Page 99 of Edge of Danger

For his part, Ian didn’t complain even once. He grunted now and then when he jostled his shoulder particularly hard, testament to the extreme pain he had to be in. But he soldiered on, picking out a trail headed generally northwest and skirting around big boulders and occasional cactus. They only had to scale one ridge of any consequence. But when they reached the top, she actually had to ask Ian to stop so she could catch her breath. The heat was taking far more of a toll on her than she’d realized.

If only they could climb into a walk-in freezer and cool their bodies off. She tried to pretend she was shivering with cold, but it didn’t work. She tried to remember the last time she’d been ice cold. It had been in Yusef’s lab in the Sudan until the fire destroyed the unit. An industrial-sized air conditioner had cooled the basement and no doubt scrubbed the air for any errant virus material that might have escaped its petri dish.

She pictured herself floating in that chilly space like a tiny speck of Ebola, cooled until she turned into an ice crystal?—

“Ian. I think I just figured out how to stop, or at least slow down, the virus in Las Vegas.”

“How’s that?”

“Viruses crystalize when they go into a dormant state. They can stay that way indefinitely. In fact, some virus, once crystallized, never become actively infectious again.”

“So scientists need to find a way to get Yusef’s virus to crystallize. How? By the time they research it, everyone in Vegas will be dead.”

“What if Yusef gives us the answer?”

“He won’t talk. If the guy’s willing to sacrifice his own daughter rather than talk, he’ll definitely take his secrets to the grave.”

“What if he already gave us the answer?”

Ian stared at her intently. “Meaning what?”

“Ebola is highly sensitive to cold. It only survives and stays active for long periods of time outside human bodies in tropical temperatures.”

Ian frowned. “Continue this line of reasoning.”

“There was a huge air conditioner blowing into Yusef’s lab in the basement of that house. What if he was using the cold air to protect himself while he worked? I didn’t see any hazardous materials suits down there, or even any self-contained breathing apparatus. How did he work with the virus so closely for so long and not catch it himself, unless he was protecting himself in some way?”

Ian nodded. “There was an abnormally large air conditioner in the bedroom he and his daughter slept in, too. The room was cold, even with the fire starting to engulf the house.”

She nodded eagerly. “That makes sense. If they could spend most of their time in air too cold for the virus to go live, he and his daughter would be safe against the virus.” She frowned. “Although…he seemed to be devoted to her. I can’t imagine him letting her anywhere near his lab unless he had a cure of some kind…”

“Go on. Where does that logic take you?”

“If I were a scientist designing and handling a weaponized virus, wouldn’t I build in a vulnerability? Or at least a back-door cure of some kind? If not for the public to discover, to protect myself and my beloved child?”

“Like computer designers building in quick, secret ways to get into a program’s software?” Ian asked.

“Exactly. He would have spent months researching the virus. If it has a weakness, he’ll have found it. Did you see anything when you were in the house that looked like preventative treatment of some kind? Syringes? Medication bottles?”

Ian’s expression lit. “There were these little blue bottles in the bathroom. A row of them, mostly empty.”

“What was in them?”

“I don’t know. But they had Arabesque writing. It looked like this.” He cast around for a narrow shard of stone and started drawing from memory in the sand. She sounded out the Farsi script as he wrote it.

“Silver. Colloidal silver,” she announced.

“What the hell is that?”

“Silver ions are antimicrobial in nature. It kills bacteria sufficient concentrations, too. The human body doesn’t react much to it, so it’s not dangerous to ingest.”

“Well, Abahdi and/or his kid were downing it in quantity based on the row of empty bottles of it that I saw. The daughter had them lined up all along her window sill and all over the top of the air conditioner.”

“What if the virus has some sort of vulnerability to ionized silver?” she speculated. “It would be easy enough to dump a bunch of colloidal silver into the water supply of Las Vegas, for example, and to treat everyone all at once.”

“If people washed down surfaces with silver treated water, would that kill the virus, too?”

“Maybe. It would have to be tested.”

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