18
Eddie Karn was
having trouble sleeping after a long day treated to Washington’s
auto-da-fé.
Dr. Edward Jason
Karn, graduate of Princeton, 1979, had been nominated by the
president for the position of commissioner of the Food and Drug
Administration. The nomination came as a mild shock to Eddie, whose
outspoken insistence on the need to subject certain genetically
modified foods to premarket approval by the FDA had met with
considerable resistance, and the agency was obviously an anathema
to the entire grocery lobby. Dr. Karn did not hesitate to speak out
on the elimination of rBGH (bovine growth hormone) from the food
supply, nor did he temper his opinion on chemically-altered
feedstock given to chicken and pigs to make them fatter and
meatier. He didn’t believe enough long-term testing had been
conducted on chemical additives, and as far as genetically modified
foods were concerned, scientists were just beginning to understand
gene sequencing in humans, enabling them to isolate certain genes
that might predispose certain individuals to illness. How could
anyone be sure that genetically modified foods were not causing
illness by disrupting normal gene functioning? Karn also believed
that mutations in the very structure of DNA might result from such
modifications.
But his gastronomic
conservatism didn’t end there. A bachelor, Karn shopped at the
Whole Foods Market, eating products without preservatives,
hormones, colorings, or bleached flour. Eddie Karn talked the talk
and walked the walk.
So why had he been
nominated by a conservative administration? One reason. Politics,
plain and simple.
The sitting
president was quickly losing his political capital, with approval
numbers falling into the low forties. Things were not going well at
home and abroad, and the White House chief of staff decided that
the Oval Office needed to score a few victories. Supreme Court
nominees, for example, might be easier to confirm if the
administration threw Congress a bone in the form of a liberal FDA
commissioner. It was a show of bipartisanship that might provide
even the most stubborn senators with enough incentive to confirm
High Court nominees while making some good old-fashioned pork
barrel trades on the side. A Supreme Court seat was for life. FDA
commissioners usually came and went with administrations. The White
House was far more interested in restructuring the court than
battling feeble attempts, doomed to failure, aimed at changing the
entire food industry. It was doubtful Karn could affect FDA
regulatory processes which had been in place for years without new
laws that the right would never allow. It was a win-win situation
for an administration with other agendas.
Aware of political
realities, Karn was completely at ease with the rationale behind
his selection. If becoming a political pawn enabled him to put some
ideas into public awareness, even if he couldn’t implement them,
then so be it.
Over and above the
odd alignment of political planets that led to his selection, Karn
was certainly qualified for the job. After five years in private
practice, the well-known oncologist spent four years as president
of the American Cancer Society. He spent another seven years with
the CDC, monitoring the incidence of various diseases in southern
states bordering the Mississippi River, where cancer rates were
unusually high since industry used the Big Muddy as its primary
means for the disposal of toxic waste. Phenol levels alone were off
the chart. The last ten years of his career were spent overseeing
research at Sloan Kettering and Johns Hopkins respectively, where
he had investigated how human genes were affected by chemical
agents and preservatives. His research convinced him that Americans
had no idea what they were ingesting.
Political or not,
Karn was exhilarated over his nomination. Then he learned that
Henry Broome was on the Senate Committee on Health, Education,
Labor & Pensions. Karn never forgot the night he witnessed
Henry Broome dumpsterize Bruce Merewether back in college, and had
kept a watchful eye on him, out of simple curiosity at first.
Subsequently, he found Henry’s career moves rather
suspect.
Henry Broome IV
always prospered after people unexpectedly retired or succumbed to
mysterious illnesses. The naturally wary Karn didn’t trust the
braggart ex-jock. As a matter of fact, Karn thought Senator Broome
was downright dangerous.
Karn had been wise
to curtail his enthusiasm. During Karn’s courtesy visits to the
Hill, Broome was habitually “called to the floor.” This left Karn
at the mercy of Henry’s staff, comprised to a large extent of
twenty-four-year-olds dressed out of the Talbots catalog who were
even less articulate on food and drug issues than on the novels
studied—though not necessarily read—in college lit seminars. The
inanity of the questions from Henry’s staff during preliminary
interviews gave Karn virtually no opportunity to prepare for
Henry’s own issues and inquiries—or rather those of the lobbyists
who kept him fed and watered—which he would have to address when
the actual hearings finally began.
