The Explorer's Code

by Kitty Pilgrim

  “I hope Cordelia goes along with this scheme. She really can’t come with me to Norway.”

  “There’s only one problem,” said Charles.

  “What?” Sinclair looked concerned.

  “If I show up at my mother’s apartment with that girl, my mother will have us married within a week.”

  “Then your mother is considerably more dangerous than I thought,” Sinclair said, laughing.

  Thaddeus Frost made a face with the first sip of canteen coffee at the Royal London Hospital.

  “I know, it is god-awful,” Paul Oakley apologized.

  “I usually don’t drink commercial coffee. I prefer to drink my own brew. Kopi luwak beans from Indonesia.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you haven’t tried it, you really should. Kopi luwak beans are the rarest coffee beans in the world. They run a couple hundred dollars a pound, if you can find them.”

  “What on earth can they do to coffee beans to make them that expensive,” Oakley demanded.

  “They are hand collected in the wild. They are beans that have been eaten by an Asian palm civet.”

  “I don’t understand. If the Asian palm civet eats the beans, how do you make coffee from them?”

  “The beans pass through its system undigested and are collected in the forest after the animal eliminates them.”

  “That is disgusting!” Oakley looked at Thaddeus Frost in disbelief.

  “Not at all. They are purified and roasted. The fragrance is unbelievable. You can get them commercially only in London and New York. But I buy mine from a private vendor in Asia.”

  “My God!” Oakley broke in. “You don’t want to be drinking that kind of coffee. You must know that SARS was connected to the masked palm civet.”

  Thaddeus Frost cut him off. “We’ll talk about it later. Here they are.”

  Sinclair walked in, his raincoat drenched. Cordelia’s hair was wet from the downpour outside. Sinclair put his sodden umbrella on the floor and pulled back two chairs. The overhead fluorescent light was unflattering; Sinclair looked tired, and Cordelia was sallow from stress.

  Frost stood to greet them. “Nice to see you again,” he said politely.

  Cordelia looked at Sinclair. “I didn’t realize that . . .”

  “Thaddeus is helping us find the deed,” Sinclair explained.

  “I see,” said Cordelia coldly, as they all took seats around the cafeteria table.

  “We were just chatting,” said Frost, “and Professor Oakley was telling me about the grave site in Svalbard.”

  Oakley looked startled.

  “The excavation you did last year,” prodded Frost. “We will talk about this year’s dig with Miles in a minute.”

  Oakley blanched, but recovered and began to explain.

  “Last year we were up there in Longyearbyen collecting tissue samples for research on the 1918 pandemic. As you know, the permafrost is great for preserving human remains. When we dug up the grave of Percival Spence, we found a set of documents in the coffin.”

  “Describe them,” said Frost, taking notes in a small notebook.

  “They were in a leather case, the size of a business envelope but thick. It was tied with a bit of string.”

  “And you told us the other day that you put the papers back,” confirmed Sinclair.

  “Yes. They’re still there.”

  “Good. We can recover them,” said Frost, and then suddenly changed the subject. “Now, speaking of Longyearbyen, what do you know about Miles? I assume you two were in it together.” His pen was poised over the notebook.

  Oakley began to squirm and looked at the notepad. Cordelia and Sinclair exchanged a puzzled look.

  “Who’s Miles?” asked Sinclair.

  There was an awkward silence.

  “I only know what is in the newspapers,” Oakley replied to Frost. “They say he was eaten by a bear.”

  “No, he was shot.” Frost looked grim. “That was what the forensic report concluded.”

  “What do you mean?” Oakley demanded.

  “When they first examined the remains the Norwegian police drew the conclusion it was a polar bear attack. But the autopsy turned up other evidence. His skull had been shattered by a bullet, not crushed by a bear.”

  Oakley was staring at him, horrified. “You mean he was—”

  “That is why I am involved. If it were a simple accident, it would not be of interest to me,” Frost said.

  “What in hell are you people talking about?” asked Sinclair. He reached over and took Cordelia’s hand.

