The Explorer's Code (34 page)

Sinclair had stayed vigilant, but with the farmworkers about and Thad-deus Frost monitoring the house, he had felt relatively secure during the day. So much so he actually started to relax and enjoy Cliffmere. He shadowed Tom as he went about the daily review of the free-range poultry operations and livestock. Tom was particularly proud of his cattle.

This morning, Sinclair and Tom had stood at the five-barred gate looking over his English longhorns.

“These Dishley longhorns are quite in demand,” Tom had explained. “One of the chefs in London has said ours is the best beef in Britain. Now all the finest restaurants want to buy our organic grass-fed beef.”

To Sinclair, they looked a lot like American longhorns except their coronet of horns swept forward and not up like handlebars.

“That is fantastic,” Sinclair had enthused. “You must be so proud of your operation here.”

“So much to do, my boy. So much to do. No time to gloat quite yet.”

Sinclair had a wonderful time learning about the farm. Tom spoke to him at length about free-range poultry farming and the threat of avian flu. Sinclair learned more than he could ever have imagined. Tom’s expertise extended well into the virology of the disease.

While the two men spent the day together outdoors, Cordelia and Marian stayed closer to the house and the outbuildings. Together they helped inventory the produce: eggs, cheeses, meats, and organic fruits and vegetables. They also packed the famous baked goods: gingerbread, shortbread, and scones, stacking them in the hunter green Cliffmere boxes, tying them up with grosgrain ribbons.

This afternoon Sinclair watched from the library window as he caught up on Herodotus Foundation business. He could keep an eye on Cordelia, sitting on the terrace with Marian, her feet in green wellies propped up on a stone wall. Marian was leaning forward, speaking earnestly. The two
women looked relaxed and happy. But this could not last forever. They had to make plans about what to do next. Sinclair picked up his phone and dialed Charles.

“Hi, Sinclair. Still in England?” Charles answered.

“Yes, it’s going well. But a lot has happened.”

“Anything wrong?” asked Charles.

“I’m in a little over my head. We had some trouble in London. When we go back, I could use some help.”

“Certainly. I’ll meet you at Claridge’s as usual?” asked Charles.

“Yes. In a day or so. I’ll let you know when.”

The special biocontainment tent had been erected and inflated over the work site at the family chapel at Cliffmere. Necropolis, the grave excavation company, had come and prepared the ground, carving up the lawn into oblong rectangles and rolling it up like carpet. Now three men in space suits were clearing the uppermost layer of soil, careful not to strike anything that offered resistance.

It was his imagination, but Sinclair thought he could smell the damp earth rising from the open grave. Of course, that was ridiculous; his air was filtered. He chafed inside the sealed suit and tried to breathe normally, but there was a slight feeling of suffocation. He fought it.

Sinclair was used to open-air excavation, and all this felt very claustrophobic. To quell the feeling, he had to keep telling himself that excavation was excavation; it was all the same. After all, what was the difference between digging up old bones in Ephesus and digging up the remains of Sir James Skye Russell? About a couple of thousand years, he mused.

In front of him the three gravediggers were perspiring inside their sealed hoods. Their shovels struck resistant earth.

Again Sinclair tried to concentrate on something else. Breakfast with Cordelia. She had looked luminous as she drank her chocolate. How could she eat all those croissants and stay so slim? Butter and marmalade too.

This morning he had decided to skip eating. Too risky. As he had left, Tom and Marian’s faces reflected the green glow of the closed-circuit monitors. The library had been dim and quiet.

He had crunched up the gravel path to the chapel a half mile away. A local official had stood at the gate. An orange containment fence circled
the church and the cemetery. Sinclair had produced his letter of admission, and endured the squint of the uniformed officer as he peered suspiciously at it. The guard was being especially officious, telling him to stay on the gravel walkways and not cut across the lawn. Only after multiple directives had he reluctantly waved Sinclair through.

The large vinyl enclosure looked like a wedding tent at first glance, especially because it was so near the chapel. It was huge, inflated, and sealed with a double air-lock door. Sinclair had dressed in the vestibule, with help from the assistants, who made sure he was sealed into his suit before entering.

