by Matthew Hart
“You don’t know who put those guys on you. Maybe it was the Canadians.”
Tommy liked to demonstrate the dark depths of his mind. But if the Canadians had wanted to put me on ice, they wouldn’t have needed a pair of yokels to do the job. They have people on the payroll. Even easier—they turn the jet around. But they didn’t. They let me in. I had a feeling the Canadians had front-row seats for whatever game I’d been sent to play.
“This is bad, Alex,” Lily said when I was off the phone.
“I’m all right.”
“No!” she said in a fury, yanking the blanket tightly around her shoulders. “You are not all right. You were betrayed and marked to be assassinated.” She was shaking. “Don’t think that because this is a bush-league Arctic town, it’s not dangerous. I grew up in such a place. Once you add diamonds, it’s not bush-league anymore. Because the men who tried to kill you were pathetic doesn’t mean the people behind them are pathetic.”
Lily had ears like a bat. She’d heard every word when I told Tommy what had happened.
“Don’t pretend you’re not angry,” she said. “You are. You’re angry because Tommy controls you. And the people above him. You can’t get free. They have you by the throat.”
She thrust out her arms to demonstrate how to clutch a throat. The blanket slipped from her shoulders. She was naked. Her pale skin glowed pink in the early light.
“The department blackmailed you into working for them. They took advantage of you.”
This was one of Lily’s articles of faith. But the department didn’t even exist when I was recruited by the CIA. That was twenty years ago, and I was no innocent kid. I had an apartment in Cape Town with a view of Table Bay. In the garage, a cream-colored Mercedes 190SL. I lived by trading diamonds. My main supply was stolen goods. High-end rough from the Namibian diamond beach. I ran it up to Antwerp every month, timing my trips to coincide with the big London diamond sales, when Antwerp was full of disappointed traders who hadn’t got what they wanted in London. The guys who came to my apartment that night in Cape Town knew all about it. They offered me a simple choice. I could work for the US government or take my chances with the diamond branch of the South African police, who were waiting for their call.
Lily was a collection of fierce beliefs. One of them was that I could go back to some truer past. I’d find the real me, the pristine spirit that existed before the government turned me into its instrument. But the government hadn’t turned me into anything. They’d liked me just the way I was.
Lily was shivering. I picked up the blanket and wrapped it around her, and we went back inside. There were still a few hours before we were meeting Jimmy’s daughter. I drew the heavy blinds on the bedroom windows and held Lily’s cold, hard body in my arms.
“Next time it will be professionals,” she murmured in my ear.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then you will have to kill them.”
“Try to get some sleep.”
5
What’s a Beaver Tail?” Lily asked the waiter.
“Basically a large doughnut, except shaped like a beaver tail and no hole in the middle.” She tapped a pencil against her teeth. “Deep fried,” she added, holding the pencil straight up, as if in warning, “then dipped in sugar.”
I handed the menu back.
“Bacon and eggs.”
“You’ll live to fight another day,” she said.
Lily ordered zero-fat yogurt and muesli. When it arrived, she unscrewed a small bottle of protein powder mixed with chia seeds and cinnamon, and added it to the muesli. The cinnamon, as I’d heard often enough to be able to recite it in my sleep, inhibited the clumping of a protein called tau in the human brain, thus helping to ward off dementia. What signs of dementia had alarmed a thirty-two-year-old woman who spoke five languages, including Gujarati, and who could calculate the value of a diamond parcel at a glance, I had never learned.
I took out my phone and scrolled through the research on Jimmy Angel’s daughter, Mitzi. There was always too much information. The NSA’s supercomputers operate in teraflops. One teraflop is a million million floating-point operations per second. You enter the search terms, there’s a big sucking sound, and every grade she ever got in school comes pouring out. Every visit to the orthodontist. The names of her mother’s cocker spaniels and of the Irish wolfhound (Finbar) Mitzi had rescued from the local pound and who’d slept in her bed every night until a snowy winter’s day when he’d fought and lost his last skirmish with the City of Boulder number 14 bus.
