“Good morning,” she said and flashed a friendly smile to the room. Behind the smile was a sadness that Josh could not place. “Who has worked in a lab before?” Five or six hands went up, and she continued. “For those of you who have some experience, what would you say is the molecular biologist’s best friend?”
“Um, a pipette?” one of the students offered.
“Enzymes?” suggested another.
“Well, those things certainly are very important in the molecular biology laboratory. But I’d like to suggest that the most important things are—bugs. Bacteria. We can’t live without them.” Two of the students who had raised their hands were now nodding.
“For those of you less familiar with the significance of bugs, don’t worry. You’ll get to it. But to begin with, let’s talk for a moment about what amazing things we can do in a molecular biology lab because of these little guys.
“In short, we can make anything we want. And lots of it. Because bacteria have two qualities that are essential to molecular biology.” She picked up a thick marker and wrote on a white board behind her as she spoke. “Number one: we can easily manipulate their DNA. We can drop a small piece of DNA, called a plasmid, into a population of bacteria, zap the bacteria with an electric shock, and they’ll open up and take the plasmid inside of themselves.
“Number two: they replicate like crazy. So we pop our DNA plasmid, encoding any molecule we want to generate, into bugs, and as the bugs reproduce, they will make copy after copy of our molecule of interest. And we can harvest it and use it however we choose.
“For those of you who pull the short straw and end up in my lab,” she said, and a few chuckles followed, “you’ll be using this technology to bite the hand that feeds you. Because we use molecular biology and these helpful little bugs—to work on killing other bugs.
“The focus of my lab is anthrax research. We are dedicated to identifying molecules that can bind anthrax toxins, forming a larger molecular complex that can inhibit those toxins. Specifically, we want to block a protein toxin called ‘lethal factor.’ This aptly named molecule is the business end of anthrax. If we can inhibit lethal factor, we can reverse the effects of an anthrax infection… ”
The memory of his earlier graduate work fell away from Josh when a needle on the computer screen jerked upward and then back down to draw a defined peak.
Katrina, too, visibly snapped back from wherever her mind had wandered to. “Is this a new group of molecules?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just getting started with it though, and our hundred-year-old HPLC”—he patted the side of the machine he was operating—“had a senior moment yesterday which took me all day to correct. Sorry. So I don’t know if there are any good molecules in the new group yet.”
“Any good news on the previous group? I could use some.”
“Actually, there may be. I’ve done an initial screen and found some pretty strong lethal factor inhibitors. It’s a little early to give you numbers, but later in the week I should be able to.”
“Awesome. Well, keep me posted. If the data hold up it would be great to include in the grant resubmission.” She smiled softly. “Maybe the NIH would take us more seriously if they knew what kind of anthrax inhibition we’re getting here in our cheesy little lab.”
1:36 P.M. EDT
Guofu Wong sat down at the conference table and lowered his briefcase to the floor. “Very recently,” he said, “I was on an NIH grant review committee that received a very elegant proposal from a promising young anthrax researcher. The researcher’s name was Katrina Stone.
“Dr. Stone proposed studies designed to continue and expand upon work in her lab aimed at identifying inhibitors of the lethal factor toxin. Her approach employs a robotic technology more sophisticated than any other on the market. This enables her studies to proceed at an exceptionally rapid pace. Unfortunately, it is also very expensive.
“Dr. Stone’s preliminary results are stellar. Even in the absence of adequate funding”—he looked directly at an elderly man to his left while making the point—“she has already isolated and characterized several potent inhibitors of anthrax lethal factor.
“The application was rejected for a number of reasons, against my recommendation. But in light of the San Quentin outbreak, my team has taken the liberty of using our molecular modeling software to simulate interactions between Stone’s inhibitors and the Death Row anthrax proteins. The compounds interact almost perfectly.”
Wong turned to face Gilman. “To put all of that in lay terms, Agent Gilman, there is a scientist who may already be very much on the right track to a molecule that can block anthrax. And not just any anthrax, but this specific, genetically engineered strain. Therefore, it is my strong opinion that the grant rejection should be reversed at once and that the NIH should immediately fund this grant. I think this woman’s preliminary data is key to inhibiting the Death Row complex.”
The elderly man to the left of Guofu Wong, toward whom Wong had pointedly glanced when mentioning the rejection of Katrina Stone’s grant, had been calmly observing throughout the meeting. He had not spoken.
Now, he stood. “I’m Dr. James Johnson,” he said. At mention of the name, several people registered recognition and even awe. “I, too, was on the committee that rejected the grant of Katrina Stone”—he rolled his eyes—“against the recommendation of my friend and colleague Dr. Wong. And I’ll tell you why we rejected it.
“This scientist is only five years out of graduate school. I know that in many professions, five years of experience is a lot. However, scientist years are like reverse dog years. Until you’ve been in the field at least ten years, you’re still a pup piddlin’ on the carpet. Nobody gets a federal grant of this magnitude five years out of grad school, because they have no track record to prove that they will use the resources wisely. We’re not talking small potatoes here, folks. An NIH grant is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Needless to say, of the very few that manage to obtain this kind of funding so early in their careers, most are stars in their field. They are doing research that is beyond anything the world has seen—”
Guofu Wong interrupted. “Jim, at the risk of getting into the same debate again, Stone is a star. She is doing research beyond anything the world has seen.”
