Ice Age

by Brian Freemantle

  The newly polished official cars were in better condition, each with its own Buryat driver. They travelled separately to the surprisingly named, but fittingly baroque Grand Hotel on what, even more surprisingly after the demise of communism, was still called Marx Street. Lyalin was in the lead vehicle with the mayor and institute director. Continuing the unexpected, the main streets were wide, several multilaned boulevards bordered by imposing houses and orderly although wind-rattled trees.

  Geraldine said: This doesn’t look at all primeval to me.’

  Stoddart said: ‘This was one of the gold mining centres of Siberia before the revolution. Once it competed with St Petersburg for grandeur.’

  Guy Dupuy, who had started out withdrawn from them in the corner of the rear seat, said: ‘You think ticks could be in those trees?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, in this wind,’ reassured Stoddart. Away from the openness of the airport it didn’t, in fact, seem so strong. Dupuy was already wearing one of the protective hats which he’d kept firmly on during the photographs and Stoddart wondered if the man had changed into his long johns as well.

  ‘You think our gear’s going to be all right in those trucks?’ asked Geraldine.

  ‘Everything’s well packed but it might be an idea to check your suit for snags,’ suggested Stoddart, remembering the unloading.

  Unaware of what was developing in Washington, Geraldine said: ‘You really believe Lyalin’s right about this place being too remote for our being here – and why – to leak out?’

  Equally unaware, Stoddart said: ‘Who knows?’ A political question, not his problem.

  When they reassembled in the foyer, Lyalin said at once that according to Bobin there was no local history of an ageing disease nor any recent cases of which the man was aware.

  ‘So you’ve told him?’ challenged Amanda, joining the group.

  ‘In English. And warned him it’s the equivalent of a state secret, although it’s shared with the represented countries.’

  ‘What about the local mayor?’

  ‘Just that there’s the danger of infection, without saying what it is.’

  ‘Is the site still sealed?’ asked Geraldine.

  Lyalin nodded. ‘There’s a police guard but from what I was told on the way from the airport it hardly seems necessary. Shamanism is a stronger local religion than Christianity, despite the churches and the Epiphany Cathedral we passed. Ol’khon is the virtual centre of it. The volcano makes a lot of audible noise, apparently. The people think it’s the actual voice of the spirits, warning them away.’

  Reynell indicated the still hovering cameramen. ‘Have they been allowed up?’

  ‘No. They want to come with us.’

  Virtually the entire fourth floor of the hotel had been allocated to them. Geraldine’s room was next to Stoddart’s, but there was no connecting door. There was a smell of dampness and the bed felt wetly cold. She sprayed it with the insecticide before erecting the mosquito net on its tent-like frame and sprayed that, too, before moving on to the windows which overlooked the Marx boulevard of imposing, mansionlike houses and reminded her of Paris, another unexpected comparison. There were some small flies, already dead, on the sill and even more on the bathroom window ledge. She doused everything with spray, the bathroom most heavily of all, and flushed the brown-rimed toilet twice but failed to get rid of the staining. The water was barely warm and the bath filled with a black-flecked scum, despite her having rinsed it twice. She didn’t sit, instead standing completely to wash away the grime of the journey if not its physical ache. She must, she realized, have smelled to the people among whom she’d been crushed for the arrival photographs but then they had, too. Uncomfortably naked – straining for the sound of a flying insect although knowing full well that ticks didn’t make a sound – Geraldine liberally smeared herself completely with the repelling unguent which at once made her smell far worse than she had before bathing but which acted as a lubricant of sorts to help put on the off-white but instantly marked all-in-one body stocking, which was a surprisingly good fit. Careful not to pad about the room in her bare feet – remembering having read somewhere of ticks burrowing under toenails – she followed Stoddart’s advice and checked the first of her three protective suits before packing it in the large sports-type holdall Stoddart had included in the equipment. She experimented fitting in as well the portable medical case but decided it risked damaging the suit so she resigned herself to having to carry two cases.