  Frost turned to both of them. “It’s a sad story. A scientist decides to do a little research in Svalbard about two weeks ago. Funded by Dr. Oakley here. The first dig is in Barentsburg to get some tissue samples. But the next day he goes to the cemetery of the Arctic Coal Mining Company.”

  “Where we are headed,” said Cordelia.

  “Exactly,” said Sinclair, looking uneasy.

  Frost continued. “But poor Miles had a little mishap.”

  “He was attacked and eaten by a polar bear,” Oakley said, without conviction.

  “Shot and then eaten by a polar bear,” corrected Frost, still looking grim. “Go ahead, Oakley, tell them where.”

  Oakley looked at Frost uneasily. He replied in a low voice.

  “At the grave of Percival Spence.”

  “Now isn’t that a coincidence,” said Frost sarcastically, and lit a cigarette.

  Cordelia was staring at Oakley, wondering what he was hiding. He seemed nervous—his posture was very stiff. A mop of hair fell over his eyes, and some strands were plastered to his temple with sweat. He was clasping and unclasping his hands on the plastic tabletop.

  Cordelia looked sideways at Sinclair. Something was not right with him either. He was leaning back, looking straight ahead, not saying much, clearly keeping his own counsel. She could see he was very uncomfortable with the entire conversation. Why hadn’t he mentioned that Frost was involved in tonight’s meeting? She couldn’t stand Frost and had made it clear to Sinclair that she was uncomfortable with him from the beginning.

  Cordelia was fed up with the whole meeting. She leaned over and placed two hands flat on the table, trying to cut into the conversation. Frost and Oakley were both talking. They didn’t stop, even though she tried several times to interrupt. She decided stronger measures were needed. So she brought her fists down on the table with a bang. Startled, they all turned to stare.

  In the glare of the harsh cafeteria lighting, she scrutinized the three of them. Sinclair looked wrung out, Oakley was as pale as marble, and Frost had narrowed his eyes, as if preparing for combat. They were supposed to be meeting tonight to talk about going to the grave site to recover the deed.

  “Gentlemen,” she said with controlled anger, “it seems to me you are all hiding something. There is something you are not telling me. What is it?”

  Simultaneously their mouths opened to protest. She shook her head and pushed back her chair.

  “I will not be played for a fool,” she said, seething. “I need to know everything there is to know before I can make any kind of decision. If I am going to go chasing up to Svalbard, I need to know the whole story. I find it utterly inconceivable that you would withhold any information, especially after the shooting up there. Now either tell me what is going on, or I’m leaving.”

  She turned to look at Sinclair, who seemed as guilty as the others. He was staring down at the tabletop, not meeting her eyes. There was a full ten seconds of silence.

  “Miss Stapleton, I believe I can shed some light on some of this,” Oakley said. “May I suggest we go to another, more private spot in the building to continue this conversation.”

  Cordelia gave him a curt nod. They all stood and silently gathered their sodden umbrellas and raincoats. Cordelia marched out of the hospital canteen. The three men followed.

  At the bank of lifts, Oakley turned to the group. “I’m going to have to sign you into
a secure facility, if you wouldn’t mind taking out some form of ID. There are a few things you need to know before you go to Svalbard.”

  They all wordlessly reached for their wallets. As they stepped into the lift, Oakley punched the floor B-4, for the fourth level down in the basement. He simultaneously slid his ID badge into the card-key slot to access a restricted area.

  “We are going to the underground lab, where we store samples and do most of our work on pathogens,” he said. “It’s perfectly safe; we keep security very tight because of the threat of terrorism.”

  The lift door slid open and they could see a glass booth with a security guard sitting behind a gray metal desk. “Good evening, Sean,” Oakley greeted him. “I have some people I need to bring in this evening. I’ll vouch for them.”

  The guard eyed the group and nodded. “Very good, Dr. Oakley.”

  One by one, Oakley signed them in as the guard scanned their ID cards with an electronic record device. When they had finished, Oakley pushed through the inner door. They proceeded to a gray concrete hallway, lit by overhead fluorescent lights.

