Brad Thor - Blowback

“It would appear that you’ve just learned something else,” said Vanessa. “Anecdotal, of course, but potentially useful.”

“Which is?”

“We may be looking at an illness that needs to grow in vivo, rather than in vitro.”

“You mean it has to be grown inside of people?”

“Maybe not every batch, but if this illness had been lying around for over two thousand years, whoever is behind it might have wanted to increase its potency by exposing it to the human immune system and letting it figure out how to beat it before setting it loose.”

“Are you saying this thing can learn?” asked Harvath.

“All living things learn. Their survival depends on it. They must adapt and overcome. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

Harvath contemplated that possibility as Mrs. Whitcomb continued. “After dripping down, the snake’s venom would then collect in the bottom of the pot and congeal into a yellowish gumlike substance. When the viper eventually died, another pot was placed beneath it to catch the watery serum as it drained from the carcass. It took about three days for those secretions to jell into a deep black substance. At this point, you had two completely different poisons that killed in two completely different ways. Neither of which was very pretty.”

“How did they kill?”

“Well, the black substance was said to cause the lingering-style death over several years, while the yellowish poison derived from the pure venom-are you ready for this?”

Harvath nodded his head and leaned toward her.

“The pure venom concoction caused violent convulsions followed by the victim’s brain turning to a black liquid that ran out his nasal passages,” said Vanessa as she sat back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest as if to say beat that.

Harvath looked at Jillian, who simply nodded her head. “And there’s nothing else that causes the brain to liquefy and run out the nose like that?” he asked.

“Not one single thing on this earth,” replied Vanessa.

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.