Bonereapers

by Jeanne Matthews

  Senator Keyes extended his hand to the agriculture minister. “Thank you, Herr Dybdahl. We appreciate this warm reception here in the Kingdom of Norway and look forward to more substantive discussions with you and your cabinet at the dinner tonight.” He nodded deferentially to Sheridan. “Do you have anything you’d like to add, Senator Sheridan?”

  Sheridan waved an arm across the audience. “If there are no more questions…”

  “I’ve got one,” said Aagaard. “Tillcorp can buy genetic deregulation in the U.S. simply by donating to you Congress people. Is the fix in for them to have free access to experiment with American seeds stored here in Norway?”

  “What do you mean, ‘the fix’? There’s no fix here. Not anywhere.” Sheridan appealed to the sensible people watching him on TV back in America. “My vote’s not for sale. Never has been, never will be.”

  “If you’re not lobbying for Tillcorp, why did you bring the president of Tillcorp and his lawyer with you on your plane?”

  “How the…?” Sheridan scowled and a note of uncertainty crept into his voice “You’re way out of line, fella. I’m here at the invitation of the Norwegian Government. To do my part, to do my country’s part to guarantee the planet’s food security.” He turned angry eyes to the row of ministers behind him, as if to demand that somebody give this rabblerouser the heave-ho. The senator obviously wasn’t accustomed to the aggressive style of European journalists.

  Dinah wasn’t accustomed to associating with politicians or the reporters who egged them on. The antagonism seemed mutually calculated to stir up their particular constituencies. The Norwegian ministers exchanged looks of embarrassment, but seemed unsure how to handle the situation.

  Aagaard pressed his advantage. “Is Tillcorp’s presence a secret?”

  “Let me through. Move. Move aside.”

  There was a commotion at the rear of the room.

  “Out of my way. Move, move!” A small, pudding-faced man with a few tufts of grayish-red hair tried to shove his way past the guards at the door. His English had the same singsong pitch as Aagaard’s. “They have to be stopped. They’re destroying God’s creations. They rob the earth of its precious fruits!”

  A shout went up from somewhere in the crowd. “Look out! He has a gun!”

  “Let me through. It’s the Americans who are dangerous. Atrazine! Alachlor! They’ve brought the death gene.”

  There was a scuffle. Norris Frye turned sideways in his chair and half-stood to see what was happening behind him. Dinah craned her neck, but Norris blocked her view. She glanced back toward the stage as a dot of red light flashed against the window to the left of Senator Sheridan. The dot jittered across the wall behind the stage, herky-jerky as a moth. She stood up and looked around for the source, but all she could see was a knot of men in coats and suits flailing their arms and trying to subdue the protester. Everyone was focused on the altercation at the back of the room. She turned back to the stage as the red dot bobbled across a corner of the Norwegian flag, lit momentarily on the microphone in front of Sheridan, flitted across Senator Keyes’ lapels, and landed onto Herr Dybdahl’s face.

  “Kristus!” Dybdahl’s hands flew to his face and he staggered backward into the arms of the other officials. “My eyes!”

  Senator Sheridan shrank away from the podium and gaped at the fallen agriculture minister. “What the…What…?”

  Erika jumped up and ran toward her husband. Norris Frye slid to the floor at Dinah’s feet and covered his head.

  She bent over him. “Senator, are you hurt?”

  “Get down,” he hissed. “It’s a terrorist attack!”

  A frightened mob stampeded toward the exit.

  “I can’t see,” cried Herr Dybdahl as his fellow ministers eased him to the floor.

  Dinah watched open-mouthed as Brander Aagaard snatched up his camera and began to snap pictures. Several other reporters did the same.

  Senator Keyes took Erika by the arm and tried to drag the Sheridans out of the line of fire. “Let’s get out of here, Colt. This way.”

  “What was it?”

  “A laser, I think. Come on now.”

  Looking dazed, the Sheridans followed Keyes to the far side of the room.