In the hearing room,
Henry greeted Karn off-camera like a long-lost friend. A
traditional two-handed grip and a string of reminiscences from
college days led Karn to the witness seat. Having seen Henry’s
ruthless behavior at Princeton firsthand, Karn detested this false
show of camaraderie. And false it was. The moment the chairman’s
gavel opened the proceedings, Broome grilled the physician
mercilessly on his positions regarding the possible danger of
chemical additives and genetically modified foods. Karn’s
confirmation hearings were as acrimonious as those for Robert Bork
in 1988, when Bork had been recommended for a Supreme Court
seat.
Henry was not the
only senator to adopt an attack posture, however. Despite Karn’s
attractiveness to the left, liberal senators suddenly realized that
they represented America’s breadbasket. It was one thing to get up
close and personal to visit voters at home, but they didn’t expect
to see constituents unceremoniously bumping up and down past their
offices in tractors, trucked in overnight thanks to the grocery
lobby, and waving distinctly unfriendly signs such as “KEEP KARN
OUT OF THE BARN.” One or two who actually served on their senators’
finance committees scraped enough mud off their shoes to mosey
upstairs into the rarified offices of the Senate in order to
explain to their representatives that reelection should not be
regarded as a given no matter how much money was stashed away in
the local party’s war chest.
The committee vote
was 17-4 against Karn, a doleful political lynching of the first
order. Karn’s White House handlers professed the proper amount of
shock and betrayal at the hands of conservative Senate leaders,
while most pundits thought the president should have withdrawn the
nomination to save the very respectable oncologist considerable
humiliation at the hands of his questioners. Thanks to Senator
Broome, the hearings had become an inquisition, making Dr. Edward
Karn look like a New Age lunatic who would disrupt the country’s
entire food chain, spiking prices in the process because of his
hard-line stance against what most people regarded as scientific
progress. Consumers wanted to see products moving swiftly along the
supermarket’s conveyor belt, not a warning leaflet from the
paranoid Dr. Karn.
And that was how
Eddie Karn knew that Henry was still the same monster he’d known in
college.
As morning broke,
Gwen felt renewed, invigorated. Adrenaline flooded her bloodstream
as she put on her PHS uniform while Jack slept peacefully in the
gray dawn. She left his favorite cereal on the counter—Cap’n Crunch
(boys will be boys, she figured)—and was out the door by
7:30.
Gwen flipped on the
fluorescent lights of her office at exactly 8:15. She hastily
reviewed some trivial reports littering her desk, grabbed a cup of
coffee, met with a coworker to discuss projected flu stats for the
coming winter, and then impatiently waited for the digital clock on
her desk to register nine o’clock in green block
letters.
A few minutes before
nine, her phone rang unexpectedly.
“Gwen? Dardenoff
here.”
“How are you, Dave,
what’s going on?”
“Something a bit
puzzling at this end. Not quite sure what to make of it … After we
spoke, I decided to run some of your friend’s brain tissue for
advanced testing in the hopes of finding something.”
“And?” Gwen
asked.
“No other traces of
foreign substances, but the cyclic AMP level in the brain was off
the charts. I see that sometimes in cocaine-related seizures and
the crystal meth that those bikers like to cook up. I haven’t seen
it before in a plain old overworked smoker.”
“What do you make of
it, Dave?”
“I’m kind of at a
loss here. It’s not a test we do very often because it doesn’t
really help establish any kind of cause. On the other hand, it’s a
pretty unexpected finding and I thought you would like to
know.”
“Do you think there
was some sort of foul play?” asked Gwen.
“I really don’t know
what to think. I’ll call again if anything comes up.”
Dardenoff ’s call
shook Gwen to her core. There was just no way she was going to
leave this one alone. Marci deserved more of an explanation than
“worked herself to death.” It was time to play her strongest
card.
Gwen’s fingers
practically dialed by themselves. “Is Jan Menefee in?” Gwen
asked.
