A moment of silence passed as each man considered the card again. Then Jack mused aloud, “So, there’s allegedly something about to happen. And then something else on Christmas Day…
“E-mail the translation to me when you’ve completed it. I still need to log it into the database, and I’ll send the card to the Postal Inspection office for analysis. But I assume if no shit hits any proverbial fans in the next couple of weeks, then we’re probably fine.”
Twenty hours passed, and death row was redefined. Convicted murderer Nathan Horn struggled for air as he lay dying on his bed. Every feeble breath felt like lightning in his chest.
Much of Horn’s present state was ironically akin to the once-familiar sickness of heroin withdrawal—a sensation he had not experienced in twenty-two years. His lungs had become increasingly weak over the last hour, and he now continuously felt light-headed and nauseous. There was nothing left to vomit, but he was vaguely aware that he had soiled himself again. Horn had stopped getting up a few hours ago, after he had fainted in the throes of a violent retching spell and hit his head on the concrete floor hard enough for blood to trickle down his agonized face.
Too weak to care that his body was shutting down, he could only be grateful that the violent illness he had been engulfed in throughout most of the morning had finally subsided.
The rotten meat smell of the sores was everywhere. Someone was screaming. Someone else—or maybe it was the same man—was vomiting.
Horn had no choice but to lie in misery and absorb the sounds and smells of the mortally ill. Mercifully, his vision was totally gone. He could not see the disgusting mess that had become of the six-by-eight cell where he had spent the last eighteen years of his sentence. He was also unaware that Buzz, the child molester on the other side of the wall, had been dead for three hours, or that Sam—who two years earlier had raped and murdered his own sister at the age of nineteen—was now on his hands and knees as he sobbed, mumbling an inarticulate prayer to a God that had never existed to him until that morning.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, Horn’s ravaged mind was a collage of people and events from his past. His mother. His parole officer. The sixteen-year-old girl he had shot in the chest in her apartment because it turned out that she didn’t have any dope after all. A parade of lawyers. The judge who had asked God for mercy on his soul. Horn had laughed out loud.
The sores were like fire, and their flames were spreading. He could no longer feel the distinct patches of corroded flesh; they were all melting into one surreal torture. Internally, he was being slowly devoured. Externally, he was burning alive. His last semi-lucid thought was a forlorn one.
They had all been right. Nathan Horn finally believed in Hell.
OCTOBER 13, 2015
6:01 P.M. PDT
“What in God’s holy name happened in here?!”
The faint Southern drawl of Special Agent Sean McMullan echoed as his rich voice boomed through the concrete corridor of San Quentin’s North Seg. The corridor had otherwise fallen silent. It was a first for the prison’s original death row wing, the wing eternally cacophonous with the rage of dead men walking.
Now? Men, yes. Dead, for sure. None walking. Two tiers of thirty-four cells. Sixty-eight dead men, not walking. Death row indeed.
Treading gingerly down the hallway with an ashen prison director on his left side and the CDC Associate Director of Epidemiology on his right—all three men in full-body, air-supplied, positive-pressure biohazard suits—the veteran agent silently counted to ten to maintain his composure.
Sean McMullan had been a special agent with the FBI Biological Countermeasures Unit—the BCU—for ten years. But he had never seen anything like this.
Each private cell was a new stage set with another scene of the macabre. A few of the bodies were lying next to steel toilets, but most had died in their beds. IV poles stood at many of the bedsides, and needles, still plunged into stiffening flesh, attached clear tubing to half-empty fluid bags. Some of the bodies were in oddly contorted positions, and most were lying in one form of bodily discharge or another. Some exhibited the sores; others did not. All of them had expressions of terror and agony frozen to their faces.
McMullan turned to the pallid man walking next to him and asked how the deaths of sixty-eight inmates could possibly have gone unattended.
“They did not go unattended,” the prison director asserted. “Death row inmates are checked routinely throughout the day and night. These inmates were all fine yesterday morning.
