Ice Age

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘It’s unusual.’

  ‘Have you ever known spongoid as extreme as this, upon any examination you’ve ever conducted?’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ the man finally conceded.

  From the reluctance, Geraldine guessed this hadn’t been part of any autopsy finding, on any victim. ‘Could we now expose a femur?’

  ‘Both thighs?’

  She needed to be as sure as she possibly could be, Geraldine decided. ‘Please.’

  It took far longer, because of the connected muscle and ligament encasement. In both, the finger-penetrating spongioses was as pronounced as at the spinal base, towards which, at the suggestion of the now fully co-operative American, they extended the incisions as far as the hips. In both, and at the knees, there were the pronounced bony outgrowths of osteoporosis. There was also sufficient cartiliginous mass in the right femur to suggest osteosarcoma.

  ‘Where did you get the suggestion?’ asked Hooper outright.

  ‘The way they were found, in Antarctica. It was a guess.’

  The second post mortem, upon George Bedall’s forearms, found the same degree of spongiosis in both but although the bone was wafer thin – later tests showed it to be less than a third of the thickness it should have been – the two breaks in each, the first where the astrophysicist had fallen in the field station, the second intentionally broken by Morris Neilson to get the corpse into the sleeping bag, were distinctly sharp edged and separated, not joined greenstick fractures of bone that was soft.

  Hooper said: ‘We need second autopsies on every victim, for bone tests, don’t we?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Geraldine. It was only when she straightened, supporting herself against the specially adapted support chair, that she realized she had been bent over dissecting tables for five hours. Her entire body throbbed. It didn’t help when she tried to stretch the ache from her back and shoulders.

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘It doesn’t prove anything.’

  ‘It’s more than anything my teams found so far. And we thought we’d finished.’

  It was only when she was stripping off in the decontamination chamber that Geraldine discovered the tear in the forefinger of her left-hand glove. She hadn’t been aware of it happening at any time during the autopsies and decided it was far more likely to have occurred unzipping and undoing the awkwardly stiff fastenings of the protective suit. In which case it had occurred after she’d safely passed through the sterilization process. She still intently studied the forefinger, satisfying herself there was no skin break or abrasion.

  Walter Pelham and Duncan Littlejohn were waiting outside the chamber. The laboratory director said at once: ‘Lebrun’s outer skin, the coreum, was dead of course.’

  ‘Of course?’ urged Geraldine, expectantly now.

  ‘But the layers below, the lucidum, gradulosum and both strata of the germinative, were dead, too! The man is literally only being contained – held together – by the last corium layer!’

  ‘So you’ve established necrobiosis?’ said Pelham. There was none of Hooper’s earlier acknowledgement or Littlejohn’s disbelief.

  The decay and death of the outer epidermis is a constant process,’ said Geraldine, saddened by the man’s resistance. The dying of the other strata in supposedly living people is unknown, wouldn’t you agree?’.

  Pelham flushed. There’s an urgent message for you to return your minister’s call, at the embassy,’ said Pelham. ‘And the Russian translations are ready. You OK for a late night meeting? You’d seem to be the person with most to say.’

  Geraldine still ached, despite the shower. ‘What time?’

  ‘You’re the one who’s got to catch up. Midnight’s been fixed, for your benefit.’

  And with what she was already doing still unfinished. ‘Midnight’s fine.’

  She spent a further full hour gratefully seated in the observation gallery individually questioning Harold Norris and Darryl Matthews, disappointed at not getting the replies she wanted from either Alaskan survivor. It was probably too much to expect to score ten out of ten, but it would still have been good. The Russian material waiting in her room didn’t look too formidable and she took a hopefully relaxing bath before telephoning Washington. By the time she did – no longer aching so much – Peter Reynell had already flown out on the London-bound Concorde. The message was to ring him at his London home in four hours.

