The Vesuvius Isotope

by Kristen Elise Ph. D.

  “Yes,” she says, and her gaze drops to the floor.

  “Were they twins?”

  “Yes,” she says again.

  “What were their names?” My voice cracks with the question.

  “My son was Giuseppe. My daughter was Sofia. Of course, they carried the last name of my husband, Samir Ratib.

  “He was Egyptian. I met him here, in Cairo, when I was doing my doctoral research. The twins were sixteen when I initiated the Piso Project. They were seventeen when my husband’s brakes failed and all three were killed.

  “So I understand your grief,” she says, and now she is looking into my eyes. “And I’m so sorry to have caused it.”

  The morning sickness I had endured for the first two months of my pregnancy is entirely absent now. But at this moment, I feel queasy. I draw a deep breath. “You knew the danger you were involving Jeff in before you ever called him.”

  “Yes,” Alyssa says.

  “You knew that he could easily be killed.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  Alyssa looks into my eyes again. “I knew Jeff was the most likely person in the world to help me solve the nardo puzzle. I believed that if he didn’t, this battle that has gone on for two thousand years might continue for a thousand more. How many husbands have been killed? How many children?” Her voice catches in her throat and she takes a breath.

  “You followed Jeff’s career for a long time,” I say. “That was how you knew he would be the best person to help you. And I am sure you discovered a thing or two about my past as well. And that was why, even in his absence, you could bring yourself to involve me.”

  Alyssa looks down again. “I knew that, if you were in my shoes, you would have done the same thing.”

  The train comes to a halt at Midan Tahrir. I step off and approach the Ramses Hilton, grateful for the passport and money in my overnight bag.

  Alyssa begins to walk in the other direction, but I reach forward and gently touch her arm to delay her a moment.

  “He would have died from his cancer if you hadn’t called him,” I say.

  She nods.

  “And I also would have lost my daughter, and we would not have saved the thousands of people who contracted Wilson’s Disease, all within days of each other.”

  She nods again. A tear runs down each of her cheeks, and she looks down at the sidewalk.

  “So you see,” I say. “You have nothing to feel guilty about. Together, we saved thousands of lives. And you did not kill Jeff. As a matter of fact, I did.”

  Alyssa only stares, and in her eyes is the dawning of understanding. It is the understanding that I have known since, lying in a Cairo hospital bed, I first saw John’s list of cancer patients. First, and again. It was the same list that has visited me in my nightmares for eight years. Alyssa places a hand on my arm, and her empty gaze tells me that reassuring words escape her.

  I hug her one more time before leaving. As I approach the hotel that will be my home for my last night in Egypt, I rub my swollen belly with both hands. I imagine the young life inside of me. And I wonder what his legacy will be.

  The glaring lights upon the brilliant white beds only accent the appalling conditions of the patients. They are crammed together, side by side and end to end. Thousands of adjacent hospital beds.

  Beside me, a feeble plea comes forth from a teenaged voice.

  “Please…”

  I step forward. I pull a wheeled IV pole toward the bed and hang upon it a clear plastic bag, heavy with liquid. I tap the child’s vein and insert a needle as gently as I can.

  “I’m here, Lexi,” I say. “And you will be OK now. All of you will.”

  I gently squeeze the bag, and the solution inside it begins to flow.

  Magic is effective together with medicine. Medicine is effective together with magic.

  -The Ebers Papyrus, ca. 1500 BCE

  Epilogue

  Eight years ago, I created a monster. I thought that I was doing the right thing. I made it for my daughter. In a way, I also made it for my son—my first son, Christopher. And, admittedly, I made it for myself.

  I created a molecular monster. Of course, I had no way of knowing at the time that eight years later my blockbuster cure for a virulent form of anthrax would induce a new, rare cancer that would come to be known as Wilson’s Disease. Or that this cancer would lead to the murder of my husband, a man whom I had not even met when I generated the molecule.

  It made me rich. It made me famous. And had I not been rich and famous, I might never have met Jeff. I certainly would not have been speaking about the drug at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases that day in Paris. And he would not have been sitting front row center for my lecture, his smile interrupting my train of thought.

  The drug saved my daughter’s life. But eight years later, it almost killed her. Her, too. And more than three thousand others who, thank God, I have now found a way to rescue from the drug’s long-term effects.

  Of course, I have yet to see the new effects that may come still, effects that may be caused by the treatment for Wilson’s Disease, the treatment revived after two thousand years to treat a cancer born again in the twenty-first century. Perhaps I have now created another molecular monster. Perhaps I initiated yet another nightmare when I revived the isotope from the ruins of Herculaneum, the isotope that would come to be known as Vesuvium.

  What if I had known? What if I had known that Jeff, the one true love of my life, would die from it? Would I still have produced the drug that came to be known as the Death Row Complex?

  What choice did I have?

  Coming in 2014

  The Death Row Complex

  Selected References

  Burstein, Stanley. The Reign of Cleopatra. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004.

  C. Seutonius Tranquillus. The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. ca. 69–122 CE. Trans. Alexander Thomson, M.D. Amazon Digital Services, 2012.

