Beneath the Ice

by Patrick Woodhead

  From Louis’s brief Bear had discovered that Bukovsky had swiftly become one of the pre-eminent microbiologists in the US despite her relatively young age. She had graduated from Princeton with a near-flawless grade average before being recruited into an advanced division of GlaxoSmithKline’s exalted R&D department. One success followed another, each accompanied by career advancement until she was heading up the entire division. All this before she had celebrated her thirtieth birthday.

  The unprecedented speed of her ascent was matched only by the equally unheard of financial package offered by Richard Pearl to persuade her to work for him. She had tendered her resignation the same day.

  Bear signalled across the sea of tables, standing up to shake hands. Despite the heat of the day, Bukovsky’s hand felt cold, with long and slender fingers that would have been the envy of any pianist.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Charlotte. It’s good of you to come at such short notice,’ Bear began.

  ‘The name’s Lotta,’ Bukovsky replied, dispensing with any pleasantries.

  Bear gave a conciliatory smile. ‘Sorry, Lotta.’

  Perching on her chair with a small overnight bag resting on her lap, Lotta stared at Bear without speaking for a few moments. There was something discomfiting about that stare, something aggrieved and agitated. Without even realising it, she was clenching her hands into fists so that her fingernails bit into the soft pads of her palms.

  ‘Your accent,’ she asked. ‘That French?’

  Bear nodded. ‘From the Congo.’

  ‘So how long have you worked for Reuters?’

  ‘Four years,’ Bear answered casually. ‘On and off. Sometimes freelance.’ She reached into her bag and slid a business card across the table. A printer in town had made them up for her that afternoon.

  ‘These feel new,’ Lotta said, bending the stiff card between her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘They are. A new batch arrived two days ago. Got a promotion to cover the whole of Southern Africa, and for some reason the pen-pushers in head office always like to have our titles correct.’

  ‘Congratulations. So where is your head office nowadays?’

  Bear smiled thinly. ‘I thought it was supposed to be me asking the questions?’

  Lotta didn’t flinch, waiting for a response.

  ‘Three Times Square, New York. Do you want my press ID as well?’

  Lotta looked as though she might and there was an awkward pause. Bear remained motionless, not giving away anything. She had been stupid to blurt that out, knowing full well that she hadn’t had time to get a fake ID made as yet. After a moment more, Lotta bent forward, placing the bag on the ground at her feet.

  ‘He always used to say he could tell when we were lying,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘Used to do this thing where he’d fire questions at you, totally unrelated questions, saying that truth could only come from within.’

  ‘He? You mean Pearl, right?’

  Lotta flinched visibly at the mention of his name. ‘You have to understand who you are dealing with here. Pearl is utterly mercurial. He’s not classically intelligent, but he has this ability to be totally different things to different people.’

  ‘For example?’

  Lotta’s eyes moved skywards as she tried to articulate her feelings. It was obviously something she did not enjoy doing.

  ‘He’s like . . . this thing . . . this controlling thing that knows everything about you. He’s there all the time – sometimes generous and charming, almost spoiling you. Then, without warning, he flips. It’s like living with a schizophrenic. I worked for him for all that time and only now that I am finally away from him, do I realise how manipulative he was. He played us right from the start but we went along with it anyway, like lambs to the fucking slaughter.’

  She looked weary, eaten up by the strength of her own feelings. ‘After a while, that was the norm. Pearl made it all seem normal.’

  Bear studied Lotta’s expression every time she mentioned his name. The revulsion she felt was palpable. ‘Was Pearl ever more to you than just your boss? Anything . . .’

  ‘Go on, say it,’ Lotta dared her. ‘You goddamn journalists are always looking for the dirt. You mean anything sexual, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I mean sexual,’ Bear countered.

  Lotta remained silent. Then her hostility seemed to fade, replaced by a kind of dulled introspection.

  ‘He was my lover for nearly a year. And the whole time, it seemed like he shared everything with me. But actually, it was only ever what he wanted me to know.’

  ‘So what happened between you?’

  ‘I didn’t suspect anything until about three months ago. We were staying at a hotel in New York and it was early in the morning. I was working on my laptop while he was still asleep in bed. I noticed him wake up and go into the bathroom. A few minutes later I went over to turn off the main bedroom lights and somehow I managed to trip all the fuses in the suite.’

