McKean 01 The Jihad Virus

by Thomas Hopp

  “Peyton McKean!” I laughed. “You’re a thrill-seeker!”

  He smiled. “Let’s just say my mind needs stimulation. Too much of what happens in the laboratory is predictable to me. It takes a lot to get my adrenaline pumping. Life is often too sedate for my constitution.”

  “Even with a new vaccine in the offing?”

  “All the more so.” McKean lofted a pedagogical index finger and elaborated. “With the project in Janet’s capable hands, no time need be lost. If my cousin’s story turns out to be nothing, then I will have taken a diverting ride through some spectacular country. My thinking on scientific subjects will no doubt be stimulated.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I have found it is exactly at the moment I feel compelled to stick close to my work that I must get away, to let my thoughts clear. When inspired thinking is what’s needed, then it’s best to leave the details behind. Hopefully, I’ll come back with a refreshed mind and new insights into the vaccine problem. Getting away from one’s work is sometimes the best way to get it done.”

  “A method to your madness,” I thought out loud.

  He smiled. “We won’t be gone too long.”

  “We? You don’t expect me to come with you!”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “You want to help, don’t you?”

  I was caught off guard. “I guess so.”

  He looked at me cagily. “You see, there’s one thing I need from you.”

  “What?”

  “I need a ride, Fin. I really am a pitiful driver. I even hitched a ride here in the ImCo courier van this morning. Will you drive me to Winthrop?”

  I had been edging toward my car while we spoke. Now I moved faster, but McKean reached the passenger door as quickly as I reached the driver’s.

  I grabbed the handle. He grabbed his. “You’ll drive me, then?” he said with a look like a lost German shepherd puppy.

  I swallowed hard. “All right, I will.”

  “That’s the spirit,” he said. He got in, but as I sat in the driver’s seat, I felt a gnawing worry about what I was getting into. The notion of running up against kidnappers or terrorists - or both - got my heart pounding. I drove out of the loading area considering ways to decline McKean’s invitation to adventure, but then my mind suddenly cleared. All my doubts fled, overruled by a drive more powerful than survival: the journalist’s instinct for a story. Not only would I be first on the scene of a major news scoop if anything turned up, but I would spend, by a quick reckoning, nearly ten hours in the enclosed space of my car with a man whom I truly wished to know better as a journalistic subject. It all came in a flash of insight. Driving Peyton McKean to Winthrop was both the decent, upstanding thing to do - and my ticket to a professional triumph.

  If it didn’t get me killed.

  As I drove toward an entrance to Interstate 5, McKean tapped my arm with a finger.

  “To ImCo first, Fin. I need to attend some details before we leave - the little matter of the vaccine Janet and I are going to create.”

  PART TWO: IN THE METHOW VALLEY

  Chapter 6

  McKean called Janet to his office and in ten minutes mapped out a strategy for making a vaccine biosynthetically in E. coli bacterial culture. They would use the same genetic engineering tricks they had used to create the Congo River vaccine. The details flew past me like a conversation between a Greek and a Roman without interpreters.

  A subunit vaccine, McKean called it. Janet would take the DNA encoding the B7R protein with its DIE, DIE, DIE sequence, stitch it into a new DNA plasmid carrier, mass produce it in culture, then purify B7R with an antibody that could grab the molecule via a short segment of added amino acids McKean called a flag, or an epitope tag.

  “That’s the idea that got me hired here,” McKean told me. “Mass-producing viral subunits as flagged molecules and purifying them with anti-flag antibodies.”

  “The invention you made in New York?”

  “Exactly. It simplifies the purification step, which is often a stumbling block. It’s like attaching a handle to each B7R molecule - an easy way to grab hold of it. Anti-flag purification can cut weeks off the development time for a vaccine. Let’s hope that’s enough.”

  He scribbled on his yellow pad, spelling out two short strings of DNA letters encoding the flag amino acid sequence, and handed it to Janet.

  “There you go,” he said. “Two synthetic DNA oligonucleotides that we can stitch onto the B7R gene. You can start making them on the oligonucleotide synthesizer right away. Leave it running overnight.”

