Ice Angel

by Matthew Hart

  For Mich and Mez

  They fought last year by the upper valley of Son-Kan,

  This year by the high ranges of the Leek Mountains,

  They are still fighting… fighting!

  They wash their swords and armor in the cold waves of

  The Tiao-Chih Sea;

  Their horses, turning loose over the Tien Mountains,

  Seek the meagre grasses in the white snow.

  —Li Po, “The Long War”

  PROLOGUE

  Fate came looking for Jimmy Angel on an August morning on the shore of a little bay a mile above the Arctic Circle. In Canada they call that region the Barrens, a treeless landscape of water and rock and bushes already turning scarlet. In the Barrens in August, winter was in the air. The frost on the tent glistened in the early light. Jimmy stood with his eyes closed and his face tilted up, his lumpy, grizzled features arranged into a grin so broad it could only have been put there by the fusion of two ideas: Jimmy and a large sum of money.

  He tossed back the dregs of his coffee and took a bite out of a twelve-inch salami sub with Swiss, olives, peppers, dill pickles, and honey-mustard dressing. Smell-wise, it packed a punch undelivered by any other food likely to be found between Jimmy and the city of Yellowknife, where he’d bought it two days before. A sub has a pretty good shelf life in the Arctic, as long as you leave out things like lettuce and tomato, which Jimmy hated and would have left out anyway. He had twelve subs—a three-day supply. After that it would be freeze-dried meals like chicken à la king and beef stroganoff that he would boil on his camp stove. When cooked, they looked like wads of newsprint, and that was what they tasted like. Anyway, this is academic, because it wasn’t Jimmy who was going to eat the rest of the subs or the freeze-dried chicken à la king.

  A breeze ruffled the bay. Jimmy’s floatplane creaked against the lines that tethered it to the stony beach, and wavelets slapped the pontoons. In his head Jimmy was writing the press release that would send his share price skyrocketing. He tossed back the last piece of sub. All that now remained of the sandwich was the swarm of gaseous molecules saturated with its scent that swept up the gravel slope behind the tent and spread downwind. In a single cubic centimeter of air there were twenty-seven trillion trillion molecules to smell. To the right nose, a lot of information.

  Jimmy strolled around the site, admiring his handiwork—the grid of squares marked by twine, pegged out in a professional way. The ground had been scraped clean of surface minerals. Mostly clean. Here and there a few grains winked in the sunlight like tiny gems. Jimmy crouched by the grid and fingered them lovingly. Ilmenites as black as coal, and the brilliant emerald green of chrome diopsides. Best of all, the garnets. Some of them bloodred. Others a scarlet that edged toward orange. And most tantalizing, most irresistible—those that throbbed with a deep-purple pulse.

  * * *

  Eight miles downwind, the bear was snuffling among the Saskatoon berries when the first molecules of salami sub arrived. Eight miles is not far for a bear. A bear can pick up a scent twenty miles away. It can smell seven times better than a bloodhound—and a bloodhound can smell three hundred times better than a person. A bear is really a smelling machine that eats. The part of a bear’s brain that manages the sense of smell is five times larger than the same area in a human brain, even though the bear has a much smaller brain. The sensing surfaces inside a bear’s nose are hundreds of times greater in area than those in a human nose. So never mind the Saskatoon berries and never mind the stinking bits of scale and bone that clung to his fur from a dead fish he’d found on the side of a stream. Those salami molecules sailed in loud and clear. They hit the bear’s nose like a freight train. His big shaggy head went up with a jerk, and he made the bear noise that translates as: whoa!

  And then that bear went loping out of the bushes on a beeline for Jimmy’s camp. A grizzly bear. Ursus horribilis.

  * * *

  Jimmy sat down on a boulder and began to fill out a series of plastic sampling tags. The tags would be affixed to the sampling bags that were already loaded in the plane. Jimmy took pleasure in the task, checking the GPS coordinates and inking them onto a tag with his Edding field pen. He had beautiful lettering. His mapping instructor at the Colorado School of Mines had been a scrupulous calligrapher, and Jimmy’s charts were works of art. He was neat in everything he did, and his sampling sites were meticulous. Where he did sometimes nudge things out of kilter was in the way he disclosed information to the stock market. He would include this data, but not that. Whether this made him a felon or not, people could argue. Had argued. That’s not to say Jimmy deserved the bear.

