The animal trial.
Lantos had a soft spot for the mice she routinely subjected to these tests. They were far more intelligent and even cunning creatures than they were given credit for. But countless millions of them had been bred and used and destroyed by now for the purposes of medical research and scientific gain; it was their misfortune that they reproduced rapidly and had genetic counterparts, some nearly identical, to 99 percent of human genes. She wished there was some other and better way to glean the information the scientists needed … but so far no one had come up with one.
Right now she had three glass containers, each containing six white mice, all ranged on a counter. One tank was the control group—who would remain untouched in any way—another was the tank whose inhabitants would be injected with a common flu virus, and a third was reserved for the mice who would be exposed to the viral strains or material that had been extracted and isolated from the body of the deacon.
Nestled in a corner of the lab tent, an open crate of additional live mice was housed for subsequent tests. She had checked their food and water supplies that morning.
One by one, Lantos reached into the second tank, and with a packet of syringes she found it devilishly hard to manipulate through the gloves, injected each with a dose of the strain most prevalent in the human population at the time she had departed for the island. Lots of people, all over the globe, were going to be sick with it that winter, but no one whose health wasn’t otherwise compromised would die from it. The mice scrambled around, trying to avoid her grasp, but lay docile in her hand as she made the injections, marked their backs with a dab of blue ink, and put them back among their comrades.
It was with the third tank that she had to be extraordinarily alert and careful. She had made a serum from the blood drawn from the deacon’s frozen veins, spun and purified it, and dubbed it SPI—for St. Peter’s Island—#1. There would be several others in the days to come. The serum was contained in an innocuous brown vial with a little orange label, and as she filled a fresh syringe with the concoction, then administered a drop or two to each of the six mice in the third tank, she wondered if she was looking at a harmless soup, or Armageddon in a bottle. Each SPI #1 mouse was marked with a daub of orange stain on its back and tail.
The mysteries of flu were legion. The Spanish flu had been an airborne illness, dispelled and disseminated in the coughs and sneezes of its victims; all of their bodily fluids and secretions, from mucus to saliva, tears to feces to blood, were saturated with the virus, and the next victim had only to breathe in a poisoned vapor, or unwittingly touch a tainted surface before then touching that same hand to his mouth or nose or eyes, for the transmission to be made. The flu was onto another host.
And mutating all the while. Just as Lantos felt a certain sympathy for the mice, she also harbored a grudging, if horrified, admiration for the flu. Almost all researchers eventually did. The virus was a veritable Houdini, armed with a thousand tricks and stunts and contortions that would allow it to move through as large a host population as possible, with the greatest possible ease and speed, and keeping one step ahead of its victims’ ability to create antibodies or defense mechanisms to defeat it. Even armed with the latest technology and decades of previous research results, the scientific community—Lantos included—was often astonished at the infinitesimally small changes that could transform a flu from a mild annoyance to a lethal disease of epic proportions. In reconstructions of the 1918 flu, research scientists had concluded that it was the polymerase genes and the HA and NA genes in particular that had made it so virulent. But the sequences of those polymerase proteins were not only present in subsequent human strains, but differed by a mere ten amino acids from some of the most dangerous avian influenza viruses seen in the past few years. The flu could morph, Lantos knew, almost before your eyes, changing its genetic structure to blend in with any crowd, like an immigrant putting on a new suit of clothes to walk the streets unnoticed.