A/N: This is the chapter that I am most nervous about posting. All the science in this chapter is sound, it's just the end result of everything combined that I theorized about and may be a little far-fetched. But this is BONES, right? A little far-fetched science is par for the course. Let me know what you think because I'm really, really curious about what you all think about it and if the way I wrote it makes sense. Thanks for all the feedback and great reviews so far and I'm looking forward to more! Enjoy!

Chapter 9

August 18, 2010

Washington D.C.

Jeffersonian Medico-Legal Lab

Brennan felt like her life had been swept up in a whirlwind. She hadn't felt this out of sorts since her parents left her and it was really bothering her. Cullen explained to Brennan that he and some of the people at the Embassy felt that Booth was set up; that the evidence against him was a little too perfect. Cullen said he felt that Booth might been onto something in the Santa Ana case and someone decided to take him out of the case in a drastic way. Brennan and Cullen both agreed that figuring out what happened to Alex might help reveal who set up Booth. After she left Cullen's office, she had Angela drive her back to the Jeffersonian and she called Hodgins and Cam and told them to immediately start working on the mosquito Booth sent. Any clues they could gather about the death of Alex Santa Ana could only help Booth's case.

It had been 5 days since Cullen told her that the Chinese government had declared Booth a political prisoner and sentenced him to 20 years of hard labor. In those 5 days, Brennan had not gone home, insisting that she was needed at the lab to help with the evidence. She was still waiting for Cam and Hodgins' results with the mosquito. But the real reason was because she couldn't sleep in their bed knowing that her bedmate was seven thousand miles away, being held against his will for something he didn't do. She knew much Booth was affected by the taking of a life. There was no way he was the killer.

Her office phone rang and she considered just letting it go to voicemail, thinking it was probably a colleague wanting her opinion on a set of bones, but picked it up anyway. "Brennan."

"Dr. Brennan, it's Cullen. I have Ambassador Patrick Donovan and the agent that was tailing Alex Santa Ana on a secure line from the U.S. Embassy in China. I thought you would want to be informed about everything happening in Booth's case."

Brennan sat down. "Of course, I'm all ears. Well, technically no human could be made of ears because the ears do not contain necessary blood vessels and bony structures-"

"Um, Dr. Brennan? This is Ambassador Donovan. Thank you for the explanation but if it's the same to you, why don't we get started? This is Special Agent Michael Li. He was assigned to following Alex Santa Ana from June 13th to his death on July 28th."

Cullen started with the questions and Brennan sat with her ear pressed tightly to the phone, trying to absorb everything they said. "Agent Li, can you tell us if you noticed anything out of the ordinary when you were tailing Alex Santa Ana?"

"I did. From the very first night I started looking after him, I noticed one guy in a Red Army uniform showing up at the same places Alex went to. At first it seemed like a coincidence; the man always was talking to people and seemed to have a purpose for being at these bars and clubs. But after a while, it seemed like something else. Then one night, about three weeks after Alex had been here, the guy made me and didn't show up anymore. I have no idea how he recognized that I was FBI; I didn't give any signs that I wasn't a local hitting the bars. After he left, there was this other guy that was hanging around Alex. Alex seemed to know him and the guy bought him a few drinks on occasion," Li told them.

"Why didn't you say any of this when you talked to us over the phone after Alex's death?" Cullen stated, beating Brennan to the question. If we had known someone was following Alex, we could have warned Booth to look out as well, Brennan thought bitterly.

Agent Li sighed and Brennan could here the regret in his voice over the phone. "Look, I took a risk telling you what I did over the phone. It was a pay phone in an alley, not the secure line we have here at the Embassy. The government here has every cell phone, phone, apartment; everything is bugged. During the time I was assigned to watching Alex, I had been in this country for four years trying to infiltrate 14K, one of the biggest organized crime triads in this country. And I was successful too; I almost had the thing cracked when Alex died. If they knew I was talking to the FBI they would kill me. Walking into the Embassy today effectively ended my work here."

"Then why did you come forward today?" Brennan asked.

"When I heard about what happened to Agent Booth, I knew I had to come forward. He's a good guy; I met him once at Quantico at a conference about ten years ago. I know he didn't do this," Li responded.

"Would you be able to recognize the men again if you saw them?" Donovan asked Li.

"Definitely," Li replied confidently. Before anyone could say anything else, there was a knock on her office door and Brennan looked up to see Cam, Hodgins, and Angela on the other side, silently asking if they could come in. She motioned them to come in.

"I have to go, my team has some evidence they need to show me. Deputy Director Cullen, I'll call you when I have more information," Brennan said as she hung up the phone. She watched as Cam and Hodgins sat down in front of her desk and Angela took up residence on the couch.

