The Romanov Cross: A Novel (37 page)

In order to feel confident in their results, she and Slater had decided that they would need to exhume no less than three more corpses, all from separate and distinct spots in the cemetery. To avoid any risk of cross-contamination or confusion among the specimens taken, they had also determined to work on only one cadaver at a time, reap the harvest they required, then put the dissected remains back in their frozen grave. The simplest lab protocols were always the safest and most elegant, Lantos believed, especially when dealing with what were called “select agents”—the most notorious pathogens like ricin, anthrax, and ebola—and under such tricky conditions as these.

After stretching her muscles and pressing her hands to the small of her back, she debated going over to the mess tent for a quick pick-me-up—some hot oatmeal and a mug of coffee—or to get just one more test under way. The idea of a break was very tempting, but it was such a hassle to suit up, then undress again, that she decided to go forward with just one more bit of business first.

The animal trial.

Lantos had a soft spot for the mice she routinely subjected to these tests. They were far more intelligent and even cunning creatures than they were given credit for. But countless millions of them had been bred and used and destroyed by now for the purposes of medical research and scientific gain; it was their misfortune that they reproduced rapidly and had genetic counterparts, some nearly identical, to 99 percent of human genes. She wished there was some other and better way to glean the information the scientists needed … but so far no one had come up with one.

Right now she had three glass containers, each containing six white mice, all ranged on a counter. One tank was the control group—who would remain untouched in any way—another was the tank whose inhabitants would be injected with a common flu virus, and a third was reserved for the mice who would be exposed to the viral strains
or material that had been extracted and isolated from the body of the deacon.

Nestled in a corner of the lab tent, an open crate of additional live mice was housed for subsequent tests. She had checked their food and water supplies that morning.

One by one, Lantos reached into the second tank, and with a packet of syringes she found it devilishly hard to manipulate through the gloves, injected each with a dose of the strain most prevalent in the human population at the time she had departed for the island. Lots of people, all over the globe, were going to be sick with it that winter, but no one whose health wasn’t otherwise compromised would die from it. The mice scrambled around, trying to avoid her grasp, but lay docile in her hand as she made the injections, marked their backs with a dab of blue ink, and put them back among their comrades.

It was with the third tank that she had to be extraordinarily alert and careful. She had made a serum from the blood drawn from the deacon’s frozen veins, spun and purified it, and dubbed it SPI—for St. Peter’s Island—#1. There would be several others in the days to come. The serum was contained in an innocuous brown vial with a little orange label, and as she filled a fresh syringe with the concoction, then administered a drop or two to each of the six mice in the third tank, she wondered if she was looking at a harmless soup, or Armageddon in a bottle. Each SPI #1 mouse was marked with a daub of orange stain on its back and tail.

The mysteries of flu were legion. The Spanish flu had been an airborne illness, dispelled and disseminated in the coughs and sneezes of its victims; all of their bodily fluids and secretions, from mucus to saliva, tears to feces to blood, were saturated with the virus, and the next victim had only to breathe in a poisoned vapor, or unwittingly touch a tainted surface before then touching that same hand to his mouth or nose or eyes, for the transmission to be made. The flu was onto another host.

And mutating all the while. Just as Lantos felt a certain sympathy
for the mice, she also harbored a grudging, if horrified, admiration for the flu. Almost all researchers eventually did. The virus was a veritable Houdini, armed with a thousand tricks and stunts and contortions that would allow it to move through as large a host population as possible, with the greatest possible ease and speed, and keeping one step ahead of its victims’ ability to create antibodies or defense mechanisms to defeat it. Even armed with the latest technology and decades of previous research results, the scientific community—Lantos included—was often astonished at the infinitesimally small changes that could transform a flu from a mild annoyance to a lethal disease of epic proportions. In reconstructions of the 1918 flu, research scientists had concluded that it was the polymerase genes and the HA and NA genes in particular that had made it so virulent. But the sequences of those polymerase proteins were not only present in subsequent human strains, but differed by a mere ten amino acids from some of the most dangerous avian influenza viruses seen in the past few years. The flu could morph, Lantos knew, almost before your eyes, changing its genetic structure to blend in with any crowd, like an immigrant putting on a new suit of clothes to walk the streets unnoticed.

