‘Ten bio suits, three two-way radios, a whole stack of containment boxes, a couple of Nikons. General stuff, like body bags and candy bars.’
‘O Lord, what did I do to deserve this punishment?’ Dennis Evelyn Branch appealed, in a high, hysterical voice. ‘O Lord, I’m begging of you now, if you want me to do your work, then send down a storm of rain. Send down a hailstorm if you have to. But put out this fire. Lord, any way you will. For my sake. For your sake.’
There was a moment’s pause. Dennis Evelyn Branch cried out, ‘Please, Lord!’ but the Lord wasn’t impressed. The panel van blew up with an ear-splitting bang and tumbled backward across the parking lot, over and over. The second Volvo blew up, too, jumping sideways into a border filled with flowering shrubs. The shrubs immediately caught fire like the burning bush in the Bible, and so did the wood-chippings in the border, with a strong whiff of barbecue. A single blazing wheel rolled drunkenly away toward the trees and disappeared from sight.
The heat from the three burning vehicles was immense. They groaned and crackled and splintered. The men stood and watched them, shielding their faces with their hands.
‘This here, this is arson,’ Dennis Evelyn Branch declared. ‘Don’t you try to tell me this wasn’t arson. Don’t no vehicle catch on fire spontaneous. What, whamm! just like that? I don’t think so. This here’s somebody with a deliberate intention to prevent us from doing the Lord’s work, passing on His holy message, you believe me.’
‘Believe you, reverend,’ said the man beside him.
In the distance, Conor heard the braying-donkey noise of Norwegian firetrucks. He looked out and saw that the Southerner and his companions were all preoccupied with their blazing cars. He took a deep breath, and then he risked it: mounting the steps toward the building three at a time. He reached the door, put his hand on the doorhandle, and it was locked.
Don’t panic, he told himself. And whatever you do, don’t look around.
He took the key out of his pocket, jabbed it in the lock, twisted, and stepped inside. None of the men turned around: they were all too busy with the burning chaos in the parking lot.
Inside the building there was a plain reception lobby, much like the building next door, except that this one was stacked with dozens of boxes and wooden crates. Behind the desk a large-scale map of northern Norway had been pinned, from Narvik to Spitsbergen, with a criss-cross pattern of red ribbons stretched across it with thumbtacks.
Conor studied the map closely, but so many towns and villages were marked that it was impossible for him to work out where tomorrow’s destination was. He left the lobby and pushed his way through a heavy wooden fire-door. He found himself in a short corridor with three more doors leading off it to the left.
He tried the first door but it was locked. The second door opened into a storeroom, where more boxes were stacked, as well as assorted oddments of lighting equipment and reels of heavy-duty electrical cable. The third door took him into a brightly lit laboratory.
He closed the door behind him and took a look around. There were workbenches along two walls and two more parallel benches in the center, both of them crowded with chemical glassware, gas burners, binocular microscopes, gas chromograph spectrometers, two top-of-the-range IBM computers and rows and rows of test-tubes.
There was a smell of chemicals and animals. On the workbench opposite stood a dozen wire cages. Only two of them were occupied: one by three white rats, and the other by a small rhesus monkey which appeared to be asleep or drugged. Conor peered into the cage and said, ‘Psst!’ but the monkey didn’t stir.
The far wall had another door in it, and a large unlit window. Conor approached the window and shaded his eyes with his hand so that he could see inside. There was another room, much smaller, with a single iron-framed bed in it, and a plain desk with a desklamp and a wooden chair.
He tried the door. This, too, was locked – and with a much more sophisticated lock. It was stenciled with the single word QUARANTINE. So Magda had been right about the biohazard. The question was: what kind of biohazard was it?
He made a quick search of all the drawers and filing cabinets, although he didn’t really know what he was looking for. He tore a sheet of paper off a pad and copied down the labels of all the test-tubes. Even if he didn’t understand what he had found, a biologist might.
