Page 78 of Her Captivated Hero

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Wearinga little black cocktail dress was not what she anticipated when she thought about going on a mission with a SEAL team.

Talk about bizarre.

“Be careful with that,” Wyatt said to the two bellhops who were lugging the two large cases that contained her portable biocontainment lab. Another bellhop had a cart that was filled to the top with suitcases.

“Riya, you need to cut back on the shoes,” Wyatt teased. “The luggage fees are out of control, Darling.”

Riya had no idea how to respond to that, so she kept her mouth shut. Wyatt was wearing Navy dress whites, as he escorted her to the hotel elevator. They were supposedly a couple checking into the awards ceremony that was supposed to start in two hours.

Wyatt was with her because he was still not battle ready, so he would be manning logistics and communications. She was pretty sure that he’d really been brought to Abu Dhabi to babysit her.

As soon as Wyatt had tipped the bellhops and they were alone in their room, he threw all the suitcases on the beds and quickly started opening everything up.

“Just how many guns did you bring?” Riya asked.

“You can never have enough fire power,” Wyatt said, not bothering to look up. He continued to open suitcase after suitcase. Finally he opened the one that contained her positive pressure protective suit, and everything she would need inside the biocontainment lab.

“What is all of that?” Wyatt asked as he booted up his computer.

“This is a centrifuge and that is a thermal cycler.” Riya continued to unwrap items from the bubble wrap. “Hold on and I’ll tell you what the rest of the equipment is.”

“No, Riya. I don’t need you to tell me what the name is of each piece of equipment. I want to know what you plan to do with them. I mean, I’m not going to tell you this is a MP7 submachine gun, you just need to know it goes bang. For example, what the hell does all this do?”

“The thermal cycler will amplify segments of the DNA, that will assist me in isolating what is relevant.” She bit her lip. “Actually, I pray to God that your team finds the canister before it opens and emits anything. If it’s closed, we still know it’s on a timer to open and emit the vapor, so we’ve got to get it into a containment system.”

“We’ve got that covered,” Wyatt pointed to the five oxygen cylinders. “They’re empty, and they’ve been modified. Using the canister that was found at the nightclub in Vegas as a template, two mechanics in San Diego made these up from our oxygen tanks. We can drop in the ‘live’ poison canisters and dispose of them at our leisure.”

“They’re not live until the two gel packs inside the canisters dissolve and the liquids inside the packs mix and form the gas.”

“Yeah, Riya, you explained that the gel packs will dissolve within an hour, so they have to time this just right. But what I don’t get is why it matters, once the canister is filled with the gas, can’t they just let it sit there forever, before opening it up?”

“They recovered the canister in Las Vegas where the toxic gas was held.”

“I know,” Wyatt said. “That’s what we based our safety containers on.”

“Well, that canister is too small to house the gas for long, maybe a half-hour at the most, before the gas will revert to liquid.”

Wyatt frowned, “but it’s still poisonous, right?”

“Oh, it’s deadly in that concentrated liquid form,” she confirmed. “It’s just not an aerosol, which is a good thing.”

“When it hits the air, will it go back to its aerosol form?” Wyatt asked.

“No, the original interaction that occurred between the two is what created the gas. We’re good once it goes liquid. It’s that first fifteen minutes that we’re screwed.”

“Not a problem,” Wyatt said with a grin. “We’ll get the guys, and contain the shit, before it farts.”

It took her a moment to figure out what farting had to do with what they were talking about. When she did, she giggled. Riya felt one of the boulders fall off her shoulders.

Wyatt reminded her of the UCSD soccer player she tutored for a semester. He’d been hard for her to understand to begin with, because he’d always been goofing around, but in the end she’d realized it was important to him to earn her respect and be her friend. They still talked at least once a quarter. Yep, if she really spent time and studied Wyatt she bet he would turn out to be the same way.

“Riya? Are you okay? You’re kind of spacing out on me.”

“I’m sorry, I do that sometimes.”

Time to stop reminiscing.