Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (9 page)

“I want to know about any studies or tests in Alaska, where any sort of radioactive material was deposited, especially on the North Slope. Seventy-year period. Note the ones we already know about and see if there’s something we don’t.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“See what you can find on grants given scientists over that same period by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Anything related to toxics or germ tests.”

Eddie’s eyes were bigger now, and he nodded, meaning, Go get ’em, One
.

Valley Girl asked, “How deep, sir?”

“Bottom of the sea. Run all service branches. Including Defense Security Service,” I said, naming the Pentagon agency responsible for providing protection to private companies doing defense work. DSS helped out with electronic alarms, executive protection, armored cars, and even factory personnel screening. “
Alaska.
I want companies contracted to work on biowarfare. I want exact tests, years, and results. University research partners. Got it?”

“Colonel,” said Valley Girl excitedly, chewing her signature gum. “Is something happening in Alaska?”

“You are not to discuss this with anyone, even at the unit, get it?”

She sounded intimidated. “Of course, sir.”

“You’re the best we have,” I soothed. “So if you see something that doesn’t make sense to you, too much money for a small project, too little explanation of a test, extra money for cleanup,
anything odd
, a gap, a closed file, a reference, use your judgment. I trust you.”

Now her voice was happier. “Yes, sir!”

I clicked off. Eddie sighed. “Well, there goes our government grant work when we go private.”

“Who needs it? We’ll be capitalists, Eddie. No more government dole for us!”

“I got news for you, Uno. When we’re in Leavenworth prison, that’s government dole.”

I smiled. “Why? I never told Valley Girl that anything I’m asking for relates to the Harmons. It’s all mission. Background.” I smiled. “Chickening out, Marine?”

“Galli will go apeshit.”

I sighed. “I like the admiral, Dos, but right now he’s more worried about Wayne Homza. Galli knew exactly what he was getting when he asked me to stay.”

“The Light Brigade strikes again!”

“We find the redheaded woman, Eddie. And Kelley’s boyfriend, Leon Kavik. This could all have nothing to do with Washington. Or testing. It’s Friday night in Barrow, so I have a good idea of where those two may be.”

I wanted to speak to Kelley’s boyfriend. I ignored the voice in my head telling me that I should be with Karen. That it was 9
P.M.
on a Friday night and I’d been working for over twenty-four hours. That I’d told her I’d take a break and meet her at the weekly roller rink dance. Instead, I called her to explain I’d be late.

“No problem,” said Karen, with the barest hesitation. Perhaps I’d not heard it at all.

“Give me till ten,” I said, as the Ford’s headlights swung off road, illuminated the Iñupiat Heritage Center.

The little voice in my head said,
Hey, isn’t this how it started with your ex-wife? With excuses? Wasn’t this what you said you wouldn’t do if you fell in love again?

Getting out of the truck, I told that voice that Karen was a different person, not like my ex-wife. I told that voice, eyeing the two-story-high museum where Leon Kavik worked:
Karen has security clearance. She understands the importance of this. Sengupta’s toxic screens haven’t come up with any hits. Maybe the boy can help.

The Heritage Center sat on North Street, near Arctic Family Medicine, the home for the elderly, and across the road from what looked like a small wooden shack but was an entrance to Barrow’s oddest feature, a three-hundred-million-dollar, 3.2-mile-long underground tunnel carved into permafrost, snaking through the city, to bring potable water from the lagoon, fiber optics and phone lines. Inside the tunnel, temperatures remained at forty-eight degrees.

“Oil taxes built the Utilador,” garrulous Dave Lillienthal always argued, over vodka, at our dinners on the base. “Oil paid for the old folks’ home.”

Bruce Friday usually snapped back: “One day you’ll blow a pipe offshore and kill or scare off every whale within a hundred miles.”

“Oh, posh! More Tito, Bruce?”

I wasn’t interested in their arguments now. I saw a lone figure inside the glass door, behind the admission area, wiping the counter, stooped, weighted, depressed.

Karen understands about completing a mission. What’s one more hour to wait?

Something about the scene in there reminded me of an Edward Hopper painting,
Nighthawks
. It was the sense of weary figures killing time, a diner in the painting, a museum here; but in both cases, night pressed in against human life. The figure beyond the glass door looked startled when I entered. He was tall and thin, wide nosed and thin lipped. He wore a spotted sealskin vest, thick workman’s painter pants, and a red-checkered flannel shirt. His stomach bulged over his silver buckled belt.

“We’re closed,” he said in a neutral tone.

“Leon? I’m Joe Rush. I’m helping out Chief Toovik. Can we talk about Kelley Harmon?”

He knew from my tone that this was an official visit. The look in his chocolate-colored eyes grew wide. He assumed I was a detective, at first. He glanced back into the museum, as if seeking help, but the only help back there was history; glass cases filled with Iñupiat harpoons, old skinning knives, wolverine ruffed polar bear fur parkas, mouth-chewed, softened sealskin boots.