There were two plain cardboard folders on the workbench, too. He flicked through them but they were crammed, in tiny handwriting, with biological formulae. He jotted down their titles. Apia and Longyearbyen.
He was taking a last look around when the door opened. One of the men was standing there, a tall Norwegian, his face reddened by the heat of the burning cars.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded. ‘Who let you in here?’
Conor held out his hand. ‘Hi. Sorry to keep you so long.’
‘What are you talking about? I don’t know you from Adam.’
‘Sure you do. Don’t you remember that time in Oslo?’
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You can’t come in here.’
Conor took hold of his hand and gripped it tight. Then he slowly released it, sliding his fingers away in the way that Sidney had taught him. ‘You remember. It was summer. The sun was shining. You met me at that café on Stortorvet. You said you could always trust me. You still trust me, don’t you?’
The man blinked at him, uncertain. Conor didn’t know if he had managed to put him into any kind of trance or not. He might simply have been confused. The firetrucks had arrived outside and there was shouting and clattering.
‘Listen, I have to leave you for a moment,’ said Conor. ‘You feel quite relaxed standing there, don’t you? You don’t mind waiting because it’ll give you time to think about yourself. You’ve been under stress lately, haven’t you? You need to spend some time working out your problems.’
He laid his hand on the man’s shoulder. The man stared at him with green, troubled eyes. His eyebrows were as blond as a pig’s. For one long second, Conor thought that he was going to hit him. But then he stepped back and allowed Conor to pass.
‘Just remember … think about relaxing. Think about clearing your mind. Your problems – they’re like a messy tangled-up bundle of string. Try to unravel it.’
He walked back along the corridor leaving the Norwegian standing obediently in the doorway. He opened the front door and it was still pandemonium outside. Three firetrucks had turned up, and firefighters were spraying foam all over the wreckage of the two Volvos and the burning van. Foam blew in the wind and caught in the bushes. Police had just arrived, too, and two of them were talking to Dennis Evelyn Branch. Branch half turned toward Conor as he left the building, but then one of the policemen must have asked him a question because he turned away again.
‘Well?’ asked Eleanor breathlessly, as Conor climbed back into the car. ‘Wasn’t that just spectacular?’
‘You should get a job in special effects,’ said Conor.
Magda started the engine and turned the Opel around. ‘Did you get what you wanted?’
‘Not exactly. I didn’t really have enough time. But I’ve noted down the names of some of the chemicals they’re using and the titles of a couple of files. I’m hoping that they may be able to help us.’
‘Maybe I should try hypnotizing Birger again.’
‘Yes, maybe. But don’t worry. We’ll think of something.’
‘Well, I hope it involves blowing up more cars,’ said Eleanor. ‘I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in years.’
Chapter 28
They called Birger’s room six or seven times that evening, but there was no reply. They even went up and knocked on the door. ‘Maybe he’s checked out already,’ said Eleanor. Magda shook her head. ‘He’s probably spending the night with some whore, celebrating his new job. Men, you know? Sometimes they disgust me.’
The next morning Eleanor checked with all of the air carriers – Braathens, Norving, NorskAir and Wideroe – but
none of them had a private charter flight out of Tromso to any destination to the north. She called Troms Fylkes Dampskibsselskap, too, the main shipping company, and they were equally unhelpful.
Conor said, ‘We’re going to lose our grip on this situation, unless we do something fast.’
Magda picked the cloudberries out of her cornflakes, and arranged them around the edge of her plate. ‘So what do you suggest? We send out sniffer dogs?’
‘Better than that. What’s the time? I’m going up to the university and see if there’s somebody who can tell me what these chemicals are, and what these names mean.’
‘Do you want me to come with you?’ asked Eleanor.
‘Sure … that would be nice. Magda, why don’t you call the auto rental concessions? Check if anybody rented out a panel van and a couple of cars? You could always pretend that you were some secretary, and that one of your bosses had left something behind – you know, a briefcase full of urgent documents, something like that.’
