Текст книги "Zodiac Station"

Автор книги: Tom Harper

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Twenty-four

Eastman

Flying into Zodiac, we could see the wrecked Twin Otter at the end of the runway. Christ knew how long before they got it out: might be a hundred years.

I was busting to get back to Vitangelsk right away. I grabbed some coffee and cereal from the mess, then found Greta in the shop. She kept that place like your granddad’s basement: tools hanging on nails on the walls, hardware spilling out of plastic boxes, smell of oil and fried metal in the air. She was working on a busted snowmobile, stripped down to her tank top, hair braided back.

‘You look good,’ I told her.

She gave me a look like she could care less.

‘Do you have any bolt cutters I could borrow?’

She took a heavy-duty pair of long-handled bolt cutters off a peg on the wall and gave them to me. You could break into Fort Knox with those things.

But I wasn’t taking a chance. ‘You don’t have something like a portable gas-cutting torch too, do you?’

Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t say anything – but for some reason I felt I had to explain myself.

‘One of the struts buckled on my radio telescope. Crushed the cable; I need to get it out.’

‘I can help.’

Was that a straight offer? Or was she calling my bluff?

‘I’m good.’

‘Be quick. There’s a storm coming.’

‘All staff,’ said the speaker on the wall.

I’d spent a night in the cold, no sleep: I was twitchy as hell. The voice coming out of the speaker almost made me jump into Greta’s arms.

‘All staff, please report to the mess for an urgent briefing,’ Quam said over the intercom.

The Horrorscope on the door said Your future is stormy. Inside, everyone was sitting on the couches – like movie night, only without the entertainment. Anderson had gotten out of bed, I noticed, though Trond the pilot wasn’t there. Ash sat on the end nearest Quam. I wondered if this was about him.

‘I have an announcement to make,’ Quam said. Guy couldn’t open his mouth without telling you he was a pompous ass. ‘Following a consultation with Norwich, it’s been decided that all Zodiac personnel will be confined to base until further notice.’

The room erupted. Quam looked surprised, though he was an idiot if he hadn’t seen it coming. He took a step back, pressed up against the TV like a prisoner facing the firing squad.

‘Did the penguins make that decision?’ someone asked sarcastically.

Quam held up his hand for silence, like an elementary-school teacher with a rowdy class. It was a while before everyone quieted down enough for him to speak.

‘We can’t afford any more accidents. With the Twin Otter out of commission, we’re terribly exposed. If anything else happened, there’d be no way to get us out.’

I didn’t think that would improve morale any. I kept quiet, and watched the others. They’d started shouting again. Ashcliffe said something like ‘health and safety gone mad’; Annabel was listing all the people who funded her research. Show-off.

‘I’ve got instruments collecting data up on the mountain,’ said Fridge. ‘Am I supposed to forget about that?’

‘Use the data link.’

‘The data link is fucked.’

‘What about Gemini?’ Annabel said.

‘Gemini’s off-limits.’

‘My funding body pays a fortune to keep me here so I can do science.’

‘Violating this policy will put you in breach of the contracts you signed,’ Quam said. He sounded desperate.

‘So what?’ Fridge demanded. ‘You can’t send us home. Will you throw us out into the snow like fucking Captain Oates?’

‘That would be a breach of contract,’ Ash said. Heavy with sarcasm. He must have forgotten he was going home anyway.

I raised my hand. Quam pointed to me, grateful for that gesture of respect.

‘Did the assholes in Norwich consider that someone’s more likely to end up dead if we’re all locked in together like this?’

‘Enough!’ Quam thumped the TV so hard I thought he’d broken it. Then he really would’ve had a mutiny. ‘I didn’t make this policy, but we all have to stick with it. For our own protection.’

‘Who do we need protecting from?’ Anderson asked. If Quam heard that, he ignored it.

‘As a positive,’ said Quam, breathing hard, ‘I’d like to announce that this Saturday will be Thing Night.’

That earned him an ironic cheer. Everybody loves Thing Night.

