Days of Night
Page 1
PRAISE FOR JONATHAN STONE
Moving Day
“Crisp, elegant prose distinguishes this exceptional crime thriller from Stone.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“From the author of the Julian Palmer series (The Cold Truth; Parting Shot), this is a compelling mystery with a moral foundation.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“Well-developed characters, vivid settings, and tautly written suspense make this a true page-turner, sure to appeal to Harlan Coben and Laura Lippman fans.”
—Booklist
The Teller
“Stone’s plotting is tight as a drum, and his writing lean, with short, staccato sentences that create an immediate and immersive experience. Fans of Stone’s other suspense titles will be thrilled, and newcomers will scramble for more.”
—Library Journal
“This fast-paced shell game of misdirection, in which it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad, is reminiscent of Found Money by James Grippando, and Good People by Marcus Sakey.”
—Booklist
Two for the Show
“The surprise-filled plot shifts rapidly between illusion and reality, keeping the reader constantly—and entertainingly—off-balance.”
—Publishers Weekly
Other Titles by Jonathan Stone
Two for the Show
The Teller
Moving Day
The Cold Truth
The Heat of Lies
Breakthrough
Parting Shot
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Stone
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542045841
ISBN-10: 1542045843
Cover design by Brian Zimmerman
Contents
Start Reading
The only thing . . .
PROLOGUE
BOOK ONE: DAY
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
BOOK TWO: NIGHT
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
BOOK THREE: DAY
76.
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
On 11 May 2000, astrophysicist Dr. Rodney Marks became unwell while walking between the remote observatory and the base. He became increasingly sick over a 36 hours period, three times returning increasingly distressed to the station’s doctor. Advice was sought by satellite, but Marks died on 12 May 2000, age 32, with his condition undiagnosed . . .
The cause of Marks’ death could not be determined until his body was removed from Amundsen–Scott Station and flown off the continent for autopsy. . . A post mortem established that Marks had died from methanol poisoning . . . The case received media attention as the “first South Pole murder.”
―Wikipedia
The only thing that’s the end of the world is the end of the world.
—Barack Obama
PROLOGUE
He’s a scientist. A biologist. So he’s cursed with knowing.
The sudden profuse sweat, out here in fifty below. The sheen of it across his face, his hands; his arms and legs suddenly soaked in it beneath his heavy clothing.
He tears a glove off to see the telltale sign he suspects. His fingers suddenly gray. Blood circulation to his hands stopped. Far more sudden and severe than the white of frostbite.
He knows too that the angry, shocking look and color of his skin—his hands, his abdomen, his neck—will retreat to normal, to undetectable, in the fifty-below temperature. It’s visible to him momentarily. It will never be visible to anyone else.
He can picture it. He’s cursed with knowing.
The steady, relentless spread from his veins to his organs—lower intestine, bladder, pancreas, upper intestine.
He can visualize the different cells of each organ, their different mechanisms, taking it in, trying to defend themselves, being overwhelmed, passing the compound on, helpless, defenseless, ambushed.
He knows by the sudden painful bloat of his stomach that all his organs have gone into free fall together.
He can feel the paralysis set in. Extremities first—toes, fingers, like frostbite but hot, sizzling, followed by nothing, no feeling.
He’s cursed with knowing—by the pace of it, climbing his biceps, climbing his thighs, like a liquid knife cutting through the nerves, like a mad explorer slashing forward—that he has maybe a minute left. He knows he has been poisoned.
He knows he will soon feel a shortness of breath as the poison—whatever it is—finishes its journey through his bloodstream to his heart.
There it is. The shortness of breath.
He can picture his bronchial cells, their own version of violent protest, their own shutdown.
He feels dizziness but no need to vomit. He knows, from this, that he will not be expelling any of the poison that way. It acted too fast to let his stomach and intestines defend themselves. Which eliminates certain classes of poisons but leaves plenty of other possibilities.
He can think of a dozen poisons that could have this effect. He doesn’t know how this one got into his system. Or how it lay in wait, to unleash at this perfect time and temperature, when he is by himself, out in fifty below.
He knows he will lose muscle control in a half minute or so and will find himself facedown on the frozen tundra.
He is facedown on the frozen tundra.
He never liked it here. Some people thrive here. For him it was too alien, uncomfortable, challenging.
He knows he’s about to black out. No blood flow to the brain.
He’s a scientist. A biologist.
He knows this is where the knowing ends
.
He knows it’s the last thing he’ll be cursed with knowing.
BOOK ONE: DAY
1.
