Ice Age

by Brian Freemantle

  Morgan only accompanied the woman to the outer office on her departure. When the Chief of Staff re-entered the presidential quarters Partington said: ‘Well?’

  I’m impressed, gauged Morgan. ‘I think Amanda O’Connell is someone we’ve been underestimating.’

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking,’ confirmed the president. ‘Let’s keep a close eye, when it’s time for changes.’

  And see how she does in the meantime. ‘It’s a good idea, Mr President.’

  ‘How’s it all going?’

  ‘Good, I think.’

  Amanda shook her head to Stoddart’s gestured invitation to another drink. She’d chosen club soda, as he had. Something she’d have to do all over again, later. So, she supposed, would Stoddart. She said: ‘No difficulties working together?’

  ‘I’ll tell you after the latest arrivals get here but at the moment, no.’ They’d met in the Old Ebbitt Grill, opposite the Treasury Building, for convenience but had to wait half an hour at the bar for a table Amanda judged sufficiently isolated.

  He was showing the proper caution, which was good. ‘We don’t want any panic from premature disclosures.’

  Lecture time: there’d had to be a reason for the cocktail drink invitation. ‘I don’t accept that, conducted properly, telling people who need to be told would inevitably lead to that.’

  ‘Others do.’

  ‘I know all the arguments.’ Stoddart was adjusting to the bedlam, enjoying it. It wasn’t until he’d started the drive from Fort Detrick – being in a car, on an open road, with ordinary people all around him in ordinary cars doing ordinary things – that he’d fully appreciated how unnatural, how totally unreal, his life had become.

  ‘You thought about personal effects?’ Amanda was caught by how easy it was to be direct, speaking so indirectly.

  ‘Yes.’ Was Amanda O’Connell what was known as a Washington Witch, a woman who’d subjugated everything – sex, family, any personal life – to political ambition?

  ‘You quite sure about that?’ Why, she wondered, was he looking around the bar and the restaurant as if it was his first time in such a place?

  ‘Yes.’ He hoped he was.

  ‘You a rich man, Jack?’

  ‘No.’ Why, back in this real world in which he so gratefully found himself, was this conversation so unreal? Because it wasn’t, he answered himself at once. This was don’t-fuck-with-the-fairies, don’t-believe-in-Santa bedrock Washington reality.

  ‘You know what you’re doing?’ Amanda was curious, like someone encountering a new biological or animal species, which was perhaps yet again – too often – appropriate to the current situation but didn’t fit their immediate conversation.

  ‘Maybe not. It’s what I feel it’s right to do.’

  ‘I’ll take that second drink now,’ abruptly announced Amanda. ‘Scotch and branch water: Macallan if they have it.’ An off-balancing ploy, further to off-balance a man open to persuasion.

  Stoddart looked away, searching for their waiter. He stayed with club soda. Feeling a need to fill the silence he said: ‘So there it is: how I feel.’

  Amanda was sure no one could overhear them but she still leaned forward, reducing the possibility, and lowered her voice, too, the closeness adding to the seriousness of what she intended to say. ‘You didn’t kill them, Jack. They were dead – all of you were potentially dead – from the moment you went into that outstation. You got lucky, the others didn’t.’ She was getting very good at this, Amanda congratulated herself. ‘You’ve no idea what it is, where it came from, how it’s transmitted, have you?’

  Stoddart glanced hurriedly around them.

  ‘Just you and I, Jack. No one’s listening. Can listen.’ There couldn’t, upon reflection, have been a better place to have met.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘So answer the question!’

  ‘No,’ admitted Stoddart. ‘We don’t know any of those things.’

  ‘So bringing the bodies back – Olsen’s accusation – is only a possibility.’

  ‘A sufficient possibility.’

  Amanda clinked her whisky against Stoddart’s soda glass, her very private celebration. ‘Is it?’

  Stoddart frowned, as she’d expected. ‘I don’t understand?’

