The Tyvek suit and rubber apron she was wearing weren’t exactly comfortable, either. With her fingers encased in latex, her mouth and nose covered by a face mask, and her eyes protected by oversized goggles designed to accommodate her glasses, she had to move more slowly, and with greater deliberation, than her nature dictated. But she knew that this mission had to yield some answers, and quickly. What were they dealing with — the dead remnants of an extinct plague, or the dormant, but still viable, vestiges of the greatest killer the world had ever known?
For hours she had done nothing but study the specimens taken from the various organ sites of the young deacon, whose body still lay, like a disassembled engine, in the autopsy chamber at the rear of the lab tent. She didn’t like leaving it like that, not only because it presented a hazard but because she always tried to be respectful in her work. As soon as Slater got back from the graveyard, where he and Kozak had gone to figure out which grave to open next, she would enlist his help in putting the body back together.
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.