* * *

Quam went and shut himself in his office. I guess he was regretting not fitting locks. I sat down in my room and thought about what had happened.

Kennedy’s story was crazy, but it wasn’t the craziest thing that had happened at Zodiac that week. If he wanted to lie, there were easier ways to do it than almost freezing to death in a mining car. And I’d seen the extra set of footprints around the tower. I wished I’d have followed them.

So who was the guy in the yellow parka? He had to be DAR-X, protecting whatever they had locked in the HQ building where all those wires led. I had to get back there.

Of course, I wasn’t allowed off base, but I wouldn’t let Quam’s BS regulations stop me. And while I was going off the reservation, I might as well kill a few birds.

I got out my laptop and wrote an email to a colleague of mine, physicist at Rutgers called Guy Roache.

Getting some interesting results from my probe at Vitangelsk. Levels ~ 1400.

In case you’re wondering, there actually is a physicist at Rutgers called Guy Roache. Except, he spells his name without an ‘e’. The email address I used was a good-looking fake set up by my buddies at Fort Meade. The messages went all the way to New Jersey, then bounced right back to Echo Bay to set up a meet with Bill Malick. Vitangelsk was the place, 14:00 was the time. The tilde meant ‘today’.

You’re probably thinking it’s kind of dumb. But we had to be careful. Rumour at Zodiac was that Quam used his administrator privileges to read other people’s mail. If he’d caught me giving out data, he’d have had me on the first plane out of there.

Not that that was a problem now, with the Twin Otter trashed.

* * *

I still wanted to know what Hagger could’ve found up there. For starters, it might explain some things I needed to know. For another thing, it might have gotten him killed. If I was going to meet Malick in Vitangelsk, I had to be prepared.

I let myself in to Hagger’s lab and found someone already there. Anderson was on a stool, squinting into a microscope. A green notebook lay open on the bench beside him. Beside that, like he’d just taken it out of his pocket, lay a key on a teddy-bear key ring.

‘Feeling OK?’ I asked, like I’d come to see how he was doing. I tried not to stare at the key too obviously.

‘Better, thanks.’ He smiled. ‘It’s very strange, missing two days of your life. You go around the whole time with that feeling you’ve forgotten to turn off the gas.’

‘And back at work already.’ Edging closer, I could see it was a Yale key. And under the microscope, he had a section of yellow tube that looked like the pipes at Echo Bay.

‘I’m trying to tidy up a few things Hagger left behind.’

‘Whatcha got?’

‘Nothing I can understand.’ He picked up the notebook and pulled a loose-leaf sheet from between the pages. A computer printout, covered in a grid of zeros, ones and twos. ‘This, for example. I can’t make head nor tail of it.’

I’d wondered what Hagger did with that. I thought about telling the truth, and couldn’t see any reason why not.

‘It’s mine,’ I said. ‘I gave it to Hagger. I was getting interference with my instruments. One day, I was playing around with frequencies trying to figure it out and I picked up this fragment. Nothing else, just a series of numbers. I showed it to a few people at Zodiac to see if it had anything to do with their work. Hagger didn’t know, but he was interested. He liked crossword puzzles; said he’d see if he could do something with it.’

Anderson looked it over. ‘The twos are what make it odd.’

Smart cookie. ‘That’s what we thought. Zeros and ones could just be any kind of binary, what you’d expect. The twos make no sense.’

‘And this is all you managed to get?’

‘Yeah.’ I gave him back the paper; it was only a copy. ‘Did you ever find out what Hagger wanted up on the Helbreen? I mean, his major work was on sea ice, right?’

‘It’s possible Hagger had traced some sort of chemical in the sea ice. He thought it might be coming off the glacier in meltwater.’

I dismissed that. It might have been what he was looking for, but it wasn’t what got him killed. ‘Nothing about DAR-X in the notebook?’

‘That was a different project.’ He slid off the stool so I could take a look through the microscope. ‘Some micro-organism in the water was corroding their pipes. They asked Hagger to analyse it.’

