“Oh, Jesus, Kate…don’t give that asshole mouth-to-mouth. Besides, he’s dead.”
“I know,” said Kate, bending closer, “but we have to try.”
Tom cursed and set the shotgun against the wall. Lifting Joshua, he stepped toward the door. Kate fought down a sudden surge of nausea and lowered her face toward the dead man’s.
The intruder’s eyes snapped open like an owl’s, Kate screamed, and he shoved her aside and vaulted to his feet, leaping toward Tom and the baby.
Tom turned instinctively, shielding Joshua from the stranger. The man landed on Tom’s back and Joshua tumbled to the floor and rolled under the crib, screaming.
The man in black threw Tom against the wall and leaped for him, long fingers going for his throat. Tom met the attack with a stiff arm and upraised palm that flattened the intruder’s nose like a pulped tomato. The man snarled—the first sound that Kate had heard from him—and threw Tom ten feet through the open screen door to the balcony. Then he pivoted, reminding Kate of a giant spider, and began scrabbling under the crib to get at Joshua.
Kate’s first and strongest impulse had been to get to her child. But her brain had overridden her instinct, and she had left Joshua under the crib while she crawled across the carpet to the shotgun.
The intruder saw what she was doing. He gave up reaching for the screaming child and leaped to his feet and bounded across the room toward her.
Later, Kate did not remember pumping another shell into the chamber or lifting the weapon. Nor could she remember pulling the trigger.
But she would always remember the terrible blast, the sight of the man catapulted backward through the glass of the sliding door, and the terrible angle of his body sprawled across the balcony overlooking the ravine. Tom had just gotten to his knees and now he shielded himself from a hailstorm of shattered glass.
Kate staggered to her feet and stepped forward, staring through the smashed glass at the intruder’s body. This blast had almost separated his left arm from his torso. She could see exposed ribs gleaming.
“Kat!” shouted Tom at the same instant the intruder jackknifed forward and seized her ankle.
She went down hard on her back, her head hitting the leg of the crib. The man pulled himself through the shattered door, using just his right arm.
Dazed, only half-conscious, forgetting her Hippocratic Oath and her lifelong pledge of non-violence, she raised the Remington, pumped the last shell in, and shot the man in the chest and face from point-blank range even as he reached past her for Joshua.
This time the blast knocked the man out the door, across the patio, and over the railing into the sixty-foot ravine below.
And then Kate remembered nothing except Joshua in her arms, still crying but unhurt, and Tom’s arm around her, Tom’s voice soothing her as he led her into the lighted living room and called the police.
Chapter Sixteen
KATE had been on the ER end of ambulance runs during her residency years ago, but it was as if she had never seen paramedics in action on site before. They arrived ten minutes before the police and seemed to take the blood- and glass-filled nursery for granted. One of the men went to check for signs of the intruder in the ravine while the remaining male and female paramedic set Tom’s dislocated shoulder, pulled shards of glass from his back, and checked Kate and Joshua over and pronounced them unhurt. Kate and Tom both pulled on some clothes in preparation for the next wave of officialdom.
Three Boulder police cars and the sheriff s 4 × 4 arrived at the same time, blue and red lights flashing across the meadow and shimmering on the windows. The paramedics were trying to get Tom to go to the hospital, but he refused; the detectives interviewed Tom in one room, Kate in the other. She never let go of Joshua.
Powerful flashlights were probing the ravine when Tom and Kate pulled on their jackets, bundled Joshua in a heavy blanket, and stood at the edge of the patio to watch.
“It’s at least eighty feet down there,” said the sheriff. “And there’s no way down to the stream except down this cliff.”
“It’s less than sixty feet,” said Tom, standing at the edge of the granite and sandstone bluff. The shrubs there were broken and tom. Kate could hear the stream trickling at the bottom of the ravine; it was a sound she had grown so used to that she normally ignored it.
“The body could have washed downstream,” said the chief Boulder detective. He was young and bearded and had dressed hurriedly in sweatshirt and chinos under a corduroy jacket.
