Текст книги "Zodiac Station"

Автор книги: Tom Harper

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

‘I looked in the field log. Everyone comes and goes, but no one’s been to the cabin. Or admitted to it. I’m afraid that doesn’t do us much good.’

I thought through my list of names, all the lines connecting them.

‘How do you think Tom Anderson fits?’

‘Quam didn’t want him here,’ said Kennedy thoughtfully. ‘He and Hagger had the most tremendous row about it last week.’

I gave him a stern look. ‘Were you spying?’

Kennedy squirmed. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing.’

‘Forget it. I heard it too.’ The whole base had heard it. ‘So Hagger knew something. Quam thought he might tell Anderson, so he tried to stop Anderson coming here. When that didn’t work out, he killed Hagger.’

‘That explains why Hagger was up on the glacier near Vitangelsk when he should have been working on sea ice. But what about the faked data?’

My brain was working overtime, like I’d drunk three cups of coffee on top of a NoDoz. ‘How’s this? Hagger and Quam were in this together, working for the Russians. Hagger faked his data so he would get the funding to come to Zodiac. But he did it in a dumb way, and someone figured it out. Quam got pissed off, because Hagger had drawn suspicion on them; he went up to the Helbreen to bitch Hagger out. Someone lost their temper, there was shoving, and Hagger bit the dust.’

‘So what do we do now? Confront Quam?’

‘We don’t have enough evidence.’

‘But Jensen—’

‘Proves nothing. Quam can bluff that out. You have any idea how dangerous he is? If he thinks we’ve figured him out, he’ll disappear us down the nearest ravine.’ I flexed my fingers. Even inside the mittens, they’d begun to go numb. ‘We need proof.’

‘How?’

I grinned. ‘I’ll break into his office tonight.’

Kennedy looked unhappy, but it was only a mild case of morals. Hell, it’s not even breaking in if there isn’t a lock.

‘And you keep an eye on Anderson. Either he’s one unlucky son of a bitch – or he’s more dangerous than we can imagine.’

I turned for the door. ‘Let’s get back to the Platform. It’s too fucking cold out here.’

Outside, the storm hadn’t died down any. The second I opened the door, I got a face full of ice. We were straight into the wind now, and it cut right through to the bone. Forget the flag line, or the lights on the Platform. The visibility was so bad I could barely see Doc six feet in front of me. I had to hope like hell he could see where he was going.

It felt like it took for ever. At first, I assumed it was the wind and the cold and hating every second. But even then, we should have made it eventually. Looking ahead, I couldn’t even see the Platform lights.

I tugged on the rope. Doc stopped and waited for me to catch him up.

‘Are we going the right way?’ I had to pull aside his hood and put my mouth almost against his ear so he could hear me over the roar of the wind.

He shrugged, and pointed to the marker post just in front of him. Still on track.

OK. We went on, heads down, faces frozen, not even bothering to wipe off the snow that gathered in the creases on our coats. I started to think about all the guys who went out in the snow and nearly died, Victorian explorers who thought a tweed suit and a pocket watch were all you needed for polar expeditions. Was this how they died? Walking on, bent lower and lower, until finally they collapsed face first and never got up? Not one of my life’s ambitions.

The rope went tight so fast it almost knocked me on my ass. Before I could wonder what the hell Doc was playing at, I was being pulled forward, jogging over the ice in a crab run I couldn’t control.

I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew I had to stop it before we both got killed. I kicked my heels into the snow, trying to get a hold. Couldn’t. The rope pulled me on, my feet skidding over the snow like I was skiing. Ahead, through the chaos in the air, I could see a dark scar cutting across the ground, and the rope dropping into it.

The gulch. The crack at the edge of the glacier. I could just about see some of the warning poles whipping about in the storm. How the hell did we get here?

It was too close. The rope wasn’t long enough, and I was going too fast. I pulled off my mittens and reached for the knot around my waist, scrabbling to undo it. Kennedy was screwed either way, but maybe I could save myself.

With so much tension, the knot was never going to come undone. Normally, I carry a penknife in my pants pocket, but I’d taken it out to go to the mag hut. I was fucked. I wondered whether if I landed on top of Kennedy, he’d break my fall.

You know what saved me? The wind. An Arctic storm blowing fifty knots in your face is one hell of a brake. It slowed me down enough that I could dig my heels into the snow. I leaned back almost forty-five degrees. The wind, Kennedy’s weight on the rope, friction and gravity came into perfect equilibrium. I was weightless.

I’d stopped.