  * * *

  They are not pretty things, bears, unless your personal aesthetic relies entirely on regard for function. In that case, sure. Bears are more efficient than they look. They get where they have to get, and you’d be surprised how fast. A loping grizzly bear looks like an animal wearing an animal suit that’s a size too big. They look like they will trip on their own skin. However, they don’t.

  The last obstacle between the bear and Jimmy was an esker, a kind of gravel ridge. The bear hit the side of the esker and tried to gallop up. The esker got steeper toward the top. The bear dug in, spewed loose gravel out behind it, and then just slid backward down the slope on its ass. Without even stopping for a second to have a think, it flung itself back at the hill and went pounding up again, except this time madder.

  * * *

  Jimmy tucked the sampling tags into the pocket of his shirt. The wind was starting to gust, so he carefully buttoned the pocket flap. He strolled back to the tent for a last look around, checking inside to make sure everything was in order. It was. He went back outside for a last good look at the site.

  It was perfect. No two ways about it. Jimmy put his hands in his pockets and pressed his top teeth against his lower lip, rocking back and forth on his heels with a feeling of deep satisfaction. He walked one way and then the other, studying the shore. The cove where the plane was moored and where Jimmy had his camp was called Clip Bay. Its shoreline formed a perfect arc that looked as if it had been clipped out of the side of a circle. Another thing that attracted Jimmy—the drop. The water didn’t shoal away gradually. It plunged straight down. There was the shore, ringed by a narrow band of shallow turquoise water, then black. An inky impenetrable depth. Jimmy knew what had caused that shape, and that knowledge was going to help make him very rich. Such were Jimmy’s thoughts when a ticking sound—the sound of pebbles and larger stones colliding—made him turn around.

  The bear was already halfway off the esker, storming down the steep side in a cloud of dust and gravel. “Fuck,” said Jimmy. “Fuck fuck fuck!” And he ran for the plane. There was a loaded pistol in the cockpit, clipped under his seat. A pistol doesn’t sound like much, but it was a Ruger Redhawk. A .357 slug in the face will take the sparkle out of even a grizzly’s day.

  The straightest route from where Jimmy was standing to the plane lay through the pegged-out grid with its mesh of sturdy twine. Understandably, he forgot it was there. He galloped into it, caught his boot on a line, and sprawled headlong onto the hard ground.

  He flailed at the tangle of cords that ensnared his arms and legs, finally yanking the whole grid out of the ground. He hobbled to the plane, trailing a line of stakes, and scrambled onto a pontoon. A single metal step like the rung of a ladder was fixed to the fuselage below the door. Jimmy got a foot on the step and yanked the door open. He was reaching in for the pistol when something struck the side of his foot and made a loud metallic bang as it hit the rung. Jimmy’s boot flew from its foothold. He was hanging from the door, trying to hoist himself in, when the bear arrived.

  The grizzly hurtled off the beach, smashed into Jimmy, took off the airplane door with a swipe
of rage, and cannoned into the water—Jimmy and the bear all mixed up together. The bear thrashed at the water and dislocated Jimmy’s shoulder with a blow that opened a gash down to his elbow. With his good arm, Jimmy flailed at the water and managed to flounder away. The bear swam to shore and hauled himself out. It stood roaring at Jimmy, rocking from side to side. It shook its head wildly and smacked a paw on the end of a pontoon, tearing the metal with his claws. Gasping, Jimmy made it to the far end of the pontoon. He looped his good arm over it and looked at his wound. The bear’s claw had sliced the leather of his jacket as neatly as a sword cut. Blood leaked into the water. A pink cloud curled against the silver metal.

