by Tom Harper
I stared a while, until the wind rattling the shack walls reminded me I better go. Quam would have a conniption if I didn’t get back.
The day had gotten so dark it turned the ground grey, flat and featureless. Getting home, avoiding the bumps and lumps (and maybe worse) would be a bitch. But if I looked, I could see some not so old footprints breaking up the snow where they’d come out of the shack. I followed them until they stopped at a big dent in the snow near where I’d parked. About right for a snowmobile. And, if you looked, there was the track the snowmobile had made down the mountain, not far from where I’d come up.
I saddled up my snowmobile and followed the line to see where it went – straight back to Zodiac.
Twenty-eight
Eastman
I made it about five minutes in front of the storm. Sky so black, I needed my headlight; wind blowing the ground snow into blizzards that reached halfway back to the clouds. It almost ripped me off the stairs before I could get through the door.
Annabel saw me the minute I got in. So much for sneaking back.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be locked in here with the rest of us?’
‘Nice to see you too.’
I pulled the empty bottle out of my pocket and tossed it to her. ‘You recognise this?’
‘Have you been stealing my dye bottles? There’s no alcohol in them, you know.’
‘I found it up at Mine Eight, near Vitangelsk.’
She shrugged. ‘Not guilty.’
Interesting. ‘Sure?’
‘There’s no glacier up there.’ She looked at my snowmobile suit, covered in a fine frosting of blown snow. ‘You’ve come a long way. I hope Quam doesn’t find out.’
I took off the suit and clipped my rifle in the gun rack. Part of me wondered if I shouldn’t hold on to it.
‘I’ve been on a snipe hunt,’ I told her. ‘Rare Arctic bird, very hard to catch. It’s endangered, actually.’
‘Aren’t we all?’ she said.
With everyone locked up, you couldn’t move an inch without running into someone. Halfway down the hall, I met Greta coming out of the radio room.
‘How’s your leg?’ she asked.
I didn’t know what she was talking about. I slapped my thigh; I must have looked like some kind of idiot. ‘Leg’s fine.’
‘Your telescope. The strut.’
‘Right.’ The lie was so old I’d forgotten it. ‘All fixed. Thanks.’
At the best of times, Greta has a way of looking at you like you don’t exist. Just then, I was certain she saw straight through me.
‘Can I have my bolt cutters back?’
‘I’ll drop them by the shop when the storm’s over.’
‘Quam wants you.’
I bet he did. Quam’s the kid who jerks off, then lies awake all night praying his dick won’t fall off. Ever since I left, he’d have been wishing he hadn’t let me go, worrying how it would look if I got buried by an avalanche or eaten by a bear.
‘I’ll say “hi” when I have the chance.’
I went into my lab before anyone else could grab me. I had a lot to do – but most of all I needed to think. I sat at my desk, listening to the wind howl through the masts above my room. It snapped off pieces of ice and scattered them on the roof, right over my head. It made a sound like a kid tipping out a box of Legos.
There’s an innocent explanation for everything, if you shut your eyes tight enough. But I wasn’t after innocent explanations.
I started with what happened to Kennedy and the big guy in the yellow coat who chased him up the cableway tower. I believed Malick when he said it couldn’t have been one of his people. He was as surprised as me: the antenna, the mine, the cableway. If he was one of the bad guys, he could have shot me when he had the chance. Or let me break my leg falling down a coal hopper in the cableway station.
It had to be someone at Zodiac.
It wasn’t me or Kennedy. After the scene in the cave, Ash crying over a dead bear, I doubted it was him. That left Quam, Fridge, Annabel, Greta and Jensen.
I wrote them all down on a sheet of paper, thought a minute, then put Anderson on the list. He said he’d been in bed all day, but had anyone seen him? Unlikely he’d have made it out, with his head so banged up, but unlikely isn’t impossible.
After another minute, I drew a line connecting Anderson and Greta. I remembered the way they’d both raced off the day he arrived. They’d found Hagger’s body, no doubt about that. But was he dead when they got there?