Heller comes in on a supply plane toward the end of the season, during the long summer days of late February, when the weather is predictably clear, windless, and warm.
Relatively warm.
Endless blue sky. Searingly bright sunshine. (Do not take your sunglasses off when you’re outside, he was told. Seriously. You need them there. No fashion statement. You’ll damage your corneas. Repeat: do not take them off.)
Supply plane, yes—but not what that phrase once conjured. Not some bushwhacking, barnstorming, belly-churning contraption setting down anywhere on the ice, sliding and spinning to a stop in a haze of cold, dusty whiteness. Not like the wing-and-a-prayer old days, of which he had already heard so many stories.
Nowadays, a converted US Army 747, gray, massive, in full-cargo configuration. Specially outfitted for this service. A supply ship of the twenty-first century. He is one of about twenty passengers, in familiar, standard airplane seats of five-across rows that would seem like any other 747, except the rows are bolted to the aircraft’s bare metal floor, like an afterthought, amid an inconceivably large airborne warehouse of food, clothing, medical equipment, and scientific supplies surrounding them, most of it secured behind cargo netting. Cartons, crates, Bubble-Wrapped equipment. Snowmobiles, motorized sleds. All for the benefit of humans, but the humans on board have no choice but to feel secondary, small.
Arriving on the supply plane. Entirely appropriate, Heller thinks. Because he is a kind of supply, after all. A commodity they haven’t needed until now.
He has been looking out the window for the last half hour, silent, riveted, as the previous and known world disappears behind him, and this new world spreads out majestically in front of him, and he continues watching intently for the entire landing. The landing strip is simple, unadorned, but clearly demarcated by blinking light poles.
Everything he has seen on approach—the blue horizon, distant white summits (crisp, not hazy), the intense white sheet stretched taut and featureless to the horizon—is expected, just as imagined. Yet at the same time, everything is new, and remarkable.
He suddenly realizes why that is: He had imagined the sight of it. But he had not adequately imagined the feeling.
On board he has learned—unsurprisingly, in retrospect—that this is the same aircraft that carried the body out. The body that had been flown twenty thousand miles for an autopsy. A record, probably. The dead body that is bringing his live body here. Cause and effect. Tit for tat. A weird trade. As if he is a sort of replacement.
On touchdown, a skirt of white erupts instantly around the wheels and lower fuselage. The white skirt falls away by the time the plane spins slowly, balletically, almost ceremonially on its own axis at the end of the runway. It taxis, then stops, and the pilots cut the engines. Heller sits listening to the sudden silence for a moment.
Following the cue of the others now moving around him, veterans of this flight, he zips into his orange parka, provided to him under the auspices of the US scientific community. They’re all identical subzero orange parkas—with name tags so that (he understands instinctively) you can identify one another without seeing a face or hearing a name.
He grabs his duffel, heads back with the others to the cargo bay.
A crewman throws levers. The cargo bay hydraulics hum and strain. The cargo ramp descends magisterially.
There’s something laughable, absurd about the blast of cold.
A cold that is mute, still, overwhelming, ungodly, a fact of life—for a moment the only fact of life as he descends the cargo ramp.
Bringing his breath up short. Freezing his brain for a moment, in a delirium of new sensation. He’s anticipated it, of course. He’s been told about it. He expects it. But it’s so far outside his previous experience. I’m gonna LIVE in this? I shouldn’t be here. Nobody should be here.
But more than all that, it’s a reminder—on his skin, boring into his bones—that he is venturing into something extraordinary.
Like the views on arrival.
Like everything about it so far, he muses.
Totally expected.
Totally unexpected.
Heller notices how deeply it is both.
And is thereby prompted to remind himself—it’s at the moment when you think you know something that you really, suddenly don’t.
At the bottom of the ramp, he steps carefully for the first time, but with no sense of ceremony, onto the ice.
A bearded, compact man in a yellow parka approaches him. Swarthy, elfin—qualities apparent even behind the sunglasses and under the knit black cap. “Joe Heller?”
“I’m Heller.”
A gloved hand is thrust out in greeting. “Manny Hobbes.” Emmanuel Hobbes—the station manager he’s been e-mailing with for months. Smiling, jovial. “Welcome to the end of the world.”
At the time, of course, Hobbes means it only geographically.
Only genially.
Only as a good-natured, friendly greeting.
Nothing more than that.