The report ran more than a hundred pages. In a rare act of mercy, someone in research had put it through a filter that selected the most relevant data and placed it in a separate table. That was where I learned that she’d just finished her geology degree at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden and was a director of Jimmy’s company. She had a boyfriend named Pete Parson, a Dogrib Indian and bush pilot.
I studied the photograph of a tall girl with a crooked nose and a gaze that could penetrate steel plate. The phone pinged to announce a text. I closed the document, changed to the secure setting, entered my password, and read the message.
“We have to be at the floatplane dock in an hour,” I told Lily.
“You should change that password,” she said. “It wouldn’t take a genius to guess it’s your daughter’s birthday.”
“It’s supposed to be something you won’t forget.”
“You remember the date, Alex, but you’re never ready for the actual event. Unless Pierrette reminds you, I have to.”
Pierrette was my ex. She and Lily had worked out some elaborate truce. I’d liked it better when they were enemies.
“Is this flight a search for Jimmy Angel?” Lily said as we made our way to the elevator.
I finished scrolling through the details. “We’re going to check the known places Jimmy was exploring. You’re sure you want to come? I thought you were going to use the trip to build up contacts here.”
“I want to see where the diamonds come from. But what do you mean by “known places”? I thought part of the problem was that people didn’t know where he’d been looking.”
“His daughter knows.”
“Mitzi Angel is in Yellowknife?”
“She’s been here three days. This will be her second flight to look for him.”
Lily screwed the cap back on her little bottle of powder and shoved it in her pocket. “Why would she take us with her?”
“She’s an American citizen and a director of a US-listed public company. I work for the Treasury. She doesn’t really have a choice.”
I didn’t ask how she knew Mitzi’s name, but I sure wondered.
* * *
I changed into beat-up camo pants and a long-sleeved tee and laced on my old hiking boots. We were supposed to be ready to stay out a few days.
Lily’s main concession to a trip into the wilderness was to change from her white Ashland jeans to the equally expensive black. She slipped on a slightly older pair of the Gianvito Rossi suede ankle boots she favored. She wore a soft red leather jacket, perfectly tailored to conceal her little Glock Slimline. It was small gun anyway, but Lily made sure it packed a punch by loading it with Fiocchi Extrema, a no-kidding-around, nickel-jacketed hollow-point she liked. She had emptied the Akris shoulder bag and had just re-packed everything into a black-leather Prada zip-top when someone knocked. She seemed to expect it. She opened the door to a small round man in dirty jeans and motorcycle boots. He wore a cheerful expression that went well with his clerical collar.
“This is all I could find on short notice,” he said, handing Lily a long, narrow parcel.
“Thank you, Father,” Lily said. She handed him an envelope. “Please say a mass for your own intentions.”
He sketched a cross in the air with two fingers before he left.
“Jesus, Lily. You made a gun buy before breakfast?”
“Someone tried to kill you.”
Lily had friends wherev
er there were diamonds. She also practiced a form of Catholicism that involved a practical arrangement with the deity. She gave generous donations, and in return she expected God to look the other way when she did what a girl sometimes had to do.
That priest had more than a seminary in his background. The package contained a sawed-off Ithaca Featherlight twelve-gauge. Police called that weapon a riot gun. Lily worked the pump a few times to get the feel of the action, checked the three boxes of shells that came with it, and slipped everything into the Prada zip-top. It fit perfectly.
We went downstairs and out to the parking lot. She fished out a set of keys, pointed her arm, and pressed the unlock button. A black Ford F350 King Ranch gave a squeak and flashed its lights. In Lily’s view, brand awareness was a form of prayer. God put things on the earth for his creatures’ use. Prada, Ithaca Featherlight, F350. You gave thanks and climbed aboard.