I added Hagger’s name, off to one side, and put a line between him and Anderson. Then another one between Hagger and Greta. Everyone knew he’d been screwing her.
I’d made a triangle. I sat back and wondered what it meant. Loose ice jittered across the roof. I began to wish I hadn’t asked Greta for the bolt cutters. Had she guessed why I wanted them? Did Anderson know who’d taken his key?
I got out my laptop and opened up the sample I’d grabbed from the antenna. I ran it through some software, cleaning it up and zooming in. Even in that short clip, there was a hell of a lot of data going through the pipe. It took some work, but I had the tools, and the closer I looked the more I recognised repeat patterns in the signal. That gave me an idea what I was looking for.
1010211201020012010201110212.
I was back where I began. The same pattern I’d snatched out of the air before. Now I knew where it went to, at least. I ought to compare it with the original intercept. Except, I’d left that with Tom Anderson.
I stared at the triangle on my paper again. Hagger – Greta – Anderson. Why did Anderson come here? Why did it all go to shit the moment he arrived?
I wrote down another name, Luxor Life Sciences, and drew a dotted line connecting it to Hagger. Biology – biologist. After a minute’s thinking, I added a question mark next to the line.
Companies leave records. I opened my browser and searched for Luxor Life Sciences. The storm made the connection run slow, like the dark ages of dial-up. I clocked it at nearly two minutes before the search results came up.
None of them looked like the magic bullet. No corporate website or Wikipedia entry. I clicked on one of the links at random, then stood. I could get a cup of coffee while it loaded.
Something hit the roof so hard, the whole room shook. I ducked. I heard more thuds, ringing on the steel roof like footsteps. Some monster piece of ice must have broken off of something.
The screen flashed. ERROR – THE CONNECTION WAS LOST.
I hit ‘reload’. After a long wait, the machine flashed up the same message again. I tried my email. Couldn’t connect. That bump must have knocked out the communications antenna.
Fuck.
‘Bad day?’
Kennedy came in and sat down on my spare chair. He was holding a piece of paper.
‘Where have you been all day?’ he said. He sounded pissy. Jesus, it was like being thirteen again.
‘Did something come up?’
‘I should say so. Anderson worked out Hagger’s password. He checked his email.’
That might be something I could use. ‘And …?’
He handed me a printout. ‘We found this.’
The header said it was to Hagger, from some guy at Cambridge University. Not that you can always trust an email address. The subject said, bold letters, URGENT – NATURE – RETRACTION.
‘Read it,’ said Kennedy.
Dear Martin,
In view of our friendship, I’m writing to you in confidence. Whatever you’ve done, I want to offer you the chance to withdraw the paper voluntarily. If not, I will write to Nature and insist they retract it.
There was a whole lot more, which I scanned. All I saw was science stuff: chemicals, concentrations, shit I haven’t thought about since AP Chem. The point seemed to be that Hagger had faked the data on a big research paper.
‘I don’t get it,’ I told Kennedy. If Hagger was a fraud, that wasn’t irrelevant. But it wasn’t a smoking gun, either.
‘The time-stamp.’ He pointed to the top of the page. ‘This came in at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning.’ He dragged me down the corridor to the front door and flipped open the field log. ‘You see?’
I read what he wanted to show me. ‘Hagger left the base at nine a.m. So, he never saw the email. So what?’
Kennedy hustled me into the pool room. ‘I spoke to Quam two days ago. He knew about all this, Hagger’s problems, the retraction.’
‘Wasn’t it common knowledge?’
‘That Hagger had been having problems with his data, yes. But a wholesale retraction from the world’s most prestigious journal? That’s a whole different kettle of fish. And look at the message. He says he’s writing in confidence.’
‘You know what academics mean when they say “in confidence”. It means they didn’t post it on their blog. Anyhow, Quam has the administrator password for the whole Zodiac network. He can read anyone’s emails.’
