Crime Zero (aka the Crime Code) (1999)

by Cordy, Michael

  A desk lamp was the single light in an otherwise dark office. It was after one in the morning, and for the last four days he hadn't returned home to his wife and two children or slept for more than a couple of hours at a time. Over that period he had returned to the first recorded incident two weeks ago and studied the autopsies and relevant tests: a twenty-one-year-old called Salah Khatib who had been shot for refusing to shoot four deserters. Aziz had then charted each subsequent suicide or brain hemorrhage, recording every link between Khatib and the others.

  Khatib's urine had yielded the first clue. It and the other victims' had contained an exceptionally high level of androgens, hence Aziz's initial belief that they were suffering from steroid abuse. The hair loss and acne plus pronounced testicular atrophy in many of the men had seemed to confirm this. Suicide was also a known risk of steroid abuse.

  But the blood told another story. It confirmed the androgen levels, but it also contained massive amounts of the enzyme monoamine oxidase. MAO is a marker for the level of neurotransmitters in the brain, particularly the inhibiting transmitter serotonin.

  Aziz then conducted a full DNA scan on Khatib's blood, using one of the two Genescopes in the military hospital. These expensive gene sequencers were two of only three in the whole of Iraq. The third was in a private medical bunker below the main presidential palace two miles north of Baghdad.

  Comparing the DNA profile in Khatib's military records with the DNA profile in the blood taken from his corpse, Aziz found a subtle but significant difference. Seventeen of Khatib's genes had been modified by the addition of a series of control sequences, sequences that were not present in the original genome recorded in his military records and certainly not present in the standard human genome. At first Aziz had been at a loss to understand why this should be the case. Then he had checked if Khatib had received any gene-modifying drugs in the last few weeks. In the man's records among the battery of jabs and inoculations every soldier received, Aziz noted one DNA vaccine, the standard Bio-Shield injection given to any soldier about to go into combat to immunize him against biological weapons, particularly those used by Iraq, allowing the weapons to be used in battle without harming its own troops. Despite the numerous wrangles with the UNSCOM inspection teams, it was common knowledge that the rais had secretly developed a powerful biowarfare capability. It was this that allowed the Iraqi president to consider defying the U.S.-led UN Security Council and invade Kuwait again.

  But the BioShield viral vector wouldn't change the particular genes that had been modified in Khatib's genome. The BioShield vaccine merely modified stem cell DNA, immunizing the body to most of the standard threats while making the cells receptive to more specialized booster vaccines designed to counter the ingress of newer bioweapons. But Khatib had only received the standard BioShield vaccine and no boosters. Even if he had, they wouldn't have had this effect on his genome. Something had subverted Khatib's genes in a way that killed him.

  Looking at the other suicide and brain hemorrhage victims, Aziz's team discovered that they shared the same anomalies in the key seventeen genes. Studying these genes and understanding how they boosted aggression hormones, fuel neurotransmitters, and inhibition neurotransmitters had convinced Aziz that they were the cause of the problem, but how and why had they been changed?

  He had also checked with Yevgenia Krotova, the Russian scientist who headed Iraq's biological warfare capability. According to her team, not all the deceased had received the BioShield DNA vaccine, and many of those who had were given it years ago. How could it be the source? Especially as all the batches of vaccine his team and hers had subsequently checked revealed nothing unusual. What was the link? If only he had been a more committed doctor, he might now be able to explain this. He might be able to prevent more men from dying.

  Pausing from writing his report, he rubbed the painful spots on his chin and picked up a small blue cardboard carton from beside the laptop. He had studied medicine at University College London two decades ago and could easily read the Western lettering on the pen-size carton. The text told him nothing he didn't already know, but as he stared at the carton, four dark hairs fell on the keyboard of his laptop computer. Instinctively he scratched his scalp. A cold tremor ran through him as he watched the dark strands fall like fur off a molting dog.

  Suddenly everything was as clear as ice.

  The source of the epidemic wasn't in all the BioShield serums at all, only in a few, perhaps in just one random corrupted sample. That was why his team hadn't found anything in its batch checks. It would take only one person infected by a rogue viral vector if the vector hadn't been attenuated, rendered noninfectious. That person would then spread it to all the people he came into direct contact with, starting a chain of infection.

  Which included him.

  With a trembling hand Aziz began to type on the laptop, rewriting parts of the report. He had to record what he had discovered and alert his team and Yevgenia Krotova. Khatib was probably the index patient and had been infecting others before he died. With the close quarters in which the army lived, it could decimate the troops within weeks, if not days. His team had to search their stocks for any other corrupted samples of vaccine and analyze them to find a cure. He must also tell the generals about what happened, tell them to call off the advance. Yes, he thought, as he typed feverishly, suddenly painfully aware of all those soldiers going to war, perhaps he could avert the conflict and save all those lives too.

  Sweat streamed down his forehead, and he felt so tired he wanted to sleep. But he couldn't rest; he had too much to do.

