Beneath the Ice (17 page)

Staring across the table, Lotta seemed to pick up on Bear’s hesitancy.

‘What?’ she asked. ‘You don’t think he has blood on his hands?’

‘Look, as a journalist, I can’t pin an entire article . . .’

‘What about the two other microbiologists?’ Lotta challenged, cutting her off mid-sentence. ‘Their deaths were no accidents.’

Bear moved back in her seat, eyeing Lotta carefully. ‘You can substantiate that?’

She nodded, eyes turning towards her overnight bag. ‘I have it right here.’

Bear followed her gaze, but resisted the temptation to ask to see the proof. ‘So that’s why you ran?’ she said. ‘Because you thought you were next?’

‘I
was
going to be next,’ Lotta replied flatly. ‘That’s exactly what Pearl had planned.’

A waiter approached the table and both women stopped speaking, leaving the sentence hanging in the air. Ordering a glass of water, Bear looked towards Lotta who simply shook her head. But just as the waiter went to leave, she suddenly called him back.

‘Actually, make that a tequila on the rocks. A double.’

As soon as he had gone, Bear picked up her notepad once more. ‘I want to step back a bit and start from the beginning. Tell me about the work you were doing at Global Change. I’ve read some of the reports on the website, but it’s all pretty vague.’

Lotta seemed a little deflated by the change in tack, but then nodded. ‘The projects are vague because so is the science. We switched from one project to the next, drifting really, until earlier this year Pearl got it into his head that algae was the future of bio-fuel. He was going to revolutionise the fuel industry and ploughed millions into the project. A few months later, we had vast growing chambers set up brimming with hexane solvents, but of course we could never make the fuel stable enough for production on a large scale. We failed again and again, with Pearl refusing to accept that the science just wasn’t there yet. Instead, he would simply blame us for not working hard enough.’

Lotta exhaled deeply. ‘Then he had us switch to something else. Have you ever heard of the term “iron fertilisation”?’

‘Vaguely,’ Bear replied with a shrug. In reality she had read several papers on the subject.

‘The theory has been around for a while,’ Lotta explained. ‘You take iron sulphate particles and spread them into the ocean. The iron causes plankton to bloom and, as the plankton grows and completes its life cycle, it sucks carbon dioxide out of the surrounding air. When the plankton dies it sinks down to the bottom of the ocean, thereby locking in all that carbon on to the seabed. People were looking at it as a solution to climate change.’

‘And Pearl was one of these people?’

‘Yeah, he was. Last summer he had me fronting a team that dumped over a hundred tons of iron sulphate off the islands of Haida Gwaii on the west coast of Canada. Initially, the experiment reacted well and there were traces of huge phytoplankton blooms all around the boat. But then, things started to go wrong . . .’

Lotta’s lips pursed in disdain, causing her cheeks to pinch a little tighter. ‘We didn’t realise it at the time, but under certain conditions iron sulphate can cause the nitrous oxide level to spike. It sucked the oxygen out of the water and we managed to kill every living organism within a hundred-and-eighty-square-mile radius. We literally created a desert in the blink of an eye.’

She shook her head, eyes glowing with a mixture of anger and contrition. Over the ensuing months, she had obviously been eaten alive by guilt.

‘You know, I grew up by the sea,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘I spent almost my entire childhood there, and now . . .’

‘Did you know the iron sulphate could react like that?’ Bear interjected, trying to bring her back on topic.

‘The initial tests were inconclusive. No one had ever tried it on such a large scale,’ Lotta answered, then paused, gently shaking her head. ‘Shit. I’m talking like him now. The answer is yes – we knew there was a chance it could happen, and instead of postponing for further testing, we just streamrollered ahead.’

‘But it’s over, right? After what happened, Pearl can’t be looking to bleach out any more of the Pacific.’

‘You don’t get it. This is not a rational mind we are dealing with here. Pearl is
only
interested in the quality of the air and the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It all stems from the days he spent in the submarine. I mean, just look at the man – he uses an inhaler when he doesn’t even have asthma and hooks himself up to an oxygen mask when he sleeps.’