“One moment please,”
replied the passionless voice of a receptionist.
Gwen nervously
tapped a ballpoint pen against a coffee cup with PEQUOD’S glazed
around its surface in large letters. In the thirty agonizing
seconds before a familiar voice announced its presence at the other
end of the line, she pictured Jan in her mind—brilliant scientist
by day, flirt and party girl by night.
“Menefee.”
“Hi, Jan. It’s Gwen
Maulder. How are you?”
“Other than shocked,
fine. I haven’t heard from you since last year when you called
about that botulism hoax. What kind of deadly disease warrants a
call from my old friend today?”
“Okay, guilty as
charged, Jan. Sorry I’ve been out of touch. Can I blame my lack of
social graces on my husband by any chance?”
“Is he being a
pain?”
“Not really, but I
thought it was worth a shot.”
“Then what can I do
for ya this time, Cap’n?”
Gwen paused and
closed her eyes. She would lay out the story as best she could and
hope that Jan would understand the urgent nature of her call. “A
good friend of mine died in May. Marci Newman.”
“You talked about
her a lot in medical school. Your undergrad roomie, right? That’s
pretty awful.”
“Thanks. It was very
… unexpected. There was no history of disease whatsoever except for
mitral valve prolapse.” Gwen related the details to Jan, as few as
they were, anticipating the response.
“Sounds like another
victim of stress in the twenty-first century,” lamented Jan. “At
Marci’s age, I doubt smoking contributed to her death, but then
hey—I don’t think Big Tobacco has come clean yet on what kind of
additives go into cancer sticks. I don’t know what to think about
those cyclic AMP levels. It’s not the kind of thing that gets
measured routinely at autopsy and you sure can’t take brain samples
in normal healthy living people for comparison. I can understand
why you might be a bit suspicious, though. Hey, on a different
subject, it’s a shame that Eddie Karn wasn’t taken seriously as a
candidate for your front office. I heard the word ‘additives’
causes him to bristle, which didn’t play well at his confirmation
hearings.”
Gwen scratched the
words, “cigarettes/additives” on a memo pad. Upon awaking that
morning, she’d decided to make a list of any and all possibilities.
Fitz Rule Number Three: Leave no stone unturned.
“Yeah,” Gwen said.
“Karn’s a decent guy from what I’ve heard, but I don’t know that
it’s feasible to start looking in every box of chocolate chip
cookies to see if the chemicals that extend shelf life will cause
us all to grow an extra finger. We have to find a happy medium or
we’ll all go completely bonkers.”
“Point well taken.
But how can I help you with the death of Marci Newman? Is there
something you haven’t told me yet?”
“Actually,” replied
Gwen, “I was hoping there was something you could tell
me.”
“I’m not
following.”
“BioNet. Word up
here in Rockville is that it can track small trends in large
populations.”
“Absolutely. It
passed its trials with flying colors, although it really hasn’t had
any serious test of its potential, which I suppose is good when you
remember that it’s designed to pick up signs of
bioterrorism—exposure to powders, gas, viral and nerve
agents—things like that. It can also key on symptoms of something
out of left field, like SARS. Hopefully, it won’t be detecting
anything at all if the supersnoops at the FBI and CIA are getting
their act together. At present, we’re just beginning to do regular
surveillance runs to see what’s out there.”
“What if you
programmed BioNet to look for cause of death in people in the
thirty-to-forty age group, people who were thought to be otherwise
healthy?”
“I’d say you were
casting an awfully big dragnet. Too many young people die everyday,
Gwen. I don’t have to remind you of that. BioNet is sensitive, but
I can pretty much guarantee that it’s going to spit out a normal
morbidity and mortality curve for any segment of the
population.”
Gwen leaned back in
her chair, fingers laced behind her head.
“What if we narrow
it down and look for people who died after a seizure episode?” Gwen
realized that if cigarettes were involved, young people wouldn’t be
the only ones affected, although teens and twenty-somethings were
indeed smoking more than older people during the past decade, with
seniors turning to nicotine patches and gum in droves. Tobacco
aside, the idea that the mysterious trend for which she was hunting
involved only younger members of the population was an unwarranted
assumption. She was, after all, trying to look at things from a
greater perspective, Fitz Rule Number Two.
