by John Case
He had a soccer match that night – indoors at the Sportsplex in Springfield. All the usual suspects were there, and, as ever, no one on his team had exactly the same shirt. They were playing a team of Hispanics, most of whom worked at the World Bank. All of them were kitted out in a blaze of identical colors – actual uniforms, with knee-high socks! – while Frank’s side stood around in T-shirts that were . . . kind of dark. Mostly.
‘Whattaya mean it’s not blue! It’s got blue in it!’
‘C’mon, ref! Es gris! Make him change it.’
‘It’s not gree, you fuck. What the fuck is gree?’
When the game ended in a draw, the two teams went upstairs to drink beer and heckle the other sides, playing below. It was a good time, as it always was, because it was the only time that he didn’t have to think – or think about anything important. There was no Washington Post, no thoughts about his father, no Fletcher Harrison Coe, Neal Gleason, or body-transfer cases. Just a dozen guys doing something they liked and were kind of good at. It didn’t mean anything, and that’s what made it so important.
He left around ten o’clock, walking out into the parking lot. He was feeling good, which surprised him, because as soon as he left the building, he remembered that he was at a dead end. He didn’t have a clue about what to do next. About Kopervik. Or Annie. Or any of that. And all of a sudden, that mattered again.
But it was a beautiful night, and he stood for a moment beside the Saab, taking it in. An airplane crawled across Orion, moving impossibly slow. Frank watched it for a while and decided it wasn’t an airplane. It must be a comet, he thought. Or . . .
The Panoptikon Satellite Corporation was located in Herndon, only a couple of miles from Dulles Airport. It was a publicly traded company whose product was reconnaissance – satellite imagery with a resolution matrix of one meter. Its clientele was a mix of third world countries that couldn’t afford their own satellites, minerals’ exploration companies, environmental groups, agribusiness, commercial fisheries, and the media. Among other things, it gave great weather.
And it wasn’t cheap. Frank felt guilty about spending the foundation’s money on a story he’d been told to drop, but he wasn’t going to pay for it himself – and it was something that had to be done.
He told the clerk what he wanted, gave her the coordinates for Kopervik and the date he’d worked out for the Rex Mundi’s arrival on Edgeoya. The clerk keyed the information into her computer, waited a few moments, and announced, ‘No problem. We photograph the Svalbard archipelago twice a day, and it looks like we’ve got archival footage going back three years.’
Twenty minutes later she returned with a 36 × 48 photograph, black and white, and still a little damp. Along its upper right edge ran a continuous band of print, repeating the date/time stamp and the positional coordinates. She laid the picture on a viewing table and dropped a felt-covered weight on each corner.
They looked at it together.
After a moment she laughed and said, ‘Look.’ Her forefinger pointed to an oblong puff near the right-hand corner of the sheet.
Frank squinted. ‘What?’
‘That.’ She laid one long, curved, and elaborately painted fingernail next to an oval shape that looked, at first, like a flaw in the paper. ‘Polar bear,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen ’em before.’ She plunked a photo loupe onto the picture and told him to take a look.
She was right. It was a bear. But he was more interested in Kopervik itself – the clutch of buildings, the church, and the helicopter. With the loupe, you could see that the chopper was sitting in a fog of snow kicked up by its own rotors. They must have been turning when the picture was taken from space.
He swung his eyes back to the village and was able to pick out, from among the other buildings, the shape of the little chapel, with its truncated but recognizable steeple. And near the chapel, a scatter of black dots. Annie, he supposed, and Kicklighter, and the boys from NOAA.
They were gathered in a little group near a dark area, where the snow cover had been disturbed. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the bird’s-eye view, he realized that this was the graveyard next to the chapel. He could make out the stone wall that surrounded it, its square geometrical shape clear, even under the snow. Using the magnifying device, he picked out the regularly spaced smudges that must be the headstones and, nearby, a dark area that seemed to be smeared. There were boxes or logs, a jumble of lumber or –
Coffins. A jumble of coffins.