I saw a big blowup shot of Merlin on a wall, standing on ice, bent toward the sea, eyeing the back of a bowhead whale with a harpoon sticking out. I saw black-and-white photos of elders; when they were young, carving up a caribou.

A stark, fishy odor filled the modern atrium, its rankness at odds with the curated, well-lit exhibits. The smell—I knew from visits here—meant that someone had been in back, in the community workshop, with a bucket of bloodied seal, building a new
umiaq
for the spring hunt.

“You’re a Marine?” the boy said, looking puzzled, handing back my ID. He seemed hemmed in by the counter. I felt that he wanted to leave. But it was unclear what he wanted to get away from. The investigation? Or the deaths?

“I’m a doctor,” I said. “We’re trying to figure out exactly what happened out there. I’m sorry, Leon, I heard you knew Kelley pretty well.”

Most museums are filled with artifacts from elsewhere. This one existed to explain the Iñupiat way of life to visitors, and to help educate young kids in town.

The boy said, softly, “Yes. I was a friend.”

“I know it’s late, Leon. Just a few questions.”

“What’s the point? I told the police what I knew.”

He wasn’t sullen, or defensive. It was more like I heard futility and grief. I said, softly, “Sometimes, when you’re trying to figure problems out, little things help.”

“She needed help
before
. And she didn’t get it.”

He walked out from behind the counter. He locked the front door, shut off the overhead lights, so a soft glow from streetlamps outside made the parka in a glass case seem alive. He beckoned me to follow and I trailed his slumped form down a shadowy corridor, into the glass-walled workshop in back, illuminated by a red nightlight. I saw a half dozen long, sturdy wooden worktables, tools on sideboards. This was where local artists carved walrus ivory into statuettes. I saw knives on the wall, neatly arranged hammers, saws, screwdrivers, and small jeweler-like hand tools. He took a stool. I sat down, too, making sure I stayed at eye level, to show respect.

“Leon, what do you mean, she needed help
before
? What was wrong before today, before the shooting?”

He rolled his eyes. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not to me.”

“She’s dead,” the boy blurted out. “Of course something was wrong.”

“Do you have any idea what?”

He looked bewildered. “What are you asking me for? How would I know?”

“Did Kelley say anything about tension in the group?”

Leon Kavik had large hands, and I saw a long, healed scar on the right palm as he held both hands up. There were high school textbooks on the worktable . . .
Chemistry Two . . .
and I realized that he did homework here.

He said, “‘Tension’? No, unless her mother was driving a car or someone ate her dad’s ice cream . . . or that HBO guy, the one with the camera, was around. Pushy, Kelley said.”

“When’s the last time you saw Kelley?”

“A week ago, when they were in town. We rode to the quarry on my motorcycle. She looked for dinosaur bones. She found part of a mammoth bone, to use as a paperweight.”

“Did she seem sick to you last week?”

“The police asked that. No.”

“Think about it. Coughing? Headache? Sniffles?”

“I told the police! She wasn’t sick.”

“Did she say anything about her parents fighting, or
them
being sick?”

“She said they were like Moonies, always smiling. Never disagreeing. Borg people, she said. But sick? No.”

Which means, if he’s right, that the symptoms hadn’t started a week ago. They came on fast.

“Leon, this is helpful because it helps us pinpoint when any sickness started. Because they all had fever. Did she say anything to you about Clay Qaqulik?”

“Just that she liked him, I mean, as a person.”

“Did she mention anything about their water supplies?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. The taste? A shipment being late. Problems with food or water.”

“Well, they had accidents all summer, but that was equipment breaking.”

I watched him for signs of guilt; stiff posture, twitchy hands, change in tone. Kelley’s friend had said, “He has a temper.” I didn’t see it yet.

I asked when he’d met Kelley and he said, “Here, when she came in to look around the center.”

I asked what they did together.

“Ride around. It was tough to see her because she was hardly ever in town.”

I asked whether he’d been bothered by that.

“What does that have to do with what happened?”

“I’m just curious.”

“Well, it was a pain, that was for sure.”

“Made you angry?”

“Yeah. Sure. Her parents worked her to death.”

“By the way,” I lied, “I heard that you helped them with supplies, loading up food and water.”

He looked surprised. “No. I never did that.”

“I just asked because someone said they remembered you helping in the warehouse. You were a big help, they said.”

“Ha! I was never even there. Kelley warned me to stay away when her parents were around. They didn’t want her to see boys. They were tough on her back home, too. No boys.”

He seemed more hurt than angry, but who could tell? I was fishing. I switched direction. “Leon, what did she tell you about their project?”

“Not a lot. They collected stuff in lakes. Algae. Fish. Plants.”

“Did she say why?”

“She said species are dying out as the North Slope warms. And new ones are popping up. She said her parents concentrated on basic collecting, what’s the word,
cataloging.
She said they shipped their stuff back to New Jersey—and to a school in Norway.”

