Without looking in the unseen direction Geraldine said: ‘That might be a question to put to your people, not to me!’ She was scanning all the monitors now, looking for other readings, at once confused when she found the body temperature gauge. It was a normal average – 37 degrees – which was impossible with the heartbeat that was still registering mostly 165 beats a minute and with the positive warmth she could feel from the man’s hand and wrist, through the glove. She said: ‘How do you feel?’
‘What sort of question is that!’
Geraldine winced at her own crassness. ‘What do you feel?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Are you hot?’
‘Cold.’
Another impossibility. Why hadn’t this all been picked up – brought to their attention – before now? Lebrun’s wrist and arm remained unmoving when Geraldine released them, moving her hand to check the bed coverings. The room temperature would be as automatically recorded as everything else. And Lebrun was covered to the neck by two separate thermal blankets. With such an accelerated heartbeat, under two such blankets, the man should have been visibly perspiring but he was equally visibly totally dry skinned.
‘What is it?’ demanded Pelham.
Conscious of Lebrun’s slow but obvious attention to the question, Geraldine once more didn’t reply. Instead she said: ‘I want to snip a little hair. That’s OK, isn’t it?’
‘What is it?’ echoed the Frenchman.
‘I want to make some more tests,’ said Geraldine, avoiding the question.
‘Keep me alive! Please keep me alive!’
‘Stop this!’ came Dupuy’s voice.
Geraldine’s concentration was only upon the man before her. ‘If I could … can …’ she tried awkwardly, before stopping the clumsiness and abandoning the attempt. ‘… I can’t …’
‘Try … maybe …’
‘Let me.’
The long-handled scissors on the instrument tray were specially adapted for protective suited use, the finger and thumb eyelets enlarged to accommodate gloved hands but Geraldine was unaccustomed to using them, unable to grasp them as she should have done. She finally picked them up between both hands, like shears, not needing any finesse to take her intended DNA sample, which was a mistake because trying to hold them that way was even more insecure. She dropped them when she was bringing them over Lebrun’s chest and her impeded attempt to keep them away from the man worsened the accident, tipping the blades to fall points first against the Frenchman’s collar bone. There was no penetration but the force was sufficient to split the skin surface and there was a pinprick of blood, but Lebrun registered no reaction whatsoever.
Dupuy said: ‘For God’s sake, get out of there!’
To the Frenchman lying on the bed in front of her Geraldine said: ‘Did you feel that?’
‘What?’
Geraldine retrieved the scissors, pressing the points sufficiently to indent the skin but not break it further along the man’s shoulder. ‘Can you feel anything?’
‘No.’
The blood spot on the collar bone had almost immediately coagulated. She eased the top of the smock away from the man’s chest and four more times indented the skin. Lebrun felt nothing. Neither did he when she pricked both arms. Careful not to disturb any of the tubes and catheters to which he was linked, she eased aside the bed coverings and tested his unfeeling abdomen and legs. She finally took the hair clipping hurriedly, successfully at the second attempt, anxious to make the other tests she considered necessary. Wishing she could have used her bare fingers she instead utilized small surgical forceps to measure skin pinches in every part of Lebrun’s body that had failed to respond to skin pricks and finally used a scalpel to scrape off what she considered sufficient skin from the man’s forearms and thighs.
‘Is it going to hurt when I die?’ asked the man.
‘No,’ said Geraldine, sure that it wouldn’t.
‘How long?’
‘Soon.’
‘No one else would tell me.’
‘It’s your right to know; your dignity.’
‘I hope I can maintain it.’
The two men were waiting for her outside the decontamination chamber, Dupuy hovering from foot to foot in red-faced fury that nearly made it impossible for him to form the words and when they came they were at first disjointed. ‘What the hell do you think you were doing in there?’
For the first time Geraldine saw Stoddart behind the other two and guessed he’d been summoned. She said: ‘What should have been done before now: realizing and analysing what we did have, in front of our very eyes!’
