The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (16 page)

In addition to its role in cancer, the HER2 protein is essential to the normal function of heart cells, and treatment of cancer patients with HER2-targeted therapies can lead to severe cardiac toxicity. Thus, in choosing to take a HER2-targeted drug, a breast cancer patient must decide whether to risk a potentially fatal heart malfunction in order to combat the cancer. Without treatment, however, the cancer patient is likely to die.

When Jeff and I began the program, the risks and potential benefits of targeting the HER2 protein were well established. Our idea was not. We hoped to engineer a new superheavy isotope that would act only in the breast cancer niche, thus targeting the cancer cells while leaving the cardiac cells untouched. We knew the risks we were taking in advancing our program, which was radically different from others already underway and thus completely without precedent.

So we kept our fledgling project under wraps, not even involving our colleagues or employees. The HER2 work was a private effort, solely between Jeff and me.

The reference to HER2 was clear proof to me that the text message had indeed come from Jeff himself and that it was intended for me. It was a brilliant way for him to send a private message to me while also providing the messenger with a red herring.

Trust nobody. Her 2.

Trust nobody.

Dante Giordano waited for nearly twenty minutes before finally stopping a woman coming out of the restroom. He spoke to her, and she shook her head. When she walked away, he stepped inside the women’s restroom himself.

I watched from a shop across the mall. On my head was a new hat, over my eyes a pair of sunglasses, and wrapped around my shoulders a new shawl—all hastily purchased following my covert re-entry into the mall.

When Dante came back out of the restroom, he did not appear to notice me. I waited a moment and then followed him.

He stared mostly at the ground, shaking his head mildly as he exited the main doors of the crystalline mall. I followed him for what seemed like nearly a mile.

When Dante finally left the streets behind, it was to ascend a stone staircase into an old building. I watched him go through the heavy iron doors, and I waited for them to close before approaching. I looked up at the building. I was at the University of Naples.

He had been telling the truth. He was a student.

I tore my eyes away from the façade of the university building and reviewed the text message once again.

Trust nobody. Her 2.

Why didn’t you send me a message I could use? Why didn’t you write me a letter?

The questions answered themselves. Because Jeff knew that the cancer was not the only threat to his life. Because he could not hide a message in a place where he was sure I would be the one to find it. And because nobody could be trusted to deliver it to me.

But he did trust somebody to deliver it to me.

The man at
Castel dell’Ovo
was absolutely unfamiliar to me. I was certain I had never met him. Yet, he followed me. He called me by name as I stumbled backward on the castle terrace. He told me he had a message from Jeff. He was reaching for something as I threw myself into the water. I had assumed it was a gun.

It now occurred to me that it might have been a cell phone.

I withdrew Jeff’s iPhone from my purse and clicked into the mysterious text message again. I replied:
Who are you?

The response came through almost immediately:
Is he dead?

A chill crawled over me. I had no idea how to respond. As it turned out, I did not have to. While I paused to gather my wits and compose a response, a second message came through:
Katrina meet me at Stazione Circumvesuviana now.

Fifteen minutes later, I entered the train station where I had first noticed the man looking at me. I saw him immediately. He was easy to spot because he was wearing the same touristy shorts and T-shirt that he had been wearing the previous evening.

“Who are you?” I demanded again as I approached him. “Why did you ask me if he was dead?”

The man’s bearded face revealed neither malice nor sympathy. In fact, the total lack of emotion was unnerving.

In broad daylight and at close range, I could see how lined his face was. He was probably close to my age, but life had not been kind to him.

When he spoke, his voice was heavily accented, but all too clear. “Because when he dies, I get a lot of money.”

The mysterious bearded Italian turned and charged briskly out of the train station without speaking again. With no choice, I followed, almost running to keep up.

The crowd from the train station thinned as he led me down a small side street and into an alley. The crowd thinned even more, and I wondered where he was taking me. Rickety balconies strewn with laundry overhung the alley. The air was stale from the piles of garbage outside of the meager homes. The occasional stray dog looked up with mild interest as we passed, but there were no longer any other humans in sight.

We reached the end of the alley and turned left, only to follow another narrow alley.
This man could be leading me anywhere
, I thought. The warning from the text message echoed once again through my mind, but then, to my relief, I began to hear the sounds of people. As we came upon a group of parked cars, the welcomed sounds of civilization intensified. Finally, we came to a cross street wide enough to support moving traffic, and the chaos of Naples resumed in full.

The street opened up into a large piazza. The tall bell tower of a church rose above the other buildings in the square. This was where he was leading me.

“
Santa Maria del Carmine
,” the man announced abrasively as I followed him into the church. We passed through its dilapidated walls and out into a monastic central cloister, and my initial confusion began to fade as I came to realize why he was showing me this place.

The central cloister was serving as a makeshift homeless shelter. Several ragged men and women occupied sleeping bags lined up along its walls. Stolen carts from the Galleria Umberto I were filled with sparse, miscellaneous belongings ranging from blankets to board games held together with frayed bungee cords. When we entered the area, I felt like an intruder, like I had just barged into a stranger’s apartment without knocking. But my mysterious companion seemed, literally, at home.

“I live here,” he said with his heavy accent, confirming what I had just begun to suspect. “I sleep over there.” He pointed to an empty mattress topped with a crumpled blanket.

Aghast, I looked at him again. This was the man with whom Jeff had entrusted a final message for his wife?

The man’s shorts and T-shirt were faded, but not noticeably dirty. Regardless, they were clearly secondhand. While this man was not a tourist, he may have been wearing a tourist’s former attire—clothing that had been discarded by a traveler who decided it was not worth carrying on the remainder of his trip. Or perhaps it was donated by a local. I realized now why he was wearing them again, why he had not changed his clothes since the previous day.

The man’s thick beard was not groomed. It appeared disheveled in a somewhat natural way, but not obviously unkempt. I could now see that his hands were dirty, but not so much as to call attention to himself. Only the lines around his eyes and across his forehead gave away the hard years behind him. So when he asked me again if Jeff was dead, the quiet optimism that shone in his eyes seemed out of place.

“How do you know my husband?” I asked.

“I don’t. I just met him a few weeks ago.”

“How?”

“He just showed up here. He came in and asked if anyone spoke English. Only a few of us did. He talked to each of us separately for a few minutes. I guess I got the job.”

“What job? Why you?”

“I didn’t ask why,” he said. “I guess because I spoke good English and I’m not crazy like some of the others. I could talk to him. I could understand what he wanted, and I was capable of doing it.”

“What did he want you to do?”