  “No problem,” said Janet. “They’ll be ready in the morning.”

  McKean got up. “I’ll be out the rest of the day. But I’ll be here in the morning, bright and early.”

  Janet nodded. “About the time the synthetic DNA oligomers come off the machine.”

  “Right,” he said. “I’ll help you splice them onto the B7R gene. I suppose I should stand around wringing my hands until then, but you know I trust you, Janet.”

  She smiled.

  He said to me, “Even so, we’ll be in a real horserace if the virus breaks out of containment in Sumas. The quick purification is the last step. Before that can happen, we’ll have to get the microbes to grow with B7R in their guts. They don’t always cooperate.”

  Janet’s face clouded and he noticed. “Let’s hope we’ll only be carrying out an academic exercise,” he said, “rather than battling a modern plague.”

  Her eyes widened. “Things aren’t that serious, are they, Peyton?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not certain any more.” Then he cleared his throat as another disturbing thought came to him. “By the way, Janet, if that FBI man, Fuad, calls or comes around, tell him I went out to borrow an autoclave part from a lab at the University of Washington - you don’t know which one, or when I’ll be back. That should keep him off our trail.”

  She frowned. “Why do you need him off your trail?”

  McKean and I exchanged glances.

  “I can’t tell you why, at the moment,” he said. “But I’ll be counting on you.”

  She looked dubious, but said, “Okay, Peyton.”

  “Now,” said McKean. “You’d better get to work, and I’d better get going.”

  Janet went to the lab as McKean gathered an olive green canvas field coat and an olive canvas safari hat from pegs on the wall. He paused as we were about to leave.

  “I almost forgot another obligation,” he said. He picked up his phone and dialed. After a few seconds he murmured, “Answering machine again.”

  “Hello Dear,” he said. “I’m going to be working late tonight. I’ll tell you about it when I get home. Sorry to miss my turn cooking dinner. There are leftovers in the ‘fridge.’

  I noticed a small family photo on the wall next to McKean’s whiteboard; a sandy-haired boy of about six sat between McKean and a nice looking blond woman about half McKean’s height. The photo was close to McKean’s desk so he could see it easily while he worked.

  “Say ‘Hi’ to Sean for me,” McKean finished. “Tell him I’m sorry there’ll be no bedtime story tonight, unless you want to read him one. Remind him Daddy loves him very much.”

  He hung up the phone and we headed for the elevator. I asked, “She’ll be okay with that?”

  McKean nodded. “I’ve done plenty of all-nighters in the lab. She’ll assume it’s another one of those. That’ll keep her from worrying about bigger things. I’ll give her the real details after we’re back safe and sound. Don’t you have anyone to call?”

  “Nope. Wish I did.”

  Within ten minutes I had my Mustang speeding northbound on Interstate 5. McKean sat in the passenger seat in a thoughtful mood. He stared blankly at the traffic as I threaded my way through it, going a bit over the speed limit.

  “Thanks for agreeing to drive us to Winthrop,” he said after a time. “It’s really quite a long haul.”

  “Don’t mention it,” I said. So far, it seemed McKean
was more interested in my credentials as a chauffeur than my companionship. But that was no problem for the newshound in me.

  “I’m not too reliable a driver,” he admitted, “when my mind is full of thoughts, I neglect my steering, signaling, and braking. When I’m obsessed with conflicting data my eyes neglect to tell my brain the whereabouts of traffic, although my foot presses the accelerator down all the harder. That makes for a lot of horn honking and finger gesturing in my direction.”

  “With a mind like yours, Peyton, that must happen pretty often.”

  “Too often, I’m afraid. Anyway, with you driving, we have no such concern.”

  “Thanks for the backhanded compliment about my brainpower,” I said. “I’ll keep my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel.”

  “Please do, and hurry,” McKean urged. I floored the accelerator and passed a semi on the right. I began changing lanes too often and, no doubt, offending more than a few fellow drivers as the Mustang flew northbound through busy suburban traffic.

