The Death Row Complex (The Katrina Stone Novels Book 2)

by Kristen Elise Ph. D.

  She stopped writing and looked Gilman in the eye. “While we are on the subject of invasion into my staff’s privacy, I would like to discuss compensation. You have already assured me that the lab will be well funded for the project. That is wonderful. However, I expect that there will also be reasonable salary adjustments for all of us in consideration of the disruption to our careers and lives, and because of the potential risks we are facing.”

  “There will be no risks to you,” Gilman countered. “As you have noted repeatedly, you will be under FBI surveillance. That also means FBI protection.”

  “Of course, this is true of the lab,” Katrina countered. “But will my staff have twenty-four-hour personal protection? If so, their privacy is invaded even more greatly than I thought. If not, then of course they are in some degree of danger. This project is about national security. I am not naïve enough to think that it is perfectly safe.”

  “There will not be twenty-four-hour surveillance of anyone,” Gilman conceded, his face reddening. “We do not feel it is a necessary use of our resources unless you are actually threatened in some way. OK, Dr. Stone. What do you think is fair compensation, then?”

  Katrina began scrawling on her notebook again. “My postdoc currently has a job offer in biotech on the table for eight-five thousand a year. This is almost double what he currently makes as a postdoc, which is normal for the transition between postdoctoral work and the biotech industry. But the job he is being offered is a nine-to-five position with no risk to Jason’s health and safety. I assume that, considering the factors we’ve just discussed, he will be compensated for staying on this project by at least thirty percent more than that.

  “My senior graduate student will be turning down a postdoctoral fellowship offering him forty-five thousand a year. I would like to offer him double that, since he will be pigeonholing his career by failing to carry out a postdoc after graduate school if he takes on this project. Trust me—I know very well how difficult it is to succeed after making such a decision. So, in essence, this assignment will become his first professional position.

  “As for the remaining students, I believe they are entitled to a twenty percent increase over their current student stipends, which are not even generous enough to pay the rent in this city. And as for myself, I am taking on the heaviest risks and the most responsibility. I expect a forty percent pay raise.”

  Gilman abruptly stood and pushed back his chair. “Dr. Stone, this is extortion. My personal opinion, frankly, is that you and your staff should be ashamed of yourselves. I will be relaying your demands—or ‘conditions,’ as you call them—to my superiors in the brief I will write regarding this meeting. But unless you hear from me again, you can assume that our proposal has been withdrawn.

  “Forget everything you have heard about the Death Row strain of anthrax on penalty of reprimand by the federal government. We are finished here. Good day.”

  As he voiced the final words, Gilman strode briskly out of the office without shaking Katrina’s hand.

  She calmly watched him go. She was smiling.

  The FBI had already taken a lot of risks in bringing this situation to her. Someone in the highest sphere of influence was strongly pushing to include her. She assumed it was the scientist who had fought to approve her grant application with the NIH.

  Roger Gilman was just a field agent.

  It wasn’t over.

  11:49 A.M. PDT

  Gilman stormed away from Katrina Stone’s office and jabbed the button for the elevator. Once outside, he gulped deep breaths of air to calm his rage. How dare she?

  As he walked briskly toward his car, his cell phone began to ring. “Hello, this is Roger Gilman,” he said angrily.

  “Hello, Agent Gilman. Guofu Wong here.”

  “What can I do for you?” Gilman asked the CDC epidemiologist.

  “I assume you’ve received the latest update from San Quentin?”

  “The last report I read stated that they had narrowed down the search to any Latino or other dark-skinned inmate at the prison, and that the food supply had been the source of the contamination,” Gilman said sourly. “And there was a whole bunch of scientific jargon about culturing bacteria, which I assume you will interpret for all of us according to your own agenda.”

  Wong ignored the insult. “The science is certainly sound,” he said calmly. “What of Katrina Stone?”

  “I hope she chokes on her own anthrax.”