  The trouser suit she’d travelled in was concertinaed from such prolonged wear and she rolled it up and tossed it into the bottom of the wardrobe. There, for the first time, she saw more dead flies and insects and she resprayed the entire closet after hanging up her spare clothes. She decided against putting her underwear, shirts or sweaters in the unlined drawers but sprayed the case in which she left them, accepting everything would probably be permanently stained and have to be thrown away. She dressed, finally, in jeans, shirt and zip-up jerkin and decided on a bill cap under which she managed to coil her hair tightly. She greased her face with repellent, which made make-up pointless.

  Stoddart and Lyalin were the only two ahead of her in the foyer. Both had their sports bags beside them. There was also a bag beside Vladimir Bobin. The photographers were with uniformed policemen in an adjoining lounge.

  Bobin prepared himself like a clock winding up to strike before saying: ‘There are some wall paintings, in the caves. But just stick people, as they invariably are: nothing to indicate an ageing condition.’

  Apprehensively, Geraldine said at once: ‘You’ve been inside?’

  Bobin shook his head. ‘An anthropologist from the institute.’

  Lyalin hesitated. ‘He should be put into isolation immediately.’

  It was unravelling, thought Geraldine. From Stoddart’s expression he was thinking the same thing.

  Bobin swallowed, heavily. ‘It’s a woman. She’s been in contact with everyone for two days. What diagnostic tests are there?’

  ‘None that we know of,’ said Geraldine.

  ‘Oh God!’ said the man.

  Geraldine wondered if he was praying to the one to whom the cathedral was dedicated or the growling presence on Ol’khon island. It was probably a good idea to insure with both.

  Amanda O’Connell and Peter Reynell, who also had adjoining rooms, arrived shiny-faced together. Guy Dupuy was next, his features so heavily greased there were globules of repellent under his chin and behind his ears, where he’d smeared it on the back of his neck. His ski hat was pulled low enough to cover his ears but sprigs of lank hair escaped all around. Even his jeans and ski jacket seemed creased from wear, like his always buttoned suits. At the arrival of the mayor, who’d clearly come in the same car as the police chief, the two local press photographers emerged.

  Echoing Geraldine’s earlier doubt, Amanda said: ‘We’re not going to be able to keep a lid on this!’

  Geraldine said: ‘If we can find an answer here, it won’t matter.’

  ‘It will if we don’t,’ countered the American woman.

  As three more people, a woman and two men, came expectantly towards them Bobin said: ‘My people, from the institute.’

  The anthropologist, Lyudmilla Vlasov, was a short-cropped, slightly built, white-blonde, Caucasian-featured woman of about thirty-five. Any hair colour change would have been difficult to detect – and might anyway have been natural – but there was no obvious brown-spotting keratosis or skin wrinkling.

  Stoddart said to Lyalin: ‘You must ask her about any symptoms.’

  In far better English than the institute director, Lyudmilla said: ‘Why don’t you? What symptoms?’

  ‘How many days ago were you in the caves?’ said the discomfited Stoddart.

  ‘Four,’ replied the woman.

  ‘How long were you inside? And what about the people who found the bodies originally?’

  ‘I was the only one to go inside. The cave was found by a Buryat hunti
ng party. They ran, immediately, thinking they were spirits. They described them as monkeys. They reported it to the police in Irkutsk, who contacted the institute. There’s one exposed cave; you’ll understand what I mean when you get there. I got up into a gallery and saw the group, male and female. All wizened. Very hirsute. I could see other galleries – passages – leading off into the mountain. I didn’t have any equipment: no lights. It was incredibly cold. I knew it had to be a proper investigation – anthropologically, I mean – so I got out and went back to the institute and then we got the orders from Moscow not to touch anything.’

  ‘Did you physically touch any of the bodies? Touch anything at all?’ seized Stoddart.

  ‘I told you, I wasn’t properly equipped,’ said Lyudmilla, indignantly. ‘Of course I didn’t touch the bodies or anything around them. The site has to be photographed; precise records made of how everything is … as it was when they died …’

  ‘You been conscious of any physical change: tiredness, losing your hair or its colour, generally feeling unwell as if you might be going down with flu?’ asked Geraldine.

