A Heartbeat Away

by Michael Palmer

  Griff could see the gears turning in the convict’s head. Davis was clearly not ready to give away anything for free.

  “What’s this all about?” the man asked.

  “I need to know what happened to you at the Certain Path Mission,” Griff said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s important.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Special privileges,” Griff said.

  It was the first thought that came to his mind. The warden gave him a disapproving glare.

  “That wasn’t part of any discussion I had,” he said.

  Impatient and exhausted, Griff glowered back at him.

  “I’m sure the federal government will find a way to subsidize you for any added cost or burden.”

  The warden grinned, and so did Davis.

  “Federal government, eh?” Davis said. “You mean, like the president?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So it ain’t just rumor.”

  “What isn’t?”

  Davis sat up straighter and tapped his feet on the floor in a quick rhythm.

  “Rumor going round the cells is that the president himself personally arranged this little meeting.”

  “Who told you that?” Tobert demanded.

  Griff decided in that moment that in any clash of character or intellect between prisoner and jailer, his money was on the prisoner.

  “Hey, easy there, warden,” Davis said. “The cons and guards talk. We learn things, they learn things. So is it true? Did the president send you?”

  “He did.”

  “This have anythin’ to do with what’s goin’ on in Washington?” Davis read the surprise in Griff’s expression. “We got newspapers in the library, you know. Not all of us are as dumb as we look. Some of us can even read.”

  “It is about the Capitol.”

  Davis looked contemplative as he traced the scar on his lip with a nicotine-stained fingernail.

  “Special privileges, huh?”

  “Now, tell me what happened at the Certain Path Mission.”

  Davis fell silent. He stared at Griff through his two different-colored eyes and remained silent until the guard returned with his cigarettes and an ashtray, lit the smoke, and handed it to him. The convict jostled with his irons to slip the butt into his mouth. Then he took a long, hard drag and exhaled a plume in the warden’s general direction.

  “They tested on me,” he said. “The lady in a white suit, like a spaceman, I mean spacewoman, sprayed stuff in my face. She injected me, too. And almost every day, she drew blood outta my arm.”

  “Did she tell you what it was she injected?”

  “Said it would help me get clean off drugs,” Davis said. “But it didn’t take the cravin’s away none. Once I heard her and that fake asshole monk talking about burnin’ bodies. But the police didn’t think much of my report, like I told you. That Chinawoman and the monk are the ones what should be sittin’ here, not me.”

  “Did they do any other experiments on you?”

  “She asked me stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  Davis thought for a beat.

  “She gave me a stack of cards,” he began. “Each card had a number on it, from one to ten, or sometimes a shape, like a star or a circle. Then she’d tell me to pick up a card and study it. I weren’t allowed to show her the number, see, but she asked me what it was. Sometimes she told me that I had to lie about it, like if I had a four, I’d tell her it was a seven, or something. You see?”

  “Go on,” Griff said. “You’re doing great.”

  “But then she’d ask me if I was lyin’ to her. Well, of course I were lyin’ to her,” Davis said with a laugh. “She told me to. That were the instruction. But here’s the rub—the real weird part. Sometimes, she said to me that if I admitted to lyin’ about the number, she’d burn my arm with a solderin’ iron.”

  “So you were supposed to tell her that you weren’t lying about your card number, even though you did.”

  “That’s right,” Davis said. “Simple. No, I’m not lyin’, it’s really a seven, so don’t burn me.”

  “And what happened when she asked if you were lying?”

  “I was sort of woozy—half asleep, if you know what I mean. But I do know that I told her the truth. I mean the real truth. I admitted to her when I ’uz lyin’, and I admitted to her when I weren’t.”

  Davis looked down at his cigarette, clearly upset at what he was remembering.

  “You admitted to lying even though it meant you’d get burned?”

  Davis turned his wiry arms over and showed Griff a series of crisscross scars that covered both forearms and extended nearly up to his biceps. The scars were almost certainly burns. Griff felt his stomach turn and his heart begin to race.