I was more interested in the pipe than the bugs in the water. I hoped I’d find something inside it, fibre optics or antenna cable. So far as I could see, it was just a hollow tube.

‘How about that key?’ I asked. Casual as I could. ‘Last I heard, we didn’t have any locks at Zodiac.’

A strange look crossed his face, like he wished I hadn’t seen it. I could see him thinking about what to tell me.

‘I found it where Hagger died, by the crevasse. It must have fallen out of his pocket.’

That got my attention – if it was true. ‘Did Hagger have a filing cabinet, or a desk drawer he kept locked?’

He waved his hand around the lab. ‘I’ve looked everywhere. As you say, there aren’t any locks at Zodiac.’

‘No secrets among friends,’ I said cheerfully.

‘Maybe it was his house key and he forgot it was in his pocket.’

‘Maybe he had a secret liquor cabinet chilling in the glacier.’

We both laughed.

‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘Need to check my emails. Let me know if you find anything.’

‘Right away,’ he promised.

I could tell he wanted me to leave, so I didn’t linger. I went straight out in the corridor. Of course, I left the door open a tad. The corridor’s so dark, you wouldn’t really see someone watching you through the crack.

As soon as I was gone, Anderson took the key off the bench and hid it in a drawer. I guess he wished he could have locked it away safe – but there are no locks at Zodiac. Nothing to stop a guy going into a lab at night and taking something out of a drawer.

Back in my room, the reply had come in from Malick.

I’m in meetings all day, but hopefully can get to it tomorrow. Levels >1400 definitely something worth talking about.

He couldn’t make it until tomorrow. I remembered what Greta had said and called up the weather forecast. It didn’t look good. A polar low was heading our way from Greenland: I could see the comma cloud coming together on the satellite, the long tail starting to turn. Those things move almost as fast as a hurricane. When it hit, it was going to get ugly.

But I had to get back to Vitangelsk, and see if the key fitted the lock.

Twenty-five

Eastman

I could have just snuck off, and taken Quam’s shit later. But if anyone noticed me gone, I didn’t want them sending out search parties with a storm coming in. So, next morning, I spun him a line.

‘One of the struts buckled on my radio telescope,’ I told him. If you’re going to lie, lie consistently. ‘If I don’t get it fixed before the storm comes, the whole thing could go.’

Of course he said no. ‘Safety is paramount.’

‘I’ve just been shortlisted for a million-dollar grant from the NO double A. You want me to tell them I can’t bring it to Zodiac because my instruments got trashed in a storm?’

Everyone has weaknesses. Quam’s were more transparent than most. Mention a grant, you could almost see the dollar signs ring up in his eyes.

‘Everyone has experiments running out there.’

‘So don’t tell them. I won’t sign out; I’ll check in directly with you on the satphone. No one has to know.’

‘But you can’t go on your own.’

I pointed out the window, to the upper slopes of the mountain behind us. Clouds dashed over it.

‘I’m not going far.’

Quam played with the Newton’s cradle executive-toy thing he had on his desk – the classic bureaucrat’s move. I tell you, Captain, only the fucking Brits would send a vanilla guy like that to run a place like Utgard. Maybe he was good at cricket.

‘Don’t let the others see you,’ he said.

Just as I was leaving, I pretended I’d thought of something else.

‘Don’t worry if I’m out for a while. If the weather goes south too soon, I’ll stay in the caboose up there.’

I thought he’d complain. Perhaps he wanted to, but didn’t have the strength. He slouched in his chair as if something had snapped inside of him.

‘Please don’t let anything happen to you. It’s my job, if anything else happens.’

‘It’s my life,’ I pointed out.

I didn’t much care about the storm. If it got too bad, I could hole up in one of the buildings at Vitangelsk until it passed. I made sure I packed fuel for the MSR, and plenty of food. Plus a few pieces of equipment from my lab that had nothing to do with survival.