“The stream’s pretty shallow this time of year,” said Tom. “No more than six or eight inches of water in the deeper spots.”
The detective shrugged. The sheriff’s men were rigging a Perlon climbing rope around the large ponderosa pine at the edge of the patio.
“You’re sure you didn’t recognize the man?” asked the detective sergeant for the third time.
“No. I mean, I’m sure,” said Kate. Joshua was sleeping in the folds of blanket, the pacifier still in his mouth.
“And you don’t know how he got in?”
Kate looked around. “The sheriff said that the kitchen door had been jimmied. Is that correct, Sheriff?”
The sheriff nodded. “Pane cut out. Both inside locks opened. It looked fairly professional.”
The detective made a note and looked over to where the sheriffs people and the paramedics were arguing about how to rig the ropes. Uniformed police officers walked along the edge of the ravine, shining flashlights down into the darkness.
The chief detective came out of the house holding a plastic baggie. Kate saw the gleam of steel in it. He held it up to the light. “Know what this is?” he asked.
Kate shook her head.
“Fancy little palm knife,” he said, showing her how it was held, the steel knub against his palm, the double-edged blade protruding between the knuckles of two fingers. The detective turned to Tom. “He had this in his hand when he came at you?”
“Yeah. Excuse me a second, Lieutenant.” Tom walked over to the sheriffs deputies and quietly showed them how the Perlon lines had to be rigged. Then he borrowed a web harness from a paramedic and clicked a carabinier in place as if to demonstrate how to prepare for a rappel.
“Hey!” shouted the deputy as Tom leaned back, one arm still in a sling, and gracefully rappelled over the edge of the cliff.
A paramedic tied on to his own line and followed him down the cliff. The uniformed officers swung their lights onto the duo as they bounced down rock and dropped gently into the shrubs and dwarf juniper at the base of the cliff. Tom looked up, waved with his good hand, and unclipped from the Perlon line. Deputies scurried to hook on and follow.
The sun came up before the search was called off. Kate had carried Joshua into the house and tucked him in her own bed; when she came back out, Tom was pulling himself easily up the rock face with one arm while the deputies and paramedics huffed and puffed to climb with both arms busy.
He stepped onto the patio, unclipped his carabinier, and shook his head.
“No body,” gasped a deputy coming over the edge. “Lots of blood and broken branches, but no body.”
The detective sergeant took out his notebook and stepped close to Kate. He looked tired and the brilliant morning light gleamed on gray stubble. “Ma’am, you’re sure you hit this guy with both shotgun loads?”
“Three times,” said Tom, putting his good arm around her. “Twice at ranges of less than four feet.”
The detective shook his head and stepped back to the bluff. “Then it’s just time until we find the body,” he said. “Then maybe we’ll figure out who he was and why he was trying to kidnap your baby.”
Tom nodded and went into the house with Kate.
On Monday, Ken Mauberly called Kate into his office. She had been expecting the invitation.
Mauberly was the chief administrator for the Rocky Mountain Region CDC, but his office was the only one in the NCAR/CDC complex without windows. He said that the view distracted him. Kate
sometimes thought that this choice of an office said much about the character of the man: quiet, dedicated to work, self-effacing, competent, and fanatical only about his long-distance running.
He waved her to a seat and slouched in his own chair. His jacket was draped over the back of the chair, his tie was loosened, and his sleeves were rolled up. He leaned across the desk and folded his hands. “Kate, I heard about the problem you had Saturday night. It’s terrible, just terrible to have your home invaded like that. Are you and the baby all right?”
Kate assured him that they were fine.
“And the police haven’t caught the assailant?”
“No. They found some signs that he might have left the stream about half a mile below the house, but there’s been nothing definite. They’ve put out some sort of bulletin based on the description Tom and I gave them.”
“And your ex-husband is all right?”
Kate nodded. “His arm was injured slightly, but this morning he was pressing weights with it.” She paused. “Tom is staying with us…with Julie and the baby and me…until they find the guy or we all get our courage back.”
