The Cold Edge

by Trevor Scott

  He started walking again. “I don’t give a shit if you shot them outta the sky. Find them. And get me what they’ve found.”

  “Sir, how do you know they found it?”

  Oberon stopped again, this time looking into the store window reflections for the tail he could feel somewhere behind him.

  “Trust me. Jake Adams found it. Now you find him and what’s mine pronto.”

  “Yes, sir.” The man hung up.

  Shaking his head, Oberon shoved his satellite phone into a fanny pack, zipped it, and swung it to the back of his waist. Then he walked toward his favorite coffee shop.

  ●

  Two blocks back and across the street, Colonel Reed gazed around the corner of a brick wall at the entrance to a narrow alley. Keeping up with the little man was never a problem, but doing so without being caught was nearly impossible. It was if the man had a sixth sense about being followed, turning around like a spastic absent-minded professor who had lost his way. But Oberon’s moves were all calculated. Reed knew that Victor Petrova had not only been highly trained by the old KGB, he had actually written the book for them on counter surveillance.

  Now the little spy had ducked into his favorite coffee shop, and the colonel guessed he would be there for a while.

  He was suddenly startled when one of his phones vibrated in his coat pocket. Right side. That would be his satellite phone. Only two people had that number.

  Answering with a simple, “Yeah,” the colonel waited.

  “I was nearly killed today.”

  “Nearly? That’s a weekly occurrence for you, Jake. Where the hell are you?”

  “How’d you know? Seems like hell has frozen over.”

  The colonel kept his eyes open for anyone near him. The streets were not super busy, but he still needed to stay at the top of his game.

  “So, where are you?” the colonel repeated.

  “Where you sent my dumb ass. Spitsbergen.”

  “What’s that noise in the background?”

  “The pilot is fixing a fuel line. Someone got a lucky shot. You don’t seem surprised by this.”

  The colonel cleared his throat. “Where exactly are you? And did you find our old friend?”

  “Yeah, I found Steve. He was dead just like we guessed. Of course he’s been frozen solid for more than twenty years.”

  Their signal was starting to break up and the colonel guessed it had something to do with his proximity to the buildings. So he started walking toward a small park a block away.

  “And then someone started shooting at you?”

  “Yeah, I don’t have much time for small talk. The shooters were in another helo. I’ve got the specifics. Remember this.” Jake told him the tail markings, model and paint scheme.

  “I’ll check into it. Can’t be that many helos on Spitsbergen.” The reception had improved as the colonel reached the open park.

  “Listen, colonel,” Jake started and stopped, breathing into the phone heavily. “What have you failed to tell me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know damn well what I mean,” Jake screamed. “Tell me about the frickin’ box.”

  “My God, it’s true. Do you have it?”

  “It had biohazard written all over it,” Jake said. “Why the hell would I keep that?”

  “You didn’t leave it at the site.”

  “What’s in it?”

  The colonel swiveled his head around, hoping nobody had him under sound surveillance. “Tell me you have it?” he whispered loudly.

  “I’m not a complete idiot, colonel,” Jake said. “Do you really think I think you sent me all the way to Bumfuck, Norway to find a frozen friend? Christ, I might have been drinking too much recently, but that doesn’t mean I’m entirely brain-dead.”

  “All right,” the colonel said. “No bullshit. You have it right?”

  “What’s in the damn box?”

  The colonel thought for a moment. Jake had a right to know what he was into, but what he didn’t know might be as important as what he did know. “It’s a weapon the old Soviets developed.”

  “What kind of weapon?”

  “Don’t know for sure. But I heard it was based on the nineteen-eighteen flu virus. Modified somewhat.”

  “Jesus. That killed millions.”

  “Between fifty and a hundred million. Over seventeen million in India alone.”

  “But don’t we have a way to fight that now?”

  “It depends on how they have modified the virus, or if they can catch it before it spreads too rapidly. But remember, back in nineteen-eighteen the main form of transportation for worldwide travel was by boat. Steam ship. It took a month to cross the Atlantic. Now, assuming best case, or worst case, depending on your perspective, the number of people traveling during any given week is astronomical compared to back then. More travel today in one day than traveled in an entire year back then.”