Then the hard work began. Inch by inch, I hauled myself back. The first three steps almost broke my back; each time I lifted my foot, I thought I’d lose it completely and go right over the edge. But it got easier. Once he stopped falling, Kennedy’d managed to get his feet against the ice wall to brace himself. As I pulled, he was able to walk up, taking some of the weight. The wind kept pushing me, so hard that when Kennedy finally made it up I lost my balance and sat down hard on a bare sheet of ice.

The rope went slack. A dark figure staggered out of the storm, covered all over in snow like fucking Bigfoot. He crouched beside me.

‘That’s the last time I let you go first,’ I shouted at him.

He shook his head. ‘I followed the flag line.’

He was right. I’d seen it too, the red poles every ten feet, all the way from the mag hut.

‘Someone moved the poles.’ It was the only explanation. Someone had actually tried to kill us. It was a hell of a thought.

If he thinks we’ve figured him out, he’ll disappear us down the nearest ravine. Christ, I didn’t mean it that literally.

And if I didn’t get off my ass and out of that storm soon, he’d have succeeded. My hands were already ice, and God knows where I’d dropped my gloves. They were probably halfway to Siberia by now. Pulling out Kennedy had cost me most of my strength: even in my ECW gear, I couldn’t stop shivering. In those conditions, that gives you less than five minutes.

I stuck my hands in my coat pockets. At least it kept the wind off of them. Kennedy put his arm around me, and together we stumbled our way back along the flag line. If it led straight from the mag hut to the gulch, I had a pretty good idea where the Platform ought to be. Soon, off to our right, I saw a dim glow. We broke towards it. The lights got brighter. Now I could see the steel legs, rigid in the chaos. Best goddam sight I ever saw in my life.

I just managed to get up the stairs, kick the bar to open the door and fall inside the vestibule. I couldn’t even get my gear off. Kennedy had to unzip me and pull off my coat. His hands were shaking almost as bad as mine.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Did someone just try to kill us?’

‘Look on the bright side.’ Hunched over on the bench, I looked around the boot room. A few of the other coats were still wet with melted snow: Quam’s, Greta’s and Fridge’s. Anderson’s wasn’t there at all. A lot of people to be out on a shitty night like that.

‘At least if they’re trying to kill us, we have to be on the right track.’

Thirty

Eastman

It fries your brain when you wake in the night and it’s daylight outside. Humans are tropical mammals; we like some darkness in our lives. Spending summer in the Arctic is like being dumped on the bright side of the moon.

Not that there was a whole lot of daylight that morning. The storm had died down, but it was still blowing strong. I could hear it moaning through the antennas. It’s lucky I don’t believe in ghosts.

After we came in from the mag hut, after I defrosted my hands, I’d gone in to the mess. Some of the others had gone to bed, most were still decorating for Thing Night, listening to music and drinking a few beers. Quam was in his office.

There was no point asking if anyone had gone out while we were in the mag hut. People had been coming and going all evening. Whoever did it, I didn’t want to alert him.

I worried Kennedy might say something. He looked as if he was about to flip out. But he went off into his medical room, and when he came back he seemed a whole lot calmer. Soon after, we both went to bed, though it took me a long time to get to sleep.

I got out of my bed at 3 a.m. and walked down the corridor to Quam’s office. Maybe I should have felt nervous, or guilty: the truth is, I was juiced. Quam had tried to kill me – I was certain it had to be him – and I wanted to nail him. Forget the radar, the Russians, the mine and all that. This was personal.

But I wasn’t so mad I got dumb. I got to the office, had my hand on the handle, when I heard a noise from inside. Tick, tack, tick, tack. A metallic sound, so regular I could have convinced myself it was a clock or some piece of machinery playing up.

Except I’d seen Quam’s desk, and that executive toy he kept next to his computer monitor. Newton’s cradle: you swing a ball from one end, and the ball at the other end kicks up. The conservation of momentum, Newton’s laws, if you want the technical explanation.

Now, I have a PhD in physics, so I can explain Newton’s laws pretty good. In a closed system, momentum is never gained or lost. In other words, if you set one of those toys off in outer space, it would keep going for ever.

But Utgard’s not outer space. Not quite. Gravity and air resistance mean the balls eventually slow down and stop. Unless there’s someone to keep them going.

I backed away. There was no light coming under the door. Maybe he’d gone to bed right before I got up.

Tick, tack, tick, tack.

I listened in the dark. The balls got slower. Tick … tack … Slower, and stopped.

I counted ten, then reached for the door handle again. But right before I touched it, the noise began again, firm and hard.

