Hanratty tossed a box of tissues from his desk to Taylor. “Clean yourself up and get out to the lab.”
“Make sure you get rid of the evidence,” Cass called as Taylor walked out holding a wad of tissues to his nose. He shot her a dark look as he left.
Hanratty signaled for Keene to close the door, then he came around his desk to sit on the edge. He stared at Cass with a searing, predatory look. “Talk.”
“Talk? About what? About how you’ve been setting us up? Pushing buttons and watching the results while people kill themselves?”
“Start from the beginning. Why were you at COBRA in the first place?”
She struggled to stay calm. “Pete asked me to take Jun’s midwinter dinner out to him since he couldn’t join the party. I tried to follow the flag line out to COBRA, but someone had pulled up and relocated the last dozen stakes and the end was simply . . . fluttering in the wind.”
Hanratty’s eyebrows shot upward and he glanced at Deb. “Catch Taylor and warn him about the flag line.”
She nodded and hurried out of the office, calling after the security chief. Hanratty turned back to Cass. “You’re saying someone sabotaged the flag line? Misplaced it on purpose?”
“No, I’m saying you or someone you ordered to move the flag line did it on purpose.”
“I didn’t. But let’s leave that for a moment. What happened then?”
“I made it to the lab and went inside,” Cass said. “When I called for Jun, there was no answer. I searched the cubes, found an e-mail lying open on his desk supposedly from his wife—asking for a divorce—and a minute later, I found Jun hanging from the top of the dish antenna.”
“And you think Jun killed himself because of the contents of his wife’s e-mail?”
“You mean your e-mail?”
Hanratty sighed. “Jennings, do you realize how delusional you sound? I’m not a wizard, manipulating people so they kill themselves upon my command. If I had that much control, why didn’t I calm down that fracas that you started in the galley? Or smooth things over after the power outage?”
“You don’t have to control a fire in order to start one,” she said levelly. “You’re not interested in containing what you do, you’re interested in studying it.”
He leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “And how do you know that?”
“All of these accidents, all of these crises, they’ve all been just too easily turned on, then turned off when things got out of control. No one saw Sheryl’s body after she died, not even the only doctor on station. The power went out, but was magically restored precisely after the crew had reached an emotional tipping point.”
“And I suppose Jun’s suicide was just another facet of the experiment?”
“Everyone on base has known for weeks he’s been having personal issues at home,” Cass said bitterly.
“So someone wrote that e-mail to push him over the edge. Just to see if he’d kill himself?”
“Yes .”
He blanched. “That’s insane.”
“Any more than faking someone’s death?” Hanratty opened his mouth, but she cut him off. “Look me in the eye and tell me that Sheryl Larkin actually died out on the ice back in February. Look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t turn the power off just to see how they’d react. Look me in the eye and tell me this isn’t all some kind of experiment.”
Hanratty raised his head and quirked an eyebrow at Keene.
“No.” The psychologist shook his head slowly. “It’s not her. She’s saying the right things, but I can’t see any reason for her to storm into the party like she did and hope to get any useful data.”
“Does it make any more sense to arrange for her to find Jun? It amounts to the same result.”
Keene shook his head again. “Not even close, Jack. It’s the difference between being the messenger and observing the messenger. The first would make no sense—being frog-marched to your office for an interrogation is an easily predictable outcome. If she’s the Observer, where does that get her? She’s neutralized and sitting in your office.”
“But the second scenario is logical if he manipulated Cass into starting the panic,” Hanratty said reluctantly. “Then he gets to sit back and record the crew’s reaction.”
Keene nodded. “Exactly. Cass is not our man. Put simply, if she were, she wouldn’t have allowed herself to be brought here to your office.”
“God damn,” Hanratty said softly, looking back at Cass almost fondly. “I really thought it might be her.”
“What are you talking about?” Cass demanded, turning in her chair to try and take in both of them. It was unnerving that Keene continued to stand behind her.
