Ice Angel

by Matthew Hart

  Carstairs sat beside Mackenzie. A Canadian major and an American half colonel were there for ballast. Tabitha and I pulled over metal chairs and wedged ourselves in.

  “I’m just not getting the problem, Kev,” Mackenzie said, continuing an argument. “It’s an exercise. We bring in another Galaxy from Alaska with a small battle group. Chopper some guys into the Barrens and fire off a bunch of ordnance. Make some noise. Send the Chinese a message: allies present and alert.”

  “My superiors don’t see the need for it, sir,” the Canadian said. “If they did see the need for the kind of display you describe, we have the rapid deployment capabilities to meet that need ourselves. There would be no need for an American force.”

  Mackenzie was just managing to keep a lid on his temper. He shifted his position abruptly in a display of annoyance. A yelp sounded under the table, followed by a furious snuffling. “Damn it, Carstairs,” he said, “let him out for a breath of air, will you? And don’t just leave him out there like you did before. He’s not a goddam malamute.” He glanced at Tabitha. “Excuse the language, ma’am.”

  This gave everyone present—except Carstairs, who was dragging the bulldog out of the room—the chance to stare openly at Tabitha. She’d brought into the room more than the smell of shampoo and body soap and the lethal chic of her appearance. She’d brought the whiff of power that came from the person at the other end of her phone.

  “Let’s not worry about my lily-white ears,” she said briskly. “We have a situation on our hands, and we’d all like to make sure it doesn’t do any damage to such an important alliance.” The brigadier arched an eyebrow and adjusted a paper in front of him. Tabitha went on, “Why don’t we hear what Alex Turner has to say. Alex works for the Treasury,” she said to the brigadier. “He knows a lot about the diamond business.”

  All eyes turned to me. They didn’t need to be told who I was. They’d probably watched the flight to the container camp on an AWACS feed and, for all I knew, had thermal imaging of the trek through the snow to the Chinese camp. They studied the side of my face with the professional detachment of men whose job involved sending soldiers into places from which, if they came back looking like me, they had nothing to complain about.

  “You took a look at the Clip Bay camp,” Mackenzie said. “Would you call that a larger camp than normal?”

  “That depends on the target,” I said. “If Fan thought it was particularly rich, he might have wanted to get a big diamond sample out fast to see exactly how rich and be able to exploit it quickly. That could explain the size of the camp and the type of drilling.”

  “What do you mean by ‘type of drilling’?” the brigadier asked.

  “He has four drills, and they’re all wide-diameter. Wide-diameter drills are used to extract a sample of the ore so he can count and evaluate the diamonds. But that’s skipping a step. You have to know two things to decide if a target is rich enough to support a mine. The number and value of diamonds in each ton of ore is just one of those things. The other is—how big is the deposit? Xi doesn’t know the size of the target because he hasn’t done the exploration drilling to define it, and that’s the usual first step.”

  “So he’s brought in all this equipment,” Mackenzie said, “ostensibly to prove the value of the target, but because of his methodology, he can’t actually learn the value of the target.” He shot a look at the Canadian. “What he does have is a site that he can claim is a valid exploration target but in fact is nothing but a pretext.”

  The brigadier drummed his fingers impatiently on the table. He wasn’t hearing this opinion for the first time.

  “With respect, that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that Fan hasn’t taken the usual first step. Presumably”—he looked at me—“if he finds a bunch of diamonds in the ore he’s extracting with these bigger drills, he could then drill down to define the extent of the deposit.”

  “Sure, but I don’t think he’s going to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he isn’t going to find any diamonds.”

  38

  That got everyone’s attention. The generals stared, exchanged a quick glance, then looked at Tabitha. She splashed an icy green glare at me and then frowned hard at the table. She didn’t like surprises any more than they did.

  “Spit it out,” Mackenzie said. “Are you saying this is all a hoax? Because if there’s no discovery, the Chinese have no reason to be there. Am I right, Kev?” he said, sensing that things were turning his way.

  “I’m waiting to hear Mr. Turner elaborate on his assertion, sir.”

