A Heartbeat Away

CHAPTER 60

The Kitchen was like a ghost town. Griff’s biosuit was isolating enough when Melvin was around. Now it merely enhanced his inestimable sadness and loneliness. Each procedure felt like the last one he would be able to perform. Even with the crisis in the Capitol, and the ticking bomb of WRX3883, thoughts of Angie were the only thing keeping him on task.

After Chad Stafford and his men had retrieved Melvin from the ventilation shaft and returned to the compound, Griff had spent some time alone beside the plastic bag containing his friend’s body. His family in West Virginia had opted for cremation and a memorial service sometime in the future. Griff promised Melvin’s sister and mother that if the president survived the crisis in the Capitol, he would be there to honor the man who had done so much to save his life.

Now, he knew that he needed to have the help of his gangly, oddly obsessed soulmate one more time—as motivation to press ahead with the analysis of Johnny Ray Davis’s serum, and the incorporation of the new data into the program he had named after Orion, the hunter.

Griff barely spoke on the Army helicopter flight from El Dorado back to Kalvesta. He kept running the Led Zeppelin song “Dazed and Confused” over in his mind. It had been thirty-six hours since he left the lab—thirty-six hours of minimal sleep, of watching his closest friend be murdered, and of being battered in body and spirit.

Dazed and confused.

The president had taken almost no time at all to pardon Davis for his crimes—proof of how critical things had gotten for the seven hundred waiting in the Capitol for news that they might not die. Griff had left the now ex-convict at the hospital, where he’d undergone the plasmapheresis. The legacy of WRX3883: grisly death after grisly death, and now a double murderer set free.

Paul Rappaport was still at Kalvesta, and was there to greet Griff when he deplaned. The two men shook hands, but Griff did nothing to hide the coldness he was feeling.

You’re Genesis, you son of bitch, he thought. I know you are.

Rappaport appeared relatively calm.

“We’re counting on you, Rhodes,” was all that he said as Griff started his journey downward.

You’re counting on me to fail, Griff said to himself. But win or lose, I’m going to bring you down. And when I do, there’s going to be a photo of Melvin Forbush in your coffin.

Sergeant Stafford coordinated the security detail assigned to cover Griff, and barked out instructions that kept his team on constant alert. Stafford and some troops accompanied Griff down to the lab level. Because of the exposure risk, they guarded only the entrance to the Kitchen, not the Kitchen itself. Griff passed into the restricted area alone, carrying with him, in a large cooler lined with icepacks, six liters of Johnny Ray Davis’s anticoagulated blood.

Carefully, Griff decanted some plasma into four test tubes and set each tube in one of four wells of a large centrifuge. The instrument whirled in excess of three thousand revolutions per minute, separating cellular debris from the serum.

Seven hundred lives rested on his finding an elusive antigen, or some unusual enzyme in that serum—something that had allowed Davis to survive, while others exposed to WRX3883 had died. Seven hundred lives were running out of time.

Griff used gel electrophoresis to separate the treated serum into DNA, RNA, and protein molecules for further analysis. Police forensics used the technique to amplify DNA for their criminal investigations, but Griff was interested in every component of the serum—most specifically, something unique to J.R. Davis.

Hours passed. Frustration and apprehension grew. Fatigue became a mortal enemy. Then, suddenly, it was there.

Interleukin 6.

Davis’s serum contained ten times the normal level of the protein Interleukin 6.

Ten times the norm.

Griff checked and rechecked his technique and his calculations. He felt a vibration at the base of his neck and down his spine. He knew the sensation well. It occurred whenever an idea had begun to take hold and grow.

What, exactly, was it that the warden said about Davis? Griff tried to recall. The man could run straight to California without becoming winded—something like that. Never gets tired jogging in the yard.… Never.

It had been a simple, off-topic conversation that Griff had nearly forgotten about. But suddenly, when viewed in a different context, that comment took on an enormous new significance.

Griff knew a great deal about the IL-6 protein. It was secreted by T-cells and functioned in part to stimulate the body’s response to trauma—burns, tissue damage, and such. He was also aware that IL-6, for reasons still unknown, became elevated during periods of physical stress. He conducted some quick research on the Internet and found a study of Fuchs heterochromic iridocyclitis that linked patients with the different-colored irises to elevated levels of IL-6 in the blood. The Fuchs variant of heterochromia was associated with viral illness, probably measles.

Griff began to wonder what would happen if he added an adjuvant to Orion—a biochemical booster that amplified IL-6 production.

But which one?

More research online. More poring through his grad school notes and his files of articles.

Bless you, Melvin, for keeping everything in order. Bless you, old friend.

One possibility kept arising: antisense oligodeoxynucleotides, more commonly called ODNs. The odd name was also known by geneticists as “negative sense.” Sense and antisense proteins were increasingly being used to battle complex diseases such as AIDS, asthma, and even muscular dystrophy. In theory, a synthetic strand of the nucleic acid could bind to messenger RNA and effectively alter its behavior.

Griff powered up his computer. He modified Orion’s programming to include an ODN adjuvant that stimulated IL-6 production from the body’s lymph nodes and spleen. In his program, Griff magnified the production of IL-6 until the levels cranked out by the body treated with ODN matched those found in Davis’s blood.