He frowned. It was exactly what he’d expected to see, and yet . . . There was something about the scene that nagged at him. He tapped his fingers on the table and spent several more minutes staring at the satellite shot, sliding the loupe here and there to take a closer look, but it refused to yield any more information to him. He looked at the date band running across the top, and once again he shook his head. He’d chosen the date by working backward from the arrival of the Rex in Hammerfest.
It was a three-day trip, so . . . it looked like the expedition was ahead of schedule. Apparently, the exhumation hadn’t taken as long as they’d expected. This was clearly their last day on Edgeoya. It had to be for them to make it back to Hammerfest when they did. Also: there were no work tents at the site, so they must have been returned to the Rex by the time the picture was taken. And the other equipment, too, because there was none of that to be seen, either.
He slid the magnifying device over to the helicopter, looking for the body-transfer cases, but the whole area was fuzzy with blowing snow. And besides, he thought, the crew wouldn’t have stored the equipment first and then come back for the transfer cases. They’d have been the first things taken to the Cold Room in the hold.
He removed the felt-covered weights from the corners and watched the photo sheet curl up into a cylinder. The clerk expertly tightened it until its diameter was small enough to fit into the cardboard tube with the Panoptikon logo on the side. She pushed a plastic cap into the open end and wrote out a bill for $289.46.
He was halfway back to his apartment when it hit him. Somewhere in Bandarland, just before he got to the Chain Bridge Road, he thought, Wait a minute – and hit the brakes. The guy behind him went ballistic, but Frank was already in the middle of a U-turn, heading back to Herndon.
‘I want to go again,’ he told the clerk
‘Excuse me?’
‘Same coordinates, make it a month earlier. February twenty-eighth, or whatever . . .’
She looked at him, shrugged, and tapped on her keyboard.
Half an hour later he was looking at the second photograph – which was exactly the same as the first, minus the helicopter, Annie, and her friends.
He slid the loupe over the graveyard. The dark eruptions were there, the jumble of coffins. He looked up at the date band, just to double check and to make sure that the clerk had not misunderstood. But there it was: 1147 February 28, 1998. When Annie and Kicklighter were still in the United States. And yet – the bodies were already gone, and the coffins piled up in a heap.
It was the realization of this possibility that had sent him into a U-turn near the Chain Bridge. Until then, he’d tried to explain everything away. Back too soon in Hammerfest? Well, things must have gone swimmingly at the site.
What had gotten to him, finally, was the coffins. Laying like that in the snow, in a jumble. Annie had explained to him the efforts she had gone to in order to obtain permission for the exhumations. First, she’d had to identify the miners, trace their families, contact them for permission to dig up their kin, then get the Lutheran church to agree that tearing up its graveyard was in the public interest. He knew that once NIH was done with the miners, the remains would be reinterred on the mainland.
It was all so very proper, and almost self-consciously respectful. He just couldn’t imagine that Annie would go to all that trouble and then toss the coffins into a heap, as if they were so much scrap lumber.
So someone else had gotten to Kopervik first. And taken the miners. He thought
about that for moment, then returned to the counter.
‘Hit me again,’ he said. ‘A month earlier. January twentieth would be good.’
She gave him a look. ‘You know – most people don’t find this addictive.’ She tapped and clacked on her computer and then shook her head. ‘And anyway: I wouldn’t do January – not at that latitude. Unless you’re interested in infrared.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s dark, all day long. If there were lights, you could pick them out, but –’
Frank shook his head. ‘No, it’s a ghost town.’
‘So . . .?’
‘Try November twentieth, ’ninety-seven.’
It took three more hours, and by the time he was done, the bill came to almost $2,800.
He’d worked his way back a month at a time until he found what he knew must be there: the snow cover pristine, the graves undisturbed. The date was August 20, 1997.
Which meant that the bodies had been taken between then and September 20, when the graveyard was as it appeared in the subsequent months until Annie’s arrival by helicopter.
Once he had the time frame, it was just a matter of homing in on the actual date of the exhumation, which turned out to be September 9.
