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Arctic Floor

Page 25

by Mark Aitken


  ‘Military passports with no orders—that’s not a good mix.’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Anything to declare this morning?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Any firearms, explosives, alcohol, tobacco?’

  ‘No, ma’am, ‘cept a couple packs of Marlboros.’

  ‘No cash in excess of ten thousand Canadian dollars?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘You carrying any blood samples, any used veterinary equipment?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘You currently under criminal indictment in the United States?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Parole or suspended sentence?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘This your truck?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Those your mineral blocks in the back?’

  Gallen craned his head but couldn’t see the supplies in the tray of the Dodge. ‘No, ma’am.’

  Officer Langtry looked past him to Winter. ‘And this would be Mr William Higgins?’

  Gallen craved a smoke but didn’t want to light up. ‘No, ma’am.’

  Moving to the other side of the truck, Langtry scanned Winter’s passport but paid particular attention to his face.

  ‘Kenny Winter?’ she said. ‘Not Kenny Winter, defenceman for the Hurricanes?’

  Winter smiled. ‘Yes, ma’am, but don’t hold it against me.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Officer Langtry, beaming. ‘Lethbridge is our team. We’re all ‘Canes fans down here.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Thought I was non grata?’

  ‘Forget that crap,’ she said, waving it away. ‘Those animals from Spokane been getting away with it for years. You just gave a little back is all.’

  Walking back to Gallen, Langtry leaned on the door. ‘So, you’re not William Higgins but you’re in his truck? ‘

  ‘My gooseneck is broken so I borrowed Billy’s.’

  ‘You’re not towing, sir.’

  ‘I’m looking for horses, at the auctions,’ said Gallen. ‘If anything’s worth buying, we’ll hire a trailer.’

  ‘Looking for horses?’

  ‘We’re trainers. Roy Gallen’s my father.’

  Langtry Googled him on her iPad. ‘Sweet Clover, huh? Roy Gallen and family—stock contractor for the rodeo, trainer of ropers and cutting horses.’

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Which auctions?’

  Gallen hesitated. ‘Up Stettler and Big Valley. Maybe try Leduc, around there.’

  ‘Stettler’s a meat auction,’ said Langtry.

  ‘Only if they go for meat,’ said Gallen. ‘Otherwise they’re a cheap roping horse.’

  Langtry’s face softened. ‘You do that?’

  ‘He does,’ said Gallen, pointing at Winter. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many hundred-thousand-dollar roping horses were bought at meat auctions.’

  She looked back at the customs office, where faces peered out of the plate glass in the early morning light. Then she scribbled something on a sheet of paper, tore it off.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, lowering her voice as she handed back Gallen’s passport. ‘Next time, bring a signed declaration that this vehicle is in authorised third-party use. Have a nice day, sir.’

  The slap on the roof sounded friendly enough as Gallen started the Dodge. Easing out of the customs enclosure, onto Canadian territory, Gallen could sense Winter craning his neck.

  ‘Don’t attract attention, Kenny.’

  ‘Sorry, boss. Can’t keep my eyes off that ass.’

  Handing Winter his passport, Gallen swung the Dodge onto Highway 4 for Lethbridge and hit the gas. ‘Keep your eyes on that instead.’

  Opening the passport, Winter pulled out the scrap of paper that Officer Langtry had placed there.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Says, US intelligence about to be notified that Gerard Gallen just crossed the border.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Gallen.

  ‘Least she gave us a heads-up,’ said Winter, turning in his seat and looking behind. ‘Nice work on the meat auctions.’

  Gallen lit a smoke and inhaled deeply as he keyed his Nokia and looked at the list of call centres he could use for his long-distance card. He rang the Miami one, then input his PIN and the number he wanted to call in Jakarta.

  The call went to voicemail and he hung up before the beep sounded.

  He was sinking off the grid, just like he’d been trained. The fear he’d been feeling at the border crossing was evaporating into a cold, hard sense of what he had to do.

  He was back in the game, and he was liking it.

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER 40

  Pulling into a shopping centre on the north side of the Crowsnest Highway in Lethbridge, they found a parking spot and changed their US dollars at a bank that was just opening. They walked to a line of used-car lots on the south side of the highway where Gallen found what he was looking for: an eight-year-old Chev Impala for $2499, before taxes. After he’d changed the registration with his Roland Smith driver’s licence, they took the closest on-ramp and gunned the car north for Calgary.

  Gallen grabbed his phone as he found a comfortable speed between the armada of trucks that were heading for Calgary and on to Edmonton. This time he dialled the call centre in Boston then, after inputting his PIN, the Jakarta number.

  ‘Pete,’ he said as the American voice answered. ‘Gerry.’

  ‘Hey, Gerry,’ said the intel man. ‘You in Boston now?’

  ‘Alberta’s too cold, even in spring,’ said Gallen.

