“No, I don’t,” he said.

“Then why didn’t you send it on in advance?”

“Because, as you’ve seen from the cover clearances, we’re trying to stay under the radar as much as possible.”

“Why?” She was starting to feel exasperated again, and it looked like Dr. Slater could see it. He sipped his coffee, and then, in a very calm and deliberate tone, said, “Let me explain.” She had the sense that he had done this kind of thing many times before, that he was used to talking to people who had been, for reasons he was not at liberty to explain, kept in the dark.

As he laid out the case before her, her suspicions were confirmed. The stuff about the coffin lid and Harley Vane she already knew, just as she knew most of what he told her about the old Russian colony. She had grown up in Port Orlov; everyone there knew that a sect of crazy Russians had once inhabited the island and that they’d been wiped out in 1918 by the Spanish flu. She even knew that the sect had been followers of the mad monk Rasputin, who was said to have bewitched the royal family of Russia, the Romanovs, in the years before the Revolution. But out of politeness, and curiosity about where all this was going, she let him run on. As the grandma who raised her had always said, God gave us only one mouth, but two ears. So listen.

Truth be told, she also liked the sound of his voice, now that he was talking to her like an equal.

“Rasputin’s patron saint was St. Peter,” Slater explained.

And see, she thought, that was something she hadn’t known.

“The coffin lid bore an impression of the saint, holding the keys to Heaven and Hell. That’s one way we knew where it came from.”

“But apart from Harley Vane’s washing up there, nobody’s set foot on that island for years. It’s got a very bad reputation among the locals. How do you know for sure?”

“We did a flyover an hour ago. We could see where the graveyard had given way. The permafrost has thawed, and the cliff is eroding.”

Nika’s phone rang, and she hollered, “Pick it up, Geordie! No calls.”

“That’s why we have to set up an inspection site there, exhume the bodies, take samples, and make sure that there is no viable virus present.”

And it suddenly dawned on her, with full clarity, why this had all been kept so secret. My God, they were talking about doing something that was, first of all, a serious desecration of old graves — the sort of thing her own Inuit people would take a very dim view of — but even worse, they were talking about the potential release of a plague that had wiped out untold millions. That was one lesson that no native Alaskan escaped.

“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.”

Chapter 15

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.