In Cold Pursuit (31 page)

She was still high from this experience ten minutes later as she slipped quietly into the kitchen in search of a way to warm herself. She found tea, cups, and a container of honey laid out right next to a self-heating teapot. As she plugged in the pot, she heard someone moving beyond the heavy drapes that separated the room from the sleeping quarters beyond.

The station manager emerged, shuffling slowly in a pair of fuzzy slippers with leopard spots, his eyes swollen from sleep. “Howja sleep?” His voice rasped with early morning and too much drink the evening before.

“Okay.”

“Yer lying.”

“Yeah.”

“Sucks.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Find whatcha need?”

“Mm-hmm.”

He arched his well-padded body into a stretch, moaning. “Sheila said to tell you there’s an e-mail message for ya. She printed it out.” He pointed with his elbow toward the computer stand.

Valena grabbed the page and sat down on the couch.

Sheila had folded it three times, stapled it as many times across the middle, and written
VALENA
on it. Quickly, she picked out the staples, unfolded it, and read it. It was from Cal Hart.

Well, check that one off the list of suspects
, thought Valena, and then, an instant later,
But maybe this is a con, a try at misdirection!
She turned toward the station manager, who was now scratching at his armpits and belly. “Can I use this computer to send an e-mail?” she asked.

He swept one arm in a small but regal bow to indicate that it was hers for the asking. “But you won’t get through, at least not right away.”

“Why not?”

“Some asshole’s switched the dish off.”

“Someone turned off the dish?”

“Yeah. You know, back in the wiring room, where they’ve got that little laptop that controls our universe. Someone’s decided it’s funny to go in there and play God over all of McMurdo. Punched the two keys. We’re incommunicado with the outside world until our techs wake up.”

“Has it been off all night?”

“I suppose so. I found it the last thing, as I was making my rounds before I went to bed.”

“But who would want to do that?”

“Well, I sure didn’t do it, and Sheila wouldn’t, so it was probably one of you idiots, and as you can see, I’m not yet dressed to greet the world, so unless you’d like to sashay over to the bunkhouse and shake sleeping bags until you find the right guy, then we’ll just have to wait. Meanwhile, you can send your messages, but they just won’t reach their targets until we get the system back up.”

Valena sat down in the task chair in front of the computer desk and turned on the machine. It was old and booted slowly. While she waited, she looked again at Cal’s note, and then more closely at the paper on which it had been printed. Some of the holes through which the staples had been punched had been punched twice, slightly widening the holes.

Somebody had read her message and had tried to reclose it without being caught.

Sheila emerged from her room, scowling like she had a headache as she approached the task of making breakfast, but as Valena opened her mouth to speak to her, one of the men who was working with the satellite dish came in from the bunkhouse and spoke first, wishing Sheila a good morning.

“Screw you and the horse you rode in on,” Sheila snarled in return. “All your fault with that cheap New Zealand pinot.”

The man laughed. “No one told you to mix it with whiskey.”

“And now ye’re my father. Ye want breakfast, or are ye thinking maybe ye’d rather a day without food?”

“Eggs over easy,” he said.

“We have no fresh eggs and ye know it. Ye’
ll
have mummified bacon and waffles like the rest of us mortals.”

The station manager wandered back into the room and addressed the tech. “Oh, so you decided to get up, did you? Well, some bozo turned your system off during the night. Would you mind turning it back on? The lady here is trying to e-mail her pen pals, and I’m sure that little research station down there on Ross Island would like to get back in touch with the real world, too.”

The tech was busy sucking up coffee. He stared at the manager over the mug. “You’re kidding me.”

“No, I’m Mary Poppins. And Sheila, you’ve got to quit showing people how to switch the damned thing off. It was only a matter of time before someone decided to muck with it.”

The tech wandered back toward the wiring room, grumbling.

Valena watched the station manager’s progress toward the
coffeepot, hoping that he would leave the room for a while. She wanted desperately to speak to Sheila again, to ask her when she had left the note and who might possibly have opened it. To ask a thousand questions. But she needed privacy, too and that was a scarce quantity here in Antarctica.

She turned and looked at the cook, who was now opening a rasher of precooked bacon that she had left thawing on the kitchen counter the evening before. Feeling Valena’s eyes on her, she looked up. She was not smiling. She lifted a long, sharp knife, the type used to chop large amounts of vegetables, and brought it down with authority.

Valena returned her gaze to the computer, which was finally ready. Hoping that no one would look over her shoulder at what was on the screen, she opened her e-mail to write to Cal but found other messages waiting for her that interested her much more. The first was from Em Hansen:

Valena tucked that bit of wisdom into her brain and opened the next message. It was from James Skehan, dated Wednesday evening:

Valena closed this message immediately. She sat back and tried to think. Should she reply? In her haze of fatigue, she could not sort out what to think about any of the messages or what to write in a return. As she sat still, listening to her heartbeat pounding in her ears, all possibilities jammed on one logistical particular: she did not know when she would be arriving back in McMurdo. She was not in charge of that schedule.
No one is in charge of anything in Antarctica. The continent itself is in charge!

“How’d you sleep?” Edith asked as she sat down at the table. She looked fresh as the proverbial daisy.

Valena squeezed her eyes shut. “Fine.”

“Nothing like a day of good physical work to tucker you out.”

“Right.”

“Go get your gear together out of the bunkhouse and then come and have breakfast. We’ll be loading up the empties to take back to Mac Town and be getting on the road ASAP. There’s another storm coming, and I want to be in Gallagher’s with a pool cue in my hands when it hits.”