  “Come this way,” said Oakley. “I want to show you something.”

  Oakley scanned the lock on a steel door with his ID badge and pushed it open. The storage facility had a damp, musty smell, layered with a faint odor of lab chemicals. He flicked on the lights, revealing a large room with row upon row of steel shelves. It was clearly a storeroom for samples. Some amorphous blobs of pink and gray were floating in old-fashioned formaldehyde jars. The shelves also held age-stained, sepia-colored cardboard boxes with faded fountain-pen writing on the labels. Oakley walked down the narrow aisle in front of a ten-foot-high shelf. Reaching about shoulder height, he pulled down an old cardboard file box. Supporting it with both hands, he walked to a conference table and metal folding chairs at the back of the room.

  “Please take a seat,” he said, his voice echoing. “This might take a moment to explain.”

  Once they all settled down, Oakley lifted the lid and extracted a small plug of wax about a half inch thick and the size of a postage stamp.

  “This,” he said, holding it up between his thumb and index finger, “is a razor-thin sliver of lung tissue embedded in paraffin. It was taken from a soldier who died in the 1918 pandemic. Back then, medical officers would sometimes take lung samples and soak the bit of tissue in formaldehyde and then embed it in paraffin.”

  They all unconsciously leaned back.

  “No need to be alarmed,” Oakley assured them. “It’s not a live virus. We have to dissolve the wax away with a solvent before we can examine it. Then we extract the genes from the cells. Primarily we can look at the genes of the victim who died, but if we are lucky, we may also find some of the genes from the virus as well.”

  “Why the science lesson?” Frost demanded impatiently. “Get to the point.” His face was closed, unreadable.

  Cordelia looked at him with intense dislike and turned to the scientist. “I expect the point you are making is that it is dangerous to dig up the grave,” she prompted.

  “Actually, no,” Oakley said, replacing the square of wax in the box as if it were the most precious thing in the world. “It won’t be dangerous to dig up Percival Spence’s grave in Svalbard. There is no body in the coffin. Just your deed.” He looked up at them somberly.

  “I am about to tell you why we have been digging up in Svalbard in the last month.” His eyes went to Frost, but he elicited no response. So Oakley took a deep breath and plowed on. “There are only about fifty of these 1918 flu samples in the entire world. Each one is so small, it has only a few thousand cells. That may seem like a lot, but none of them have the entire sequence of the flu virus. These samples were our only source of 1918 genetic material. This is all we had to work with to sequence the virus.”

  “So what?” said Frost. “Get to the point.”

  “The point is millions can die if we don’t find out more about this virus as soon as possible. We think it has similarities to another virus that we are seeing emerge.”

  “What virus? I haven’t heard about any pandemic,” Frost said.

  “We believe that the strain of avian flu that is in Asia right now could be the next global pandemic. Millions of birds die every year. They used to simply cull the bird populations to keep it somewhat under control. But in the last decade or so we discovered that humans can contract the disease. And, most important, humans can now sometimes pass it to each other.”

  “So it jumped species?” Sinclair asked.

  “We believe it did. Human-to-human transmission is entirely possible. And that makes it dangerous.”

  “So why don’t the individual countries work to eradicate it?” asked Cordelia.

  “They are trying, but there is no real way to stop it. Infected birds carry the disease and spread it wherever they fly, and they cross borders. Most of the time the infected carriers just infect other birds. But now people who live around the birds have become infected. The disease has appeared in rural areas of China where people live with their chickens in the household. And there was a severe outbreak in the live-poultry market in Hong Kong. A half dozen people died.”

  “I remember reading about that,” Cordelia admitted, “but it didn’t seem all that serious to me.”

  “Well, it is. We’re working round the clock to decode the genome and find out more so we can develop a vaccine. Potentially, this avian flu could kill millions of people, the way the 1918 pandemic did. This strain of H5N1 is highly pathogenic. In recent years, outbreaks have killed two out of every three people who have contracted it. There have been at least four hundred known cases of human infection in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, Europe, and the Near East.”