  Pedantically Amanda recited: ‘You’ve no idea what it is, where it came from, how it’s transmitted.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re heading an investigation to answer all those questions. And at the same time proposing to risk the disclosure that would cause public hysteria. And by the same inevitability destroy yourself and every argument you’ve ever scientifically advanced, as well as getting yourself taken off the investigation. All that and total financial wipe-out. And all for nothing, if in the end you find that Olsen’s death – the deaths of everyone who went in with you on the rescue mission – had nothing whatsoever to do with your bringing the bodies back. Which, from every scientific and medical judgment, you should without question have done. That seems a very wasteful suicide to me.’

  A Washington Witch weaving spells, thought Stoddart. Except that spells were fantasy and what this icy woman (witch of the north? witch of the south?) had just enunciated with crystal clarity was the sort of return to real life he’d so very recently appreciated.

  Amanda ached to go on but knew that at that precise moment another word would be too much.

  ‘I just … it doesn’t sit right,’ groped Stoddart. ‘And I made someone a promise.’

  ‘Which I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t keep, at the right and proper time. That’s all I’m saying, wait until the right and proper time. You get forced by public reaction into a resignation and the practical, working part of this investigation get’s fucked, for God knows how long. You think this person you made a promise to would want you to do that?’

  ‘No,’ Stoddart admitted at once, not needing to reflect what Patricia’s attitude would have been. He gestured to the waiter again and ordered himself Scotch this time, without the branch water.

  ‘It’s been useful to talk it through; reach the same conclusion between ourselves.’

  ‘Is it between ourselves?’ demanded Stoddart, wanting the woman to know his awareness that there were more Washington warlocks than witches.

  ‘It’s a political decision. When it has to be made, it’ll be made from here. And you have my word that you’ll be told in advance so that you can fulfil any personal promise.’ Had he genuinely loved Patricia Jefferies or was he motivated by a guilt-driven sense of duty? None of her concern. ‘Anyone resent your being in charge?’

  Stoddart shrugged. ‘The question hasn’t really arisen. Not until Geraldine was stopped from leaving the base and came to me, so I suppose that’s her acknowledging the fact.’

  ‘But now we’ve got the new arrivals,’ reminded Amanda, using Stoddart’s own phrase. ‘We’ll get over any problem by making it clear that the Russian is the deputy.’

  Stoddart exaggerated the eye-widening at the matter-offact announcement. ‘What if she won’t accept being the deputy?’

  ‘She’ll be told from here by her minister. She’ll have to accept it. I’m just putting you in the picture.’ Which she hadn’t yet done with either Reynell or Buchemin.

  Seemingly sharing the thought, Stoddart said: ‘Guy going to be told from here, too?’

  ‘Yes.’ She leaned forward again to outline the CIA discoveries that Spencer was delivering to Fort Detrick and at the end said: ‘Could there be any significance?’

  Stoddart pursed his lips reflectively. ‘Could be, in certain circumstances. I’m anxious that because there is so little to follow we don’t clutch at everything and make too much out of nothing. That’s a blind alley approach. But it’s certainly worth putting on the table precisely because we do have so little.’ He looked at her curiously. ‘Why have Paul go all the way back to Fort Detrick? You could have given it to me, tonight. Saved him the journey.’

  ‘He was al
ready on his way before you and I arranged to meet,’ lied Amanda easily. She swept her hand around the beehive humming bar. ‘And maybe documents marked White House Eyes Only and stamped with the Agency’s crest might have caught somebody’s attention.’ She saw the awkwardness with which he reached for his glass, to look at his watch. ‘What time you meeting her?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the next block. ‘Thought we’d do the tourist bit and have a drink at the open penthouse bar of the Washington Hotel. Then Georgetown.’

  This gene thing anything to get excited about?’

  He shook his head. ‘Beginning at the beginning. Pelham hadn’t got to genetics.’

  Amanda said: ‘Could be that you’re going to be proved right about warming?’

  Stoddart made another doubtful head movement. ‘Still only a possibility. And if I am, it’s sure as hell not the way I wanted it proved.’

  They got a table at the verandah edge, with an uninterrupted view of the Washington Monument and the planes landing at faraway Reagan airport to their left. Almost as soon as they sat, there was scurried movement on the roof of the Treasury Building directly opposite as the guards took up their routine positions and then the roar of a helicopter taking off from the White House lawn beyond. At once the machine lifted into view clear of the buildings and wheeled away over the park.