“At one p.m., a guard checked on them and made a note that an inmate had vomited. That inmate indicated he thought it was the food, and he declined to go to the infirmary. By nine p.m., there were two dozen sick men. Vomiting. Diarrhea. Fevers. Chills. Stuff like that. They were unanimously blaming the chicken from lunch.
“When the guards began bringing sick inmates to the infirmary, the doctor on duty assumed he was seeing an outbreak of food poisoning or stomach flu. He sent some swabs to the lab to be tested for Salmonella and E. coli. He gave the sick inmates fluids, began antibiotic regimens, and prescribed anti-nausea medications. There are no appropriate treatments beyond that, and we had insufficient space in the infirmary. So the doctor began returning them to their cells and prescribing bed rest.
“He also called in our entire medical staff to attend to the sick inmates through the night. Then, at about seven o’clock this morning, some of them began to break out in sores. That’s when we called the CDC.”
Even before the CDC team arrived, inmates were already dying. It had taken only a cursory evaluation of the situation before the CDC had solicited assistance from the FBI BCU. And by the time Sean McMullan arrived in the evening, San Quentin’s North Seg death row wing had been completely depopulated.
It had only been thirty hours since the first inmate became symptomatic.
McMullan stopped in front of a still-locked cell and peered through its bars. The man lying dead inside the cell must have been in his early thirties. His muscular, tattooed arms were clearly the product of extensive weight-lifting. McMullan had every reason to assume that the inmate had been healthy before yesterday.
“OK,” he said. “I’m going to need someone to draw a map of this cell block. I want each dead inmate pinpointed on that map, showing where he died and whether or not he had made it to the infirmary for treatment. I want to know who was puking at one p.m., which ones were sick at nine p.m., and the order in which they began getting sick after that. I want to know the order in which they died. I want notation of which ones have the sores. And I want to talk to the infirmary. Is the infirmary doc sick?”
“No, but he’s quarantined. And three inmates from other wings of the prison are also dead. Those bodies are still in the infirmary.”
McMullan dismissed the prison director, and, when he was gone, turned quietly to the CDC epidemiologist. “Dr. Wong, is there anything else about this that I’m missing?”
Guofu Wong blinked and cleared his throat. “No, sir,” he said. “Unless you’re missing the fact that this is the most virulent biological weapon the world has ever seen.”
OCTOBER 15, 2015
1:00 P.M. EDT
Two days later, CDC Associate Director of Epidemiology Guofu Wong stood at the head of a conference table in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. Behind him, a large screen projected a slide from his laptop computer. Sean McMullan and several additional FBI agents were among the audience, scrawling into notebooks and punching laptop keys as the doctor spoke.
“The sixty-eight death row inmates at San Quentin State Prison died from anthrax poisoning,” Wong said.
Someone gasped. The man sitting nearest to where Wong was standing shifted his chair backward as if to physically distance himself from the epidemiologist who had been at the prison.
“The skin lesions that many of the inmates developed,” Wong continued, “were in some ways indicative of textbook cutaneous anthrax. They exhibited the classic bl
ack moldy appearance from which the name anthrax, which means coal, was derived.”
Wong projected a slide upon which two photographs were displayed side by side. Each photograph showed a section of human skin blemished with the black sores of which he spoke. One image was labeled “Normal Anthrax Lesions” and the other “Death Row Anthrax Lesions.” The sores on both photographs were similar in appearance.
“But anthrax lesions are usually painless,” Wong continued. “The prison staff said that these men were screaming in pain. Furthermore, cutaneous anthrax is rarely fatal, and the lesions are typically small and few. Gastrointestinal anthrax could have caused the nausea and vomiting, and inhalational anthrax would definitely result in the shortness of breath some of the men were experiencing. But it sounds like a number of the inmates had all of these symptoms.
