The Explorer's Code

by Kitty Pilgrim

  “You take the left side, I’ll take the right,” directed Sinclair.

  They walked around scanning the glass cases for old papers, or anything that resembled a deed.

  “Anything?”

  “No,” said Cordelia. “This is all about the whaling and mining operations in Spitsbergen at the turn of the last century. There are no real documents.”

  “Let’s go upstairs,” suggested Sinclair. “I’m sure the curator’s office is up there. The deed may be in a desk drawer, or even a safe.”

  As they headed toward the narrow staircase, Sinclair felt an unaccountable prickle of anxiety. He stopped, alarmed. Subtleties of intuition were not his style, but something about this wasn’t right.

  “Let me go first,” he said.

  Cordelia let Sinclair squeeze past her on the narrow staircase. He walked up the first few steps and stopped.

  Cordelia saw him hesitate, clearly uncertain what to do. He put a hand back to stop her from climbing up farther. Her view was blocked.

  “Delia, go back down now. Now!” he said.

  She turned and went down the steps quickly, nearly stumbling. She got to the main floor and looked back; Sinclair was not following her. He was standing on the stairs, immobile, looking into the room above.

  “What is up there, John?” Her voice cracked in fear.

  “Delia, please go outside with Erin and Charles,” Sinclair said urgently. “Please, do it now.”

  His harsh tone of voice was chilling. She turned and walked quickly across the ground floor of the museum and out the door.

  Sinclair could only assume it was the curator: Nils Edgeland. He had been impaled by a whaling instrument in his back. His shirt was stained around the puncture wound and the blood had congealed around the shaft of the weapon in a dark burgundy gel. His body was slumped on the floor in a nearly fetal position, as if he were still writhing in pain.

  Feeling a bit light-headed, Sinclair looked away from the body at the antique whaling implements on the walls. He had spent many a summer in Nantucket and was familiar with the function of nearly every tool on the wall: long-handled flensing knives with curved blades and blubber spades. Sinclair realized he was slightly in shock, because it suddenly seemed terribly important to find the right word for the weapon that had killed the man. He shook himself out of it. He had to think clearly.

  Sinclair approached the body. Nils had been dead for a day or more. The blood was congealed. Only the cool temperature in the empty museum had kept the body from decomposing. But that explained the ripe smell that had hit them when they entered.

  There was no way to help this man. Whoever had killed the curator must have been looking for the deed. But what if they hadn’t found it? As callous as it seemed, Sinclair realized, he should continue to look for it.

  He turned his eyes away from the gruesome sight and started searching. It was certainly worth a try, before the police came in and turned the place into a crime scene. Once that happened, they would never allow him near the place.

  He walked around, being careful not to touch anything. His boots echoed on the wooden floorboards. All the exhibition cases were intact and nothing seemed out of place.

  Sinclair scanned the walls and the glass cases, which were filled with historical documents: provisions slips for the Arctic Coal Mining Company, shipment order forms, coal-mining records, receipts for whale-oil deliveries, and letters from dignitaries and statesmen who had visited Spitsbergen.

  He carefully scrutinized the document cases. There were handwritten records from a century ago, but nothing looked quite like a land deed. Just as he was turning away from a display, he saw the leather volume. It was exactly like Cordelia’s journal. The case wasn’t locked. He wrapped his shirttail around his hand to raise the glass lid of the case and gingerly lifted the volume out without touching anything else.

  As he opened the leather-bound book, he saw the exact same handwriting he had seen in the journal: it was another diary written by Elliott Stapleton! He tucked it into his jacket pocket.

  On the way back to the staircase, he glanced at the array of whaling implements on the wall. He lifted down the first whaling tool he could reach, a three-pronged blubber fork that was used to lift slabs of whale meat out of the kettle. He would have preferred one of the guns they had taken from the dead Russians, but Erin and Charles had them, as they kept watch outside.

