Weapon of Choice

by Patricia Gussin

  Since Charles’s laboratory grew bacteria deliberately engineered to resist every known antibiotic, access to it was restricted to scientists with doctoral degrees and intensive training in antimicrobial technique. When live cultures were exposed, only he and Jones could pass the biometric identification process and enter the double doors to the domain of their lab and incubator. Once they had worked with the cultures and stored them away, their techs could clean up and prep the lab for the next round of “hot” experiments. UV-CD lamps were left on when the lab was unoccupied to keep all surfaces sterile.

  At the outset, Charles had not planned to screw up Stacy’s holiday plans, but if he could make her miserable life even more miserable, that was a bonus. The option to simply not show up without notification meant their immedidate supervisor would be called in on an emergency basis. No point in kicking up all that fuss. Besides, he liked Stan Proctor—had liked the man—before he’d promoted a Negro woman. Charles reporting to Stacy? Unthinkable. “Your race is your religion, son,” his father had recently told him. “White Supremacy rules. Don’t you ever forget it.”

  But now, Charles never would have to take orders from Stacy Jones. He’d never again set foot in the CDC lab. Maybe not even in Atlanta. Once the staph was released, the folks at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, would track it to his program at the CDC. Those folks at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases didn’t mess around. The USAMRIID brass would go ballistic. Rumor was, the Fort Detrick hierarchy wanted to make the case that the CDC staph program is indistinguishable from bioterrorism and should pack it in. The CDC countered that their program was a vital hedge to protect the public if ever ultra-lethal or super-resistant staph strains showed up in the population. Except for USAMRIID, the CDC was the last agency to run such a program after the NIH Labs’ resistant-staph program bit the dust in Bethesda a few years ago.

  Charles didn’t think they’d shut down his program, but he didn’t know much about politics. That was his dad’s department. Never mind. He had Will Banks’s word for it: by tomorrow night, Charles would be out of the country. The Order, Banks claimed, had safe houses everywhere in the world. But where exactly would they send Charles tomorrow night? Will still hadn’t told him. Would they tell his parents? Certainly they’d let his father know; Chas was a big deal in The Order. For a chilling instant, Charles thought of Russell, laid out on a cold slab at the morgue. Sweet Jesus, he had to go to Russell’s wake tonight as Will had directed.

  Charles told himself to stop thinking about Russell. What good did it do—other than scare the heck out of him. He was committed now. He would not falter. He had the staph in the test tubes, in nourishing media. Now, all he had to do was store them at room temperature till it was time to transport them to the Palace Hotel kitchen—and then inoculate the cream puffs as instructed by the pastry chef. After that, Will Banks would take over the operation. Charles, The Order’s all-time MVP, would be the hero of all his glory dreams.

  One final look around the lab. A light over one of the containment hoods flickered, the negative pressure system hummed in the claustrophobic sterile room.

  He’d chosen tubes of media to transport the bacteria, not the clumsy bulk of petri plates. While in the incubator, he’d secured the specimens he’d secreted yesterday. Turning his back to the security cameras, he expertly transferred the inoculum from petri dishes to his transfer tubes. Sterile technique. No nervousness whatsoever. He did this every day. It was his craft.

  Satisfied, he replaced the contaminated petri plates in their hiding place and simply walked out of the secure zone, tubes tucked into a pouch strapped to his waist. Too close to his testicles? That thought amused him. Good thing he wasn’t smuggling out radioactive material. But the grin faded when he thought of Russell. Only a few days ago Russell with his background in nuclear technology had been his competition. But The Order had picked him. Satisfied? he asked himself.

  Putting on his best hangdog, sick look, Charles shuffled toward the office he and Stacy Jones had shared. He answered the ringing phone. Stacy. How considerate of her to call at this moment. He was about to leave her a message. Faking hoarseness, he told her that he was not feeling well, that he would not be in tomorrow, and he hung up the phone.

