Several members of the hospital staff came charging out through the sliding glass doors—all duly warned, and garbed in hazmat suits—and while two of them jumped into the back of the old ambulance and started trundling Frank, still on the gurney, into the receiving area, a third yanked open the driver’s side door. Melted snow and slush slopped out, and Nika felt as if she was about to slide out onto the floor, too. A burly male nurse grabbed her, and escorted her inside, a strong arm wrapped around her waist.
“Quarantine,” she said, through her mask. “He needs to be quarantined.”
“They know,” he said, through a plastic face mask of his own. “The Alaska Highway Patrol called ahead.”
She was guided onto the nearest chair, but when she glanced down at her mask, she could see that there was a pink stain on the gauze. “Me, too,” she said, in a muffled voice.
But she wasn’t sure he’d heard her.
When her gloves were taken off to check for frostbite, she saw in the center of her palm, where the needle had pricked her on St. Peter’s island, a cluster of tiny red lines, radiating outwards like the rays of the sun in a child’s drawing.
“Me, too,” she repeated, drawing away from him and doubling over as a fit of coughing overwhelmed her. “Quarantine.”
The nurse instinctively jumped back, and when Nika’s breath finally returned, she gasped, “Stay away,” before sliding down out of the chair, limp as a rag doll, and onto the gleaming linoleum floor.
Chapter 60
“Let me at least take the tiller!” Anastasia had begged Sergei, more than once, but he had refused every time. His teeth were clenched in determination, his eyes were fixed on the distant prospect of St. Peter’s Island, but Ana feared for his life. He had guarded her, cared for her, loved her, for thousands of miles, and now, just as they were within sight of their destination, his skin was turning blue, and his cough had become rough and constant and alarming.
It had also become familiar.
Anastasia and her sister Tatiana had come down with the flu themselves the winter before, but bad as it had been, they had weathered it. Thousands of others, she knew, did not. In the military hospitals, where the imperial daughters helped to tend to the soldiers wounded in battle with the Germans, Ana often passed by the influenza wards, where she could hear the retching and hacking, the agonized cries and the deathly gurgles of its victims as they drowned in a tide of their own blood and mucus. Once gone, their bodies were hastily wrapped in their own sheets, and rather than being taken through the hospital corridors again, and risking a further spread of the contagion, they were slipped out a window, down a wooden chute requisitioned from a grain silo, and straight onto the back of a waiting wagon. Huge pits, swimming in quicklime, had been dug on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, and the dead were deposited there with no observance or ceremony of any kind. Who would have lingered in such a place to do so?
She should have known when she first heard the pilot Nevsky coughing at the inn. All the way across the continent, she and Sergei had skirted every danger, from random thieves to Bolshevik soldiers, corrupt officials to marauding Cossacks, but this was the one threat that could not be seen coming. And even if they had, what else could they do? There was no other means of getting as far as they had than to bribe a pilot. She wished an ill fate on Nevsky.
“Sergei,” she warned, in the tone of a grand duchess who would brook no dissent, “I cannot sail this boat alone. For my sake, if not your own, you must rest, just for a bit.”
But he had acted as if he hadn’t even heard her; it was possible he had not. It looked as if the teeth were rattling in his skull, and he had collapsed in another paroxysm of coughing. It had all come on so fast she could hardly believe it … though she had seen such a phenomenon before. Even in the military wards, it had often been the hardiest and most energetic young men who had fallen the fastest. It was one of the great mysteries of the disease. Dr. Botkin, who had cared for Ana and her sister, had suggested it was this very constitution that contributed to the victims’ demise. “Their own strength is their undoing,” he had said, shaking his head as he read their thermometers and ordered more cold compresses to bring down their fevers. “Be glad that you are frail and pampered princesses,” he’d said, and Tatiana had thrown a pillow at him.