* * *
At the floatplane dock, we parked in a gravel lot. We hauled our bags out of the back and made our way past a small operations building. Exhausted flight crews clustered around a fire map posted on the outside wall. A yellow water bomber ran up its engines as the crew cast off the mooring lines. The big plane pulled away and plowed out to the main channel. Forest fires had been burning all summer, from Siberia to Alaska and into Canada’s northern territories. The closest fire was two hundred miles away, but when the wind was from the west, as it was this morning, you could catch the smell of smoke in the air, and the faint scrim of haze had turned the sun red.
Mitzi Angel stood at the end of the dock in front of a Twin Otter. She wore a faded denim jacket with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a pair of heavy work gloves. She was lobbing bulky pieces of luggage through the open cargo door as easily as if they were full of ping-pong balls. She had long, sunburnt legs in baggy cargo shorts. A tassel of chestnut hair, caught into a scrunchy, sprouted from the top of her head.
A man stood in front of her, bouncing on his toes and shaking a wad of papers.
“I’m warning you, Mitzi. If this airplane takes off, I’ll have it impounded when you get back. You could be charged with theft and criminal trespass.”
She slammed a bag down on the dock and swung to face him, planting her hands on her hips. “Jesus Christ, Larry—trespass? You don’t even know where I’m going. How can you say I’ll be trespassing when you don’t know where I’ll be? Goddamn it. I thought you were our lawyer. I thought you were supposed to help me.”
“I’m the company’s lawyer. As an officer of the company, you should heed my advice.”
“Heed? Who even says that?” She grabbed another bag and flung it into the Otter. “Pete,” she called through the hatch, “will you for God’s sake get going!” A moment later the right engine coughed into life.
“You have no right to visit any place where Jimmy was exploring,” the man called Larry squawked. His face was white, and a vein throbbed in his forehead.
The left engine caught next and roared to life. It made even more noise than the first because the cowling was open. A yellow ladder stood on the dock beside it. Another bag went sailing into the plane. A young man in greasy overalls appeared in the cargo door and just managed to dodge the hurtling sack. Thick black hair, stocky build, dark features. Just like the picture of him scanned into the briefing note. Pete Parson, the pilot, Mitzi’s boyfriend.
He hopped onto the dock, ducked under the wing, and scrambled up to examine the port engine. He reached inside with a wrench, made an adjustment, then closed the cowling and fastened it shut.
“I’m warning you one last time,” the man with the papers shouted over the engines. “Control of the company has passed into new hands. Any knowledge you may have about diamond properties belongs to them.”
“Mitzi Angel?” I said, stepping close so she could hear me.
“If you’re the Treasury guy, get in!” she yelled over the engine noise, snatching my bag and launching it through the door. She noticed Lily. “You have got to be kidding me. You’re bringing, like, a date? Honey,” she said to Lily, studying her clothes, “this is the north country. We’re not going on a fashion shoot.”
“Honey,” said Lily, returning the inspection, “that much I could have guessed.” She let Mitzi see how much Arctic air a pair of gray eyes could hold, then rifled her Prada through the door and followed it in.
Mitzi tossed off the lines and tumbled through the door and latched it shut. We taxied away from the dock. Through the window I could see the man brandishing his papers again, this time at a white RCMP vehicle with its roof lights flashing, just pulling up at the foot of the dock. The same constable from last night leapt out and ran along the pier, waving his arms. I saw Luc climb out of the SUV. He knew we weren’t stopping. He watched with a wolfish grin as we taxied out to the channel.
“Mitz,” Pete yelled from the cockpit. “There’s another water bomber coming in. He’s on final five minutes out. I’ll have to take off as soon as we’re in the channel or they’ll hold me until he lands.”
“Help me tighten down the load,” Mitzi said. “Use that ratchet on the bulkhead.”
A heavy wire net with straps at the corners lay across a pile of timber posts. Each post tapered to a lethally sharp end. As the deck trembled, the posts shivered against each other. If one came loose, it would shoot down the hold like a massive spear. As we taxied through the chop I ratcheted one side tight and Mitzi did the same.
