The Romanov Cross: A Novel (54 page)

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.

It was the first time Slater had lost a colleague on one of his missions; you could not be a field epidemiologist, in the world’s most deadly and undeveloped regions, and not be aware of the risks you were taking. It was something that lurked in the back of your mind the whole time.

But Eva Lantos? She’d been holed up in her M.I.T. lab, safe and sound, and he had lured her out. While nothing that happened on the island could have logically been foreseen—it was a place where logic seemed to hold no sway—he blamed himself, all the same. It was a simple, straight line he could draw—if he had not phoned her that afternoon from his office at the institute, she’d be happily teasing out the rat genome in Boston today. Instead, she was dead in an isolation tank at AFIP.

Slater closed his eyes and wished that Knudsen, this angel of death, would leave him be. When he looked again, Knudsen was gone. Thank God for small favors. And then he realized that, through the fabric of his suit, his fingers were clutching the ivory owl.

The monitors kept up a steady beeping, the ventilator whooshed, the machines hummed, and Nika—silent, still, her eyes shut—fought on. He remembered the first time they’d met, when the helicopter had chased the Zamboni she was driving right off the ice rink. They’d gotten off on the wrong foot, especially when he was so slow to realize that she was the mayor of the town—
and
the tribal elder, to boot. He’d had a lot of catching up to do.

But he had quickly come to recognize her virtues, her skills … and
her beauty. That last item he had tried to overlook—he knew he had serious work to do, and it was no time to become distracted. Slater had always maintained a strictly professional demeanor in the field, and on an expedition of this importance, it was especially critical. He had never intended to feel the way he did now, he had never seen it coming. Like that fantastic display of the aurora borealis they had watched together one night, it had taken him utterly by surprise.

And now … what did he do with these feelings? He had never told her how he felt. He had never told her that he had fallen in love with her. But if she died tonight, in this terrible place, away from her home and the people she loved, he did not know how he would bear it.

He had lost all track of time. There was a clock on the wall, but he had no idea if it was 10
A.M.
or 10
P.M.
There was only one window, down at the end of the hall, and even that one was tinted and permasealed. Meanwhile, the Alaskan daylight was coming later, and growing shorter, all the time. How the Inuit had survived in this intemperate world astonished him still, but they were a hardy lot … and that, in the end, was what he was counting on. Nika’s ancestors had been among the sturdy few to survive the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, and perhaps that acquired immunity had been passed down to the young woman fighting for her life now.

He unzipped his suit enough to pull the ivory owl through, and then he snapped the cord. He smoothed a spot on her blanket and laid the
bilikin
down on top of it. He knew that she was in a very dark place, and if the owl could truly prove to be a guide, then now was the time.

The deacon, not surprisingly, was the first to succumb.

It was he who had first embraced Anastasia on the beach, he who had held her hands—the very hands that had caressed the cheek of the dying Sergei—as he escorted her up the steps chiseled into the cliffs and through the main gates of the colony. The others, maybe three or four dozen in all, were beside themselves with joy when she arrived. She was brought into the church, where a supper had been hastily laid on a table in the nave, and the bell in the church dome was rung over and over. Her safe arrival was considered a harbinger of a bigger, and even better, thing to come. She was the long-anticipated psychopomp, the bird who heralded the return of Rasputin himself.

Anastasia was seated at the head of a long and narrow refectory table, and to her embarrassment an old peasant woman summarily removed the sopping boots from her feet, and soaked her aching, frozen toes in a bucket of warm, salted water. The embarrassment immediately gave way, however, to a tingling sensation, and a not-altogether-pleasant throbbing as the blood once again began to circulate in her feet and ankles. Deacon Stefan offered her a glass of something she imagined to be grog—Nagorny the sailor had described such stuff—as bracing as it was vile. Other women were still
bringing hot bread and pots of stew to the table, and Anastasia, though so grief-stricken at the loss of Sergei that she could barely eat, took what she could, and thanked them profusely. All of them—men, women, and a handful of children—stared at her unabashedly, and she could not help but notice how often their eyes went to the emerald cross. Several times she saw the older colonists cross themselves while gazing upon it. They listened, enraptured, as she recounted the journey that she, and the missing Sergei, had undertaken. It was rare enough, Ana surmised, that they saw anyone new here, and rarer still when that newcomer was one of the grand duchesses of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty.

Here, if nowhere in Russia anymore, that title commanded respect, even reverence.

A cabin was set aside for Ana, but when she saw that it was filled with someone else’s personal belongings—a hand-stitched quilt, an icon of St. Peter, pans and kettles on hooks above a potbellied stove, a dress in the armoire—she tried to decline. “I don’t want to put anyone out of her home,” she said. “I can sleep anywhere—the church would be fine.”

But Deacon Stefan had insisted. “The people vied for the opportunity,” he said. “Vera would be mortified if you didn’t accept her hospitality. She is honored.”

And so she had accepted. She did not even remember saying goodnight to the deacon. The second she had sat down on the straw-filled mattress, she had been overwhelmed by fatigue and fallen into not so much a sleep as a stupor. She had a vague recollection of the old woman who had bathed her feet coming into the room and removing her other damp clothes. The quilt was thrown over her, tucked tight to her chin, and a bearskin was thrown over that. Ana did not move a muscle; she felt she couldn’t even if she tried. For many hours—she never knew exactly—she lay there, half-asleep and half-aware of everything and everyone. Her mind traveled back over the endless journey that had brought her to the island at last, combing over every detail, revisiting every scene, from the attic room at Novo-Tikhvin to the cramped compartment on the Trans-Siberian Railway (where a conductor
had become so inordinately curious about Ana that Sergei had made them disembark in the dead of night at the next fueling station).