Was that truly what had saved them? Or was it, as Rasputin had darkly ordained, that she carried in her blood a proof against the plague, that the deadly blood disease inherited from her mother, and passed on only to the male offspring, offered some immunity from the worst ravages of the Spanish flu? How strange, that her compromised nature might have been her greatest guardian.
She could serve as the messenger of doom, it seemed, but not one of its victims.
A block of ice bumped up against the boat, and a wave of icy blue water crested the starboard side and sloshed into the bottom, washing up and over her boots. She tried to lift her feet above the water, but she could not maintain her balance on the narrow thwart for very long. Both her feet were nearly frozen, but the left one in particular, wearing the boot specially designed to accommodate its deformity, had no feeling left in it at all. She longed to remove the boot and rub the life back into it, ideally before a roaring fire … but St. Peter’s Island was still far off.
And the closer they got, the less welcoming it appeared.
A gnarled black rock, swathed in mist and surrounded by jagged rocks sticking up out of the water like spikes, it was the least likely place on earth to have earned the name of sanctuary. But that, she knew, was precisely why it had been chosen. The followers of Father Grigori, who believed, as she did, that he was a prophet, had traveled all the way from Pokrovskoe to take refuge here, to build their church and to await the return of their starets. For Ana, his bodily return seemed unlikely—she knew all too well the ravages that had been inflicted upon him before his drowning in the Neva River—but she did not doubt the strength of his spirit. She did not doubt the image she had seen, swirling up out of the gun smoke in that cellar in Ekaterinburg, any more than she doubted the emerald cross, imbued with his powers, that she still wore under her coat and corset.
Sergei had taken his hand from the tiller and was pointing, with one shaking finger, ahead at the island. When she reached out and stroked the side of his face, he drew back in horror, afraid of infecting her, and insisted that she look for the fires. “They will light fires.”
And then, racked with a cough that drenched his own hand in blood, he had let go of the sail and let go of life. Blessing her, he had rolled over the side of the boat, and into the churning waters of the strait.
The last thing she had seen of him, as she lunged to the stern and his body was engulfed by the waves, was a frozen blue cornflower bobbing between the shards of ice. It was, undoubtedly, the one she had first given him by the train tracks in Siberia.
She’d have given every gem in her corset to reclaim it.
And then she had turned to the task of steering the boat through the blinding fog and the heaving waves, steadfastly looking for the fires that Sergei said they lighted on the cliffs every night. “They are the beacons to guide their prophet, lost and wandering in the dark, to their new home,” he had told her. And when she saw them burning like tiny candles at the end of a long and gloomy hallway, her heart had risen in her chest. The boat, as if guided by some miraculous hand, had passed through the rocks and reefs and tide pools, and ground to a halt on a narrow strip of pebbles and sand. When she had sunk to her knees on the beach, soaked to the skin and gasping for breath, she had thanked God for her deliverance. Over the crashing of the surf, she thought she heard the tolling of a church bell.
And in the last light of day—a day that was shorter in this northern part of the world than anywhere else—she had looked up to see her rescuers running down the beach toward her. But the prayer of thanks turned to ashes in her mouth as they closed the distance.
Far from coming to her rescue, these were a pack of black wolves, the
ir eyes shining orange and their white fangs bared. The boat was gone, drifting back out to sea, and even if she had wanted to try to outrun them, there was nowhere to go. Pulling the cross from beneath her clothes, she clutched it tightly, lowered her head in prayer, and prepared to join her massacred family in Heaven. The wolves came on, and at any moment she expected to hear their bloodthirsty panting and feel their sharp teeth at her throat. But just as she braced herself for the attack, she heard a sharp, piercing whistle from the cliffs above, and when she lifted her eyes long enough to look through the veil of her own ice-rimed hair, she saw the wolves drawing up short, nervously pawing the sand, moving in circles around her, whining and barking like dogs at the kitchen door.
What had happened?
The lead wolf, with a white blaze on its muzzle, stepped closer—she could smell his rank breath—and stared at her hands, clutching the emerald cross, with an almost human curiosity.