“Based on the information I had at the time we reviewed her grant,” Johnson said, “I did not consider her a star. Her research was innovative, yes. But she was also competing with large, well-oiled labs that could carry out similar studies in one tenth the time it would have taken her to do it.”
“You mean, like yours… ”
A collective discomfort began rippling through the room as the task force members shuffled awkwardly in their chairs.
James Johnson glared at Guofu Wong and drew a breath. “OK, look Guofu,” he said. “First of all, if I was so greedy as to bulldoze some pissant girl for funding, I’d be running a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company right now, not working for the government. I’m not quite that desperate.”
He laughed softly, and several others laughed with him. The two women at the table—not laughing—exchanged a glance.
“You and I both know,” Johnson continued, “that I’m a pioneer in infectious disease research. I’ve been doing this since you were a child, and I’m most certainly not in competition with young Katrina Stone.”
He turned to the rest of the task force. “Now, the fact is: the decision not to fund this woman’s grant was made before the emergence of the so-called Death Row strain of anthrax. I would like to review the data that Dr. Wong and his team have put together. If I agree with his conclusions, then I will absolutely agree with Dr. Wong. If Stone’s inhibitors are as potent as he claims they are, then she is definitely the most promising researcher to combat this biological weapon. However, I have a much bigger concern.”
He turned to once again address the other scientist exclusively. “How do you know she didn’t e
ngineer it?”
5:36 P.M. PDT
Katrina Stone left the grant review on her desk and walked through the lab toward the robot room. As she passed the pH meter setup by the door, she noticed that, as usual, the two most commonly used bottles were uncapped. Even repeated safety violations and tongue-lashings from Katrina had not broken her students of the habit. Sighing, she donned a pair of latex gloves from a box on the table and capped both bottles before throwing the gloves away.
Katrina passed through the open door that led out of the main lab and into the robot room. Nobody was inside. The massive liquid-handling robot, affectionately nicknamed “Octopus,” was active as usual.
Katrina walked past Octopus toward the adjacent room just as the machine’s Robotic Manipulator Arm—ROMA—was reaching an opening slit in a tall octagonal incubator. The laser at the tip of the ROMA scanned the barcode on a reaction plate. The claw squeezed the sides of the plate and pulled it out of the incubator, placed it precisely over its designated location on the workbench, and then slowly lowered it down into its slot.
As the ROMA retraced its path, a second arm swung into position. The pipetting arm moved over a large, liquid-filled reservoir and aspirated a precise volume into its tips, then carried the liquid to the reaction plate that had just been placed. The pre-programmed procedure scrolled along the computer screen.
Taking care to steer clear of Octopus’ moving arms, Katrina passed by the robot through yet another door into the cell culture room. She was greeted by a conspicuous, bright red “BSL-2: Biosafety Level 2” sign, on which were listed the “moderate risk” biological agents permitted inside the room.
Li Fung, Todd Ruddock, and Oxana Kosova looked up, extended distracted hellos to Katrina, and turned back to their work. Todd and Oxana were each sitting in front of a laminar flow hood with their arms inside, using automatic pipettors to dispense pink liquid media into flasks of cells. They each wore blue latex gloves. Neither wore goggles or a lab coat.
Li, dressed in jeans and sneakers with a fully buttoned, calf-length white lab coat, was peering through the microscope at a dish. She pulled a black marker out of the chest pocket of the lab coat and made a notation on the top of the dish.
“Has anyone seen Jason?” Katrina asked.
“He had to go take care of some divorce thing with his lawyer,” Oxana replied.
Katrina frowned. “Has he been over to the BSL-3 facility today?”
Oxana shrugged.
“I don’t know,” offered Li. “Is everything OK?”
“No,” Katrina said. “Everything’s not OK. If I can’t procure some funding soon, our lab is going to be shut down.”
At that moment, postdoctoral fellow Jason Fischer had two things on his mind: getting his work done and getting to his band’s gig. But right now, he could do neither. Traffic northbound on I-15 was at a bumper-to-bumper standstill.
Jason wriggled to a partial standing position in the driver’s seat of his ancient Honda to yank his cell phone from the front pocket of his baggy pants. As he sat back down, a thick lock of his long black hair snagged on the metal hinge to his rearview mirror and was ripped out. “Mother fucker!” Jason shouted.
After glancing at the clock on the screen of his phone—the clock on the dashboard had been broken for years—Jason clicked into the touchscreen to make a call.
“What’s up, ass lick?” his singer Zack answered.
“Hey, Zacklies, what time do we go on stage tonight?” Jason asked.
“The show starts at eight, but we don’t go on till ten.”
“That means at least ten thirty.”
“Maybe,” said Zack. “Why, you’re not going to be late, are you?”
“Nah, I think I should be there by about nine thirty. But right now I’m sitting in a parking lot on the 15 aimed the wrong direction. I have to go to Sorrento Valley and whack some infected mice before the show.”
