Текст книги "The Romanov Cross"

Автор книги: Robert Masello

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

Chapter 7

Although Dr. Levinson had spoken with a touch of hyperbole, Slater soon discovered that she’d meant what she said. He was instructed to draw up a game plan and risk assessment, a preliminary budget (though Dr. Levinson had made it clear on his way out that cost was to be no object), put together a team of whatever specialists he would require, and have it all on her desk in seventy-two hours. Normally, it was the kind of thing that would have taken weeks, if not months – not only to be put together but to be vetted by everyone else in the chain of command. But again, Dr. Levinson had made it plain that this project would have the highest-priority clearance not only from AFIP, but from the Army, the Air Force, and the Coast Guard, all of which would have to be involved at one stage or another. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had also offered their full cooperation and support. “But I don’t want them meddling,” Levinson had said. “They take a month to make a cup of coffee.”

Dr. Slater had returned to his offices, rolled up his sleeves, and started making out the ideal roster to assist him. He would need a team of people who were as dedicated as they were skilled, and as competent as they were fearless. They would be performing some of the most sensitive and dangerous work imaginable, and under what were sure to be very tricky and adverse conditions. It was one thing to do an autopsy in a state-of-the-art lab; it was altogether another to take organ core samples in an open graveyard, on a freezing island, where the ground beneath your feet could give way at any time. He would have to choose his people very carefully.

First of all, the logistics would be crucial. There would be tons of gear – quite literally – that would have to be brought to the island site. Everything from decontamination tents to jackhammers, generators to refrigerators (even in Alaska). For a job this big and complicated, there was only one man he trusted – Sergeant Jerome Groves, who was due to be redeployed to some hot zone in the Middle East at the end of the week. All things considered, he might be glad to get the call.

Slater put his name at the top of the list.

The next thing he’d need would be that geologist he’d been thinking about earlier. Before Slater and his team put even one shovel into the earth, they would need to use ground-penetrating radar to assess what lay beneath the soil, and to make sure – before doing irreversible damage – that the coffins, and the bodies inside, had not shifted or become separated from each other over the past century. During a typhoid outbreak in Croatia, he had once worked with a Russian who had read the underground water tables as easily as if he were reading a menu in a restaurant. He was attached at the time to the Trofimuk United Institute of Geology, Geophysics and Mineralogy, the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but Slater had no idea what he was doing now. Still, Professor Vassily Kozak was the man he wanted, and he added his name to the list.

As for the virology and autopsy work, Slater could take care of most of that himself. But he would still need another pair of hands, and another set of eyes, to assist him in the cemetery, and to help him run the lab. It took him only a few seconds to come up with Dr. Eva Lantos, a virologist with a Ph.D. from M.I.T. and a mind like a steel trap. The last time he’d heard from her, she’d been living in Boston with her latest girlfriend, and working on the mole-rat genome, but if anybody was up for an adventure, it would be Eva.

Slater made a few calls, left a few messages that were, because of the top secret nature of the mission, a lot more cryptic than he’d have liked, and started burrowing through the accompanying paperwork the AFIP had gathered for him. By the time he had written a preliminary request list and sent the memo back to Dr. Levinson’s office, he glanced out the window and saw that it was already dark out; he’d forgotten to have lunch and had somehow powered himself through the day with nothing but black coffee and a packet of trail mix he’d found in his desk. As a doctor – particularly one who suffered from recurring bouts of malaria – he knew perfectly well that he needed to keep to a healthy and well-regulated diet, and do whatever he could to lower his stress levels. But that was a laugh, of course. He had no sooner escaped spending five years in the brig than he’d been posted to an Arctic island on a Level-3 mission. Fishing his pill case out of his pocket, he swallowed a couple of Chloriquine tablets, flicked off the desk lamp, and went down to get something to eat.

Because of the erratic schedules of scientists and researchers, the cafeteria was kept open around the clock, so he grabbed a quick sandwich and a Snapple. A couple of people said hi, and “Weren’t you overseas somewhere?” and he realized, with relief, that the news of his assault on a commanding officer and his subsequent court-martial hadn’t received much play here. The civilians on staff had no idea of its gravity – all they knew about military discipline was what they’d seen on episodes of JAG—and the army personnel were so involved in their own projects and plans, they weren’t concerned with anyone else’s.