Newton’s first law says that if something’s stopped, it stays stopped unless an external force is applied. Quam had to be in there, sitting in the dark, listening to the balls clack just like me. What else was he doing there? Waiting? For what?

Suddenly, I heard another noise. A chair scraping back from a desk. I didn’t have time to get back to my room. I ducked across the corridor and slipped inside Fridge’s lab opposite, leaving the door open a crack so I could see.

Quam stepped out. In the dim light, he looked a hundred years old. Shoulders slumped, face lined. He had a slip of paper in his hand.

He walked up the corridor and stopped outside the mess door. I thought he’d go in – maybe he had the munchies – but he didn’t. He just stood there, doing something with the paper. Then he turned around and went back into his office. The chair squeaked, and a moment later the tick tack of the toy reset again. Just in case the laws of physics had changed while he was away.

I snuck out of Fridge’s lab and headed for the mess. It was a dumb thing to do, with Quam right there. He could have come out again any moment. But I had to know if he’d done what I thought he had.

On the door, the Daily Horrorscope had changed. Guessing who wrote those things was one of our favourite games at Zodiac, but in all those conversations I don’t think anyone ever suspected Quam. Now that I knew, I kind of wished I didn’t.

There wasn’t much light, but I could read what he’d put up.

The storm is just beginning.

Thirty-one

Eastman

Everyone makes it to breakfast on Saturday. It’s waffle day. Somewhere along the line, someone had too much time on his hands and spent the winter making an old-fashioned, cast-iron waffle maker. Every Saturday, Danny wheels it out with little plastic cups of batter, and everyone stands in line to make their own. It even stamps a little Z for Zodiac in the centre of the waffle.

Now, I like waffles as much as the next guy. But that morning, I hardly tasted it. Knowing someone in that room had tried to get me to walk into the gulch the night before kind of put me off my breakfast. I kept on sliding down in my chair, like my body wanted me to keep my head down. I stared at the others: sticky fingers, syrup dribbling down their chins. Some of them caught me, gave me looks that said I was some kind of freak.

I’m the only one here who has a clue, I said back, in my head.

No one was happy. For some of those people, a season at Zodiac was the high point of their careers. Instead of using it, they were sat there wasting tens of thousands of dollars a day doing squat. But you know what really pissed them off, the one word you heard over and over when you listened in on their conversations? Internet. That’s what was driving them crazy: twenty-some people trapped on the Platform, and no Internet. Do you blame them? Captain Scott took a lot of shit, but he never had his web access cut off.

Kennedy joined me at my table. He always poured his syrup so neatly over the waffle. Mine was drowning in it.

‘Did you find anything last night?’ he asked, looking so guilty he might as well have put it on Facebook.

‘Quam was in there all night.’ He hadn’t showed up at breakfast. I wondered if he was still in there, tick-tacking his Newton toy, or if he’d gone to bed.

I looked out the window. The weather was still ugly. Snow devils whipped across the ice; clouds covered the mountain peaks. From my table, I could see the mag hut, and the flag line leading to it. Or where the flag line had been. The poles lay scattered on the ground like someone had been through with a giant lawnmower.

‘Terrible storm damage,’ I said sarcastically.

‘The Internet’s still down, too,’ Doc said.

‘I know.’ I swabbed up some more syrup with a piece of my waffle. Maybe it was because I was sitting under the tinfoil spaceship Greta’d hung for Thing Night – or maybe because someone had tried to kill me – but I felt kind of paranoid.

‘You look anxious,’ said Doc. ‘Would you like something for it?’

I shook my head. Those pills dull your brain; I had to stay sharp. Keep my wits. I didn’t know when, but I knew for sure they’d come for me again. And I was going to be ready.

I strolled down the corridor and knocked on Hagger’s lab. The red skull smiled at me from the door. HIGH INFECTION RISK OF UNKNOWN DNA. No one answered, so I let myself in. I dropped the key I’d taken back in one of the drawers, and buried it under some pipettes and tubing, the kind of place it might have gotten lost. Then I had a look around.

The yellow pipe Anderson had been looking at sat in the corner in a tray. The pipe looked pretty ragged, peppered with holes like someone had blasted it with a shotgun. Maybe Malick’s story, the bug munching on his drill rig, had something in it. Hard to see what that had to do with Mine 8. Maybe nothing.

