Pandora's Curse - v4

by Jack Du Brul

  “What about your team?” Mercer held his mouth close to Koenig’s ear.

  “Most of them are out with the core drill taking samples. I’m hoping a safety inspector will be sent soon, so I don’t have to recall them and lose a few days of work.”

  “So we’re your sacrificial goats to Denmark’s bureaucracy?”

  Werner shrugged. “I’m sorry. My hands are tied.”

  If he was telling the truth, Mercer could understand Koenig’s position. “All right,” he said. “No sense blaming the messenger.”

  Anika was right in front of him at the boarding ladder when Mercer turned to take perhaps his last look at the camp. If not for traces of cooking smoke rising from the back of the mess hall and the generator enveloped in its own exhaust, the base would have looked completely deserted. The only motion came from the breeze lofting wisps of snow like dust in an old Western movie. Mercer felt like whistling the theme from High Plains Drifter.

  Greta Schmidt caught his eye. She must have said something to her companion because he strode over to the plane, cutting the distance in a few strides. In a burst of vindictiveness, Mercer went up the ladder so the German would have to stand in the buffeting prop wash if he wanted to speak with him. He tapped Anika on the shoulder before the Geo-Research official reached the hatch.

  “Would you save me a seat? I’d like to talk to you.”

  Anika stared at him for a second, a shadow of apprehension behind her fixed smile. “Okay.”

  “You are Philip Mercer?” The German’s accent wasn’t bad, but he spoke in a low, rasping snarl as if afflicted by a terminal case of laryngitis.

  “I’m Mercer.” Neither man made a move to shake hands. There was an instant antagonism between them. It was instinctive, the coming together of two rival animals.

  “I’m Gunther Rath. I recently had a nice talk with Elisebet Rosmunder. She gave me something to give to you. It’s taped to the bulkhead behind the cockpit.” Before slamming the door closed, the man gave Mercer an ugly smile and said, “Have a good flight.”

  What the hell was that all about? Mercer turned to find a seat and slammed into Anika, who hadn’t yet moved from the entrance. She looked terrified.

  “I’m sorry.” He tried to help her to her feet at the same moment the pilot gave the engines a burst of power to begin taxiing. They both fell back into the slush left melting on the cabin floor.

  The pilot’s voice came over the tinny speaker mounted in the ceiling, his Icelandic accent made more unintelligible by the motors’ thunderous bellow. “Sorry about that. With another weather system moving in, I want to get back in the air as quickly as possible. There isn’t even time to unload the supplies we brought.”

  As the DC-3 bounced over the uneven glacier, Mercer fought to get Anika and himself into a seat and belted in. He thought he’d hurt her when they bumped because her normally pale face was as white as the snow outside and her eyes refused to focus. He took her hand and found it quivering.

  “Anika?”

  “I know that man,” she said as if in a trance. “I recognized his voice. I don’t think he realized who I am.” Then she broke out of it. The wellspring of determination he’d seen during the fire in Camp Decade rushed back. Her grip tightened. “Did you get the package from Otto Schroeder?”

  Mercer blinked, stunned that she all but admitted her guilt. “So it was you who searched my room.”

  “Yes,” Anika replied defiantly. “Did you get it?”

  “As a matter of fact I did.” It suddenly occurred to him that she couldn’t know who had sent the package because it hadn’t left his sight since Harry had forwarded it. “How do you know Otto Schroeder?”

  Anika paused as the plane’s skis came unstuck from the ice and the DC-3 strained into the air. “I watched that man back there order his death.”

  GEO-RESEARCH STATION, GREENLAND

  As soon as the hatch closed and the DC-3 began lumbering across the ice, Greta took Gunther Rath by the hand and led him toward her quarters at an urgent pace. He knew by the predatory gleam in her eye what she wanted, and his need surpassed hers. However, now was not the time. He snatched his arm away after a few steps.

  “Later, Greta.” His voice was made harsher by the suppression of his own desires. “We don’t have time.”

  “Yes, we do,” she breathed, her hand reaching for his groin, not caring if others saw. “It has been far too long.”

