Her right hand began to ache. She wasn’t sure if the pain was from the cold or from hitting Tipton in the mouth. She remembered the chemical warmers she’d bought at the church. She put the flashlight in her pocket, the mitten under her left arm, and dug inside her purse again with her right hand. Pen, pad, iPod. She found a warmer and ripped off the packaging with her teeth. The jerky movement unbalanced her and she grabbed the wall behind to steady herself. When she brought her hands forward again, the mitten and the warmer were gone.
Keep calm, she warned herself. She adjusted her butt and grubbed around for another warmer. This time she was careful. She opened the packet without incident and inserted it into her mittened left hand. She found another, opened it carefully, and tried to squeeze the fingers of her right hand around it. They didn’t want to bend. She forced them into a fist and stuck her fist in her coat pocket.
Tipton moaned. “Can you jump down here and help me straighten my leg?”
It was an effort to hold her revulsion in abeyance. She nevertheless considered whether going down might be an option. There might be an exit somewhere down there. But it was probably plugged by permafrost and, even if she could jump down without breaking her own leg, getting lost in the bowels of an abandoned coal mine was the last thing she needed.
Her neck and shoulder muscles had stiffened and her arms and legs were starting to cramp. “What time is it now?”
“Two-oh-five.”
It was going to be a long two hours. Maybe she could goad Tipton to talk about his crimes. That should keep them from falling asleep. “Why did you kill Eftevang, Tipton?”
“Why should I talk to you?”
“Because you won’t get out of this hole alive without my help.”
For a long minute, the only sound was the idling engine of the stolen car above their heds. Finally, he decided. “I promised him some documents that I downloaded from Valerie’s computer. He was going to name me as his source.”
“That’s it? He didn’t threaten to blackmail you or shake you down?”
“No, but I would’ve been branded a leaker. No one who’s anyone would have trusted me again.”
“Did Zeb Warren or someone in his campaign ask you to dig up dirt on Tillcorp and Sheridan?”
“Promised me a plum job in his administration. A slot at the top. Very inside.”
“How did you persuade Eftevang to come to Longyearbyen?”
“Told him I had something WikiLeaks would go for.”
“What did you tell Mahler and the senators about WikiLeaks?”
“Only mentioned it was possible that WikiLeaks would use Eftevang to publish the Africa rumors. Both of them had a reason to be nervous.”
“What did you intend to leak, exactly?”
“Tillcorp secrets.” His speech began to slow and sound curiously apathetic. “Would’ve tied ‘em up in lawsuits for decades.”
He must be going into shock, she thought. That broken leg would make him succumb to the cold sooner. She would have to keep him talking. “And Tillcorp’s secrets would’ve embarrassed Senator Sheridan?”
“No…political… distance.”
“Between Colt and Tillcorp, you mean?”
“Mmm. Colt would’ve been tarred with the same brush.”
“How did you hack into Valerie’s computer?”
“No…hacking.” He sounded increasingly stuporous.
“Tipton? Tip, wake up. How did you hack her computer?”
A speck of green glimmered in the dark below. “Two-ten.”
“Hold on, Tipton. I’m sure somebody’s looking for us as we speak. Why no hacking?”
“Hmm?”
“You said you didn’t hack Val’s computer.”
“Didn’t have to. She used the same password she’d used when she worked for Whitney.”
“And you found incriminating documents.”
“Hmm.”
“What did they prove, these documents?”
He made a raspy, incoherent sound.
“Tip? The Tillcorp documents, what did they show?”
“Cows and pigs and chickens…”
“What about them?”
“Sick. Tested positive.”
“Positive for what? Was it something the cows were eating that made them sick?”
“GM corn. Some new pathogen. Moving up the food chain. Mov…ing…up.”
“Tipton?” She’d read that people have been known to survive a drop in body temperature to sixty degrees. He couldn’t have dropped thirty-eight degrees this fast. “Tipton! Tipton, listen to me. There’s a chemical warmer down there on the ground somewhere. I’ll shine the light. Look for it and put it in your shirt. It’ll warm you up.” She took the light out of her pocket and shined it around the floor. “I think I see it, Tipton. It’s about two feet from your left leg. Can you…?”
“Said the only way to authenticate the documents was to name the source. Stupid. Had to kill him. Had to…”
“After Eftevang’s murder, did Warren tell you to frame Senator Sheridan?”
“My idea. Way better than a little dirt about sick cows.” He coughed. “No way to spin a murder.”
Dinah’s insides felt shivery. The cold was eating into her bones and her backside felt like a frozen tenderloin. She hugged herself and contracted her glutes. “So you took the e-mail you’d written and you planted it in the room Maks Jorgen had rented. How’d you get the key?”
“Lying on the front desk. Easy-peasy.”
He was playing with the flashlight beam, chasing it with his hands like a baby. She turned it off. “Where are the documents now, Tipton? What did you do with them?”
“Secret.”
