Doomsday Book (53 page)

He wondered suddenly about the dig itself. It was out in the country from Witney, on a National Trust farm. Perhaps it had ducks, or chickens, or pigs, or all three. And Badri had spent an entire day and a half working there, digging in the mud, a perfect chance to come in contact with a reservoir.

Colin came in, soaked to the skin. "They ran out of placards," he said, rummaging through his duffel. "London's sending some more tomorrow." He unearthed his gobstopper and popped it, lint and all, into his mouth. "Do you know who's standing on your staircase?' he asked. He flung himself onto the window seat and opened his Middle Ages book. "William and some girl. Kissing and talking all lovey-dovey. I could scarcely get past."

Dunworthy opened the door. William disengaged himself reluctantly from a small blonde in a Burberry and came in.

"Do you know where Ms. Montoya is?" Dunworthy asked.

"No. The NHS said she's out at the dig, but she's not answering the phone. She's probably out in the churchyard or somewhere on the farm and can't hear it. I thought of using a screamer, but then I remembered this girl who's reading archaeohistory and ... " He nodded toward the small blonde. "She told me she saw the assignment sheets out at the dig, and Badri was signed up for Saturday and Sunday."

"A screamer? What's that?"

"You hook it to the line and it magnifies the ring on the other end. If the person's out in the garden or in the shower or something."

"Can you put one on this phone?"

"They're a bit too complicated for me. I know a student who might be able to rig it, though. I've got her number in my rooms." He left, holding hands with the blonde.

"You know, if Ms. Montoya
is
at the dig, I could get you through the perimeter," Colin said. He took his gobstopper out and examined it. "It'd be easy. There are lots of places that aren't watched. The guards don't like to stand out in the rain."

"I have no intention of breaking quarantine," he said. "We are trying to stop this epidemic, not spread it."

"That's how the plague was spread during the Black Death," Colin said, taking the gobstopper out and examining it. It was a sickly yellow. "They kept trying to run away from it, but they just took it along with them."

William stuck his head in the door. "She says it'd take two days to set it up, but she's got one on her phone if you want to use that."

Colin grabbed for his jacket. "Can I go?"

"No," Dunworthy said. "And get out of those wet clothes. I don't want you catching the flu." He went down the stairs with William.

"She's a student at Shrewsbury," William said, heading off through the rain.

Colin caught up with them halfway across the quad. "I can't catch it. I had my enhancement," he said. "They didn't have quarantines, so it went everywhere." He pulled his muffler out of his jacket pocket. "Botley Road's a good place to sneak through the perimeter. There's a pub on the corner by the blockade, and the guard nips in now and again for something to keep warm."

"Fasten your jacket," Dunworthy said.

The girl turned out to be Polly Wilson. She told Dunworthy she had been working on an optical traitor that could break into the net's computer, but hadn't managed it yet. Dunworthy phoned the dig, but there was no answer.

"Let it ring," Polly said. "She may have a long trek to get to it. The screamer's got a range of half a kilometer."

He let it ring for ten minutes, put the receiver down, waited five minutes, tried again and let it ring a quarter of an hour before admitting defeat. Polly was looking longingly at William, and Colin was shivering in his wet jacket. Dunworthy took him home and put him to bed.

"Or I could sneak through the perimeter and tell her to phone you," Colin said, putting his gobstopper back in the duffel. "If you're worried about being too old to go. I'm very good at getting through perimeters."

Dunworthy waited till William returned the next morning and then went back to Shrewsbury and tried again, but to no avail. "I'll set it to ring at half-hour intervals," Polly said, walking him to the gate. "You wouldn't know if William has any other girlfriends, would you?"

"No," Dunworthy said.

The sound of bells clanged out suddenly from the direction of Christ Church, pealing loudly through the rain. "Has someone switched that horrid carillon on again?" Polly asked, leaning out to listen.

