“How well does Cillian understand this?” Ariel asked.
“He knows that we protect him, he’s not a stupid man. He does have a gambler’s heart though, and he believes deep down that he’s going to come up with something himself sooner or later, in spite of my safeguards, that is going to make him a huge fortune. That hope is what keeps him interested.”
“Why doesn’t he just fire you and do whatever he damn well pleases?” Ariel asked.
Brendan looked uncomfortable. “He can’t. Not really. Ullow mostly works for Doyle—it’s part of the agreement that transferred most of the family wealth to Cillian. Doyle has managed the McGrane fortune since Cillian’s dad began to amass it back in the seventies. Even with shipping costs that guy managed to carve out a niche manufacturing pharmaceuticals for U.S. companies and undercutting anyone back in the states. Now the McGrane conglomerate makes meds for companies all over the world.”
“Does Eoin know about this little arrangement? I mean making changes just for the sake of making them?”
“Eoin is the person who insists I do it this way. So every month or two Doyle sits down with me and we go over plans for my next release. A key component of my job is to produce a new release often enough that Cillian doesn’t lose interest and take up a new and more expensive hobby. I make a lot of graphical changes each time.”
“I’m sure you do,” Ariel said as she reached out and touched Brendan lightly on the arm, ignoring the several mundane images of his upcoming life that the touch brought on. “I don’t fault you one bit for it,” she added as she left Brendan’s office.
It was only after she had made her way onto the elevator to return to her own desk that it occurred to her just how many of those mundane images involved Brendan spending time over the next few months with Cillian, laughing and talking like they were the best of old friends. It seemed friendlier than one would expect for a man who claimed to be merely humoring the other.
******
February is the month for celebrating the return of the sun in the northernmost reaches of Greenland, while those in the southern parts of the country have been enjoying sunlight every day for a month or more. In Qaanaaq, on the far northwestern coast, near Canada’s Ellesmere Island, the sun rose for the first time in 2012 at 1 p.m. on Feb 14. As an honored visitor, Siarnaq was included in the festivities as families gathered for songs and shared coffee and cakes to celebrate the first daylight of the new year.
He asked his questions quietly, not wanting to disturb the fun, but the locals had no idea what he was talking about and laughingly told him so. Only later did a woman approach him who was originally from the Eastern side of Greenland, a place with cultural differences and less modernization. She’d spoken to her kin and heard of the sort of machines that Siarnaq described, and how they had come from Canada and were being moved over the ice, to somewhere even further north than her remote town of Ittoqqortoormitt.
“There is nothing north of Ittoqqortoormitt.” It was Siarnaq’s turn to laugh.
“There is the National Park,” the woman said a little defensively. “Those from Ittoqqortoormitt hunt in the park. And there is obviously something else up there too.”
Yes, Siarnaq corrected himself, there obviously was.
“There is a man of Greenland who they say is responsible for what is being done. Not one of the People, but of this land. He is educated, an engineer who went to Copenhagen.”
Siarnaq felt the tightness begin in his chest. There were not many who could be so described, and a cousin who had hurt him deeply more than decade ago was one of those few.
“Is he an older man? A young one? Do you know anything about him?”
“He is a young man, I think. At least they say that he left Greenland not so many years ago to study airplanes and rocket ships and now they think he is building one or another of them up near those weather stations in Peary Land on the north coast, where it is so dry that there is no ice or snow. No one can imagine why.”
Siarnaq thanked the woman, and had to leave the house to collect his thoughts. At one time, Siarnaq had played childhood games with his cousin Carl, who was only a year older and therefore close enough in age to be a friend. For awhile, Siarnaq had also idolized this cousin, who was a whole year older and had traveled more and therefore seemed worthy of being admired in the way that children do.
As a boy, Carl had shared Siarnaq’s secrets and his dreams, and then he had turned himself into an enemy by rudely telling Siarnaq that his gift of prophecy was fake. Carl had cemented his status with his casual apology that had been followed by years of silence and an ongoing absence at family events thereafter.
Siarnaq had composed many angry, hurt diatribes in his head to deliver someday to this unfeeling cousin. Even now, as a grown man, the memory still stung. However, the pain was overshadowed with this new knowledge that Carl, this very same cousin and childhood friend turned enemy, was the one working to bring modernization and machinery to the far north where it least belonged.
Siarnaq left that day with a new mission in his heart. He would not only work to keep his people sufficiently free from the modern ways, but now he would also do everything in his power to thwart his heartless cousin with his evil, unwanted plans.
******
Ariel had met with the two Ullow programmers assigned to Mikkel’s project several times already, perhaps because the problems of their unique situation involved her more. Both were eager young men with a slight build, dark brown hair and cherubic faces sprinkled with freckles. They weren’t that hard to tell apart, but to her ongoing embarrassment Ariel couldn’t seem to remember which one was Fergus and which one was Ronan.
She knew that Mikkel didn’t particularly like changes to his software, and he probably wouldn’t have wanted much in the way of modifications at all if it were not for his apparent competitiveness with one of Ullow’s other customers, Baldur. The rivalry was clearly one way.