  McKean settled in for the long five-hour trip, first northbound through the evergreen forests and lowland farmsteads between Puget Sound and the Cascade Mountains, and then across the North Cascade Highway to the ranchlands of the Methow Valley. As the trip progressed, I started chatting up McKean while slinking past traffic snarls on a two-lane freeway with slow trucks passing slower ones, sanctimonious jerks driving the speed limit in the fast lane, and some aggressive drivers rushing up on the tails of cars ahead of them to make sure I couldn’t change lanes, some of whom gave me a honk and a finger when I went anyway.

  Despite the difficult driving and my misgivings about what lay ahead, I remained true to my main purpose in accompanying Peyton McKean. I was going to learn more about him, if it put us both in the ditch. As we bunched up behind heavy exit traffic at the Tulalip Casino in Marysville, I said, “Explain again why you’re doing this.”

  “Doing what?” McKean shook himself out of deep thoughts.

  “Heading off on a what might be a wild goose chase when you’ve got the hottest project I can imagine going on in your lab.”

  “I like to go where things don’t add up,” said McKean. “In science, and in life. That’s my favorite turf, terra incognita. To do good science, you’ve got to spend most of your time at the outer limits. That’s where great discoveries are made.”

  “You’ve got to spend time there,” I said. “I’m not so sure about me.”

  “Try it.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. But if this isn’t a wild goose chase, we could get ourselves killed.”

  McKean shrugged. “Mike’s stumbled onto a little bit of terra incognita…” He stared out at the dairy lands and black-and-white spotted cows of Stanwood zipping past, his eyes following details but his mind a million miles off. “I’ve just got to see what he’s onto.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. I had intended to grill him on every detail of his scientific background while we traveled, but I found myself in a weird mental space. Between the hard driving and doubts about what we might find before we saw the farms of Stanwood again, I had trouble concentrating on a proper interview. There were long stretches where neither of us spoke, and the sound of my car’s tires droning on the pavement was hypnotizing.

  South of Mount Vernon, the Skagit River bottomland was covered with fields of red-and-yellow tulips. The colors shook me out of a zombie-like trance I had fallen under.

  “Hey Peyton,” I said. “May I call you Peyton?”

  He smiled a mesmerized smile, staring at yellow rows of daffodils wagonwheeling past. “Call me ‘Hey Shit-head,’ if you want. I don’t stand on formalities.”

  “I guess not. So why do you think terrorists would attack the State of Washington?”

  “I doubt they are interested in Washington per se,” he replied. “Think of it this way. The distance from the Arabian Peninsula to the State of Washington is over seven thousand miles. The two places are a world apart. But to someone from the Middle East, Washington lies invitingly close to any point in the contiguous United States. It’s the back door to the U.S.A.”

  “Why not the Mexican border?” I countered.

  “Ahmed Ressam,” said McKean, “was caught with a carload of explosives at the Port Angeles checkpoint. That’s the westernmost crossing between Canada and the contiguous U.S. Perhaps he figured our security would be lax at such a far-flung outpost. It’s as remote as you get from the major population centers to the south and east. Of course, he made a mistake when he tested the alertness of the home state of Boeing and Microsoft.”

  “True,” I agreed. “But it was only the last in a chain of inspectors that caught him. Los Angeles International Airport nearly got a big hole blown in it.”

  McKean sighed. “I don’t expect to ever live in a world free of terrorism.”

  “Why not?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Terrorism is not a new idea. The biology underlying it is innate, part of our animal character. Terrorism is, quite simply, apish.” He leaned back in his seat, folded his hands, steepled his long, thin index fingers together, and touched them to his lips.

  “I can’t see that,” I resisted. “It seems to me terrorism is an outgrowth of civilization, not nature.”

  “Then you are nearsighted.” He took the somber tone of a world-weary visionary. “Terrorism is, unfortunately, a simple expression of biology, like the appeal of a flower to a bee.” He scanned the rows of tulips fanning past his side window.