  Then the bear recaptured the scent of the salami. It lost interest in Jimmy and went roaring into the tent. The tent collapsed, and the grizzly got tangled in the canvas. In a demented rage it reduced the tent to shreds. Five minutes later the bear was lying on its stomach in the ruined camp with the smashed food locker clasped in its massive paws and bits of olive in its fur. Its big red tongue raked around in the splintered plastic for pieces of salami.

  Jimmy was still in the water.

  The temperature of lakes in the Barrens is never far above freezing. Jimmy got cold fast. When a human body loses heat faster than it can replace it, hypothermia sets in. As body temperature drops, the nervous system and the heart fail. Unless you get out of the water fast, you lose consciousness. At the temperature in the lake, Jimmy had about fifteen minutes before blacking out. But although the bear roared on the beach for only five minutes before it headed to the tent, Jimmy couldn’t pull himself onto the pontoon. The first thing the cold takes is not consciousness but coordination. In that water, Jimmy had three minutes before he would lose the ability to control his limbs, and those three minutes were almost gone.

  A ribbon of blood wound through the shallow water by the shore. Jimmy noticed how beautiful it was. He would have liked to slide into the curling stream of color. Then he thought of his daughter. He fixed her image in his mind and stretched his good arm along the pontoon. With the last of his strength he dragged his body half out of the water. The stones and gravel were warming in the sun. He laid his head against them. He tried to push away the shadows gathering in his mind. To keep his daughter there. Had he told her about the garnets?

  The bear roared, followed a split second later by a sharp report. Jimmy tried to turn his head to see. His chin dug into the gravel, and he couldn’t move it. He listened for the bear. Instead he heard the crunch of footsteps.

  1

  A dirty wind came off the river. I turned my back to shelter the flimsy pages. They had the usual heading. Department of the Treasury: Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—FinCEN. A line of red type warned that it was a federal crime to read the document without authorization.

  In a few terse paragraphs, the document described Jimmy Angel’s life as the government saw it.

  Born 1952, Fort Collins, Colorado. Geology degree, Colorado School of Mines. PhD, University of Utah. Married 1990. One child: a daughter, born 1994. Widowed 2000. Then came what they really cared about.

  Jimmy Angel hadn’t led a blameless life. To finance his mineral explorations in the Canadian north, he’d formed companies and issued stock. Sometimes the people who bought that stock came to believe that Jimmy cheated them. Once, a court agreed, and once was enough. He was in our files for good.

  “OK,” I said to Tommy, “he cut a few corners. It’s not like he brought down Lehman Brothers. Why do we care about this?”

  Tommy put a ball on the tee and placed his tree-trunk legs wide. His lime-colored bowling shirt snapped around him. He brought the clubface to the ball, gave an irritating wiggle of his ass, and drove the ball in a perfect, soaring arc that cleared the netting at the end of the driving range and dropped it into the Hudson River.

  At six-two and pushing 240, Tommy was overweight. But fifteen years ago, when he was still a New York Jet, he’d been the fastest cornerback in the NFL. There were men still limping today from hits they got from Tommy when he could cover forty yards in five seconds flat. Pro ball was the route that had taken a lot of Black kids out of the Bronx, but Tommy could pick up any sport. He just had that gift. That’s what I kept telling myself as he teed up another ball and launched it into the river. Tommy was my boss, a circumstance I found even more irritating than the ass wiggle.

  He stepped back and held the driver out to me. I ignored it.

  “It’s your meeting, Tommy.”

  He shrugged and tossed the club aside. “Did you see the breakout?”

  I found the page he was referring to and turned my back to the wind again.

  The driving range was on the roof of a pier that stuck out into the Hudson from the west side of Manhattan, a reminder to the glittering island that it once had to work for a living. The river sucked at the ancient pilings and slapped against the seawall. Hydrofoil commuter ferries from the New Jersey side flew by on their way to the downtown terminals. The wind groaned in the netting, and the windows in the little pro shop set up a constant tinkle of loose glass. Good luck with the parabolic mike if anyone was trying to listen in.

  Tommy had an arrangement with the man on the gate. When we wanted the range to ourselves, we got it. Not that we needed it. For sensitive discussions, we had an acoustical “dead room” two steps from Tommy’s office. It provided total security. What it didn’t provide was the opportunity for Tommy to demonstrate his alpha status.