‘You want me to be a secretary?’ said Magda, haughtily.
‘If it helped us to find what Dennis Evelyn Branch is up to, I’d expect you to be a restroom attendant.’
‘Oh, I see. While you and Eleanor go off to the university to rub shoulders with the intelligentsia?’
Conor took hold of her (very cold) hand. ‘Magda … we have to find these people. God knows what’s going to happen if we don’t.’
Professor Jorn Haraldsen welcomed them into an office that was almost psychotically tidy. It had a large bright window overlooking a sculpture garden, in which several hefty stone women stood around as if they were waiting for somebody to bring them their clothes back.
On the left-hand wall of Professor Haraldsen’s office hung a large abstract photograph of something crimson and blobby. The right-hand wall was lined with books and every book had been covered in speckled blue paper to match the carpet. Professor Haraldsen’s desk was completely clear except for a rough lump of volcanic rock. Professor Haraldsen himself was slightly built, gray-haired, with the face of an ageing imp. He wore a brown knitted sweater with a zip fastener, brown locknit pants and extraordinary brown earth shoes. He looked as if he skied and bicycled and skinny-dipped in freezing-cold fiords.
‘How do you think I can help you?’ he asked, perching on the edge of his desk. ‘I have to tell you, I don’t receive many requests from the public at large.’
Conor handed him the sheet of paper with the names scrawled on it. ‘I just want to know if these mean anything to you. If there’s any connection between them.’
Professor Haraldsen took a pair of half-glasses out of his sweater pocket and scrutinized the list with his nose wrinkled in concentration.
‘Ah, well, yes. Amantadine. That’s a drug which has been giving some promising results in the treatment of influenza, particularly in the early stages. So are some of these other drugs. Two of these – cyanodine and heliocyclatine – I’ve never heard of.’
‘So what does this suggest to you? That somebody’s trying to find a cure for the flu?’
‘It most certainly looks like it. Especially if you consider these two other names, Apia and Longyearbyen. Both of them have associations with the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–19. Without any doubt, the greatest natural disaster in recorded history.
‘Apia was a small harbor in Upolu, Western Samoa, in the South Pacific. At the height of the pandemic, in November 1918, a ship from New Zealand arrived in Apia carrying several dozen passengers who were suffering from the flu.
‘Most of the natives of the South Pacific had never been exposed to any kind of influenza virus before, so they had never been able to build up immunity to it. But in 1918, US Navy ships took the virus to the Society Islands, where it killed over a tenth of the population. And after that ship put in at Apia, seven and a half thousand Western Samoans died within six weeks – which had the dubious distinction of being the highest per capita devastation of the whole pandemic.
‘I find it extraordinary that people today seem to know so little about the Spanish influenza, or the terrible havoc that it caused all round the world. Nearly six hundred and seventy-five thousand Americans died – as many as you lost in both world wars put together, as well as Korea and Vietnam. In Britain, a quarter of a million. Here we lost whole communities of Sami – the people we used to call the Lapps – wiped out for ever. Throughout the world, the pandemic killed maybe as many as fifty million people.’
He paused, and then he said, ‘It was an incredibly deadly virus, incredibly swift to act. You could wake up in the morning feeling fine and be dead by lunchtime. People dropped dead in the streets. You can always recognize the symptoms of Spanish influenza – vividly discolored faces, blackened feet and bloody fluid overflowing out of the lungs.
‘If somebody is trying to find a cure for it, then they should be congratulated, and given all the help that we can offer them. After all, there is a strong possibility that it could reappear – and what could we do about it if it did?’
‘I’m not so sure that their main objective is to find a cure,’ said Conor.
Professor Haraldsen took off his glasses and blinked at him. ‘I don’t understand. Why else would they wish to study it? And, obviously, they are trying to locate living samples of it.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘This other name you gave me, Longyearbyen. You know where this is, Longyearbyen?’
