He walked through the bar and let himself out. The whole town was quiet and blanketed in snow, but even from here he could hear the grinding of the Caterpillar excavator and occasional bursts of jack-hammering. His boots squeaked in the snow as he made his way along the street and started to climb the hill. It wasn’t long before the cemetery came into view. The site of the exhumation was completely covered now by a semi-transparent nylon dome, over fifty feet across, illuminated from within by floodlights. Shadowy figures in protective white spacesuits were moving around inside it, so that it looked like a recently landed UFO, with its alien crew.
The snow was falling more lightly now, but the north-easterly wind was still keen, and it made the tents rumble and flap. As he neared the cemetery, Conor skirted around in back of them, keeping himself well out of the light. He opened up the nearest tent and cautiously peered inside. There was nobody there, but there were stacks of black plastic boxes marked Biohazard, as well as a trestle table crowded with scientific equipment that Conor couldn’t even put a name to.
He tried the next tent. There was nobody in this one, either, only crates of drilling equipment and reels of cable and boxes of spare halogen lamps. As he approached the third tent, however, a man suddenly stepped out of it, dressed in a bulky protective suit complete with oxygen tanks, and carrying his helmet under his arm. He was a big man, the same height as Conor but very much bulkier, with a black woolly hat and the slitted eyes of a Sami.
‘Hej!’ he shouted, and rattled off a guttural burst of irascible Norwegian, which Conor took to mean that he should get the hell out of here before he was ripped in very small digestible pieces and fed to the polar bears.
‘Sorry,’ said Conor. ‘No speaka da Norsk.’
The man came toward him with a threatening look. He waved his hand two or three times to shoo Conor away.
Conor said, ‘OK, I’m going. But look – I’ve got something for you!’ He tugged off one of his gloves with his teeth and unzippered one of his pockets. The man watched him, perplexed, as he took out the small foil pack of burundanga that Magda had given him, and beckoned him closer. The man took two or three steps forward. Conor edged around so that the wind was behind him, opened the foil, and blew the dust directly into the man’s face.
Burundanga had put Conor into a trance, instantly, but he had never seen it used on anyone else and for one moment he didn’t believe that it was going to work. The man flapped his hand in front of his face, coughed, then stood completely still, staring at Conor with the blankest expression that he had ever seen.
Conor stepped back. Then he stepped closer. ‘Can you hear me?’ he said. He prodded the man in the chest. The man stayed where he was, his eyes focused on something that Conor couldn’t even imagine.
He couldn’t give the man verbal instructions, but he took hold of his arm and said, ‘Come on, buddy, this way,’ and led him across to the tent full of drilling equipment. Obedient as a Labrador, the man shuffled along beside him, and waited patiently while Conor opened up the tent-flap. Once they were inside, Conor said, ‘Stay still, OK?’ while he closed the flap behind them. Then he stood in front of the man and mimed to him that he should take off his protective suit. At once – and without any protest at all – the man unfastened the seals at his wrists, took off his gloves, and proceeded to undress. Conor helped him to lift off his oxygen tanks, and even let him hold onto his shoulder to balance himself while he climbed out of his pants. Underneath the suit he was wearing a soiled gray sweater and a pair of thick black tracksuit bottoms tucked into two pairs of cheesy, sweat-stained socks. Conor just prayed that he wasn’t lousy.
He guided the man to a pile of crates at the far end of the tent, all stenciled BUGGE DRILLS A/S. He indicated to the man that he should sit down on one of the crates and stay where he was. Then he took off his parka and struggled into the protective suit himself. He zipped all the zippers and popped all the poppers and fastened all the seals. It took him two or three minutes to figure out how the helmet locked onto his head, but eventually it closed with a well-engineered ker-lick. He twisted the knob of his oxygen regulator and took three deep, pressurized breaths.
He said another prayer: Mary, Mother of God, please make sure that I have put on this suit properly, and that I don’t get infected with the Spanish influenza. Because many people need me, even those people who think they don’t, amen. And even those people who would rather see me dead, double-amen.
