Beneath the Ice (16 page)

After checking in at the Cape Grace Hotel, Bear decided to go for a walk along the sea front. She still felt a little nauseous from the flight and was sure that the sea air would do her good. As she ambled along the main quayside, she watched the profusion of Cape Coloured workers blasting at the underside of the mighty ships with high-pressure hoses. The spray drifted high into the air, catching in the hot morning sun, while further along the harbour she could make out the beginnings of the V&A waterfront. The shopping mall was brimming with street entertainers, from human statues and gumboot dancers, to street merchants and touts selling dolphin-watching trips. They were all there, vying for the easy buck of the half-bored tourists as they walked laps around the canals and interlocking waterways.

As Bear passed one of the larger boats she noticed it was flying an American flag. Then, a minute later, she passed another with the Stars and Stripes gently flapping in the breeze. She stood still, eyes scanning the gun-metal grey of the vessel’s hull before tracing back up to the stern deck. Huge coils of towlines were visible above the guard rail, while neatly stacked to one side was a row of hydrophones. Bear recognised them from an offshore mining job she had done a few years back. The devices were used in seismic surveys when boats were prospecting for oil or gas.

Out on the rear deck, a sunburnt man with a black beard and balding head moved from one hydrophone to the next, checking each one meticulously. As he came close to the quay, Bear called up to him.

‘Where are you headed?’

For a moment the man didn’t realise he was being hailed, but then he craned his neck over the edge to peer down at her.

‘I said, where’s your boat headed?’ Bear shouted, remembering to flash him a smile, but the man only stared at her for a couple of seconds before returning to his work. She watched him for a moment longer, guessing that they were probably heading up to the Niger Delta. There had been another find up there last week and now all the big oil boys were throwing everything they had at it.

Glancing down at her watch, Bear realised that there were only another eight minutes to go before the scheduled call with Luca. For the last two days she had rung at precisely 18.00 GMT as Bates had suggested, but there had only been a blank tone. If only she could somehow get a message to Luca, asking him to call her instead.

Another five minutes’ walk took her to the front steps of her hotel. After the bustle and commotion of the docks, the cool interior was a welcome respite and Bear smiled gratefully at a waiter.

‘A double espresso,’ she said, before checking herself. ‘No, wait. Make that a glass of sparkling water, please.’

‘And your room number, madam?’

Bear opened her purse to check the card key and paused as her eyes settled on a picture of Nathan in the inner pouch.

‘Two hundred and four,’ she heard herself saying, while her eyes passed over every line and contour of her son’s face. He was laughing in the picture, eyes shining with pure joy. His curly brown hair was wild and unkempt. Despite her ex-husband Jamie’s continual protests, Bear had refused to keep it short. She loved her son’s hair like that; the smell of it and the soft tickle as Nathan would curl up against her chest.

Bear looked up and out towards the bank of windows. The situation with her ex-husband had to change. She had rung him from the back of the taxi that morning and been tersely informed that Nathan was still with his grandparents. Jamie had hung up, not even telling her when her son would be back.

It had been like that for several months now, with Jamie spurning her every attempt at compromise. He just couldn’t get over the residual anger. Bear knew that if this had been any other part of her life, she would have hit back, and hard, but when it came to Nathan, she found herself instinctively backing down. Her own guilt at leaving him, even for six months, had given her ex-husband the upper hand and now it played out in their every conversation.

During the long, sleepless nights of the last few months, Bear had even fantasised about kidnapping her son. She had plotted routes and imagined the paper trails she would leave to throw the police off her scent. After spending so many hours staring into the dawn skies, her plotting had become ever more sophisticated, with the web of lies growing until her own head spun from the mindboggling detail. But Nathan? Could she really rip him away from Cape Town and everything he had grown up with?

The sparkling water arrived and Bear slugged it down, still desperate for a coffee.

Screw this. If Jamie didn’t get Nathan back to Cape Town by the time her flight was scheduled to leave, she would act. He had five days, although he would never know the clock was ticking.

The decision made, she signalled to the waiter again.

‘Can you get me that espresso after all?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got a feeling, it’s going to be a long night.’