  ‘Maybe getting even colder when you lose a billionaire, hey, Gerry?’

  ‘It wasn’t a great first week.’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to Piers yet, but he’s in town next week.’

  ‘Thanks, buddy,’ said Gallen. ‘But it’s not that.’

  ‘What you need?’

  ‘You must know a good hacker, someone who can access a file on a corporate server?’

  Morton sighed. ‘Shit, Gerry. You had to do this on the open air? You clean?’

  ‘I’m clean, Pete,’ said Gallen as he overtook a line of semis. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Don’t get smart,’ said the ex-DIA man. ‘Maybe you don’t need a hacker. What are you looking for?’

  ‘You remember my employer?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I need a residential address on two names. Can do?’

  ‘Spell them,’ said Morton. The NSA’s voice-recognition software scanned for names, numbers and words. It was less efficient with strings of letters.

  ‘Why don’t I just tell you their positions?’ said Gallen as he slipped back into the long line of trucks.

  ‘Try me.’

  Gallen listed the acting chief executive and the vice-president, security and after thirty seconds of tapping and clicking, Morton came back on the line.

  ‘Can’t break in. I’ll ask my guy. Where do I send the results?’

  ‘I’ll call in an hour.’

  Morton laughed, a cackling smoker’s laugh.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘You, buddy,’ Morton said. ‘You’re obviously dodging our friends in DC and, just so you know, it suits me that I think you’re in Boston. Clear?’

  ‘Crystal,’ said Gallen. ‘I’ll call in an hour.’

  ~ * ~

  The Elf cafe was perfect for Gallen’s needs: the internet bunker was tucked away in Calgary’s Chinese-Korean sector, on the corner of 17th and 34th streets. The place had no coffee, no trendies and no one wanting to be friendly.

  Setting up a Gmail account under the name ‘Zamboanga1103’, Gallen went into settings and set up email forwarding. Opening another window, he went to a website that collected spam databases and cut and pasted two thousand email addresses into the forwarding rules of his Zamboanga1103 account. Scrolling down the addresses he stopped about halfway and inserted his Igor Olafnowsky email address and then shut down the computer.

  Opening
his Igor Olafnowsky Gmail account, Gallen looked around and saw Winter smoking on the street outside the window. Selecting the Fort Worth number on his long-distance card, Gallen got Morton on the second ring.

  ‘I’ve got ‘em,’ said Morton. ‘What have you got for me?’

  ‘An IOU you can cash in anytime, so long as it doesn’t endanger my life.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to it,’ said Morton. ‘You want this on the air?’

  ‘Gmail,’ said Gallen, looking around at the Asian faces in the bare room. ‘The city we met in plus the month and year. Thirteen characters.’

  ‘Gotcha, buddy,’ said Morton. ‘On its way now. Don’t be a stranger.’

  The line went dead and Gallen hunched over the monitor as youngsters milled. Hitting the refresh button on the Gmail program, he waited for a shade over a minute. The email arrived and he scribbled the addresses on a piece of paper as fast as he could.

  Turning off the server stack and the monitor too, Gallen paid with a Canadian ten-dollar note and left before the owner could complain.

  Winter drove for two blocks to a drive-through McDonald’s before heading down to a river park where they decamped and ate at a picnic table in the weak sun.

  ‘So, Aaron’s got a surname and he hasn’t listed his Calgary address?’ said Winter, burger spilling from his mouth as he looked down at Gallen’s scrap of paper. ‘Think they put him up at the same hotel where we stayed?’

  ‘Not a bad bet.’

  Finishing their lunch, they made a plan. They’d book into the Sheraton: Gallen would case Florita’s house; Winter would source firearms and try to find Aaron.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ said Winter, sipping on Sprite.

  ‘I want to know who Florita and Aaron are talking to and where they’re going,’ said Gallen.

  ‘I know you keep saying that they’ve done nothing wrong, that we’re just doing recon,’ said Winter, slightly exasperated, ‘but shit, Gerry, you must have some suspicions.’

  Looking at two scullers powering down the river in the lee of the skyscrapers, Gallen wiped the grease of the French fries off his fingers before opening his new pack of smokes.

  ‘Suspicion might be the wrong word,’ he said, lighting up. ‘Let’s just say that a week ago I was blown out of the sky, and only two people seem to have gained from the experience.’

  Winter took a smoke. ‘I hadn’t seen it that way.’

  ‘I lost Durville to a bomb, but they want me back? With a promotion?’

  ‘Not like any army I ever fought in.’

  ‘No,’ said Gallen, turning for the car. ‘So let’s do this the military way.’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘We start at the beginning,’ said Gallen. ‘By understanding how much we don’t know.’

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER 41

  The news backgrounder on CNN showed a group of European and American activists from an organisation called ArcticWatch parading a few bedraggled Inuit in front of a press conference in Paris. A woman with a strong French accent said something about global warming and decimation of hunting grounds for the Inuit and tied it all up with a bromide about corporate greed, Big Oil and the global mining oligopoly.