And, to make matters worse, it had learned over the centuries to jump species, too, as fluidly as a trapeze artist. No one knew whether the next pandemic was brewing in a pigpen in Bolivia, or on a poultry farm in Macau.

Once all the mice were treated and marked—their tanks separately ventilated, and placed several feet apart—Lantos stoppered the vial of SPI #1 and took it back, for safekeeping, to the freezer in the autopsy chamber. There, she placed it beside the range of samples taken from the deacon’s cadaver, along with the diamond-studded icon and the paper prayer he had held in his rigid hands. Slater had promised Kozak that if the initial lab results on the blood and tissue came back clear, he would allow him to thaw out the paper, unscroll it, and read whatever it said. The professor had looked like a kid who’d been promised a trip to Disneyland.

We are all such strange creatures, Lantos thought, closing the freezer. We have our individual passions and interests, most of them
formed in some way in our childhoods, then those same interests become translated in our later lives into careers. Kozak had probably collected rocks and geodes, and wound up a geologist, while she had always been fascinated by the natural world and the myriad forms that life could take. Summers had been spent on the Massachusetts coastline, studying the busy life in the tide pools and clamming with her dad. Where did all this activity come from? How did it all survive? She could see how everything was connected, but what then was her place in it (apart from enjoying, guiltily, the clam chowder)? If there was a natural order—or disorder—who or what was responsible for that? Big questions. She had loved to turn them over and over in her mind, and now, by concentrating on one of the tiniest and yet most indefatigable life-forms on the planet, she got to dedicate her life to the big stuff, after all. If you could figure out the flu, it was like turning the key on a box filled with mysteries.

But a Pandora’s box, if you weren’t careful.

She closed the freezer, and as she turned to leave the autopsy chamber, she thought she saw a yellow glow, like a lanternlight, hovering near the main entry to the lab tent. And maybe someone’s silhouette, too—someone on the short side. But she was peering through several layers of thick plastic sheathing, and it was like looking at something at the bottom of a murky pond. She was reminded of the crabs that would scuttle for cover when she fished her hand into the tide pool.

She parted the curtains of the autopsy chamber and stepped out, face mask and goggles still in place, expecting to see Slater, or maybe even the professor, entering the tent. After so many hours of work, she would be glad of the company.

But she was wrong.

More wrong than she had ever been in her life.

She stopped where she was and stood stock-still, but it wasn’t as if she could become invisible. The human silhouette was gone, the tent flaps were open, and a black wolf, with a white blaze on its muzzle, planted its paws on the rubber matting, its back bristling from the wind, its eyes glaring with a strangely human intensity.

“The lines are still on the screen!” Kozak shouted to Slater from across the graveyard. He was pushing his GPR back and forth like a vacuum cleaner on the snowy ground.

“So it’s not a computer malfunction?”

Kozak shook his head, his head down and earmuffs flapping, as he studied the digital monitor mounted between the handlebars. The professor had been puzzled by the fissile lines that kept showing up on the geothermal ground charts and had insisted on coming back out again to see if they would reappear.

And they had.

Now, Slater wondered, would he have an explanation? Looking out across the windswept cemetery, Slater could barely imagine how, or why, anyone would have willingly chosen to settle in such a bleak and inaccessible spot as St. Peter’s Island, a place where even the simple act of burial would have required a Herculean effort.

“Of course!” Kozak said to himself, loudly enough that Slater could still hear it across the rows of old graves, while smacking his palm against his forehead.

“Of course what?” Slater said, stepping between the stones and markers.

“These are the kinds of lines and deformations you usually see only in minefields.”

“There were no mines here,” Slater said, coming to his side.