  On the other end of the line, Wong was silent.

  “The woman is demanding an exorbitant sum of money,” Gilman continued, “not just for her research, but also as pay for herself and her staff. And even if she wasn’t, I still wouldn’t trust her a bit. I’m still not convinced she didn’t design the Death Row strain.”

  Wong paused for a moment before answering. “Agent Gilman, let me assure you of one thing. Stone has done extraordinary work with very limited resources. She has put everything into finding her inhibitors. She couldn’t possibly have had the time after those efforts to create a biological weapon. And furthermore, I cannot stress enough the importance of bringing her technology into the mainstream—”

  “You know what, Wong?” Gilman blurted out. “I think you maybe ought to take a step back and look at what this technology has created. I mean, even if Stone is not the person directly responsible for the Death Row strain, it had to be someone like her, right? It had to be an anthrax researcher that developed this biological weapon.

  “The trouble with your technology is that it has no higher power, no God, no ethical authority beyond the ego of the inventor. It has no sense of conscience.”

  To Gilman’s surprise, Wong chuckled. “It’s funny that you would use that word,” he said. “Conscience. Con science. Literally, ‘with science.’ Agent Gilman, you and I are not that different. Scientists are investigators, just like you are. We both seek the truth based on the evidence before us. And the only way to really get at the truth is to be honest in one’s interpretation of the evidence. Scientific reason and ethics are necessarily married.”

  Gilman scoffed. “James Johnson is a scientist, and he doesn’t trust her either.”

  A long silence passed over the line.

  “Agent Gilman,” Wong said finally, “there’s something I haven’t told you and Agent McMullan about the relationship between Katrina Stone and James Johnson… ”

  Ten minutes later, Gilman was driving between Katrina Stone’s lab and his hotel. Ignoring California cell phone law, he clicked off the call from Guofu Wong and speed-dialed Sean McMullan, not bothering to engage the Bluetooth of his government-issued car.

  When McMullan answered, Gilman repeated what Wong had said.

  “I’m confused,” McMullan said. “How does Stone have a relationship with Johnson? I didn’t think they had ever even met.”

  “They haven’t met. But they do have a relationship—sort of. Wong says that when researchers are seeking funding, they apply for grants to the NIH. Most of the grant reviewers are researchers just like Dr. Stone. Experts in their fields. Reviewers for any given grant are typically selected based on the fact that they specialize in similar research to that described in the application.”

  “OK, so what’s your point?”

  “James Johnson thinks that Katrina Stone plagiarized his data.”

  McMullan paused. “How could she have done that?”

  “Johnson has to write grant applications just like everyone else. When a grant is reviewed, the researcher who wrote it never knows by whom. But they are usually quick to guess, and the longer a researcher has been integrated into the scientific community, the more guesses they have. James Johnson has been in science for a long time. He knows a lot of people.”

  “Yeah,” said McMullan. “From what I gathered in that meeting, it sounds like he is some kind of legend. But why would he have to worry about funding in the first place? I thought he’d be set.”

  “That’s what I asked Wong,” said Gilman. “
But it turns out that’s not really the case. Johnson is a legend—for groundbreaking discoveries he made back in the ‘80s. And he was set, for a while, based on those discoveries.

  “Then he became comfortable and a little arrogant. He trusted that those discoveries would keep him going, and he became very lazy about keeping up on the latest and the greatest.

  “Wong says that science is a fast-moving field and young researchers pass older ones who aren’t keeping current. Johnson did his training long before the arrival of many modern advances that are now commonplace. Like many of his generation, Johnson relies on tried and true methods. But many younger scientists believe him to be somewhat out of touch and even a bit fearful of technology. Evidently, he has made relatively few major contributions in the past ten years or so.

  “Of course, this is all from the mouth of Wong, who smugly educated me that ‘conscience’ means ‘con science,’ which means ‘with science.’ Wong doesn’t seem to think scientists can do any wrong, so I don’t trust his opinion any more than I trust Stone. But there’s even more.