"No," he said. "It's the Americans." He cocked his head in the direction of the sound, trying to determine whether Ms. Taylor had settled for Stedmans, but he could hear six bells, the ancient bells of Osney: Douce and Gabriel and Marie, one after the other, Clement and Hautclerc and Taylor. "And Finch."

They sounded remarkably good, not at all like the digital carillon, not at all like "O Christ Who Interfaces with the World." They rang out clearly and brightly, and Dunworthy could almost see the bellringers in their circle in the belfry, bending their knees and raising their arms, Finch referring to his list of numbers.

"Every man must stick to his bell without interruption," Ms. Taylor had said. He had had nothing but interruptions, but he felt oddly cheered nonetheless. She had not been able to get her bellringers to Norwich for Christmas Eve, but she had stuck to her bells, and they rang out deafeningly, deliriously overhead, like a celebration, a victory. Like Christmas morning. He would find Montoya. And Basingame. Or a tech who wasn't afraid of the quarantine. He would find Kivrin.

The telephone was ringing when he got back to Balliol. He galloped up the stairs, hoping it was Polly. It was Montoya.

"Dunworthy?" she said. "Hi. It's Lupe Montoya. What's going on?"

"Where are you?" he demanded.

"At the dig," she said, but that was already apparent. She was standing in front of the ruined nave of the church in the half-excavated medieaval churchyard. He could see why she had been so anxious to get back to her dig. There was as much as a foot of water in places. She had draped a motley assortment of tarps and plastene sheets over the excavation, but rain was dripping in at a dozen places, and where the sagging coverings met, spilling down the edges in veritable waterfalls. Everything, the gravestones, the battery lights she had clipped to the tarps, the shovels stacked against the wall, was covered in mud.

Montoya was covered in mud, too. She was wearing her terrorist jacket and thigh-high fisherman's waders like Basingame, wherever he was, might be wearing, and they were wet and filthy. The hand she was holding the telephone with was caked with dried mud.

"I've been ringing you for days," Dunworthy said.

"I can't hear the phone over the pump." She gestured toward something outside the picture, presumably the pump, though he couldn't hear anything save for the thump of rain on the tarps. "It's just broken a belt, and I don't have another one. I heard the bells. Do they mean the quarantine's over?"

"Hardly," he said. "We're in the midst of a full-scale epidemic. Seven hundred and eighty cases and sixteen deaths. Haven't you seen the papers?"

"I haven't seen anything or anybody since I got here. I've spent the last six days trying to keep this damned dig above water, but I can't do it all by myself. And without a pump." She pushed her heavy black hair back from her face with a dirty hand. "What were they ringing the bells for then, if the quarantine's not over?"

"A peal of Chicago Surprise Doubles."

She looked irritated. "If the quarantine's as bad as all that, why aren't they doing something useful?"

They are, he thought. They made you telephone.

"I could certainly put them to work out here." She pushed her hair back again. She looked nearly as tired as Mary. "I was really hoping the quarantine had been lifted, so I could get some people out here to help. How long do you think it will be?"

Too long, he thought, watching the rain cascade in between the tarps. You'll never get the help you need in time.

"I need some information about Basingame and Badri Chaudhuri," he said. "We're attempting to source the virus and we need to know who Badri had contact with. Badri worked at the dig on the eighteenth and the morning of the nineteenth. Who else was there when he was?"

"I was."

"Who else?"

"No one. I've had a terrible time getting help all December. Every one of my archaeohistory students took off the day vac started. I've had to scrounge volunteers wherever I could."

"You're certain you were the only two there?"

"Yes. I remember because we opened the knight's tomb on Saturday and we had so much trouble lifting the lid. Gillian Ledbetter was signed up to work Saturday, but she called at the last minute and said she had a date."

With William, Dunworthy thought. "Was anyone there with him Sunday?"