  “So, I should destroy it,” Jake said.

  “No.”

  “It’s heavy, I could drop it into the ocean and it will sink like a rock.”

  “No.”

  “Or I could just leave it buried in a glacier,” Jake said. “Tell no one where I put it.”

  “No.”

  “What is wrong with you?” Jake asked him. “This could be the most deadly virus in the world. Why would we hang onto it?”

  Silence. Colonel Reed’s eyes shifted around the small park for any sign of danger. Finally, he said, “Our government needs it, Jake. They want to try to come up with a vaccine. This is probably not the only sample of the virus from those old days. What if it gets into the hands of terrorists and they unleash it on the world? We need to have a way to ramp up a vaccine. If we have a head start.” His words hung in the damp air.

  “I’ll bring it to Oslo,” Jake said.

  “Keep me informed along the way,” the colonel said, and hung up the SAT phone, returning it to his right jacket pocket.

  Looking around, Colonel Reed wondered what his little friend was up to now. He guessed that Oberon thought he was at least one step ahead of him, maybe two. But that would have been a false assumption. He smiled and stepped off toward a taxi. Time to leave Stockholm and the land of tall narcissistic blonde bimbos and head to Oslo. At least the women weren’t so damn self-centered.

  ●

  A few blocks away in the coffee shop, Oberon sat at his normal corner table sipping a cup of cappuccino, swirling his cell phone around on the hard wood surface. He wasn’t concerned about being in front of the window, because the last attempt on his life was only a ruse to impress his American friend. He needed to keep the good colonel on his toes and looking over his shoulder. The more he looked behind him the better chance he would not see something coming from the front or sides.

  As the phone jangled an ABBA tune, he smiled and stopped the spinning.

  “Yeah?”

  “He followed you to the coffee shop. Then he had a long conversation with someone on his SAT phone in the park.”

  “Good work. Where is he now?”

  “In a taxi a couple of cars in front of us. Looks like he might be heading back to his hotel.”

  “All right. Stick with him and keep me informed.”

  “Will do.”

  Oberon flipped the phone shut and gave it another spin on the table. Then he smiled again and finished the last of his coffee. A long talk on a SAT phone? He must have gotten an update from his man, Jake Adams. Which means his chopper didn’t go down in the ocean off Spitsbergen. Time to take a more active role.

  11

  Jake had just gotten off the phone when Kjersti closed the side panel below the engine. She had found a small leak, but enough of a hole to lose far too much fuel to allow them to return to Longyearbyen without repairing it.

  Kjersti had expertly dropped the chopper down out of the fog bank, found a fifty foot ceiling above the icy ocean, and had expertly flown just above the white caps to a small glacial point at the edge
of a deep fjord, setting down on the hard surface to find the fuel leak.

  Anna had not found the flight particularly comforting, and had almost not made it out of the side before throwing up with great ferocity. Jake wondered how she even had that much in her, since they had only eaten power bars, smoked salmon and water over the past twenty-four hours.

  While Anna lay in the helo and Kjersti fixed the fuel line, Jake had wandered off and made the SAT phone call to Colonel Reed. He was disturbed now with the revelation that the box likely contained a deadly flu virus, modified even more to kill with greater efficiency. How the hell could the Soviets do such a thing? And did the Russians still maintain a program and the virus somewhere in that country? Worse yet, perhaps, was the possibility that the American government wanted the virus for more than just defensive purposes. He didn’t know who to trust. Colonel Reed had always been a straight shooter in the past, but he had sent him on this wild goose chase. Why hadn’t he just told him the truth from the beginning? Why use the ruse of finding an old friend to entice Jake into going here? That was easy. If Jake had known he was going to Spitsbergen to find a deadly weaponized virus, would he have been so eager to go? Hell no.