‘Good of you to call so regularly, Peter.’
‘I’m planning to come back,’ declared Reynell. Everything had to be timed to a watchmaker’s precision but he was sure he could do it. The need was to feed – and predict – the man’s perpetual anticipation and answer it for himself, ahead of anyone else, which made Cabinet meetings a one-man, self-operating puppet show. That and to let Buxton think there was a possibility in agreeing to his return to London.
There was a pause, before the jump from the London end. ‘It’s all turned out to be nothing then?’
Reynell smiled at the over-interpretation. ‘Far from it. We could have a very serious situation here: one we need to be on record as having reacted to.’
‘Are you absolutely sure you can afford to come back if it’s that serious? Wouldn’t it be better you stay there, on top of everything? But let me have a very full briefing overnight in the diplomatic bag.’
Imagining another opportunity to upstage him publicly in the House, in his absence, recognized Reynell. It was seed planting time. ‘I accept that what I’m suggesting puts my credibility on the line, but as a science minister – although I suppose really it’ll become a medical problem – I don’t believe I can afford not to come back and personally address Cabinet. I’ve talked it through with Sir Alistair and also with Dr Rothman. They agree.’ The name listing ensured Buxton knew there were independent witnesses to the call, people who would know if the man used prime ministerial authority to refuse the return. The fact that he hadn’t been able to reach Geraldine Rothman was immaterial at the moment.
‘What, exactly, is it?’
The unprovable moment of open deception, Reynell accepted: the moment, if he miscalculated by a hair’s breadth, Buxton could isolate as the first positive move against him. ‘British agriculture, tens of thousand of jobs, are still affected by the transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy into humans, as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease …’
The hesitation was intentional and over-anxiously Buxton took it, as Reynell was sure the man would.
‘What’s the connection with mad cow disease and what you’re doing there?’ protested the prime minister.
‘I’m using it as an example of a government miscalculation. I don’t think we – you – should risk anything similar with what I’ve become aware of, since getting here. That’s why I’m suggesting full Cabinet involvement …’ The lure was feather light. ‘I realize, of course, that Cabinet might go against me: consider I’m over-reacting, but I’m prepared to take that risk …’
‘What is it?’ insisted Buxton, impatiently.
‘It could be an epidemic: a pandemic, even.’
‘Confirmed?’
The bastard had bitten! ‘No.’
‘If you consider it’s that serious, then of course you must.’
‘Thank you, prime minister.’ Before the failed coup meeting at the Carlton Club, Reynell had estimated his inner government support at just under half the Cabinet, with a sufficient number of uncommitted members to tip the balance either way in a direct leadership challenge. In just twenty-four hours – thirty-six at the most – he’d have changed the odds substantially.
‘I’ve missed you,’ said Henrietta, answering Reynell’s next call.
‘It’ll only be a flying visit, literally: a day and a half maximum. Invite your father to dinner.’
‘Serious plans.’
‘Anything to tell me?’
Stoddart had been entering his office after the brief, dismissive confrontation with Geraldine Rothman when Amanda’s second call came. ‘Could be the Brit’s on to something. We won’t know until she’s finished re-examining some autopsy findings; maybe conducting secondaries herself. She’s in the morgue now!
‘Your McMurdo contract doesn’t carry any third party liability insurance. Only if something happens to you, personally.’ By telling her at the end of their meeting, as he had, Paul Spencer had obviously learned the intended lesson. Amanda hoped it lasted.
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘I thought it was something important you should know.’
‘Like the victims’ families should know,’ said Stoddart.
‘Haven’t you thought that by going solo you could screw up the special financial arrangements being planned here?’
‘No,’ admitted Stoddart.
‘Think on it,’ insisted Amanda. ‘Think on it very hard indeed. What’s more important, your conscience or the financial security of their wives and kids?’
‘We’ve got trouble,’ announced Sheldon Hartley, the Pentagon colonel who had jointly organized the security clampdown at McMurdo and Amunsden-Scott under the guise of medical concern.