She then dialled Luca’s satellite phone number and waited, the minute hand on her watch just having clicked on the hour. Once again the call didn’t connect, only adding to her mounting sense of frustration. The desperate need to speak to Luca was growing with each day, and with it, her need for answers.

CHARLOTTE BUKOVSKY HAD
the look of a woman scorned. She walked with her shoulders hunched, accentuating her already wary body language, while her arms were kept crossed in front of her as if attempting to shield herself from some as yet unseen danger. Moving out on to the hotel veranda, her eyes darted furtively from one table to the next as she searched for the woman she was supposed to be meeting.

Bear remained still, observing her approach. Bukovsky was in her mid-forties and relatively tall, with sun-kissed blonde hair that had been scraped back from her face and secured in a tight ponytail. It pinched the skin either side of her eyes, giving her a slightly startled look. Around her tanned neck she wore a green silk scarf tied in a knot. The scarf was the only touch of colour in her otherwise drab ensemble. Bear watched her draw nearer, realising that Bukovsky must once have been quite pretty. Now, however, her looks had faded and instead, she radiated a mixture of wounded scepticism and impatience.

From Louis’s brief Bear had discovered that Bukovsky had swiftly become one of the pre-eminent microbiologists in the US despite her relatively young age. She had graduated from Princeton with a near-flawless grade average before being recruited into an advanced division of GlaxoSmithKline’s exalted R&D department. One success followed another, each accompanied by career advancement until she was heading up the entire division. All this before she had celebrated her thirtieth birthday.

The unprecedented speed of her ascent was matched only by the equally unheard of financial package offered by Richard Pearl to persuade her to work for him. She had tendered her resignation the same day.

Bear signalled across the sea of tables, standing up to shake hands. Despite the heat of the day, Bukovsky’s hand felt cold, with long and slender fingers that would have been the envy of any pianist.

‘Nice to meet you, Charlotte. It’s good of you to come at such short notice,’ Bear began.

‘The name’s Lotta,’ Bukovsky replied, dispensing with any pleasantries.

Bear gave a conciliatory smile. ‘Sorry, Lotta.’

Perching on her chair with a small overnight bag resting on her lap, Lotta stared at Bear without speaking for a few moments. There was something discomfiting about that stare, something aggrieved and agitated. Without even realising it, she was clenching her hands into fists so that her fingernails bit into the soft pads of her palms.

‘Your accent,’ she asked. ‘That French?’

Bear nodded. ‘From the Congo.’

‘So how long have you worked for Reuters?’

‘Four years,’ Bear answered casually. ‘On and off. Sometimes freelance.’ She reached into her bag and slid a business card across the table. A printer in town had made them up for her that afternoon.

‘These feel new,’ Lotta said, bending the stiff card between her thumb and forefinger.

‘They are. A new batch arrived two days ago. Got a promotion to cover the whole of Southern Africa, and for some reason the pen-pushers in head office always like to have our titles correct.’

‘Congratulations. So where is your head office nowadays?’

Bear smiled thinly. ‘I thought it was supposed to be me asking the questions?’

Lotta didn’t flinch, waiting for a response.

‘Three Times Square, New York. Do you want my press ID as well?’

Lotta looked as though she might and there was an awkward pause. Bear remained motionless, not giving away anything. She had been stupid to blurt that out, knowing full well that she hadn’t had time to get a fake ID made as yet. After a moment more, Lotta bent forward, placing the bag on the ground at her feet.

‘He always used to say he could tell when we were lying,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘Used to do this thing where he’d fire questions at you, totally unrelated questions, saying that truth could only come from within.’

‘He? You mean Pearl, right?’

Lotta flinched visibly at the mention of his name. ‘You have to understand who you are dealing with here. Pearl is utterly mercurial. He’s not classically intelligent, but he has this ability to be totally different things to different people.’

‘For example?’

Lotta’s eyes moved skywards as she tried to articulate her feelings. It was obviously something she did not enjoy doing.

