Katrina Stone: The Death Row Complex Part 8

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, s.h.i.+elded 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 a.s.sistant 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 doc.u.ment 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 doc.u.ment 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 a.n.a.lyses 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 n.o.body in the Arabic-speaking world actually uses in day-to-day speech."

"What do you mean, a dialect that n.o.body uses? Is it an old dialect, like Shakespearean English? Then why call it modern?"

"It's modern, but it is only used in official or professional doc.u.ments, 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 s.e.m.e.n 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 gla.s.s 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.

NOVEMBER 26, 2015.

5:35 A.M. PST.

Sean McMullan parked his government-issued unmarked car in the dirt lot at the Torrey Pines Gliderport in La Jolla, California. It was 5:35 a.m., Thanksgiving Day, and the lot was mostly empty. McMullan's immaculate black sedan contrasted starkly with the two dusty SUVs parked nearby.

As McMullan stepped out into the early morning mist, a pair of surfers came into view over the crest from the beach below. Both wore full wetsuits, currently stripped to the waist, and carried short boards. Neither wore shoes. They approached the SUVs in the parking lot and waved at McMullan, and he nodded politely.

McMullan briefly wondered if the surfers would go to work that day, or if they even had jobs. He had no idea that one of them was Jeffrey Wilson, a world-renowned chemist from the nearby Scripps Research Inst.i.tute, or that Wilson had just been awarded the n.o.bel Prize.

A posted sign warned "Unstable cliffs. Stay off the staircase." In fact, the "staircase" was no more than a treacherous path of embedded rocks, large logs, two-by-six boards, and sandbags that led down to the beach below. Locals called the path Ho Chi Minh Trail. McMullan ignored the warning sign and approached it.

On a dry morning, he could jog down some parts of the trail. On a misty morning like this one, he was forced to move slowly or risk a slip on the slick rocks that could send him tumbling. He trod carefully down the irregular path, taking care to favor the tender right knee that had earned him a Purple Heart in the first Gulf War.

When he reached the beach at the bottom, he turned to begin running along the thick sand above the high tide line. The cliffs loomed above to his left, and the Pacific Ocean spread out to the right under the morning mist.

Jogging toward McMullan was a stark-naked man. As he approached, the two men began dancing awkwardly from side to side in an effort to pa.s.s each other, the stranger's limp p.e.n.i.s swaying to and fro from the motion. Finally, the man ducked past him and McMullan continued on.

It was Katrina Stone that had recommended this route, but she had failed to mention that the beach at the bottom of Ho Chi Minh Trail was clothing optional. McMullan had been caught completely off guard on his first visit. But after the initial surprise, he came to like Black's Beach for the same reason Katrina liked to run here-it was almost totally secluded. Vehicular traffic to the beach was prohibited; the access road that rose up from the sand was chained off to all traffic except for police vehicles. And with the exception of the trail from the gliderport, additional points of entry were miles away.

McMullan also liked the fact that the run back up the mountain on the access road was a b.i.t.c.h of a workout with no motor vehicles to contend with. Now, as he reached the road, the morning mist was burning off, and the southern California sun was warming the air. He took a few deep breaths and started up the steep switchbacks.

Jogging ahead of him was a large group of men, all sporting the same close-cropped haircut that McMullan himself had worn in the Marine Corps. He found himself marveling, not for the first time, at the density of military personnel in San Diego.

To the south, near downtown and the airport, was the Naval Base San Diego-the largest Naval port on the West Coast. Its neighbor on Coronado Island contained the North Island Air Station and Naval Amphibious Base. In addition, San Diego housed the Outlying Field in Imperial Beach near the US-Mexico border, the Naval Auxiliary Airfield on San Clemente Island, and the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station. Thirty miles north was the one hundred twenty-five thousand acre Camp Pendleton United States Marine Corps Base.