He ate alone, and after tossing the sandwich wrapper and the empty bottle into the trash, he considered heading home, but then he thought, to what? An empty apartment? He could always go to the gym and work out, but there was something so forlorn about the gym at night. The fluorescent lights, the acrid odor of sweat that had been building up all day, the weary attendant mopping the locker-room floor. Not to mention all the other guys who, like him, had nowhere better to go.

And even if his body was flagging, his mind was still percolating just fine right now. That was both his blessing and his curse. It always had been. If his brain were equipped with an on/off switch, he had yet to find it. Nights were the worst. His thoughts could take him anywhere and everywhere; it was like a wild ride at an amusement park that never stopped. And right now the roller-coaster car was hurtling him along toward one destination in particular – the AFIP Tissue Repository, housed next door in the archives of the old Army Medical Museum. It had been founded, with his typical foresight and wisdom, by Abraham Lincoln himself – and it hadn’t changed all that much ever since.

The most comprehensive collection of tissue samples in the world, the Repository contained over 3 million specimens – among them pieces of lung tissue from a private at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, the first American soldier who had succumbed to the 1918 flu. Before setting out for the wilds of Alaska, Dr. Slater wanted to see the slides himself and get a look at this ancient enemy he was about to confront.

But when he tried his security card on the main concourse leading to the museum, he found there was a glitch in his clearance – no doubt another problem arising from his military discharge. And though he knew he could get it fixed the next day, that didn’t help him now. He passed the laminated card, which he wore on a chain around his neck, under the scanner one more time, just for luck, and watched as the lights stayed red. A third try he suspected would set off an internal alarm. He waited around in the corridor for a minute or two, hoping to piggyback on someone else going his way, but at this time of night the offices were largely deserted and no one else was around, much less heading over to the gloomy confines of the old museum.

Still, there was another route, and though it was a lot more circuitous, it would allow him to circumvent the particular security system obstructing him now. Going back toward his office, he took a sharp right through the environmental and toxicology wing, descended the fire stairs to the garage level, then walked briskly across the unheated, and nearly empty, garage. Not briskly enough, he thought, as he felt a sudden chill. He picked up the pace, scurrying down a flight of crumbling stairs that opened into a subbasement corridor, originally designed for the discreet unloading of cadavers by horse-drawn carriages in the years following the Civil War.

The hallways here were made of red brick, faded with age, and the lights in the ceiling, each one in a little wire nest, were incandescent bulbs, and low-wattage at that. The doors he passed bore frosted-glass panes, with gold hand lettering and labels that read HISTOLOGY, WAR WOUND RECORDS, or DEPARTMENT OF PALEOPATHOLOGY. It was hard to believe that this warren was still occupied, but Slater knew that the whole Walter Reed complex had long since outgrown its campus, and no nook or cranny was allowed to lie fallow for long.

As he turned the corner toward the Tissue Repository, he came upon the old display cases that had once been part of the public exhibitions. Although they were no longer part of any organized tours, the cabinets exhibited, on dusty shelves behind thick glass, a collection of formaldehyde-filled jars. Some of them dated back to the midnineteenth century, and held specimens of gross physical anomalies – twins conjoined at the torso, or fetuses born with the fused legs and feet of sirenomellavictims. Because of their fishlike tails and amphibious eyes, they were named after the mythical sirens, or mermaids, and had seldom survived their birth by more than a day. Now, many decades later, they still floated, silently, intact, and unchanged, in the limbo of their murky jars.

Just inside the doors to the Repository, a night clerk in a crisply pressed tan uniform, his head down and earbuds in place, was typing away on his computer keyboard. He looked up in surprise when Slater entered, quickly yanked the buds, straightened in his chair, and slid a clipboard across the desk for Slater to sign in.

“I’ll need your ID, too,” he said. Slater held out his security card, while the clerk jotted down the number, then checked it online against the name on the register. Slater prayed that a problem wouldn’t crop up, but the clerk nodded, and said, “What can I do for you, sir?”