  I shoved back my chair, got up, and went to the big map of the diamond field tacked across the wall. Close-up satellite photos were pinned to the map around Clip Bay. The drills surrounding the target looked like giant predatory insects, each with its long proboscis sunk into the rock. Another shot showed a crew hauling up the drill casing to extract the thick core. I pulled out the tacks and dumped the photos on a table so the map was clear.

  “What makes the Chinese think there’s anything here in the first place?” I tapped the round bay. “What did Jimmy Angel have to sell that they bought? This entire area, all around Lac de Gras, was surveyed and explored during the diamond rush in the 1990s. Jimmy had some of those old aerial surveys. One showed a strong magnetic signature right here at Clip Bay. A nice round target that stood out like a bull’s eye from the surrounding rock. The thing is—there were hundreds of targets exactly like that. Dozens of planes were crisscrossing the Barrens towing sensors behind them, and every time they flew across an anomaly that stood out from the granite and had a round surface shape, it got marked as a possible diamond pipe.”

  “Too many targets,” Mackenzie said, immediately seeing the problem. “Not enough resources.” He’d confronted the same dilemma in war, where deciding which enemy formation to strike was a matter of life and death. “How did they decide this particular pipe was worth a closer look?”

  “They sampled the surrounding ground for certain minerals called diamond indicators, such as garnets. Indicators are mineral grains found around diamond deposits. There are far more of them than actual diamonds, and they’re easier to find. If the samplers found indicators, the target was worth drilling.”

  “I don’t get it,” the brigadier said. “If there were these indicators, these garnets, why didn’t somebody find them years ago?”

  “Because there weren’t any. Until Jimmy put them there.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  I explained how I’d found a garnet at the scene when Jimmy’s body was discovered and how Dad had ruled out that it came from Clip Bay. Jimmy had to be the one who put it there, and if he had, he’d have put others too.

  “And the Chinese knew where to look,” Tabitha said, seeing it now, “because they tracked him to the site and killed him.”

  Mackenzie nodded distantly. Neither general seemed surprised by the murder. In the calculus they were used to, the death of a single man was an economy.

  “He salted the target,” Mackenzie said. He turned to the brigadier. “That’s what they call it when you introduce minerals to a mine to make it look better than it is.”

  “I know what salting means,” the brigadier snapped, dropping the “sir” in his annoyance. “What I don’t understand is how it could happen to people like Fan and his sister. Wouldn’t they check the information, demand some kind of proof that the target was what Angel was telling them?”

  “Jimmy didn’t reveal specific targets,” I said. “They bought an interest in his property as a whole, defined by map coordinates. Anything in that defined area, they had a piece of. Of course they’d want to see where the garnets came from, and that’s what Jimmy was preparing for them when Fan killed him.”

  Mackenzie pursed his lips and looked at the map. “So assuming Fan hasn’t already figured out the target was salted, how long before he discovers the pipe’s a dud?”

  “He’s got a crusher and a lab
up there. He’s processing the ore as it comes out. From the quality of the garnets, he’s probably expecting five carats for every ton of ore. He’s probably pulled about two hundred tons out of the pipe by now. So he’d be looking for about a thousand carats.”

  “Instead of zero,” Mackenzie said to the brigadier. “So what’s he going to do now, Kev? He’s got a dud mine that was supposed to furnish him with a pretext for a massive staking campaign. If we’re right, that’s what his masters want—dozens of sites to bring in machinery, so many we can’t monitor them all. If this one’s a dud, then he’s in an even bigger hurry.”

  The brigadier scowled at the map. “It’s not going to be another Galaxy, sir. That’s not how this is going to go.”

  39

  The airman guarding the Tahoe snapped off a salute and opened the door for Tabitha. In his other hand he held a leash. The dog sat on the tarmac with a look of despair. Carstairs was nowhere in sight.

  We drove across the airfield and out the main gate and took the road that led to town. The sun struck a blinding white light from the snow. The trees and the gleaming outcrops of pink rock took on a hyper-realistic quality, as if they’d been etched on crystal by the light.