Anderson arrives, Hagger dies. Couldn’t be coincidence. I wished I could have had a look at the notebook, but I didn’t find it. Nothing in the fridge except a can of Coke. Nothing on the benchtops except instruments, and a paper printed off from about ten years ago. Anderson, Sieber and Pharaoh, ‘Pfu-87: A Synthetic Variant on the Pfu-polymer Enzyme and …’ blah blah blah …

The door crashed open. There’s only one person who bangs a door that hard at Zodiac. I turned around and saw Greta behind me. All dressed up in her coat and snow pants, and the cutesy hat with the strings down the side.

‘How you doing?’ I asked – mainly because I could see she looked furious.

‘If one more person tells me that the Internet’s down …’

‘The Internet’s down.’

She made a kind of growling noise. Without really thinking about it, I found myself backing off a couple of paces.

‘I was looking for Tom,’ I said.

‘He’s working in Star Command.’

‘I didn’t know he was interested in astronomy?’

She gave me one of those Greta looks that says it’s none of your business and she could care less anyhow.

‘Help me fix the Internet? You’re the radio man.’

‘Sure thing.’

You’re the radio man. What did she mean by that? Maybe nothing. Or maybe she was thinking of that big antenna strung across Vitangelsk, and the cable carrying the signal to Mine 8. Her face, like always, could have meant anything.

* * *

I got on my gear and headed for the laundry room. The temperature dropped about fifty degrees the moment I went in. There’s a hatch in the ceiling that opens on to the roof. It stood wide open, with a ladder going up and Greta’s boots on the top rung.

‘Shut the door,’ she told me.

‘Already have.’

I climbed up after her and clipped in to the safety rope she’d fixed. The storm was still kicking around, and the roof was an ice rink.

‘Safety is job number one,’ I said, wriggling into the harness. Hard to do when you’re wearing three pairs of pants.

‘Too many accidents,’ Greta agreed.

‘Quam must be shitting bricks.’

That got me one of her twitchy half-smiles. Though I never knew with those if it was what I’d said, or if there was something else completely going on inside her head, and the smile just happened to pop out at the same time. Often, with Greta, I felt like I was the joke.

I’d been at Zodiac a month and I still hadn’t worked her out. She wasn’t gorgeous, exactly, but she had something that meant she stuck in your mind. Like a lyric in a song that makes no sense, you spend hours trying to think what it means. Oftentimes, I found myself wondering what it would be like to fuck her. And it’s not what you’re thinking. Like I said, I’d only been there a month.

‘You think Quam seems stressed out at the moment?’ I tried.

Dumb question. ‘Always.’

We crawled across the roof to the main satellite dish that gave the Internet hook-up. You didn’t have to be a mechanic, or even the ‘radio guy’, to see what had gone wrong. The dish was dinged up like someone had taken a hammer to it. Worse, the feedhorn hung off of its bracket like a broken arm.

‘You won’t get that working any time soon,’ I said.

‘There’s a spare in the store.’

I didn’t really hear her. The feedhorn’s mounted on a big steel bar bolted right through the back of the dish. I was trying to imagine how big a piece of ice you’d need to break it like that. I remembered the noises coming through my office roof the night before. Almost like footsteps.

‘We need to shut down all comms to do the installation,’ Greta said.

I rubbed my eyes with my mitt. No comms. No plane. One by one, our links to the outside world were getting cut off.

Greta must have thought the same thing. She nodded to the safety rope.

‘Better hold on tight.’

We unscrewed the broken dish and lowered it to the ground. Between us, we carried it to the shop. Halfway there, she turned and looked back. Her nose wrinkled up.

‘Those oil drums shouldn’t be so close to the Platform. It’s a fire risk.’

‘Not a big risk at twenty below.’

‘I’ll move them.’

‘Can we do it later? This dish is killing my arms.’

Inside the shop, everything was shipshape in that obsessive Greta way. Weirdly, it reminded me of being in a church: the light coming in through the windows, the dust in the air, the smell of burning. The broken-down snowmobile under the tarp could have been a coffin set out for last respects.

We laid the dish in a corner. Greta went to the store to dig out the backup; while I waited, I eyed up the tools on the wall. She had everything there. A couple of big sledgehammers, for example, that could make a nasty dent in a piece of steel.

Maybe I was crazy. I’d heard the wind outside last night. If anyone had gone out on that roof, he’d have been blown into the mountainside at a hundred miles an hour. You couldn’t stand up, never mind swing a hammer.

Even if you wore a safety line? Greta had looked pretty nimble up on the roof just then.

She came out of the store empty-handed. As much as you could ever tell, she seemed puzzled.

‘No joy?’

‘It’s not there.’