  Geraldine said: ‘That the President?’

  ‘I had him do it just for you.’

  She smiled, politely. ‘Wonder where he’s going?’

  ‘It’s never announced in advance, for obvious reasons. There are stories that he goes out to dinner that way if the host has a place big enough to land. Must make a hell of an entrance.’ Stoddart was swept again by the pleasure of doing something ordinary. He ordered Scotch for himself, chardonnay for her.

  ‘How’d your meeting go?’ This was nice, Geraldine decided. A perfect setting on a warm night, with no undertone between them. She shouldn’t forget the last of her antibiotics. There was no pain at all – hadn’t been for several days before leaving England – or discharge, either, and she was sure the infection had completely gone. She’d asked the embassy doctor to arrange an appointment with a gynaecologist to ensure there was no permanent damage.

  Stoddart looked around, assuring himself again there was no risk of their being overheard. ‘CIA have picked up some odd marine outbreaks worldwide, infections not normally suffered by sea mammals.’

  ‘But fish illnesses?’ she qualified.

  ‘Whales dying from what seems to be influenza. Some instances of the same disease in humans.’

  ‘Confirmed?’

  ‘Not as far as I’m aware.

  ‘So there’s no strain identification?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No reason for it to have anything to do with us?’ she suggested.

  ‘None at all,’ he agreed. ‘At the moment it’s nothing more than an interesting coincidence. Useful to know about, though.’

  Geraldine asked for water with her next glass of wine and took her antibiotic as soon as it was served.

  Stoddart said: ‘You all right?’

  ‘Headache. Aspirin will shift it. Still jetlagged, I guess.’

  Stoddart wouldn’t have expected aspirin to be in what was clearly a prescription bottle. ‘Everything go OK at the embassy?’

  Geraldine decided there was nothing hidden in the question. ‘My minister is curious how things will work out with the Russians.’

  ‘So’s Amanda.’ It was the obvious opportunity, Stoddart recognized. ‘You have any problems with my being chairperson?’

  Geraldine looked at him half smiling, as if expecting a joke. ‘Hadn’t really occurred to me that you were, but no.’

  He smiled back. ‘The political group think it might be a difficulty for the Russians: want their woman to be deputy.’

  Now Geraldine laughed, openly. ‘For Christ’s sake! Aren’t we supposed to be engaged on something a little more important than titles?’

  ‘We are. I guess they’re not.’ She was refreshing, after the meeting he’d just had with Amanda.

  ‘Quite frankly, I couldn’t give a shit. My only problem is with nonsense like that – any nonsense, for that matter – getting in the way, my way, your way, anybody else’s way.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Stoddard didn’t think the deep drink she took was irritation at him, personally.

  ‘I read what you wrote, about what it was like when you got to the outstation. I’d like to hear it again.’

  Stoddart looked at her quizzically. ‘A second time?’

  ‘You wrote it intending it to be read,’ she said. ‘Thought about the words. You might describe it differently when you just talk.’

  ‘Could it be important?’

  ‘I won’t know until I hear it. I’m thinking forensic pathology now.’

  Stoddart looked around him again. ‘Not here.’

  ‘I thought you promised me dinner?’

  Stoddart wished he’d made a reservation because they got refused at the French restaurant opposite the Four Seasons, but they got into a Mexican cafe just off the turn from M Street, on Wisconsin. She insisted he order for her (‘Your neighbouring culture, not mine’) but suggested tequila (‘that much I do know’). After the lime and salt ritual she only sipped. ‘From the moment you found them as they were,’ she urged.

  Talking was different. Stoddart began stiltedly – actually trying to remember what he’d written – but very quickly lost the way and then let it become a conversation between them because several times Geraldine guided him back, wanting details greater than he had given – certainly than what he had written – earlier.

  ‘Patricia was getting close but she didn’t realize it,’ said Geraldine, distantly, when Stoddart finally finished.

  ‘Close to what?’ He’d read everything, knew everything Patricia had written.