“Moreover, the symptoms of normal anthrax occur slowly, over the course of several days or even weeks. This infection was one hundred percent fatal within little more than a day.”
Wong clicked a laptop key and a new slide appeared. On it was a small square, slightly glowing in a light lavender hue. Several haphazard patterns of unevenly spaced fluorescent lines trickled down the square like a collection of old ladders missing multiple rungs.
“So we conducted an analysis, called PCR, of the anthrax from the prison. What we learned is that an additional gene has been incorporated into its DNA. The new gene”—Wong circled one of the fluorescent lines with a laser pointer—“comes from a small, mobile DNA molecule called a plasmid. The plasmid encodes a small protein. Computer-based molecular modeling analyses suggest that this new protein can interact with the dominant toxin produced by the anthrax bacterium, a protein called ‘lethal factor.’ This interaction results in the formation of a larger complex—meaning, a group of proteins that function together as one molecular machine. The presence of the genetically engineered element in the larger complex potently activates the toxin, leading to dramatically increased virulence… ”
A squat, balding man raised his hand.
Wong acknowledged the man. “Yes, Mr… ?”
“Special Agent Roger Gilman. Can you explain that again, please, and leave out the scientific gibberish for those of us that work in law enforcement?”
“Certainly,” Wong said. “The anthrax that infected the prisoners is genetically enhanced. Its DNA encodes an additional protein that activates its major toxin. This makes the Death Row strain much more potent and much more rapidly acting than your garden-variety anthrax. The strain would not have been very difficult to engineer in a laboratory.”
“If you say so,” Gilman said, “but I don’t understand why someone would bother genetically engineering a strain of anthrax in the first place. Can’t we treat anthrax with antibiotics? Do we not have vaccines against it?”
“Those are good questions,” Wong said. “Unfortunately, vaccination against anthrax is strictly prophylactic, and antibiotic treatment is only effective at the very beginning of exposure.
“The issue is that once anthrax has been in your body for a while—a short while—it begins to release the deadly toxin known as lethal factor. Vaccines can potentially block an infection, and antibiotics can kill the bacterium, but neither can neutralize lethal factor. So ultimately, if you’re not treated essentially before you ever have symptoms, it’s already too late.”
A wavering voice from the back of the room all but whispered, “Is this new strain contagious from person to person?”
Agent McMullan cleared his throat. “If it was, the entire prison would be dead by now.”
Eight miles away, at the Naval Medical Research Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, a distraught research technician was faithfully recording his final analysis of data from the San Quentin outbreak. He could not believe what he was seeing.
Once the corpses had been documented and removed for disposal, a HazMat team had swarmed the facility. An average of fifty locations in every cell of the quarantined wing had been swabbed, as well as all of the facilities that served North Seg inmates. The swabs were used to inoculate Petri dishes for bacterial cultivation.
Normally, anthrax inoculated on a Petri dish is only detectable after overnight incubation. These cultures were flourishing within an hour after the swabs were taken.
That’s impossible, the technician thought.
But what disturbed him even more was the source of the contamination. It was the swabs collected near the kitchen that yielded the highest titers of anthrax. The bacteria were most concentrated in the outside dumpster, within the remains of the trays of rice that had been served with the inmates’ lunch.
Someone had deliberately poisoned the death row inmates.
As Wong finished speaking, the conference room fell silent for several moments. At last, BCU Director Bob Wachsman spoke. “Next agenda item?”
A man who had not yet spoken stood and cleared his throat. “I’m Jack Callahan from the White House Office of Correspondence. I was cc’d on this meeting because the prison outbreak cross-referenced with a piece of information I had placed into our database. It was a piece of mail received at the White House with a very vague reference to a prison in the text. It also contained a terror threat of cataclysmic proportions, to be carried out on Christmas Day of this year.