  We took the back road that looped through the forest. I recognized the building with the sign that advertised tours to see the northern lights. We were passing the place where I shot up the Harley when I decided to say what was on my mind. I’ll try anything once.

  “If you feel like sharing, Tab, start with what Mackenzie meant about Fan digging out the pipe for some purpose we don’t fully understand.”

  “Oh, man,” she said, running her hand through her hair. “They’re afraid that if he gets a discovery, he’ll use it as a pretext to stake every inch of free ground between here and the Arctic coast.”

  “I think we’ve all ticked that box.”

  “Sure, but then he starts digging out pipes, just like he’s digging out the one at Clip Bay.”

  “OK. And?”

  She blew out a long breath. “What shape is a diamond pipe, Alex?”

  “Well, they’re old volcanoes. Like a cone shape. In Canada they’re mostly narrow.”

  “So basically, when they excavate, what’s left is a deep, round hole in the ground. See if you can think of anything shaped like a deep round hole in the ground that the Pentagon would tend to worry about.”

  A missile silo. They thought the Chinese could use the pretext of exploration to dig out enough of the rock to accommodate a missile silo. They would bring up what they needed piece by piece, concealed with other machinery. The sheer amount of hardware that went up the winter road every year would make it hard to check. Once they had a landing strip of their own, heavy cargo planes could land.

  “It’s on the paranoid end of the spectrum, Tab.”

  “We’re talking about the joint chiefs. That’s the end of the spectrum they’re supposed to be on.”

  I’d never seen her look so tired. For that moment her face had a bleak look, and I thought of the last time I’d seen her like that. Her hands gripped the wheel while some hole inside her got bigger. But she’d signed up for it. Be careful who you feel sorry for. She was still a spy. And had a surprise for me waiting down the road.

  * * *

  Tommy had his arms spread when we drove into the restaurant parking lot. A mob of kids clustered around him. His lavender bowling shirt with the chocolate piping fluttered in the Arctic breeze. The kids all wore woolen hats and rapt expressions.

  “The runner comes right at you,” he was telling them when I got out. “He wants to make you open right or left, and he will deke the other way and leave you there like a dope. But are you a dope?” The kids all yelled: they weren’t a dope! “OK, then,” Tommy said. “So at the snap, he comes at you fast, but you stay low.” He went into a crouch and backpedaled as nimbly as an out-of-shape, overweight guy with a wrecked knee could manage. “The runner makes his fake, and you start to turn that way. He thinks he’s hung you out to dry, and he dekes the other way. But you are low and balanced, and you just keep turning all the way around in a single, unbroken move.” He stumbled in the gravel, but they got the picture. “By the time he gets the ball, you are all the way around and you are on that guy, and who’s the dope?”

  “The runner is!” they yelled.

  Tommy dug in his pocket, pulled out a wad, and peeled off a fifty. He handed it to the smallest kid. “Take the gang to Burger King,” he said. He scribbled his autograph on a beat-up football, and the kids went away with their eyes bugged out. You want to know what satellite TV has done for the NFL, that’s what.

  We went inside and took a table by the window. Yellowknife Bay sparkled at the bottom of the hill. An Otter roared overhead, banked hard, and splashed down by the floatplane dock. A Jet Ranger clattered by a half mile away and landed out of sight. There was only one place in that direction for a chopper to put down. The Chinese depot.

  “How many does that make?” Tommy said to the waiter in the Ugg boots when she came over with the coffee.

  “That’s the third today,” she said. “When I drove by last night, there were four already there.”

  “People must be getting suspicious.”

  “Suspicious—that’s history,” she said. “The whole town knows the warehouse is full of staking posts. The Chinese have started to move loads up to the Barrens. Guys at the Ekati mine spotted the activity at Clip Bay too. There’s a staking rush warming up. A couple of pilots were in for breakfast yesterday. They’d been hired from Calgary, and not by the Chinese.”

  She gave me a smile, and I don’t mean an embarrassed one.

  “You secret agents,” I said. “You’ll do anything to sell poutine.”

  She bent down and winked. “Doll, it could have changed your life.”

  “Stop flirting with the help,” Tommy told her. “Did you get a fix on Lily?”