“Tell me. I haven’t got anyone to tell.”
But he seemed to be drifting into delirium. She repositioned herself, flexed her neck, and shone the light around the walls again. If she could stand up, her head would be almost even with the opening. And if she could reach up with her arms and gain some purchase, she just might be able to heave herself over the top. It would hurt like hell, but if she made it, she’d be free.
She took one hand out of the mitten, put the light in her mouth, and braced both hands firmly on the wall behind her. Slowly, she lifted her left foot onto the pipe until the heel was almost against the wall. Using her leg strength and scooching her back against the wall, she pushed herself up by inches. As she became more upright, she drew her right leg up and planted her right foot on the pipe. All she had to do now was turn around and hoist herself over the top. She took a deep breath, cautioned herself not to look down, and prepared to about-face.
Her right foot slipped. She threw out her arms, caught nothing but air, and landed hard on her left hip. She felt the pipe give under her weight and pieces of dirt and debris that encrusted it broke off and hailed into the well. She didn’t swallow the flashlight, but she may have chipped a tooth.
“She had a cow,” maundered Tipton, jogged awake by the shower of dirt and stones.
Dinah clung to what was left of the pipe and waited for her heart to clear out of her throat. Keep calm, she reminded herself. Someone will come. She took the light out of her mouth. “Who had a cow, Tipton?”
“Valerie found out I was working for Zeb Warren.”
“You were Warren’s mole inside Sheridan’s campaign?”
“No more bein’ a flunky. Gonna be a top policy advisor in Zeb’s administration.”
The darkest hour is just before dawn, thought Dinah, only dawn wouldn’t come again until mid-February. The cold and the dark began to meld. They were inseparable from each other and from her. No one was coming. A feeling of finality settled over her. This was it. If he was going to die or if she was, she wanted to understand at least one thing. “Why did you shoot me, Ti
pton?”
“Hmm?”
“When I was coming out of the church, why did you shoot me?”
“Didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. Don’t you remember? I was wearing Erika’s parka.”
“Didn’t shoot Dinah. Didn’t…”
“Tipton? Tip, wake up. If you didn’t shoot me, who did?”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind,
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
In a hole that you can’t find?
Dinah had been singing and talking to herself for a long time. Tipton had gone quiet. Nothing she said elicited a response, not that there was much to say at this point. The two of them were about to commit yet another crime in Longyearbyen. They were going to die.
The headlights from the car hadn’t attracted any rescuers and, the longer she waited, the less hope she held out. She had scrunched both her hands into her one remaining mitten and periodically, as her writing hand warmed, she had recorded Tipton’s confession in her notepad. It hardly mattered. Not even the cold mattered anymore. All she wanted was a comfortable place to lie down and rest. She felt like an endurance flagpole-sitter, only her endurance had run out.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind,
She waved her little flashlight around the dark walls in time with the music.
The girl you kissed fell in a hole,
She’s in an awful bind.
Something white swept across the wall in front of her and a shower of snow sprinkled her face. She raised the light into the yellowish face and close-set eyes of a polar bear. It dipped its foot-wide paw into the hole and swiped at her like a cat fishing in a fishbowl.
Wailing Jerusalem! She shrank against the wall. Her eyes dilated on the thick, curved claws. One swipe and she’d be burger. Her nostrils filled with the stench of him but, pretty obviously, she smelled like a yummy snack to him. The bear made a fierce chuffing sound and stretched its long neck and fat paw farther into the hole.
She would jump. If she had to die, all right. She would die. She would break her bones and freeze to death at the bottom of this pit. But she would not, she would not be devoured by a polar bear. Her heart crashed against her chest like a caged thing. Hand shaking, she shone her light into the abyss. Tipton was awake and stirring. He was muttering to himself and taking off his clothes. His parka and sweater had been tossed aside and he was pulling a turtleneck over his head.
“Tipton, are you crazy?”
The bear gnashed its teeth and made a broad swipe with its paw. She leaned as far away as she could without tumbling off her perch and shone her light in the bear’s eyes. They seemed to regard her with a mixture of irritation and interest. Not wanting to appear to challenge him, she turned off the light and averted her eyes.
“Please…” her voice fluted. She cleared her throat. “Please go away.”
“Burning up,” cried Tipton, naked from the waist up and tearing at his pants. It was as if he were preparing his flesh for the polar bear’s pleasure.
What was the matter with him? Carbon monoxide poisoning? Maybe a fire was smoldering in a coal seam down there. Maybe the introduction of oxygen into the pit had ignited a fire.
The bear snarled and bared his fangs. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. She donated every year to the World Wildlife Fund. Didn’t they keep a list? Didn’t she deserve some kind of an exemption? This was her private Ragnarok, an end so outlandish it must have been orchestrated by the gods. She’d always prided herself on having a kind of last-ditch courage, the spiritual legacy of her Seminole ancestors who never gave up and never showed the white feather. But it was one thing to be brave in the Florida sunshine with an edged weapon in your hands and a different thing altogether to be brave in a freezing hole, empty-handed, with a polar bear breathing down your neck.
