Blowback

TWENTY-FIVE

As the facts tumbled around the fertile soil of Harvath’s brain looking for places in which they could take root, he asked, “If this is about snake venom, why can’t we use some sort of antivenin?”

“Because,” said Alan Whitcomb, “we don’t exactly know for sure what we’re dealing with here. Improper use of antivenin can not only delay a patient’s recovery, but more often than not, it can actually speed up the mortality process. Unfortunately, because of the rarity of this snake, there are no test kits or special instruments available for the conclusive identification of the presence of Azemiops feae venom. There is also no known antivenin.”

Harvath was frustrated. What good was discussing what kind of venom they might be dealing with if there was no sure way to detect it and no sure way to treat it? “I don’t understand,” he replied as he looked at Alan. “Jillian said that she had come to both of you for help because she believes the illness is derived from something in antiquity. If you’re not a paleopathologist, how do you fit into all of this?”

“Well, as Jillian said, my field is molecular biology — which encompasses both biophysics and biochemistry. In short, I study the building blocks of life, specifically something called aDNA. In case you’re wondering, the a stands for ancient. Many people in my field like to refer to it as molecular archeology. You see, for a very long time the scientific powers that be didn’t see a need for our expertise in helping examine human remains. The commonly held belief was that degradation of DNA occurred within hours or days after an individual’s death.

“The tide turned in our favor, though, in the early eighties when a group of scientists reported finding a significant amount of viable genetic information in a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy. A few years later the PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, technique was invented and voilà, molecular archeology was born. Ever since, it has been possible to extrapolate a lot of data from minimal traces of DNA.”

“How minimal?”

“Theoretically, one needs only a single molecule for a positive result.”

“Like Jurassic Park?” asked Harvath, slightly embarrassed that his contribution to the conversation was nothing more than a pop culture reference. Not that anybody could fault him for reaching. The concepts they were discussing were very difficult to comprehend.

“Jurassic Park was a good story, but it seriously stretched the bounds of credibility. As far as we can tell, DNA probably can’t last much more than ten thousand years and definitely not beyond one hundred thousand years, so the concept of finding viable DNA in a mosquito from over sixty-five million years ago gets a bit of a laugh from those of us in the scientific community.”

“So Jurassic Park—style cloning couldn’t be done then.”

“We don’t know that for sure. If we could isolate DNA that’s on the order of ten to fifteen thousand years old, science might, and I stress might, be able to bring back Pleistocene era species, but it wouldn’t be easy. A perfect example of the best-preserved Pleistocene species we’ve found to date would be woolly mammoths. In their case, though, we’ve only recovered short strands of mitochondrial DNA, not the nuclear DNA necessary for cloning. It’s a very tricky business, all this cloning stuff, and one I’m glad I’m not involved in.”

Vanessa could tell Harvath hadn’t fully grasped what Mr. Whitcomb’s specialty was, and so she tried to elucidate. “For lack of a better term, what Alan does is listen carefully to very old DNA. It talks to him.”

“Kind of like The Horse Whisperer,” joked Jillian.

Vanessa nodded her head and smiled. “Ancient DNA can tell us lots of things about how people lived, such as what their diets were comprised of and what their lives were like, but more importantly ancient DNA can often tell us more about how people died. This is Alan’s primary area of expertise — the makeup, if you will, of ancient disease on a molecular level. By studying how the organic structure of diseases has changed over time, we can hopefully develop a better understanding of how to combat and maybe even overcome the diseases we face today.”

“For instance,” said Alan, “we’re now learning that the smallpox pandemics of the Middle Ages, not the plague, mind you, but smallpox, left generations of people with a rare genetic defect that protects them against infection by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. We estimate that approximately one percent of people descended from northern Europeans are virtually immune to HIV infection. And of that one percent, Swedes are the most likely to be protected. The Middle Ages may not exactly be ancient history, but this is the type of science that falls within my bailiwick.”

“You see,” added Jillian, “if we were able to locate the original illness, or organic matter from someone who was exposed to the original strain of this mystery illness and had survived, Alan might be able to tell us a lot about the disease itself.”

“Could we cure it?”

“That’s a pretty difficult question, but if we had either the original form of the disease itself or organic material from someone who had been exposed to it and survived, we’d have a fighting chance,” said Alan.