Baldur saw himself competing against the world-wide investing community and behaved like he knew that he had an insurmountable advantage. Ariel now suspected that he did. Mikkel, on the other hand, had made it clear several times to Ullow that his main goal was to do as well or better than Baldur’s investment company. This struck Ariel as unnecessarily personal, and it was awkward for Ullow. They continually improved their own software for all of their clients, of course, and then they also contracted to make user-specific modifications that were the property of whoever paid for them.
It was the grey area in between that caused the problems. A company could request an enhancement and even partly pay for its development in order to speed up its progress. In return, that company would get to beta test it for a while, which meant that they could try it out and benefit from its features before its official release even though eventually it would be for use by all the customers. Baldur’s company often pushed for improvements out of this grey area, and they seemed content with the slight advantage that this bought them.
It was Mikkel who was not content when that happened. He didn’t have any specific changes that he wanted to see made, but he made it clear that he would spend money to stay even, so he basically asked Fergus and Ronan to simply go ahead and develop whatever improvements were being made for Baldur. Then he wanted to beta test those improvements too.
If secrecy was specifically written into one of Baldur’s specs, there was no wiggle room and Eoin had been able to say no. But usually things were more vague, and Fergus and Ronan, both just out of university, had found themselves in the awkward role of working as corporate spies in their own company. What you working on, Jake? Mind if I write down a little of that? Ariel had already gotten involved twice.
Eoin had coached the lads, as he called them, to split the difference, sometimes mirroring the work that was being done for Baldur and passing it on to Mikkel and sometimes remaining unaware of it and letting Baldur have his advantage. This tight rope act had worked so far, but it made Ariel nervous. Along with
Brendan’s ongoing efforts to write entertainment software for Cillian, she was starting to understand why Eoin had discouraged her from delving too deep behind the scenes.
“Have you ever talked to anyone else from Mikkel’s company besides Mikkel?” she asked Fergus and Ronan one afternoon as she wandered by on a fact-finding walk.
They looked at each other like this had never struck either of them as particularly odd before. “Nope.”
Ariel squinted at the two young men, who frankly both seemed to her about eighteen years old. “Not a secretary, not a personal assistant, not a fill-in when he’s on vacation.”
“Nope,” the one she thought was Fergus repeated. “We don’t talk to him that much really.”
“Don’t think he’s ever gone on vacation in the year that we’ve been here,” the one that must have been Ronan added.
“Do you have anything but a cell phone number for him?” she asked with a bit of exasperation.
“Oh yes. Cell phone coverage isn’t that good in Greenland. He has a landline.”
Okay, now they were getting somewhere. “What happens when you call the land line and he’s not there?” she asked.
“It rings and rings,” Fergus offered.
“Or we get the answering service,” Ronan added. “She’s a nice lady. She handles the phones for every business in Nuuk, I think. She doesn’t always come to the phone but when she does she always takes our message and she’s real pleasant about it.”
“Who has an answering service these days?” Ariel muttered.
“All the people with landlines in Nuuk,” Eoin said from the doorway behind her. Ariel jumped.
“I did some looking around for you, Ariel. I agree it’s odd that for all the money the man handles, Mikkel seems to have absolutely no staff. No lawyer, no accountants, no one in human resources to pay and hire them. Baldur is a master of outsourcing, but Mikkel seems to be a master do-it-yourselfer.”
“So you want me to drop this idea of taking out our clients most influential direct reports?”
“Not at all,” Eoin chuckled. “Up to now I’ve been content to let my client’s private business stay private, but I have to admit that your curiosity is starting to rub off. I want you to plan a vacation to Nuuk. It’s a town of sixteen-thousand, for heaven’s sake, so you ought to be able to find out where in Nuuk Mikkel keeps his people. Don’t be too obvious. Go see the northern lights and ride a dog sled before winter ends. You need to get more acquainted with the north anyway.”
Then, as she looked at him puzzled, he added. “You’ve got a nice direct way about you. You’re not threatening. Go meet the lady that runs the answering service. I bet you can come back from Nuuk knowing more about Mikkel Nygaard than anyone here does now, and I promise that I won’t ask questions about your expense account next month.”
As Eoin turned and left, Ronan gave a little whistle. “Wow. No questions about your expense account for a whole month?”
Fergus added. “I’ve always wanted to go to Greenland.”
“It’s February,” Ariel muttered back. “I bet you wanted to go in July.”
7. Winter in Ilulissat
Ariel did a bit of searching, found a site dedicated to travel in Greenland and was assured that “One of the best times to experience winter in Greenland is during March, when the days have already begun to get longer and the sun has begun to provide a good deal of warmth.” Given that temperatures routinely dropped below minus twenty degrees in March, she wondered what constituted a “good deal of warmth” to a Greenlander.
Then again, the idea of riding on a dog sled, racing over the frigid ice while she looked up at the glistening green northern lights, did have a bit of appeal. She read on. No, eight days of dog sledding was probably too much of a good thing.