  Erin and Charles were seated in the vehicle, looking at the bright morning. They held their guns pointed out the side windows, resting on the windowsills. All was quiet; the town below looked like a toy village.

  “Erin, how are you feeling this morning?” Charles asked.

  He looked at Erin and admired her fortitude. It was clear she was in pain. All morning she had been putting on an admirable show of bravado for the group, breezily dismissing the deeply bruised face, black eyes, and cracked and swollen mouth. Even now, when she and Charles were alone, she didn’t let down. She immediately bristled at his sympathetic tone.

  “Fine, why do you ask?”

  “Well, you may be feeling fine,” he joked, “but I didn’t get enough sleep.”

  Erin grunted and the small tilt to the corner of her mouth might have indicated amusement. They settled in for a wait, both comfortable with the silence.

  There was nothing stirring in the landscape before them. Charles looked in the rearview mirror. Suddenly another vehicle appeared behind them, pulled into the parking area, and skidded to a stop in the loose gravel.

  “Erin, watch out!” he called.

  Erin looked in the side-view mirror and saw four men rushing their Land Rover from the back. She cursed and whirled around, leveling her gun out the window. But her reaction was slow. The combination of painkillers she took last night and lack of sleep dulled her response. One man wrenched the gun out of her hand. She turned to Charles, and he was also losing the struggle to retain his gun. She whirled around. They were being held at gunpoint by two men.

  Cordelia was just coming out of the museum when the ambush started. In the flurry, none of the gunmen had noticed her standing there. Cordelia tiptoed down the wooden steps and crouched behind the second vehicle. The men were talking, and she realized they weren’t Russians! They had American accents!

  “Why don’t we take them to the seed vault.”

  “Is the boss up there already?” asked another man.

  “Yes. He’s waiting.”

  Cordelia hid behind the back chrome bumper and tried to decide what to do. It would be too dangerous to try to go back inside the museum to warn Sinclair. Out here, there was no real place to hide. She immediately understood that she might have only a few seconds before she was discovered. They would certainly see her when they returned to their vehicle.

  She knew that she should try to leave some sort of message for Sinclair. It might be her only opportunity to alert him. Kneeling down, she started writing the words seed vault in the rough dirt with her fingers. It was difficult to do without making any noise.

  Suddenly one of the men grabbed her from behind. He hauled her to her feet and pressed a gun to her back.

  “Look what I found,” the man called to the others. “She was hiding behind the car.”

  “Bring her over,” someone shouted.

  Cordelia looked down at her half-formed message. She had only managed to scrape out the letters S E E in the dirt. Was that enough of a message for Sinclair to understand? Would he know what S E E meant? It was doubtful that he would even notice it. She needed to leave another sign; something that would call Sinclair’s attention to the message in the dirt.

  The gunman was prodding her in the back, and she barely had time to think. Reaching up to her throat, she put a finger through her necklace and pulled hard. The chain broke and it fell to the ground, a bright object, right next to the letters. She stepped over the necklace and walked toward the others.

  “This is the one we are looking for,” the man announced. “Cordelia Stapleton.�
�� He never looked down as he stepped over the message.

  “Good,” one of the others replied. “Let’s get out of here fast.”

  Sinclair stood on the steps of the museum and looked out over the barren land. The Land Rover had simply vanished. No clouds of dust, no distant vehicles racing across the valley. Nothing. It was incomprehensible that they could have disappeared so fast. What had happened? They would never have left voluntarily. Perhaps they had been taken hostage, the way he and Erin were yesterday.

  Sinclair looked down, searching for tire tracks. The soil was loose and mixed with fine gravel. Then he saw something light blue and gold on the ground, winking in the bright sunlight. It was near where the Land Rover had been parked. He walked over and looked at it. It was the evil-eye necklace he had bought for Cordelia in Kuşadas1!