The hardest part was getting away. There’s no quiet way to drive a snowmobile. In the end, I had to disengage the drive belt, and push the thing around the base of the hill like a broken-down car. If anyone heard it from there, they could think what they liked. I opened up the throttle, turned on my iPod and let rip.

Was I scared? Not really. At that speed, you feel invincible. The clouds built their castles in the sky; the wind cried against my helmet. The flat light smoothed the terrain so you couldn’t see the bumps, but I didn’t care. I was riding the storm.

I got to Vitangelsk early. I parked my snowmobile in the square and made a circuit of the town, to be sure there wasn’t anyone waiting. If you think a frozen ghost town is freaky, wait until you’ve been in a frozen ghost town with a storm building. Down the valley, I could see dark clouds gathering out over the ocean. The moment I took my helmet off, the ice in the air stung me so bad I had to put it back on. But with my ears covered, I couldn’t hear a thing. I took it off again. I should have brought goggles, but all I had was my sunglasses. When I put them on, the dark day got darker. Every shadow was rendered deep black, every building looked like the House on Haunted Hill. Even the fucking snow looked dark.

I didn’t see anyone else in town. That didn’t mean they didn’t see me. I kept looking over my shoulder as I went back to the HQ building. The moment I was through the door, I took off my sunglasses and got to work.

The padlock was still there. A Yale lock, just like I remembered. I had Greta’s bolt cutters with me, but first I wanted to try something. I took out the key I’d borrowed from Anderson’s lab and pushed it in the lock.

It fitted. I twisted and it turned, smooth as butter, no hint of rust or age. The hasp popped open and the lock dropped into my hand. I stared at it like it had fallen from outer space.

‘And what in hell were you doing with that key, Dr Hagger?’ I asked aloud.

I put my shoulder against the steel trapdoor and heaved. It resisted a second, but only because of the weight. Nothing wrong with the hinges. The door swung up and clicked into the upright position.

‘Anyone home?’ I called. All I heard back was the wind howling around the outside of the building.

I took off my hat and hooked it on the rifle muzzle, then pushed it up through the hatch. A dumb trick – I probably got it from an old war movie. Anyhow, nothing happened. Either there wasn’t anyone there, or they’d seen the same movie.

Leading with the rifle, I put my head through the hatch. Even in the cold, my forehead prickled with sweat; my heart was going about a million miles an hour. I’d never felt so naked and so alive.

Above the first floor, the whole building had been gutted out. No internal walls, no floors, not even a roof. Just a brick shaft, three storeys high and open to the sky. Over my head, out of reach, eight cables came through the walls from different directions and met together in a long steel needle suspended in mid-air, pointing straight at outer space. A couple inches of snow covered the floor, but there was none on the wires. Someone made sure they got dusted off pretty regularly, it looked like.

I closed the trapdoor behind me, so that no one could sneak up. I checked the lock was in my pocket: I didn’t want to get locked in. Then I examined the antenna.

Keeping equipment in any kind of shape up there is tough. I should know. But this was pristine: all the cables tight, the metal buffed. A single wire hung down from the needle to a cleat in the floor, then ran across into a black box bolted on to the wall.

I went over and checked it out. Nothing on the outside to say what it did, not even a light to show if the power was on. A black box in every sense of the word. The only opening was the socket where the cable plugged in.

I squinted at the plug. It looked like a regular RF. The same kind I use to connect my instruments.

I took off my pack and got out my laptop. It wouldn’t boot, so I popped the battery and stuck it down my shorts for five minutes. Meanwhile, I found the interface cable I use when I’m in the field and connected it to the laptop. I put in the warmed-up battery and started the computer.

‘Here goes nothing.’

I yanked out the cable from the box. Somewhere on Utgard, if someone was watching satellite TV, I’d just ruined his show.

I didn’t waste time. Even weatherised, the battery doesn’t last much more than fifteen minutes in that cold. I connected the RF plug to the laptop, and opened a software transceiver program I use. I dialled it in to the C-band frequencies and hit record. I didn’t bother with transforms or other graphical shit: I just wanted to grab it as fast as I could.