She paused, cheeks flushing a deep red. ‘And the one thing he doesn’t give a shit about is the sea. In fact, it’s the reverse. He actively despises anything to do with it. Pearl believes that if his experiments to combat climate change damage the oceans, well, that’s just collateral damage.’

Their drinks arrived and Lotta sipped her tequila, wincing slightly at the bite of the spirit.

‘After Haida Gwaii, Pearl said the scale wasn’t big enough and everything had to be refocused on finding an alternative to iron sulphate. Something bigger. He then hit on the idea that it wasn’t to do with quantity. When we looked at the numbers, we realised that they were just too big. Essentially, we were never going to be able to dump enough iron sulphate into the oceans to make a difference. Instead, we needed a chain reaction.’

Bear froze. ‘A what?’

Lotta seemed to crumple in front of her. She no longer bristled with anger and recrimination. Instead, she looked desperate.

‘You don’t understand what it was like. Day in, day out, we were being told we were going to find a solution to climate change – the great ill of the twenty-first century. It was like working on the Manhattan Project, trying to split the atom. Only a handful of us knew the whole picture and we became so engrossed with trying to
create
the substance that we lost sight of what it would actually
do
.’

She ran her fingers through her hair, scraping her nails against the skin of her scalp. The horror of what she had been carrying finally releasing.

‘In November we managed to modify a type of irradiated radical that would chain react in saltwater. We created Tetramethylsilane.’

Bear remained silent, waiting for her to elaborate.

‘Tetramethylsilane was specifically designed to trigger a non-reversible event. In the lab we used to call it the “seed”.’

Bear’s forehead creased as she tried to grasp what had been said. ‘You’re telling me that this seed will trigger plankton to bloom all over the ocean. And that the plankton will suck up the carbon in the atmosphere.’

Lotta nodded, her eyes locked on Bear’s. ‘That’s exactly what I am saying. The seed could be the panacea for the twenty-first century’s ills, lowering carbon levels by anything up to twenty per cent on a
global
scale. Or there’s a chance that it could do the same as at Haida Gwaii and decimate an entire ocean.’

‘Chance? What kind of a chance?’

Lotta shrugged, blankness filling her eyes. ‘It’s complicated. Like, really fucking complicated. Do you have any idea how many variables have to go into the modelling?’

Bear didn’t speak but her eyes pressed for an answer.

‘OK . . . you want an answer? The last model I worked on put the probability at somewhere between forty and fifty-five per cent. Maybe they’ve got that narrowed down some more, but right now, all I can tell you for certain is that Pearl is prepared to take that chance.’

‘
Mon Dieu,
’ Bear whispered, shaking her head. ‘What if he is wrong?’

‘Then we are not talking about a few dead fish here. We’re talking about an entire eco-system being shut down
overnight.
It would mean the desertification of one of the richest maritime systems on earth. Just like that. Everything dies.’ Lotta clicked her fingers to emphasise the point. ‘No one can predict the knock-on effects if this thing goes bad, but one thing’s for sure: it’ll be on a
planetary
scale.’

Bear stared across the table in shock. ‘But I don’t understand. Why didn’t you go to someone?’ she asked, voice laden with recrimination despite her best efforts. ‘Why didn’t you inform one of the agencies and get them to stop him? Wouldn’t the DHS have oversight on something like that?’

‘Homeland Security! They’re nothing but trumped up beat cops. I went all the way to the goddamn FBI!’

Bear signalled for her to lower her voice. Despite her flushed cheeks, Lotta slowly seemed to take stock of her surroundings and did as she was asked.

‘In December I sent an anonymous email to the FBI. I detailed it all: the dumping off Haida Gwaii, the blueprint structure for the seed, everything they needed to close us – and more importantly, Pearl – down. But there was no response.’ She stared across at Bear, eyes begging her to believe the story. ‘Three weeks later I saw a car parked opposite my house for two nights in a row and I just knew that Pearl was coming for me. But after New York and all that had happened, I’d already planned my exit. I was following it too, until your man tracked me down.’

Bear didn’t respond. She was still trying to guess the reason why no one in the FBI had reacted to the evidence Lotta had sent them. Did they think it was so improbable it didn’t warrant investigation or had Pearl somehow managed to quash it at source?