  When he suddenly stopped typing fifty-eight minutes later, he wept in frustration. His left hand lay limp on the keyboard, refusing to obey his instructions. Then the whole left side of his body went numb. A tight band of steel tightened around his forehead. He could only gasp as he tried to focus on the screen in front of him.

  "Oh, no," he groaned. "No." But the brain hemorrhage wouldn't abate, and when it struck, the seizure was so massive Aziz felt pain for only fractions of a second. Disturbing half the contents of his desk as he fell backward in the chair, he pulled the laptop with him, closing it down. His body was lifeless by the time his head and the laptop struck the cold hard floor, deleting the report.

  Next to the doctor's face, inches from his open unseeing eyes, lay the blue carton of the BioShield vaccine. Under the BioShield brand name was the manufacturer's logo, a target made up of rings of chromosomes, with an arrow in the shape of a double helix hitting the nucleus in the center. "Targeting a better future" was the tag line next to the company name and address: "ViroVector Solutions, Inc. Palo Alto, California. USA."

  The Marina District, San Francisco, The Same Day, 4:37 P.M.

  "I feel like I'm going mad. All the signs point to a bigger picture than Conscience, but I can't believe it. Whatever's going on, we can't just let them get away with it," Kathy Kerr said, sipping at her tea, in the living room of Matty Rheiman's house.

  Matty Rheiman sat listening quietly in the corner while Decker paced around the room. "Do we have a choice?" Decker said, bending to the coffee table and pushing the pile of photographs toward her. He picked a picture from the top and handed it to her. "Look, I've been to your house on Mendoza Drive twice now. Jackson's people are crawling all over it. They're probably waiting until after the election, just to make sure anyone who comes looking for you doesn't cause a fuss. They don't give a damn who sees them either. Which means they don't know you've escaped yet. But it also means they think they're above the law. And they're probably right."

  Kathy Kerr looked at one of the photographs Decker had taken of her house. It showed three men, looking relaxed, leaning against a gray Chrysler parked beside her front door. She recognized all of them. They had been with Assistant Director Jackson when she'd been taken. Another photograph showed them going into her house. Going inside her home as if it belonged to them.

  "Jackson hasn't been around," said Decker. "He's probably trying
to distance himself now. He's pretty senior within the bureau, and he's probably back in Washington. I bet his rogue agents don't even know Director Naylor's involved-- not directly anyway."

  "But we've got to do something, Luke."

  "What?" Decker's voice rose in exasperation. "Kathy, it's your word and mine against the director of the FBI, the head of a major biotech company, and the future President of the United States. I've just been fired from the bureau. Shit, after Weiss's 'Conscience Against Crime' announcement the polls are putting her in the lead--a long, long way. The press loves her. The police love her. Everyone loves Pamela Weiss and her miracle cure for crime. And sooner or later Naylor and her cronies are going to find out that you escaped from the Sanctuary and come looking for you. They don't know I'm linked to you yet, but you should get away."

  Kathy clenched her jaw but said nothing.

  Almost two days had elapsed since Decker had rescued her from the Sanctuary and taken her back to his grandfa-ther's house in the Marina. All of Saturday night and most of Sunday she had slept fitfully through drug-induced nightmares while Decker watched over her. By Sunday afternoon she had felt strong enough to talk, and that evening they had shared their discoveries.

  Using Decker's overspecified but underused FBI-issue Toshiba laptop, she had reexamined the changes in Karl Ax-elman's genome from the disc she'd posted to Decker and used his FBI access codes to probe other suspicious deaths at San Quentin.

  She probably owed Decker her life, but if she expected him to share her outrage and be totally sympathetic to her plight, she was disappointed. After they'd pieced together all they knew, Decker shook his head and gave her a weary look as if to say, "What did you expect?" Project Conscience had been her dream ever since their arguments at Harvard, so why was she complaining now, just because the methods weren't entirely ethical?

  "Luke, if nothing else, we've got to find out what they're really up to."

  "Isn't it obvious what they're up to? Face it, Naylor and Prince took your idea and used you to dupe the FDA. They screwed up with Axelman and the others at San Quentin or maybe they didn't. And because they didn't want Conscience to be compromised, they covered everything up and put you away. It's as simple as that. I want to see them pay, and I'm pissed at what they did to you. But you're out now, and perhaps you should just walk away."

  Kathy looked at Decker long and hard. "Shit, there was a time when you'd have turned over every stone if you felt a crime had been committed. Don't you care anymore?"

  "Of course I care. I'm just being realistic. Let's say we did get into your house and got to your trunk in Rambo's pen--"

  She frowned. "Rocky's pen. The chimp's name is Rocky."

  "OK, Rocky's pen. Let's say we did get out all your discs and files, what would that prove?"

  She sighed. God, she'd been through all this already. "It would prove that Conscience was based on false data. That the original vector used on unsuspecting convicts wasn't the Version Nine vector approved by the FDA."

  Decker shook his head. Kathy could see the muscles working on his jaw. "OK, but who's going to care? Look, everyone now wants this miracle cure for crime you helped create. And since all future treatments will be done using your safe Version Nine, who gives a shit that violent cons were given potentially unsafe stuff?"