  Norwegian police blocked the exits.

  Even as he was pinned against the wall by a large policeman, the little pudding-faced man continued to cry out his warnings. “Like the Romans who sowed the fields of the conquered with salt, they’ll starve us, I tell you.”

  A loud male voice shouted, “Go back to your seats everyone. Nobody leaves.” He shouted again in Norwegian.

  The two Secret Service agents who’d accompanied the senators on the flight from Washington jogged down the aisle toward the stage, guns drawn and pointing every which way. They spotted Norris Frye huddled on the floor in the fetal position and pulled him up and away toward the other senators. They appeared not to notice Dinah.

  A Norwegian policeman gesticulated with some kind of telescopic baton. “Back, back to your seats. Everything is under control.”

  Brander Aagaard put down his camera, pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, and slouched into the chair left empty by Senator Frye. “Your American Secret Service is crap.” He lit a cigarette and blew a pungent stream of smoke toward the stage. “Or maybe they asked the angriper who he was aiming for and when he said it was the herring eater, they moved aside to give him a clear shot.”

  Dinah needed a bathroom too urgently to argue about either the epithet or the target, but the way the protester seemed to feel about Americans, she would’ve sworn he was aiming at Senator Sheridan.

  Chapter Two

  The enormous stuffed polar bear inside its glass cage looked straight at Dinah—meaningfully, it seemed, as if it were trying to tell her something. Something not soothing. She downed another slug of aquavit, spelled Akevitt on the bottle that Brander Aagaard had produced from the pocket of his parka. It tasted like cough syrup, but it was the only nerve medicine in sight.

  The senators had been whisked away immediately by the Norwegian police and the Secret Service agents, leaving Dinah to fend for herself. Her plea for a toilet had finally been granted, albeit reluctantly. A female officer had patted her down and shepherded her into the restroom. Now she was standing at the rear of a long line of people waiting their turn to be processed and dismissed. Unfortunately, the Secret Service had insisted on presenting all of the Americans’ passports together upon their arrival and they still had hers. She was pissed off and paperless and she didn’t know which hotel had been booked for the delegation or where they’d gone. She pulled her inadequate wool pea jacket more tightly around her and hoped she’d find an understanding person at the front of this line.

  “Who are you?” Aagaard asked. He had latched onto her the minute she came out of the bathroom. “Are you an aide to one of the senators or do you work for Tillcorp?”

  “Neither.”

  “What then? What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to answer questions about bananas.”

  “Be serious.”

  “At thirteen below, after watching a man struck blind by a laser, who isn’t serious?”

  “You’re avoiding my question. What’s this skitt about bananas?”

  Dinah assumed that she had learned her first Norwegian word and, the way this trip was shaping up, she foresaw multiple uses for it in the future. Aagaard wasn’t sharing his liquor for nothing. He was pumping her for information. Sour as she felt over being abandoned, she had no desire to see herself quoted in Dagbladet. She stuck to her script. “Bananas were the first fruit cultivated by humans and they’re the world’s fourth largest fruit crop. Actually, the banana tree is an herb and the banana is the fruit. Banana seeds are recalcitrant. They can’t survive drying and freezing like orthodox seeds, but a
t ultra-low temperatures…”

  “Skitt.”

  No kidding. She took another gulp of aquavit and turned the tables on him. “What do you know about the protester? What did he mean about Americans being dangerous? Is there an anti-American movement here in Norway?”

  “Not anti-American. Anti-Tillcorp. Anti-gene-modification. We Europeans aren’t as willing to gamble with the world’s DNA as you are. More than one organization is opposed to Tillcorp’s drive to patent Mother Nature’s creations and concentrate control of the food chain in corporate hands.”