  For the benefit of any unseen witness, he made a show of bolting for the men’s room. There he hid out in the stall for a while, and artfully mussed his hair a bit more before returning to his office. After he’d safely nestled the culture tubes in the padded section of his briefcase, Charles collected the few mementos from the lone shelf behind his desk. Coughing and fake sneezing for the security cameras, he made his way down the long hallway lined with locked office doors and out of the building.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29

  On one hand, Emma Goode was honored—who wouldn’t be?—the newspaper had planned an extravagant party in her name in the grand ballroom of the Palace Hotel. On the other hand, she felt a bit used. The sixty-nine-year-old black woman, born in the Deep South in 1916, picked up the cream-colored, engraved vellum invitation, still not quite believing that she was the honoree. Tomorrow night. The Atlanta Daily Reporter, the newspaper founded by her father, was making her their poster child. The society section of the Atlanta Constitution, the mainstream Atlanta newspaper, lay on the table, her photo on the front page. Medium-brown skin, nose sprinkled with freckles, hair streaked with gray and pulled back in a bun. In the photo, she stood at the door of the Reporter’s new building, in the trim, coral silk business suit that accentuated the slim figure, hardly changed since her wedding day forty-three years ago.

  Emma and her husband, Edward, each had put in almost fifty years at the Atlanta Daily Reporter. As it turned out, each would retire at the same age. But for Edward, seventy had come twelve years ago. Emma could have chosen to retire with him, but she’d been only fifty-seven then, and at the peak of her journalism career. The city was a hotbed of racial tension and the Atlanta Daily Reporter was the voice of the Negro—about Negroes for Negroes.

  For the first nine years of his retirement, Edward puttered cheerfully around their large house in an upscale, but segregated neighborhood. He’d busied himself with the grandchildren and taken up household chores. He looked after their finances, even became a gourmet cook. Then gradually he had started to slide—but she’d missed the clues. He just seemed more and more listless, and then one day, three years ago, he simply did not wake up in the morning. He’d been seventy-nine years old. She remembered both of her sisters advising her way back when, not to marry a man twelve years older—she’d just end up a widow. They were right, but she would not have missed a day with Edward. Life without him would have been no life at all.

  Emma had not succumbed to depression, but Edward’s loss did seem to sap her physical energy and drain her emotional reserve. Their seven children helped sustain her, along with the challenges of her job and her pride, always, in her family’s newspaper.

  The party tomorrow night may be in her name, but it really was the celebration of her beloved newspaper. And that was fine. She was turning seventy—after fifty years, she could retire gracefully. She couldn’t really remember not working at the paper. She’d started during high school, spending summers in the Circulation Department. During college she worked evenings and summers in Accounting. Then with a journalism degree from Atlanta University, she launched into reporting, and finally, editing, the news. First her mother, and then one of her sisters, cared for her children when she went back to work after each of seven pregnancies.

  The Atlanta Daily Reporter always was the centerpiece of dinner table conversation. Each of her kids worked part-time at the paper during their teens, and three stayed on for a career—her oldest daughter, vice president of operations; oldest son, financial vice president; another son, public relations manager. Newspaper publishing was in the Goode family blood, past and future. But enough reminiscing, Emma thought. She had to get the spare bedrooms
ready. Make up the bunks for the kids and check the fridge, make a grocery shopping list and what had she forgotten?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29

  Stacy headed straight for Davis Island and Tampa City Hospital from the airport. She intended to page Laura as soon as she arrived, before calling Dr. Kellerman. She hadn’t been in her job long enough to know whether she should have responded to Keller-man’s demand for CDC input or not. Kellerman had insisted that Tampa City had a virulent staph outbreak, and Stacy had not wanted to bother her boss on a holiday weekend to get administrative clearance. Anyway about it, seeing her friend Laura in Tampa over a holiday weekend would give her the perfect cover if she was violating some government protocol by chasing to Tampa on the whim of a community doctor.

  She never had visited Laura at the sprawling Tampa City Medical complex, the main teaching hospital of the Tampa Bay area. The hospital’s island setting did not fit with the public health segment of Stacy’s training. Not with the city smack in the middle of hurricane territory, not with the endless list of possible bridge catastrophes that could cut off the city’s main hospital from the population.