Ten times the norm.

Side effects of the treatment were not a concern. With a WRX infection, the only thing worse than the inevitable death were the days that preceded it.

Adding the antisense/ODN adjuvant to his Orion program took more than four hours. Griff had barely eaten or slept in two days. Still, with the excitement of the discovery, he found that his focus was sharp. His brain was pulsating with possibilities.

Work, baby!… Come on, deliver for Papa!

When the programming was complete, Griff sat in silence for a time, with his finger poised above the Return key, set to execute Orion’s “run” sequence. Images of the Capitol and Jim Allaire tumbled through his thoughts along with those of Angie and Melvin and Louisa and even Moonshine. Finally, his jaw set, he held his breath and pressed the key.

Orion was programmed by Griff to terminate computation the instant it failed. No reason to waste computing time processing a dead-end treatment. The longer Orion’s program processed, the greater the probability of success. Over the years of working in Sylvia Chen’s lab, Griff had run thousands of simulations that churned through thousands of preprogrammed assumptions, subroutines, and over a hundred thousand lines of complex code. In all that time, Orion had never run for longer than ten minutes.

Griff watched the digital clock on his computer monitor as it counted the time.

Two minutes passed … then three … then five.

Griff could feel the adrenaline rushing through his circulation.

Eight minutes … nine …

At the ten-minute-and-zero-second mark, Orion’s program terminated with the abruptness of a racecar hitting a wall. Griff knew without having to read through the output what had happened. His system had failed once again.

Four more hours.

Griff tweaked the levels of the adjuvant to drive the IL-6 levels from ten times normal up to thirty, always in increments of five. He ran a test for each change that he made.

Every time, Orion’s treatment simulation failed, and always at the ten-minute-zero-second mark.

Beneath his suit, Griff was sweating profusely now. He was exhausted to the point of delirium. But time was continuing to spill away for the people in the Capitol. He refused to quit—to believe that he and the system he so believed in had failed.

Then, like a lantern approaching through fog, an idea came to him.

What if IL-6 levels were just a part of the solution? What if there was something unique in Davis’s serum itself that would make the treatment work?

Griff altered Orion’s programming so that in addition to the antisense/ODN booster, it incorporated an exact replica of the DNA, RNA, and proteins found in Davis’s blood.

Then, once again, his eyes fixed on the counter, he initiated the program.

Once again, Orion began to synthesize a blocker against the growth of the WRX virus.

At the nine-minute mark, Griff felt a tremor of anticipation begin. At nine minutes and forty-five seconds he began to hyperventilate—short, shallow, rapid respirations.

He closed his eyes, waited for as long as he could stand, then looked at the timer.

Eleven minutes and forty-eight seconds, and Orion was still running.

In all, it took twenty-five minutes for the program to complete. Griff, flushed with excitement, waited for the output to compile. When the data finished processing, he sank into his chair. He’d been so conditioned to expect failure that when success finally had occurred, he did not exactly know how to feel.

Angie was the key. If she had not succeeded in New York, none of this would have been possible. Because of her, they had an antiviral treatment. He wished he could call and tell her, but with Rappaport listening in, he wasn’t certain the idea was a good one.

Then Griff began to wonder. Orion had worked. At least, according to the computer it had worked. The data said the drug would be a success, but he had no empirical proof—no infected subjects that he had cured.

What should be done next?

The laboratory had an extensive supply of biological and synthetic agents to work with. He checked the reagent case and confirmed there was enough antisense/ODN on hand for him to perform at least one test.

Then he asked himself if he really needed a test to prove that his treatment worked. Wasn’t his computer model proof enough? Wasn’t that the point of his work? Hadn’t he found a way to develop and test drugs that spared animals from the agony and torture of experimentation?

He studied Orion’s output files again, imagining himself standing at a crossroad. But unlike the crossroad immortalized in song and story, Griff suspected the devil was waiting for him regardless of which direction he chose. He closed his eyes and waited for the answer to come. Soon, his thoughts became filled with noise. It took time for him to recognize the hideous sounds—they were the screams of monkeys, dying in Hell’s Kitchen from an accidental overdose of WRX3883.

In that moment, Griff knew exactly what he had to do.

He stood up from his workstation. His legs were barely functional from sitting for so long. He carefully retrieved living WRX3883 virus from the cultures that Melvin had maintained, and used a syringe to mix the virus with a hundred milliliters of saline solution. In theory, his computer models alone should be enough proof that he had succeeded.

In his heart, though, he knew that was not enough.

Perhaps one day Orion would be used to jump-start a movement that would reduce or, better still, eliminate animal testing in both virology and other areas of medical and product research. But for now, the certain path to an antiviral treatment, no matter what his computer spit out, was to work with an infected host.

Moving as in a dream, Griff disconnected his air hose and unzipped his biocontainment suit. He removed his helmet and gratefully wiped the sweat from his face. Then he set the syringe down on the table and prepared a single dose of Orion’s theoretical antiviral treatment—a mixture of Johnny Ray Davis’s serum and a powerful IL-6 boosting adjuvant. He had the perfect test subject to prove all of his theories and validate all of his work.

He had himself.