“It came out of Iceland,” said Nandi. “According to the documentation, it was unearthed by a paleontology expedition in 1964, from tissue extracted from a frozen mammoth found in the glacial ice. It’s never been classified.”
The team stared in wonder at an electron micrograph image of the ancient virus as the implications sank in. “What we’re looking at is the ancestor of the entire influenza family,” Henry said. “It must have found a home in the mammoths, maybe lasting for a million years before dying with them. Somehow it’s back in circulation.”
“How?” Nandi asked.
“Somebody dug it up and propagated it in a lab,” Marco suggested.
“The Soviets did that with the 1918 flu as part of their bioweapons arsenal,” Henry said. “You’d have to take the various sequences that you find and try to reconstruct the entire influenza genome. It could be done experimentally in the lab. Or nature could do it by itself, reaching into its genetic arsenal to make something very old new again.”
“Could it have been responsible for the mammoth extinction?” Nandi asked.
“Certainly possible.”
“And what about the Neanderthals? They were contemporary with the mammoths.”
The researchers looked at each other, and then Nandi said what was on everybody’s mind. “Now it’s in us.”
53
The Ustinov Strain
Henry’s biohazard space suit with his name scrawled on it hung on the peg in the decontamination room where he had left it months before. Once he was back in the familiar plastic garment, he attached a yellow hose to the socket in his chest, and the air filled the suit like a balloon, deafening outside sounds. He had never gotten used to how cumbersome it was to gird himself before entering the most dangerous place in the world, the Level 4 biocontainment facility.
He walked through the staging room, then unhooked his air hose as he entered an air lock. The door clapped firmly behind him, as his suit collapsed from the lack of air. Through another steel door was Level 4. He opened the door and attached another air hose.
Researchers were working at different stations, operating centrifuges or incubators or transferring virus samples to slides with pipettes, focusing on the perilous tasks they were engaged in. No one paid attention as he walked through the lab into a small room, where two massive freezers stood next to the liquid nitrogen tank. Henry entered a code on the keypad of one of the freezers and a green light appeared. He opened the door.
Inside were the most lethal pathogens ever known. Ebola. Marburg. Lassa fever. Each disease carefully filed away, on icy racks in Eppendorf tubes, a library of woe. Henry knew it was pointless to ascribe consciousness or intentionality to a disease. It was not remorseless or cunning. It simply was. Its purpose was to be. But he also knew that diseases were constantly reinventing themselves, and there would never be a freezer large enough to contain the manifold weapons nature employs to attack its own creatures. And here in its own tube was the newcomer, Kongoli, with so much death on its hands already, and so much more to come.
Henry felt he had done what he could to counter the disease. His variolation technique would be recognized as a potent stopgap measure and quickly put into effect around the globe. Promising Kongoli vaccines were finally about to go into human trials. It was a race to save as many people as possible. But there were so many other viruses in the freezer. He had a foreboding that the ongoing war against disease would inevitably be lost. Humanity had enlisted the microbe as a weapon. He could imagine the day when all the diseases in the freezer were set loose.
Including his own.
The viral suspension of Henry’s disease looked like a pink ice cube. He had puzzled over it for years. Why had it killed so many people in the jungle when it had been harmless in the lab? He had studied it, trying to unlock its secrets, trying to find a reason to excuse himself. How inadequate we are in our attempts to bring nature under our control, Henry thought. How careless of us to believe that we can manipulate diseases to kill, rather than to cure. We’re like schoolchildren playing with matches. One day we’ll burn the house down.
* * *
—
NANDI HAD SOMETHING. “Remember the Siberian cranes?” she said when Henry came back into the lab. “Practically extinct now. They migrate from their breeding grounds in Siberia to Poyang Lake, in eastern China,