‘What?’ demanded Spencer.
‘Something approaching a rebellion in Antarctica,’ said the soldier. ‘They’re not accepting any medical need without proof. My people don’t know how much longer they can keep things under wraps. My team leader there talked this morning about needing to use force, which of course I forbade.’
‘Of course,’ agreed Spencer.
‘I’m specifically asking for White House orders here.’
‘I’ll get back to you,’ promised a lip-chewing Spencer.
His direct, private line rang again almost at once.
‘Things are going badly wrong in the south,’ said the Science Foundation’s David Hoolihan.
‘I’ve heard,’ stopped Spencer.
Sixteen
Common as well as scientific sense made Geraldine accede to the authority and argument of Fort Detrick’s stone-faced principal that she couldn’t continue bulldozing on as a one-person medical investigation unit, either in the specially staffed laboratories or the mortuaries. But it took the entire foot-stomping journey to the research section for her to concede it.
The installation’s chief pathologist, Barry Hooper, was a cautiously responsive black man who clearly hadn’t expected – nor welcomed – direct involvement with anyone other than Walter Pelham. Neither, from his matching, quick blinking hesitation, had Duncan Littlejohn, the balding, pebblespectacled head of scientific analysis. Pelham’s unconcealed anger at her earlier, censorious dismissiveness completed the spring-tight unease. It was also too late – and the wrong place – to attempt to make amends, which in any case would only have been for Pelham’s face-saving because Geraldine didn’t genuinely think she had anything to apologize for. To have waited, as she believed the installation director had waited, for every test and analysis to be presented to their group as a comprehensive, end-of-term report, was ridiculous. The alarm-ringing, staring-in-the-face anomalies should have been presented for interpretation within minutes of their being isolated – presuming they had been isolated! – not held back until the arrival of the Alaskan survivors and victims and then further postponed until Raisa Orlov got there.
If they meant anything at all, came the echoing warning in Geraldine’s mind. Instantly followed by a balancing – more than counterweighting – professional dogma. Fear of being proved wrong was never scientifically a reason for not experimenting or asking, although courtesy to colleagues was an understood rule of engagement, which she’d badly failed to observe.
Geraldine shrugged aside the introspection, determined against wasting any more time, posing her questions without explaining why they needed to be asked. All stain tests on the tissue and blood of every victim – those barely surviving as well as those already dead – had failed to isolate any unknown bacterium, insisted Littlejohn. Nor had any antibodies or their formative antigens been detected, either microscopically or under electron microscopy.
‘What about lymphoid cells?’ demanded Geraldine. More Raisa Orlov’s question than hers, the body-circulating lymph gland cells being those most usually and directly attacked by viruses. But she definitely didn’t recognize any demarcations, although from that morning’s encounter she imagined the Russian would try to erect electrified razor wire around her speciality.
‘Lymphocytes were removed from every victim …’ said Hooper. After quickly glancing at Pelham, the pathologist added: ‘The most basic and obvious investigation, surely?’
Geraldine didn’t respond to the patronizing defensiveness. ‘Autolysis?’
‘No evidence anywhere of disorder to indicate viral cell invasion,’ responded Littlejohn, at once.
One hundred and sixty five beats a minute arrythmia, Geraldine remembered. ‘Every one – those from both Antarctica and Alaska who were already dead – suffered massive heart failure, didn’t they?’
For the first time the hostility eased. From Littlejohn there could even have been the vaguest admiration. Hooper said: ‘My findings were general, massive organ failure.’
The positive professional clash, recognized Geraldine, expectantly. But she couldn’t challenge yet, not until she’d conducted her own examinations. And not even challenge then. There’d still be time for the man to qualify the generalization, or rather to quantify it, which was what she foresaw – hoped – to be able to do herself. ‘But the heart failure was substantial?’
‘Yes,’ conceded Hooper.
‘Manifested how?’