‘That’s it!’ Kennedy thumped the side of the pool table, like I’d just answered the million-dollar question.
‘You want to explain?’
‘When I saw Quam on Wednesday, he told me about the retraction. But he also said he’d brought it up with Hagger. “I told him to his face I was sending him home.” Those were his exact words. “I told him to his face.”’
He was looking at me like he expected the light bulb, like he’d given me everything I needed.
‘Tell me in words of one syllable.’
‘The email came in at eleven a.m. Quam read it, using his master password, and was so shocked he confronted Hagger about it.’
I got it. ‘Except Hagger had already gone up to the glacier.’
‘And never came back.’
I stared at him over the pool table, spinning a ball in place. A heavy gust of wind hit the outside wall. The Platform shivered.
But it wasn’t so cut and dried. ‘Quam was around that afternoon. There’s no way he could have gotten up to the Helbreen and back again in time. Not without the helicopter. And Jensen was out all day.’
Our eyes met. Jensen had already lied once about what he did that day, we both knew it. What if he hadn’t come completely clean?
‘We need to talk to Jensen.’
Twenty-nine
Eastman
First, we checked the logbook again. It had been a busy morning, last Saturday, but not so busy you’d lose track. A few lines down from when Hagger left, there was Quam, signing to go check a seal colony at Nansen Bay. Out: 11:30. In: 14:00.
‘Enough time to get to the Helbreen, if he had the helicopter.’
I found Jensen in the mess, helping the others get ready for Thing Night. With so much time on their hands, they’d really gone to town. Someone had taken a bucket of dry ice from one of the labs to make fog, which they were testing out. They’d even made a cardboard cut-out of the Thing himself and painted it nice and lifelike, seven feet tall and green skin. It looked a lot like a recycled Frankenstein’s monster.
‘You think Quam will make us watch the John Carpenter version?’ I heard Fridge say. Several people laughed like they’d been thinking the same thing.
I guess you’ve seen The Thing, Captain? The John Carpenter one from the early eighties, probably. It’s about a badass alien that crash-lands in Antarctica. It eats the staff at a science station one by one, then takes their shape, so you can never tell who to trust. But it’s a remake. The original was an old Howard Hawks black and white movie, and that one’s set in the Arctic.
There’s also a crappy remake from a few years back, but no one cares about that. To be honest, I prefer the John Carpenter one. It’s in colour, the effects are better, you get Kurt Russell, and snow looks like snow whatever caption they put on the screen. They filmed it in Alaska, for Chrissakes. But saying that at Zodiac is like coming to Fenway Park in a Yankee cap. They take it seriously. Thing Night’s the biggest party of the year, and it’s got to be the Arctic Thing.
I circled the room slowly so I wouldn’t look like I was targeting Jensen. By the fireplace, I found Greta up a ladder hanging a tinfoil spaceship from the ceiling.
‘The Internet’s down,’ I told her.
She nodded. ‘You can go out and fix it.’
I took a look at the weather readout on the monitor in the corner. The wind speed clocked in at a hundred kilometres an hour. Not a good time to go crawling around rooftops.
‘I’m good. I have my emergency porno stash.’
I moved on. Jensen was in the corner, surrounded by the female students. He was an attractive guy: surfer looks, sexy accent and a cool occupation. The closest thing to a rock star we had at Zodiac.
‘Kennedy wants a word,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Something to do with Trond.’
He looked sad to be dragged off, but he didn’t argue. I followed him out, slow enough so I didn’t look like I was following him, and came into the medical room just in time to hear Jensen saying, ‘Bob said something about Trond?’
‘Trond’s fine.’ I stepped in and closed the door. ‘Tell us about Quam.’
Jensen moved for the door. I leaned against it and crossed my arms over my chest.
‘That day Hagger died. You were flying Ash around looking for polar bears.’
Jensen looked from me to Kennedy, like a man who’s heard footsteps in a dark alley. ‘That’d be right.’
‘And you left Ash at Vitangelsk for a couple of hours.’