  “Afternoon flight to Calgary,” the waiter said. “Onward connection to Vancouver.”

  “And somebody’s waiting in Vancouver to tail her?”

  “I tipped the Canadians, like you said.” Ugg boots padded off to take care of other customers. Who knows, maybe they were working for us too. It’s not like anybody would feel they had to tell me.

  Tabitha’s phone made an urgent, high-pitched sound. She pushed back her chair and walked to the far end of the room. “Dollars to doughnuts that’s the White House,” Tommy muttered. “Ottawa will stop saying ‘Whose country is this anyway?’ in case they get an answer they don’t like.”

  Tabitha came back and shrugged on her coat. “Do you ever wonder why our allies hate us?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’ve got to get back to the Galaxy. I’m flying out with them.”

  “The air force is leaving?”

  “Let’s hope it looks that way,” she said. Tommy didn’t seem surprised. “What’s the mood on planet Canada?” she asked him.

  “I ordered a banking scan on Leclerc,” he said, “so some of them will be happy with that. But there are people in Ottawa who’ve been covering that bastard’s ass for years and getting rich on the fees he kicks their way. They will not be happy.”

  “Works for me,” Tabitha said. She turned a weary glance to me. “Poutine my ass,” she said, picking up her keys. I watched the Tahoe with the two-star plate pull out of the parking lot and vanish down the hill.

  40

  Don’t give me that look,” Tommy said, taking out a small tablet and setting it up on the table.

  He thought I resented him conspiring with Tabitha. But somebody’s always pulling your strings in our business. At least we both knew who it was.

  “So Leclerc’s in play?” I said.

  He jacked in two sets of earbuds and handed one to me. He called up a video and hit the play button. “The Canadians cleared me to go up to Montreal and take a whack at him.”

  It was a measure of how desperate we were that Tommy had reached out to them at all. Tommy an
d Tabitha were high-fiving each other about what a pair of smooth operators they were. But it’s never a good idea for your neighbors to know how much you’re spying on them, and if they let Tommy go up and slap Leclerc around, they were getting something for it.

  The picture was razor sharp. I could even make out the tiny sunglasses design printed on Leclerc’s Salvatore Ferragamo tie. I glanced at Tommy, and he tapped a button on his shirt. “Super micro,” he said. “Latest high-end optics.”

  In the video, Leclerc wore a white shirt and a charcoal-gray suit that fit him like a glove.

  “Deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury,” he said, glancing at Tommy’s card. “I’m not sure how I can possibly be of use.”

  “We’ll think of something,” Tommy said.

  Leclerc let his smile drift away and waved Tommy to a corner of the huge office, where a pair of sofas faced each other across a coffee table. He looked pretty cool, considering the notice he’d been given. None. Tommy had appeared on the forty-third floor of Place Ville Marie with a uniformed officer of the RCMP, who’d handed the receptionist an official letter from a senior officer requesting the meeting for Tommy. Given Tommy’s rank, it’s possible Leclerc didn’t expect an extremely large Black man in a bowling shirt.

  “It asks here,” Leclerc consulted the letter, “that I assist you with an urgent matter. Perhaps you could elaborate?”

  “Sure,” Tommy said. “Basically I’m looking for information on one of your clients. Liliana Ostrokhova, a Russian citizen currently with landed-immigrant status in Canada, resident here in Montreal.”

  There was a long pause. “I beg your pardon?” Leclerc said finally in an icy voice. “I must have misheard you.”

  “Liliana,” Tommy repeated slowly, “Ostrokhova. She’s your client.”

  “I heard what you said, Mr. Cleary. I’m dumbfounded that you said it. Even the suggestion that I would reveal the slightest detail of a client’s affairs is an appalling affront to me not only professionally but also personally.” There was a moment’s silence while Leclerc arranged his face so Tommy could see how appalled and affronted he was, before he added, “I’m not affirming in any way that the person you mentioned is a client of this firm, or that, in fact, I have even heard of her before this moment. Now, I don’t know how they do things in your country, but I received you purely as a courtesy.”