Hot Ice

by Gregg Loomis

  “‘Reykjavík’ means ‘smoky bay’ in Viking,” Bretta said matter-of-factly. “When they first came here, the steam from the geothermals looked like smoke.”

  “You ever considered a job as a tour guide?”

  She glanced at him quizzically. “Why would I want to be a guide? I am already a police person.”

  Iceland might have the world’s cleanest power, the most confusing phone books, and livestock-friendliest roads; but, if Bretta was an example, it had no sense of humor. But then, there was nothing amusing about living in the dark six months out of the year.

  14

  734 Bústaðavegur

  Reykjavík

  Five Minutes Later

  Landspítali Fossvogi was one of the few contemporary buildings Jason had seen in the city. Six or seven stories high, two wings were divided by a tower of an additional two levels. The car park was half full.

  Bretta pulled up to what Jason guessed was the front entrance and leaned across him to open the car’s door. “I will call the commissioner to tell him you are here. Room 430.”

  Jason barely had time to grab his overnight case, much less thank her for the ride, before she was driving off. He watched her pull into light traffic and disappear in the direction from which they had come.

  Inside, he could have been in any hospital in the world. The smell of disinfectant was edged by the sickly sweet floral odor common to such institutions.

  Flowers?

  In Iceland?

  A highly polished corridor led past a reception desk to a bank of elevators. Ignoring the woman behind the desk who could have been Bretta’s sister, Jason stepped inside the elevator, punched in the button for the fourth floor, and waited until the doors silently slid shut.

  He had no problem finding Room 430. A policeman sat outside the door.

  He stood as Jason approached, barring entry.

  “I’m here to see Boris Karloff. I’m Jason Peters.”

  The officer was not impressed. “My orders are no one sees the man in that room without orders from Commissioner Harvor.”

  Swell. Fly to Iceland to speak to a mystery man I haven’t seen in years about something too secret to discuss over the telephone and some flatfoot blows me off.

  “Just where might I reach the commissioner?”

  “You already have.”

  Jason turned to see a short, chubby man in police uniform extending a hand.

  “Harvor.”

  No other name. Of course.

  “Jason Peters. What’s this all about?”

  The commissioner was standing with his hands clasped behind his back, a pose Jason recognized from pictures of dozens of military men from Grant to Patton to McChrystal. Jason had a mental picture of him practicing the stance in front of a mirror.

  “Wish I could tell you, but the man simply won’t speak to anyone but you. A couple of sheepherders found him at the Langjökull Glacier. Looked like he’d been robbed and shot. His wallet was missing and there was no identification. The only thing we have is the name he gave us and how to contact you through some American company.”

  A mugging at a glacier? Well, this was Iceland, not New York.

  The commissioner read his mind. “I know to an American a single shooting may not seem like much, but here in Iceland, we average less than a murder a year. You’ll notice none of our officers is armed.”

  “Any idea what he was doing at the Lang, er Lang …”

  “Langjökull Glacier. No, as I said, he won’t speak to anyone but you.” Harvor reached past Jason to open the door. “I suggest you ask him.”

  It took a moment for Jason’s eyes to adjust to the dim light inside the room. The blur of a heart monitor danced across a screen, casting flickering shadows across a small white mound under the linen of the only bed. Tubes hung from racks or ran from under the sheets into bottles. Jason drew closer, making out a small head just above the covers.

  No Spock ears.

  The face was older than Jason remembered, eyelids the color of bruises against skin as white as the starched sheets surrounding it.

  “Is he awake?” Harvor asked.

  Eyelids fluttered open and bluish lips parted in a death’s head grimace. It took Jason a second to realize the man was speaking, whispering. He put his head next to the mouth.

  “Peters? Good of you to come.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

  The lips twitched into what might have been a smile. “Still the comedian, I see.”

  It was as if the words had tired him. Karloff’s eyes shut and Jason feared he had drifted off to sleep. He stared at the pale face, unsure what to do next. The eyes flickered open and lips quivered. Jason leaned even closer.

  “The glacier …”

  Boris was struggling with each word. “The glacier … the southwestern …” His next words were unintelligible. Then: “a church …”

  At least, that was what it sounded like he said. A church? Was the man simply mumbling or hallucinating?

  Or Jason had not heard correctly. “Say again?”

  “You will have to leave.”

  A woman’s voice. A very annoyed woman’s voice.

  Both Jason and Harvor turned to see a figure in white fill the doorway: white hair, white uniform, white shoes.

  “I am Elga, the floor nurse and the doctor has not permitted visitors. The patient has been given a sedative and you are interfering with its effect.”

  Harvor said something in a language Jason did not understand though there was no mistaking the tone. “I told her we are on police business,” he explained.

  “I do not care if you are on a mission from heaven. The patient is very weak. The doctor has not permitted visitors.”

  Jason sized up Nurse Elga. The woman was immense. If it came to physically ejecting the tubby police commissioner, Harvor was an odds-on second best.

  Harvor pulled a cell phone from somewhere in his uniform. “How may I contact this doctor?”

  “You may contact him from the hall.”

  The policeman outside stuck his head around the doorjamb, assessed the situation, and disappeared.