"Dr. Brennan, Dr. Hodgins and I have something to show you," Cam said.

"Why are you here, Ange?" Brennan asked, looking toward her friend.

"Moral support, sweetie. We have a dozy of a case here."

"What's a-" Brennan started before she was interrupted by Hodgins.

"Let me start from the beginning Dr. B. The mosquito that Booth sent was amazing. Thank him for me next time you see him, will you? I haven't had a sample like this in years," Hodgins started.

"Hodgins, could we get on with it please?" Brennan stated, starting to get impatient.

"Sorry. Anyway, the mosquito had a belly full of blood and he had eaten just before he died. We took a little bit of the blood and Dr. Saroyan put it into RFLP or restriction fragment length polymorphism so we could get a possible DNA match."

"We called the Santa Ana's as soon as we knew we had enough blood to get a DNA profile. Luckily they were already in D.C. because of the situation with their son's body. Unfortunately, they didn't have anything with them that had any of Alex's DNA on it with them but they were able to get his hairbrush overnighted from California to D.C. The hairbrush arrived yesterday and I was able to match the DNA profiles: the blood in the mosquito was definitely Alex Santa Ana. The profiles match with a 99.9% accuracy," Cam told Brennan.

"So, the mosquito bit Alex Santa Ana before it died. That doesn't give us anything. Even if Alex had an allergic reaction to the mosquito bite, it would not produce the severe effects that led to Alex's death. How does this help?"

"This is where it gets interesting," Hodgins continued and Brennan could hear the excitement in his voice and see it shining through his blue eyes. "I took most of the blood for other tests. The first test I ran was a chemical test to see if the blood had any abnormal chemicals. The blood had an extremely high level of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT."

Brennan was starting to get frustrated. "Again, so what? DDT is a common insecticide that is still being used and produced in China. It would be logical to assume that a mosquito found in China would be exposed to DDT."

"I didn't find the DDT in the mosquito's blood, Dr. B. I found it in Alex's," Hodgins finished. Now Brennan was intrigued. There should be no reason for DDT to be in Alex's blood and although DDT has never been shown to cause death in humans, it is considered "moderately hazardous" by the World Health Organization. It doesn't have any immediate effects on most people and to a healthy sixteen-year-old boy, it probably wouldn't have any effects that Alex would notice. He may have been more tired than normal, but that could have been attributed to jet lag or staying out late. With her mind spinning with the implications of this find, she told Hodgins to continue.

"So, as you know, DDT has never been shown to kill anyone, even in levels as high as we know were in Alex's blood. But, DDT has been shown to effect hormone levels in humans by introducing what are called xenoestrogens in the blood. Xenoestrogens are a synthetic hormone that can mimic estrogen in the body, so in females it has been shown to increase the rate of breast and ovarian cancers. In men it has been shown to increase rage and strengthen muscles because the body will convert the xenoestrogen into testosterone, so much so that it is a banned substance in most professional sports. Now it's other effect is what makes it so interesting to our case. The other major side effect of xenoestrogens is that it massively weakens our immune system. Now that takes a while to do, but with levels this high, the kid's immune system had to have been compromised," Hodgins finished, taking a breath.

Brennan thought for a moment. "Okay, so how did Alex get those high levels of DDT in his blood?"

Hodgins sounded like some of the wind had been taken out of his sails and his shoulders slumped slightly. "Yeah, we are still trying to figure that out," he grumbled. "But, there's something else. When we analyzed the rest-"

"Alcohol," Brennan interrupted.

"What?" Hodgins and Cam said at the same time. "Bren, as much as I could go for some right now, I don't really think-" Angela began.

"No, not that. DDT is an organochlorine, which means that it has good solubility in organic solvents, like alcohol. It is colorless and odorless and if Alex was drinking strong alcohol in mixed drinks, the tartness of those drinks easily could have masked the mild taste. We have reports from Alex's roommate that he was partying and Agent Li stated that there were a couple of older guys buying him drinks, that would have been an easy way to get him to ingest large amounts of DDT," Brennan finished excitedly. For the first time in five days, she felt that her world was falling into place again. The rationality of her science was comforting in the midst of all this chaos.

"Well, now that we know that these levels were intentional, this next part makes more sense," Cam took over from Hodgins. "When we analyzed the other part of Alex's blood we found a bacteria that causes the common cold, probably what caused the sniffles his roommate reported, but we also found a virus: yellow fever."

"Yellow fever?" Brennan interrupted with confusion. "But that virus has never been reported in that part of the world and only 15% of its victims die."