  “Not for me,” he snapped with intentional cruelty, which only seemed to inflame her more.

  “I’ve had to deal with Werner’s sulking for a week. We’re going to my room right now and you are going to screw me until I can’t walk.”

  “Keep this up and I’m taking you back to your room to slap you unconscious.”

  “You can do that too,” she simpered demurely, reveling in the presence of his overwhelming strength. It was the old game they were playing and invariably she would win. She knew his needs far outstripped hers. And the longer he held out the more violent, and satisfying, was their eventual sex. The heat between her legs grew with anticipation. Touching his groin again, she could feel him swelling.

  This time Rath couldn’t stop himself. He grabbed her by the arm. “Which is your dorm building?”

  Greta knew not to gloat. She lowered her eyes and pointed.

  She wondered who had seduced whom last year when the company Gunther represented negotiated to buy Geo-Research. At the time she had been with Werner for nearly two years, happy, and yet couldn’t explain why she was putting off his marriage proposals. They lived a vagabond existence aboard the Njoerd, working wherever his contracts took them. In all it had been satisfying, but somehow she felt she was being rushed to normalcy. Werner wanted children and a home to come back to from his voyages. Greta had mouthed she wanted those things too and knew she was lying. She didn’t know what she wanted. And then Gunther Rath had come into their lives with a blank check and the promise of noninterference in the company. He’d said purchasing Geo-Research was merely an investment for Kohl AG, a way for them to defer taxes.

  She’d known from the first that the expensive suits he wore hid something far different from his corporate image. He retained the unstudied social disdain of the wanna-be rebels who had thrilled her and her girl-friends as teenagers, but grown-up and with a lot more to offer than exciting rides on shoddy motorcycles and small bags of low-grade marijuana. At that first meeting, when Werner stared wide-eyed at the figures Rath was willing to pay for Geo-Research, Greta found herself showing off. Nothing obvious, nothing that Werner would even detect, but Gunther had known it the way a lion can sense a female in estrus.

  Whenever the three would meet in the weeks it took to sign over the company, Greta had thought she was just playing a game to see how far she could push the flirtation. But like any game without rules, she had to act more brazen to elicit the same animal reaction she’d felt the first day. She believed she was controlling him with her ploys, not once realizing she was manipulating herself into what he wanted. In the end, when she was nearly throwing herself at him, he had finally sought her out, allowing her to think that she had done the seducing. But now, a year later, knowing what their relationship had become, she realized he had gone to her only to prove his dominion. The relationship was almost that of master and slave, and she found herself greedy for any degradation he heaped on her.

  At the dorm, she first made sure the building was empty. A minute later they were naked in her room, with no others around to hear the slaps or the cries of pain and climax. Rath’s practiced hands did not leave marks where they were visible, but it would be a while before Greta could sit comfortably.

  While she cleaned up in satisfied euphoria, Gunther Rath searched for Werner Koenig and found him in the mess hall with Dieter, the rally driver. “What’s the status of the search?”

  Werner looked up, feeling the old pang of jealousy. He could tell by Rath’s expression that he’d just taken Greta. Since the day she’d left h
im, Werner had held out hope that some vestiges of his former lover remained. He knew now that wasn’t the case. Rath had reduced her to nothing more than a vessel for his warped dysfunctions. The once-sweet Greta had become a whore, yet he continued to mourn the loss of the woman who might have been his wife. Making it worse, Rath had insisted she come along on this expedition to be his eyes and ears. Werner suspected that Rath enjoyed this humiliation more than anything else — it was the kind of primitive behavior that would appeal to his Neanderthal mentality.

  “Three teams have been out for a few days now, but as you suspected we are too far south to find anything.”

  “With the others gone,” Gunther said, “we can end this charade and move a portion of the base northward. I passed on the fake weather report to the pilot of the DC-3 so they’ll swing far to the north before turning to Iceland. They’ll never see the rotor-stat flying in to ferry us.”

