The Explorer's Code (7 page)

“Charles Bonnard,” he said, offering his hand. “We spoke on the phone. Sorry I didn’t catch up with you until now. I had a lot of last-minute things to sort out. I had planned to find you before dinner, but somehow the time got away from me.”

“Oh, hello,” Cordelia said. “Thanks so much for everything. The entire evening has been perfect.”

“Leaving us so soon?” Charles said. “Could I entice you to stay for an after-dinner drink?”

“Oh, thank you, but I really am tired,” she replied automatically.

It was her standard excuse. How many times had she said it in the last year? But this time, as she said the words, she regretted them. He looked so charming; she found she really wanted to stay after all. Maybe he would press her to stay, and she could pretend to reconsider. She hesitated a moment to see what he would do.

“Oh, don’t worry, I understand completely. These things drag on for hours,” assured Charles.

“It has been lovely,” Cordelia said uncertainly, but she didn’t move toward the car.

“Well, I am so glad you had a nice time. It’s great to finally meet you. I know John Sinclair was delighted to be seated next to you at dinner.”

He didn’t move either, as if to prolong the moment.

“Oh, gosh, I hate to tell you what I did to John Sinclair. I feel like a perfect fool,” Cordelia admitted.

“What?” asked Charles.

“I didn’t realize who he was,” she confessed. “I ignored him during dinner and talked to Jean-Louis Etienne instead.”

Charles threw back his head and laughed.

“Oh. Well, don’t worry; Sinclair’s ego is strong enough to take it. But personally, I would be in tears.”

He stood in front of her, perfectly still. He seemed to be waiting for her to make a suggestion.

She hesitated. He was adorable. Why couldn’t she just reverse her decision to leave? She searched for a way to say it.

Charles, sensing her reluctance, misunderstood and stepped over to open the car door. He gave the driver a nod of dismissal as he held the door for her.

“Allow me.”

She reluctantly slid in, folding her dress away from the doorframe.

“Thank you.”

Charles lingered still, holding the car door handle.

“I’m sorry, I’m holding you up. You must be tired from traveling.”

“Not really, it’s fine,” Cordelia assured him.

“I understand you will be around for a day or so. You must promise to call me if you want some company, or need anything.” He handed her his Herodotus Foundation card. She took it.

“Congratulations on the award, and thanks again for coming,” Charles said, finally shutting her door. He waved with a smile as the limo pulled away.

She sat back in the luxurious interior of the car and looked at his card. He clearly wanted her to take the initiative and call him. She looked up and saw the limo driver observing her in the rearview mirror. He gave her a respectful nod and looked back at the road.

Maybe she
would
call Charles tomorrow. She was in Monaco, after all! He offered to show her around. What harm could there be in that? It was time to live!

She reached for her evening bag, to put away his card. Her bag wasn’t there! On the dark leather seat were only the diary and the Herodotus Foundation plaque. She frantically searched the seat and the floor of the limo for her minaudière. It was then she realized it was still in the right-hand pocket of John Sinclair’s tuxedo.

E
vgeny stood on deck and watched Anna walk along the quay toward his yacht. This was perfect. Her husband, Vlad, was at the Oceanographic Institute Ball. Alexandrov and the rest of the Russians were probably all drunk by now, celebrating their claim on the North Pole.

He ogled her as she tottered up the aluminum walkway. Magenta silk shirt unbuttoned to reveal deep cleavage. Hip-hugging little white skirt already hiking up as she ascended the steep incline of the
passerelle
. The tide was in and the Benetti rode high in the harbor. She had to hold on to the handrails to manage the climb.

She was wearing very high platform espadrilles, with laces that crisscrossed up her legs almost to the knee. Those laces might be interesting later in the bedroom. He had an exciting mental preview of what he would do to her.

Evgeny had known she would come. She had intelligent eyes and understood, even from that first meeting, what he wanted. She hadn’t seemed surprised when he called her this afternoon. He didn’t think anything would surprise this woman, but he was going to try. He felt the deep stir of excitement at the thought of making her his toy for the evening.