Mauberly tapped a pencil against his cheek. “Good, good. You know, it’s funny, Kate. I’ve opposed capital punishment all of my adult life, but if I woke as you did to find someone in my child’s bedroom…well, I wouldn’t hesitate a second to end that person’s life on the spot.” Embarrassed, he set the pencil on the desk.
“Ken,” said Kate, “I appreciate the sentiments, but you wanted to talk to me about something else, didn’t you?”
The administrator leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “Yes, Kate, I did. I haven’t had a chance to tell you what a fine job you did on the Romanian tour…both while you were there and in the report you did afterward. Billington and Chen at the WHO tell me that it was pivotal in helping form policy toward the relief effort. Pivotal.”
Kate smiled. “But what have I done for you recently?”
Mauberly returned the smile. “That’s not quite how I’d put it, Kate. But it has been a couple of months since you’ve gone full time into another project. I’d hoped that you’d head up the Colorado Springs Hepatitis-B investigation…not that Bob Underhill isn’t capable, don’t misunderstand me, but—”
“But I’ve spent a lot of my time and the Center’s resources in trying to cure my son,” Kate said softly.
The administrator rubbed his fingers together. “That’s totally understandable, Kate. What I’d hoped to do with you is discuss some alternatives. A friend of mine, Dick Clempton, is at Children’s Hospital in Denver, and he’s one of the best ADA men in—”
Kate unsnapped her briefcase, removed a thick file, and shoved it across the desk to her boss. Mauberly blinked.
“Read it, Ken,” she said.
Without another word he pulled his glasses out of his shirt pocket and began reading. After the third page, he took his glasses off and stared at her. “This is hard fact?”
Kate nodded. “You see who signed the imaging and lab reports. Donna McPherson has repeated the tests twice. There’s no doubt that the patient’s body… Joshua’s body…is somehow cannibalizing the necessary genetic components to reinvigorate its own immune system.”
Mauberly glanced through the rest of the papers, skimming the more technical pages to read the conclusions. “My God,” he said at last. “Have you conferred with anyone outside the Center?”
“I’ve gotten some ideas without revealing all of what you’re looking at,” said Kate. “Yamasta at the Georgetown University International Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Immunology, Bennet at SUNY Buffalo, Paul Sampson at Trudeau…all good people.”
“And?”
“And none of them have even a hypothesis how a SCID child can effect a spontaneous remission of such marked hypogammaglobulinemia with just blood transfusions as a catalyst.”
Mauberly rubbed his lower lip with the earpiece of his glasses. “And do you? Have a hypothesis, I mean.”
Kate took a deep breath. She had not suggested such a thing to anyone yet. But now everything depended on sharing her thoughts with her boss: not just the incredible breakthroughs she thought might be possible, not just her job, but Joshua’s life.
“Yes,” she said, “I have a theory.” Unable to stay seated, Kate stood and leaned on the back of her chair. “Ken, imagine a group of people—an extended family, say—living in a remote region of an isolated Eastern European country. Say that family has suffered from a severe but classic case of SCID…a form of the disease that exhibited all four strains: reticular dysgenesis, Swiss-type, ADA deficiency, and SCID with B lymphocytes.”
Mauberly nodded. “I’d say that family would die out in a generation.”
“Yes,” said Kate and leaned farther forward, “unless there were a cellular or physiological mutation in that family—passed on only through recessive genes—which allowed it to cannibalize genetic material from donor blood so that their own immunodeficiency was overcome. Such a group could survive for centuries without being noticed by medical authorities. And given the rarity of the double recessive appearing, few offspring would be born with either SCID or the mutational compensation.”
“All right,” said Mauberly, “assuming there are a few people—a very few people—in the world with this accelerated immune response. And the child you adopted is one of them. How does it work?”
Kate went over the broad outlines of the data, never talking down to Mauberly as layman—he was too brilliant and too conversant in medical realities for that—but also never getting bogged down in either overly technical details or idle speculation.