  Gallen sipped on his beer and rolled to his side to check the time on the bedside table: 3.37 pm. Winter was seven minutes past the RV. Even though he was buying handguns, Gallen trusted him. He’d panic at nine o’clock.

  Taking a bite from one of the perfect meatballs ordered in from Joey Tomato’s Grill across the road, he was about to check the news on Fox and MSNBC when the CNN story grabbed his attention. The ArcticWatch woman swept her hand to her side to indicate the Inuit and then called them the Transarctic Tribal Council.

  Grabbing for the remote, he sat up and increased the volume in time to hear the journalist’s voiceover pick up the story.

  ‘It has been almost a decade since the United Nations oversaw the creation of the Inuit Circumpolar Council—or ICC—in response to Inuit complaints that decisions about their livelihood were being made thousands of miles from their homelands. Inuit argued that while their Arctic hunting grounds were under the technical sovereignty of nations such as Russia, Canada, the United States and Denmark, they were a distinct ethnic people who had interacted, intermarried and traded with one another for thousands of years. The Inuit put their case as an ethnic nation with their own territorial, economic and social interests, quite separate from the interests of their imperial masters in Washington, Ottawa, Moscow and Copenhagen.’

  Gallen watched the Frenchwoman on the screen, the show using file shots of her protesting on the ice in Greenland, meeting with Vlad Putin in a Moscow drawing room and marching with Eskimos in Ottawa. Her name was Martina Du Bois, and apparently she was a Sorbonne-educated left-wing lawyer who came from a famous military family.

  The reporter interviewed her and soon they were talking about the Transarctic Tribal Council—Reggie’s outfit. Gallen focused on the story, his heart rate lifting. She spoke about the TTC representing Inuit whereas the ICC represented the governments of the various Arctic nations. Apparently there was a difference.

  It was the first Gallen had heard of the Transarctic Tribal Council being a new or rival organisation; especially that it rivalled the United Nations-sanctioned group.

  The CNN report switched to voiceover again.

  ‘With the discovery of the world’s largest oil and gas deposits outside the Middle East on the floor of the Arctic Ocean, Du Bois’ ArcticWatch has become closely aligned with the Transarctic Tribal Council. The TTC was set up to counter what Du Bois sees as the increasing encroachment of government policy friendly to big oil and mining companies in the Arctic Circle.’

  As the report broadened to describe how global warming was opening oil fields and sea lanes to the exploration companies, making the extraction of oil and minerals profitable, Gallen eased back on the pillows and wondered about what was not being said; what was the propaganda component?

  The screen was now dominated by an aerial shot of a giant ship with two hulls, each the size of a container ship. This enormous catamaran was called the Fanny Blankes-Koen, and as the helicopter circled it the reporter’s voiceover explained that the ship was an Oasis Energy venture to test the Arctic Ocean floor. Sitting on the bow gantries of the dual-hull vessel was a shape that Gallen had seen as a model in Durville’s office. It was a large pod not unlike a flying saucer from a 1950s movie.

  The reporter got to the heart of it.

  ‘This massive commitment from one of the world’s largest oil companies will seek to overcome the problems of drilling in arctic conditions by simply ducking most of the conditions altogether. The Oasis-led venture will bolt this oil rig to the sea bed and on top of it place a small town called Ariadne. In this, the largest saturation-diving platform ever built, up to one hundred oil workers will live and work around the clock for three months at a time before being replaced by a new crew. ArcticWatch has opposed the building of the Ariadne submerged oil rig, citing pollution and degradation of the Inuit’s hunting areas…’

  The door’s electronic lock clicked and Kenny Winter was inside, throwing his backpack on the bed.

  ‘Go okay?’ said Gallen, watching the door until it shut itself and locked down.

  ‘Two SIGs, nine-mil,’ said Winter, pulling off his jacket and scooping a handful of fries off the Joey Tomato’s plate. ‘Not new but they’ve been maintained. Army surplus.’

  Pulling one of the black SIG handguns from Winter’s pack, Gallen tore it down and laid the pieces on the bed cover. It was well used but seemed to have a new firing pin and newish spring on the slide. He didn’t care too much; the SIG P226 was a classic sidearm in special forces and he felt comfortable with the weapon’s strengths and limitations.

  ‘Let’s split up,’ he said. ‘You can make a friend at security, chat up one of those girls on the front desk. Let’s see if we can learn something about Mr Aaron Michaels.’

  Gallen lef
t the room first, hiding the SIG in his waistband and tucking it under his Carhartt jacket. He hailed a cab from the front of the Sheraton Suites, then waved it on. He took the third cab that stopped and directed the driver across the river and west, without stating a destination. Stopping two streets back from the river, Gallen got out and paid cash, then stood in the shadows of a tree until the taxi was out of sight.

 

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