She remembered the peanut butter cheese crackers she’d been carrying around with her since Honolulu. She reached into her purse, found the package, opened it, and began to throw the crackers up, one at a time. The first two fell down into the well, but the next one made it over the top. The bear retracted his paw. She managed to get another one out of the hole and allowed herself a grain of hope. Maybe he would be satisfied and go away. But in a minute, he came back and began to bounce up and down with his front paws, dislodging chunks of dirt and ice onto her head. She raised her arms to protect herself from the bombardment.
The bear continued to bounce and dig and snort. It must weigh over a ton. What if it fell in on top of them? She prayed it would miss her and land on Tipton.
A barrage of small rocks and ice rained down on her and jumping began to seem like the only alternative to becoming polar-bear chow. She calculated the distance to the bottom. If she suspended herself by her arms from the pipe, it would be only about a five foot drop. In his weakened state, Tipton posed no threat and if the carbon monoxide and the cold didn’t kill her, there was still a chance someone would see the car lights and come to dig her out.
She sat forward and shone the light below her into the pit. Best to swing forward on the landing so as to avoid Tipton’s broken leg. What was that word the kamikaze surfers yelled when they shot the curl? Cowabunga. She slid forward to the end of the pipe.
And then she heard the rumble of an engine. Had the car revved on its own? No. It was a different car. People had come. And barking dogs.
Karelian bear dogs?
The bear snorted and reared up on his hind legs. He towered over the hole. From her vantage point, all she could see was the lower part of his legs. The barking intensified, louder and more frenzied. The bear roared and bounced. Somebody shouted. Shots rang out. A flurry of ice balls hailed down on head.
When the noise stopped, she looked up into the bright, intelligent eyes of Crockett and Tubbs.
Thor’s face appeared between the faces of the dogs. “Dinah? Are you hurt?”
“I’m too cold to know.”
“I’ll have you out in a minute. Hang on.” He turned away.
“Thor?”
He looked back.
“Happy New Year.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Dinah wasn’t really sick enough for the Sykehus, but she had plenty of scrapes and bruises and Nurse Vanya had softened since her last visit. She had recommended that Dinah stay overnight for observation and Dinah didn’t mind the idea of someone clucking over her through the night. Her brush with death had left her feeling nervous and needy and afraid to be alone. She suspected that Vanya was lonely, too. There were no other patients in the hospital and no other staff and it was New Year’s Day. They could keep each other company.
Vanya removed the thermometer from Dinah’s mouth and Dinah asked, “Why would a person take off his clothes in sub-zero weather?”
“It’s called paradoxical undressing. It’s not uncommon in cases of severe hypothermia. I’ve seen it lots of times.”
“What causes it?”
“Doctors say when the peripheral blood vessels become exhausted, they cause a rush of blood and heat to the extremities. A person who’s hypothermic gets confused and fooled into thinking he’s overheated. Hypothermia comes on faster if there’s some other trauma.”
Dinah nodded. In Tipton’s case, there had been big trauma. By the time Thor hauled him naked out of that hole, he looked like a goner. Thor wrapped him in blankets, splinted his leg, and within an hour, he had been airlifted to the hospital in Tromsø. Thor had promised to phone her as soon as he heard any news. She had told him about her discovery of Valerie’s fingernail in the weave of Tipton’s sweater and she’d recapped his confession. Her testimony probably wouldn’t stand up in a court of law. The semi-delirious confession of a man who thought he was having a heat stroke inside
of a freezing-cold mine shaft would be dubious in the extreme.
And the revelation that he hadn’t shot her preyed on her mind. It threw everything into question.
“You were lucky,” said Vanya. “That tosk stole Tobejas’ car. When Tobejas walked back to the Whale after seeing you to the hotel, it was gone. Right away he thought it had something to do with the young man who frightened you. He called his wife to come and get him in the snøscooter and they went straightaway to Thor’s cabin to tell him.”
“It’s very odd for a policeman not to have a telephone.” Dinah didn’t want to criticize the man. He had saved her life. But he’d been missing in action at the climax. If he’d been on duty at the hotel, she wouldn’t have been addled and dragged off into a pit. He should be here right now. She’d told him that Tipton wasn’t the one who shot her.
“Thor has a telephone.”
“Tobejas didn’t think so. He had to drive to his cabin.”
“Ja, but it’s the holiday. Thor wouldn’t turn on his phone for work. He and the other policemen and women have their vacations, too. Three weeks in July and two weeks at Christmas and New Year. It’s the law. I am the, what do you say? The skeleton.”
Dinah smiled. “The skeleton crew.”
“Ja. People who live here want to go south and visit their families. Only the crazy tourists and American politikers want to come here at this time of year.”
A buzzer went off.
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