There was a small crane in the graveyard, a Bobcat, and the pegged rectangle of a tent. A helicopter sat behind the church; there were half a dozen people in the graveyard. No matter how much, or how intently, he gazed through the loupe, there was no way that he could identify any of the blurred and grainy figures standing beside the graves.
He moved the loupe to the helicopter, whose size afforded a modicum of resolution. Shaped like a dragonfly, the chopper rested on the snow, maybe twenty yards from the church. Frank stared at the machine’s fuselage, searching for identifying markers, but finding none. The resolution just wasn’t good enough. Tiring of the process, he sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.
When he opened them a moment later, he saw – or imagined – something that he hadn’t seen before: a grid. Or, more accurately, a sort of grid – there, at the rear of the helicopter’s fuselage. Raising the magnifying loupe, he held it above the photograph, raising and lowering it in search of the ideal magnification.
Which, as it happened, didn’t exist. Whatever he’d seen, or thought he’d seen, exploded beneath the loupe’s thick lens, its lines and edges flying apart as if the magnifying glass were a centrifuge. Frustrated, he pulled back in his chair and went to the counter. Half-dazed, and trying to make sense of what he’d found, he charged the bill to his Visa card and walked outside to his car, carrying a thick tube of satellite photos.
Now, at least, he knew what, when, and where. Someone had gotten to Kopervik before Annie and the Rex. That’s why Gleason was there to meet the boat. That’s why they’d returned empty-handed. And that’s why a wall had gone up around the story.
Only two questions remained.
Who? And why?
14
SOMEBODY HAD BEATEN them to it. When the expedition arrived at the graveyard, the bodies were gone.
He sat in his car on Chain Bridge, going nowhere, not really listening to the CD that was playing – a Cape Verde blues. He was staring ahead at a long string of taillights whose reflections covered the wet asphalt like pools of blood. Traffic was at a standstill. His wipers ticked back and forth. Every now and then lightning flashed through sheets of rain.
He thought there must be an accident up ahead. He thought that he ought to get some new wiper blades. He thought: the rear window is fogging up. But what he couldn’t seem to think about were the implications of what he’d learned at Panoptikon. Instead, he just kept seeing the images themselves: the cluster of rectangular shapes that were the jumble of coffins, the dark smears of the excavated graves.
He didn’t want to think, that was part of it. He’d been chasing the usual kind of story, a gotcha piece in which the intrepid reporter unearths an unholy alliance between science and the military. He’d thought he knew what the story was, but all of a sudden his frame of reference was gone, and now he had no idea. Also, it was beginning to scare him.
He tapped his fingertips on the steering wheel. Who? Why?
On the one hand, the pictures explained a lot: Kicklighter’s defeated shuffle as he walked down the gangway from the Rex, Annie’s deer-in-the-headlights look and her refusal to talk about Kopervik, Neal Gleason’s presence in Hammerfest. It explained the connection to the Pentagon, the funding from the Compass Trust. On the other hand . . . no, it didn’t. It didn’t explain anything, really.
The line of cars ahead of him wasn’t moving, and in the distance he could hear the whoop whoop whoop of sirens. He tried to organize his thoughts about the Panoptikon photographs. Mostly, they weren’t thoughts but questions, the same questions: who dug up the graves, and why?
Digging in permafrost was as hard as digging in rock – it took days to get anywhere, even with special tools. And Kopervik was so remote that it might as well be on another planet. Which meant that what happened there was a lot more than grave-robbing. Somebody – and somebody with very deep pockets – wanted the bodies for themselves. And the only reason to want those particular bodies was to get the virus they harbored. And that could only mean that the people who took the bodies wanted to culture the virus, just as Kicklighter and Adair had hoped to do.
But why?
Not to study the protein coats. Any on-the-level expedition to Kopervik – Annie would have known about it. Since she’d done all the groundwork, she would have been consulted as a matter of professional courtesy and maybe even invited along. And if not Annie, the National Science Foundation would have known about it. So would the mining company representatives, and the families who’d given permission to have the bodies exhumed.