‘So why did you come out of hiding?’ Bear asked, her mind rapidly switching tack. ‘If you knew Pearl was looking for you, why did you risk everything by coming to see me?’

‘Because Pearl is
here
! Right here in Cape Town. And in only a few days’ time, he is going to try and fly into Antarctica to test the seed.’

Bear leant forward in her seat. ‘What do you mean . . . Antarctica? I don’t see the connection.’

‘Why else do you think he has invested all that money in the GARI science base? Pearl needs to test the seed, and the subterranean lake they’ve been drilling into is the perfect place. It’s the one site on earth with saltwater encased in ice – a real-life Petri dish where he can gauge how the chain reaction will work before launching it into the Southern Ocean.’

Bear shut her eyes, feeling like the air had just been driven from her lungs. It seemed as though all the misgivings she had been harbouring for the last few days were now leaching out through the pores of her skin. The lake – that was exactly where Luca was now.

‘That’s why I came to see you,’ Bear heard Lotta say, but her mind was still locked on Luca and the danger he was in. Opposite her Lotta continuing talking using her long fingers to emphasise each point. ‘When I left for Nairobi, I thought it would take Pearl at least six months to create a transportable prototype of the seed. I knew that Antarctica would be shutting down at the end of February and so, if he missed that deadline, Pearl would have to wait a whole other year to perform the test. But then I found out that his private jet was in Cape Town and that could only mean one thing – somehow he’s found a way to transport the seed. I decided then that I had to try and stop him, and when Louis called I realised that perhaps the best way to do it was to go to the press.’

Lotta stared across at Bear and, for the first time, registered the look of deep concern on her face. Not aware of Bear’s personal interest in the story, she took it for general apprehension about what had been said.

‘Not everything’s lost,’ Lotta soothed. ‘There’s still a reasonable chance that the ice surrounding the lake will contain the reaction.’

Bear blinked several times before registering that Lotta was addressing her once again. Dragging her mind away from thoughts of Luca, she jerked forward in her seat.

‘The ice,’ she said, her voice taking on a harsh, impersonal tone. ‘You said that’s why Pearl had chosen the lake in the first place. That it was like a Petri dish. So, even if he does launch the seed in the next few days, what does it matter? None of it will get into open water.’

‘That’s the theory, but as in everything he does, Pearl bent the facts to fit his own agenda. We knew from the beginning that ice dramatically slows the reaction and, over a certain distance, could even stop it. So the lake
was
the perfect place. When we did our original research, the ice mapping over the last fifteen years suggested that there would be an average of at least five kilometres of ice between the lake and open water.’

‘Is that enough?’

‘It would have been, but things have been changing down there over the last couple of years, and I mean radically. When I was in Nairobi, I started tapping into the latest data from the German base of Neumeyer. Two years ago, the ice was down to two point seven kilometres. Last year, it was under two. This year, the distance is already only point eight of a kilometre. That’s just eight hundred metres of ice separating the lake water from open sea, and there may be places where it’s even thinner.’

‘Is that enough?’ Bear pressed her.

Lotta shook her head, eyes brimming with desperate uncertainty. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t. But one thing is for sure, it stacks the odds further in favour of some of the seed reaching open water.’

Lotta then seemed to snap out of her own nightmare and bent down to the bag at her feet. Emerging with a digital camera, she pulled a slim 64GB flashcard from its side with the tips of her nails and placed it on the napkin in front of her.

‘This has everything you need to blow the story wide open. There’s a full schematic of the seed, and enough of a trail to prove that Pearl was the one heading up the entire project.’

Folding over the edges of the napkin, she pushed it across the table. ‘But you must hurry,’ she added. ‘He’ll be leaving in the next few days for sure.’

Bear didn’t reach for the napkin, ignoring the urgency in the other woman’s voice.

‘I need to know more about the actual lake,’ she insisted. ‘Is there anything dangerous there?’

Lotta’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. ‘I was talking about the seed and . . .’

Bear reached forward, grabbing hold of Lotta’s cold hands. The sudden physical contact made her flinch and stare at Bear in alarm. ‘The lake,’ she repeated, speaking slowly as if to a child. ‘Is it dangerous?’