‘Yeah, I told you. What—’
‘Where’d you go?’
‘Checking fuel caches.’
It was what he’d said last time. I didn’t really think about it then; I should have seen the lie right away.
‘How much does one of those fuel drums weigh? Three hundred and some pounds? Lot of weight for one man to cart around.’
He didn’t say anything. Like all pilots, he was cocky as hell, but not then.
‘You came back here and picked up Quam.’ I didn’t make it a question. ‘You flew him to the Helbreen to speak with Hagger. The only thing I want to know is, did you help him push Hagger in the crevasse, or did he do it himself?’
‘That’s absurd.’
‘Then why don’t you tell us something that makes sense?’
No answer. He looked at me, and he looked at Kennedy. He ran his fingers back through his hair. I just kept staring at him.
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘We just need to get it clear,’ said Kennedy. Irish accent: he was made to be the good cop. He offered Jensen a breath mint. Nice touch.
‘Quam called in straight after I dropped Ash. He wanted to find Hagger on the Helbreen. I took him up and they had a conversation.’
‘Did you hear what they said?’
‘I stayed in the helicopter.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘Quam came back. I brought him home. Then I went to pick up Ash.’
‘Was Hagger alive when Quam left?’
Jensen sucked on the mint. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you see him?’
‘Look, I had plenty to do. If I’d known Hagger wouldn’t come back, I’d have paid more attention. Taken a picture or something.’
‘So you didn’t see Hagger alive after Quam had finished?’ Kennedy said.
Jensen looked between us again – trapped. ‘To be honest? I can’t say a hundred per cent.’
‘But you’re not certain you did see him?’
He shook his head.
‘Then why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Soon as we knew what happened – when Greta called in – Quam got me into his office. He said he knew it was awkward, but he didn’t want to explain himself because it would start rumours. He said that if the truth came out, why he had to go, that it would make Hagger look bad, and he didn’t want anyone speaking ill of the dead.’
‘Anything else?’
‘He said if I said anything, he’d get a new pilot.’
‘How did he seem when you flew back? In hi
mself, I mean?’ That was Kennedy.
‘Tense. But that wasn’t unusual. You know how Quam is.’
‘The stick’s so far up his ass it almost comes out his mouth,’ I agreed.
Jensen risked a smile. ‘You could say.’
‘Nothing else?’
He thought about it some. ‘Nothing. If there had been, I’m sure I’d have said something.’
‘I’m sure you would have.’
‘I mean, I knew it was suspicious.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m not even sure I didn’t see Hagger still there. When we left. I might have done. That’s why I wouldn’t have said anything.’
I could see his conscience rewriting history. I wouldn’t get anything else reliable from him. I stepped aside from the door.
‘That’s helpful, thanks.’
Jensen almost tore off the handle he was so happy to escape. Then he paused, troubled.
‘You really think Quam could’ve …?’
I shook my head and smiled. ‘Not at all.’
‘But he must have done it.’ Kennedy barely waited until the door was shut. ‘Everything fits.’
I could have punched his fat face. ‘Shut up,’ I told him. ‘If this is right, you think we want to be talking about it ten feet from Quam’s office?’
Kennedy flushed. ‘Is anywhere safe?’
I looked at my watch. ‘It’s nine p.m.’
‘Is that relevant?’
‘Let’s go get a mag reading.’
The mag hut is maybe a hundred-yard walk. It took us ten minutes to get dressed; by the end of it, we looked like spacemen. Hat, hood, goggles, face mask. We didn’t take rifles. We couldn’t have brought them in the mag hut, and if we put them down we’d never find them again. I figured polar bears are too smart to be out in a storm like that.
I checked the weather screen by the door. The temperature was -40˚. The wind speed read zero, which was a lie. I could hear it through the door, howling like a dog.
‘It busted the anemometer.’
‘That’s encouraging.’ Kennedy pulled up his face mask so it covered his nose a bit more. ‘Shall we?’