Zodiac Station (27 page)

‘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.

Eastman

I was in that office so fast, the balls on the Newton cradle were still swinging.
Tick, tack.
For once, my luck was in: he’d forgotten to log out of his computer. His email sat wide open on the monitor.

I sat on the edge of his chair and scrolled through his in-box, the messages that had come through before the Internet went down. For such an anal guy, he didn’t file as much as he should. It was all in there together, and with everything that had been happening, there was a lot of traffic. Stuff from the honchos at Norwich HQ, from his ex-wife, from the flight contractors. I read through it as fast as I could.

Please update your Health and Safety report, in light of recent events, as a matter of urgency.

The BSPA Twin Otter has been delayed in Port Stanley by mechanical failure and will not now be available until next Wednesday.

The consultation on Zodiac Station’s function in the new Polar Research Funding framework will conclude in June. Please ensure your submission is completed by then.

Will you be home in August? I’ve got to go to a conference in Copenhagen, and it would be helpful if you could take the girls.

Please demonstrate how your research program fulfils Value for Money criteria, in conjunction with the new Delivering Excellence in Research initiative.

There was £500 missing from your child support payments this month.

If he had to deal with that bullshit all day every day, no wonder he was so tense. And reading between the lines, it looked like money was a problem – maybe his job was even on the line.

I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes down – and there was no telling when Quam might come back. Reading through everything was like picking up pebbles looking for diamonds.

I had to try smarter. I found the search box and tried a couple of terms.
Vitangelsk
.
Mine 8
.
Radar
. Not really that smart: a six-year-old would have known to use code words. And another five minutes gone.

I listened out. All personnel were still confined to base, so the Platform was loud with noise: talking, laughing, footsteps. No chance of picking out Quam when he came.

The last message I’d read was still open on screen.

There was £500 missing from your child support payments this month.

Nothing relevant – but it got me thinking. First, I thought how much it would suck to have Quam as your dad. Then I wondered if he was short of cash – and what he might do for money.

I put a new term into the search. A single character:
£
. It brought up a bunch of results, but not as many as you’d think. There’s no money on Utgard.

I scanned through them. Mostly budget stuff, a few questions about maintenance. And then this:

We have received a grant of £100,000 from Luxor Life Sciences Corporation in respect of work at Zodiac. Please advise which fund to credit.

I thanked God and Bill Malick that I’d been paying attention.
They came here a couple years back, just when we set up Echo Bay … looking for a place to build a gene bank.
They’d looked around Mine 8. And here they were paying an awful lot of money to Quam.

‘What the hell?’

Time was up. Quam stood in the doorway, like he’d just walked in on me fucking his daughter. He looked terrible. I’m not judging – I mean, most of us at Zodiac looked like Deadheads – but Quam was usually so pristine. He combed, he shaved. Now, he had red-rimmed eyes, crazy hair and stubble like an axe-murderer.

And a face so red I expected to see a fuse sticking out his head. He slammed the door, crossed the room, and would probably have hauled me out of his chair by my collar if I hadn’t have jumped up.

‘What do you think you’re doing here?’

No point trying to bluff. ‘Why don’t you tell me what
you’ve
been doing here?’ I said. Adrenalin had me pumped; I was feeding off of his anger.

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Luxor Life Sciences mean anything to you. Huh?’ I emphasised it with a jab of my finger that almost took his eye out. ‘They’ve damn sure been paying you enough.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Bullshit you don’t. What about Mine Eight? And Hagger – you want to tell me what you did to him?’

‘Are you trying to imply—’

‘Shall I get Jensen in here? He had a hell of a story to tell me, how you called him in to fly you to the Helbreen last Saturday. He said you came back alive. He wasn’t so sure about Hagger.’

All the colour drained out of his face. ‘What Hagger did threatened everything we’d achieved at Zodiac. I had to stop him before he ruined everything.’

‘So you killed him.’

His whole body shook. ‘
No
.’

‘And then you took his notebooks up to the cabin and burned them to cover the tracks.’

He didn’t try to deny that one. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because I’m smarter than you, Quam. I’ve been up to Mine Eight; I’ve seen the antenna at Vitangelsk. Did you think you could keep all that secret for ever?’

He didn’t have anything to say to that. Couldn’t even look me in the eye. He stared past me, at the Newton’s cradle on the table. His fingers twitched, like he couldn’t stand that it had stopped, he had to set it going again.

I picked it up and slammed it on the floor. The frame cracked; the balls came loose and scattered across the room like a pinball machine. Quam flew at me, but I was quicker. I grabbed his wrists and twisted so hard his eyes watered. Damn, it felt good.

‘How long have you been working for the Russians?’

‘Russians?’

‘Did Hagger find out? Or maybe he was part of it and got cold feet?’

‘Hagger had nothing to do with it.’

We were both shouting – and the walls at Zodiac are made of spit and toilet paper. I tried to bring my voice down before someone came in.

‘How about Anderson and Greta? Were they helping?’

It didn’t quiet him down any. ‘You’re mad,’ he shouted. ‘Russians, radars, murders … you’ve read too many spy novels.’

‘What was in those notebooks you burned?’

He scratched the stubble on his cheek. The skin underneath was chafed raw, like he’d been doing it a lot.

‘Hagger was a fraud. His results, his samples, everything. I did him a favour.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘I had to protect Zodiac. Do you know how badly Norwich want to shut us down? This would have been the perfect excuse. Scandal, questions in the press, demands to do something.’

‘Very convenient.’ I pointed to the email on the screen. ‘How about Luxor Life Sciences?’

‘They gave us a grant.’

‘I bet they did. Did they also tell you to take out anyone who poked into what was happening up at Vitangelsk?’