  Elga put hands the size of a catcher’s mitt on thighs that would have credited an NFL running back. “Do you require assistance in leaving?”

  Threat, not a question.

  Harvor glanced at the form under the sheets and then at Jason. “I think we better take this up with the doctor.”

  No shit.

  As Jason turned to go, he thought he had somehow snagged his pants on part of the hospital bed. Instead, Boris’s hand was holding on to his sweater’s sleeve as the face on the pillow looked up at him. He was whispering something.

  “You are leaving.” A statement, not a question, from Elga.

  Jason held up a hand: wait. He leaned over, putting his ear next to the moving lips.

  “What?”

  “Cravas, Nigel Cravas.” There was a pause as though Boris was summoning the strength to finish. “British Institute … Tell him, tell him …” A pause. “The … eanies …”

  Jason was not sure what he was hearing. “‘Cravat’? ‘Meanie’? ‘Beanie’?” he asked.

  No good. Elga pulled his shoulders up, inserting herself between Jason and the bed. “You are leaving now.”

  15

  Five Minutes Later

  In the hall, Harvor tried the number the nurse had given him, fuming when he reached the doctor’s voice mail. “These doctors! They think they may come and go as they please! Ever since Iceland’s financial crisis a few years ago when the number of free hospitals was reduced, the doctors have forgotten they work for the state, that they are required to be on call twenty-four hours a day. Shameful!”

  If you think Iceland’s MDs are hard to get in touch with, Jason thought, try an American doc on a weekend.

  “Exactly where is this place where the man in there was found?” he asked the commissioner.

  Harvor was still distracted by
the independence of his country’s medical profession. “In an area of the glacier called Geitlandsjökull, the southern part of the glacier. But why? … Surely you are not planning on going there?”

  “Why not? We can’t get any information from the man in there.” Jason gestured toward the hospital room.

  “But as soon as I can reach the doctor—”

  “Which may be after dark.” Jason glanced out of a window at the end of the hall. “If it gets dark.”

  Apparently despairing of reaching the doctor, the commissioner returned his cell phone to wherever it had come from. “What do you expect to find there?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I don’t know,” Jason replied, “but we sure aren’t finding out by standing around here.”

  “How do you plan to get there? It is a two-hour drive and the rental-car agencies are closed. It is almost midnight.”

  Jason grinned. “I thought you might want to take a look yourself, possibly before the shooter returns.”

  Harvor looked at Jason levelly. “What makes you think he will return?”

  “The man in there, Karloff, whatever his real name is, was trying to tell me something.”

  “Who shot him, no doubt.”

  “Maybe, but I think he was giving me directions.”

  “To what?”

  “We won’t know if we don’t go there. Besides, who knows how long it will be before you have a chance to investigate another shooting in Iceland?”

  Jason’s stomach growled, reminding him that he’d had nothing to eat on the plane. “Is there a place I can get a quick bite around here?”

  “Bite?”

  “Something to eat.”

  “There is a very fine restaurant down the street, serves Icelandic specialties.” Harvor looked at his watch. “May be closed by now.”

  It was.

  Jason tried to ignore his complaining stomach. Reading the menu posted in the window in English and a number of other languages helped assuage his hunger: fresh herring, salt herring, broiled herring, baked herring, fried herring. And, of course, herring croquettes.

  He returned to the hospital, convinced that, in this case, hunger was the better alternative.

  The ride in the Range Rover took closer to three hours actually. They were no more than a few kilometers out of Reykjavík when the road went from four lanes to two to gravel. It was getting dark now, a dusklike light that would be as close to night as the summer months permitted. Other than an occasional truck headed into the city, there was no other traffic.

  Since Jason found it impossible to sleep on airplanes, even in the Gulfstream’s small but comfortable bedroom, he had been awake for more than twenty-four hours. But cars were not aircraft. There was no irrational fear that something might go wrong at thirty thousand feet. The steady sound of the engine, the monotonous hum of the tires on the road were a lullaby. He dozed off, coming awake with a jolt when the car stopped. At first, he was unaware of what he was seeing. The huge white mass shimmering in the twilight seemed luminescent, almost magical, as though an iceberg had floated out of the North Sea and onto land.

  “This is it,” Harvor said, getting out of the car, a flashlight in his hand. “Come, I will show you where the shepherd found him.”

  Jason was thankful for the heavy sweater as he pulled it tighter around him. “You know the location?”

  The policeman stopped, turning. “We may not be as sophisticated as your American police but we do investigate thoroughly, Mr. Peters. The officer who first responded made a map of the location as well as photographs of the scene. Can you see your way without a light?”

  “Not well, but I’d prefer not to turn on the light just yet.”

  “Oh?”

  “In case someone else is in the neighborhood, I’d just as soon not pinpoint our position.”

  Jason could see the gray blur of Harvor’s face as the commissioner stared at him a moment. “As you wish. Mind your step.”

  Jason was doing just that: watching where he placed his feet. The scree left by the retreating glacier made the path treacherous, all the more so because it was difficult to see in the half-light. He was so intent on trying to avoid tripping over the rubble that he was almost upon it before he saw it.

