Katrina Stone: The Death Row Complex Part 7

2:34 P.M. EDT.

USPIS a.s.sistant Forensic Director Teresa Wood sat in front of an ultraviolet light box in the physical sciences unit of the National Forensic Laboratory in Dulles, Virginia. In gloved hands, she tenderly cradled a one-inch-thick gelatinous square. Sliding one hand out from under the gel, she allowed the corner, and then the side, to contact the light box. Gently holding it in place, she removed her other hand, and the gel sat freely upon the gla.s.s.

Teresa closed the door to the small room and then switched off the overhead light. In the near-complete darkness, she found a face shield and pulled it over her face. Then she switched on the light box before her.

Bright purple ultraviolet light flooded the room from the small box. Where nothing had been visible in the overhead light, she could now clearly make out patterns of solid pink lines in the gel. Each represented a unique piece of DNA from her PCR a.n.a.lysis.

Teresa only had to glance at the patterns to see that the DNA fragments retrieved from the White House greeting card and its envelope were different from any of the biological toxins she had incorporated into her a.s.say.

Along with other toxins, DNA samples from both normal anthrax and the Death Row strain had been included in her experiment. Neither strain was present on the greeting card. Nor were any of the other toxin controls. There was absolutely no infectious material on the card.

Goose egg, Teresa thought.

Katrina felt ill prepared for the scheduled meeting with the FBI agents. Jason had helped her hide the activator data in the liquid nitrogen tank, but he had never exactly consented to the project. And today, he was not in the lab.

Reflecting on how sick he had looked, Katrina was not surprised by his absence. Jason rarely got sick, but when he did, he was a baby about it, and it seemed to last forever. She blamed the fact that he didn't ever seem to lay off the partying long enough to get well.

Katrina had been hoping it would be the tall agent, McMullan, who would be meeting with her. When the other agent arrived at her office, her spirits sank.

Roger Gilman entered Katrina's office with the fl.u.s.tered appearance of someone who had already had a long day. His morning comb-over's attempt at hiding male pattern baldness had now been surrendered, and the shiny dome of his skull reflected the fluorescent light in Katrina's office. Gilman's eyes were red, and his suit looked as if he had been sleeping in it for days.

Katrina put forth her best effort at a sincere, pleasant smile. "Good afternoon, Agent Gilman. How are you today?"

"I'm fine, thank you. How are you?" Gilman answered with equal cordiality.

The two sat across from each other over Katrina's desk.

"Have you considered our offer, Dr. Stone?"

"Yes, sir, I have considered it in depth, and this is my position. Obviously, I am more than happy to take the government's money to finally be able to do my work the way it should be done. I mean, what scientist would not wish for that? However, I have one very important condition-"

"You want total scientific freedom," Gilman interrupted. "We understand."

Katrina chuckled. "That goes without saying. But, no. The condition is this: if I am to work on the Death Row project, I must insist that I keep all of my own people. The government may provide additional staff-in fact, I will require them-but my original lab members have seniority and will answer directly to me. Additional staff will answer to them, with no questions asked."

"They're students!" Gilman protested.

"They are graduate students and one postdoc. They're very good. I have handpicked each and every one of them, and they know the work better than anyone. I need them.

"If I were forced to let them go, not only would it be detrimental to their careers, it would also be fundamentally damaging to the project. I would be forced to train new people by myself from scratch. It would take months-years, in fact-for me to bring a whole new staff up to speed. This condition is simply not negotiable."

Gilman sighed. "OK. I will include your condition to the contract we will be drawing up. However, your staff will be subject to the same scrutiny as you. I need a list of your people. We will be performing very thorough background checks on every single one of them before we involve them in this. You have not discussed the situation with anyone, correct?"

"Of course I haven't," Katrina lied.

"Good. Are all of your people American citizens?"

Katrina laughed out loud.

"What's so funny?"

"I'm sorry," Katrina said. "It's just that American citizens are actually pretty rare in this line of work. In most labs, foreign students and postdocs outnumber Americans about ten to one."

She pulled a small notepad out of her desk and began writing down information as she spoke. "My staff is as follows. My postdoc's name is Jason Fischer, and he is an American citizen. My students are Joshua Attle, also an American citizen, Oxana Kosova, who is Russian, Li Fung, who is Chinese, and Todd Ruddock, who is English. You may get any other information you need from our human resources department."

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 a.s.sured 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 nave 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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.signment will become his first professional position.

"As for the remaining students, I believe they are ent.i.tled 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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sumed 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 b.u.t.ton 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. "h.e.l.lo, this is Roger Gilman," he said angrily.

"h.e.l.lo, Agent Gilman. Guofu Wong here."

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

"I a.s.sume 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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sure 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 nutsh.e.l.l, 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 embarra.s.sed. He looked away from the doctor as he replaced the gown.

"I a.s.sume 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 gla.s.ses. 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.