To her shock, it was Eddie who gave her an answer. ‘It’s a mutagen. If it doesn’t kill you, it attacks your DNA, changing it. Like a cancer. Natalia, the woman I rescued in Vietnam? Her grandfather was experimenting with it. He deliberately infected her grandmother with it, while she was pregnant. It caused tumours that killed her grandmother, then her mother.’ His tone became even more grim. ‘And it would’ve eventually killed her too.’
‘Serafim Zernebogovich Volkov,’ said Eisenhov, spitting out the name. ‘A traitor and a monster. If he had lived, his name would be as cursed as Mengele. He tried to take the eitr and his work to your country.’ His gaze snapped almost accusingly back to Nina. ‘It was only by luck that he was stopped. He chose the wrong day to return to Novaya Zemlya.’
‘What happened to him?’ Tova asked.
‘Ever heard of the Tsar Bomb?’ said Eddie. Both women shook their heads. ‘Biggest H-bomb in history.’
‘What’s that got to do with— Oh,’ Nina said, realising. ‘Nuclear test site. Right.’
Eisenhov made a satisfied sound. ‘Khrushchev ordered the activation of what became known as the Tsar Protocol. The bomb was dropped on the thirtieth of October 1961, completely obliterating everything on the ground and sealing the pit for ever. Nobody will ever be able to open it again.’
Nina was still astounded. ‘Using a hydrogen bomb, though? That sounds like overkill.’
‘You would not say that if you had seen what I have seen,’ Eisenhov replied.
‘Which was what?’
He did not answer straight away, as if summoning up the resolve to speak. ‘Two months before the Tsar Protocol was activated,’ he said at last, ‘a sample of eitr was being transported to a missile testing site. There was an accident on the way. The eitr was spilled in a civilian area. It had… terrible effects. On people, but also on animals, plants, even insects — anything living. Most of the people who were exposed died within days, or even hours.’ He paused, moistening his dry lips with his tongue. ‘They were the lucky ones. Those who survived…’
‘What happened to them?’ Nina demanded, after Eisenhov said nothing for several seconds.
He took a long, slow breath, then opened the folder again. ‘You may not want to see these pictures. They have been a state secret for half a century, seen only by those at the highest levels of government. All the men who saw them… wished they had not. But they understood at once why Khrushchev ordered the pit to be obliterated. Even at the height of the Cold War, no Russian ever again suggested using eitr as a weapon. Do you still want to see them?’
‘No,’ whispered Tova. ‘I do not.’
‘I don’t want to either,’ said Nina. ‘But… I think I have to. If this is an IHA matter, a global security threat, I’ve got to know what we’re dealing with.’
Eisenhov nodded. ‘You are a brave woman, Dr Wilde. Very well. But remember that I warned you.’ He reached forward again to hand several photographs to her.
Eddie leaned closer to look as she turned them over. ‘Oh, Jesus.’
Nina couldn’t even speak as she stared at the first picture, horror and revulsion freezing any words in her throat. The image showed the upper body of a man lying on the ground, contorted in unimaginable agony at the moment of his death.
The cause was obvious. Parts of his face and neck appeared almost to have exploded from the inside, vile cancerous growths within the flesh having swollen to burst through his skin before themselves rupturing into oozing, diseased slurry. Bloodstains soaking through his clothing showed that the terrifying contagion had spread throughout his whole body.
Eisenhov’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘Exposure to more than a mere few millilitres of the eitr causes DNA to mutate and grow uncontrollably. The effect begins almost immediately. Death was the result in every case.’
Nina forced herself to talk. ‘And in smaller doses?’
‘There are pictures.’
She reluctantly looked at the next photograph, afraid of what it would show her.
Her fears were justified.
Eddie closed his eyes, shaking his head. ‘Shit,’ he whispered.
The picture showed a woman in a hospital bed, ugly lumps on her skin revealing that she too had been contaminated by the eitr. Her abdomen was covered in blood from a deep longitudinal incision — a Caesarean section, the umbilical cord still connected to the just-birthed child.
A child that was barely recognisable as human.
Nina fought the urge to vomit. The baby’s limbs were hideously malformed, one leg a withered, twisted stump, an arm bloated and covered with tumours and pustules. Ribs pushed through skin, a length of some intestinal organ hanging limply out of a hole beneath the distended stomach. But most appalling of all was the face, a gelatinous mass of twisted features trying to scream without a mouth, the one visible eye bulging in anguish…
The pictures slipped from her shaking hands to the floor as she squeezed her own eyes tightly shut, unable to bear the sight any more.
‘It did not live for long,’ said Eisenhov in a quiet, saddened voice. ‘Fortunately.’
Tova gasped in horror as she glimpsed the fallen photographs, hurriedly looking away. Nina tried to speak again. ‘Wh—’ Her mouth had gone bone-dry. ‘What… what about the mother?’ she finally managed to say.
‘She died soon after,’ the Russian told her. ‘The child was born a month after she was exposed to the eitr. Only a few drops, but it was enough to do that to her, and to turn her baby into a monster.’
‘It’s not a monster,’ Eddie said angrily. ‘It was still a baby. It didn’t ask to be born like that. You did it, with your fucking experiments!’
‘Experiments that we knew had to be stopped and never restarted,’ Eisenhov replied, contrition clear even beneath his mask of stoicism. He gestured to Kagan, who collected the photographs. ‘Every kind of life in the area of the accident was affected. In the smaller forms, plants and insects, mutations spread quickly. Most died, but some survived long enough to breed — and passed down further mutations to the next generation. We saw that there was a danger of the contamination spreading beyond the quarantine zone. So the entire area was… sterilised.’ He glanced up at the ceiling. Another of the domes lurked beside a light fitting.
‘You killed everything?’ Nina asked. Eisenhov nodded. ‘Including people?’
‘It had to be done,’ he said, sickened. ‘And may God have mercy on us. But we could not let the mutations spread. When Khrushchev learned what had happened, he immediately ordered all research on the eitr to be destroyed. Even the hydrogen bomb is not so terrible a weapon as the poison from inside the earth itself.’
‘The blood of Jörmungandr,’ said Tova. ‘The poison of the Midgard Serpent.’
‘So the legend’s true, in a way,’ Nina realised. ‘The eitr brings life, or at least changes it — maybe it was even responsible for kick-starting evolution billions of years ago by causing mutations on a massive scale.’ She knew from her discoveries at Atlantis that a meteor had brought life to the primordial Earth — but the eitr might have been what caused that life to explode into endless new forms. All birthed from poison, just as the Norse legends said. She looked at Eddie. ‘That’s what this girl’s grandfather was trying to do, wasn’t it? Take control of evolution, try to force it down the paths he wanted?’
‘Volkov!’ Again Eisenhov practically spat the name. ‘The man was insane — experimenting on his own wife and child! And when Khrushchev ended the project, he tried to sell his work to the Americans.’
‘But you nuked him first,’ said Eddie. ‘Good.’
‘Yes. He burned for his greed, and now he burns in hell, where he belongs.’ Kagan returned the photographs to the old man, who put them back in the folder and closed it. ‘But once we had seen for ourselves the terrible things that eitr could do if unleashed on the world,’ Eisenhov continued, ‘we knew we had to make sure that never happened. So Unit 201 was created.’