  Dinah hadn’t been formally introduced to the Tillcorp execs on board the senators’ U.S. Air Force jet, although Erika had pointed them out, saying only that they were “Colt’s corporate friends along for the ride.” The jet was equipped with two private suites, one in the nose and one in the tail, modeled Dinah supposed, after Air Force One. She, Erika, the Secret Service agents, and Norris Frye had kept to the open seating area in the center. Senator Sheridan had sequestered himself in one of the suites for almost the entire duration of the flight. Whitney Keyes and his intern buzzed in and out periodically carrying armloads of files and documents. The CEO of Tillcorp, Jake Mahler, was bald and barrel-chested with wily eyes and a transparent appreciation of his importance to the universe. He and his attorney, an attractive, businesslike woman named Valerie Ives, drifted out of the other suite and visited Sheridan from time to time.

  She said, “If the protester is anti-Tillcorp and he believes that Senator Sheridan is aiding and abetting them, then that laser beam was probably meant for Sheridan.”

  “It’ll make better copy if he was going after a government minister or one of the Diversity Trust people.”

  “Why?”

  “People go after Americans for all kinds of reasons—Iraq, Afghanistan, those subprime mortgage derivatives that you bundled and fobbed off on the rest of the world. But an attack on the Norwegian minister ties directly to the seed vault.”

  “Is the seed vault controversial?”

  “It’s aroused a lot of suspicion. The Norwegian government paid for it to be built, but a number of shady billionaires and foundations have poured millions into the project. The Global Crop Diversity Trust oversees the operation of the facility, but the Internet is full of rumors about the Trust’s dishonesty.”

  “What kind of rumors?”

  Aagaard’s eyes grew leery. “Are you a writer of some kind?”

  “No.”

  He took another drink of Akavitt and apparently decided she was harmless. “Some believe that Trust operatives have infiltrated indigenous seed banks in order to donate part of their stocks to the Svalbard Vault, but they conceal the fact that once seeds are deposited in Svalbard, they fall under the control of the United Nations’ FAO treaty, which was designed to facilitate access by corporate breeders.”

  “FAO?”

  “Food and Agriculture Organization. It’s supposed to protect farmers’ rights to their specialized knowledge and commercial use of traditional crops. But the conspiracy theorists say it’s nothing short of theft, a massive seed grab to benefit international agribusinesses. FAO gets most of its funding from a tax on seed patents.”

  Dinah could see that her report to Eleanor would be considerably more involved than she’d bargained on. “It sounds a bit sinister.”

  “It is. Some blame the Norwegian government for being in bed with the corporations, some blame the Trust for misappropriating their donors’ seed collections, and some blame the corporate breeders.”

  “And some see Senator Sheridan as a tool of Tillcorp,” she said, wishing she’d spent less time gabbing with Erika about rock-and-roll and Norwegian mythology and more time delving into her husband’s relationship with Tillcorp. “Are genetically modified seeds stored in the vault along with the natural seeds?”

  “I don’t think so, not yet anyway. The plant breeders don’t want that. Too much paperwork and disclosure and they’d run the risk of losing their intellectual property rights in their hybrids.”

  “What do they want then?”

  “I’m not sure yet. When I find out, it’ll be the scoop of the century.”

  A Norwegian woman in a police uniform pulled Dinah out of line. She wore her golden hair in braids pinned tightly on top of her head and her attitude was as crisp and starchy as her uniform. “Come with me, please.”

  She escorted Dinah to a tiny, glass-enclosed cubicle and motioned her into a white plastic chair behind a white plastic desk. The woman sat down across from her and stared. Through her glass enclosure, Dinah could still see the polar bear staring back at her from its glass enclosure.

  “Passport, please.”

  “I was on the plane with the American senators. The Secret Service agents have my passport.”

  The woman frowned. “What is your home country?”

  “America. The United States.”

  “Naturalized?”

  “No. I was born in the U.S. Georgia.”

  “Are your parents Arab then?”

  “No. My mother is a Seminole Indian.”

  The woman frowned more deeply. “From what part of India come these Seminoles?”

  “They’re not…They are Native Americans.” Dinah was growing exasperated. Her dark hair and eyes couldn’t help but stand out in a nation lousy with blonds, but this jumped-up Goldilocks seemed to regard her non-Nordic features as per se terroristic.