For all intents and purposes, the Whitcombs were investigators, and while Harvath couldn’t begin to fathom how they did what they did, he could relate to how they went about their search for answers. “So, let’s assume for a moment that what killed the people in Asalaam is based on this purple viper venom. Where are the other symptoms coming from? I mean, when you see the people in the advanced stages of this illness, they look like attendees at a Count Dracula convention.” Yet another pop culture reference, but it was the most apt description Harvath could think of.

“You raise an excellent point and one that has been bothering us since Jillian first presented this case to us,” responded Mrs. Whitcomb. “We can only assume that this is either a derivation of Azemiops feae venom that we are not yet familiar with, or that it is being used in conjunction with something else. I have searched the Arthashastra from cover to cover, but can’t find anything that would cause the full range of symptoms that we’re seeing.”

“What also doesn’t make sense is why the illness only seems to affect non-Muslims. How could this thing have been specifically bioengineered to attack specific religions?” asked Harvath.

“I don’t think that’s what we’re looking at,” said Alan. “In my opinion, it must be something else, like contamination of food or water supplies — which has been a popular method of subduing an enemy since the dawn of time.”

“As for the symptoms beyond the known effects of Azemiops feae venom,” added Jillian, “what we may be seeing here is something the scientific community occasionally refers to as duplexing.”

“What is duplexing?” replied Harvath.

“Duplexing is the combining of two illnesses to make them more lethal than they would be on their own. Australian researchers recently proved this theory quite inadvertently when they incorporated an immunoregulator gene into the mousepox virus. The result was a seriously enhanced, monster mousepox virus that was more virulent than anything they had ever seen before.

“The concern, especially among bioterrorism experts, is that this technique could be applied to other naturally occurring pathogens like smallpox or anthrax, which would dramatically increase their lethality.”

“Let’s just suppose for a second that what we’re seeing here is a case of duplexing and that the snake venom is being added to something else in order to create a more potent bioweapon. I still don’t understand how only non-Muslims were infected while none of the other indigenous people in that village seem to have been,” said Harvath.

“The duplexing itself can be a one-two punch,” replied Alan. “It could be that only people infected with substance A get sickened when exposed to substance B, and the resultant AB combination ends up being more lethal than A or B on their own.”

“Or, as we discussed,” said Jillian, “there could be some sort of immunization we’re not aware of.”

“What about the Arthashastra?” asked Harvath. “Does it talk about how the viper poison might be distributed?”

Vanessa nodded her head. “There are many suggested means of delivery — swabbing arrowheads, coating the edges of swords and spears — but one of the most interesting items I came across was a means by which it could be transformed into a rocklike substance, much like crack cocaine, and then ground into a fine powder. The toxic powder could then be left in fields for troops to walk through and pick up on their clothes, infection occurring through both skin contact and inhalation. The ancients were also very adept at employing toxic smoke to carry their chemical or biological agents across the battlefield. The key lay in the winds not turning and blowing the substance back on you.

“Modern-day troops certainly don’t do much hand-to-hand with enemies using edged weapons; I’m prone to lean toward the powder or smoke angle. But I could be wrong. We need more time to study this.

“Speaking of which,” Vanessa continued as she looked at her watch, “it’s getting late. I have a lot of e-mails yet to return, and I want to get an early start tomorrow. Why don’t we call it a night? Both of the spare rooms are made up, so you two can stay here. We’ll meet at my office in the morning, say, eight o’clock?”

“Eight o’clock sounds great,” said Jillian, answering for both of them. “We’ll be there.”

When Harvath went to bed, he began to question what the hell he was doing. With all the scientific jargon still spinning in his head, he realized he was way out of his league and seriously doubted whether he was going to be able to pull this assignment off. An unfamiliar feeling gnawed at the edge of his thoughts, an insecurity that questioned what his life would be like if he was forced to resign and live out his days as an international pariah — the overaggressive American agent who beat the defenseless Iraqi in the al-Karim bazaar.

Harvath found it difficult to breathe and wondered if this was what a panic attack was like. Regardless of what it was, he didn’t like it. It made him feel weak.

He forced his mind to turn to something else — something he could focus his energies on. As he did so, the face of Timothy Rayburn floated to the surface of his consciousness, and he struggled to understand what his involvement in all of this might be. Soon, Khalid Alomari’s face took Rayburn’s place, and as Harvath began to slip into the fathomless darkness of an exhausted sleep, he visualized killing both of them — as slowly and painfully as possible.