  “How do you figure? It seems to me terrorism is pretty complex. It’s motivated by political situations like the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

  A wan smile crossed McKean’s face. He let his dark eyes play over the passing rows of flowers. “Politics is the superficial motive, Fin. The deeper motive is boy-girl stuff.”

  “Boy-girl stuff? You mean sexuality?”

  “Answer: yes.”

  “You think sex motivates terrorists? I think that’s the last thing on their minds.”

  “Before I got my Ph.D.,” he said, “I was a biology major at the University of Washington. Like any of the best schools, it’s a true universe of ideas. I studied a great many subjects, not just biology and biochemistry, but the social sciences, psychology, sociology, and the like. I see humans as animals first, male and female, and then as higher creatures second. And that’s regardless of whether you consider the evolutionary sense or the creationist view. Either evolution or God has given us traits in common with animals. That’s what intrigues me more than any other subject - the animal nature of humanity.”

  “But Peyton, these jihadis are religious zealots and adherents of political causes. You’re not suggesting their religious indoctrination and military training are unimportant?”

  He swept the air in front of him with a hand, as if clearing away an obscuring haze. “I understand that people ascribe complex motivations to terrorists, and terrorists’ own opinions of themselves key on themes like revenge and liberation. But that’s superficial. Deeper down, they have the basest of motives. Instinctual ones, animal ones.”

  “Such as…”

  “The drive for personal power, and the desire for sex.”

  I shook my head, but McKean glanced at me sidelong with one eyebrow cocked up with smug certainty. “In the human species,” he said, “as with most apes, there is an instinctual phenomenon, part of the sexual response, that is best described as ‘down with up’.”

  I whisked past a semi on the right, but I was having trouble getting the connection McKean had made.

  “Among the apes,” he went on, “the dominant males get all the best: the best feeding spots, the most adoration from younger animals, the attentions of a harem of the most beautiful and fertile females. But there is always a group waiting in the wings: the angry young males. These are frustrated young bulls whose desire to get at the females is blunted by the lead male’s power and ability to dominate the group. These subdominant males are always on the lookout to find a weakness in th
e big male. They try to form liaisons with females while he sleeps; they attack him if he shows an infirmity of any kind. Sooner or later, a young male succeeds in challenging the dominant male and the order of things in the tribe changes. All attention now goes to the new upstart. The old dominator is dispossessed and cast out into the jungle to die. It’s all programmed instinctually into the apes, from whose mold we were created.”

  “Terrorists as animals,” I said skeptically. “You would have a hard time convincing a radical Muslim cleric of that.”

  “Yes,” said McKean. “I’m sure no one is more blind to this than the mullahs who preach hate. But every fourteen-year-old boy who has seen a fourteen-year-old girl look past him to admire a sixteen-year-old boy knows the feeling of subdominance. It’s a universal male experience. Females feel it too, looking at more popular girls. But boys feel it the most. No imam needs to teach it. Subvert that teenage frustration with a religious message, and you’ve got a powerful weapon at your disposal.”

  “But how does the animal desire to overcome dominance motivate terrorists?”

  “In their case, it’s the dominant society that is attacked, not necessarily an individual. Terrorists desire to bring down that which stands tall or flies high, either by demolishing the buildings of the dominant society, or bringing down its airplanes, which are symbols of how modern society has left them behind. Or, they may simply want to kill people of higher social standing. Depending on how low they themselves started, there are many targets they must look up to. At the heart of the matter, they simply wish to eliminate that which implies their own inferiority. It’s just the same as getting rid of the dominant male ape. Down with up, and up with down.”

  “Astonishing.”

  “The average terrorist is a young man without influence over events in his life, or over women. Most come from the lower ranks of society. And many women respond sexually to money and power - some more than others, but it’s always present as a relict of their female-ape ancestry. Food and protection were the desired commodities then. Nowadays it’s money and status. Subconsciously, young male terrorists wish to reduce all of society to their lowly status, hoping that will put them on an equal footing with their formerly powerful rivals. From there, they would have an equal chance to compete for females.”