"We know, so I inputted the strain into the Center for Disease Control's database and found that the strain in Alex's blood originally comes from West Africa. But it is also the same strain that the CDC has on hand to make the vaccine. Now the vaccine for yellow fever is one of the only vaccines that is still a live or attenuated vaccine, which means that when a person gets the vaccine, they are injected with a small amount of the live virus. This small amount can cause a fever and maybe some nausea for a couple a days but for people with a healthy immune system it doesn't bother them. For people that are immunocompromised though, it causes a major problem because their bodies cannot create the antibodies required to fight off the virus and those people will develop a full blown infection. The CDC prohibits people with compromised immune systems from receiving live vaccines," Cam said. Brennan quickly put the dots together.

"So you think that this was organized from the very beginning. That someone had been poisoning Alex since he had been in China with DDT to damage his immune system and then when his immune system was compromised enough, they injected him with the vaccine for yellow fever. With his immune system as damaged as it was, he wouldn't be able to fight off the virus and he would have presented with all the signs of yellow fever, which looks a lot like the flu. And in this day in age where everyone is paranoid about different flu viruses, they could claim that they did not want anyone to examine the body and did not want to release it because they were afraid that the virus could get out and affect the general public." Brennan was stunned by this revelation. There was a moment of silence as the three scientists absorbed this information before Cam continued.

"I would be willing to bet that if you examined Alex's body, you would find a puncture mark from where he was injected with the yellow fever vaccine."

"So now we know how Alex died. But why go through all of this trouble? If someone wanted Alex dead, there are much easier ways to kill someone. I mean the yellow fever might not have killed him," Brennan wondered out loud.

"Well, that's obvious," Hodgins stated. After a moment of silence, Angela said, "Enlighten us, Hodgins, because this is the part that Booth usually figures out."

"It was the Chinese government." After groans from Brennan, Cam, and Angela, Hodgins started again.

"Okay, okay, just hear me out. India, China, and North Korea are the only three countries in the world that still produce and export DDT and the distinct chemical formula in the DDT in Alex's blood matched the DDT produced in China. The Chinese government controls the companies that make the DDT so it would be very easy for someone in the government to get enough DDT to poison Alex. Also, not just anyone can get the yellow fever vaccine. Ever since the swine flu scare last year, a lot of governments have requested vaccines for a variety of different viruses in case of an outbreak, including yellow fever."

"Get to the point, Hodgins," Cam said and Brennan could hear the frustration in her voice.

"Alex was the son of the owners of Sabrina Telecommunications, a company which was in the process of closing one of the biggest communications deals in Chinese history. Not only was this deal worth millions of dollars to Sabrina Telecommunications but also it would have opened up China to outside influence more than ever before. Because of this there were a lot of critics to this deal inside and outside the Chinese government. I think that some of these critics thought that if the Santa Ana's son died, it would put the deal on hold for now and give them some more time to find a way to block it from happening," Hodgins said.

"So, what's the next step?" Cam asked.

"You have to find the guys that Agent Li said were buying Alex's drinks. My guess is that those guys were the ones poisoning him with the DDT. If you find them, you may be able to find the people who set up Booth as well," Hodgins answered, obviously using his years of being obsessed with conspiracy theories to come to that conclusion.

"All right. I'll call Cullen and let him know what we found. He can relay it to the Embassy. Good work," Brennan said, wordlessly dismissing the people in her office. Cam and Hodgins both nodded at her before getting up and leaving the room. Angela, though, got up from the couch and moved to Cam's now vacant chair.

"Do you know when you are going to be able to see Booth?" she asked.

Brennan shook her head no. "The Ambassador is still insisting that our presence will only do more harm than good. But I have this irrational urge to go anyway, Ange. I need to see him," Brennan said and she could hear the desperation in her voice. Brennan narrowed her eyes when Angela started to smile. "Ange, what did you do?"

"Well, sweetie, in two weeks, Peking University in Beijing is holding a conference about the significance of the "oracle bones," which are pieces of animal bones that have inscriptions on them dating back on the 13th century BCE, placing them in the Shang Dynasty. Posing as your secretary, I emailed the director of the conference and told him that as a forensic anthropologist, you have been very interested in these bones and would love to attend the conference."

Brennan began to smile as well, catching onto where Angela was going with this. "Ange, you didn't…"

"They were thrilled to hear about your interest and are expecting you on August 31st. So you might want to tell Cullen when you call him that while you are in China for this fascinating conference, you might as well set up some time to see Booth as well," Angela said as she got up and left the room.

Brennan could only stare, shocked, for a moment. Then she shook her head with a smile on her face. Even though it was still two weeks away, Angela had found her a way into China without drawing suspicion. Brennan laughed to herself as she picked up the phone, looking forward to Cullen's reaction to the "meddling squints."