  “Johnson is seventy-five years old. Wong says that when a committee is reviewing a grant application in which the researcher asks for several years of funding to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, the committee has to consider the possibility that the researcher might retire before the work is done. Or worse. So in a nutshell, Johnson’s funding has been progressively drying up for a while.”

  “What does all of this have to do with Katrina Stone?” McMullan asked.

  “Her grant application. After the NIH committee reviewed the application, Johnson told Wong point blank that it was originally his idea to use the types of molecules she was proposing. He suspected that Stone had previously reviewed one of his earlier applications and taken the idea for her own.”

  12:03 P.M. PDT

  Jason Fischer faced a hospital room wall, mindlessly re-reading a wall poster he had already memorized. Over the last nineteen hours, his diagnosis had become all too obvious.

  Visions of playing guitar, liters of booze, and late nights spent with one morally devoid groupie after another flooded his thoughts, and he realized he had been lucky to dodge this particular bullet for as long as he had. What was I thinking?

  The door opened and Jason turned to see the young doctor with the tongue ring.

  “OK, Jason, let’s see the boys,” the doctor instructed.

  Jason lifted his hospital gown and revealed a grotesque mess of red sores. They were just beginning to crust over, and the pain was giving way to an intolerable itch. For the first time in distant memory, Jason was horribly embarrassed. He looked away from the doctor as he replaced the gown.

  “I assume you have already figured this out,” the doctor said, “but you definitely don’t have anthrax. Those tests came back negative. Your sterile technique—in the lab, anyway—is fine.” As he spoke the last sentence, the doctor peered knowingly over the tops of his glasses. Then he continued. “All you’ve got here is a hangover on top of a vicious case of genital herpes.”

  Jason tried to push aside the notion that he might have preferred death by anthrax.

  NOVEMBER 1, 2015

  7:30 A.M. PST

  A San Quentin guard watched as visitors to the minimum-security wing filed through the metal detector. His eyes fell upon one woman, and he frowned.

  Her long black headscarf flowed over a black robe so seamlessly that the guard could not tell where one ended and the other began. She stepped through the metal detector and then began following the others down the corridor toward the visitation room. Her dark face was downcast, shielded by the headscarf.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” the guard said. “I’d like you to come with me.”

  “Is there problem?”

  “No, ma’am, I am sure there is not. But we will need you to remove your headscarf for a moment. It’s only a routine check.”

  The visitor’s heavily accented voice remained calm and low, almost submissive. She did not look up. “It is my right to wear hijab in the prison. I read the rules the first time I come here.”

  “And it is our right to ask you to remove it, in private, for security reasons, at our discretion. Step into the room over here, please. A female guard will join you shortly.” He motioned toward a small room to his left. The visitor shook her head and stepped toward it.

  In Dulles, Virginia, a phone was ringing. USPIS Assistant Director of Forensics Teresa Wood engaged her speakerphone without looking up from her paperwork. “Wood here.”

  “Teresa, hi, it’s Mason,” said her colleague.

  “Hi, Mason. Have you got something for me?” Mason had been tasked with tracing the IBI—a barcode applied to mail entering the system—on the greeting card from the White House. It is the IBI that permits the USPIS to determine where a document was mailed.

  “Very little,” Mason said. “I traced your greeting card, the one with the Arabic writing on it.”

  “Yeah, I know the one,” Teresa said. A photocopy of the Arabic text was sitting on the desk in front of her. She had just been examining it.

  “Well, whoever mailed the card was smart enough not to go to a post office or mail it from any other business. All we know is that the card entered the system somewhere in Phoenix, Arizona. The stamp came from a public stamp kiosk with no camera—also in Phoenix.”

  “Hm.”

  “What about the handwriting?” Mason asked. “Any luck?”