“The original document was written in Arabic. I’m circulating copies of the English translation for each of you. Upon initial examination, certain elements suggested that this document could be a hoax. The Arabic is very, uh, dodgy. And while the author claims to represent ISIL, the text is highly inconsistent with normal ISIL methods of operation. Of course, the reference to imprisonment, and to prisoners, has lent much more credibility to the threat in light of the outbreak at San Quentin. I’m concerned that the prison anthrax outbreak might have been the ‘small taste of pain’ that they ‘promised.’”
“Where is the original document now?” The question was from Guofu Wong.
“I’ve sent it to the US Postal Inspection Services lab for tracking, forensics, and graphics analysis.”
“Graphics analysis?” Wong pressed.
“Yes. The message was handwritten inside a greeting card. There was also a picture on the front of the card.”
“Of?”
“Flowers.”
“Flowers?”
“Flowers.”
“Interesting.”
A lengthy pause ensued as the task force members read their copies of the document translation and considered the incongruous image.
Director Wachsman finally spoke. “It is physically impossible for us to vaccinate the entire country against anthrax before Christmas Day,” he said gravely, “or to stockpile a sufficient supply of antibiotics to treat a nationwide outbreak. And even if we could do either of those things, the evidence I have heard here today suggests that antibiotics and vaccines developed to treat normal anthrax might not even work on the genetically engineered strain.”
Wachsman looked up at Wong, an unspoken plea for contradiction. To Wachsman’s dismay, the epidemiologist nodded solemnly.
“Director Wachsman is right,” Wong said. “Against the Death Row strain, our current treatment arsenal is likely to be utterly useless.” Wong clicked into his laptop to close the file for the slideshow he had just presented. Then he closed the laptop and dropped it into his briefcase. The rest of the task force sat immobile, most of its members staring vacantly at the conference table. Agent McMullan sighed.
“I may have an alternative solution,” Wong offered then, and all eyes looked up to focus upon him. “There is a scientist in San Diego who may be able to kill this bug.”
10:31 A.M. PDT
Professor Katrina Stone stormed out of her office at San Diego State University and slammed the door behind her.
From behind a large machine in the main laboratory, the perfectly greased head of Joshua Attle appeared. Thick glasses seated low over his nose, Josh watched over their ponderous frames as his graduate advisor darted th
rough the lab, her volatile blue-gray eyes scanning for something that they did not appear to find.
“Where’s Jason?” Katrina demanded when she saw Josh.
“Uh oh,” Josh said. “You have that ‘I just got another shitty grant review’ look on your face.”
Katrina sighed. Her face softened as she walked toward Josh and the machine he was operating. “That’s because I just got another shitty grant review. I need to talk to Jason about the revisions and they need to happen fast. If I’m going to resubmit, I have to do it by the first of February. Have you seen him today?”
Josh shrugged. “Maybe he had another court appointment?”
Katrina shook her head and sighed again. “I know his divorce is dragging on, and believe me, I can sympathize—but between you and me, I wish he’d get it done. I need data from him. Badly.”
For a few moments, she stared absently at the whirring machine, apparently deep in thought. Josh stole cautious glances in an effort to read her.
Only when he was standing right next to Katrina did Josh notice that she had visibly aged in the four years he had been her student. The vertical crease that always appeared between her eyes when she was annoyed or in deep concentration had finally begun to form a permanent wrinkle. He could now see a few sporadic, defiant white hairs in her reddish waves. Moreover, Josh thought she looked really tired.
Katrina Stone was only thirty-four years old.
Four years earlier, Josh had been pleasantly surprised when Katrina—back then, he still called her Dr. Stone—walked into Molecular Biology 610 and he saw her for the first time. He was not alone. Among the two-dozen first-year graduate students enrolled in the beginner course, several immediately took notice. In a field heavily dominated by middle-aged men, attractive young women were rare. It was only when she approached the podium at the front of the room that Josh realized the woman he had just been thinking of asking out was actually the professor.
The Death Row Complex (The Katrina Stone Novels Book 2) Page 2