8:49 P.M. EDT
In his D.C. hotel room, epidemiologist Guofu Wong was eating dinner when an e-mail popped up on his laptop. The subject was “Operation Death Row.” Wong scanned the body of the e-mail and then placed a call to an FBI agent in San Francisco.
“Hello, Dr. Wong,” the agent said when he picked up. “I assume that you’ve gotten my e-mail.”
“Yes, I’ve just finished reading over it,” said Wong. “So the source of the anthrax was the rice. I’m not entirely surprised. It seemed that the majority of victims were suffering primarily from gastrointestinal anthrax, and I can see how others could have become inoculated through skin contact with the food or through inhalation while eating and ultimately displayed various symptoms. So what does that mean in terms of suspects? Who else had access to the kitchen?”
“A number of people. The food is cooked and distributed by inmates, under the supervision of a prison employee, of course. The three dead inmates who were not living on death row were all kitchen workers who had been preparing and serving the food for North Seg that afternoon. So the contamination was definitely introduced into the rice specifically fed to that wing of the facility. We have questioned everyone who would have been involved with the process.”
“Nobody on the Terrorist Screening Center list, I assume?” Wong asked.
“I’m afraid not,” the task force agent responded. “We did get a lead during the questioning, but it’s weak. One of the kitchen workers was clearly nervous when we questioned him. After some pushing, he admitted that even though he had duty in the kitchen for that entire week, he had not performed it on one occasion.”
“Why is that?” Wong asked.
“Because someone paid him two hundred dollars to not show up. He didn’t know the guy. For two hundred bucks plus getting out of work, he wasn’t asking questions. So it looks very likely that someone—probably another inmate—gained access to the kitchen and poisoned the rice.”
“Did he give a description?”
“Just a racial slur against Hispanics.”
“Oh, great,” said Wong. “So, basically, our possible suspect list includes anyone at San Quentin of Hispanic or Latino origin. That narrows it down.”
“Yes, to about two thousand suspects,” said the San Francisco agent. “I’m waiting for the sketch artist, but I’m not putting too much weight on what that might yield. Meanwhile, we are cross-referencing prisoners of Latino or Hispanic origin at San Quentin with terrorist factions. We are focusing those efforts on ISIL, based on the information from Jack Callahan about the greeting card. So we are also looking at people of Mediterranean or mixed descent who might look Latino to an inmate not paying attention, and focusing on Arabs since the text was written in Arabic.
“Of course, these are death row inmates we’re talking about. They tend to have a lot of people who hate them. I have assigned a team to track down the extracurricular activities of the victims of these particular inmates and their families. It’s a huge task.
“But we are also considering the possibility that this could have been orchestrated by a disgruntled scientist.”
6:25 P.M. PDT
Thirty minutes later, Jason Fischer cleared security at the BSL-3 facility and rushed into the lab to do his work. As it turned out, there was less work to do than he had planned on. He only had to sacrifice half of his mice.
The control group, which had been inoculated with anthrax in the absence of Jason’s test inhibitor, was already dead. The experimental mice, those Jason was using to test his most promising inhibitor of lethal factor, were alive and did not appear to have any symptoms. Jason smiled at the efficacy of the compound.
“Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner,” Jason said under his breath as he euthanized the animals. With the precision and speed of a gourmet chef, he began isolating internal organs for his standard biological work-up, handling each mouse as if it were a vegetable and not a concentrated reservoir of deadly bacteria. After dissecting dozens of mice and properly storing their organs, he hurried through the decontamination procedures
, exited the animal facility, and entered the clean room.
Once out of the Biosafety Level Three area, Jason snatched a paper towel out of the rack by the sink and scribbled down some notes. On the way out of the building, he shoved the paper towel into his pocket.
At San Quentin State Prison, an inmate was just returning from the showers. His cellmate’s bed was empty. Good, the dickhead is gone, he thought. Too bad I can’t have my own room like those pieces of shit on death row. The thought brought a grin to his face.
The prisoner raised a dark, heavily tattooed arm and grabbed the metal frame of the bunk to swing himself up onto the bed. Looking around to make sure nobody was watching, he reached down and found a familiar slit in the mattress. He shoved his hand inside and withdrew a thick wad of cash. The prisoner counted the money. It was almost enough.
He shoved the money back inside the mattress and covered it with loose cotton.
The prisoner jumped down from the top bunk and peered into the corridor. Satisfied that nobody was coming, he returned to his bunk once again and reached into another hiding place within his mattress. He pulled out a handful of small glass vials. One was empty.
The prisoner still had two vials left, and two would be more than sufficient.
“Dude, we didn’t think you were gonna make it,” Zack said with annoyance as he helped Jason pull his guitars and amp from the car and carry them toward the club’s entrance. A large red-on-black poster next to the door read “Lethal Factor! Performing Tonight!” A second sign read “Welcome to The Metal Shop. We are not responsible for the loss of wallets, purses, hearing, or teeth.”
The Death Row Complex (The Katrina Stone Novels Book 2) Page 3