The heavy military presence around McMullan would normally have offered a sense of security. Now, it seemed ominous. As he jogged up the mountain behind the Marines, he was acutely aware that if someone wanted to both punish and cripple the United States, there was perhaps no better target than "America's Finest City." The military would make San Diego difficult to hit with traditional forces. But it was the perfect location for a biological terror attack.

10:54 A.M. PST.

Josh Attle halted in the doorway as his eyes fell on the mostly vacant s.p.a.ce in front of him. Katrina and a large sweaty man were leaning over a folding card table in the center of the room. Both were wearing hard hats. A blueprint was spread over the table.

"d.a.m.n it," Josh exclaimed, and pivoted on his heels to exit.

Katrina and the contractor looked up in unison and Katrina giggled.

Josh turned back around to look at her. "Um, have you seen our molecular biology lab? I thought I left it here."

Katrina laughed louder. "I keep doing that, too. I think our molecular lab is currently in boxes, but if you find a way to do your experiment anyway, I'll give you a s...o...b.. Snack." Katrina smiled sweetly at Josh and then returned to the blueprint.

The lab was now a construction zone, in the process of being expanded to almost twice its original size. Douglas Tsoukas, the immunologist next door, had initially been furious upon learning that he was being evicted from his lab s.p.a.ce, effective immediately, with very little explanation. The financial compensation he was offered, and the gorgeous new lab that miraculously began appearing in a new high-tech complex across the street, had quickly smoothed over his anger.

Katrina had wasted no time moving into the former Tsoukas s.p.a.ce. In addition to the multiple Ph.D. staff scientists she was provided with, a dozen temporary employees had been a.s.signed to the move and to the development of the lab s.p.a.ce itself.

Octopus the Robot was relocated into what had been Tsoukas' main lab s.p.a.ce. Within days, Octopus was joined by seven additional robots and their supporting equipment. Two robotics experts were brought on board to man the machines full time under the scientific direction of Jason, Josh, and Oxana.

The three biologists also began a relentless collaboration with a new team of organic chemists that was designing the chemical compound libraries. It was those compounds that would be screened to identify new inhibitors of the Death Row Complex. Li and Todd would follow up with the inhibitors, evaluating lead molecules for toxicity, efficacy, and stability in cells.

When molecules showed potential in test tubes, the next step was to move them into animal testing-first mice and rats, and eventually, primates. Before now, the animal work in Katrina Stone's lab had been severely stunted by a lack of funding. She had established a pulmonary anthrax model in mice-the functional equivalent of inhalational anthrax in humans-at the Sorrento Valley BSL-3 facility. But primate testing had been far too expensive.

Now, lack of funds was no longer a problem. The issue was lack of time.

The San Diego State University vivarium and the Sorrento Valley BSL-3 facility were effectively taken over. Streamlined teams of pharmac.o.kineticists, drug metabolism experts, bacteriologists, and veterinarians a.s.sembled to move compounds out of mice and rats and into a new test group of monkeys. The tension in the animal facilities was palpable as researchers struggled to select the most promising compounds prematurely, based on data that was still grossly incomplete.

The greeting card that had been mailed to the White House in October had specified that a terror attack would take place on Christmas Day. It was now Thanksgiving, and the work had just begun.

Josh Attle was halfway out the door of the lab when a young woman in skintight jeans and a babydoll T-s.h.i.+rt shoved him back inside.

Katrina glanced up from the blueprint just as the woman stepped into the lab. The neck was cut out of the tight T-s.h.i.+rt, and Katrina saw Josh cast a quick glance at her prominent cleavage. Aside from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, which were obviously medically enhanced, the woman was very thin.

"Where the f.u.c.k is Jason Fischer?" she demanded.

"Um, I, uh, I don't know... " Josh stuttered, staggering backward, his eyes darting back and forth as if looking to Katrina for guidance.

Katrina watched the exchange with the composition of a person experienced with outbursts of this nature. She tipped the hard hat off her head and set it casually on top of the blueprint. "Who wants to know?" she asked.