“Check.” Valena logged off the computer and headed for the bunkhouse. Outside, she could see what Edith was talking about. The southern horizon was studded with clouds, and the wind was again rising.

The other two satellite technicians strode toward her across the yard from the bunkhouse, heads lowered against the blow. She hurried past them to the bunkhouse and pushed open the door, nearly colliding with Wee Willy, who was on his way out, duffel over his shoulder and fake-fur hand warmer
dangling in front of the expansive front of his Carhartts. For the briefest of moments, he made eye contact with her. “Thanks again for picking this up,” he said, patting the wad of fuzz.

Valena blinked in surprise. His eyes and voice had been filled with surprise, confusion, shy affection, and…she struggled to evaluate the last ingredient… longing.

Inside the bunkhouse, Hilario and Dave were just stuffing the last bits of personal gear into their duffels. “
Hola, chica!”
said Hilario. “Ready for another day of stoop labor?”

“Uh, sure.”

“See you at breakfast, then. Last one gets no bacon.” He brushed by her and left the building.

Suddenly she was alone with Dave. He looked up at her, smiling a sleepy good-morning smile. The low light in the room made his features softer, more intimate, and the fact that he was rolling up a sleeping bag with his large, thick-fingered hands added an entirely tactile aspect to their meeting.

She moved to her bunk and began doing the same. Turned her back to him. Pushed the silky fabric of the sleeping bag into the big duffel in which it had come.

Dave spoke. “Edith says you’d like to learn to drive the Challenger.”

“Um, well…yes.”

“Then it’s a date.”

For the space of several heartbeats, the only sounds in the room were the slithering of fabric being shoved into duffels and zippers being zipped. She heard his footsteps as he crossed the floor. The door opened, flooding the room with light.

The door closed again. She was alone.

She realized that she was perspiring.

V
ALENA MANAGED TO CORNER
S
HEILA IN THE STORE-
room while everyone else was outside lashing down the return load. “I need more information,” she said.

“I don’t know what I can add,” Sheila replied, appearing
to focus her attention on which can of tomatoes to remove from the shelves.

“Anything. Any arguments you overheard. Anything that suggests that anyone other than Emmett had a gripe with the man who died.”

Sheila rubbed a corner of her apron around the top of the can she had selected to remove a nonexistent coating of dust. “Well, I heard one …” she said, concentrating on a number 10 can of applesauce.

“Come on! Any moment, Edith’s going to step through the doorway and tell me it’s time to go.”

“I only heard one side of the discussion. Though it appeared to have but the one side.”

“Who’s side? What was said?”

“It was the journalist. He kept his voice low, but I could tell that he was very, very angry.”

“At who?”

“It was outside the tent the first day he was there. I was inside, cooking. So I don’t know which of the men he was talking to, but he said, ‘We meet at last,’ and then, ‘Yeah, you,’ or words to that effect, and then, ‘I’ve come a long way to find you, asshole,’ and then I couldn’t hear any more, because there were footsteps—you know how they squeak in that cold, dry snow—and Mr. Sweeny was following the other bloke away, nattering at him. At the time I didn’t think much of it.”

“Wow. Did you tell the feds about this?”

“Nay. They didn’t ask, now, did they?”

The airlock door opened, and Edith stepped inside. “Valena!” she called. “Come on! We’re waiting on you!”

B
Y LATE MORNING, THEY HAD SET ANOTHER SEVEN MILES
of flags along the route, picking up where they had started setting them the day before and progressing back toward McMurdo. Valena fell again into the rhythm of the work, engrossing herself this time in the art of pitching flags off the top of the load while Hilario drove the Delta. The task required that she closely monitor the bundles of poles. There was an abstract pleasure to pitching the poles just right so
that they stabbed into the snow but hung at a slightly drunken angle, so that Dave and Willy, who were again riding the snow machines, would know which ones had been rammed into the snow at the proper depth and which ones still awaited their attentions.

As she watched the two men work, she noticed that Willy kept to odd numbered holes and left the evens to Dave, regardless of whether or not Dave was delayed drilling with the augur. In places where the wind had eroded the snow down to the ice, it was necessary to use the auger to get a hole deep enough to hold up the flag. This was harder work and took two to three times as long per flag as using the pike on soft snow, but while Dave moved from an even to an odd when Willy was delayed rather than moving ahead of him, Willy did not return the favor. At one point, Dave hit a long cluster of icy positions and fell far behind. Seeing this, Hilario stopped the Delta and waited for him to catch up. Wee Willy pulled his snow machine up beside the Delta and waited for his next flag.

Hilario leaned out of the cab. “Hey, Willy! Where you get off letting Dave do more than half the work?”

Willy stared at him, letting the blankness of his goggles speak for his mood.

Hilario growled, “I’ll bet you were the
pendejo
that turned off the dish last night! Yeah, I saw the little wheels turning in your brain when the techs showed us which buttons to push on that computer!”

Wee Willy fussed with his neck gaiter, clumsily letting it slip low enough to reveal his smirk.

I’ll be damned
, thought Valena.
He’s smarter than he looks. Either that, or a whole lot stupider.

Half an hour later, they stopped for lunch. As they stood around in the lee of the Delta, they discussed the weather, the ice, and their position on the trail. Willy stood with them this time, closer to Valena than she liked.

“This is my point farthest south,” said Edith. “We’re at the southernmost point of this traverse. Seventy-eight degrees, eighteen minutes south. Not as good as Shackleton, but I ride in relative comfort.”