The plane lurched hard as it dug through a wake in the channel. One of the posts ground its way loose from the stack and, still inside the net, slammed to the metal deck.
“Tighter!” Mitzi called. I grabbed the lever in both hands and ratcheted the strap another click. The Otter pivoted into the wind.
“Mitz?” Pete shouted.
“Go!” she yelled.
He reached up and grasped the throttle levers above his head, pushing them steadily forward. The Otter shook as the engines roared and the pontoons smacked through the waves.
The back end sank as the airplane bulldozed up the channel, slowly gaining speed. Two more posts slipped off the top of the pile and boomed to the metal deck. The strong net held, keeping the posts from shooting free. The powerful engines pulled the Otter up. It gained speed swiftly as it planed across the waves. The cargo deck leveled.
Mitzi threw herself into a seat beside Lily and gestured toward the cockpit.
“Quick. Sit up with Pete. You’re the tourist.”
I scrambled forward and just made it into the right-hand seat when the deck tilted, and the plane climbed steeply from the bay.
6
The city slipped away beneath us as we climbed. Off to the right in the direction of the airport, I saw an F-18 dart up into the sky. It flashed in the sun, then peeled away and vanished. The dark trail from its afterburners hung in the sky until it, too, was gone.
A thick hand reached in front of me and pointed to the headset hanging from the panel in front of me. I unhooked it and clicked the mike switch to show I was plugged in.
“Pete Parson,” he said and stuck out a large, square hand. When I introduced myself, he nodded wordlessly.
The cinnamon disk of the sun flooded the land with a powdery light. We were flying up the long inlet that led from Yellowknife to the open lake. An archipelago of rocky islands clung to the eastern shore. A cluster of houses perched on a headland at the mouth of Yellowknife Bay. Beyond, the soft pink sea of Great Slave Lake stretched to the horizon.
“This is where I check for a tail,” he said.
“Why would anyone be tailing you?”
A click sounded as Mitzi cut in. “Because the bastards tailed us last time we went out,” she said. “They must be trying to find where Dad was exploring. They’re Chinese. I think he did some kind of deal with them. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“What kind of deal?”
“How would I know?” she said angrily. “You think Jimmy would tell me? No. I have to find out from that asshole L
arry.”
We flew out over the lake for a minute. Then the cockpit tilted as Pete made a long, slow turn to the left until we were heading back the way we’d come.
“Ten o’clock,” he said.
I squinted at the sky ahead and to the left. It seemed empty.
“There’s some spare sunglasses in that pocket on the side of your seat,” he said. “Try to look into the distance. Let your eyes relax.”
I saw it then. A tiny dot in the expanse of sky.
“Any idea who they are?”
His aviator glasses flashed as he glanced at me. “I think your guess might be better than mine.” His tone wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t friendly either.
“What makes you think that?”
“I’ll tell you what makes me think that,” he said. “Jimmy disappears. Then these guys show up.” He jabbed a finger at the dot, growing quickly in size as our combined speeds collapsed the distance between us. “Then you arrive, and Mitzi gets a message from the US government to take you with us.” He made a slight course correction to take us wide of the onrushing aircraft. “That’s what makes me think you might know who they are.”
He adjusted course again as the fast-growing shape hardened into a large single-engine plane hurtling toward us. Then the other pilot corrected too, and the gleaming black plane flashed by with a roar at a distance of about two hundred yards. I caught a glimpse of the pilot staring blankly at us, and could just make out another face peering through a window.
“I didn’t see that plane at the dock,” I said.
“They’re not flying out of Yellowknife. They have a camp on the North Arm, where the Stagg River enters Great Slave Lake. There’s islands there. Good place to moor a plane. Friend of mine found the camp. He was fishing up the river and heard them shooting. They’d set up some targets.”
“Did he get close enough to see them?”
