Robin Cook - Terminal

Lieutenant Hector Salazar of the Miami Police Department normally used Sunday afternoons as an opportunity to finish the reams of paperwork generated by Miami’s typically busy Saturday nights. Sundays were generally quiet. Auto accidents, which the uniformed patrol and their sergeants could handle, comprised the biggest portion of the day’s workload. Later on Sundays, after the football games were over, domestic violence often flared. Sometimes that could involve the watch commander, so Hector wanted to get as much done as he could before the phone started to ring.

Knowing that the Miami Dolphins game was still in progress, Hector answered the phone at three-fifteen with little concern. The call was patched through the complaint room to a land line.

“Sergeant Anderson here,” the voice said. “I’m at the Forbes Cancer Center hospital building. We got a problem.”

“What is it?” Hector asked. His chair squeaked as he leaned back.

“We got a guy holed up in the research building next door with two, maybe three hostages,” Anderson said. “He’s armed. There’s also a bomb of some kind involved.”

“Christ!” Hector said as his chair tipped forward with a thump. From experience, he knew the paperwork this kind of scene could generate. “Anyone else in the building?”

“We don’t think so,” Anderson said. “At least not according to the guard. To make matters worse, the hostages are VIPs. It’s the director of the center, Dr. Randolph Mason, and his wife, Sarah Mason.”

“You have the area secured?” Hector asked. His mind was already jumping ahead. This operation would be a hot potato. Dr. Randolph Mason was well known in the Miami area.

“We’re doing it now,” Anderson said. “We’re running yellow crime scene tape around the whole building.”

“Any media yet?” Hector asked. Sometimes the media got to a scene faster than backup police personnel. The media often monitored the police radio bands.

“Not yet,” Anderson said. “That’s why I’m using this land line. But we expect a blizzard any minute. The hostage taker’s name is Sean Murphy. He’s a medical student working at the clinic. He’s with a nurse named Janet Reardon. We don’t know if she’s an accomplice or a hostage.”

“What do you mean by ‘some kind of bomb’?” Hector asked.

“He mixed up a big flask of nitroglycerin,” Anderson said. “It’s standing in ice on a desk in the room with the hostages. Once it freezes, slamming the door can set it off. At least, that’s what Dr. Mason said.”

“You’ve talked with the hostages?” Hector asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Anderson said. “Dr. Mason told me he and his wife are in a glass office along with the nitro. They’re terrified, but so far they’re unharmed and they have a phone. He says he can see the perp. But the girl is gone. He doesn’t know where she went.”

“What’s Murphy doing?” Hector asked. “Has he made any demands yet?”

“No demands yet,” Anderson said. “Apparently he’s real busy doing some kind of experiment.”

“What do you mean experiment?” Hector asked.

“No clue,” Anderson said. “I’m just repeating what Dr. Mason said. Apparently Murphy had been disgruntled because he’d been denied permission to work on a particular project. Maybe he’s working on that. At any rate, he’s armed. Dr. Mason said he waved the gun in front of them when he broke into their home.”

“What kind of gun?”

“Sounds like a .38 detective special, from Dr. Mason’s description,” Anderson said.

“Make sure the building is secure,” Hector said. “I want no one going in or out. Got it?”

“Got it,” Anderson said.

After telling Anderson that he’d be out on site in a few minutes, Hector made three calls. First he called the hostage negotiating team and spoke with the supervisor, Ronald Hunt. Next he called the shift SWAT team commander, George Loring. Finally he called Phil Darell, the bomb squad supervisor. Hector told all three to assemble their respective teams and to rendezvous at the Forbes Cancer Center ASAP.

Hector heaved his two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame out of the desk chair. He was a stocky man who’d been all muscle during his twenties. During his early thirties, a lot of that muscle had turned to fat. Using his stubby, shovel-like hands, he attached to his belt the police paraphernalia he’d removed to sit at his desk. He was in the process of slipping into his Kevlar vest when the phone rang again. It was the chief, Mark Witman.

“I understand there’s a hostage situation,” Chief Witman said.

“Yes, sir,” Hector stammered. “I was just called. We’re mobilizing the necessary personnel.”

“You feel comfortable handling this?” Chief Witman said.

“Yes, sir,” Hector answered.

“You sure you don’t want a captain running the show?” Chief Witman asked.

“I believe there’ll be no problem, sir,” Hector said.

“Okay,” Chief Witman said. “But I must tell you I have already had a call from the mayor. This is a politically sensitive situation.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, sir,” Hector said.

“I want this handled by the book,” Chief Witman said.

“Yes, sir,” Hector said.

Sean attacked his work with determination. Knowing that his time was limited, he tried to work efficiently, planning each step in advance. The first thing he did was slip up to the sixth floor to check on the automatic peptide analyzer that he’d set up on Saturday to sequence the amino acids. He thought there was a good chance his run had been disturbed since Deborah Levy had appeared to read him the riot act just after he’d started it. But the machine hadn’t been touched, and his sample was still inside. He tore off the readout from the printer.

The next thing Sean did was carry two thermal cyclers down from the sixth floor to the fifth. They were going to be his workhorses for the afternoon. It was in the thermal cyclers that the polymerase chain reactions were carried out.

After a quick check on the Masons, who seemed to be spending most of their time arguing over whose fault it was that they’d been taken hostage, Sean got down to real work.

First he went over the readout from the peptide analyzer. The results were dramatic. The amino acid sequences of the antigen binding sites of Helen Cabot’s medicine and Louis Martin’s medicine were identical. The immunoglobulins were the same, meaning all the medulloblastoma patients were being treated, at least initially, with the same antibody. This information was consistent with Sean’s theory, so it fanned his excitement.

Next, Sean got out Helen’s brain and the syringe containing her cerebrospinal fluid from the refrigerator. He took another general sample of tumor from the brain, then returned the organ to the refrigerator. After cutting it into small pieces, Sean put the tumor sample in a flask with the appropriate enzymes to create a cell suspension of the cancer cells. He put the flask in the incubator.

While the enzymes worked on the tumor sample, Sean began loading some of the ninety-six wells of the first thermal cycler with aliquots of Helen’s cerebrospinal fluid. To each well of cerebrospinal fluid he added an enzyme called a reverse transcriptase to change any viral RNA to DNA. Then he put the paired primers for St. Louis encephalitis virus into the same well. Finally, he added the reagents to sustain the polymerase chain reaction. These reagents included a heat stable enzyme called Taq.

Turning back to the cell suspension of Helen’s cancer, Sean used a detergent designated NP-40 to open the cells and their nuclear membranes. Then, by painstaking separation techniques, he isolated the cellular nucleoproteins from the rest of the cellular debris. In a final step he separated the DNA from the RNA.