I’d not heard of this. “Norway?”

“Joint study. To write up everything they found. She wanted to go there. She showed me pictures. She said in Norway there are lots of big Arctic oil and gas projects.”

“But the Harmons didn’t do anything related to oil?”

He shrugged miserably, as if an inability to answer was an insult to Kelley. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re doing fine. Tell me more. She said plants are dying out.”

“Yeah, my cousin lives down in Teller? He says a lot of their wild berries are dying off as it gets warmer there. I guess that’s the kind of thing that the Harmons were looking at, I mean, in the lakes.”

I watched him carefully for guilt or anger. A sharp intake of breath. A
tell
. I saw only pain, but plenty of liars look as innocent as babes.

I don’t know why we discount young love as
puppy love
, as if the number of years you’ve spent on Earth qualifies you to experience more sincere emotion, as if age is a requirement for love, as if we cynical adults have cornered the market on wisdom about the one thing that too many of us don’t appreciate until too late.

“Kelley told me maybe I could get a scholarship to Prezant College. You know, for my work.”

Leon swept his arm toward the table, and I realized that the artwork was his: the exquisite six-inch-tall walrus-ivory Eskimo woman, sparkly flecks of baleen as eyes; the baleen mask—made of a whale’s mouth filter—a black smooth surface etched with figures of seals; and a small painting that caught my attention most: a lone hunter in a parka, his back to the viewer as he stood on a floating bit of ice, lost at sea, rifle over his shoulder. Sky a claustrophobic gray.

“He looks lonely,” I said.

“He’s in trouble because he did not pay attention. He will float off and die because he made one mistake.”

•   •   •

I FOUND KAREN DANCING WITH THE FILMMAKER, AND THE SIGHT, MIKAEL
trying to get closer to her as she kept her distance, his arms outstretched as if to embrace her, the quiet pleasure on his face, filled me with rage.

It’s your own fault, Joe.

The roller rink was one of Barrow’s big social centers on Friday nights. There were no movie theaters in the city, no bowling alleys, malls, or bars. None of the nexuses of idle leisure marking other towns. There were church meetings and socials. There were potluck dinners at churches. There were high school sports contests or traditional Eskimo dance groups, where Karen had dragged me onto the floor last week for the “everyone invited to join” dance.

When she saw me she waved me onto the floor, smiling. Mikael Grandy turned and his grin faltered but he gamely retreated toward the folding chairs and four-person tables grouped in a semi-circle facing the raised stage. Grandy did not have his camera. The fucker hadn’t even brought it.

Karen put her index finger over my mouth, which meant,
Not one word about Mikael
. She put her head on my chest. Her arms went around me. The tension began to drain away.

The skating rink was over a half-century old, a vacuum to be filled with weekly performances of the Barrowtones, a half dozen middle-aged amateur rockers: the electric-piano-playing Eskimo Ph.D. geologist from the Iñupiat-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation; the guitar-playing Serbian who owned one of the town’s three pizza joints; the long-haired San Francisco–born radio jock; the Arkansas guitarist who played like Stevie Ray Vaughn; and, I saw with surprise, Deputy Luther Oz doing pretty good on the drums.

We danced—so did five other couples—to oldies, “Devil with a Blue Dress” and “The House of the Rising Sun” and we slow moved to “Georgia on My Mind.” I wiped the deaths away. I felt her small, strong body move with mine, her arms warm against the back of my neck. I’m not a good dancer, I’m too stiff, but she made me melt and manage synchronization. When the third dance was over she took my hand and led me to a table. The asshole was sitting there, nursing a can of Pepsi from a machine out in the hall.

“Where’s the camera, Mikael?” I asked, feeling Karen stiffen beside me. My voice had been too rough.

“All work makes a filmmaker lose his edge, Joe.”

“You’re a good dancer.”

“I go to clubs sometimes in Brooklyn,” he said. “Maybe if you and Karen come east, I’ll show you around.”

“
I heard your family once owned a big piece of Alaska.”

A shrug. “The czar giveth. Then he selleth to America.”

Karen looked terrific in light brown cords and a cobalt-colored fitted sweater, a gold necklace showing a miniature walrus-ivory snowy owl between her bud breasts. Her hair smelled of coconut shampoo. When she took my hand, Mikael studiously avoided looking in that direction. Eddie Nakamura strode up, glanced down at the filmmaker with displeasure, smiled broadly at Karen, shook his head at me as he sat down, meaning:
I can’t find the redhead.

“Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” began playing. About four dozen people had wandered in off the street, a few were sipping from beer cans, more women present than men. The single women often danced together, the single men were usually at tables, watching the women. The dancers’ ages ranged from the twenties to the sixties. Overheard from the adjacent table, during a pause, Alan McDougal, who ran the base, and diamond hunter Calvin DeRochers, talking about the Harmons.