So, what was going on?
He toyed with the notion that a pharmaceutical company might have gone after the virus, hoping to make a vaccine. But why would anyone create a vaccine for a bug that didn’t exist, or only existed under the permafrost above the Arctic Circle? They wouldn’t. No one would.
Who, then? And why?
Why acquire a strain of influenza that was legendary for its virulence? Well, that wasn’t so hard, he thought. If you weren’t going to study it, and you weren’t going to make a vaccine, then the only reason to go after the bodies would be to extract the virus to make a biological weapon.
And what a weapon. As an airborne infection, it was spectacularly contagious, and what was more –
A honk from behind pulled Frank from his reverie, and he saw that twenty yards separated him from the faint red eyes of the car ahead. The traffic had finally started to move. He hunched forward in his seat, the windshield pearly and barely translucent from the pounding rain. Crossing the bridge, he turned up Arizona and swung down Nebraska. At Ward Circle, American U. students splashed across the complicated intersection, giddy and sodden.
Who? The military was the most obvious candidate, but as he’d discovered, it was the military – or at least the intelligence community – that had secretly sponsored the expedition. Which was not something they would do if they had already exhumed the bodies.
Terrorists, then. That would certainly explain Neal Gleason’s presence. But, no. Given the resources needed to mount an expedition to Kopervik – an expedition that might well result in nothing but frostbite – one of the bad-boy nations seemed a lot more likely. Iran, Iraq, Libya. The usual suspects.
But he didn’t think so. There was something wrong with his analysis, something he was forgetting. But what?
Two blocks from his apartment he stopped at Mixtec, and left ten minutes later with a container of rice and bistec al pasilla. Returning home, he tossed the satellite photos on the coffee table and sat down in front of the TV, flicking through the channels until he found the Bullets’ game. Or the Wizards’. Or whatever they were calling themselves that week. He watched Strickland dish a no-look pass to Webber, who went up for a reverse jam. Good-looking play, but
then the score flashed across the screen and he saw that it was Indiana by sixteen.
He flicked it off. His head wasn’t into it anyway. He was still preoccupied with the satellite photos and the sense that something about them didn’t add up. But what?
He had the idea that maybe he could spring it loose by looking over his notes and files about influenza. While he finished eating, why not listen to some of his interview tapes? Maybe something would jog his memory. He rummaged through the box of cassettes in the back of his file drawer until he found what he was looking for – influenza/Adairintvw//3/8/98 – and stuck the tape in the cassette player. He got a beer and a bottle of Yucateco sauce, and listened to the tape.
‘It’s unintentional. They use host cells to reproduce, and in the process, kill the cells. The fact that they make you sick is a side effect. The ideal virus wouldn’t make you sick at all.’
‘No? I thought that was their raison d’être.’
(Laughter) ‘No. They have the same raison d’être as we do – biologically speaking. They want to make more of themselves . . . So if they kill off the host, they aren’t being efficient.’
He shook his head. How could he find what he was after without knowing what it was? He pushed the fast-forward button. Annie was saying:
‘Now, smallpox is so stable you could put it on a piece of paper and stick it in a filing cabinet and it might survive for decades. Centuries. It’s a worry for anthropologists, you know, digging up mummies.’
‘But influenza –’
‘Is a different story.’
He snapped off the machine and got to his feet. He wasn’t getting anywhere with the tape. Better to see the source herself.
Annie’s town house was a few feet above street level. He sat on the stoop for half an hour waiting for her. Finally, she came up the steps, laughing, talking with a small dark-haired woman, both of them lugging plastic bags full of groceries. This time she wore sandals, a faded red Hoyas T-shirt, and a pair of Levi’s with shredded knees. Somehow, he could tell that the knees were frayed by genuine wear and tear and not for the sake of fashion. The small woman saw him first and put a hand on Annie’s arm. Annie stopped walking, her laugh died away, and her expression flickered through some interesting changes – for a nanosecond she looked really happy to see him – before settling into a kind of wary smile.