  His voice rose in volume. "Christ, Kathy, apart from the fact that you were kidnapped, why do you care? This is your dream. I've got reason to be pissed off. I've never believed in all this 'genes means everything' shit. I've spent my whole working life hunting down killers and rapists based on the notion that the way they think and behave is based on their past. I've done a pretty good job of it too. But now I discover that my own daddy was a particularly unpleasant serial rapist and murderer. And according to this brave-new Genes "R" Us world of yours, I'm suddenly no better than the scum I've hunted down."

  He lowered his voice and turned away from her. "Kathy, I've always hated the whole fascist notion of genetic predetermination, but this is what you wanted: an ordered society where unpleasant variables are canceled out. So don't accuse me of not caring."

  Kathy bit her lip. Matty was still sitting quietly in the corner of the room, his dead eyes leveled at her. She had the unsettling impression that he could see not only her but also what she was thinking.

  "Luke, that's not fair," said Matty quietly. "Hear her out. I don't agree with Kathy's ideas either, but I'm sure her motives are good. Kathy didn't want this, did you?"

  "No, of course not. Certainly not like this. Luke, I can understand why you're angry, but I'm angry too. And I want to try to stop them. Look at Axelman's death! The disc I sent you shows that his genome was altered, and any scientist with half a brain cell can plug the disc into a Genescope and it'll tell them how lethal the alterations were. Axelman wasn't corrected to make him behave better. The corrections killed him."

  "But he would have died anyway. He was on death row. And if it was just an accident, who really cares?"

  "But that's the whole point. I don't think it was an accident. Trust me, I know a bit about viral vectors; I had a good teacher. What killed Axelman and the others at San Quentin was too well designed to be an accidental mutation. Something very strange is going on. I don't know what, but it's more than Conscience. I'm sure of it."

  Decker sighed and turned toward her. His eyes searched hers, as if seeing her for the first time. She could see his analytical mind working, weighing the implications of what

  she was saying.

  "You can't do nothing, Luke," said Matty simply.

  "Gramps, I'm sorry, but would you please stay out of this?" He turned back to Kathy. "You're really sure this was no accident?"

  She paused. "Pretty damn sure. Yes."

  "Sure enough to risk your life trying to prove it?"

  She swallowed hard and took a deep breath. "This was my life, so I guess so, yes."

  Decker kept staring at her for a moment and then gave a small nod. She looked vulnerable wearing his baggy sweater and rolled-up jeans, especially with her ruffled dark hair and pale skin. But there was steel in her eyes.

  During the last few days he had watched her sleeping form toss and turn, jettisoning the drugs injected into her system. He had been consumed with anger that the director of his FBI could have justified this and whatever else she had sanctioned in the name of fighting crime.

  He was also incensed with Kathy for being so naive. She seemed to think that everything in the big bad world could be smoothed as neatly as variables in one of her experiments, that people, especially senior people, obeyed set rules and laws. But his anger was outweighed by a real fear for her, knowing that if Naylor's people got hold of her again, they would have no choice: They would kill her.

  He didn't believe in her conspiracy theory, but the cover-up was real enough. And he did want to get to the bottom of this. He hated the whole idea of Conscience, and his continually churning mind couldn't help throwing up anomalies. Kathy wouldn't have blown the whistle on the FDA scam. She would have been pissed off initially, but after calming down, she wouldn't have risked her life's work. Naylor and Prince must have known that, so kidnapping Kathy and potentially murdering her did seem excessive. Also, Alice Prince didn't seem like a person who would willingly allow Kathy, someone she knew and trusted, to be hurt--not of her own volition anyway. The San Quentin deaths weren't a factor either. As far as Naylor was concerned, no one--least of all Kathy--knew about those. The bodies had been officially executed and then cremated.

  Still, Decker couldn't see how Kathy's life was worth the futile goal of thwarting a project she herself had initiated. However, he realized that if he refused to help her, she would go it alone and wouldn't last five minutes. Plus Matty had been fussing over her the last two days, telling him how something had to be done to stop this.

  "Let's say you could prove all this, and that's a big assumption because I bet Naylor and Prince have already got plans to discredit you, then who would you tell?" />
  "Pamela Weiss."

  "What makes you think she isn't involved?" he asked. It didn't fit with his impression of her. But he wouldn't bet on Weiss's not being involved.

  "Because when Naylor and I argued about this, she insisted that Weiss knew nothing. She seemed furious at even the idea of her finding out. I'm telling you, we've got to get to Weiss." Kathy stabbed her finger into one of the photographs. It showed her house viewed from the rear. The top of Rocky's pen was just visible over the fence of the backyard. "And to make her believe us, we've got to get the evidence that proves her friends are deceiving her."

  "I assume Rambo." Decker corrected himself again. "I mean, Rocky can be noisy. And he'll get pretty excited when he sees you?"

  "Yes," said Kathy. "He'll make some noise." Her face fell. "Are you saying we can't get to the trunk until the men have gone?"

  "Not if we don't want to be found out."