  ‘You think they died from an infection that made them like that?’ demanded the woman, instantly prescient.

  Stoddart hesitated before saying: ‘Yes. We’re anxious not to frighten anyone, though.’

  ‘Except me!’

  Stoddart realized, relieved, that apart from Bobin, who already knew, none of the other locals gathered intently around were able to understand the conversation, including Lyudmilla’s two blank-faced entomologist colleagues. ‘What’s the answer to my question?’

  ‘No,’ said the woman. ‘Nothing at all. Would something have shown, by now?’

  ‘We think so,’ said Geraldine.

  ‘Is there an antidote?’

  ‘No,’ said Geraldine bluntly.

  ‘Fuck!’ said the woman.

  Geraldine said: ‘There’ve been other victims. All have registered visible symptoms under four days.’

  ‘What’s your discipline?’ asked the Russian.

  ‘Genetics. And forensic pathology.’

  ‘So you’re medically qualified?’

  ‘There aren’t any diagnostic tests,’ anticipated Geraldine. ‘But if you’d like me to check you out then of course I will.’

  There was an impatient eruption of Russian and Lyalin said: ‘They want to know what’s going on.’

  Stoddart said: ‘I could make it take a while getting the right-sized suits for those who are coming with us.’

  ‘All I can literally do is examine you externally, for any signs,’ Geraldine told the other woman.

  ‘Please,’ said Lyudmilla.

  Raisa Orlov emerged from the elevator as they approached it and at once demanded: ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘You can come too,’ invited Geraldine.

  Lyudmilla Vlasov’s actual age was thirty-three. Her hair colouring was natural and both Geraldine and Raisa concentrated upon it – under-arm and pubic, as well as head – when she told them she hadn’t yet detected any discolouration. Neither did they. Nor was there any indication of loss. Completely – and unashamedly – naked Lyudmilla was remarkably firm bodied, with no breast sag. There appeared no elasticity weakening when the skin was pinch-tested, which both Geraldine and Raisa did separately.

  Examining separately again, neither Geraldine nor Raisa located any liver spots on any part of Lyudmilla’s naked body. While Lyudmilla dressed, Raisa used Geraldine’s room and telephoned to call the pathology department of Irkutsk hospital, feigning the anger with which she slammed down the telephone.

  ‘There say they haven’t the equipment for swab testing,’ she declared.

  ‘We have at the institute,’ announced Lyudmilla, at once.

  ‘We’ll organize it on the way,’ said Geraldine.

  ‘It’ll involve a detour,’ warned Lyudmilla.

  ‘Then it’ll have to be made,’ said Geraldine.

  They were back in the foyer before Stoddart finished issuing the protective suits, carrying one down the same size as Geraldine’s for the Russian anthropologist. The local officials stood uncertainly with their allocated suits still in their packs.

  The Listvyanka Institute is on the headland tip where the Angara river flows into Lake Baikal and there the river-bordering road ends instead of continuing northwards along the lakeside to Ol’khon. The only way to reach the island and the overshadowing Primorskiy Khrebet mountains is by an entirely different road leading directly from Irkutsk and when Geraldine insisted the swab test was essential, Stoddart accepted they had to split.

  ‘We’ll wait for you at Shara-Togot,’ promised Stoddart, who knew from his earlier research visit, as well as by studying a map with Bobin while they waited, that Shara-Togot was the port village from which boats crossed the narrow strip of water to the island.

  The buffeting wind increased when they began to clear the city and on the side roads they saw for the first time how some of the insufficiently stilted houses were cracked – some even lopsided – and subsiding from their bricks and concrete thawing the permanently winter-frozen tundra upon which they were too directly built. Raisa chose the front passenger seat for unshared comfort, but twisted at once to look at Geraldine and Lyudmilla in the rear. The driver was a creased-suited, oil-haired, Asiatic-featured Buryat whose dashboard swung and tinkled with shaman amulets.

  Geraldine said: Tell me what sort of people they are, in the caves.’

  Me, not us, isolated Raisa.