Slater explained what he was after, but as the clerk started to get up from his chair, he said, “You can stay put. I know my way around in here, and I can get it myself.”

“You sure?” the clerk said, sounding like he’d love to get back to what he’d been doing. Slater caught a glimpse on the computer of some video war game.

“Yes. It won’t take me long.”

And then, inexplicably, the clerk pulled some Kleenex from a box and handed a wad to Slater.

“What’s this for?”

“Pardon my saying so, sir, but you’re sweating.” He gestured at his forehead, and when Slater dabbed at his skin, the tissues did indeed come away damp.

“Thanks,” Slater said, “I guess I was in too big a hurry to get here.”

The clerk shrugged and, surveying the spooky vault, said, “That’ll be a first, sir.”

The Repository was huge, with several chambers interconnecting under brick archways, all of them retrofitted with rows of bright track lights mounted above microscope-equipped workstations. Long aisles were lined with endless rows of metal cabinets, each of them divided into drawers, no deeper than a deck of cards, containing the tissue and bone samples. Organized first by the pathology, then by the organic or anatomical origin, and then again by era, the samples had been gathered and sent to the archives from barracks and battlefields all over the world, and unless size was an issue, the oldest ones in any category were usually deposited in the bottom drawers of each section. It took Slater, who hadn’t been down in these archives for several years, a half hour just to find his way into the right corner of the right room. It was the last chamber in the chain, and like all the others he had passed through, no one else was in it.

Crouching down, he pulled out one drawer, checked the samples, closed it, and opened another. Here, he found what he was looking for. The last remains of Private Roscoe Vaughan, an artillery trainee at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, in 1918 … and the first known Army casualty of what had been dubbed, however inaccurately, the Spanish flu. Forty-three thousand others would follow him to the grave. Though it was little known, during the Great War, more of the doughboys had died from the flu than in combat.

All that was left of the private now was a block of paraffin, no bigger than a crouton, in which the Army surgeon, Captain K. P. Hedgeforth, had embedded slices of lung tissue he had taken from the dead soldier. Preserved in formaldehyde, the block had been dispatched to Washington and kept there in a little brown box on a shelf for nearly eighty years before its deadly secrets had been explored by AFIP scientists.

Slater took the cube, now in a glassine envelope, and several of the slides that had been prepared from its contents back at Camp Jackson, to the examining table at the far end of the room. All of this material had been declared utterly inert, and was used now solely for teaching and historical research purposes. But samples taken from it in 1996, then put through the polymerase chain reaction, had yielded enough information to enable the institute’s pathologists to reconstruct the entire genetic structure of the virus. Unlike this dead source material, the results of those molecular tests were now lodged, under the strictest security precautions, in little vials in a deep freeze in an undisclosed location nearly impossible to access, especially for someone with Dr. Slater’s compromised credentials. For him to get in touch with the origins of the epidemic whose victims’ graves he was about to desecrate, this musty archival material would be the closest he could come.

But something in his gut had told him that he needed to do it. Although epidemiology was often thought to be a cold-blooded discipline, one where its practitioners exercised objectivity and disinterested judgment in the face of appalling realities, Slater had never approached the job that way. He was a fighter, and in order to fully engage in battle, he needed some visceral sense of his enemy.

Though the electricians had done their best, the lighting at this spot was dicey; the brick ceiling was curved like a barrel, and the illumination from the lights mounted overhead was too bright in some spots and too weak in others. Slater found that he had to pull his stool first this way then that in order to keep the shadows from impinging on his work surface. Behind the walls, he could hear the muffled clanging of old pipes.

Private Vaughan had been a “well-nourished” young man, according to one of the documents he’d read that afternoon; another had called him “chubby.” He stood about five feet ten inches, and was, like most of the other infantrymen, eager to get to France before the fighting stopped. He had been trained, in the scrubby dunes around the camp, to maintain and deploy field artillery. But on the morning of September 19, 1918, instead of joining his platoon, he reported to sick bay, complaining of chills and fever. He was suffering from a dry cough, a dull headache, and his face was flushed. Although his heartbeat was regular, his throat was congested, and he said he was having trouble catching his breath. The doctor, who’d seen the flu before, consigned him to a cot.