  This was it!

  “Did you even try to lie to her?”

  “Every time,” Davis admitted. “I knew how bad that damn iron burned. But she’d ask me, ‘Johnny Ray, tell the truth now. Are you lyin’ to me about that number?’ Sometimes, I’d shake my head no, but then I’d answer yes. And then she’d burn me. And we did it over and over again.”

  Davis, clearly distressed by the memories, asked the guard for another smoke.

  Griff could only stare at him. Not only did he survive his WRX3883 exposure, but the virus in his body had actually worked on the will center. For all of Chen’s shortcomings, the test she had devised was truly brilliant—brilliant and elegantly simple. Johnny Ray Davis lacked the willpower to lie, even though he knew the consequence of telling the truth would be extreme pain.

  Then Griff felt a knot developing in his gut. He knew that he desperately needed this man’s blood. He needed to study it, to figure out what had allowed him to live when all the others had died. But he also knew using Davis’s serum would be tantamount to the most egregious violation of his own code. He had committed his life’s work to testing on computer models, not animals. But Orion kept failing him, and time was running out. To make his program work, he needed to feed it better data. And the data that he needed was coursing through the arteries and veins of the man seated across from him.

  Did it matter that Johnny Ray Davis was a convicted double murderer? Did it matter that Griff wasn’t the one who had exposed him to the virus and tested its effects? Sooner or later, every drug intended for use in humans or animals needed to be tried in humans or animals. Where should the line be drawn?

  Help me, Louisa. Help me know.

  “I need your blood,” Griff suddenly heard himself saying.

  Davis treated the request the way he might a ten-dollar cigarette trade. “How much blood?” he asked.

  “All of it.”

  Davis coughed out a thick cloud of smoke and stubbed away the last embers of his Marlboro.

  “How’s that possible?” he asked.

  “It’s called plasmapheresis,” Griff explained. “We’ll replace your blood with a substance called albumin, and where necessary, a fresh supply that matches your blood type. Hospitals do it all the time.”

  “What’s this for? You tryin’ to figger out why I’m still alive?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out.”

  “Why do you think I didn’t die?”

  “If I had to guess?”

  “Yeah, if you had to guess.”

  “You’re heterochromic,” Griff said.

  “I’m hetero what?”

  “Your eyes. They’re two different colors. It’s a genetic marker. Often accompanies other genetic deals. That’s why I need your blood. I need to see what’s different about it—what else beside the gene for your eye color. Because to be honest, you should be dead.”

  “My sister’s eyes’re just like mine.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Well, ain’t that just a peach,” Davis said. “You need my blood. But you can’t just gut me like a fish to get at it, can you?”

  “No, I can’t.”
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  “But what you’re really sayin’ is that the president hisself needs my blood.”

  “I have paperwork you’ll need to sign to authorize the transfusion,” Griff said.

  “Not so fast, amigo,” Davis answered. “You know that I’m innocent. The bastards are gonna fry me for a crime I didn’t do.”

  Griff’s mind flashed on the photographs of the brutally murdered husband and wife that were included in the case file he had reviewed.

  “I’m not here to judge you, J.R.,” he said. “I’m here to take your blood.”

  “Well, I thought you should know that I ’uz innocent before I tell you what it’s gonna cost.”

  “You want money?”

  Davis laughed sharply and lit another smoke.

  “No, you stupid prick,” he said. “I want you to call your buddy, Mr. President, and get him to issue me a full presidential pardon. You can have my blood all right. But I’ll be a free man before I give you one innocent drop of it.”

  CHAPTER 60

  DAY 8

  9:00 A.M. (CST)

  The Kitchen was like a ghost town. Griff’s biosuit was isolating enough when Melvin was around. Now it merely enhanced his inestimable sadness and loneliness. Each procedure felt like the last one he would be able to perform. Even with the crisis in the Capitol, and the ticking bomb of WRX3883, thoughts of Angie were the only thing keeping him on task.