  Something made him look up. Twilight was beginning to fade into the twenty-hour day. Limned against the dove-gray sky of early dawn towered a form vaguely familiar but just out of the reach of Jason’s memory.

  He stopped and the commissioner, hearing no steps behind him, turned around. “What is it?”

  “That rock formation.” Jason pointed.

  Harvor’s voice bore a tinge of annoyance. “There are many rock formations here. The ice cap carves …”

  Jason tuned him out. In daylight, he would have missed it, but in the half dark where sight was not three-dimensional, the silhouette had a square, Romanesque tower above … above … a church!

  He had heard Boris correctly.

  But what had he meant?

  Jason was pointing. “We need to take a look at those rocks.”

  Harvor reached into a pocket and produced a sheet of paper. “I can’t be sure in this light, but it looks like from the map the investigating officer found your friend there.”

  Both men were silent as they climbed the steep slope. Once at the top, they were surrounded by the formation itself.

  “We cannot see without the light,” Harvor observed, stating the obvious. “The rocks will block the natural light until the sun is higher in the sky.”

  An event Jason was unsure took place in these latitudes.

  “OK, let’s take a look.”

  The policeman played the flashlight’s beam across rocks so black Jason guessed the blood from Boris’s wound would be invisible.

  “Can you tell from the diagram exactly where in this stone jumble he was found?”

  Before Harvor could answer, something twinkled in the light to Jason’s left. “Play the light over there.”

  The flashlight’s beam revealed a space between two of the huge rocks, a narrow passage. Just beyond, something sparkled. Jason sucked in his stomach and squeezed through.

  From behind him, Harvor protested, “I don’t think I can get through there.”

  The portly policeman was right. “Go around that pillar to your right.”

  As Harvor came puffing up, his light picked up something shiny.

  Jason squatted but did not pick it up. “Looks like a bullet casing. I’d guess nine millimeter.”

  Harvor leaned over. “You have experience in such things?”

  Jason was turning it over with a ballpoint pen, careful not to touch it. Inside what amounted to a roofless room of stone, the ejected shell could not have gone far. The shot must have been fired within a few feet of here.

  He stood, extending he brass shell on the tip of the pen for the policeman’s inspection. “Your investigating officer must have missed it.”

  “Or it wasn’t here when he was,” the cop offered defensively.

  How many Icelanders own handguns, Jason thought, let alone went about firing them indiscriminately?

  But he said, “You might want to keep that in case there are partial prints on it.”

  Harvor looked at him suspiciously, his expression now visible in the increasing light. “You did not answer my question, Mr. Peters: You have experience in such things?”

  “I watch Law & Order.”

  Harvor was clearly making a decision as to whether to let the matter rest as Jason slowly turned around, his eyes searching the stone chamber. Wordlessly, he took the flashlight from the policeman’s hand, shining it across the face of the rock that surrounded them.

  There was a noise Jason could not believe he was hearing. It sounded like, but could not be … a cell phone’s beep. Following the persistent chirps, Jason came to a crevice that gave back the light from his flash. In one step, Jason was reaching into it. His groping fingers touched something cold, metal that had absorbed the ambient t
emperature of the brief night.

  His hand closed around it and he drew it out. A cell phone.

  He flipped it open. “Yes?”

  The reply was both distinctly British and, equally certain, irritated. “See here, Karloff! We are not paying you to ignore our calls. I’ve been trying to reach you for hours!”

  “I’m sorry,” Jason mumbled, trying to imitate Boris’s voice. “I’ve been busy. I—”

  The tone went from annoyed to wary. “You’re not Karloff. Where is he?”

  “Er, indisposed at the moment. With whom am I speaking?”

  There was a moment of silence before the phone went dead. The tiny screen displayed a number Jason recognized as being somewhere in the British Isles. He committed it to a memory long ago trained to recall names, words, and numbers.

  “Who was that?” Harvor demanded.

  “Someone who clearly didn’t want to speak with me.”

  “He gave no name?”

  “That is correct.”

  Harvor reached for the phone. “We can determine the source of the call.”

  Reluctantly, Jason handed it over as he stuck his other hand back into the fissure. This time he touched another, much smaller, piece of metal and what his fingers told him was a piece of string. No, a twig.

  Harvor extended the hand not holding the phone. “Those, too, Mr. Peters.”

  “And I will take both those and the cell phone,” said a voice.

  Harvor and Jason turned to see a man holding a gun. His face could have been the surface of the moon it was so pocked with scars. Acne? Jason thought he recognized the black matte polymer of a Russian made GSh-18, the original, if brief, replacement for the Makarov as the standard Soviet military sidearm. The fact the man had his finger curled around the square trigger guard instead of the trigger itself reminded him the weapon had a Glock-like safety that was automatically released when the trigger was squeezed.

  The stranger was no amateur.

  “Unless you are a police officer, you have no permit for that weapon,” Harvor said with a huff. “You can be sent to prison for even possessing such a thing.”

  Jason didn’t take his eyes from the stranger. “I don’t think he’s overly worried about the possibility. I’d suggest you do as he asks.”