"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.
Montoya was holding the stones up to the light again, chipping with her fingernails at an occasional clot of mud and then rubbing at the surface, and he realized suddenly that what she was examining were bones. Vertebrae, perhaps, or the knight's toes. Recquiscat in pace.
She found the one she had apparently been looking for, an uneven bone the size of a walnut, with a curved side. She dumped the rest back into the tray, rummaged in the pocket of her terrorist shirt for a short-handled toothbrush, and began scrubbing at the concave edges, frowning.
Gilchrist would never accept spontaneous mutation as a source. He was too in love with the theory that some fourteenth- century virus had come through the net. And too in love with his authority as Acting Head of the History Faculty to give in, even if Dunworthy had found ducks swimming in the churchyard puddles.
"I need to get in touch with Mr. Basingame," he said. "Where is he?"
"Basingame?" she said, still frowning at the bone. "I don't have any idea."
"But — I thought you'd found him. When you phoned Christmas Day you said you had to find him to authorize your NHS dispensation."