He went back to the man on the crates, and guided him to the far end of the tent. He mimed that he should lie down in the narrow space between two boxes of compressor parts; and then, when he had haltingly done so, Conor covered him up with a sheet of brown plastic wrapping material. He didn’t know how to tell him in Norwegian that he shouldn’t wake up for at least a couple of hours, but from what Sidney had said, the effects of burundanga could last for days.
Conor left the tent and trudged toward the nylon dome. Another man in a protective suit was waiting for him and beckoned him to hurry up. He broke into a heavy trot.
The Jeep was parked close to the entrance to the dome. Standing beside it were two hard-looking men in black salopettes, and Dennis Evelyn Branch himself. Branch was wearing a black fur hat with ear-flaps and a sable coat that came almost down to the ground. His face was even whiter than the snow, and his sunglasses as dark as writing-ink. Although Conor was sure that he wouldn’t recognize him behind the gold-tinted glass of his helmet, he kept his gloved hand raised to shield his face, as if he were dazzled by the floodlights.
‘What kept him so damned long?’ Branch said to one of the men in salopettes. ‘I want all of the bodies out of here in four hours flat.’
The man said something to Conor in Norwegian. Conor rubbed his stomach as if to indicate that he had felt ill.
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Branch, turning away. ‘I’m trying to spread the Lord’s Word around the world and it all has to be put on hold while this character goes to the bathroom.’
Conor was ushered into the nylon dome. It was dazzlingly bright inside. Most of the excavation had been completed now. Seven parallel trenches, twenty feet deep, had been jackhammered out of the solid tundra, and seven coffins exposed. They were of plain, cheap wood, but the permafrost had preserved them perfectly, so they looked as freshly made as they did when they had been lowered into the ground.
There were seven men in the dome in protective suits, excluding himself, and they were gathered round the furthest grave with aluminum ladders and nylon ropes and a heap of black zip-up body bags. Conor went over to join them, even though he didn’t have any idea what he was supposed to do. He was worried about the body bags, though. Hadn’t Professor Haraldsen told them that the Norwegian authorities had refused to allow the bodies out of the cemetery? They were supposed to take quarantined samples, not whole cadavers.
One of the men positioned an aluminum extension ladder down the side of the trench and began to climb down it. Another man said something angry to Conor and pointed to the bottom of the trench, so he presumed that he was meant to climb down there, too. He picked up one of the ladders and arranged it on the opposite side of the trench. He was about to climb down when the man shouted at him again and handed him a long-handled crowbar. He gave a thumbs-up, took it, and made his way awkwardly down the aluminum rungs. Inside his helmet it was impossible to see where to put his feet, and halfway down he slipped and caught his sleeve on top of the lower half of the ladder. He heard two or three of the other men shouting at him, but he didn’t look up. He was sweating now and his mouth was dry. He knew what could happen if he compromised his protective suit.
He reached the bottom of the grave. The other man had a crowbar too, and he wedged the sharp end of it underneath the coffin lid and waited. Conor took the hint and forced his crowbar under the lid on the opposite side. Slowly, the two of them eased the lid upward until the nails came creaking out, working their way toward the foot of the coffin until the lid was completely loosened. T
hey laid down their crowbars and lifted the lid between them – taking extravagant care not to puncture their gloves on any splinters or protruding nails – and rested it vertically against the side of the excavation.
Conor turned – and there, in the nightshirt that he had died in, his eyes closed, his face puffy-looking but peaceful, lay young Tormod Albrigsten, looking no different from that day in 1918 when he had slithered down the gangplank of the Forsete and held out his hand to Arne Gabrielsen.
For almost a minute, everybody in the dome stared down at Tormod in awed silence. He looked as if he might open his eyes at any moment and climb out of the coffin. Conor had seen more dead bodies than he cared to remember, but he had never seen anybody who looked like this, as if he were simply sleeping. Yet he was probably more than a hundred years old.