I guess I didn’t look too surprised. ‘You know how pissy this is going to make everyone,’ I warned her.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t even tell me.’

She stepped towards the door – and found me blocking her way. I wanted to get some things straight while I had her alone.

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘You knew Hagger as well as anyone.’

She gave me an Oh, please look.

‘Did he ever say why he brought Tom Anderson up here?’

‘Ask Tom.’

I didn’t like her tone. ‘I’m asking you.’

I was standing closer to her than I’d realised. In the sunlight, I could see the tiny soft hairs on her cheek. I had a powerful, stupid urge to kiss her.

‘You and Tom seemed to hit it off pretty fast,’ I said. ‘Soon as he gets here, you’re racing off together. Maybe you wanted to trade Hagger in for a younger model. Maybe Hagger got in the way, and Anderson got rid of him.’

‘Fuck you.’

Something inside of me snapped. I only meant to grab her, but suddenly, not even thinking, I was kissing her, pressing my mouth against hers. She struggled, but I had her pinned against the wall. And I was hard.

I tasted blood in my mouth. The bitch bit my lip. I pulled back, ready to slap her. That was what she wanted. Before I knew it, she’d grabbed a crescent wrench from its hook on the wall and swung it against my elbow. Christ, it hurt.

Greta was breathing hard, her cheeks red.

‘Is that what you did to the satellite dish?’ I gasped. I wanted to hit her back, but there wasn’t anything in reach. And she was holding that wrench like a morning star.

‘Get out,’ she said.

Truth is, I was so hopped up on adrenalin, I didn’t know what I’d do next. If I’d slap her, or get her down on the floor and fuck her, or what. I stared her in the face.

‘If you ever do that again, I’ll feed your balls to a seal,’ she said.

I left.

I knelt down in the snow outside. My legs were trembling; I wanted to puke. I blamed it on the pain in my elbow. I didn’t know what came over me in there. She was dangerous.

I rubbed snow on my face to cool off. I took some breaths. It felt like a jackhammer was pounding against my skull, harder and harder, until I clocked it was coming up from the sky. A helicopter flew over the station: big, ugly-looking thing with a double-bubble nose. Must be DAR-X heading home. Too high to see if Malick was in there waving.

I went over to Star Command. The crucified Buzz Lightyear smiled down at me as I reached the caboose. I went in without knocking. Anderson was inside, still wearing his coat and hat, looking at a readout on a monitor. Three machines that looked like laser printers sat on a tabletop, humming and clicking.

‘What’s going on?’ My voice sounded loud and fake, even to me. Did he look guilty – or just surprised someone had burst in on him? I admit, everyone looked guilty to me that day. Someone had to be.

Anderson waved a plastic Baggie at me. All I saw inside was water. ‘Analysing Hagger’s samples.’

‘I heard they were bullshit. He doped the data.’

He didn’t ask how I knew. ‘I don’t think he did. If you look at the notebooks, he knew the samples were dodgy but he didn’t know why. That’s what he was looking for.’

I didn’t buy that for a second. Hagger knew exactly what he was doing. I pointed to one of the machines.

‘What’s that?’

‘A mass spectrometer. It gives you the mass of the elements in a sample, so you can guess what’s in it.’

‘And this one?’

‘DNA sequencer.’

‘I didn’t know we had those here.’

‘Hagger must have set them up.’

Far away from where anybody could see them. They looked good, but who knew what was inside them. ‘Do they work?’

‘Perfectly.’

Was he covering for Hagger? Time to show a little more leg. I pulled out the sheet of paper and showed it to him.

‘I got another reading on that interference. Looks like it’s coming from near Vitangelsk.’ I watched him like a hawk as I fed him the bait. If it meant anything, he hid it well.

‘Up by Mine Eight,’ I threw in.

He read the numbers. ‘It’s the same as before.’

‘If only we could unlock it,’ I deadpanned. ‘You know, with a key.’

His eyes flicked up at me. Only for a second, but my senses were white-hot and I caught it. He knew. He fucking knew.

‘Why did Hagger bring you here?’ I asked

I thought he didn’t hear me – the DNA sequencer had started to spit out some data, and he was copying them down in his notebook. A string of letters, G’s, C’s, A’s and T’s, repeating themselves in random combos. Not so different from the numbers coming through the antenna, if you thought about it.

‘Have you ever been to New York?’ he asked.

‘Sure. Empire State Building, NBC tour, all that shit. Why, you want some tips?’

Just then, Kennedy walked in.

‘Quam’s gone out to check one of the bear cameras.’

It was all I needed to hear.