  So the good colonel had played him. But what about his other good friend, Kurt Jenkins, the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had to know there was more to this box of biohazard than he was saying. At least Colonel Reed final came clean. Christ, he should just dump the damn thing in the ocean. But then it would eventually decay and do who knows what to the marine life. Maybe they’d end up with a fish flu that would kill off the entire salmon population. Damn, he liked salmon.

  “What’s up?”

  Jake turned and saw Kjersti standing ten feet away, her hands on her thin hips. “I called in and said we’d be late for dinner. Get her fixed?”

  She swept some hair away from her face with the back of her hand and said, “Yeah. Good enough to get back to Longyear.”

  “Great. What about our friends?” Jake gazed out onto the misty ocean for a second. When he looked back, he was staring at a .44 magnum revolver.

  Neither said a word.

  “Let me guess,” Jake said. “You work for them.” That wasn’t right or they wouldn’t have shot at her. What the hell was going on?

  “Who are you?” Kjersti asked him.

  “We told you. We’re just here looking for our old friend. We found him. Now we’re heading back. Fun in the Arctic.”

  “You were CIA,” she said, “and have worked with the Agency many times over the past decade.”

  “You seem to know me better than I know me,” Jake said, a cold edge to his words.

  She continued. “And your girl friend works for Interpol.”

  He strained to keep his eyes on her. “So. We have day jobs. What’s your point?”

  “I want to know what you found back there,” she demanded.

  “You’re just my taxi driver,” he said. “I give you my locations and, if you don’t piss me off too much, throw a tip your way. Now, with the gun pointed at me, you might kiss that goodbye.”

  “You’re incredible.”

  “Anna seems to think so.”

  With her name mentioned, there was a soft whistle from behind Kjersti, who swiveled her head and saw Anna pointing one of the rifles at her back.

  Jake stepped over and took the pistol from Kjersti’s hand. “If you plan on pulling a gun on someone, make sure you have your back to the sun and nobody can sneak up on you. Since there’s no sun to be seen, you only had one thing to remember. Didn’t the Norwegian Intelligence Service teach you that?”

  “How did you know?” Kjersti asked, her tone dejected.

  “You just told me.”

  “You were bluffing?”

  “Kind of. But we were tailed from our hotel to the Oslo airport. That was one of your NIS men. Then our hotel room, which I changed at the last minute, was bugged while we ate dinner. A man watched us while we ate, but I’m guessing he wasn’t NIS. Nor was the bug. It was not the type your government purchased.”

  “How do you know?” Kjersti asked him.

  “Because I consulted with NIS, the Swedish Security Police, SAPO, and the Danish Security Intelligence Service on covert communications a few years ago. I told them what to buy. This bug was good, but it was former East Bloc. About a decade old.”

  “They told me to watch out for you. That you were good.”

  “Why were you sent with me?”

  “For that reason. We heard something was going down at Svalbard. When we found out the Agency was sending you, we assumed something big was happening here. Since I had flown tourists here during my summers in college, I was the natural choice. We knew you’d need a ride.”

  “The Agency didn’t hire me,” Jake protested.

  Anna lowered her gun, took a few steps forward, and said, “So then your government has been tracking us by GPS the entire time.”

  “We’ve been trying,” Kjersti said. “But, as you know, the Borealis that screwed up our SAT Comm has also messed with our GPS tracking.”

  “I noticed,” Jake said. “Had to wait until this morning to get a good location on Steve’s body.”

  “Can you tell me what the hell is going on?” Kjersti asked. “Why are these people trying to kill us?”

  “I have a better question,” Anna said to Jake. “Tell me about the box in your backpack. The one with the biohazard symbols and the Russian letters. What’s up with that?”

  Kjersti’s eyes widened as her gaze shifted from Anna to Jake.

  He didn’t want to get either of them involved with this. Just wanted to get back to Longyearbyen, fly to Oslo, fly separate from Anna back to Austria while he took care of the rest of this case, but now that she knew about the box, there would be no denying her into this game. After all, this was her area of expertise at Interpol.

  Jake explained what he knew about the biohazard box. When he was done, the three of them stood around like high school kids, kicking snow and wondering what to do.