Suddenly somebody shouted an order and the spell was broken. One of the men lowered down a body bag. This wasn’t one of the standard-issue cadaver containment receptacles that the coroner’s department used in New York. It was made of some rubbery material and it had a press-together airtight seal as well as a zipper. Conor’s companion picked it up and held it out with both hands. He looked at Conor and frowned. Then he shouted at him, and although he couldn’t understand Norwegian, Conor caught the word ‘akvavit’ and got the gist: the man was accusing him of being drunk.
Impatiently the man shook the body bag at him. Conor looked down at Tormod’s body and realized what was expected of him. He bent down and eased his hands into the side of the coffin, and lifted Tormod out.
The body was surprisingly heavy. Not only that, it was utterly rigid, frozen solid, so that it looked as if Tormod were being levitated by a stage magician, his arms by his sides and his legs horizontal. His bare feet were still blotchy from the Spanish influenza, his toes slightly curled.
Conor’s companion arranged the body bag in the bottom of the coffin and Conor lowered Tormod into it. They wrapped the bag around him, fastened the airtight seal and pulled up the zipper. Then Conor took the head end while his companion took the feet. They climbed up their ladders on opposite sides of the grave, carrying Tormod between them, as stiff as a board.
Tormod’s body was taken away; and then Conor and his companion climbed down into the next grave to repeat the operation. This time they discovered the body of young Ole, who had worked in a quarry. He still had his blond downy mustache. Seeing these boys, Conor was beginning to get some idea of the enormity of what Dennis Evelyn Branch was planning to do. These weren’t nameless millions: these were somebody’s children. Ole was still wearing a nightshirt which his mother must have made for him, sometime during the First World War.
It took a little over an hour to lift out all seven bodies. As soon as the last one had been carried out of the dome, Conor was handed a shovel and the men began to push all the broken-up soil back into the graves. When they had roughly filled them up, they began to pull the nylon sheeting off the dome and dismantle the framework.
It was snowing again: much more thickly now, almost a blizzard.
The floodlights were switched off, one by one, and Conor saw swimming after-images in front of his eyes. The generators were shut down, too. The men in protective suits took off their helmets and started to walk back to the tents. Dennis Evelyn Branch and his two bodyguards went with them. Conor kept his helmet on and hung behind. He had been looking for a chance to catch Branch on his own. In an out-and-out confrontation he would have no hope at all. Even if Branch’s men weren’t armed, he was hopelessly outnumbered, and he would be lucky to get as far as Branch’s Jeep.
He was beginning to think that Eleanor had been right. Only two people had ever been any good at improvisation, and neither of them was him.
He stared to circle away from the tent where everybody else was going – back to the drilling-equipment store where he had left his parka. But the last of the men in protective suits turned around and gave him a wave and called out to him. ‘Per!’ Then, more insistently, ‘Per!’
He hesitated, but the man called yet again, and he had to follow. He pushed his way in through the tent-flaps still wearing his helmet. Inside, it was dimly lit and stiflingly hot. All of the miners were gathered here now, as well as two or three other men, all of them dressed in black, and two young Norwegians who looked like students. Lab technicians, maybe, Conor guessed.
He saw now how Dennis Evelyn Branch had been able to excavate the cemetery without interference. In the half-darkness at the far end of the tent, five young Norwegian soldiers were sitting in a line on the floor with their cropped heads bowed, cowed and pale. They were being watched over by one of the men that Conor had seen at Breivika Havnegata, the one whose Volvo had burned. He was holding a Belgian FN rifle loosely across his knees and repeatedly yawning.
Dennis Evelyn Branch stepped stiff-legged into the center of the tent with his hands buried deep into the pockets of his coat. He had taken off his black fur cap, and his bone-white hair stuck up wildly.
‘My friends, you’ve done real well here today! You’ve done us all proud! We’re two hours ahead of schedule and that means that we’re two hours nearer to the day when the Word of the Lord will be spread around the globe!’
He stalked to the left; he stalked to the right. He never took his hands out of his pockets but the sharpness of his voice made up for all of the arm-waving and the pointing that most evangelists used to stir up their congregations.