Professor Paul Oakley—thin and intense—had greeted him.

“Mr. Sinclair, a pleasure to meet you. I know your work at Ephesus. That gladiator graveyard is spectacular. Incredible work there, if you will permit me to say so.”

“Thank you.”

“If you would stand just to my left, we will avoid any mishaps. Gently now, lads,” he said to the diggers.

“It won’t do to contract this stuff,” he said in an aside to Sinclair. “It’s deadly.”

“No worries, I’ve had my flu shot.”

Paul Oakley snorted behind his mask.

“A flu shot? That won’t be much help. They estimate this disease killed twenty-five million people in the first month.”

“Just goes to show, you shouldn’t skip that flu shot.”

Sinclair’s nerves were making him crack jokes. Oakley didn’t have an ounce of humor about him.

“No joke, Sinclair. Most influenzas kill the young and the very old. This pandemic killed the strong and those in the prime of life—because of cytokine storms. You are a prime target.”

“What is meant by ‘cytokine storms’?”

“They trigger the overreaction of the immune system. The stronger the immune system, the stronger the reaction,” Oakley explained. “People would contract the disease and collapse within hours, attacked by their own body fighting the disease.”

“That fast?”

“At best, they’d be dead by the next day: bleeding from the nose, ears, coughing up blood, losing bowel control, bleeding from the intestines—a real horror show.”

Sinclair checked his mask to make sure it was secure.

“The majority of deaths were from bacterial pneumonia, a secondary infection, but the Spanish influenza of 1918 also killed people directly, causing massive hemorrhages and edema in the lungs. They called it the Spanish influenza because they originally thought it came from Spain.”

“This flu is an old one—extinct. Why the interest?” Sinclair asked.

“This is a version of H1N1. The recent swine flu was H1N1 also, a different strain. One of our chief goals is to see if it is in any way related to the H5N1—the avian flu we are seeing around the world today.”

“I see.”

“One theory is that the 1918 flu started with birds also, although it has never been proven. We are looking at human-to-human transmission of present-day avian flu. If we can find the link to the 1918 flu, it may put us one step ahead if another pandemic hits.”

“I think I’ll stick to my Greek and Roman inscriptions. You can handle the pestilence.”

Oakley didn’t hear; he was leaning over the grave. “Will you look at that. . . .” Oakley said in awed surprise.

Ten hours later, they were all seated around the long wooden table in the kitchen of the estate. The remains of steak-and-mushroom pie were before them, and they were drinking mugs of hot sweet tea with milk. Fruit and cookies had been brought out, and the staff had retired. Tom, Marian, Cordelia, Paul Oakley, and Jim Gardiner were all still talking about the exhumation.

Sinclair was silent. It had been a long day and he was exhausted. There had been no sign of a document in or around the coffin, and that had been a big disappointment. Sinclair reviewed in his mind the procedures he had witnessed. He kept telling himself there was no way he could have missed it. After the topsoil had been removed, the diggers had worked steadily until they stood chest high in the trench. They had to dig much wider and longer than the coffin, to give the scientists room to maneuver and to avoid putting any foot pressure on the coffin. Hours later, the coffin had become visible. Sifting the layers of soil from the lead-lined coffin was painstaking. Sinclair had remained alert, looking for anything else that might have been buried in the soil.

Over the years, the coffin had split, probably due to the extraordinary depth of the interment. For flu victims, the burial was twice as deep as usual, for fear of contagion. Oakley had decided to leave the coffin in the ground because of the split in the lid. There had been a discussion over whether to take samples through the split, but in the end the heavy lid had been raised and samples were taken directly from the corpse. They had been expecting to find a well-preserved cadaver, but it was heavily decomposed due to the cracked coffin.

Oakley had explained that they hadn’t expected to find the virus intact, but that it should have left its “footprint” in the lungs. He said there were opportunities using molecular biology to re-create the virus, or at least look at its genetic makeup. A full sequencing had not been achieved so far because only fragments of the virus had been recovered from other exhumations.

Sinclair had half listened to Oakley’s discourse on influenza. He had examined the grisly contents of the coffin as the team biopsied the lungs. There was no sign of a deed, or of any kind of box or container.