The landing strip is just a few hundred yards from the center of McMurdo Station, and most of the orange parkas, he notices, begin to hike toward it, lugging their duffels, in the bright February summer sun. But Hobbes has an ATV to take Heller—minor VIP treatment, maybe his first, maybe his last?—and Hobbes sets Heller’s duffel into the corrugated metal bed in back.
They can’t really talk above the unmuffled engine, so Heller looks around him during the quick trip. Ahead of him is the closely packed community of McMurdo Station. He can already see a haphazard jumble of dozens of buildings, constructed over decades with no discernible street pattern, simply thrown up ad hoc, some buildings sixty years old, others sleek and new. Part ramshackle frontier town, part interplanetary settlement. A community he must penetrate somehow. That he assumes he will find unfriendly, unwelcoming of the task they’ve given him. Solve it. Solve it quickly. Involving as few people as little as possible. Don’t rattle what we’ve built here. Don’t derail our ambitions, our dreams. Get this taken care of. Figure it out for us; then get the hell out of here and let us go back to our science, our work, our way of life.
He turns and looks out onto the horizon. Empty field, warm enough at this time of year to grow some things—a hardy bit of flora, stubby, surprising hints of green punching up through the frozen earth. And beyond it the sea—blue, gray, dark green, a roiling reminder of their insignificance in the face of nature.
He sees someone in a parka—from this distance, not much more than a floating, puffy, bright-red dot—standing motionless at the edge of the sea. A moment of contemplation and meditative calm? Or of churning fear? Suicidal impulses? Absorbed in the ocean’s vast beauty? Or in his or her own tyranny of thoughts, the ocean only secondary, happenstance, a blue-and-gray canvas for the ceaseless splashing of internal turmoil.
The figure’s posture gives nothing away of motive or inner life. Just that lone figure and that vast panoramic sea.
Man’s smallness, nature’s vastness, as if posed purposely for Heller.
The puff of parka now moves a little along the shore.
And Heller turns his attention back to the bump and rumble of the ATV beneath him and the growing presence and bustle of McMurdo Station before him.
Less than a minute later, the ATV pulls up to a thick, low, drab Quonset-style building, and Hobbes cuts the engine.
“Visitor’s dorm. Here’s your key, room 109. Go ahead and unpack, get cleaned up, use the john, relax a little after that brutally long flight. I’ll pick you up right here in an hour to take you over for the briefing.”
A nod. A smile. Hobbes starts the engine again and is off.
2.
People don’t know the first thing about Antarctica, thinks Heller. They don’t even remember what they learned in grade school. The other continents have centuries of civilization and
culture, a couple of millennia of human presence, travel and trade, generations of explorers, then settlers, then tourists, tying all the continents together, bringing them alive in the common imagination, so that even grade-school kids have pretty vivid mental pictures of dozens of places in Europe, South America, Africa, and the Far East, the native garb of their inhabitants and the distinctive sound of their languages, yet in that same common imagination, Antarctica is merely a single image of frozen white.
People don’t know there’s hardly any actual land; it’s ice, miles deep. Shifting ice. Shifting so much that the flag marking the South Pole has to be adjusted by ten meters every year, to keep it placed correctly. People assume global warming is affecting it, but much of Antarctica is actually getting colder, and some of its areas are seeing an increase in sea ice. People don’t know its most basic geographic facts. That East Antarctica is elevated, hence colder, than West Antarctica. They don’t know that it’s technically a desert (because there’s no rain), with only an occasional dusting of snow (because it’s generally too cold for clouds and precipitation to form). That the only real weather, the only real storms, are windstorms. Like on Mars. That its weather has nothing to do with the rest of the globe’s; it’s a weather system unto itself, closed, locked. That it’s the size of Europe or North America, but across 98 percent of its mass, it is geologically, climatologically, and biologically identical and unchanging. That the Antarctic Peninsula, at sea level, can warm up to nearly sixty degrees for a few precious days in the summer, but at the South Pole, fifteen hundred kilometers inland, it never gets above freezing, and more typically remains at sixty or seventy below—and at Amundsen-Scott Station, right next to the pole, it sometimes registers a hundred below or more.
None of which he knew before he boarded the plane. All facts he picked up browsing the Internet on his smartphone, drifting in and out of sleep on the long flight down. (His smartphone that will soon be useless. There’s no cell phone service at the American bases in Antarctica. The Australian bases, the Argentine base, yes. The American bases, no.)
He laughs—trying to learn about an entire continent on a single plane trip, on the way there. An infamously dangerous continent. Spending a few minutes on some facts about survival—that doesn’t feel very smart. That can’t be a good thing.