  He picked it up and held it in his hand. The sight of it made him heartsick. He never should have left her, not even for a second. She must have put it there to tell him something. He looked down again, and his eyes focused on a pattern in the dirt. There were letters scraped there. He walked around in a full circle. They were easily decipherable: S E E. See. See what? He knew Cordelia had meant to give him a clue to their destination, or possibly to the identity of their abductors.

  He ran a hand over his forehead to clear his brain. Panic was impeding his thought process. What had she been trying to write? He started through all the letters of the alphabet. SEE-A SEE-B SEE-C.

  SEE-D. He stopped. SEED. The seed vault! How could he be so thick? He kept staring at the spot where Cordelia had written the letters in the dirt. How long ago had she done that, ten minutes? How long had he been in the museum? He didn’t know. He had never hated himself more than at that moment. He was failing, and failing badly. And Cordelia’s life was at stake.

  Sinclair stood up and wondered if he could see the seed vault. He knew it was buried deep into the mountainside. The steel door of the vault was visible on the cliff face in the distance. From here he could just barely see a metallic glint against the mountain. To reach it, he needed to go down this mountain, across the floor of the valley, and back up the mountain on the far side.

  The distance was enormous, and it was two miles into the village. There was no alternative; he had to run.

  It seemed like a cruel joke, having to chase after them on foot. As Sinclair started off, he cursed his stupidity. He needed to keep running at a steady but sustainable rate. His brain raced ahead of his feet, and he began to form a plan.

  He needed to get help. The only person he knew was the director of public construction and property. Anders Olaussen. Father Christmas. Olaussen would know how to access the seed vault.

  The road was steep, and Sinclair used the pronged whaling implement as a hiking pole to take the pressure off his knees. The dry air burned his throat and rasped his breathing. He was parched long before he came to the bottom of the mountain. When he reached level ground, he felt like he had been running for hours.

  He finally reached the outskirts of the town and located the Svalbardbutikken, the general store. On Main Street, he saw a few families out doing their grocery shopping. He walked more slowly, trying not to attract attention until he stood outside the office building. He entered and ran across the lobby and up the short flight of stairs to Olaussen’s office.

  The young secretary had just come in and was still standing with her coat on, setting a coffee cup on the desk.

  “Is the director in?” asked Sinclair.

  “Oh, hello, you are back,” she said, startled.

  “Is the director in?” Sinclair demanded.

  “I . . . I don’t think so, I just got here.”

  Sinclair pushed past her and headed down the narrow corridor to the back office. The door was ajar. Sinclair stopped, aware that something was amiss. With the toe of his boot, he edged the door open.

  He was too late. Father Christmas was dead at his desk, slumped over as if asleep.

  At that moment, Sinclair had the clarity of mind that comes with extreme fear. Nils Edgeland and Anders Olaussen were mere bystanders in all of this, but they been killed in cold blood. Cordelia, Erin, and Charles were in grave danger. He had to get to the seed vault!

  Near the dead man’s hand, Sinclair saw a bundle of keys on a key chain. He needed a vehicle, and here was an opportunity. Without any compunction, he scooped up the keys and dropped them into his coat pocket.

  The young woman came into the room just as he finished pocketing the keys, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were on the man slumped over the desk.

  “He is dead,” he told her.

  She looked at him, her eyes round and frightened.

  “What kind of car does he drive? Is his car outside?” Sinclair was moving toward the door. The young woman wasn’t watching, absorbed in the grisly spectacle before her.

  “He parks in back,” she said. “I didn’t see the car. He has a Volvo.”

  “Call the authorities,” Sinclair said, standing at the door.

  He watched her reach for the phone, and then he turned and slipped out of the office. Sinclair sprinted down the stairs and out onto the street. He took a quick left turn around the corner of the building and found the parking lot in the back. There were four vehicles, and three of them were Volvos. Which one? He looked at the keys. He pressed the automatic lock button, and heard the faint click of a door unlocking. He pressed it a couple of more times and located the vehicle.