  “How is that possible? The airship is under tight flight guidelines until it receives its certification.”

  “Because it’s owned by one of Kohl’s subsidiaries. We can do anything with it we want. It should be here in another couple of hours. There actually is a fog prediction for this area that’ll last for at least a day, so moving a building and the ’Cats is going to be tricky. It should be a good demonstration of the airship’s capabilities. With the Surveyor’s Society out of the way, we have two and a half weeks until their replacements arrive and we have to return everything back here.”

  “Damn Danish government,” Dieter said. He was actually a longtime Kohl employee. “If they hadn’t amended our permit, none of this would be necessary. We should have fought them harder when they told us to move our operation to Camp Decade to accommodate the Americans.”

  “If we’d argued they might have barred us from Greenland completely.” By his tone it was clear Rath didn’t want to debate the point again. “Pressure against Kohl in Europe is mounting. We have to find the cavern.”

  Werner didn’t want to hear how the recent buyers of Geo-Research had perverted his company for their own ends. He had agreed to sell at the overvalued price because Rath and a battery of Kohl lawyers had assured him that Geo-Research would continue to operate as it had in the past. He was told they would do nothing to damage the hard-won reputation he’d built for clear scientific research.

  That promise had lasted until this mission, just one year later. Trapped now by a moment of greed, he and Geo-Research were being corrupted by Gunther Rath and his boss, Klaus Raeder, for a mission Werner didn’t fully understand. He had no idea why they were searching for a cavern or what was inside. Nor did he care. He just wanted the operation to be over so they would give him his company back and leave him alone.

  “Werner, you don’t look well,” Rath mocked.

  “I was just thinking how glad I’ll be when you are gone.”

  “It won’t take us long. Once we finish clearing out the cave, our interest in Geo-Research is over. Your company will continue under the Kohl umbrella but in a much less hands-on role.”

  “What happens if you don’t find the cavern before the next team of researchers arrives from Japan?”

  “For their sake, let’s pray we do.” Rath looked out the window in the direction the DC-3 had vanished. “Go make preparations to move a dorm building and Sno-Cats.”

  Bern Hoffmann was stationed in the communications alcove, a pair of sleek headphones covering his ears. He’d just finished rewiring a couple circuit boards and was replacing an access panel at the back of the set. Rath walked over and touched his shoulder to draw his attention. “Have you fixed our solar-max problem?”

  “Just about, Gunther.” While he used Rath’s Christian name, there was subordination in Hoffmann’s voice. Like most of the people at the base, he was actually part of Rath’s security force. “There are legitimate atmospheric problems, but nothing like what we led the Surveyor’s Society to believe. We can communicate with the Njoerd just fine.”

  “And you’re sure the plane’s radios are dead?” While the pilots were outside the aircraft, Rath had watched as the young technician sabotaged the radios.

  “I doubt the pilots will realize they’ve been wrecked until they’re halfway to Iceland.”

  “Which is as far as they’ll get.”

  Anika’s statement extinguished any anger Mercer had been harboring. Even when they were facing the fire in Camp Decade, he hadn’t seen such naked fear. She was like a raw nerve, exposed and pained. By admitting that she had searched his room, he no longer had a reason to doubt her. She hadn’t gotten the name Otto Schroeder from him, which meant she had additional information from another source, information that he needed. He said nothing, studying her with his depthless gray eyes, a patient, nonjudgmental scrutiny that invited her to continue. Emotion continued to play across her face as she struggled to regain her composure. He knew she was deciding how to overcome her natural suspicion and take him in her confidence.

  Only the forward half of the DC-3’s open cabin had seats. The rear portion was given over to cargo, which lay under mesh netting secured to eyebolts in the floor. Mercer and Anika were in the rearmost seats. Forward sat Marty and Ingrid, who were talking with their heads almost touching. Ira was a couple rows behind them, looking around nostalgically, obviously transported to another time and place by the utilitarian aircraft. The remainder of the passengers either stared out the square windows or had already settled in to a book.