But this was not like any flu the world had ever encountered.

Over the next few days, Private Vaughan got progressively worse. His fever rose, leaving him delirious much of the time and shivering under a pile of blankets that could never get high enough. His face took on a purplish tinge and his feet turned black. A secondary infection, pneumonia, set in, and his lungs began to fill with mucus. When he tried to speak, bubbles of blood broke on his lips, and while the doctors and nurses looked on in helpless horror, Private Vaughan slowly drowned in his own fluids. At 6:30 A.M. on September 26, he was declared dead.

Private Vaughan was the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

The Spanish flu, so named because it had cut a devastating path through Spain on its way to the New World, would eventually claim the lives of 675,000 American civilians. The body counts in other countries would be immensely higher. And before it had burned itself out, the fate of nations – and the planet itself – would be drastically altered. For those who thought the carnage of the First World War was the worst calamity humanity could endure, the Spanish flu proved them hopelessly mistaken.

Slater looked at the little cube of tissue-impregnated paraffin – once a chunk cut from a candle – and marveled at the devastation that it represented. Powering up the microscope, he slid one of the original slides, prepared by Dr. Hedgeforth, into view; the glass was so much thicker than current slides that he had to lift the eyepiece and do a bit of juggling to make it feasible.

He bent his head, made a few adjustments to the magnification, and observed a pale yellow background – a thin sliver of the paraffin – and in its center a dark smudge, like a crumb of burned toast on a pat of butter.

That smudge was a tiny piece of the private’s left lung, which had been so sodden and engorged with blood that Dr. Hedgeforth had said it looked like a slab of liver.

Even after all these years, the slides and candle wax gave off a whiff of formaldehyde, and the scent took Slater back to dissection labs and all-nighters in med school. As he studied the slides, and adjusted the magnification, he was able to bring out, in one of the last, a clearer view not only of the amorphous cells, faintly lavender and forever fixed in their positions, but fragments of the deadly virus that resembled bits of barbed wire. It was, he thought, like looking at an ancient battlefield – a place of death and destruction. You were looking back in time to something that had ended long ago but whose impression was even now unaltered. It was news from a world that had ceased to exist … news conveyed, in this instance, by a young soldier whose very essence had returned to the stars.

How long Slater stayed at it, he hardly knew. He lost himself in his research and his thoughts, the silence around him broken only by the occasional, distant clang of the heating pipes behind the old brick walls. In his own way, he was girding himself for combat. The enemy was right here, safely vanquished and preserved beneath the glass slide, but it was the same foe he would soon confront in the Arctic … though there, all bets would be off.

His thoughts had become cloudy – and he might even have dozed off on his stool for a few seconds – when he became aware that there was someone in the archway behind him. He slowly turned his head. One of the track lights hit him square in the eyes, and he had to raise one hand to shield his gaze from the glare.

For a split second, it was as if he was looking at the dead doughboy whose tissues he had been studying … but then the young man in the uniform spoke.

“We’re closing up, sir,” the night clerk said. “The archives open again at eight A.M.”

Slater nodded, then removed the last slide from the microscope, put the paraffin cube back into its glassine envelope, and slipped off his stool. He wobbled for a moment, but he ascribed that to having sat in one position for too long, and a precarious position to boot. He just needed to get the sample and the slides back in the drawer, go home, and get a good night’s rest.

Even the empty apartment seemed beckoning now.

Making his way under the archways, he felt an unexpected draft at his back and had to control the impulse to shiver as he passed the clerk, standing at the door with a set of keys dangling in one hand. It was only when he had rounded the corner and was safely out of the clerk’s sight that Slater dared to take his pill case from his pocket and, while leaning up against the redbrick wall of the corridor outside, quickly down a couple of the antimalarial pills dry.

Physician, he thought, with his eyes closed and his head spinning, heal thyself.

But when he opened his eyes again, his gaze was met by the silent stare of the siren baby, forever swimming in its formaldehyde jar. Would the Russian corpses, he wondered, be so well and safely preserved?