  Kjersti was the first to speak. “This is crazy. Why would the Soviets just leave it here? Why not come back? Especially after losing four KGB officers and a fighter pilot.”

  That was the burning problem stuck deep in Jake’s gut. There had to be a reason to leave it there, but he still had no clue why.

  Anna looked to Jake for answers.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “The cover story is that the pilot tried to defect. We know that’s probably bogus. But what if it was actually true? What if the pilot was part of some conspiracy to ship the virus out of the Soviet Union? Maybe the authorities were not entirely sure about his actions or what he was planning. When he crashed, they sent a sanitation crew to make sure he was dead.” Jesus he wasn’t sure he believed that scenario.

  “I don’t know,” Anna said. “The old Soviets would have sent a second crew once the first crew didn’t return.”

  “I agree,” Kjersti said.

  “Afraid I do too,” Jake conceded. Then it came to him. “Unless someone with enough power cancelled the operation and destroyed all evidence of the event.”

  Kjersti shrugged and Anna nodded her head in agreement.

  Jake continued, “Then the cover-up was on. If they sent another crew, that would have forced us to send another crew to counter them. But you forget about it, and like my friends at the Agency told me, say it was simply a defection gone bad, then both sides can write it off as a horseshit op and move on. Besides, as far as we know, the actual location of the downed plane was never relayed back to Washington or Moscow. They would have had to start over from scratch. And, according to the weather reports from that time, it didn’t stop snowing for nearly two months, completely encasing the MiG into the landscape. In fact, as you saw, the crash site appeared to have been undisturbed in more than twenty years.”

  “Except for the animal predation,” Kjersti reminded Jake. “But it looked like some of that came years ago. Perhaps
just after they were killed.”

  “Right,” Jake said. He thought of his old friend, Steve Olson, and how he would probably become polar bear bait in the next few weeks.

  Anna swung the rifle to her shoulder. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Exactly,” Kjersti said. “What do we do with the box?”

  That was the problem still rumbling in Jake’s gut. It would be irresponsible to simply leave it behind. If some bird caught the virus and then passed it on to another bird and then to a human, and that human passed it to another. He didn’t want to think about him having unleashed a pandemic virus, with deaths in the millions.

  Jake let out a quick breath and said, “We’ll have to get a hold of some guanidinium thiocyanate to inactivate the virus before transport.”

  “What is that?” Kjersti asked.

  Anna said, “It renders the virus inactive without killing its structure. So scientists will still be able to study it to possibly synthesize a cure or a vaccine to fight it.”

  “Why not just destroy it and call it done?” Kjersti asked, her gaze shifting from Anna to Jake.

  “Just in case,” he said. “In case the Russians still have a stockpile of the virus in some lab. We have to assume that this is only a small representative sample of the virus.”

  “I’m so stupid,” Kjersti said. “I didn’t even think about that possibility.”

  “It’s why our military handles most of the testing and storage of these viruses. It’s more for defense than offense. We never know what might get out there. I’ve been ordered to turn this over to the American government. Nobody else can properly handle this.”

  Kjersti’s disposition seemed to fade. “Well let’s get you two back to Longyearbyen as soon as possible.”

  “No,” Jake said. “They’ll be waiting for us there. We need a Plan B.”

  12

  Oslo, Norway

  They had followed the little guy, Gary Dixon, all over the city, as he met with various contacts, most of equally diminutive stature. Jimmy McLean had stayed back now as his associate Velda Crane had taken the lead. But Jimmy didn’t like laying back in the shadows. He wanted to be out front taking charge. Yet, he knew there were times when he had to give up control. He had taken photos of those Dixon had contacted and sent them to London for identification. Nearly all of them had records of underground activity, most of them jacked for petty crimes. But the disturbing fact had been their nationalities—everything from Norwegian to Swedish to Danish and even Russian. What did they all have in common, other than the obvious fact that most were also little people? Jimmy McLean had no idea there were so many small folks running around—especially with criminal records. Did he simply not see these people on the streets because of his own large stature?