  Geraldine made no immediate effort to reply, a taco suspended briefly before her. Eventually she said: ‘Buckland Jessup was actually kneeling, arms lifted. “As if he was praying,” Patricia said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘George Bedall was between the rooms, both arms broken from where he’d fallen, reaching out …?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No!’ refused Geraldine, positively.

  Stoddart waited, while automatically she used the taco as a spoon for the guacamole. Eventually she said: ‘People don’t die like that. I know that’s how it appeared to have happened. That’s what Patricia Jefferies wrote. Morris Neilson, too, although not so definitely. Now you’ve told me the same. But it’s not possible.’

  Stoddart only just stopped the impatience becoming loud. ‘That’s how it was!’

  ‘A person can’t die, arms outstretched, kneeling like Jessup was kneeling. Arms don’t snap cleanly, like a dried stick, as Bedall’s arms snapped.’

  ‘They did!’

  ‘I know – accept – that’s how it was. How you found them. But if Jessup had died kneeling, arms in front of him, he would have collapsed: fallen sideways or forwards. Not remained upright, like a statue. And Bedall’s arms wouldn’t have snapped as the autopsy showed they were, quite separately from how they had to be broken again, to carry the body …’ She stopped again, talking more to herself than to him. ‘I need to look at those breaks, see the differences … look at the Alaska bodies, too. And talk to Matthews and Norris …’

  ‘If we’re going to go on exchanging thoughts you’ve got to help me!’ pleaded Stoddart.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Geraldine, still more to herself than to him. ‘I don’t know what I’m trying to say: what’s wrong with what you clearly found. Just that it shouldn’t – couldn’t – have been like that.’

  Believing he understood something of what she was saying, Stoddart said: ‘Bucky was frozen as he was, kneeling with his arms out in front of him.’

  Geraldine shook her head again, positively. ‘I need to go back through all the autopsies, maybe
carry out some again. It’s a mistake! Sub-zero as it was the bodies wouldn’t have frozen like that …’ She snapped her fingers. ‘And rigor would only have set in – despite it being below freezing – after Jessup had toppled frontwards or sideways, not quickly enough to have kept him upright.’

  ‘So what have we got?’ demanded Stoddart.

  Geraldine finished her tequila in one gulp, forgetting the lime and salt. ‘What we always had. A total bloody mystery that I’ve just further confused myself about.’

  The reservation was at Paul Young’s, on Connecticut Avenue, one of the three must-go, socially-to-be-seen Washington restaurants that Amanda had guessed Peter Reynell would choose and she wished she could have bet on it, to win the cab fare home. As they arrived, to Krug already in the cooler, their seats at the bar as well in the restaurant reserved, she made herself the second bet that Reynell would expect to share the taxi and a lot more besides. She waited for him to invite approval – a reference to the ‘62 wine vintage, perhaps – but he didn’t and Amanda, objectively aware of her rocket-like escalation from the cockroaches rest room, sat back to enjoy it, making more bets. She lost at once, expecting him patronisingly to insist upon ordering for her, although he didn’t ask her preference for wine, choosing without consulting the list a Puligny Montrachet and a Pomerol. Reynell started with oysters, which she’d never ever been able to try, and seeing her look he offered her one. She declined, waiting for him to make the obvious aphrodisiac remark, but he didn’t do that, either, and Amanda decided it was time she stopped making bets, even to herself. If money had been involved she would by now already be losing heavily. It wasn’t, of course, a wasted indulgence; rather a necessary one. She’d been testing herself – her expectations – against the man and so far he was ahead, despite her initial, first-guess success.

  Reynell said: ‘Pity Gerard couldn’t make it.’

  ‘It was nice of you to ask him.’ Was this going to be the first pass?

  Reynell hadn’t invited the French minister but knew she wouldn’t ask the man, whose turn on Reynell’s divideand-spin carousel was planned within the next two nights, depending upon the assessment of Gregori Lyalin. ‘If he had been able to come – instead of needing to go to the embassy to talk to Paris – we perhaps could have rehearsed ourselves, without the intrusion of official records.’