She bussed him on the cheek as she reached the top of the gangplank. What a great little piece. Her scent was sweet and heavy. Expensive. He felt a stir again. He wanted to smell it mingled with sweat, fear even. It was going to be one hell of a night.

B
ritish researcher Paul Oakley picked up the phone on his desk and dialed a long-distance number. As he waited for the ring, he surveyed his office and ran a hand through his mop of hair. He really had to sort out some of this mess. Stacks of paper stood in piles as high as his head. His office at Queen Mary’s School of Medicine was the epicenter of internationally renowned research on the deadly pandemic of 1918, but right now it looked like the epicenter of an earthquake. It was time to clean up. But he didn’t have the emotional focus right now; he was nervous. For the first time, he actually was involved in something clandestine, and it didn’t suit him.

The person he was calling didn’t answer, but the voice mail clicked on. He spoke quietly.

“Miles, it’s Paul Oakley. I hope you have been able to find what you were looking for. Give me a call.”

Paul Oakley was maintaining deniability about the expedition. The story was, his friend Miles was acting on his own. Oakley’s department head at the hospital would never approve of what they were doing, and if something went wrong he would have to play the innocent. Miles had offered to take the blame, if it came to that; he was retired, wealthy, and had no organization to censure him.

To maintain secrecy, they were both paying for the expedition out of pocket. Oakley had the money. He had patented a popular ulcer drug early on in his career and had been living off a princely income ever since. With his money and Miles’s dedication, they had decided: no paperwork, no grants, and no funding proposals. They hadn’t said a word to the press, had not even indulged in any lunchroom chat. Scientific competition had
torpedoed many a worthy project. And Oakley wanted to be the very first to crack the gene sequencing of the apocalyptic pandemic virus of 1918.

The problem was finding tissue samples of victims who had been stricken ninety years ago. There were only a half dozen cadavers in the world preserved under the kind of conditions necessary to generate a good tissue sample.

His cell phone was ringing. It was Miles, calling back.

“Paul, we are good to go here.”

Miles sounded ramped up and energized, and the connection from Svalbard was surprisingly clear, despite the fact he was in the most remote spot on earth.

“Did you find enough people to help you do the digging?”

“Yeah, I got a couple of guys who can do the heavy lifting. I will call you when we get closer to the . . . samples.”

“Great. Talk then.”

M
iles flipped his cell phone shut and watched the exhumation. They had been digging for three hours now, thawing the earth with a steady jet of steam, shoveling out the muddy gruel, and piling it to the side of the pit.

He remembered when he first considered exhuming the grave in the Svalbard settlement of Barentsburg, forty years ago. Back then, he had been a young scientist with lots of ambition. But he hadn’t timed his expedition properly, just went on a whim, with only a pickax and determination. It had been a complete failure. The season had been wrong, the ground frozen. There were no samples.

Miles had learned a lot about permafrost since then. In very cold climates, permafrost can tolerate a considerable amount of heat, water, or steam without thawing, making a steam generator a critical piece of equipment. And even then it wasn’t easy because the amount of energy needed to melt the ice was intense. Normally it took one calorie to raise one gram of water a degree, but it took 80 calories to melt a gram of water from ice, and 540 calories to make one gram of water into steam.

Luckily the ground in Barentsburg was ideal for this. This grave was in thaw-stable permafrost, well-drained and coarse sediment. It was mostly glacial outwash that contained a mixture of soil, sand, and gravel. Because there was so much rock, the settlement of the ground after it thawed would be minor.

Miles was also lucky the mass grave was well below the active layer of earth, not subject to annual thawing and freezing. It was permanently frozen.

The great problem with cemeteries in the Arctic was that if the graves
were not deep enough there would be frost heaving. Shallow graves were often subject to the phenomenon of frost jacking—the thawing and freezing gradually pushing the ground surface upward. Any object buried in this active layer of soil would be constantly rising with each season. So coffins buried hastily in shallow earth were continually heaved up after a few thaw cycles. It was a macabre sight, and unnerving to many who had placed their loved ones in what they thought was a final resting place only to have them reappear after a few seasons.