“Seizures?” said
Jan. “Very doable, since seizure activity, as luck would have it,
has already been programmed into the system. Many chemical agents
used by terrorists push people right over the seizure threshold, so
it’s an integral part of the project.”
“What kind of
statistical breakdown can BioNet provide?”
“Let me give you a
mundane but very accurate example. Every community in the country
with public sewage can measure the volume of refuse processed by
its treatment plant on a minute-by-minute basis, providing an
extremely accurate measure of toilet flushes per minute. Big deal,
right? Actually, a sudden spike in flushing might indicate a
possible attack of the runs on a community-wide basis. This might
signal nothing more than beef poisoning from a bad fast-food chain,
but it could just as easily point to something far more insidious,
such as the introduction of a deadly viral agent to the community’s
water supply. Thanks to Homeland Security, BioNet is linked to an
unbelievable number of information sources, with sewage plants
being just one example among thousands. If a threat were to be
identified, the system could tell you age, gender, race,
geographical location, preexisting medical conditions—could tell
you almost anything, in fact, except whether or not a patient
attends church regularly.”
“Damn,” said Gwen.
“It’s that good?”
“Yep. The joke down
here is that it should be able to predict the stock market by next
year. Let me give you the short version of BioNet’s capabilities. I
already told you that BioNet is first and foremost an amazing data
bank that has amassed more information than any previous computer
or record-keeping system in history. That alone makes it worth its
weight in gold. For starters, BioNet can search its database for
routine patterns, such as where certain disease outbreaks usually
arise or what age groups are most susceptible to certain kinds of
infections, but that’s just the tip of this cyber-iceberg. It can
correlate different sets of variables, be they geographical
location, ethnicity, symptoms—you name it—and show possible
relationships within a matter of seconds, whereas old-fashioned
medical research could take weeks, months, or even years to
establish patterns. That’s just Level I, however.”
Gwen chuckled. “What
is Level II? A computer from Star Trek?”
“Actually, you’re
not far off the mark. Level II is what makes BioNet a quantum
computer, the very first of its kind.”
“Quantum?”
“Yes. Follow along,
and I’ll forego the lecture on Boolean algorithms, which, in a
nutshell, give computers the ability to process yes-no and
either-or statements. We’ve all seen messages displayed such as ‘Do
you wish to quit this application?’—yes or no—or ‘Choose drive C or
drive D as file destination’—an either-or decision. Here’s where it
gets creepy, though. In a Quatum computer, each bit—or quibit—can
have a value of zero, one, or anything in between, exponentially
increasing the power of computation.”
“If you say so,
Jan.”
“I say so, Gwen.
What BioNet is programmed to do at Level II is to decide which
probable realities are most likely to exist given a set of
variables, and what realities might be expected to exist in the
future. It takes the entire yes-no, either-or computer logic to a
level of programming based on quantum physics. Theoretically, it
can actually predict outbreaks before they happen. Likewise—and
here’s the real beauty of the entire system—it can assign a
preliminary diagnosis to a set of symptoms and then extrapolate
backward to find the agent responsible—environmental, viral,
bacterial, what-have-you. Does that mean BioNet is perfect in using
quantum probability as its programming foundation? Let me just say
this: in simulations, it hypothesized heretofore-unknown viruses as
the cause of a disease by deciding on the probability of viral
mutations. Yep, I’d say we’re most definitely in Star Trek
territory, my dear Dr. Maulder.”
“To say I’m
impressed would be an understatement,” Gwen admitted. “I could also
ask a million follow-up questions, the answers to which I wouldn’t
understand. So the bottom line is this: will you run my data at
Level I, Jan? On the q.t.? Depending on results, we can move to
Level II.”
“Sure, but no need
for secrecy. With seizure frequency built into the program, I can
run it at will. Shouldn’t raise a single eyebrow. And since I’m the
director, who’s going to tell me I can’t play with my own toy? As
far as I’m concerned, this is what BioNet was designed to do.
You’re an FDA epidemiologist with a concern. Period.”
