The Explorer's Code (9 page)

In the paper, the caption under the photo read: “In addition to the Herodotus Award, Miss Stapleton was given the missing journal of her great-great-grandfather from the year 1908.”

Cordelia looked over at the journal on the nightstand, still open to the page she read last night. She walked over, picked it up, and read another entry.

F
EBRUARY 19
, 1908

T
HE MOST INGENIOUS APPARATUS
I
HAVE SEEN IN THE
A
RCTIC IS THAT WHICH IS FASHIONED FOR AERIAL BALLOONS
. W
HEN BALLOONS ARE NOT FEASIBLE, BIG KITES ARE SENT UP FOR THE SAME PURPOSE
. A
LL THE DATA IS RECORDED ON THE GROUND, INCLUDING TEMPERATURE, HUMIDITY, AND RAINFALL, AND, MOST INTERESTINGLY, EARTHQUAKE VIBRATIONS THAT ARE ACCURATELY LOGGED ON A SEISMOGRAPH.
T
HIS METHOD IS ALSO USED TO RECORD THE VIBRATIONS OF ICE FALLS FROM THE GLACIERS
.

Cordelia closed the journal and gazed out at the harbor, thinking. Elliott Stapleton was describing the first version of the kind of Arctic ice survey Jean-Louis Etienne was doing with his team now.

T
he excavation had gone well, and the common grave was interred again. Miles was elated, and paid the young men twice what he had promised. The diggers had been so grateful, they had insisted on shaking his hand all over again; his departure had taken another half hour. Miles looked at his watch as he headed for the Land Rover. He needed to send the tissue samples out on the flight from Longyearbyen, fifty-five miles away. But first he needed to pack them properly.

Arriving at his hotel about two hours later, he knew the timing would be tight. He pulled into the gravel parking lot in front of the door and unloaded his Styrofoam coolers of samples. The hotel was an old mining barracks that had been converted into a very snug guesthouse for about twenty visitors. He claimed his key from the desk and headed up the wooden stairs.

Inside the room, Miles put the Styrofoam coolers on the table. He had assembled all the packing materials on the bed before he left, and now he began to wrap and tape the package with care. The courier label from Global Delivery Express was filled out and ready.

The cadaver had given him more than forty perfectly intact samples of lung, kidney, brain, and liver. The 1918 pandemic virus would certainly be recoverable in one of them. Miles checked his watch again. He had an hour before the last flight from the small airport in Longyearbyen.

As he packed, he thought about that call to Paul Oakley. The scientist had been characteristically subdued on the phone. Of course, that was just British sangfroid. He was probably wild with anticipation. Oakley was one of the most talented young virologists in the world. And for Miles, it was
a pleasure to do his dirty work, so to speak. He was glad to help crack the sequence of one of the deadliest viruses in history.

Miles had only one other thought as he packed the small Styrofoam crate. He also wanted to check out the Arctic Coal Mining Company graveyard in Longyearbyen. There were nine miners who died of the pandemic buried in the company plot. The company had done right by them. They had been buried in good wooden caskets, deep into the permafrost. The American company had treated its employees well, even in death.

The company burial plot was a mile or so outside the town of Longyearbyen. It would be a short drive after he dropped off the package at the airport. There would be time before dark. Of course, Miles would take his rifle in case of polar bears. They roamed freely in this area, and anyone leaving the perimeter of the town was required to carry a firearm.

Miles looked at his watch and panicked. Forty-five minutes until the plane would leave, and it would be the last one for the day. From his present location, halfway up the mountain, he would have at least a twenty-minute drive. He couldn’t miss that plane. He scooped up the tightly wrapped package and headed for the door, doubling back for his cell phone. He needed to hurry.

On the way to the airport, Miles remembered he had left his rifle back at the lodge. But if he wanted to make the plane there was no time to turn back. He continued to drive down the rutted track to the small airport. Should he continue out to the burial plot tonight? At this latitude, and at this time of year, the daylight would last well into the evening.