Now, hours later, in the kitchen, Sinclair was only half listening to the chatter. He was slicing up a pear and wondering where the deed was. Tom, Marian, and Cordelia had all exchanged a look of disappointment when he and Oakley had come in from the day’s work. Sinclair gave them a small shake of the head.
Nothing,
he mouthed silently. But no one mentioned it. Out of deference to the exhumation project, they were all waiting until after Oakley left to discuss the deed.

“This could give us a little more to go on,” Oakley was saying with enthusiasm. “The samples were not great, but I think they are usable.”

Sinclair observed Oakley with interest. Clearly his dedication to his work was fierce. Oakley was whippet-thin and highly energized. His conversation displayed a rigorous mind, and there were flashes of impetuousness that often came with real genius. In his early forties, he was still almost boyish, with a tweedy kind of rumpledness about him. His sandy hair had no trace of gray, and his face was yet unlined.

“When did the first influenza appear in civilized society?” Cordelia was asking.

“No one knows. These diseases are ancient, prehistoric. The word
influenza
is from the Italian
influenze di freddo,
or ‘influence of the cold,’ “ said Oakley. “The word first appeared in the English language in the 1700s.”

“How much genetic data did you get from your exhumation last year in the Arctic?” asked Tom.

“Not all that much. We expected the bodies to be buried in the permafrost. But that wasn’t the case.”

“What happened?” asked Cordelia.

“Well, the coffins had risen gradually over time. Or another possibility is that they hadn’t been buried deep enough in the permafrost to allow the virus to survive.”

“Where did you do the exhumation?” asked Jim Gardiner.

“Svalbard, on the island, in the town of Longyearbyen. The people were miners in the Arctic Coal Mining Company. Actually, there were seven young men who were signed on to work in the mine, but they contracted Spanish flu on the ship and died when they got to the mining camp. They were buried in the company cemetery.”

Cordelia, Sinclair, Tom, and Marian all looked at one another.

“The company cemetery? Did you say the
Arctic Coal Mining Company
?” asked Cordelia.

“Yes, why? What’s the matter?” asked Oakley.

The story came together at a rapid pace. If Oakley had not been there, they never would have found the answer.

Sinclair leapt to his feet and started to pace. “I can’t believe the coincidence of this!” he said. “Perhaps we’re looking in the wrong grave!”

“Didn’t Elliott Stapleton go to the Arctic in 1918?” asked Jim Gardiner.

“ ‘The deed is buried with my partner’—the partner in Svalbard!” said Cordelia. “He didn’t bury it
here
. He buried it
up there
!”

“Percival Spence,” said Jim Gardiner.

“The
other
partner!” said Cordelia.

“The
silent
partner,” said Gardiner.

“Silent as the grave?
That
kind of silent partner?” asked Sinclair.

“. . . who died of Spanish flu, just like Sir James!” said Cordelia.

“There
is
a Percival Spence buried there,” said Oakley. “At least that was the name on one of the gravestones we found.”

“That’s it!!”
said Gardiner.
“By God, that’s it!!”

“There were no remains in the grave,” said Oakley. “When we dug up the coffin, it was empty.”

“Empty!”
said Sinclair.

“Yes, it was an empty coffin,” said Oakley. “Except for some document we found inside.”

They all froze in shock. Oakley looked around at them and his face lit up.

“Oh my goodness, it’s your deed!”
he said, finally understanding.

There was not a sound in the kitchen. No one breathed. No one blinked.

“Where are the papers now?” Sinclair asked quietly.

“We put them back where we found them. They were in a leather folio. We just closed up the coffin and buried them again.”

It was past midnight by the time Oakley had the sample cases loaded into his beautiful vintage Bentley. He and Gardiner would ride back to London together. Gardiner gave Cordelia one of his trademark bone-crusher hugs and climbed into the passenger seat. Then, just before they pulled away, Gardiner turned the hand crank, rolling the window down.

“I’ll only need a day or so to get that paperwork together. You can claim the deed in Norway by Friday.”

“Thanks so much for everything, Jim.”