  “We haven’t found a match with any known members of ISIL or with anyone else from whom we have an Arabic handwriting sample. The White House interpreter who first read this document made the observation that the handwriting is, in fact, very odd. It looks like it was written by someone who does not speak Arabic.”

  “Could someone have put the sentences together from a dictionary or an online translator?”

  “Not if their reference language was English. The sentence structure is just too different, and no online translator on the market can reproduce it. Whether you entered the English text word for word or as a whole sentence, the Arabic translation would still come out as gibberish. Especially given the content. This text is strange, but it is real Arabic. It didn’t come from online translation.

  “So the FBI linguistics department is working on it as well. They are trying to pinpoint a dialect. Even that task has proven elusive.”

  A few moments later, the prison guard’s female colleague approached. “What now, Fred?”

  “Just a routine check. Muslim woman. Bulky headscarf. I want her to remove it. And I want her frisked.”

  His colleague rolled her eyes. “I’m sure she’s a terrorist, just like the seventy-five-year-old grandmother you had me frisk earlier this morning. Do the words ‘racial profiling’ mean anything to you?” She walked away without waiting for his answer.

  Once inside the room, the annoyed female guard closed the door behind her. “Please remove your headscarf,” she said to the woman while examining her own manicure. “You may use the mirror.” She motioned toward a small mirror mounted on the wall.

  The visitor consulted the mirror to reach up with black-gloved hands and remove the hijab. Long thick ropes of equally black hair cascaded over the loose robe. “You touch my body now to check for bomb? Why? Because I am Muslim?”

  The guard sighed without looking up from her fingernails. “No, ma’am. Thank you for your cooperation. You may go.”

  NOVEMBER 6, 2015

  3:48 P.M. EST

  Linguistics analyses were fruitless. Five days after learning that the greeting card was mailed in Phoenix, Teresa spoke to the linguistics specialist from the FBI.

  “The card was written in a mixture of Egyptian, Levantine, and Iraqi Arabic,” the specialist said, “with a smattering of language from Modern Standard—a dialect that nobody in the Arabic-speaking world actually uses in day-to-day speech.”

  “What do you mean, a dialect that nobody uses? Is it an old dialect, like Shakespearean English? T
hen why call it modern?”

  “It’s modern, but it is only used in official or professional documents, newscasts, and the like.”

  “Great. So our terrorist is a newscaster from anywhere in the Arab world. How close are the different dialects to each other?”

  “Distinct enough that Arabs don’t always understand other Arabs.”

  NOVEMBER 9, 2015

  3:48 P.M. EST

  Three days later, Teresa withdrew the card itself from a sealed envelope with gloved hands. She spread it out on the sterilized metal table before her and drew the head of a CrimeScope toward it. She flicked the scope’s power switch and began directing intense light of various wavelengths at the card in hopes of picking up objects or substances that would otherwise be invisible.

  Teresa inched the light source across and down the card in a grid pattern. Seeing nothing, she adjusted the filters to change the wavelength of light produced and then retraced the same motion again.

  No semen present. No blood. No surprise. It was a piece of mail. There also did not seem to be any ink-to-ink variations that would indicate that the card had been doctored. Think, Teresa. What would be on this?

  She changed wavelengths again. With painstaking diligence, she ran the beam of light over every square centimeter of the front of the card. A gloved hand tenderly opened it, and she ran the light over the inner leaflets. Nothing.

  Teresa ran the CrimeScope’s beam over the outside of the envelope. Nothing. She held the envelope open with one hand to direct the light inside. And two new lines became visible.

  The first was long and narrow. Microscopic hair fragment? The second was fuzzier. Probably a fiber of some kind.

  Without deflecting the beam, Teresa reached into the top drawer of the lab bench upon which the scope was sitting. She retrieved a long glass cylinder from the drawer and uncapped it one-handed. Then she withdrew the sterile micro-forceps inside. Without allowing anything to touch the sterile tip, Teresa smiled as she reached in with a steady hand to collect the evidence.