“But there were explosions,” Kozak said, pointing at the crazed web of lines that radiated across his computer grid. “You see where they are?”

“It looks like they’re everywhere.”

“Everywhere in the graveyard,” Kozak said, “but not as you come to the end of the rows. Not as you start to enter the woods.”

“Okay,” Slater conceded, “I’ll buy that.”

“The colonists were setting off explosions in the cemetery. They were using dynamite, probably, to break up the tundra and permafrost.”

Of course
, Slater thought, echoing Kozak. It made perfect sense. Global warming might have loosened the hold of the soil, but it was the bedrock beneath that had been fractured already. No wonder that coffin had fallen into the sea.

But what would it mean in the epidemiological sense? What would it mean for the cadavers of flu victims? Would it have created an aerated or unstable ground environment, and if so, would that have contributed to the decay of the bodies and the dissipation of any viral threat? The state of the deacon’s body argued otherwise—he was frozen as solid as an ice cube when he’d been dug up—but he could prove to be an anomaly. The only way to know for sure was to exhume at least two or three more.

And to do it before this storm that was blowing in got any worse.

Slater had pretty much decided on which grave to excavate next. It was a dozen yards or so closer in from the cliffs, and if he followed that one up with the plot at the northwesternmost corner of the lot, he’d have a rough triangle that he could then work either in, or out, from, depending on the results he and Lantos were getting in the lab. By now, he figured, she had created a purified blood sample from the deacon, and might even have begun the live-animal trials. He was eager to find out how she was coming along.

“What do you say we pack it in then?” Slater asked.

But Kozak, rapt in the numbers that were scrolling down one side of his computer screen, simply grunted.

“Vassily?”

“You go; I want to study this more,” the professor said. “I will see you in camp.”

Slater knew enough not to disturb a fellow scientist when he was absorbed in his work—he himself had been known to fall asleep at his desk after ten or twelve straight hours of crunching data—so he clapped him on the padded shoulder of his parka and picked his way back through the graves. But he must have taken a slightly different route because suddenly his foot plunged through the snow and into a hole in the ground. The sole of his boot thumped on top of a creaking coffin.

How could he—and Kozak—have missed this on their general survey of the graveyard days ago?

Pulling his boot out, he got down on his knees and brushed the snow cover away. About two feet down, he saw a casket lid splintered as if it had been hit by an axe. Through a gaping hole in the wood, he saw the dark shadows of a corpse.

Jesus Christ. When had this happened?
In the pale and failing light of the day, he couldn’t tell if the damage had been done recently, or if this was just an age-old accident that had been overlooked thus far.

Either way, it had to be contained, and immediately.

“What are you doing?” Kozak called out.

“There’s a hole in the ground here,” Slater hollered, “and a compromised burial plot.”

“That’s not possible,” the professor said, indignantly, heading in his direction. “I covered all the ground, and if there had been a hole of any kind—”

“It’s here,” Slater interrupted, “and don’t come any closer. We’ll have to seal this up right away.” He was already reformulating his exhumation schedule; this grave, and its dimly glimpsed occupant, would have to be the next one investigated. Grabbing up several of the pennant flags that marked the grid, he stuck them as firmly as he could in the snowy earth all around the perimeter of the grave. “Don’t
come any closer than you already have,” he warned Kozak again, “and don’t let Rudy or Groves get any closer than this, either.”

He stood up, and looked all around for any sign of intrusion, but the fresh snow had covered any tracks that might have been there. None of this made any sense. If the hole had been made recently, who could have done it? Why would they have done it?

And could they possibly still be on the island somewhere?

“Keep an eye out,” he said ominously to the professor. “We might not be alone here.”

Even as the professor looked at him slack-jawed, Slater took off for the colony. He needed to put the word out that the cemetery was now completely off-limits to everyone—though it was Nika he had foremost in his mind. He could not risk her coming out here to perform some native ritual so long as an open grave posed any possible danger.