Hanratty ignored her. “Either way, we’ve got a hell of a mess on our hands and we need to contain it. Suggestions?”
Before Keene could answer, there was a knock on the door and Deb stuck her head into the room. Hanratty frowned. “What?”
“Taylor radioed.” Deb tried speaking, couldn’t, cleared her throat. “Jun is dead.”
“Damn it.” Hanratty’s eyes flicked from Cass to Keene and back to Deb. “What’s happening with the crew?”
“People are losing their shit, is what’s happening.” Her voice started high and climbed the scale. “Jack, you need to make an appearance or we’re going to have some major issues.”
“Get Taylor on the horn and tell him to get back ASAP, then head for the galley and help Ayres stabilize things. I’ll join you in two minutes.” The door closed with a soft bump. Hanratty looked at Keene again, his eyes slightly wild. “I need some ideas, Gerald.”
“We need to calm people down and start looking for the Observer. No more tiptoeing. No more pretending we don’t know what’s going on. No more playing within his sphere of influence. I’m not sure we’re dealing with a rational or even sane person. At the rate the situation is escalating, the next test may not only be lethal, it will be widespread.”
“What are the two of you talking about?” Cass demanded.
“What about her?” Hanratty gestured as if she were a piece of furniture.
“She’s volatile and a liability. The Observer obviously used her to spark full-scale unrest among the crew. She’s smart and generally well liked. If you let her run amok among the personnel, she’ll have them burn this place to the ground. We’ll never flush out the Observer then, because we’ll be too busy keeping our heads above water.”
“So . . . ?”
“I think we need to reduce our liabilities.”
Cass turned in her chair in time to see Keene reach into a breast pocket and pull out a flat, black case the size of a cell phone. From it, he withdrew a prefilled syringe, removed the cap, and flicked the barrel to force an air bubble out. Eyes wide, she opened her mouth to scream when Hanratty suddenly pinned her in the chair with his shoulder and knee. Ignoring her yell of protest, he grabbed her right forearm in both of his hands and forced her palm upward, exposing the soft, white underside of her forearm and the blue veins beneath. Cass began screaming as she understood what they were trying to do. She clawed at Hanratty’s neck with her free arm.
“Hurry,” Hanratty said through gritted teeth. “She’s strong.”
Keene stroked his thumb along the vein that stood out from the skin of Cass’s arm, then tried unsuccessfully to push the needle in. “Hold her.”
“I’m trying, goddammit.”
On the fourth attempt, Keene hit the vein and pushed the plunger to its limit. “Don’t let up. This could take a minute.”
Cass screamed insults at them as long as she could but, driven by her slamming pulse, the drug slipped like quicksilver up her arm. Even as she started in on a new round of curses, she felt herself falling away, tumbling through layers of gossamer and spider lace until her head slumped forward on her chest and she was out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Taylor swore loudly and jerked his head up.
Out of long habit, he’d rested his face agains
t his fist as he read over the report he was crafting. But doing so put pressure right below his broken nose, sending streaks of pain followed by dull, but insistent, throbs up into his cheeks, forehead, and eyes.
Gingerly, he explored a spot behind his jaw where he could put his fist so that he could continue with the report. It was doubly irksome because the document had been Hanratty’s idea, not his, a bit of bureaucratic bullshit that the station manager thought might save their asses at trial—if the consequences of what had been done at Shackleton ever made it that far.
It was incredibly frustrating to sit at a desk, writing a report that would never see the light of day, when what they should be doing was getting out into the crowd, cracking skulls and getting in people’s faces. But when he’d proposed the idea to Hanratty, he’d been shot down.
The station manager had the same reaction as so many others Taylor had tried to advise over the years; they mistook his hands-on approach as simplistic bullying. But Taylor wasn’t a Neanderthal and he wasn’t stupid. Sheer physical intimidation wasn’t going to silence the kind of people who came to Antarctica. Pressing a crowd already teetering on the edge into doing things, agreeing to things, that they might normally find difficult to defend . . . well, that was another story.