  Croce, Benedetto. Storie e Leggende Napoletane. 1919.

  Ebers, Georg. Cleopatra. 1894. Trans. Mary J. Safford. Teddington: Echo Library, 2007.

  Harris, Judith. Pompeii Awakened. 2007. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009.

  Kleiner, Diana E.E. Cleopatra and Rome. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.

  Plutarch. Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. ca. 46–120 CE. Trans. John Dryden, 1819–1861. New York: Random House, 1992.

  Schiff, Stacy. Cleopatra, A Life. New York: Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group, 2010.

  Sider, David. The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005.

  Tyldesley, Joyce. Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

  The

  Death Row

  Complex

  Kristen Elise, Ph.D.

  Coming in 2014 from:

  San Diego, CA

  Prologue

  By the time they caught up with him, he had forgotten to keep running. Lawrence Naden was incoherent and scarcely recognizable—the sloughed, discarded skin of a human being.

  It had been a rainy week in Tijuana. A brown river carried trash along the gutters of the squalid street. Piles of refuse collected in rough areas, generating dams that would eventually break from the weight of the water and garbage behind them.

  A burst of static abbreviated the heavily accented warning from the megaphone. “You’ve got nowhere to go, Naden!”

  The dark-skinned officer holding the megaphone motioned, and several federales carrying M16 rifles filed steadily across the sloping yard, taking care to maintain their footing in the thick mud. Others were already entering the house from the back.

  Except for a handful of onlookers, most of them ragged children, the street was abandoned. The regular occupants had fled at the first rumor of approaching law enforcement. This time, however, the federales were looking for a single individual. Drugs were only a secondary concern.

  As the major
ity of uniformed men congregated at one rickety house, they shouldered the M16s and began instead withdrawing pistols. A few stepped onto the porches of flanking shacks. They peered suspiciously through the dirty windows or through plastic taped over holes where windows had once been.

  The men entering the house were greeted by the familiar rank combination of sweet-smelling rotting food, human waste, and burning chemicals. The front room was abandoned but had recently been occupied, as evidenced by a smoldering spoon on a card table against one wall. Needles and syringes, plastic bags, and glass pipes littered makeshift tables, moldy couches, and the concrete floor.

  Silently, the federales crept through the house with firearms raised. As those behind him assumed formation along the wall of the narrow hallway, the lead officer kicked a bathroom door, and it flung open as he shrank backward against the doorjamb.

  The evasive maneuver barely saved the officer from being shot in the face.

  As the bullet cut through the thin drywall behind him and embedded into a rotting wall stud, the officer instinctively leaned in and flicked his index finger three times. The brief staccato of semi-automatic fire rang out, and the ambusher fell gurgling into the bathtub.

  Coldly, the officer lowered his pistol to look down at the body. Then he turned to his team.

  “Esto no es lo,” he said and then reinforced in English, “This isn’t him.”

  There were two other doors along the hallway. One was wide open. The lead officer caught the eye of the man nearest it and cocked his head toward the room. The flanking man immediately stepped in, gun drawn. He strode to the closet and opened it and then stepped back out into the hallway and shrugged. The attention of the team turned to the other door. It was closed.

  After making eye contact with the rest of the team, the lead officer repeated the practiced kicking of the door then stepping out of the line of anticipated fire. There was none. Cautiously, he followed the barrel of his weapon into the room, noticeably relaxing as he did. The others followed.

  A man was sitting cross-legged on the floor across the room with his back against the wall. His disturbingly gaunt body slumped to one side. A trickle of fresh blood flowed down the inner part of his forearm from a newly opened wound. The entire area of flesh was scarred, scabbed, and bruised. As the officers filed into the room, his half-open eyes registered a slight recognition. A needled syringe dropped from his hand and rolled toward the officers in the doorway.

  The brief lucidity that had momentarily graced Lawrence Naden’s eyes faded as the heroin flooded his bloodstream. His pupils fixed into a lifeless gaze onto a spot on the floor, and then the rush overtook him.

  Chapter One

  The image was lovely in a somewhat odd, geometric way. A bouquet, or maybe, a tree? The flower heads were a jumbled mess. The stems, in contrast, were perfectly arrayed, an intertwined cylinder projecting downward from the flowers piled on top of them. The overzealous, rainbow-coloring of it all was unlike anything existing in nature.

  The leaves around Foggy Bottom were turning, and it was getting cold already. Rain was beating against the windows, and White House intern Amanda Dougherty scratched her back with a letter opener while frowning curiously at the image on the greeting card.

  The card had probably been white; it was now a slightly charred sepia from the UV irradiation. Despite its ugly signature on the paper, Amanda had been much more comfortable taking this job after Mr. Callahan had explained that decontaminating irradiation was a mandatory process for all White House mail. It was done in a New Jersey facility following processing and sorting at Brentwood, the facility that had made national headlines years earlier when anthrax spores intended for U.S. government officials had infected several people and killed two of its employees along with three others.

  Today, by the time the mail reached Amanda, it was safe.

  Amanda flipped open the greeting card. “Oh, my word,” she said quietly. The handwritten text was small and neatly aligned, but Amanda most certainly could not read it. She thought it might be Arabic or Hebrew or Farsi. She could not tell them apart.