  Perfect timing with an hour to spare before the scheduled scientific meeting, Geraldine calculated, finally settling down to read what Raisa Orlov had supplied.

  ‘It was stupid! Arrogant, stupid and achieved nothing except belittling yourself!’ accused Gregori Lyalian, intentionally stressing the contempt to puncture the woman’s pomposity. ‘It’s entirely a matter for you if you want to make a fool of yourself. It’s not, when you make a fool of me, your superior. And of your country, which you’re supposed to be representing at an international forum. I’ve ordered everything, omitted in what you brought, sent immediately from the Institute and now I am giving you a direct order – which I’m placing on record here at the embassy with the ambassador – to co-operate totally with everyone with whom you are supposed to be working. You understand that better than when I told you virtually the same in Moscow?’

  Raisa Orlov physically shook with fury at the rebuke, her hands – her entire body – so wet with perspiring anger that she had to use both to avoid dropping the telephone. It would have been the pig-fucking American, Stoddart, who’d complained direct. No doubt urged on by the British woman who he was probably fucking, in between pigs. ‘There is an anti-Russian animosity here,’ she tried. ‘I was tricked into a discussion before I had the opportunity to study what was available here: to assess my responses.’

  ‘It was nothing of the sort!’ rejected Lyalin. ‘It was preposterous arriving without a translation. And from what I read in the original, after that translation was made by the Americans, to have left out the material that I’ve now got on its way.’

  ‘How have you explained the omissions?’ The enforced humility rasped out, as if there was a physical obstruction in her throat.

  Lyalin refused her any escape. ‘You tell me how to explain it. You created the problem.’

  ‘Not ready,’ she said.

  ‘Speak up! I didn’t hear you.’

  ‘I said that the complete written findings and the samples weren’t ready when we left Moscow.’

  ‘How are you going to explain specimens that clearly were taken, days ago, not being made available?’

  ‘They were still being worked on.’

  Would this humiliation – and this reprimand – bring her to her senses? wondered Lyalin. ‘I’ll support that story. This time. If there’s any more totally justifiable criticism I shall order you back to Moscow and have someone replace you. And to ensure there isn’t any misunderstanding, I’m going to put all this in writing and have it brought up to you at Fort Detrick.’

  Criticism, isolated Raisa. So there had been a direct complaint! And Gregori Lyalin was siding with the Americans – with the West – against her. She would have to be very careful, she thought, although not thinking about any of the warnings she’d just received. She was the person with the international reputation, not the man who covered himself in so much hair he looked like a bird nesting inside an overgrown hedge. She couldn’t risk making her calls to the Institute from here but that’s what she had to do. Independently reach people she controlled and make sure the stories were spread about her abandonment. She’d also need to get some idea of Lyalin’s strength, within the Kremlin and within the Moscow White House. No one was going to treat her as Lyalin imagined he could treat her. Neither him nor the people she was going to meet again, in just a few hours; meet and be totally prepared this time. Ready. And knowing full well that scientifically and medically none of them had the slightest clue what they were up against. Or, she thought with a smile, whom they were up against.

  In his working pa
rt of the Detrick complex, Jack Stoddart was using the intervening hours as diligently as Geraldine. Although there was data still to correlate, the proof of warming from the robot gauges at Noatak and close to the destroyed Antarctic base was positively established. And the drafted-in paleobotanist had promised at least preliminary results of the protectively obtained permafrost cores from the same locations by eleven that night. Stoddart was impatient to know whatever Geraldine had discovered, and supposed as chairman of the group he could approach her in advance but decided instead to wait to hear it at the same time as the others. It was more important to assess the outbreaks of human influenza, and if what Amanda O’Connell had told him on the telephone about the infection in Lake Baikal fitted in with everything else the CIA and Science Foundation monitors were picking up. He was beginning to think that although there might be no direct connection with the ageing disease, there might be a linking thread: two maybe.