"He was only here in the morning, and there was no one here then. He had to leave to go to London. Look, I've got to go. If I'm not going to get any help soon, I've got to get back to work." She started to take the receiver away from her ear.

"Wait!" Dunworthy shouted. "Don't hang up."

She put the receiver back to her ear, looking impatient.

"I need to ask you some more questions. It's very important. The sooner we source this virus, the sooner the quarantine will be lifted and you can get assistance at the dig."

She looked unconvinced, but she punched up a code, laid the receiver in its cradle, and said, "You don't mind if I work while we talk?"

"No," Dunworthy said, relieved. "Please do."

She moved abruptly out-of-picture, returned, and punched up something else. "Sorry. It won't reach," she said, and the screen went fuzzy while she, presumably, moved the phone to her new worksite. When the picture reappeared, Montoya was crouched in a mudhole by a stone tomb. Dunworthy supposed it to be the one the lid of which she and Badri had nearly dropped.

The lid, which bore the effigy of a knight in full armor, his arms crossed over his mailed chest so that his hands in their heavy cuirasses lay on his shoulders and his sword at his feet, stood propped at a precarious angle against the side, obscuring the elaborate carved letters. "Requisc -- " was all he could see.
Requiscat in pace
. "Rest in peace," a blessing the knight had obviously not been granted. His sleeping face under the carved helmet looked disapproving.

Montoya had draped a thin sheet of plastene over the open top. It was beaded with water. Dunworthy wondered if the other side of the tomb bore a morbid carving of the horror that lay within, like the ones in Colin's illustration, and if it were as ghastly as the reality. Water spilled steadily into the head of the tomb, dragging the plastic down.

Montoya straightened, bringing up with her a flat box filled with mud. "Well?" she said, laying it across the corner of the tomb. "You said you had some more questions?"

"Yes," he said. "You said there wasn't anyone else at the dig when Badri was there."

"There wasn't," she said, wiping sweat off her forehead. "Whew, it's muggy in here." She took off her terrorist jacket and draped it over the tomb lid.

"What about locals? People not connected with the dig?"

"If there'd been anyone here, I'd have recruited them." She began sorting through the mud in the box, unearthing several brown stones. "The lid weighed a ton, and we'd no sooner gotten it off than it started raining. I would've recruited anybody who happened by, but the dig's too far out for anyone to happen by."

"What about the National Trust staff?"

She held the stones under the water to clean them. "They're only here during the summer."

He had hoped someone at the dig would turn out to be the source, that Badri had come in contact with a local, a National Trust staffer or a wandering duck hunter. But myxoviruses didn't have carriers. The mysterious local would have had to have the disease himself, and Mary had been in touch with every hospital and doctory's surgery in England. There hadn't been any cases outside the perimeter.

Montoya held the stones up one by one to the battery-light clipped to one of the supporting posts, turning them in the light, looking at their still-muddy edges.

"What about birds?"

"Birds?" she said, and he realized it must sound as though he were suggesting she recruit passing sparrows to help raise the lid of the tomb.

"The virus may have been spread by birds. Ducks, geese, chickens," he said, even though he wasn't certain chickens were reservoirs. "Are there any at the dig?"

"Chickens?" she said, holding one of the stones half-raised to the light.

"Viruses are sometimes caused by the intersection of animal and human viruses," he explained. "Fowl are the most common reservoirs, but fish are sometimes responsible. Or pigs. Are there any pigs here at the dig?"

She was still looking at him as though she thought he was daft.

"The dig's on a National Trust Farm, isn't it?"

"Yes, but the actual farm's three kilometers away. We're in the middle of a barley field. There aren't any pigs around, or birds, or fish." She went back to examining the stones.

No birds. No pigs. No locals. The source of the virus wasn't here at the dig either. Possibly it wasn't anywhere, and Badri's influenza had mutated spontaneously, as Mary had said happened occasionally, appearing out of thin air and descending on Oxford the way the plague had descended on the unwitting residents of this churchyard.