He decided he could do it. He would make a quick trip tonight, just for a look, and then go back tomorrow. It wouldn’t do to be out too late by himself in the middle of the Arctic without a rifle. He’d have to keep a sharp lookout for bears.

The stink of jet fuel was terrible; the purity of the air made it even more acrid and nauseating than it normally was. Miles watched the SAS MD-82 take off from Svalbard Lufthavn, Longyear, the single scheduled flight each day out of the world’s northernmost full-service airport. His package of tissue samples was on board. The pilot headed into the bright sky for the three-hour flight to Oslo and, from there, on to London.

Miles watched it for a while, then started up his vehicle and took the
airport road, turned left, and headed west along the dusty track to the outskirts of the town. The oblong shapes of the town buildings, made of concrete and tin, soon blended with the landscape and faded into the distance. This was certainly desolate country. He drove for several miles without any sign of human contact on the lunar terrain.

Then suddenly, farther ahead, he could see the Arctic Coal Mining site and the remnants of the workers’ housing. The group of buildings stood abandoned but resilient, a testimony to the courage of the few dozen men who had eked out their livelihood here in 1918, when the pandemic hit.

He drove through the ghost town. The graveyard was not hard to find. The small chapel, identifiable by its steeple, was padlocked and boarded up, but the wrought-iron fence around the cemetery stood, gate open, unhinged and hanging by one rivet. Inside, the tombstones listed terribly, and many were down flat on the earth. The stones had shifted during the past century of thaw and frost.

Miles put his vehicle in Park, deciding to keep the engine running in case he needed to get out quickly. Especially in late summer and spring, polar bears were all too prevalent, and he didn’t want to take any chances.

He walked among the stones, looking for the names of the nine miners who had been stricken in 1918. He knew their names by heart, so often had he fantasized about doing just this. It was a long shot, but he wanted to get permission from the magistrate in Longyearbyen to take more samples. Paul Oakley had exhumed three of these graves last year, but there were six others. Why not take a few more days to see what other possibilities might turn up? The samples Oakley had taken a year ago were of mixed quality because some of the graves had repeatedly thawed over the decades. But some of the other six graves might have more intact samples. Tomorrow he would petition the local officials in person.

As Miles walked, he bent over each grave to decipher the worn stone, completely absorbed in his quest. Three rows down, he saw one of the graves had been disturbed. The tombstone read
PERCIVAL SPENCE
1918. He looked at the earth; it bore the rough surface of recent digging. This grave had been exhumed. Very recently. The dirt was barely tamped down and still stood in a slight mound over the site. Percival Spence had died in the 1918 contagion. Who would have dug up the grave? He bent down to look at the plot, his knees protesting as he held the squatting position.

“You’re getting old, my boy,” he said to himself.

Those were his last words. He never heard the rifle shot. His cranium was blown away and his brains were splattered all over the headstone in a bloody mass.

His assailant lowered his rifle and walked over to the Land Rover, turning the ignition off with a gloved hand. Then he approached the inert body. Extracting the cell phone and the wallet from the parka pocket, he left as silently as he had come. The gunman drove away in his own vehicle, past the churchyard, and checked to make sure the body of the scientist was not visible from the road. Much was hidden by the filigree of the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the tombstones. Only the small iron gate tilted open on its broken hinges.

The bear was a big one, a male weighing more than nine hundred pounds. It sniffed the air as it came down the mountainside, and made tracks in the earth. The searchers found the tracks later and measured them at thirteen inches long, nine inches wide, and estimated the bear would have stood about ten feet tall. Its fur had the cream color of a mature male, and when it opened its mouth the gray tongue was a stark contrast to the yellow-white teeth. The bear had smelled the kill.

It didn’t take long to find the body. The scent of blood called across the hard ground. After a long winter the animal needed food to satiate its cravings for flesh. And the human had been so freshly killed, the polar bear found it acceptable for feeding. The little iron gate was open. The parka offered as much resistance as a candy wrapper to its massive claws. The bear feasted messily on the carcass of the slain scientist, obliterating any evidence of how Miles had met his death.