The whistle came again, and all the wolves turned to look at the cliffside, where a man in a long black cassock was slowly descending an almost invisible flight of stairs. For a second, Anastasia thought, “My God, it is Rasputin!” But as he marched across the frozen beach, she saw that it was someone else—tall as Rasputin and as broad in the shoulder, but with a face that was more benign, less worldly, and unshrouded by a tangled black beard. There was an undeniable ferocity in Father Grigori’s features, but none in this priest’s. He waved one arm, and the wolves, except for their leader, were swept back like dust before a broom.
“Anastasia,” he said, dropping to his knees beside her, “I am Deacon Stefan.”
It was the man Sergei had told her about, the man who had led the pilgrims from his village.
Taking her into his embrace, he said, “We have been waiting a long time for you.”
The hot tears suddenly springing from her eyes warmed her face, and when the wolf with the white nose stepped forward to lick them, the deacon did not intervene.
Chapter 61
It was a strange situation. That much, Dr. Frank Slater would have been the first to admit.
On the one hand, he was a patient at the Nome Regional Health Center, most of his time spent lying in the cranked-up hospital bed and under observation by closed-circuit camera and through the glass panels of the ICU doors, and on the other hand he was in charge.
The explosion on the bridge had left him with a concussion, two fractured ribs that made him wince with every deep breath he took, and more cuts and bruises than he could count. His malarial meds had had to be airlifted in—normally, there wasn’t much call for them in Alaska—but if anything, it was his chronic disease that had helped to save his life. Because of his already compromised immunological response, and the ingestion of his retroviral drugs, any exposure he had undergone to the Spanish flu had been mitigated. His system was already too weakened to mount the kind of stiff resistance that engendered the fatal cytokine storms that had killed so many millions.
It was the first time he’d ever been grateful for that damn mosquito bite.
But even as he was being nursed back to health, he knew that he bore the responsibility for running this quarantine unit. He had improvised it himself—first by commandeering the ICU, then by putting the staff through intensive, on-the-spot training. They were a lot more accustomed to routine problems like heart attacks and hunting accidents, but even as they were wheeling him in on the gurney, he had begun to issue instructions on how to deal with a virus as potentially deadly as this one. He had strictly cordoned off this area of the hospital’s top floor, nearly all communication was done through the intercom system, and only a limited number of personnel, always outfitted in full hazmat gear, were ever allowed in or out. Right now, the unit had just one other patient—Nikaluk Tincook.
And she had not fared as well as he had. Like Dr. Lantos, she had been brought in suffering not only from the flu, but from septicemia, a flood tide of bacteria clogging her bloodstream. The minute Slater had been told about the red lines on her palm, he had personally drained and sterilized the wound site, but it was too little, too late. The flu and the sepsis were like old pals, reunited now and working in deadly concert, and if he didn’t calibrate his responses perfectly, he could lose her to either one. The fear gnawed at him like a rat.
Dr. Jonah Knudsen, the crusty old coot who normally ran the hospital, had advised that she be sent on to the state-of-the-art facility in Juneau, where Dr. Lantos was being treated. Standing outside the door and speaking through the intercom, he had told Slater that Rebekah Vane and her sister Bathsheba had also been sent there.
“Have they presented symptoms of the flu?”
“Rebekah has,” he said, “but then she apparently had greater physical contact with Harley Vane and his bodily fluids.”
“His bodily fluids?”
“She served him tea and toast, and later, after he’d vomited, she cleaned up the mess.”
Then it made some sense.
“Although her condition is otherwise stable, she does have a fractured jaw and other minor injuries, and just so you know, she has named you, in addition to the federal government, in a lawsuit for a host of damages. First and foremost, of course, is the loss of her husband.”