  After Chad Stafford and his men had retrieved Melvin from the ventilation shaft and returned to the compound, Griff had spent some time alone beside the plastic bag containing his friend’s body. His family in West Virginia had opted for cremation and a memorial service sometime in the future. Griff promised Melvin’s sister and mother that if the president survived the crisis in the Capitol, he would be there to honor the man who had done so much to save his life.

  Now, he knew that he needed to have the help of his gangly, oddly obsessed soulmate one more time—as motivation to press ahead with the analysis of Johnny Ray Davis’s serum, and the incorporation of the new data into the program he had named after Orion, the hunter.

  Griff barely spoke on the Army helicopter flight from El Dorado back to Kalvesta. He kept running the Led Zeppelin song “Dazed and Confused” over in his mind. It had been thirty-six hours since he left the lab—thirty-six hours of minimal sleep, of watching his closest friend be murdered, and of being battered in body and spirit.

  Dazed and confused.

  The president had taken almost no time at all to pardon Davis for his crimes—proof of how critical things had gotten for the seven hundred waiting in the Capitol for news that they might not die. Griff had left the now ex-convict at the hospital, where he’d undergone the plasmapheresis. The legacy of WRX3883: grisly death after grisly death, and now a double murderer set free.

  Paul Rappaport was still at Kalvesta, and was there to greet Griff when he deplaned. The two men shook hands, but Griff did nothing to hide the coldness he was feeling.

  You’re Genesis, you son of bitch, he thought. I know you are.

  Rappaport appeared relatively calm.

  “We’re counting on you, Rhodes,” was all that he said as Griff started his journey downward.

  You’re counting on me to fail, Griff said to himself. But win or lose, I’m going to bring you down. And when I do, there’s going to be a photo of Melvin Forbush in your coffin.

  Sergeant Stafford coordinated the security detail assigned to cover Griff, and barked out instructions that kept his team on constant alert. Stafford and some troops accompanied Griff down to the lab level. Because of the exposure risk, they guarded only the entrance to the Kitchen, not the Kitchen itself. Griff passed into the restricted area alone, carrying with him, in a large cooler lined with icepacks, six liters of Johnny Ray Davis’s anticoagulated blood.

  Carefully, Griff decanted some plasma into four test tubes and set each tube in one of four wells of a large centrifuge. The instrument whirled in excess of three thousand revolutions per minute, separating cellular debris from the serum.

  Seven hundred lives rested on his finding an elusive antigen, or some unusual enzyme in that serum—something that had allowed Davis to survive, while others exposed to WRX3883 had died. Seven hundred lives were running out of time.

  Griff used gel electrophoresis to separate the treated serum into DNA, RNA, and protein molecules for further analysis. Police forensics used the technique to amplify DNA for their criminal investigations, but Griff was interested in every component of the serum—most specifically, something unique to J.R. Davis.

  Hours passed. Frustration and apprehension grew. Fatigue became a mortal enemy. Then, suddenly, it was there.

  Interleukin 6.

  Davis’s serum contained ten times the normal level of the protein Interleukin 6.

  Ten times the norm.

  Griff checked and rechecked his technique and his calculations. He felt a vibration at the base of his neck and down his spine. He knew the sensation well. It occurred whenever an idea had begun to take hold and grow.

  What, exactly, was it that the warden said about Davis? Griff tried to recall. The man could run straight to California without becoming winded—something like that. Never gets tired jogging in the yard.… Never.

  It had been a simple, off-topic conversation that Griff had nearly forgotten about. But suddenly, when viewed in a different context, that comment took on an enormous new significance.

  Griff knew a great deal about the IL-6 protein. It was secreted by T-cells and functioned in part to stimulate the body’s response to trauma—burns, tissue damage, and such. He was also aware that IL-6, for reasons still unknown, became elevated during periods of physical stress. He conducted some quick research on the Internet and found a study of Fuchs heterochromic iridocyclitis that linked patients with the different-colored irises to elevated levels of IL-6 in the blood. The Fuchs variant of heterochromia was associated with viral illness, probably measles.