  I studied the breakout. It showed the usual tangle of ownership of a small company that had to raise capital from multiple sources. Angel Minerals was traded on an American stock exchange. That meant Jimmy had to disclose the identity of important owners in public filings. One of them stood out.

  “The numbered company,” I said.

  We wandered down the range. Tommy limped a little as we made our way toward the river. That was another opportunity not offered by the dead room—demonstrating how to suffer without complaint.

  “If you’re going to stumble around like that,” I said, “maybe you should think about a walker.”

  When we got to the end, we stood for a minute watching the river traffic.

  “We pulled that numbered company apart looking for who owned it,” Tommy said. He flexed his leg and rubbed his right knee. It always gave him trouble in the damp, but it had made him who he was. When his knee blew out, Tommy went to law school. He became an ace crime-busting prosecutor, handled a few top-secret cases for us, and now here he was, running our clandestine agency.

  “Jimmy Angel,” he began, but we were interrupted. Minnie Ho came tripping down the range, the sunlight flashing on her silver jeans.

  “Hi, boys,” she said, splashing us with her thousand-watt smile. “Don’t let me bust up the powwow.” She gave Tommy a peck on the cheek and plucked a fold of his rippling rayon shirt in her slender fingers. “Just wanted you to know I’m here. Take your time. I’ll be outside.” She glanced at her watch. “The show doesn’t start until three, so we’re good.”

  “Outside” meant Minnie would be waiting in the parking lot in her vintage Bentley, a car that looked stately but hummed with enough communications equipment to run a war. Minnie was one of New York’s hottest fashion designers. Her shows drew buyers from London, Paris, Milan, and Hong Kong. She was never out of touch with her global business. I knew because my daughter worked for her. Minnie had taken her on at a bad time in Annie’s life, mostly caused by me.

  “Five minutes, Min,” Tommy said.

  “Hey,” she said, tilting her head at my blazer. “Is that Etro?”

  “Annie,” I said.

  She grabbed a lapel and twisted it this way and that to examine the seam, then shook her head. “Man, that girl can sew.”

  She blew Tommy a kiss from her fingertips and was taking her first call before she’d gone three feet.

  Tommy did his best to conceal how knocked out he was by Minnie, but I could see him struggling to remember what page we’d been on.<
br />
  “You were going to tell me why we’re suddenly interested in Jimmy Angel,” I prompted.

  Tommy looked at the water and frowned as he pulled his thoughts together. Just upriver, a stack of gleaming decks slid away from a pier. The cruise ship’s passengers packed the rails as the liner turned its bow downriver.

  “Jimmy’s disappeared.”

  I let a little silence seep into the space between us while I mulled this over. “And you know this how, exactly?”

  “We were keeping in touch.”

  I would have laughed, but I could already see where things were headed, and for sure the joke was going to be on me.

  “Let’s see if I’m getting a handle on this,” I said. “Since you’re all up to speed on Jimmy Angel, to the point where you know that he’s gone missing, I’m going to take a wild guess that you were running him as some kind of agent. You were running Jimmy Angel, and now you’ve lost him and you don’t know what to do.”

  “Sure I know what to do. I call you. You’re the big-time spook on the payroll. You put on those phony glasses of yours with the mustache and false nose and go find him.”

  If you nicked Tommy with a knife, sarcasm was what would dribble out. It didn’t fool me. He was worried, or he wouldn’t have called me in.

  “He’s missed a reporting date, hasn’t he?” I’d been here before. Tommy’s predecessor had tried to run an agent too. They get hooked on the undercover side of the business and decide it looks like fun.

  Formally part of FinCEN, our small and secret agency had a lot of independence. We investigated the kind of financial crimes that couldn’t be solved by a subpoena for bank records. The people we dealt with were at a level of bad where it was sometimes necessary to put a gun in their ear to promote cooperation. Put into a report and read over coffee by people with too much time on their hands, it looked easy. They’d decide to give it a whirl themselves.