The battery was dying in front of my eyes. When it hit ten per cent, I saved the file and shut down. Then I plugged the cable back in the black box. Didn’t want to piss off whoever the signal belonged to. With luck, they’d think it was the storm screwing with the transmission.

Or maybe they were closer than I’d thought. Before I’d even zipped my bag, I heard a creak on the stairs. I forgot the pack and grabbed my rifle. More creaks – definitely someone coming up. He stopped, just the other side of the trapdoor. I aimed the rifle.

The steel door squeaked. A gloved hand pushed it up until it latched open.

‘If you take another step, I’m going to blow your head off,’ I warned.

I heard him stop. Then, a rustling sound as he unzipped his coat. A hundred crazy scenarios played out in my head. What if he had a grenade? Or a bomb? Or—

A head popped up like a rabbit through the hatch. I was so wired, I almost pulled the trigger right there.

‘Jesus, Bob,’ said Malick. ‘I thought you wanted to see me.’

Twenty-six

Eastman

He lifted himself through the hatch. He noticed I hadn’t moved the gun.

‘What is this?’

‘You tell me.’ I nodded at the antenna hanging in the space above us like a giant spider. ‘In fact, there’s a few conversations we need to have.’

He looked up, and did a pretty good job of making himself seem surprised. ‘What the hell is that thing?’

‘You tell me,’ I said again.

‘I swear on my mother’s grave, I never saw it in my life.’

‘Yeah?’

He chuckled. ‘Truth to tell, Mom’s alive and well, doing just fine in Fort Lauderdale. But you get the point.’

I didn’t smile. ‘I’m not sure that I do.’

‘I only came here because you asked me, Bob. If you want to show me whatever fancy toy you’ve got here, you go right ahead. But don’t make out like I should know what the hell you’re talking about.’

‘It’s not my toy. It’s a satellite antenna – and I want you to tell me what you’re doing with it.’

He shrugged. ‘I’m in the oil business.’

‘Really? I heard you have something called methane clathrates coming out of that well.’

He didn’t argue the point. ‘Either way, DAR-X isn’t exactly AT&T. We’ve got Iridium and UHF at Echo Bay, and that does us fine. We’re not searching for E.T. in our spare time.’

‘You expect me to believe that.’

He managed to make himself look genuinely hurt. ‘As a matter of fact, Bob, yeah, I do.’

I pitched him the change-up. ‘Tell me about Martin Hagger.’

He looked confused. ‘Your guy who fell down the crevasse?’

‘Who was doing a special project for you. Why did you need to get rid of him?’

Malick just stared at me. Big Texas oilmen don’t go down easy, but he looked floored.

I switched up again. ‘Were you here two days ago, Bill? Any of your people chasing us? Our doc almost got himself killed, running away from some guy in a yellow parka shooting at him.’

The fear I’d felt was flowing out now. Strength and weakness, it’s the same thing, they just run in opposite directions depending on which way the switch is flipped. I had the gun; I could make him do what I wanted. I jabbed it at him in case he’d forgotten.

‘I can account for every one of my guys. None of them’s been up here since the weekend. Show’s over; we’re breaking down the camp. Heading home tomorrow.’

That surprised me, if it was true. Maybe now they had this thing up, they could leave it to run itself.

‘Can we rewind?’ said Malick. ‘I came here because you said you had some data for me.’

‘I lied.’ I’ll admit it, I enjoyed saying that. Something about a gun that strips away the bullshit. ‘I just had to get you here.’

‘So you could show me this space needle?’

‘So you could tell me what it’s about.’

He looked at me like I was crazy.

‘What the hell are you on? Yeah, we’re drilling for methane at Echo Bay. Yeah, we were having problems with the pipes and Hagger looked into it. All above board. Why he died, and what that has to do with this great big radio you’ve found – maybe you can tell me.’

‘You know who you’re working for?’

‘I work for DAR-X.’

‘I mean, who’s paying you.’