This, however, was a very, very deep grave—a mass grave. It had not thawed since it was originally dug in 1918. The bodies would not have decomposed as rapidly as they normally would. Now Miles would try again to collect the tissue samples frozen into a pile of cadavers all buried in a common pit.

Miles had contacted the authorities before he began work. The magistrate was in the town of Longyearbyen, a village six hundred miles from the North Pole, one of the northernmost pieces of land in the world, on the edge of the ice pack. Longyearbyen administered the smaller hamlet of Barentsburg, where he was digging. It was an old mining camp, which for three-quarters of the year was frozen wilderness. Even during the peak of the summer season Barentsburg had only some four hundred residents. But the residents Miles was interested in were long dead.

The magistrate’s answer to Miles’s question lifted his hopes. No one had been near the mass grave of the 1918 flu victims in Barentsburg in nearly forty years. The last person who had examined the site was Miles himself. Back then, he had traveled the fifty-five miles to the village by dogsled. Now he would take a Land Rover. When he went to Barentsburg that winter long ago, the little village had been clad in the romance of the Arctic ice and snow. Now, in early autumn, the place had lost most of that romance. Barentsburg was a desolate dump. Coated with coal dust, it stood ramshackle and depressing on the edge of a bleak sea.

When Miles arrived this time, there had been a great willingness to help. It was almost as if unearthing a pandemic might liven the place up a bit. Six young diggers, coal mine workers, had stepped forward to help, for the modest fee of a hundred dollars each.

Miles knew the grave held seventy-two people. The history was grim. In 1918, a village celebration had turned into a death sentence. A ship had put into Advent Bay, and two men on board had brought the deadly contagion with them. They had arrived in Barentsburg by dogsled, ready to
work in the coal mine. They had been lavishly welcomed: the village had prepared a feast for the newcomers and everyone had turned out to celebrate. There was grilled fish, blueberries, griddle cakes, and whiskey consumed in the largest structure in town, a church, with people crammed cheek by jowl on the wooden benches in the overheated room, talking, laughing, eating. That proximity had been their doom. Within a day the first had fallen, in extreme distress.

First came the high fever, facial discoloration, deep brown splotches, and purple “heliotrope” rash. Next came the telltale cyanosis, victims blue-faced from the lack of oxygen. The feet turning black was the indicator of eventual death. The victims were a horror show of symptoms, with blood-colored saliva foaming out of their mouths and rectal bleeding from the intestines. Some died within hours, delirious with the high fever, gasping for air as they drowned in their own blood.

The whole village had been wiped out. Only five adults survived. The rest were buried hastily in a deep pit. What a tragedy, Miles allowed himself to think, as he watched the generator pump steam into the permanently frozen ground.

Miles took a deep breath to quell his excitement. There was a good chance they would be able to biopsy the tissue if it had been frozen all this time. This deadly pestilence was all but extinct, but he would seek it out, resurrect it, bottle it, and send it back to the civilized world, to Paul Oakley.

Miles and Oakley had been comrades-in-arms for decades against the new influenza strains that were emerging in the world. Most recently, they had been conducting clinical trials using new vaccines and antiviral drugs.

Paul Oakley had already tried to get samples from the high Arctic. He had funded a team last year to try to get tissue from the old miners’ graveyard in Longyearbyen. The mission had been only partially successful. This year they might succeed in Barentsburg.

This was not a mere ego trip, or the resolution of an unfulfilled scientific quest from decades ago. Miles and Oakley knew it was a critical race against time. Tissue samples were essential to discovering the genomic connection to the avian flu that was ravaging Asia. The pandemic of 1918 would be the key to stopping the new avian flu outbreak from spreading.

“We’re almost there,” he encouraged the men who were digging.

They were covered in mud. The steam helped, but the diggers still had a hard time, their strong young arms wielding picks and shovels.
The slurry was heavy with water, rock, and mud. The rectangle they dug was six feet wide and twenty-eight feet long. As the ground melted, and the earth warmed, the powerful grave stench came up. They dug steadily despite the retch-inducing smell.