  He opened the door, threw the whaling fork into the back, and slid into the driver’s seat. He pulled the leather journal out of his pocket and slid it under the passenger seat. The car was an old model; it started with a key. He sorted through the tangle, fingering several security fobs and two dozen keys of all sizes. Finally he located the ignition key and inserted it. Despite the cold, the car jumped to life. He didn’t have much time.

  London

  Thaddeus Frost stood in the corridor outside Intensive Care at the Royal London Hospital. It was a damn good thing he had brought that poisoned coffee with him in the ambulance, or Jim Gardiner would be dead. He had saved hours of guessing. The lab test had been started as soon as Gardiner was admitted. It was a relief that he was going to live. But he might not be completely functioning ever again. The doctors had said the powerful nerve agent might leave him blind, or crippled, or mentally impaired.

  Frost wanted to make sure Gardiner would pull through before he headed up to Oslo. After all, he was personally responsible for the incident. He should never have left Gardiner on his own in the airport. Only those few minutes late, and it had turned into a deadly mistake. Inexcusable.

  Frost had immediately called Paul Oakley to come and help him. He knew the ropes at the hospital, even if this kind of toxic poisoning was not his specialty. True to his word, Oakley was there in a half hour. He hurried up the corridor, looking deeply upset.

  “Thanks for coming so quickly,” Frost said. “When I called you, I didn’t realize you had met Gardiner. I was just hoping you could help cut through some of the red tape here at the hospital.”

  “Yes, I know Gardiner,” said Oakley. “I met him when we were doing the exhumation at Cliffmere. We rode back to London together.”

  “I was at Cliffmere also,” said Frost. “Although if you had seen me, I would not have been doing my job properly. I was in the shrubbery.”

  “I had no idea all this was so dangerous,” Oakley said. “This attack is . . . well, I’m not sure Gardiner will recover.”

  He looked gray with worry and his wire-framed glasses were slightly off-kilter.

  “These people are killers. I shouldn’t have let him go to the airport alone. I was late,” Frost confessed.

  Oakley’s eyes opened in surprise. He put his hand on Frost’s arm and spoke gently.

  “You mustn’t blame yourself. In fact, you probably saved him. How in the blazes did you know the coffee was poisoned?”

  “I smelled it.”

  “You smelled it?”
Oakley echoed, in disbelief.

  Thaddeus Frost smiled a rare smile.

  “Yes, I am cursed with an extrasensitive sense of smell. I am practically a human bloodhound.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Thaddeus nodded. “Mostly it’s a curse. In an airplane, I can smell an overdue diaper change twenty rows back.”

  “How extraordinary!”

  “Sometimes, for my botanical work, it’s very useful. I can smell natural scents that others don’t pick up.”

  “Like your coffee beans,” said Oakley.

  “And my orchids. Most people don’t realize they each have a unique scent.”

  “That is absolutely fascinating,” said Oakley, who was starting to stare at him as if he were a potential subject for study.

  “Of course, food is a horrible ordeal,” Frost went on to explain. “I can’t eat much. If the chef uses day-old fish or slightly overripe cheese, it’s awful.”

  “I have never heard of anything like it.”

  “I smoke to ramp it down, so I can cope. Smoking impairs your sense of smell,” Frost explained.

  “Smoking will kill you.”

  “I should be so lucky,” said Frost, looking at his watch. “Listen, I hate to do this, but I need to leave right away. I may have already missed the flight with a connection to Longyearbyen.”

  “What about Gardiner?”

  “Could you stay and monitor him?” Thaddeus asked. “There is a situation up in Svalbard.”

  “Cordelia and Sinclair!” realized Oakley, alarmed. “Of course. Are they all right?”

  Thaddeus nodded. “For the moment.”

  “Go! I will tend to Gardiner.”

  Thaddeus Frost clapped Oakley on the arm and walked quickly to the elevator. His mind was already calculating what was necessary. He picked up his phone and dialed his contact in Norway. With this kind of body count, it was going to turn into a mess; he’d be up to his eyeballs in paperwork for months.