‘I don’t have the first idea.’
‘It’s on Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, which is half-way between the coast of northern Norway and the North Pole. About five hundred and eighty kilometers north of here. It’s the chief Norwegian settlement. Population, maybe twelve hundred hardy souls. Coalminers, mostly; and scientists. You wouldn’t want to live there unless you had to.
‘Longyearbyen was named after an American, J.M. Longyear, who was the first person to mine coal there, in 1905 or thereabouts.’
‘So what does it have to do with flu?’
‘Absolutely everything. In September of 1918, seven young Norwegian miners died in Longyearbyen after they had contracted the Spanish influenza here in Tromso. The townspeople of Longyearbyen were very worried that they would catch the virus themselves, so they buried the bodies deep beneath the tundra in the permafrost, which never thaws out.’
‘That would have killed the virus, wouldn’t it?’ asked Eleanor.
Professor Haraldsen shook his head. ‘It would have had the opposite effect. It would have put it into hibernation; or what in science fiction stories they call “suspended animation”. Just like the crew of a starship, who are frozen or have their metabolism artificially slowed down so that they can travel for years without growing any older, so this Spanish influenza virus has been travelling through time also without ageing, ready at any time for reawakening.
‘In 1918, medical science wasn’t advanced enough to preserve any samples of the whole virus. But we can assume that the bodies of those seven young men have remained frozen solid for the past eighty years; and that they have been well enough preserved to give us tissue samples from which we can isolate a whole live virus.’
He hopped down from his desk and walked across to the blobby photograph on the wall. ‘You see this? It’s a magnification of the “bird flu” virus which broke out in Hong Kong in 1996. It caused the death of a three-year-old boy; and it was only by killing all of the chickens in Hong Kong that the authorities managed to eliminate it. One point three million chickens! Maybe that seems extreme. But I have no doubt in my mind at all that they almost certainly saved the world from another 1918.
‘Before this happened, nobody thought that the virus could jump the species barrier from bird to human. But the flu virus is able to shuffle its genetic codes like a quick-change artist. So you can never know when and where it’s going to break out next. It can start with events as unpredictable as the westward migration of infected wild ducks from China. In 1917, the flu broke out in Americ
a, but it was carried eastward into Germany and Scandinavia and Eastern Europe by troop movements. These days, if it broke out again, it could so easily be carried around the world by long-haul flights. We take every outbreak of flu very seriously. The World Health Organization has a whole network of flu surveillance experts; and of course you Americans have the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
‘But you’ve worried me now. You say that somebody is trying to isolate the 1918 virus for some reason other than a cure? What reason could that be?’
‘We think that it’s possible somebody intends to use a flu virus as a biological weapon.’
‘You’re talking about who? The Iraqis? We know they have anthrax and the Marburg virus. But the Spanish flu? That would be madness. That would wipe out millions and millions. They could have no control over it.’
‘I don’t think they’re very worried about having control over it, except to protect themselves. They’re not Iraqis. They’re a breakaway evangelical movement that believes that everybody in the world should convert to their own particular brand of Christianity.’
‘When you say everybody—?’
‘That’s precisely what I mean. Everybody. You. Me. The Catholics. The Jews. The Muslims. The Shintoists. The Buddhists. Every religion and every sect of every religion that you can think of.’
‘But how can they expect this? It’s insanity. What will happen if people refuse?’
‘In that case,’ put in Eleanor, dryly, ‘the whole world will be heaped a hundred deep with martyrs.’
Professor Haraldsen sat down at his desk. He rubbed his chin as if he were trying to decide if he needed a shave. ‘This isn’t a very, very bad taste joke?’ he asked, after a while; although he could obviously tell by Conor’s expression that he was deadly serious.
Conor said, ‘You’re a professor of epidemiology. Don’t tell me you don’t have any clout with the medical authorities? Surely you can stop Branch and his people from digging up those graves at Longyearbyen?’
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