The Romanov Cross: A Novel (16 page)

“But why here? Those bodies have been buried for almost a hundred years. Why would you think that they would contain a live virus when there are graveyards all over the globe filled with people who died from the flu?”

“But the bodies there weren’t flash frozen and kept in that state ever since.”

In her mind’s eye, she pictured the woolly-mammoth carcass that had been unearthed, nearly perfectly preserved, when they built the oil and gas refinery just outside town. She was just six years old then, but she remembered staring at it, feeling so sad, and wondering if it had been killed by a dinosaur.

“What about the risk to this town? If there’s a threat a few miles offshore, that’s a lot too close for comfort in my book. Are we going to have to evacuate? And if so, for how long? Who’s going to pay for that, and where are we supposed to go?”

She had a dozen other questions, too, but he held up his hand and said, “Hold on, hold on. It’s all in that report.”

“Thanks very much,” she said, acidly, “but as we’ve already discussed, it’ll take me all night to read that thing.”

“The risk,” Dr. Slater said, “has been calculated to be well within reasonable limits, and just to be on the safe side, we will be proceeding under Biohazard 3 conditions at all times. Any specimens will be taken on and off the island by Coast Guard helicopter. They won’t even pass through Port Orlov. We will only need this town as a temporary staging area. We’ll have assembled, and be gone, by the day after tomorrow. Nobody needs to go anywhere.”

For the moment, she was pacified, but she still wasn’t happy. She had come back to this town in the middle of nowhere because she felt a responsibility to it, and to her native people. She knew the history of their suffering, and she knew the toll those terrible misdeeds continued to take, down to the present day. There wasn’t an Inuit family that didn’t still feel the pain from the loss of their way of life, not a family that wasn’t fractured by depression or alcoholism or drugs. She had made it out, with a scholarship first to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and then the graduate program in anthropology at Berkeley. But she had come back, to be their voice and their defender. Only right now, she wasn’t sure how best to go about it.

The phone rang again, cut short by Geordie picking up down the hall.

“I know I’ve given you a lot to digest,” Slater said, but before she could answer, Geordie hollered, “When you said no calls, did you mean the sanitation plant, too?”

“Yes!” she called back, exasperated.

“But I’d be happy to answer any other questions you have. I know you’ll have plenty more.”

A gust of cold air blew down the corridor, followed by the sound of stamping feet. Professor Kozak leaned in the doorway, his glasses fogged and his face ruddy. “Is anyone hungry? I am hungry enough to eat the bear!”

It was just the note of comic relief that Nika needed. She smiled, and Dr. Slater smiled, too. His face took on a wry, but appealing, expression.
She found herself wondering where else he had been before winding up in this remote corner of Alaska. From the weariness that she also saw in his face, she guessed it had been a lot of the world’s hot spots. “I’m not sure they’re serving bear,” she said, slipping the report into her desk drawer, then locking it, “but I know a place that does the best mooseburger north of Nome.”

Charlie had been in the middle of a webcast, sending out the word from the Vane’s Holy Writ headquarters—and of course soliciting funds so that the church could continue its “community outreach programs in the most removed and spiritually deprived regions of America’s great northwest”—when his whole damn house started to shake.

His wife Rebekah had come running into the room with her hands over her head and her half-wit sister Bathsheba right behind her shouting, “It’s the Rapture! Prepare yourself for the Lord!”

Charlie almost might have believed it himself, except that the sound from on high reminded him so much of a helicopter. Out the window, he could see spotlights whisking back and forth across the backyard and the garage, where he kept his specially equipped and modified minivan.

Whipping around from the Skype camera on his computer, he’d wheeled his chair out of the meeting room and onto the back deck, just in time to see this huge friggin’ chopper moving like a giant dragonfly over his land. It was no more than fifty feet off the ground and looked to him like it was on some kind of close-surveillance mission. For a moment, he wondered if the federal government was sending a black-ops team to take him out; he’d certainly been known to say
some inflammatory things about those bastards in Washington. The lighted cross on top of his roof, it suddenly occurred to him, might as well have been a bull’s-eye.