  Henrietta lay on her back, totally pleasured, needing only to bring her outstretched arms across to hold Reynell’s head. ‘If foreplay became a separate Olympic event as well as fucking, you could go for gold in both.’ Reynell made to move but she anxiously tightened her grip, keeping his head where it was. ‘No! … It’s coming … coming … there!’

  He moved up the bed, trailing his tongue over her stomach and breasts, until he was level with her. After several minutes Henrietta said: ‘Who was that on your telephone?’

  ‘The scientific advisor still in Washington.’

  ‘You fucking her?’

  ‘Did it sound like I was fucking her from what we said?’

  ‘I hope you’re not going to disappoint me, darling.’

  ‘I haven’t ever before, have I?’

  Henrietta refused the double entendre. ‘Daddy’s very curious. So am I.’

  ‘I want to clear the Cabinet meeting first.’

  ‘Influenza!’ she exclaimed, disbelievingly, having overheard Reynell’s end of the conversation an hour before.

  ‘You’d be surprised who’s going to catch the cold!’ Reynell enjoyed his own joke, sniggering at it, and decided to use it again so that Henrietta could appreciate it too, when she’d be better able to understand.

  ‘My turn to welcome you home,’ she said, sliding further down in the bed.

  Seventeen

  Jack Stoddart regarded that morning’s false start and the later irritable frustration outside Henri Lebrun’s isolation chamber as learning curves. From what Amanda had told him, the Russian awkwardness was limited to Raisa Orlov personally, not one of the woman performing to a Moscow script, which kept the problem localized for him to eradicate, and this was Amanda’s judgment as well. If Raisa Orlov attempted a repetition tonight he had to confront it head on and get any black hat, white hat shit out of the way, even at the risk of further embarrassment.

  Certainly the Russian woman had created the most obvious difficulty. But his major role (what the fuck was his full role?) had to be always to remain totally objective. And being objective, it was unfair to isolate Raisa as the only disruption. Stoddart understood Geraldine Rothman’s frustration. And although in terms of normal scientific investigation they were moving at the speed of light, his sense, like Geraldine’s, was that they’d wasted time waiting for every result to come in to be analysed and cross-checked and referenced with every other finding, instead of reacting at once to anything unexpected. But to have done so would have been to ignore their necessary level of professionalism. They’d followed established – internationally required – medical investigative methodology. Which made Geraldine’s unthinking, lash-outat-anyone impatience just as distracting as Raisa Orlov’s initial, backfired condescension. And, completing the circle, justified Walter Pelham’s complaint about the British scientist and her peremptory demands as she left Henri Lebrun’s room for specific laboratory tests on organs removed from the dead, as well as upon specimens she’d taken from the Frenchman.

  Thank God it had all happened so quickly, within a single half-intervening day. So far, only he knew – acknowledged – his own difficulty with the uninvited function politically imposed upon him. A very personal learning – realizing – curve indeed.

  Because it was the initial formal session requiring a record-maintaining secretariat, they were assembling in a small conference room closer to Pelham’s suite and Stoddart got there early enough to be the first – psychologically the person in control – although he only made it minutes ahead of Pelham himself, who was accompanied by one of the support staff with individual copies of the completed laboratory tests. Stoddart considered adding his assessment of the emergency team and robot sampling from both American sites, but decided the data was best kept separate to avoid its being overwhelmed. Stoddart still checked through the thick file and quickly located the transcripts of the earlier Blair House meeting at which Gregor Lyalin – as well as apologizing for the translation failure – disclosed the seal disease outbreak at Lake Baikal.

  Watching Stoddart going through reports, Pelham said: ‘Dr Rothman’s late input is all that’s missing.’

  Diplomacy time, Stoddart at once recognized. Dr Rothman, not Geraldine, uttered in a voice as stiff as the man himself. Stoddart said: ‘We’re all a little strung out, Walt. I need your help keeping things as smooth as I can. As smooth as they need to be kept, for everything to stay on course. I’d appreciate a little slack.’