‘What we did here tonight was ethical and it was scientific. We took almost all of the precautions that the Norwegian health authorities demanded of Dr Duncan’s expedition; so nobody can accuse us of fecklessness or of unnecessarily risking the lives of innocent people. All right, the Norwegians didn’t want us to take the bodies away with us, but that’s what we’re going to do, because we have a higher purpose. Not just scientific knowledge, but Christian purity. And if we simply took samples and left the rest of the bodies here, then the chances are that Dr Duncan would work out some kind of a cure for this virus, some kind of an antidote, which is not God’s intention.
‘God’s intention was to give me the means whereby this entire planet can become Christian; and devoted to Christian morality and Christian principles. God gave the same means to Moses in Egypt. “And all the first-born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of the Pharaoh who sits on his throne, to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; and all the first-born of beasts. Moreover there shall be a great cry in all the land of Egypt, such as there has not been before and shall never be again …”
‘Thus says the Lord, “Let my people go, that they may serve me.”’
‘And that is what I say to the Catholics in Rome, and the Hindus in Delhi, and the Shi’ites in Iran. That is what I say to the faithless Communists in China and the Taoists in Tokyo. I say let the Lord’s people go, that they may serve Him. I say, let His people go.’
His voice had been rising higher and higher, and suddenly he was almost screaming. ‘Let His people go, that’s what I say! Let His people go!
‘Because this planet is going to Hell in a handcart. This planet is doomed! This planet is corrupted to the core like a rotten apple. Unless the peoples of this planet wake up to the Word of the Lord … unless the peoples of this planet say, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I understand the one true way!” And unless the peoples of this planet junk their Sivas and their Buddhas and their plastic Virgin Marys … what hope do we have? What hope of salvation?
‘Are you going to walk up to the gates of Heaven with a Winn-Dixie bag crammed with rosaries and incense and 3-D pictures of Jesus, and say, “Let me in, Lord, because I’m religious and here’s the proof”? That stuff, that isn’t religious! That’s idolatry! That’s worse than idolatry! Being religious is being pure in heart, and having faith in things which you don’t have evidence for, and giving of everything you have. More than anything else, being religious is casting pride aside. Humbling yourself, before God. Recognizing in your heart of hearts t
hat you are just the same as every other human being on this planet, no better, no worse. That Sarawak woman in Indonesia, living in her hut, are you any better than her? That leprous beggar outside the Bombay railroad station, how about him? What makes you any better than him?
‘Your pride, that’s all. Your pride. And God will judge your pride, when it comes to the Day of Reckoning, and those that are proud shall be cast down into the fiery furnace, and those that are truly humble shall sit on the right hand of God.’
Dennis Evelyn Branch lifted his head as if he expected applause, and whoops of encouragement, but when he was greeted by shuffling indifference and a smattering of smokers’ coughs he suddenly realized that he was talking to a group of dog-tired Norwegian miners who couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and a few students who had probably been enticed to help him by the money he was prepared to pay, rather than his rhetoric.
‘Good job then,’ he said, anticlimactically. ‘Sammy, let’s get out of here.’
He went for the exit and his protectors followed close behind. Conor realized that this was going to be his only chance. He shouldered his way close behind them out of the tent, and reached into his pocket for Toralf’s pistol. Outside, in the pelting snow, Dennis Evelyn Branch was less than twenty feet away, headed for his Jeep, his bodyguards on either side.
Conor unlocked his helmet and tossed it across the snow. The wind was so cold that it took his breath away. He lifted the pistol, aimed it directly at Branch’s head and yelled out, ‘Freeze!’
Branch took two or three steps before he understood what Conor had shouted at him. He slowed, and turned around, his hands still deep in his pockets. Conor walked right up to him, less than ten feet away, so that there wouldn’t be any chance of missing. The two bodyguards kept their hands hovering high, and well in sight. They didn’t want Branch to be summarily shot because they dived too quickly for their guns.
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