  Lyudmilla made the vaguest gesture towards the driver. ‘Certainly some facial similarities.’

  ‘Neolithic or Neanderthal!’ seized Geraldine.

  Lyudmilla smiled, apologetically. ‘I can’t be positive from the ones I saw, so briefly.’

  Wind constantly hammered against the car, despite the summer brightness of the sun which struck constant sparks off the snow of the surrounding mountains. Geraldine wondered how the head-shaking trees kept their leaves. The body stocking that had seemed so comfortable when she’d first put it on was now cutting her, too tight under the arms and in her groin.

  ‘Tell me about the illness,’ said Lyudmilla.

  ‘I wish we could,’ sighed Geraldine. ‘The infection, when it’s contracted, spreads astonishingly quickly –’ she smiled sideways – ‘which is a major factor in your favour.’ Uncaringly crossing professional boundaries, she went on: ‘Viruses are very choosey, for self-protection. If they destroy their host cells too quickly they destroy their chances to replicate.’ To the woman in the front seat, Geraldine said: ‘Isn’t that molecular and biochemical fact, Raisa?’

  ‘Yes,’ begrudged the Russian virologist.

  ‘So how about, in some way we’ve never known before and don’t understand, a non-selective virus or a bacterium exploding like a shotgun cartridge and hitting lots of different genetic targets at the same time?’ asked Geraldine. ‘That would result in what we’re looking at, wouldn’t it?’

  Raisa Orlov said: ‘That’s scientifically impossible.’

  ‘So’s a forty-year-old person becoming eighty years old in days, and we’ve watched it happen,’ said Geraldine.

  The institute complex emerged suddenly ahead of them, against the brilliant azure-blue background of the furrowed lake, a range of low, single-storey buildings clustered around a central, five-floored building. A lighthouse would have completed the scene, but Geraldine acknowledged there was no flashing light capable of warning against the unseen hazards of the water. The driver followed Lyudmilla’s overthe-shoulder directions to the furthest, prefabricated block.

  ‘I might as well do the test myself,’ offered the abruptly friendly Raisa Orlov.

  The designated laboratory was far better equipped with much more modern equipment than Geraldine had at best anticipated, even to the extent of having an electron-microscope. There were three white-coated assistants who at once deferred to Raisa’s superior authority when Lyudmilla introduced the Moscow virologist. It was the first
time Geraldine had seen Raisa work and she was impressed; the Russian had the sure-fingered nimbleness of a large person intent on proving herself. In seconds she took both throat and nasal swabs without appearing to cause Lyudmilla any choking discomfort. Just as quickly Raisa prepared four slides from each source, staining them one by one in the order in which she slid them beneath the visual microscope. Only then did she slow, with the intensity by which she examined every slide. She came up shaking her head to announce, theatrically: ‘Nothing!’

  The tension visibly leaked from the Russian anthropologist.

  Raisa smiled at Geraldine and said: ‘Want to take a look?’

  Geraldine did so, curious at the abrupt change of attitude. Every slide was totally clear. Straightening, she said to Lyudmilla: ‘We had to be confident to have travelled this far in such an enclosed space with you. But it’s good to be doubly sure.’

  The time difference between the two capitals meant Henry Partington’s early morning statement in Washington DC disclosing the pandemic extent of the ageing illness – which he insisted upon identifying as the Shangri-La strain – exploded four hours before Prime Minister’s Question Time in London. Lord Ranleigh had already succeeded in planting his ‘where’s the minister for science?’ question in the parliamentary sketch columns of that day’s Daily Telegraph and The Times but on the back of the Washington announcement propelled it into front page speculation in the main edition of the London Evening Standard.

  Ranleigh still tried to reach his son-in-law through the Washington embassy, despite his previous day’s conversation with Reynell, and when he was unsuccessful reluctantly decided that the opportunity had to be seized without Reynell knowing about it. Ranleigh lunched discreetly at his South Audley Street townhouse with the Foreign Secretary and the coterie of backbenchers who had supported Reynell’s campaign from the beginning. All agreed that Reynell’s absence was unfortunate but that they had no alternative but to move.