‘Some company out of the Bahamas. Why are you looking at me like that? They’ve got the concession, they’ve got the permits, they’ve got the paperwork. We’re just the contractors. The only reason we keep quiet about the methane is to stop Greenpeace getting on our asses. You saw what they did to Shell in Alaska.’

‘The guys you’re working for are Russians, Bill. I guess you know that. And they don’t give a damn about gas or oil, do they?’

‘They do when I give them my progress reports.’

I nodded my head up at the giant web above us. ‘This is what it’s all about.’

He shrugged. ‘If I even knew what it was, I could tell you why you’re wrong.’

We stared each other down, like two gunslingers in a stand-off. Except, I was the only guy with a gun. And you know what?

I had no clue what the hell to do with it.

Like I said before, I’m a scientist, not Jack Bauer. I couldn’t waterboard the guy, or hook electrodes on his balls. I’d counted on the gun to scare him into confessing. Now what?

I almost shot him out of sheer frustration. That’s what power can do: overload you.

‘This place has a good, strong door,’ Malick said. ‘There a lock?’

I nodded.

‘Not when I arrived. How’d you get through?’

‘I found the key.’

‘Uh-huh.’

I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. The gun in my hand felt solid and dangerous. ‘Don’t try to imply—’

‘Jesus, Bob, listen to yourself. You asked for this meet. You chose the place. If I was what you say I am, you think I’d have come in here, no gun, no backup? You’re the guy with the gun. You’re the guy with the key. Tell me, if the cops showed up now, who’d look like the bad guy?’

‘Hagger had the key.’ I wished I hadn’t have said it. ‘But—’

He knew where I was going and cut me off. ‘I didn’t give it to him, if that’s what you think.’ Leaning forward, on the attack. ‘Hagger worked for you guys.’

‘You too,’ I reminded him.

‘One small job. For you, he was full-time.’

When you’re looking down the barrel of a gun, it’s easy to ignore what the other guy’s saying. But I had just enough sense in me to hear it. What if DAR-X was a decoy? What if the Russians sent them up here, not to run the radar program, but to double bluff us. We’d be so busy looking at them, we’d never guess the real bad guys were right under our noses. Inside Zodiac.

I put the gun down. Losing it made me physically nauseous, like when you’re so hungry you want to puke. My hand hovered over it, in case Malick made a move

He gave me a fake smile that was supposed to reassure me. ‘Now. You want to tell me what this is about?’

For a minute, I just stared at him. But either he was lying, in which case he knew already; or he was being truthful, and he could maybe help me. I told him in three sentences: the Russians, the satellite radar, the base station.

‘Well I’ll be goddamned,’ Malick said, like a guy who’s just found his wife in bed with his pastor. He looked up at the needle pointing into space over our heads, the taut wires holding it in mid-air. ‘That’s why we had radio trouble.’

He pulled off his heavy mittens and wiped his nose. He noticed the wire that ran down into the black box on the wall.

‘Where does that go?’ he asked.

I gave it a glance. Not for more than a second – but that was all he needed. You don’t make it in the oil industry, not in places like Athabasca and Prudhoe Bay, if you can’t handle yourself. He shot out his arm. Before I even knew it, he had his hand on the rifle barrel and was twisting it away.

My grip was too slack. I snatched, but he had it before I could grab hold. He took a step back, reversed the weapon and pointed it at me just too fast for me to wrestle it back off of him. His finger danced on the trigger, warning me.

Now I understood why he took off his mittens.

‘I really hate having a gun pointed at me.’ He squinted down the barrel, right at my chest. ‘Right now, I’m sure you appreciate that.’

Oh fuck! Panic raced through me. I realised how cold I’d gotten. I’d been standing still in that room a long time. I was shaking.

‘You’re a good liar,’ I told him. ‘You played me just right.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know shit about this radar thing. But you …’ A jab of the rifle. ‘You seem real familiar with it.’

My mind raced. It sounds dumb, but I had to know how much I could believe him. Was he one of the bad guys? Or just pissed off because I pointed a gun at him?