In the end Ariel opted for the cheapest and shortest of the alternatives, a three-night tour out of Reykjavik that would take her to Nuuk and on to another popular town even further north. Airfare for that particular weekend was great, given that everyone else was trying to fly into Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day. Ariel had already learned that the holiday was likely to be more subdued than in the U.S., and locals assured her that with all the tourists coming, it wasn’t a half-bad time to leave town.
Plus, travel in and out of Iceland would also give her the chance to visit the mysteriously empty offices of d4 and meet Ulfur if she was lucky. Maybe she could even bring Hulda a really good sandwich for the lunch that she insisted on taking at her desk.
******
Nell’s idea of lunch involved a nice bottle of wine and ordering lots of her favorite things à la carte. She held up her end of the bargain though, virtually eliminating the small talk and going straight to what Ariel needed to know.
“Cillian’s an old friend from college,” she explained, settling into her chair and having her first sip of wine. “We went to university in Cork together over two decades ago now. We both hung with a crowd that knew how to enjoy their playtime. No, no, not that kind of playtime,” she chuckled as she took a sip of her wine. “He and I were just buddies. In fact, when I first met him he had just fallen head over heels in love with Lara, his ex. I got to be friends with her too.
“What happened with Lara?” Ariel asked softly, trying to gently move Nell away from college memories and on to things that mattered.
Nell shrugged. “It’s complicated. I’d say that Lara started to remind Cillian a little too much of his parents.”
“Cillian wasn’t so fond of his parents?”
Nell let out a sharp laugh. “That would be bit of an understatement. His mom was one those fussy women, but old man McGrane was a particularly dour man from a mildly rich Irish family, the kind that preferred tea to whiskey, you know. Mr. McGrane was determined to grow an empire and found a way, once he moved into manufacturing pharmaceuticals. Cillian and his sister were raised to behave, and they did until they went to college. Then she fell in love with an unemployed factory worker, refused to listen to her parents and basically ran away to get married. Cillian learned how to party and fell in love with Lara.”
“His parents objected to his falling in love?” Ariel asked.
“Lara wasn’t what his parents had in mind. They wanted someone with a family pedigree, but they put up with Lara because they thought that she kept Cillian better behaved. She did do that for a while. In the end Lara was willing to grow up more quickly than Cillian, and once three adults were pushing him to tow the line—and he had two children of his own adding to the pressure—Cillian did a stupid thing. He asserted his independence one of the few ways he could. With his penis.”
“Lara wouldn’t forgive?”
“Why would she? She was smart enough to see how restless he was and that this was just going to keep happening. You know, philandering as passive resistance. I think she loved Cillian too much to stay and watch the drama play out. She wanted to cut her losses and make a new life.”
“A happy ending for her?” Ariel asked.
“Don’t know. Cillian’s parents wanted a quiet annulment and custody of the grandkids, and Lara just wanted her children. A nasty custody battle started and the McGrane’s somehow got the marriage annulled, which made the kiddos technically bastards, and that really pissed Lara off. One day soon after, she and the kids disappeared. Police looked into foul play, of course, but most people think Lara had the good sense to go far away. No one has heard from her since.”
“How did Cillian handle it?” Ariel asked.
“He pretended not to care. He was in his mid-thirties by then, and fell right into the life of gambling, drinking, womanizing, everything his dad hated. A couple of years later Mrs. McGrane died, Cillian’s dad retreated into a deep depression, and Cillian had responsibilities whether he liked it or not. By then he’d run up a lot of debts with his horses and his other distractions and he needed to start taking better care of the family money.
“Nice summary,” Ariel said.
“Thanks, I do have
a bit of a way with words,” Nell agreed, licking a piece of hummus off of her fingers. “This stuff is so good.”
She stood up and put her hand an Ariel’s shoulder. “I’m headed to the loo, dear. Just so you know, this is all public knowledge—you can get it from any good gossip in Dublin.”
As Nell made her way off to the restroom, Ariel scrutinized the premory that Nell’s touch had unexpectedly left behind. In it, a teenaged boy was walking quickly down the street, nervous that he’d be discovered. He wore old jeans and a dirty t-shirt that said something rude, and he was basically working as a courier. He kept his head down. There was some danger involved.
That seemed like such a random precollection at first—then it occurred to Ariel. The teenaged boy was Nell. Was this a role she would play on stage somewhere? Why cast a forty-something-year-old woman for the part?
Nell returned before Ariel could make any more sense out of the scene, and she continued her story without needing a prompt. Ariel kept very quiet, hoping that what was coming next wouldn’t be such common knowledge.
“Old Mr. McGrane isn’t right enough in the head to manage anything these days,” Nell said. “I understand that he has lucid periods, during which he checks on his realm and dictates his wishes. Woe to those who are caught not towing the line when the old man has a good day. The rest of the time, he sits upstairs at the estate and stares out a window and says nothing. He will not do therapy, and the drugs—the very drugs that his company makes, by the way—leave him just as depressed as before he took them and considerably less alert. He takes them or not as suits his mood, or the mood of his caregivers.
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