  Not her problem now. Her problem was to find Laura and Kellerman, evaluate the infectious disease phenomenon here, and get back to the CDC to take care of her cultures since Charles was too ill, or so he claimed. If the culprit here was a staph, the right antibiotic cocktail should work. Stacy thought about nature and antibiotic resistance. Too much indiscriminate use of powerful antibiotics seemed to dare Mother Nature to develop yet more resistant organisms. Stacy’s work was like a chess game with Mother Nature: predict her opponent’s next move and have an antidote ready. Mother Nature was the ultimate winner; Stacy knew that any victory could only be fleeting.

  Developing bad bugs to preempt Mother Nature’s evolution was controversial, too, obviously. But, God forbid, America’s enemies should launch a biological warfare attack, CDC management wanted to be ahead of the curve with antibiotic solutions to potential biological threats. A few years ago, the Fed bosses had gone paranoid about lab security, and the government terminated the CDC-NIH collaborative project. No question that her CDC research program was under close scrutiny by the army’s biological researchers in Maryland at USAMRIID’s top-secret facility.

  She remembered that Keystone Pharma had hired a prominent scientist from the NIH several years ago. Norman Kantor. They wanted his promising drug discovery, ticokellin, for commercial drug development by the company. But recent disturbing news; Keystone Pharma had pulled the drug out of clinical studies because of side effects. Too bad. But not even ticokellin would work against the cultures in her lab.

  When Stacy’s cab pulled up to the front door of Tampa City Hospital, she decided to go to the information desk, introduce herself, and have Laura Nelson paged. But on the way to the circular desk in the center of the lobby, she was approached by an attractive man in fresh scrubs, looking to be in his forties.

  “Dr. Jones?” he asked.

  “Hello,” she said, looking straight into the man’s blue eyes. Reddish hair on the long side, white skin with freckles, tall, maybe six feet.

  “I’m Tim Robinson, a friend of Laura’s,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you over the years. Laura will so glad to see you. Please, come with me.”

  “Tim Robinson?” Stacy couldn’t restrain a grin. “ ‘Dr. Tim.’ That’s what the kids call you. Laura’s annual Thanksgiving guest from Philadelphia. See, I know about you, too.”

  “Thing are bad here,” Tim said right off.

  “Natalie?” Stacy asked, keeping up as Tim headed toward the bank of elevators.

  “Natalie’s admitted, but—”

  Stacy interrupted Tim, “That infectious disease guy, Dr. Keller-man, pretty much demanded I come down here. What’s going on?”

  Tim held the elevator door, they stepped inside, and he pushed the third floor button. “We’ll meet Laura in Natalie’s room. She’s seventeen, so they put her on the pediatric floor.”

  “Seventeen. Hard to believe. Did Laura tell you that I babysat for them once when they were toddlers?” Stacy felt an icy prickle run the length of her spine. That night had ended in disaster. She had ended up in the hospital with a concussion and a dislocated shoulder.

  Tim seemed to scrutinize her. “Our Laura did not share that memory with me,” he said.

  Stacy had always speculated about Laura’s relationship with Tim. Now as she followed him off the elevator, she imagined them as a couple. Steve had been dead for seven years, and didn’t Laura deserve to have someone in her life? And a man in my life would be nice, too.

  “Stacy, I’m so glad you’re here.” Laura stood at the door to Natalie’s room, gowned, her hair pushed up into a paper cap. Stacy wanted to hug Laura. But, Stacy recognized the isolation setup.

  She grabbed a gown from the shelf. “Where’s Natalie?” She threw on the gown over her pantsuit.

  “Down for an x-ray,” Laura said. “I was going to Radiology to be with her, but now that you’re here—”

  “I’ll find Natalie and stay with her,” Tim said. “You take care of business here.”

  “Laura, tell me everything.” Stacy was now gloved, wearing booties and a cap as well as the gown.

  They went into Natalie’s private room, Stacy noting the inappropriate décor for a seventeen-year-old: clowns and cartoon characters.