‘He’s like . . . this thing . . . this controlling thing that knows everything about you. He’s there
all
the time – sometimes generous and charming, almost spoiling you. Then, without warning, he flips. It’s like living with a schizophrenic. I worked for him for all that time and only now that I am finally away from him, do I realise how manipulative he was. He played us right from the start but we went along with it anyway, like lambs to the fucking slaughter.’

She looked weary, eaten up by the strength of her own feelings. ‘After a while, that was the norm.
Pearl
made it all seem normal.’

Bear studied Lotta’s expression every time she mentioned his name. The revulsion she felt was palpable. ‘Was Pearl ever more to you than just your boss? Anything . . .’

‘Go on, say it,’ Lotta dared her. ‘You goddamn journalists are always looking for the dirt. You mean anything sexual, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I mean sexual,’ Bear countered.

Lotta remained silent. Then her hostility seemed to fade, replaced by a kind of dulled introspection.

‘He was my lover for nearly a year. And the whole time, it seemed like he shared everything with me. But actually, it was only ever what he wanted me to know.’

‘So what happened between you?’

‘I didn’t suspect anything until about three months ago. We were staying at a hotel in New York and it was early in the morning. I was working on my laptop while he was still asleep in bed. I noticed him wake up and go into the bathroom. A few minutes later I went over to turn off the main bedroom lights and somehow I managed to trip all the fuses in the suite.’

Lotta hesitated as the memory came flooding back. ‘He just went mad, absolutely mad. He started throwing himself against the bathroom door, trying to break it open. The whole time, he was screaming. It was this horrible, blood-curdling scream that went on and on.’ She bit down on her lip, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘Eventually, he broke through the door and then came at me, strangling me with his bare hands. I could feel his grip around my neck, getting tighter and tighter, while his face hung over mine, so close that we were almost touching.’

Raising her hand to her neck, Lotta ran a finger across the smooth silk of the scarf. Pearl’s wedding ring had left a deep, raking cut on the left side of her throat, but after three months, the scar was just beginning to fade.

‘It was only after I passed out that he finally stopped,’ she whispered. ‘He was trapped, you see. Trapped in the dark. Since his ordeal in the submarine . . .’ Lotta shook her head slowly, drifting into silence. Several seconds passed before she managed to regain her composure enough to continue. ‘But him hurting me like that made me re-evaluate everything. Right from the start. I began going back over everything and doing my own research. One of the things I discovered was that there is a lot more to the submarine incident than the press ever reported.’

Bear raised one eyebrow. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Pearl and Fedor Stang weren’t
lucky
to survive. They did so for a reason.’

‘I thought it was just a case of the rescue team arriving in the nick of time.’

A sneer appeared on Lotta’s lips, curling the edges upwards. ‘There was never going to be enough air for twenty-seven men. Fedor Stang was the ranking officer, while Pearl was one of his juniors. Only a couple of days into the whole thing, they ordered the rest of the crew into the bulkhead under the pretext it would help with the rescue. Then they locked them all inside, sealing the flood doors.’

Bear’s mouth widened in disbelief.

‘They guessed how long it would take for the submersibles to make it down to that depth and link on to the hull,’ Lotta continued. ‘So they decided to take control of ninety per cent of the air supply.’

‘You’re saying they actually murdered twenty-five other men?’ Bear asked incredulously. ‘If that’s true then surely someone else would have done the maths and figured out that only two men were breathing down there.’

‘After they got out, they explained everything away, saying they had used the air tanks in the ballast and part of the diving equipment. At the time, they were heroes. No one was going to start looking for an explanation that didn’t need to be found.’

Bear jotted a few notes on her pad, but inwardly she wondered how much of this she could take at face value. Lotta looked every inch the jilted ex-girlfriend prepared to go to any lengths to get her revenge. Mind you, Bear could hardly blame her. If someone had tried to strangle her, she would undoubtedly have done the same.

‘You have proof of all this, right?’

Lotta shook her head. ‘Not enough to re-open the matter officially. It was over a decade ago and there’s nothing concrete that would stand up in an enquiry. But I found a full copy of the forensic report hidden in Pearl’s private office. He’d even annotated certain sections. The rest I figured out for myself.’