Of course, Slater thought. Even as they were fighting to save her life, from an incident that would never have occurred if her family had not gone on an illegal treasure hunt in the first place, she was lying in her bed concocting lawsuits. It was the new American pastime, and it made him, more than ever, want to find a way to get away from everything that it suggested and implied. He simply wanted to practice medicine again, in a place where his talents and his work would be valued and the bureaucracy extended no further than the usual burden of insurance forms. His days as a globe-trotting epidemiologist might be over—Dr. Levinson had made that perfectly clear—but his efforts to save Lantos, and now Nika, had reminded him of the satisfaction to be had from healing just one person. What was that old Hebrew proverb he’d once heard Dr. Levinson herself say—“If you save one life, it’s the same as saving the whole world.”
Right now the only life he wanted to save, even more than his own, was Nika’s.
All day long, her small compact body, sweating through one hospital gown after another, had been racked with coughing fits and spasms. Her long black hair, tied into a tight braid, had lashed the pillows like a whip. Her platelet count plummeted, her blood gases revealed she had entered into metabolic acidosis, her breathing became so faint that a mechanical ventilator had to be wheeled in; her major organs began to shut down like dominoes falling in a row. Lungs, liver, central nervous system; when her kidneys failed, Slater had had to immediately put her on dialysis.
She’d been young and healthy and athletic, and now it was the very strength of her immune system that was threatening to kill her. It was kicking into overdrive … and throwing her whole body into shock. Many patients, he knew, never came back from it.
The hospital staff, panicking, looked to him for guidance, and he ordered up a fresh barrage of IV antibiotics—cindamycin and flucytosine this time—along with vasopressors to constrict her blood vessels and treat her hypotension, insulin to stabilize her blood-sugar levels, corticosteroids to counteract the inflammation. The diseases were burning through her like a forest fire, consuming her just as her Inuit ancestors had once been consumed, and he had to find a way to sustain her long enough to let the contagion burn itself out.
“Dr. Slater,” one of the nurses said after he had maintained his vigil for hours on end, “why don’t you go back to your own room and take a break? We’ll alert you if anything changes.”
“I’ll stay,” he said, perched in a fresh lime-green hazard suit on the plastic chair in the corner. Every few hours, the chair, like everything else in this section of the old ICU, was sprayed from top to bottom with a powerful disinfectant.
Surrounded by the machines and screens, tubes and wires and IV trolleys, Nika could barely be seen. But every fluctuation
in her respiration or temperature, cardiac rate or cerebral activity, was being tracked and monitored by the array of instruments that had been brought into the room. Slater, exhausted, slumped backward in the chair, and felt the ivory bilikin on its leather string swing against his damp skin.
The little owl, with its furled wings. On the island, Professor Kozak had asked about it, and Nika had said it was purportedly from a woolly mammoth.
Impressed, Slater had looked at it even more closely.
“That would make it, perhaps, eleven thousand years old,” Kozak had later informed him.
Slater wondered if it had gained some extra charge, some supernatural potency, over all those centuries it had endured. Although he wasn’t a believer in such things—how could he be?—right now he was ready to accept any help he could get.
Dr. Knudsen appeared, hovering in a white lab coat, through the glass panel in the door.
That was not the help he had hoped for.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Knudsen said, sounding not sorry at all as he bent toward the intercom box, “but I thought you should know.”
“Know what?” Slater said, already dreading the reply.
“It’s about Dr. Eva Lantos. She died one hour ago.”
It was like a hammer blow to his already bruised chest.
“For purposes of public safety,” Knudsen continued, “the official death certificate entered in Juneau is recording it as simply a lethal bacterial infection. But her body was immediately removed to the AFIP labs in D.C. by Army air transport.”
Slater could see that the doctor was holding a clipboard against his chest, and rocking on his heels.
“I’m very sorry,” he said.
But Slater didn’t think he looked any more regretful than he sounded; he looked like a man who didn’t mind telling his privileged guest, the one who had taken over his own ICU, that he wasn’t such a hotshot, after all.
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