But the doctor was the one to break the silence. “Why are they after me?”
Jax turned and looked at Tan Lily, then made eye contact with Punky.
“Why do you think?” Punky asked.
Tan Lily focused on her. “It must have something to do with my husband working for the CIA.”
“Did you know he was working with us?” Jax asked.
She nodded. “Before I took Shen Li and fled, we talked about how to stop the regime from moving forward with their plan to develop synthetic bioweapons. The last time I spoke with him, he had said he believed they were going to scrap the program and focus their efforts in other areas.”
“So, why would they still need him?” Punky asked.
“And why are they after me?” Tan Lily said, repeating her initial question.
Jax joined them in the living room and sat down in a chair next to Punky. “Why don’t you tell us more about these synthetic bioweapons, and maybe we can figure that out.”
Punky saw the doctor relax, as if the topic was something she was comfortable discussing. “You have to understand that when we’re talking about synthetic bioweapons, we’re not talking about something that is extremely difficult to do. This isn’t science fiction. It’s science fact. Twenty or thirty years ago, it might have been difficult. But not today.”
“What would it look like?” Jax asked.
Tan Lily nodded as if formulating her thoughts to put them in a way they could understand. “There’s two parts to it. First, there’s the construction of the weapon. Then, there’s what we will call switches, that will turn the weapon on.”
“Like a trigger,” Punky said.
Tan Lily nodded. “In the early days of biological warfare, scientists would take a naturally occurring virus and weaponize it. Today, I don’t need to go to Africa and find a sample of Marburg. I can buy a DNA synthesizer that is completely untracked and construct the virus at home. The recipe is out there. How do I create Marburg? The genome is there, and all I have to do is take bits and pieces and ligate them together.”
“Ligate?” Punky asked.
Tan Lily gave a little shake of her head. “It means to join molecules or molecular fragments together through a new chemical bond. It’s something even high school students are capable of.”
“How long would it take a group of teenagers to do this?”
Tan Lily shrugged. “If they wanted to, they could create — from scratch — one of the world’s most deadly pathogens in only a few weeks.”
“A few weeks? Wouldn’t that be cost-prohibitive?” Jax asked.
“Oh no. It would cost maybe only thousands.”
“So, constructing the virus isn’t difficult,” Punky concluded. “Why would they need someone with your husband’s expertise? Or yours?”
“Because developing the trigger is a bit more challenging.”
“And what does that look like?” Jax wasn’t taking notes, but Punky could tell he was hanging on the doctor’s words.
“When constructing the pathogen, you can create a switch so that exposure to a drug or a molecule will trigger what is known as promotion, or the expression of these genes.” Tan Lily paused before locking eyes with Punky. “Did you have chicken pox as a kid?”
Punky nodded, though she had been so young she couldn’t remember it. “When I was four or five.”
“Chicken pox is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, also known as human herpesvirus three, and it has been embedded in your central nervous system since you were four or five. When you turn fifty, you will be exposed to something that will trigger the virus and cause shingles.”
“What triggers it?”
Tan Lily shook her head. “We don’t know. We don’t understand that yet, but we do know how to engineer switches so that a molecule — like caffeine, for example — could be used as a ligand to activate a gene. You could do this at the DNA level or the RNA level and promote the production of those genes — either through more RNA, which leads to more protein, or more protein right off the bat.”
Punky shook her head, still trying to gain an understanding of the biology and chemistry involved in making something like this work.
“These switches, called riboswitches, are nature’s way of turning a gene on or off. Technically, it’s a regulatory segment of a messenger RNA molecule that binds a small molecule and results in a change of production of the proteins encoded by the mRNA. But, because we are so smart and like to play God, we have figured out how to take these switches and insert them into a constructed pathogen.”
“Why?”
“Because exposure to an innocuous or ubiquitous chemical would promote the pathogen’s efficacy.”
Punky held up her hand. “Wait a second. Are you saying that you could infect a large group of people with a pathogen that might go undetected until exposed to a second chemical?”
Tan Lily nodded. “I just told you that you have the varicella-zoster virus in your system now, but you haven’t had any symptoms or adverse effects since the chicken pox and won’t until that switch is triggered when you get older. Yes, you could infect a population with a pathogen that remains dormant until you trigger it.”
“Why would you do that?” Jax asked.
“I can tell you why we were asked to look into it.”
Punky’s skin broke out in gooseflesh. “Why?”
Andy Yandell felt the C-2 Greyhound cargo plane shudder underneath him as the eight-bladed propellers spun to a stop. With practiced motions, he completed the engine shutdown procedure from memory while his copilot read the checklist out loud and verified each step had been done properly. After the final one, Andy took a deep breath and readied himself for spending a night at sea.
As if reading his mind, his copilot said, “Thank goodness we’re only here for one night.”
Even if he shared the sentiment, his conversation with the Navy fighter pilot over beers at Club Iwakuni still resonated with him. “You know you’re in the Navy, right, Greg?”
“Hey, man, there’s a reason I became a COD pilot. Let the fighter guys get all the glory. I’ll just keep their girlfriends company and rack up my Bonvoy points and per diem.”
Andy shook his head, then unstrapped from his seat and stepped over the center console to make his way aft from the cockpit and down the steps into the cargo hold. Sailors from the Reagan’s supply department were already swarming up the ramp to retrieve their requisitioned cargo while his crew chief worked to unstrap pallets from the steel decking.
Andy stepped around a stack of crates marked with “Fishermen’s Cooperative” but paused when he caught a whiff of a pungent aroma wafting up from one of them. He wrinkled his nose and squatted down for a closer look at the suspected culprit.
“What’s that smell?” Greg asked, descending from the cockpit. “Please tell me it’s not dinner.”
“It’s not dinner.”
Andy reached out to touch the liquid seeping through a crack in the wooden crate and rubbed his gloved finger and thumb together. The liquid had an oily texture that turned his stomach, and he thought better of bringing it closer to his nose for a second whiff. Instead, he wiped it on his flight suit pant leg and stood.
“But, just to be safe, I’d stay away from the fish sticks.”
Greg groaned. “Next you’re going to say I can’t have hot dogs either.”
Andy chuckled and watched the other pilot duck through the hatch on the port side and descend the ladder to the flight deck for a breath of fresh air. He didn’t think that was such a bad idea, and he had more important things to worry about than seafood that had already spoiled.