The pathologist’s face stiffened, superciliously. ‘How else? Muscle discolouration: infarction …’
‘Softening,’ pressed Geraldine. ‘What about autolysis? In the brains, for instance?’
‘Of course,’ said the man. ‘It’s customary with normal ageing.’
‘But this was anything but normal ageing,’ Geraldine reminded. ‘How much cerebal softening was there? Liquefaction?’
‘There was liquefaction, yes.’ Hooper’s reluctance was easing.
‘Pancreas?’
‘Again, customarily one of the first organs most likely to fail.’
‘Did it, in every case?’ persisted Geraldine.
The looks this time were between Hooper and the man who’d headed the laboratory investigation and it was Littlejohn who replied. ‘Not in every case. In Jane Horrocks, from Antarctica, we decided from their softness that her liver and kidneys went first. In Armstrong, the kidneys preceded the pancreas. In Ben Jordan, an Alaska victim, it was the spleen and gall bladder.’
Geraldine felt a warmth of satisfaction spread throughout her body. It was only when Pelham asked the significance of the reply that she realized she must have been smiling. She said: ‘I don’t know … don’t know what it means, that is. But I think it’s important – might give us a direction and prevent us taking the wrong path. Which I know is talking in more riddles than we already have and why I want to take it further before offering anything more …’ She handed Littlejohn the slide containing some of the skin she had pared from the still living body of Henri Lebrun. ‘While I’m …’ she began, stopping before the undiplomatic mistake, ‘… assisting Barry with the secondary autopsies, I’d appreciate your running a test on this.’
‘To establish what?’ frowned Littlejohn.
‘Whether it’s living skin. Or skin that’s already dead. From a dead man.’
Geraldine half-expected Walter Pelham to accompany them into the dissecting area but he didn’t, although he came as far as the suiting room. The bodies of Buckland Jessup and George Bedall, the two Antarctic victims whose condition and symptoms had first aroused Geraldine’s doubts, lay ready on adjoining dissecting tab
les, the skin still whitened by its recent refrigerated preservation. Geraldine considerately gave way to Hooper on the man’s own territory, following several steps behind. There were two similarly suited attendants already there. At the tables the pathologist looked enquiringly at her through his vizor and because she hoped more quickly to find her answer – some answer at least – from the rodeo-riding Texan, she identified Buckland Jessup. The body had lost both the immediate after-death rigor and the effect of being climatically frozen and was fully outstretched, no longer squatted with the hands in an outstretched praying or entreating position.
‘What are we looking for? Or at?’ demanded Hooper.
‘The vertebrae. Other bones later, but the easiest to reach first.’
The two attendants moved immediately, uncovering the already investigated body. The original entry from sternum to pelvis had been as neatly rejoined as would have been an incision on someone living. She’d always liked – admired – such courtesy upon the bodies of the already dead. The opening parted with Hooper’s release of the sutures, exposing the organ-removed chest and intestinal cavities, with no obstruction to the spinal column.
‘Well?’ Hooper demanded.
Geraldine reached forward, but abruptly stopped, remembering that Pelham, who would be watching from the gallery, would be among the rest of the control group before which she would later explain these practical experiments to support her theory. ‘You before me,’ she yielded. Try intruding your finger where the thoracic joins the cervical.’
Hooper’s extended finger went maybe a millimetre into vertebrae and supporting trabeculae. ‘Consistent with what I would expect.’
‘Now try the sacrum, nearest to the coccygeal.’
The pathologist’s forefinger virtually disappeared into the unresisting softness. Without commenting, Geraldine manually repeated the tests for herself. At the sacrum her forefinger penetrated almost to the second knuckle into the intra medullary canal.
Hooper said: ‘Localised skeletal dying is recognized.’
‘Spinal differences of this magnitude?’ Geraldine challenged. She was right! she decided, feeling another burst of satisfaction. She didn’t know about what, but she might have found an entrance into the maze.
Ice Age Page 19