Page 58 of Edge of Danger

“How come you don’t trust me?” Ian demanded. “I’ve had your back on multiple occasions, and we get along famously in the sack, if I do say so, myself. What else do you want from me?”

“A little professional respect would be nice,” she snapped.

“What are you talking about? I think you’re a hell of a shooter, and you handled yourself like a pro when the bullets were flying. I wouldn’t go out on this op with you if I didn’t think you could pull your weight.”

She just glared at him.

He blurted, “Is this about the flash drive and those mice? Let go of your grudge, already.”

Was she holding a grudge? Startled by the idea, she examined the notion. She had always worked alone before. Maybe she didn’t know how to work with others. But still, she hadn’t asked him to run into that damned burning building after her. The intel was hers. She should have been the one to hand it over to Uncle Sam?—

Her train of thought was interrupted by their arrival at Andrews and quick transfer to a sleek Learjet for their trip to the west coast. They’d just leveled off at altitude when the laptop computer that had been in Ian’s go-bag beeped.

“Briefing’s coming in,” he announced.

The full intel dump on the possible Abahdi sighting didn’t have a lot of additional information for them. A few grainy pictures from long-range security cameras. A security specialist at the theme park had noticed a little girl matching Salima Abahdi’s description, accompanied by a male of the right height and build for Yusef. In every picture of him, though, the man’s face was obscured by sunglasses and a baseball cap such that it was impossible to make a positive ID. Which was, in and of itself, suspicious.

Piper studied the poor quality photos of the girl closely. “She looks happy.”

“Her life’s about to implode,” Ian replied grimly.

“Her life already imploded when her mother died.” Piper knew all about that one. Her mother might have run away, but the loss was total, just the same. The only thing Piper remembered about her mother was her smell. And the safe, happy feeling of being hugged by her.

Ian pulled her back into the present with, “If it comes to a grab, you take the girl. I’ll take the father.”

“I thought the grab was supposed to be low key. We don’t want to scare him into releasing the virus. Assuming he hasn’t done so already—“ She broke off, thinking hard.

“What?”

She looked over at Ian. “Would Abahdi expose himself and his daughter to the virus?”

Ian frowned. “Don’t know. Maybe. He had his kid with him at that lab where he was working on it.”

“Yeah, but the lab was tightly controlled. Fans vacated the air directly out of the basement, and the containment chamber for the viruses he worked with looked pretty decent. I would interpret that to mean he didn’t want to kill his daughter.”

Ian nodded. “Let’s follow your logic. If he doesn’t want to kill his kid, he probably hasn’t turned the virus loose on Los Angeles. Where, then?”

“If we’re excluding Los Angeles, then we need to exclude all of southern California. Given wind shifts, he couldn’t be sure of his daughter being safe if they accidentally got downwind of the virus release.”

“It’ll carry on air, then?” Ian asked.

Piper sighed. “Lassa fever spreads by nearly every vector known to man, including airborne vectors. If Abahdi has successfully hybridized some sort of Ebola-Lassa cross, I would expect it to go airborne.”

“Translation into dumb soldier talk, please?”

He was anything but a dumb soldier. She refrained from correcting him, however, and explained, “I believe his engineered virus will spread on currents of air. If an infected person were to exhale, the virus would hang in the air and could be inhaled by a passerby. In addition, if the containers of the virus in Abahdi’s coolers were, say, sprayed into the ventilation systems of a large building, the virus would be carried to every corner of the structure.”

Ian swore quietly under his breath.

“Oh, it gets better. Lassa also spreads through casual bodily fluid transfers—kissing, sex, sweat, my blood getting into your wound, or even when an infected fly or mosquito bites you and shares its saliva with you.”

“Yeesh.”

She continued grimly, “As if that’s not enough, Lassa spreads through animal feces like rats, mice, and yes, humans. Mouse poops in a tub of flour that gets made into bread you eat, and you’re at risk. Which is to say it also spreads in foods.” She warmed to her subject. “And then there’s touch. If I have some of the Lassa virus on my palm and shake your hand, you’d pick it up on your skin. Next time you rub your nose or eye, boom. You’re infected.”

“Jeez.”

“The good news with Lassa is it kills only about a third of the people who contract it. And, modern anti-viral meds are generally effective on serious cases.”

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