Early on in his career—fresh out of training, his sheriff’s star still shiny and new, with his security work for TransAnt still years away—he’d learned to use the tactic on prison guards who hadn’t liked some of his more distasteful methods of keeping the general population under control. The formula had been simple. Shove them, alone, into the cage with a three-hundred-pound lifer jacked up on hooch and looking at solitary for six months. Give them a baton or a can of pepper spray. Faced with taking a beating or dishing one out, the whistleblowers suddenly seemed more open to the idea of using violence to maintain order. Once the potential whistleblowers had become part of the so-called problem, complaints to oversight boards and humanitarian agencies simply evaporated. Balance was restored.
It was the reason he’d counseled Hanratty to allow Ayres and Deb into their little circle. If the time ever came when they had to answer for the extreme measures they’d taken to keep order at Shackleton, the very people who’d opposed them and could report on their actions the most accurately were suddenly culpable. Extend the idea out to include everyone on base—whether they were willing participants or not—and your ass was covered. As much as it could be with the clusterfuck that had become this year’s winter-over.
Unfortunately, that didn’t seem likely to happen. Hanratty had convinced himself that all that was needed to salvage the crew’s tattered confidence and flagging morale was a stern, honest talk. The man thought he was some kind of great orator, capable of leading the masses by the power of his voice.
The station manager lacked authority—with a single summer and a disastrous winter under his belt, he wasn’t veteran enough to impress anyone—but more importantly, he didn’t seem to have even a rudimentary feel for people, and more than once Taylor had sensed a bit of false theatricality, as though Hanratty had learned how to lead people from reading it in a book or during a weekend seminar. The possibility that he was a fake scared Taylor more than anything that had happened, because he’d seen what happened when a dangerous population sensed a poser. They turned on you, became a mob, and then there was no getting their trust—or fear—back.
He felt that same danger now that he’d felt walking the halls in lockup. Jennings was the spark that had lit the fuse to the powder keg. A chunk of the crew had stopped working after her performance in the galley, preferring instead to hole up in their berths or hunker down together in labs or workstations to wait. Wait for what, nobody knew, but backing into a corner was an instinctive reaction to danger. The next step was to lash out.
At least he’d convinced most of the operations people to keep going. The cooks and fuelies and other maintenance specialists understood that their collective survival depended on keeping the base running. The scientists, oblivious to the need to keep the infrastructure going, seemed to be the ones who wanted to either pull the blankets up over their heads or come out swinging.
He closed his eyes briefly. It wasn’t anything they couldn’t handle. As long as they could keep the general population calm or at least subdued, they could start splitting individuals off for questioning until they found the goddamned Observer and stopped the next harebrained stress test.
A shout from the outer admin office jerked Taylor’s head up a second time. Several voices, men’s voices, swelled, each trying to be heard over the others. You didn’t have to hear the words to know the emotion: they were angry. He shot to his feet and headed for the door, the report forgotten. He had a feeling that the spark had reached the keg.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
As it probably had for every prisoner in history, the sound of the key turning in the lock woke Cass, pulling her up like a fish from an ocean of sleep.
With her heart thudding like a trip hammer, she rolled to a sitting position, ready to defend herself, attack, or run, not knowing which option was best. The door opened a crack, then widened by cautious inches until Biddi stuck her head into the room like a turtle poking its head out of its shell. “Anyone home?”
“Oh, my Jesus Christ.” Cass almost cried at seeing the familiar moon face. “How glad am I to see you?”
“Loads and loads, I hope,” her friend said, coming into the room and shutting the door behind her quietly. She gave Cass a hug, holding her at arm’s length and looking her over. “You’re keeping well.”
“Jokes? At a time like this?”
