“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.