  “Still, compared to the common flu, that is a small number of cases,” Sinclair interrupted.

  “Yes, but if this strain mixes with the common flu it will be a disaster.”

  “How could that happen?” asked Sinclair.

  “If a person became infected with the avian flu and the common flu at the same time, a superbug could develop that would be virtually unstoppable. It’s only a question of time before that happens. That is my theory. I believe avian flu is the next global catastrophe, on a scale you cannot imagine.” Oakley looked stricken. Breathing hard, he was now perspiring freely.

  “Why is that not happening?” Sinclair demanded. “If avian flu is already infecting people, why isn’t it spreading more rapidly?”

  “Good question,” said Oakley. “We don’t know. But we do suspect that the 1918 pandemic may have the key. One theory holds that the 1918 flu was initially an avian flu, carried by birds. Some scientists think it then went on to infect other animals, such as pigs, and then ultimately became deadly to humans. That’s one theory, anyway. But we just don’t know.”

  “Now I get it,” Cordelia said. “I was so focused on finding our deed, I never paid much attention to your exhumation at Cliffmere.”

  “We dug up Sir James Skye Russell’s grave site because we hoped to get another viable sample. The key to preventing the next pandemic is to study the victims of the past.” Oakley rested his hands on the box of samples, as if protecting them.

  “Did you get a sample from Sir James’s grave?” asked Cordelia.

  “No, the body was too decomposed,” Oakley said. “And our theory about a lead coffin preserving the remains was erroneous. The virus had been destroyed.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Sinclair.

  “And your point is?” Frost prompted. “Why did you drag us down here? You could have told us that without the show-and-tell.”

  “I believe we may have found a live virus up in Svalbard,” said Oakley. “My colleague went up there a few weeks ago to exhume some grave sites in a remote area called Barentsburg. He found a perfectly preserved, frozen cadaver, took samples, and sent them to me.”

  Frost glowered. “Where are they now?”

  “That’s just it,” Oakley said, his face crestfallen.
“The samples are missing, and I find it hard to tell you this but . . .” Oakley dropped his voice, and they all leaned forward. “I believe the samples were lost in the mail. I never received them, and then Miles was . . . killed.” There was complete, stunned silence.

  “What does all that mean?” asked Cordelia, confused.

  “I have come to believe the people who are after your deed may have misunderstood what Miles was digging for and stolen the samples, thinking the package contained the deed.”

  “So where are the samples!” Frost demanded.

  Oakley’s face was sallow, and his mouth barely moved as he spoke. “I don’t know. But if the vials with the samples were opened, they could have infected someone. Now keep in mind, the virus would be transmissible for only a few hours before the sample would break down in the sunlight and the heat,” Oakley explained, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “So no one would be infected unless they opened the vials and handled the samples right away. That’s the good part.”

  “And the bad part?” Cordelia asked, almost in a whisper.

  “I think two people were infected and died right here in this hospital,” Oakley said. “Both patients tested positive for an unknown strain of H1N1 flu that I have never seen before this. They died within hours. They had all the symptoms I have been reading about in the eyewitness accounts of the 1918 pandemic.”

  “If they died of the 1918 flu, you may have your sample after all, in those two cadavers,” observed Sinclair.

  “Yes, ironically, we may,” Oakley admitted to him. “Although it was not my intention to unleash the virus.”

  “So should we be worrying about a pandemic in London right now?” Cordelia asked, dry-mouthed.

  “No. I think they are the only victims,” Oakley assured her. “It’s been over a week and no other cases have turned up. The sample must have degraded shortly after it was opened. And no one else came into contact with it.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said Frost, leaning back, stunned. “What a goddamn nightmare.”

  The doorman at Claridge’s observed the attractive young couple as they came out of the hotel. The man’s arm was around the woman’s shoulder and she was murmuring something. He was leaning toward her to listen, half shielding her face from view. They looked very much in love.