But the chopper moved on, skimming the treetops, then disappearing over the ridge and heading in the general direction of the community center. He listened as its roar gradually decreased, then grabbed his cell phone out of the pocket of his cardigan and called Harley. First he got the automated message, but he called back immediately, and this time Harley, sounding groggy, picked up.

“How the hell did you sleep through that?” Charlie demanded.

“Sleep through what?”

“That helicopter that just about knocked my chimney off.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the military chopper that’s scoping out the town. I bet it’s got something to do with you and that coffin.”

“Charlie, next time you decide to flip out, call somebody else.”

“Don’t you dare hang up,” he warned. “Now get up and get your ass down to the Yardarm and find out what’s going on.” The Yardarm Bar and Grill was the local equivalent of a switchboard.

“Why don’t you go?”

“ ’Cause I’m in the middle of my broadcast.”

Harley laughed. “To who? You really think anybody’s listening out there?”

Charlie did sometimes wonder how many there were, but envelopes containing small checks and five-dollar bills did occasionally show up in his mailbox, so there had to be some. Not to mention the fact that he had two women in his house who had found him over the Web.

“I’m not gonna argue about this,” Charlie said, with the authority that always carried the day. “Get going.”

When he hung up and turned around on the cold deck, Rebekah was standing in the doorway with her hands in the pockets of one of her long dresses. Bathsheba was lurking right behind her, apparently persuaded that the Rapture had been postponed. Their white faces and beaked noses put him in mind of seagulls.

“We lost the connection online,” Rebekah said. “I told you we don’t have enough bandwidth.”

Harley dropped the phone on the mattress and lay there for a while. Why did Charlie always get to call the shots? It couldn’t be because he was in a wheelchair; it had been like this his whole life. Angie had told Harley he should just leave Port Orlov and start over someplace where his brother couldn’t boss him around. And he was starting to think that, dumb as she was, she was right about that much. If this graveyard gig worked out, and the coffins did contain valuable stuff, then that just might be his ticket to the good life in the Lower 48.

He wouldn’t even give his brother his phone number.

Getting up, he stumbled around the trailer, looking for some clean clothes—or clothes that would pass for clean—and ran his fingers through his hair in lieu of a proper brush. The floor was ankle deep in detritus—beer cans, cereal boxes, martial-arts magazines—and all of it was bathed in a faint violet glow from the snake cage on the counter next to the microwave. Glancing in, he saw Fergie curled on the rock, and he said, “You hungry?” He couldn’t remember when he had last fed her, so he opened the freezer and took out a frozen mouse—it was curled up like a question mark in a plastic baggie—and nuked it for about a minute. Once he had left one in too long and the stench had made the trailer unlivable for a week. He’d had to move back home with Charlie and the witches, and that was so creepy he couldn’t wait to get out of there. Bathsheba, in particular, kept turning up outside his door on one dumb pretext or another.

The trailer was parked about a hundred yards off Front Street, between the lumberyard and a place called the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe. Harley had never asked anybody if he could park it there, and nobody had ever told him he couldn’t. That was one thing that you
could
say for Alaska—the place was still wide open.

But freezing. Even though the Yardarm was only a few minutes’ walk away, by the time he got there his ears were burning from the cold, and he had to stand in the doorway soaking up the heat. The
usual crowd was around, Angie was carrying out a tray of burgers and fries, but some things were different: there were two guys at the bar he had never seen before—real straight-arrow types, still in their Coast Guard uniforms—and over in the far corner, Nika Tincook was at a table with two other men he’d never laid eyes on. Four strangers in one night, in a bar in Port Orlov—that was positively breaking news.

On her way back to the kitchen, Harley snagged Angie by the arm and said, “What’s up?”

“Harley, don’t do that here—the boss is watching.”

But he couldn’t fail to notice that her eyes had flitted in the direction of the two Coast Guard dudes, one of whom had glanced back.

“Who are they?”

“Pilots.”

“I can see that.”