“All right,” she summarized, “this indicates that—one, Joshua’s body has a way of adapting human blood as a repair mechanism for his own immunodeficiency; two, there is someplace—possibly that blood-rich shadow organ Alan isolated—where the blood is broken down; three, the constituent genetic material is disseminated throughout his body to catalyze the immune system.”
“How?” said Mauberly. The administrator’s eyes were very bright.
Kate spread her hands in front of her the way she did when guest-lecturing at a medical school. “Best guess is that the transmitter component of Joshua’s disease is a retrovirus…something as persistent as HIV, only with life-giving rather than fatal consequences. From the data, we know the dissemination is very rapid, much more aggressive than HIV even in its most virulent stages.”
“It would have to be,” interrupted Mauberly, “if it were to have any survival value for the SCID-symptomized family or families in which the mutation appeared. A slow immunological reconstruction would be useless when the slightest head cold in the interim would be fatal.”
“Exactly,” said Kate, unable to hide her own excitement. “But if the mutated retrovirus can be isolated…cloned…then—” She was unable to go on, despite the importance of doing so.
Mauberly’s gaze was elsewhere. His voice was shaky. “It’s premature, Kate. You know what we’re thinking is premature.”
“Yes, but—”
He held up one hand. “But the payoff would be so dramatic…so miraculous.” He closed Joshua’s file and slid it back across the desk to her. “What do you need?”
Kate almost collapsed into her chair. “I need time to work on this project. We’ll code-name it…oh, RS-91 or R3.”
Mauberly raised an eyebrow.
“RS for retrovirus search and for Romanian Solution,” she said with the slightest smile. “R3 for Romanian Recessive Retrovirus.”
“You’ll get the time,” promised Mauberly. “And the budget. If I have to sell one of the Crays. What else?”
Kate had thought it all out. “Continued use of the imaging facilities, Pathology, and at least one Class-VI lab,” she said. “And the best people to go with them.”
“Why the Class-VI biolab?” asked Mauberly. The expensive and super-secure facilities were used only with the most dangerous and experimental toxins, viruses, and
recombinant DNA experiments. “Oh,” he said, seeing the answer almost immediately, “you’ll be trying to isolate and clone the retrovirus.” The thought sobered him. “All right,” he said at last. “You can have Chandra.”
Kate nodded in surprise and appreciation. Susan McKay Chandra was CDC’s superstar, one of the two or three top viral and retroviral experts in the world. She normally worked out of Atlanta but had been a temporary researcher at Boulder CDC before. Well, thought Kate, I did ask for the best.
“We’ll have to submit this to the Human Bio-Ethics Review Board,” began Mauberly.
Kate stood up. “No! Please… I mean…” She calmed herself. “Ken, think…we’re not experimenting on a human being.”
Mauberly frowned. “But your son…”
“Has undergone a few advanced but very basic medical tests,” said Kate. “And he will have to submit to a few more. Blood and urine tests. Another CT scan, more ultrasound, perhaps MR, and maybe isotopic scintigraphy if we find his bone marrow involved in this…although I’d rather avoid that because bone imaging can be uncomfortable…but we are not experimenting! Just carrying out standard diagnostic techniques for isolating the kind and severity of immunodeficiency that this patient has. The Review Board will tie us up for months…perhaps years.”
“Yes, but—” said Mauberly.
“If we isolate the R3 retrovirus and if we can clone it to adapt it to HIV or oncological research,” pleaded Kate, “then we can approach the Board. We would have to. But then there would be no doubt as to the need for human experimentation.”
Ken Mauberly nodded, rose, and came around the desk to her. Kate rose to meet him.
Amazingly, he kissed her on the cheek. “Go,” he said. “As of ten A.M. today, you are officially detached for the RS-Project. Bertha will take care of the paperwork. And, Kate…if we can help you or the family with the aftereffects of Saturday’s problem, well, just ask…we’ll do it.”
He walked her to the office door. Outside, Kate shook her head—not only at the magnitude of what had just happened, but at her realization that for a few minutes she had forgotten all about “Saturday’s problem.”