  “Thanks so much for coming.” Laura led Stacy to two vinyl-covered chairs in the corner of the room. “I’ve never faced anything like this. Patients in the ICU dying of a virulent infectious disease, a staphylococcus, resistant to all antibiotics, including methicillin, oxacillin, and vancomycin.”

  “That’s what Dr. Kellerman told me,” Stacy said. “But what about Natalie? Tell me what’s happening with your daughter, and then we’ll focus on the ICU.” No way to make a connection, but Stacy could appreciate the tug of war between Laura’s dedication to her daughter and to her patients.

  “It turns out, Natalie has a boyfriend in the ICU. Yesterday morning she faked abdominal pain so I’d let her stay home. I knew as soon as Tim got into Tampa, he would check on her. But before he got to my house, she’d left to go to see the boy in the ICU.”

  Stacy drew a deep breath as Laura continued, “Now he’s one of the sick ones. Natalie came in close contact. His name is Trey.”

  So the two are epidemiologically related. Not good at all.

  Laura’s eyes brimmed with tears. “And now she’s febrile with a high white count. Stacy, patients are dying up there. What if Natalie—”

  “Slow down, Laura.” Stacy needed Laura focused and logical. “You said that Natalie was inside the ICU. What was the nature of her contact with the patient?”

  “I just don’t know. She met the boy’s father, she told me that, but Trey was her boyfriend. She said she kissed him. She went there before there was any evidence of an epidemic.”

  Stacy gritted her teeth at the public health implications of the word “epidemic.”

  “I’ll need details,” Stacy said, shifting full gear into infectious disease control mode. “When exactly did each patient begin exhibiting signs of infection? Every symptom—nurses’ notes are usually the most reliable.” Stacy stood up now. “I’ll need all this data charted by fifteen minute intervals. I need every health care worker who was in that room identified, and probably quarantined. Same with every visitor—to the best of our ability. We need triple infectious disease precautions. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go to the ICU now.”

  “I should be here when Natalie gets back.” Laura remained in her chair, twisting one plastic-gloved hand with another.

  “Laura, we do need to get on top of this infection. Your daughter’s life may hang in the balance if the staph in your ICU proves truly antibiotic resistant.”

  Stacy watched the color drain from Laura’s face. Then she nodded and got up. Both women took off their protective layers, and Laura led Stacy
to the elevator that would take them to the ICU.

  An older white man in green scrubs and a long white coat met them at the elevator on the seventh floor.

  “The pediatric floor called to say that you were on your way up, Laura.” The man eyed Stacy. “I was on my way home to get some sleep, but they said the doctor was here from the CDC.”

  Stacy read the name tag sewn on his coat. Duncan Kellerman, M.D. She didn’t wait for introductions by Laura. “Dr. Kellerman, I’m Dr. Jones from the CDC. Dr. Nelson has given me a preliminary briefing, but I need every detail of what’s happened in this unit.”

  Stacy had seen it before and she’d see it again. The look: a black woman, telling me what to do?

  “You’re Dr. Jones?”

  “Stacy is a microbiologist at the CDC, the world’s foremost expert in antibiotic resistant staph,” Laura said. “She’s given us a list of precautions we must put in place if we’re going to stop this epidemic.”

  World’s expert? Laura was exaggerating. One of them, maybe. There were others, her boss, Stan Proctor. The boys at USAMRIID. Norman Kantor formerly of the NIH, recently retired from Keystone Pharma, and his former associate, Victor Worth, relegated to fungus research after the staph program at the NIH had been terminated. One of the first things on her to-do list was to see if she could recruit Norman Kantor out of retirement as a consultant.

  “Laura, Dr. Jones, I’m exhausted. I’m going home for a couple of hours. I can’t function without some sleep. I’m a lot older than either of you.”

  “Dr. Kellerman, we’re on a tight schedule. So let’s proceed, before you go anywhere.”

  “No, way, young lady,” Kellerman said, his tone resentful. “I may have called you, but not to take over. I’m in charge here, and I’ll—”