“Were you just handling those dead mice again?” she said, wrinkling her nose. She brushed at the place on her arm where he’d been holding her.

“What are they doing here?”

“You got me. Why don’t you ask them?”

She pulled away and went back through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

Harley, hoping nobody had noticed how she shrugged him off all of a sudden, sauntered over toward the bar and eased himself onto a stool near the Coast Guardsmen. Engrossed in their own conversation, they didn’t acknowledge him in any way.

He ordered a beer and then, leaning toward them, said, “Never seen you guys around town.”

“Just passing through,” the one with the blond crew cut said, but without turning around.

“On that chopper that flew in?”

The red-haired one—who’d been checking out Angie—nodded warily.

“Oh yeah? If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the job?”

“Routine,” the redhead said, and when Harley looked over at the
crew-cut guy, he, too, just stared down into his nearly empty mug and said, “Training mission.”

Then they kind of closed up like a clamshell, talking to each other in low tones, and Harley felt like a horse’s ass sitting there on the stool next to them. But he wasn’t about to get up and leave right away because that would make it look even worse. Instead, he sat there and finished his beer, trying to draw the bartender into conversation about the latest Seahawks game. But even Al was too busy to talk.

There was a boisterous laugh from the rear, back near the pool tables, and Harley saw it was from the husky guy in glasses, the one sitting between the tall, thin guy and Port Orlov’s illustrious mayor, Nika. Harley had never had a thing for native chicks—he liked leggy blondes, even if they were fake blondes like Angie—but for Nika, he had often told his pals Eddie and Russell, he would make an exception. She couldn’t have been more than five-three, five-four, with big, dark eyes and hair as black as a seal. But he loved the way she was built—trim and hard, and when the weather was good and she went around town in just a fleece jacket, with her long hair loose and whipping in the wind, he had to admit she got him going.

After putting away one more beer and hanging out by the jukebox like he cared what played next, he meandered back toward the pool tables. Selecting a cue from the rack, he pretended to be checking its tip and its straightness, and then, as if offhandedly, noticed Nika sitting a few feet away. “Hey, Your Honor,” he said, facetiously.

“Harley.”

“Want to run a few balls with me?”

“Another time.”

He was debating what his next move should be when the tall guy, with the remains of a burger and fries on the plate in front of him, saved him the trouble. “Is that Harley as in Vane?” he asked.

“The one and only. Accept no substitutes.”

“Frank Slater,” he said, rising enough to extend a hand. “I’m pleased to meet you. I heard about your ordeal.”

“Yeah, that’s what it was, all right.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” he said, pushing out
an extra chair. “I’m a doctor—it’s in our nature.” This was too good to be true, Harley thought, even if Nika did look like she was going to shit a brick. Harley turned the chair around so that he could lean his arms on the back as he sat down.

“This is Professor Kozak,” Slater said.

“Prof.” When they shook, the guy’s grip was like a vise—not like any professor’s that Harley’d ever heard of. Had to be a Russkie.

“I’m glad to see you look completely recovered,” the doctor observed. “No residual effects then?”

“Nah, I’m okay,” Harley said, though if the guy had asked about any mental effects, he could have told him a different story. Every time he closed his eyes, he had a nightmare about being chased by a pack of black wolves, only they all had human faces.

“You know, there’s something called PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—and it can hit you days, weeks, or even months, after something like what happened to you.”

Harley had seen enough TV shows to know all about it. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard.”

“I just wanted you to keep it in mind,” he said, “and let you know that you should see someone if you start having some problems dealing with the fallout. It would be completely normal if you did.”

Harley snickered. “Yeah, okay. If I start freaking out, I’ll just go and see one of the shrinks we don’t have, at the hospital that doesn’t exist.”

The doc nodded, like he knew he’d just made an ass of himself, but at the same time Harley felt this weird urge to take him up on the offer and get some of this crap off his chest—to tell him about the dreams of the wolves and the sight of somebody with a yellow lantern. It wasn’t like he could confess any of it to Russell or Eddie—they’d just tell him to have another beer—and even Angie would think he was acting like a pussy.