  Griff began to wonder what would happen if he added an adjuvant to Orion—a biochemical booster that amplified IL-6 production.

  But which one?

  More research online. More poring through his grad school notes and his files of articles.

  Bless you, Melvin, for keeping everything in order. Bless you, old friend.

  One possibility kept arising: antisense oligodeoxynucleotides, more commonly called ODNs. The odd name was also known by geneticists as “negative sense.” Sense and antisense proteins were increasingly being used to battle complex diseases such as AIDS, asthma, and even muscular dystrophy. In theory, a synthetic strand of the nucleic acid could bind to messenger RNA and effectively alter its behavior.

  Griff powered up his computer. He modified Orion’s programming to include an ODN adjuvant that stimulated IL-6 production from the body’s lymph nodes and spleen. In his program, Griff magnified the production of IL-6 until the levels cranked out by the body treated with ODN matched those found in Davis’s blood.

  Ten times the norm.

  Side effects of the treatment were not a concern. With a WRX infection, the only thing worse than the inevitable death were the days that preceded it.

  Adding the antisense/ODN adjuvant to his Orion program took more than four hours. Griff had barely eaten or slept in two days. Still, with the excitement of the discovery, he found that his focus was sharp. His brain was pulsating with possibilities.

  Work, baby!… Come on, deliver for Papa!

  When the programming was complete, Griff sat in silence for a time, with his finger poised above the Return key, set to execute Orion’s “run” sequence. Images of the Capitol and Jim Allaire tumbled through his thoughts along with those of Angie and Melvin and Louisa and even Moonshine. Finally, his jaw set, he held his breath and pressed the key.

  Orion was programmed by Griff to terminate computation the instant it failed. No reason to waste computing time processing a dead-end treatment. The longer Orion’s program processed, the greater the probabilit
y of success. Over the years of working in Sylvia Chen’s lab, Griff had run thousands of simulations that churned through thousands of preprogrammed assumptions, subroutines, and over a hundred thousand lines of complex code. In all that time, Orion had never run for longer than ten minutes.

  Griff watched the digital clock on his computer monitor as it counted the time.

  Two minutes passed … then three … then five.

  Griff could feel the adrenaline rushing through his circulation.

  Eight minutes … nine …

  At the ten-minute-and-zero-second mark, Orion’s program terminated with the abruptness of a racecar hitting a wall. Griff knew without having to read through the output what had happened. His system had failed once again.

  Four more hours.

  Griff tweaked the levels of the adjuvant to drive the IL-6 levels from ten times normal up to thirty, always in increments of five. He ran a test for each change that he made.

  Every time, Orion’s treatment simulation failed, and always at the ten-minute-zero-second mark.

  Beneath his suit, Griff was sweating profusely now. He was exhausted to the point of delirium. But time was continuing to spill away for the people in the Capitol. He refused to quit—to believe that he and the system he so believed in had failed.

  Then, like a lantern approaching through fog, an idea came to him.

  What if IL-6 levels were just a part of the solution? What if there was something unique in Davis’s serum itself that would make the treatment work?

  Griff altered Orion’s programming so that in addition to the antisense/ODN booster, it incorporated an exact replica of the DNA, RNA, and proteins found in Davis’s blood.

  Then, once again, his eyes fixed on the counter, he initiated the program.

  Once again, Orion began to synthesize a blocker against the growth of the WRX virus.

  At the nine-minute mark, Griff felt a tremor of anticipation begin. At nine minutes and forty-five seconds he began to hyperventilate—short, shallow, rapid respirations.

  He closed his eyes, waited for as long as he could stand, then looked at the timer.

  Eleven minutes and forty-eight seconds, and Orion was still running.