The assassin walked into the courier office at the airport hangar and looked around. The Norwegian kid at the desk was reading a dog-eared thriller in English.

“Good evening, I’m sorry to bother you, but I just wanted to check that my package made the plane. My colleague was supposed to bring it. An older guy in a black parka?”

The kid looked up. His mottled complexion revealed he still suffered the hormonal upheavals of youth.

“Yeah, he made it.” The boy looked unwilling to put down the Clive Cussler novel. “He made it, but just barely. I think there was only three minutes between the time he arrived and the time the plane took off.”

“Wow, that’s a little close. Would you mind if I checked the paperwork to make sure it was sent to the right place?”

“Sure,” said the kid. “Take a look. It went to Professor Paul Oakley, Institute of Cell and Molecular Science, School of Medicine, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS.”

The assassin held his hand out for the clipboard of receipts for the day’s courier packages.

“Let me just check to see if he put down the right phone number.”

The kid handed over the clipboard and went back to his novel. The assassin riffled through the dozen package receipts, deftly palmed the one he wanted, and gave the clipboard back.

“Good book?”

“Yeah, it’s really interesting.” The kid took the clipboard without looking at it.

“Well, enjoy it. Thanks a lot.”

“You’re welcome,” the kid said, still looking down at the novel and finding his place.

C
ordelia walked through the large Victorian hall of Monaco’s Oceanographic Institute and breathed in the fragrant, dusty smell of an old library. The sun was pouring through the large two-story windows, painting the wooden floors with light. The huge room was lined with standing exhibit cases. The original Victorian specimen cases had been in place since the day the exhibition hall had been built, and the floors and tables of the room had the beautiful patina of age. In the cases, the materials had been chosen to coordinate with the theme of the gala, artifacts from the voyages of Prince Albert I and Elliott Stapleton from 1898 to 1910.

Cordelia looked at the sepia-toned photos depicting every type of activity, from whaling to lab work. A film clip flickered in the corner of the room. She walked over to watch the historical travelogue. It was from 1908. There was the whiskered prince, dressed in a naval costume aboard his ship, the
Princess Alice
. The old film jerked and wavered, the movement too fast, but the excitement of the expedition was captured: the enthusiastic crew waved as they displayed their marine trophies—a large fish was caught in an old-fashioned conical net. There was the prince on deck leaning over to examine a small whale. The loop on the film was short, only a minute or so. She watched it several times.

Cordelia’s footsteps echoed in the empty hall, and her body relaxed in the warmth of the Mediterranean sun streaming through the windows. Her mind drifted. These exhibits spoke to her in a very intimate way; this was as close to home as she had been in a long time.

“I need you,” she said aloud to the empty hall. “I need you.”

She felt the crushing loneliness.

“Please, I need
somebody,
” she whispered to herself. She didn’t know whom she was talking to.

She suddenly remembered her father’s old coat, in the cardboard box in the back of her closet. For years, she would take it out and bury her face in the cloth, trying to catch the scent of him. But after a while, it had no more power for her. Life moved on. The answers she needed became more complex. In the past few years she could no longer hear her father’s voice in her mind. She forgot what he sounded like.

But now, after reading the journal, and walking through the museum, the yearning came back. Her great-great-grandfather’s voice was the one she heard now, calling out from the faded pages. She desperately sought some communion with her own flesh and blood—an elemental urge.

She stood and walked across the cavernous space to the next exhibit hall, identical to the one she had left, soaring, sunlit, and Victorian.

As she walked into the room, standing there in a shaft of sunlight was John Sinclair. He was totally absorbed in reading the documents in the case before him. She felt a twinge of embarrassment for her behavior last night. But there was also the flush of sudden confusion, and deep attraction to the man. Her reaction was so strong she thought it must be visible to anyone watching her.

Just then he looked up, noticed her, and smiled. Standing there in the sunlight, with strongly chiseled features and a deep tan, he was very much the Victorian explorer. His white linen shirt was crumpled and rolled to the elbow, and he wore a rumpled pair of khakis.