  After a moment of thought, Amanda got up and walked to Mr. Callahan’s office, where she rapped softly on the door. He yelled through the door for her to come in.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Amanda said timidly. “We got a greeting card in a foreign language. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with these.”

  “What language?”

  “I don’t know. Something Middle Eastern. It has all those funny double-you looking things with dots over them.”

  Mr. Callahan motioned for her to enter and took the card from her. He glanced briefly at the image on the front and then flipped it open to look at the text inside.

  “It’s Arabic, but I don’t speak it. I’ll give it to an interpreter. Thank you, Ms. Dougherty.”

  Ten minutes later, Jack Callahan handed the card to an interpreter who had just entered his office.

  The interpreter frowned.

  “What?” Jack said.

  “This card may have a cute bouquet on the front, but the text…” He trailed off, skimming silently down the card, and then read aloud, slowly translating from the Arabic.

  Dear Mr. President,

  Your nation will soon know at last the full weight of the terror you have inflicted upon our people for years. You will soon reflect upon 11 September of 2001 and consider the date insignificant.

  A glimpse of the pain we promise has already been put to course. You will shortly learn what it is. You will then have the privilege of living in fear for two months, as our people have lived in fear of the genocide inflicted again and again upon us by the Crusaders.

  At last, on your Christmas Day of this year, there will begin a nightmare in your country unlike any you have ever seen, unlike any you can even imagine. It will blanket your nation, and no man, woman, or child will be spared. There will be nothing you can do to stop it.

  We have been imprisoned by the tyranny and oppression of your leaders for too long. The world will now see that you are the prisoners, and Allah will praise the final victory of al Qaeda.”

  On the other side of the country, a man and a woman whispered as intimately as possible through a chain-link divider.

  Arms extended and fingers intertwined through the barrier, they leaned in almost close enough to kiss. His dark hands enveloped her lighter ones. The woman’s figure was concealed within an ankle-length, flowing skirt and a chunky black sweater. Her long black hair hung in thick ropes along the sides of her face, shielding her from everyone but the prisoner.

  Their conversation was hurried, urgent.

  The guard on duty passed by, slowing ever so slightly in a casual effort to overhear them. For a few seconds, he could hear the man impatiently reassuring his mate.

  “It’s OK. I’ve taken care of it. You don’t have anything to worry about. So shut up already.”

  The guard strained to listen, but the woman said nothing. She glanced up, and her face was revealed to the guard for just a moment. She looked afraid. The inmate’s expression was one of anger and defiance. To the seasoned guard, it was a familiar combination. He strolled leisurely away to watch over another visiting couple.

  The prisoner glanced over his shoulder to watch him go. Turning back to his visitor, he raised one dark eyebrow and gave a subtle nod.

  The woman disconnected one hand and tucked it gently and deliberately into a fold of her long skirt. A moment later, the hand returned calmly to the barrier and assumed its former position against her lover’s. The guard was still across the room, but, overhead, electric eyes faithfully recorded the scene.

  Couples were beginning to kiss goodbye through their dividers, and the room was clearing out. Visiting hours were almost over. She would be ordered to leave soon. They hurried to finish their vital conversation.

  “Stay in contact,” the prisoner whispered. “I will be calling on you.”

  His visitor’s eyes flared in shock. Th
is was supposed to have been their final meeting. They had agreed.

  “What are you talking about?” she hissed.

  He smiled menacingly, revealing a broken fence of rotten teeth. “Oh, did you think it was going to be that easy for you, bitch? That I’d do all the work and you’d get the glory? I know a good negotiation when I see one. Don’t fucking think I’m kidding.”

  “Never mind then! I’ll get someone else!” she said quickly.

  “Too late, lover,” he said with a grin. “The cat’s already out of the bag.”

  As the prisoner and his visitor were saying their goodbyes, an inmate in a remote wing of the prison was vomiting into his private toilet for the second time that hour. He half-heartedly cursed the prison food. The truth, however, was that he did not think he had food poisoning. He felt like he was coming down with the flu.

  The interpreter paused and looked up, his dark eyes a question mark. Jack Callahan seemed relatively unconcerned.

  “We get letters like that a lot,” Jack said. “They almost always turn out to be a hoax.”

  “This one might be too,” his colleague concurred. “Something about the Arabic is unusual. I was paraphrasing, of course. Most of what is here doesn’t translate directly. But… it reads like it was written by someone who might not be a native speaker. Or, maybe they’re just very poorly educated. I don’t know exactly. Also, the handwriting. It is sort of, ah, overly meticulous. Like someone who doesn’t speak or write Arabic is trying to copy something they saw written, not like someone writes in their native language.”

  Jack made a related point. “It is strange to me that the al Qaeda organization is mentioned but the author gives no other details. Usually, when we get a direct threat from al Qaeda, or they claim responsibility for an attack, there are very specific references, things that had to have come from them in order to lend credibility. For example, they usually include specific names. And since when do they send a greeting card to general White House mail instead of making some kind of grandiose announcement over international airwaves? Those bastards thrive on publicity.”