Page 74 of Her Captivated Hero

The general grimaced. “My thought exactly. They’re some YouTube sensation. Anyway, they died. Their deaths had all the hallmarks of meningitis. As soon as it was flagged, the CDC got involved and we got involved. We knew it was the same poison used in Al Khabor. The nightclub was twelve-thousand square feet. Those were the only three people impacted.”

Holy crap.

“Holy shit,” a man said behind her.

“Dr. Patel, since you researched this toxin, would you please come up and explain the significance of the triplets being the only ones affected.”

Riya stood up and went to the lectern. She rifled through the pages in her notebook. Giving a presentation wasn’t new, but having to give it when cold blue eyes were glaring at her made her knees shake.

Just keep your eyes on the page.

“When I first examined —”

“Louder,” someone yelled from the back.

She looked up and saw Gray, her gaze skittered away from him, and she saw Drake Avery. He gave her a sweet smile of encouragement. It helped. She cleared her throat.

“When I first examined this toxin, I only had a sample of cloth. There were microscopic particles of the airborne poison. The toxin carried a fast-acting form of meningitis, something that had never been developed before. In speed, it is along the line of Ebola or ricin. After comprehensive testing, it was clear that it only impacted the Y chromosome, i.e. men. What’s more, the way it was developed, the person who was targeted was not contagious.”

She looked up and saw that everybody in the room was nodding their heads.

“It was clear to me that even though it was used as a poison, that this kind of specific virus could be developed further so that it could target specific gene pools. If that could happen, why not reverse it so instead of a poison, turn it into a treatment for things like sickle cell anemia?”

Again, she looked up. She was surprised by the number of heads that were still nodding. She shouldn’t have been. She’d read enough SEAL books to know that intelligence was part of the selection criteria. God knew Gray was brilliant.

“Dr. Patel, does this poison have to be DNA specific, or could it be used on a broad population?” Liam McAllister asked.

“The thing that makes this so extraordinary is that they can target DNA. In theory, yes Commander, they could use this toxin on the masses. But what would be the point?” she answered.

Now came the part where she needed to come clean with the general. “When I left the lab in D.C. I continued to work on the specific sequencing of the contagion. It was intriguing. As I reversed engineered the sequence —”

“What?” the general said in a deep voice. “Would you mind repeating that Dr. Patel?”

What was he going to do, send her home? Not bloody likely.

“I said that after I left D.C. last month I doodled with the sequencing of the toxin from memory. It was important work that couldn’t be shoved into some corner. Lucky for us I was able to reverse engineer some of the poisons sequence and calculate—”

“Doc,” she looked up and saw Drake Avery with his hand up.

“Yes?”

“Are you saying you figured out a way to stop the poison?” Drake asked in a friendly voice.

“I’m pretty sure I can neutralize it, yes.”

“Even after it’s been sprayed?” Gray’s voice was biting.

“If I get to the victims fast enough, I think I can, because the aerosol shouldn’t have hit them with an intense enough dose to kill them immediately.” She turned to the general. “I’m assuming these triplets took at least twelve hours to die, and that none of the normal treatments for meningitis worked?”

He gave her a surprised look. “How did you know?”

“It’s how I would have progressed the poison after a month. What they had developed last month was in its early stages.”

“Do you have notes that we can review?” one of the CDC scientists asked.

“I’ll scan them and e-mail you copies,” she offered.

“No,” Commander McAllister said. “We’ll make copies here, and provide them to you. I don’t want things on unsecure e-mail servers.”