Biddi motioned for them to sit on the edge of the bed. “Is there a better time? The bloody world—by which I mean our little microcosm of said here at the South Pole—has gone barking mad. If you can’t laugh now, there’s no hope for you. And, look, they even installed you in the VIP suite. The last person to grace this room was a senator.”
“It’s because it has its own bathroom,” Cass said bitterly. “Not because they want to treat me well.”
“Oh, well. At least it has a queen-sized bed, love.”
Cass sighed. Lovable, unflappable Biddi. But what she needed was information, not a cheerleader. “So, nothing’s changed? They’re not letting me out?”
A look of sympathy said it all. Cass’s heart sank, but it had been a forlorn hope to begin with. Hanratty wouldn’t have sent Biddi to spring her if they’d changed their mind—he would’ve done it himself or sent Taylor or Deb to do it—but she’d had a wild hope that that’s why her friend had showed up.
“So, what are you doing here, Biddi? Not that I’m ungrateful. You’re just taking a risk, is all.”
Her friend jerked a thumb behind her to indicate the rest of the station. “Mr. High and Mighty pulled everyone together for another one of his helpful all-hands meetings in the gym. I listened to the first half then snuck out, recognizing that it was the perfect time to come visit my fellow janitor. The only time, really.”
“No one knows you’re here? How’d you get in?”
Biddi looked at her with pity. “Love, we’re janitors. The first day I came down, I made sure they gave me the keys to every door in the building. Never heard of a master key?”
Cass laughed despite herself. “You’re shitting me. Any chance you could, say, lend me that key for a minute?”
Biddi shook her head. “I’m afraid not. Not because I don’t want to, Cassie, but because . . . where would you go? This place is as good as Alcatraz. Better, really.”
“It would just be nice to have some freedom back.” The mania subsided, replaced by a black anger. “Those fuckers drugged me.”
Biddi’s mouth made an “o” of shock. “I should’ve guessed they would need to do something that extreme to toss you in the hoosegow, but I never imagined they’d actually go through with something so . . . wrong.”
Cass put a hand to her forehead. “I don’t even know how long I’ve been locked up.”
<
br /> “You don’t?” Biddi asked, curious.
“How would I?” Cass said, rubbing her forearm. Aside from bruises where Hanratty’s hands had held her down and the puncture wounds where Keene had fumbled for a vein, there were small red dots near the crook of her elbow. “But judging from this, they kept me under and maybe even stuck an IV in me for a while.”
Biddi looked at her brightly. “Good news, love. You’ve been out for four months. Winter is over.”
“Biddi, goddammit.”
She gave a small, apologetic smile. “You found Jun—poor, poor man—at midwinter’s. Today is the twenty-sixth, so five days.”
“My God.” Now that she had an actual number, a wave of anger and nausea rippled through her body. “I’ve got to get the hell out of here.”
“And I repeat, dear heart, to do what? Go where? When Hanratty or his little minion Taylor catches you in the hall, what will happen?”
Cass shivered. Another needle. And this time, maybe no waking up .
“For right now,” Biddi continued, “they’ve got you locked up, sure, but they can’t imprison you any more than they already have and they can’t keep you any longer than the normal winter-over.”
“They’ve gone over the edge, Biddi. They could dump me in the middle of an ice field just to get rid of me.”
Biddi hesitated. “I don’t disagree with you, Cassie, but—while I think there are some who sided with you when you read the riot act to our esteemed leader—there are others who might feel relieved to hang a scapegoat, if only to have someone to blame. It’s bollocks, I know, but if you sit tight and don’t bring attention to yourself, you won’t give any of them an excuse to do something drastic. You’re safe as houses staying here compared to the madness raging out there.”
“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned it. What’s going on?”
Biddi hunched forward conspiratorially, but she was already whispering. “Things have been falling apart since they tossed you in the dungeon. The things you, ah, mentioned at the midwinter party seemed to hit quite a nerve.”
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