“You’re a peach,
Jan. I owe you.”
“Hey, I’m a Georgia
gal, Gwen. Of course I’m a peach. And all you owe me are a few more
calls from time to time. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Gwen hung up and sat
back in her seat, feeling a sense of accomplishment that had eluded
her for too long. For the first time since Marci died, Gwen felt
that she might finally know what happened to her.
Her good mood lasted
until 5:15 that afternoon. That was when she got an e-mail from her
boss, Ralph Snyder. Gwen had been around the agency long enough to
know that no end-of-the-day e-mail was a good harbinger,
particularly when it came directly from above rather than through
the bureaucratic chain of secretaries and administrative
assistants. The note was terse and to the point. It read, “Can we
review your current workload, recent accomplishments, and job
priorities in my office Monday morning at eleven?”
The seemingly
straightforward question was a bad omen. In bureaucratic parlance,
“review” was a sure indication that something was going to change.
Snyder couldn’t fire Gwen without citing an incident of gross
negligence or incompetence, but he could make her life hell by
dumping paperwork in her lap, reducing her to nothing more than a
secretary compiling stats.
Why would he
suddenly be on her case? Gwen knit her brows and tried to recall
something—anything—that would have caused the anal-retentive Snyder
to single her out for reassignment. No, there was nothing she could
think of. Her duties had remained constant except for work
resulting from the occasional request from Snyder himself to
supervise fieldwork in various cities for limited periods of time.
What interest, she wondered, could Snyder possibly have in her “job
priorities”?
She left the
building and then stopped dead in her tracks. “Oh shit,” she
muttered, her legs suddenly feeling weak. She slid into the
driver’s seat of her trusted blue Nissan Maxima and lowered her
head onto the steering wheel.
The call to Jan
Menefee. Snyder must have somehow learned of her request to use
BioNet.
“Dammit,” Gwen said,
raising her head. “It’s a valid inquiry. It’s what I’m supposed to
do.”
Gwen could hear
Snyder’s high-pitched, whining voice lecturing her on the need to
separate her actions on behalf of the agency from a single case,
and one without a great deal of merit, involving a
friend.
Gwen turned the
ignition key and backed out of her parking space, attempting to
parse the matter in her thoughts as she began her drive back to
Garrett Park. How could Snyder possibly know of her call to Jan—and
know so quickly … unless she was under surveillance. She was alone
when she made the call, and even if a secretary had overheard her,
the subject of her conversation was routine. She was conducting
medical business, which is why the FDA cut her a paycheck every two
weeks. The only logical conclusion was that someone didn’t want her
investigating Marci Newman’s death.
She would tell Jack
about Snyder’s e-mail as soon as she walked through the front door.
If anyone knew about being under surveillance, it was a former
Secret Service agent.
No. That was the one
thing she definitely couldn’t do. Jack would say that enough was
enough. He would tell her to back away—safety first—and then he’d
recite a dozen other maxims. Being a former special agent, he would
probably do some snooping, but he wouldn’t bend over backwards to
find out why Snyder was unhappy. On the contrary, he would be
secretly elated that the agency itself stamped the death of Marci
Newman out of bounds as a legitimate avenue of inquiry. He’d also
be supremely pissed that she had called Jan Menefee in the first
place.
The deep green
foliage of a late summer afternoon drifted by the car window. She
had to confide in somebody. But who could help her? Perhaps more
importantly, whom could she really trust?
I can trust Mark. The thought surprised her as soon
as it came to her. Mark Stern? Was there some cosmic reason why
she’d read his byline just yesterday? Was there even a bigger
cosmic reason why he was in Washington at all? Gwen wasn’t sure she
believed in such things, but she also didn’t believe in accidents.
It wasn’t an accident that she flipped open the paper the way she
did last night. Maybe she needed to know that Mark was
there.
And regardless of
how she felt about their time as lovers or Mark’s ability to ever
join the adult segment of the human race, she knew one thing
absolutely—she could trust him with anything. But should she
contact him? If she did, she wouldn’t be able to let Jack know for
any number of reasons. Did she really want to do this behind Jack’s
back?
No, she
didn’t.
Not yet,
anyway.