‘I don’t …’ He was struggling to speak. He sat down hard in his chair. ‘I don’t know who they are. They’re planning to do something with Mine Eight but they haven’t got all the funding. They asked me to keep an eye on things.’

‘Is that why you snoop on other people’s emails?’

He had the audacity to look hurt. ‘That’s for morale. If anyone’s not happy here, I have to be the first to know about it.’ He tapped the papers on his desk. ‘It’s all in the contract.’

‘And when you found out Hagger had been looking around there …’

Again, that blank look. ‘Hagger never went near Vitangelsk.’

‘It’s around the corner from the Helbreen glacier.’

‘With a bloody great mountain in between.’

He started to get out of his chair, saw me square up and thought again.

‘The only time Luxor Sciences said anything about Hagger was after he died. They suggested removing his notebooks.’

‘I bet they did.’

‘To protect our funding,’ he protested. ‘They didn’t want the scandal to ruin Zodiac.’

‘And how did they know all about that so fast? Did you tell them?’

‘No.’ He scratched his beard again. ‘
No
.’

Quite suddenly, he dropped his head on the desk and started crying.

‘Jesus,’ I said in disgust.

‘Get out,’ he screamed. ‘Get out, get out,
get out
!’

There was no way I could shut him up – not unless I clocked him. And if he kept on, someone would walk in in a minute, and then it would take one hell of an explanation. His word against mine – and mine was full of murders, Russians, secret radars and spies. They’d have locked me up in two minutes.

So I left him, weeping on to his desk like it was the end of the world.

Eastman

It was weird, stepping out of his office. Like waking up after a bad dream. I could hear Danny in the galley cooking lunch; students laughing and joking in the mess. Through the end windows, I could see a bunch of people playing soccer in the snow. They looked like they were having a good time.

I had nothing in common with them.

I went into the bathroom, leaned on the sink and took some deep breaths. I stared at myself in the mirror. You don’t do that too often at Zodiac; I barely recognised myself. My beard had grown full, and my eyes seemed to have shrunk into my head. It reminded me of those old photos you see, guys who got stranded on the ice and had to survive a winter eating their boots. You wonder how they managed when they finally got back to civilisation. One of them shot himself in a hotel room, I seem to remember.

Was Zodiac changing me? For sure. First Greta, then Quam: something was coming out of me that hadn’t been there before. In a place like Utgard, you freeze hard without even knowing it. Maybe I should have popped one of Kennedy’s chill pills.

‘Gotta stay sharp,’ I told the man in the mirror.

Gotta stay sharp
, he mouthed back at me.

What to do now? The showdown with Quam should have locked everything in place. Instead, I felt less certain than ever.

He admitted going up to see Hagger on the Helbreen.

He admitted burning the notebooks.

He admitted taking money from Luxor.

So why wasn’t I more sure that he’d killed Hagger and sold us out to the Russians? Was it his sob-story act? Was I that gullible?

And how were we supposed to rub along, now that I’d effectively accused him of espionage and murder? Did we just show up to dinner together and act like it never happened? Or should I go all
Mutiny on the Bounty
and try and relieve him of his command?

If I did that, who’d be with me?

I picked up a satphone and rang a number in Washington DC. It was against protocol, but only a little. It was also 5 a.m. on the Eastern seaboard, but those guys are open all hours.

‘I need to find out about a company called Luxor Life Sciences,’ I told them. ‘Our Internet went down, so call me back on this satphone.’

I didn’t tell them why I wanted it. You never know who’s listening – especially if down the road they happen to have an antenna as big as a small town. Plus, the guys I was speaking to get paid to figure out that stuff.

You know what’s crazy? After all that, I spent the afternoon catching up on work. It had to get done some time – and I was way behind. Human beings are weird that way: we go through the wildest experiences, then you drop us back in the cage and we go right back on to the hamster wheel.

You remember that tsunami that hit Japan a few years back, the one that knocked out the nuclear reactor? I saw a TV documentary about it, just before I left the States. There was a guy in it: lost his home, his job, his mom, everything. And you know what pissed him off the most? He’d spent the whole afternoon before it hit washing his goddam car. That’s what he couldn’t get over.

I laughed at him, then, but now I know how he felt. If we could see what was coming, we’d all do things differently.

About five of eight, I went along to the mess for Thing Night. No sign of Quam, or Anderson. Or Greta or Fridge. In fact, the whole thing felt kind of flat. Usually, Thing Night happens in July, when Zodiac’s crawling with people. I guess Quam moved it forward to improve morale. Instead, it probably made everyone more depressed over how lame it was.

But people made an effort. Jensen had stuck some badges on his flight overalls so he looked like an air force pilot; Ash had put on a Frankenstein mask and taped drinking straws on to his fingers for claws. He kept complaining he couldn’t hold his drink properly. Danny had tied his hair in a samurai-style topknot, like the cook in the movie who never gets a line; he kept bringing out trays of cookies shaped like UFOs, and miniature green jello shots that smelled of gin.

I sat down next to Kennedy. He’d trimmed his beard into a mad-scientist goatee and powdered it white, and put on a jacket and tie. Which, if you’re in 1949, is apparently what you wear at the North Pole.

‘Where’s Quam gone?’ I whispered to him.

‘I haven’t seen him all day.’

The old RKO logo came on screen, the radio mast blaring out from the top of the world. Kind of appropriate, under the circumstances. Everyone got quiet and gripped their drinks.

I should explain that watching the movie isn’t the point; the point is to drink. The two main characters are Dr Carrington and Captain Hendry. The rules of the game are that every time someone says ‘Doctor’, anyone with a PhD drinks. When they say ‘Captain’, the others drink. And when there’s a reference to ‘science’, or some bogus piece of pseudo-science, everyone drinks.

Every time someone came back from the bathroom, I looked over my shoulder to see if it was Quam.