  “Anika, please,” Mercer said as gently as the rattling aircraft would allow. “I think between the two of us we know what’s going on, but alone we know nothing. We have to share if we’re going to figure out who killed Igor and why.” He had already assumed a connection between Bulgarin’s murder and Otto Schroeder’s.

  Anika looked into his face, searching for the strength she hoped he possessed because hers was gone. Everything had come full circle too quickly. Hearing Schroeder’s killer outside just now had abolished any desire she had for justice. She wanted to run from all of this, to go to Vienna to be with her Opa. He would know what to do.

  “I hadn’t heard of Otto Schroeder until I opened the package from Germany,” Mercer continued, his gaze never leaving Anika’s eyes although the plane pitched and vibrated. “I was warned by an e-mail before I left the States that something was being sent. I had no idea what it was. I still don’t. This journal Schroeder sent me is written in German.”

  “You haven’t read it?” Anika asked. It was a neutral question, one that gave nothing away.

  “I can barely read English,” Mercer joked, but Anika didn’t respond. “All the German words I know are either food related or naughty.”

  “What did that man say when you got on the plane?” There was a sudden urgency in her voice. She had a premonition that this wasn’t the time to compare notes. Not yet anyway. There was a more pressing issue. There were now two murderers at the base camp, and she was beginning to see conspiracies behind everything.

  “He told me his name is Gunther Rath and wished us a good flight.”

  “We don’t have time to go into the whys, wheres, and hows but that man put a bullet in my leg last week and presided over the torture of Otto Schroeder, an old soldier I was interviewing for my grandfather. Just before Schroeder died, he mentioned your name and said you were someone who could help. It can’t be a coincidence that you, me, and Rath are in the same place at the same time. We’ve all been manipulated.”

  “Does Rath know Schroeder was going to send me something?”

  “No, he’d been driven away by snipers.”

  Mercer’s eyes widened. “Remind me to ask you the whole story sometime. Rath probably didn’t recognize you because everyone looks the same under ten layers of clothes. Yet you still think he’s a threat.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Mercer did, but he didn’t know how immediate a threat. It wasn’t a great leap of deductive reasoning to guess that Rath was working with Igor Bulgarin’s killer. Greta
Schmidt? Possibly, but unimportant right now. He put himself in their position and knew the murderers’ first priority would be to eliminate all traces of the crime. The physical evidence, Igor’s body, lay unguarded at the base. And the only two people who had firsthand knowledge of the killing were on the same antique plane. With another convenient fire in the cold laboratory and a plane crash, the killers would be in the clear.

  Mercer didn’t forget that Gunther Rath had been on the DC-3 while the pilots were peeing in the snow. And then he remembered Rath mentioning Elisebet Rosmunder. He unstrapped his seat belt and ran for the cockpit. If his sudden hunch was wrong, no harm done, but if he was right…

  Taped to the bulkhead was a manila envelope. He tore it away from the wall. Unsealing it with trembling fingers, he tipped out the contents. Photographs. The first was the shot of Mrs. Rosmunder’s son, Stefansson, before his ill-fated trip to Greenland. The second was the one a nurse took shortly before his death. And the third picture, Mercer balled in his fist after just a glance. The bullet hole in the old woman’s forehead was like an obscene third eye.

  The rage began someplace deep inside, and he let it come, let it grow until it filled every fiber and nerve. He vibrated with it. For long seconds he allowed it to consume him like an internal fire, waiting for that moment of transmutation when rage became hate. And it came too, sharper than any he’d felt before. Unfocused anger was corrosive, worthless, but the hate was a weapon he could control. The ability to harness it was the gift that had allowed him to face so much ugliness in the past without destroying his soul.

  He looked down the length of the cabin, knowing that his responsibility lay here. His revenge for Mrs. Rosmunder’s murder would come once he was sure these people were safe.

  The door separating the cockpit from the rest of the plane was open. Out the windscreen, Mercer could see that the black ocean far below them was dotted with icebergs, as murderous a sea as he’d ever seen. The pilots were both young Icelanders dressed in vintage-looking bomber jackets.