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