caught stealing the shredded paper from a central wastebasket.”
“Shredded paper?” Scully asked.
Baxter had a serious look on his face. “A hacker employed by a rival biotech company could have extracted password information from the stolen garbage. Once inside our computer banks, there’s no telling what sort of damage they could have done.”
Mulder stifled a smile. It seemed he did not have a monopoly on paranoia. Then again, perhaps Baxter was right. Mulder knew that the biotech industry relied on its secrets to survive. Patents could only protect inventions that were already complete—every step along the way was a fierce race. And judging from the lavish front atrium with its expensive marble walls, the payoff could be impressive.
Baxter stopped in front of another glass door, again placing his palm against an infrared panel. After two clicks the door slid open, and Baxter gestured for the two agents to step inside. “Dr. Kyle will answer all your questions from here on out. I hope you enjoy your visit.”