  ‘So would I,’ said the dry, unyielding man.

  ‘I’ll do what I can to see you get it. Your people are closer to what she’s been doing today. You think she’s got something?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Stoddart didn’t like the attitude: refusing to acknowledge the contribution of others – particularly when they formed part of the same working team – was the very apogee of scientific protocol. ‘If she has, so soon, we’re all going to look good.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  It had been Amanda’s suggestion that Paul Spencer sit in on the session, as he was doing in Washington, and the liaising American arrived at the same time as Guy Dupuy. Looking between the two men already there Dupuy said to Pelham: ‘You told him?’

  The installation director said: ‘Lebrun died two hours ago. Much quicker than we believed he would.’

  The reluctance of a misdiagnosis or continuing petulance? Stoddart felt able to confront both – or either – women if he had to, but he could hardly challenge openly the man in charge of the complex itself. If Pelham’s attitude became a problem, the correction would have to come from Washington, an admission by inference that he couldn’t properly hold the group together as he was expected to do.

  The entry of the two women was almost simultaneous, too, Raisa ahead by maybe a minute. Each of them had been early, Stoddart noted, wondering if they’d all tried for the psychological first. If she had – but in fact been the last – it didn’t appear to upset Geraldine. He hoped the tiredness he was sure he detected hadn’t shortened her temper any further. She was wearing the same rumpled shirt and jeans of the morning. Raisa had changed into a fulsome but uncreased smock over trousers and she’d lightly made up. Geraldine hadn’t bothered. Her face shone under the artificial light, hinting at freckles.

  Moving at once to stamp his authority on to the gathering, Stoddart said: ‘This is our first working session with everyone involved—’ He patted the medical dossier in front of him. ‘There’s a lot here to digest and a lot more to talk about. If we’re going to move forward, which we must, the input from each of us has got to be constructive …’ He filled the staged pause looking at the blank faces around him. ‘Which is what the disagreements have to be, as well: constructive, not divisive. Let’s work – together – for points to be made, not scored …’

  The pig-fucker was making a direct, personal attack upon her, Raisa knew, posturing in front of the rest of them, probably playing out some charade over which they’d already sniggered in preparation. Geraldine supposed the rebuke was in order but she hadn’t expected i
t. Until that moment, without consciously calling it to mind, she hadn’t put Stoddart down as a forceful man; not disinterested – how could he have been disinterested! – but aloofly distracted. The new emergence was interesting.

  Too general, judged Pelham. This session had to be the test. He wasn’t again going to be treated as the British woman imagined she could treat him – treat everyone – and if Stoddart couldn’t run the operation better the problem had to be raised with Washington, direct, not through the liaison man beside him. Raised and solved. Fort Detrick was his complex and his was the supreme authority here. It hadn’t been such a good idea after all to agree to Stoddart being the neutral controller because the words contradicted themselves. Stoddart was being too neutral, which prevented his being in control.

  Guy Dupuy was locked into his own uncertainty, held there by Lebrun’s death. The medical opinion had been that the climatolagist should have survived for twelve hours and he’d died in eight. Dupuy remained unsure whether he’d had the authority to prevent the British woman’s examination, Lebrun himself being by then beyond any rational decision. If the autopsy currently being conducted found evidence that Lebrun’s death had been accelerated, even by as little as a few hours, by Dr Rothman’s intrusion then surely he had some culpability, for not forbidding it.

  Paul Spencer cupped his hands over a stomach from which all university muscle tone had been melted by overindulgence and was surprised at the outspokenness, which hadn’t been necessary down in Washington but from which there might conceivably be a morsel to bite at, which was why he’d argued so strongly to attend, relegating the unrest in Antarctica – for which he so far hadn’t thought of a resolve anyway – until the following day. Had there been more friction here than that which he already knew about over the translation failure? Yet again he was at the right place at the right time.