‘I only know what I told you.’ I couldn’t take my eyes off that gun. ‘Please. You have to believe me.’

I hated myself for begging. I didn’t think it made me sound any more truthful, either.

‘I’m keeping an open mind. And a slug in the chamber.’ He nodded toward the loose cable that hung down from the needle, though the gun never left me. ‘Where does that go?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Let’s go see.’

We went down through the hatch and outside, round the side of the building. Malick followed me all the way with the rifle. Now we knew what we were looking for, we saw it right away. A black cable coming out the brick and down the wall, like a TV antenna. Hiding in plain sight. It vanished under the snow.

‘You gonna tell me you don’t have a clue where that goes?’ Malick said.

I looked him in the eye. White pearls of frost beaded his eyebrows.

‘I know why you don’t trust me. I get it. But if neither of us has anything to do with this, we’re on the same side. We can figure it out together.’

‘That’d be fine.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘So long as you go first and keep your hands where I can see them.’

Every snowmobile carries a shovel with the emergency pack in case we have to dig a snow shelter. I fetched it, and dug away the surface where the cable went under the snow. A few inches down, it had already hardened to ice, but I could see the cable running below it like a vein. I scraped away more snow, peeling back the line. It pointed up the hill, towards the coal-processing buildings on the top level.

‘I checked there yesterday.’

‘Maybe you missed something.’

We tracked the cable under the ice, pausing every ten feet or so to check we had it right. It went pretty straight, not hard to follow. Up the hill, and into a big corrugated-iron barn on the north-east edge of town.

‘This is where the coal came in,’ I said, to break the silence. Any silence is awkward when there’s a gun pointed at you – and this was a freaky place. The front of the building faced away, out to the cableway towers that went across the mountainside to the mine. Around the barn, elevated tunnels and rusted gantries led off to satellite buildings; cranes drooped from the sky and icicles hung off of the rails. The whole thing made a hell of a tangle, plenty of steel waiting to collapse on your head. Plenty of places for someone to watch.

A beating noise broke the cold silence. I spun around, trying to see where it came from. Snow fell from one of the gantries. A white bird flew into the sky, almost invisible against the grey. Probably a ptarmigan. Behind me, Malick had the gun raised like a hunter. If he’d been faster, he could have had it for dinner.

He saw me watching him and swung the gun back down to cover me. ‘Don’t get any cute ideas.’

I put up my hands. ‘I’m as scared as you are.’

He didn’t argue the point.

We picked our way over the crap on the ground to the big barn. There was no entrance at ground level, just a creaky flight of stairs going up the side of the building to a door. They hadn’t put a lock on this one. Or a handle.

‘Open it,’ Malick told me.

He was behind me, a couple of steps down. If I’d been Jackie Chan, I could maybe have knocked the rifle out of his hands and kicked him down the stairs. But that shit’s only for the movies. And tell the truth, I was more interested in finding where that cable went to. So long as Malick wanted that, we were on the same team.

It’s a weird thing to say about a guy with a gun at your back, but I was starting to trust him. I believed he didn’t know about the radar. Sure, he could have been pretending, but why bother? Now all I had to do was stay alive long enough to convince him he could trust me too.

I put my shoulder against the door and pushed. The only thing holding it shut was ice; it creaked like Scotch tape being peeled off. I opened it an inch, paused, then kicked it in and jumped inside.

The metal stairs outside clanged as Malick ran after me. But I wasn’t trying to get away from him. I just didn’t want a bullet in my face the moment I stepped through the door. Not that my Delta Force impression would’ve fooled anyone.

There wasn’t a sound. And – so far as I could see through the gloom – no one there.

I was in a long corrugated-iron shed, thick plank floor, no windows, but open at one end where the cableway brought the coal buckets in from the mine. It gave enough light to see by. A few of the buckets still hung off of the cables. In the centre of the room, I saw a rusted mess of gears and axles, and a huge flat wheel at head height that used to drive the cableway.