  “What is your name?”

  “Dinah Pelerin.”

  “Full name.”

  “Dinah Loyce Pelerin.”

  “Will you open your purse, please?”

  Dinah handed over her sporty red Hobo bag, which matched the buttons on her pea jacket, and watched as the woman removed and scrutinized each item. Tissues, chapstick, wallet, iPod, compact, lipstick, hairbrush, toothbrush, pen, notepad, keys, aspirin, peanut butter cheese crackers. She held up the puka shell Eleanor had given Dinah to wish her a safe voyage and examined it minutely.

  “It’s for good luck. Please, if you’ll just contact Senator Norris Frye, at whatever hotel he’s staying, he’ll vouch for me. I’m his technical consultant. Really. I’m here to talk about Hawaiian bananas.”

  The woman instructed her to wait and strode out of the cubicle. She marched past the polar bear’s cage and paused to confer with two male cops, also blond. One of them opened a cell phone. She saw that Brander Aagaard had reached the front of the line. Blowing smoke out the side of his mouth like a diesel truck, he brandished his press credentials to some sort of military cop in a red beret. The cop’s forehead corrugated into angry folds. Dinah didn’t have to hear what Aagaard was saying to know that he was being obnoxious. She massaged her temples, which had begun to throb. What kind of chicanery was going on here? Was Aagaard being a provocateur or did he have evidence that seeds could be checked out of the Svalbard vault for experimentation? That was precisely what Eleanor had sent her to find out.

  If only it weren’t so cold. She kneaded her chilly arms and envisioned herself somewhere far, far away, stretched out in a snug, soft bed piled high with blankets.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the woman returned and informed her that she had been cleared to leave the airport.

  “But where…?”

  “Your senators are staying at the Radisson. One of the military officers will drive you.”

  The Radisson. Dinah almost whimpered with relief. She should have known that a bunch of VIP senators wouldn’t undertake a winter junket to the Arctic unless their creature comforts could be assured. She picked up her purse and stood up. As an afterthought, she asked, “Have you heard whether the agriculture minister is going to be all right?”

  “He is in hospital. We have no report on his condition yet.”

  ***

  The two-mile drive f
rom the airport into Longyearbyen didn’t afford much in the way of sightseeing. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and black as coal, the commodity which had been mined here since the beginning of the twentieth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spitsbergen Island—the largest in the Svalbard archipelago—had been visited primarily by whalers and Russian trappers. But the island was rich in coal and in 1905, an American tycoon named John Munro Longyear bought out the Trondheim-Spitsbergen Coal Company and renamed it The Arctic Coal Company. The town that grew up around the mines became known as Longyearbyen, “byen” being the Norwegian word for city. Today, with the addition of the airport, a university, a research institute, tourist facilities, and the Doomsday Vault, Longyearbyen had become the largest town in the Arctic, boasting a population of just over two thousand hardy souls, all of them in excellent health. There were no dead people in Longyearbyen. Because the permafrost prevented bodies from decomposing, no burials were allowed. According to what Dinah had read, dying was for all intents and purposes illegal. Anyone who felt sick enough to die was required to get out of town pronto.

  In front of the merrily lit Radisson Blu Polar Hotel, her driver opened the door for her and walked her across the snowy walkway to the entrance. A sign posted inside the foyer requested her to remove her boots, so she lined them up on a rack with scores of others, slid her cold feet into a pair of the hotel’s clunky clogs, and scuffed into the lobby. The huge stone fireplace drew her like a magnet. She stood with her back to the fire for a few minutes and took in the ambience—modern, nicely furnished in the bland style of most hotels, and brilliantly lit. The Blu Polar could have been located anywhere in the world except for another sign that was posted on the wall above the front desk.

  To all our guests, the risk of polar bears

  in the restaurant isn’t very big

  So can you please hang your weapons

  in the weapons cabinet?