A man-made plague. A mad-man’s plot. A vulnerable nation. Don’t run, screaming, for the hills. That’s simply a description of Joe Massucci’s new techno-thriller, Code: Alpha.

by STEWART WARREN
HERALD-NEWS WRITER

JOLIET, Ill. — Written in the Joliet man’s spare time, CODE: ALPHA arrived at bookstores earlier this month. Its striking blue and silver cover, featuring a missile blasting from the deck of a hijacked oil-tanker, graces the shelves of Barnes and Noble, Crown Books, Borders Books and Music, O’Hare Airport and even the K-Mart and  Jewel Food Stores on Jefferson Street. The first printing numbered 70,000.

Because he’s a full-time senior communications consultant for Amoco Corp., it took him several years to write the story of Julie Martinelli, a doctoral candidate in biological engineering. Massucci, 42, banged out the book in fits and starts, whenever he had a few spare minutes.

Martinelli, his heroine, proposed the creation of an incredibly lethal neurotoxin while doing her thesis. “(The virus) is four-hundred times as lethal as conventional neurotoxins with characteristics that make it ideal for covert biological warfare,” Massucci said, explaining the imaginary, genetically engineered plague called “Saint Vitus.”

Bold terrorists steal it. The plot thickens. Soon the fate of the world is up for grabs.

Massucci based his story on two, real-life events. “I read an article about a Stanford graduate candidate who proposed splicing  toxigenic genes into E. Coli, bacteria commonly found in the human intestine. Her adviser dissuaded her from going ahead with the experiment, in the event the anomaly ever escaped the lab. That was the basis of the idea,” he said.

Later, he read a separate story that security was so lax at the U.S. Army’s biological warfare research institute at Ft. Detrick, Md., that large amounts of deadly organisms could be carried out of laboratories in a pocket or briefcase by any employee with clearance to work there.

“I put those two incidents together and said, ‘What if a terrorist went in and did that? What would be the consequences?’”

While writing the book, a challenge for Massucci’s was telling the story from a woman’s point of view. “In my first draft, she just wasn’t strong enough as a character,” he said. The male hero – a commando-type – had all the muscle in that version, he said.

“I completely rewrote her character. (I made her) strong-willed, take-charge, a very smart woman who is as good as anyone else when it comes to life-and-death situations.”

Although CODE: ALPHA is brand new, Massucci already has gotten lots of positive feedback from readers. He has a Web site on the Internet, and many have sent him e-mail. “One woman said the book was like a fever – she stayed up all night reading it.”  n

Joe Massucci has been writing since he was 8 years old.  When he isn’t writing, Joe is a recording musician, a photographer, and an instructor in multimedia computing and desinging Web sites.