  Lotta hesitated as the memory came flooding back. ‘He just went mad, absolutely mad. He started throwing himself against the bathroom door, trying to break it open. The whole time, he was screaming. It was this horrible, blood-curdling scream that went on and on.’ She bit down on her lip, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘Eventually, he broke through the door and then came at me, strangling me with his bare hands. I could feel his grip around my neck, getting tighter and tighter, while his face hung over mine, so close that we were almost touching.’

  Raising her hand to her neck, Lotta ran a finger across the smooth silk of the scarf. Pearl’s wedding ring had left a deep, raking cut on the left side of her throat, but after three months, the scar was just beginning to fade.

  ‘It was only after I passed out that he finally stopped,’ she whispered. ‘He was trapped, you see. Trapped in the dark. Since his ordeal in the submarine . . .’ Lotta shook her head slowly, drifting into silence. Several seconds passed before she managed to regain her composure enough to continue. ‘But him hurting me like that made me re-evaluate everything. Right from the start. I began going back over everything and doing my own research. One of the things I discovered was that there is a lot more to the submarine incident than the press ever reported.’

  Bear raised one eyebrow. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Pearl and Fedor Stang weren’t lucky to survive. They did so for a reason.’

  ‘I thought it was just a case of the rescue team arriving in the nick of time.’

  A sneer appeared on Lotta’s lips, curling the edges upwards. ‘There was never going to be enough air for twenty-seven men. Fedor Stang was the ranking officer, while Pearl was one of his juniors. Only a couple of days into the whole thing, they ordered the rest of the crew into the bulkhead under the pretext it would help with the rescue. Then they locked them all inside, sealing the flood doors.’

  Bear’s mouth widened in disbelief.

  ‘They guessed how long it would take for the submersibles to make it down to that depth and link on to the hull,’ Lotta continued. ‘So they decided to take control of ninety per cent of the air supply.’

  ‘You’re saying they actually murdered twenty-five other men?’ Bear asked incredulously. ‘If that’s true then surely someone else would have done the maths and figured out that only two men were breathing down there.’

  ‘After they got out, they explained everything away, saying they had used the air tanks in the ballast and part of the diving equipment. At the time, they were heroes. No one was going to start looking for an explanation that didn’t need to be found.’

  Bear jotted a few notes on her pad, but inwardly she wondered how much of this she could take at face value. Lotta looked every inch the jilted ex-girlfriend prepared to go to any lengths to get her revenge. Mind you, Bear could hardly blame her. If someone had tried to strangle her, she would undoubtedly have done the same.

  ‘You have proof of all this, right?’

  Lotta shook her head. ‘Not enough to re-open the matter officiall
y. It was over a decade ago and there’s nothing concrete that would stand up in an enquiry. But I found a full copy of the forensic report hidden in Pearl’s private office. He’d even annotated certain sections. The rest I figured out for myself.’

  Staring across the table, Lotta seemed to pick up on Bear’s hesitancy.

  ‘What?’ she asked. ‘You don’t think he has blood on his hands?’

  ‘Look, as a journalist, I can’t pin an entire article . . .’

  ‘What about the two other microbiologists?’ Lotta challenged, cutting her off mid-sentence. ‘Their deaths were no accidents.’

  Bear moved back in her seat, eyeing Lotta carefully. ‘You can substantiate that?’

  She nodded, eyes turning towards her overnight bag. ‘I have it right here.’

  Bear followed her gaze, but resisted the temptation to ask to see the proof. ‘So that’s why you ran?’ she said. ‘Because you thought you were next?’

  ‘I was going to be next,’ Lotta replied flatly. ‘That’s exactly what Pearl had planned.’

  A waiter approached the table and both women stopped speaking, leaving the sentence hanging in the air. Ordering a glass of water, Bear looked towards Lotta who simply shook her head. But just as the waiter went to leave, she suddenly called him back.

  ‘Actually, make that a tequila on the rocks. A double.’

  As soon as he had gone, Bear picked up her notepad once more. ‘I want to step back a bit and start from the beginning. Tell me about the work you were doing at Global Change. I’ve read some of the reports on the website, but it’s all pretty vague.’

  Lotta seemed a little deflated by the change in tack, but then nodded. ‘The projects are vague because so is the science. We switched from one project to the next, drifting really, until earlier this year Pearl got it into his head that algae was the future of bio-fuel. He was going to revolutionise the fuel industry and ploughed millions into the project. A few months later, we had vast growing chambers set up brimming with hexane solvents, but of course we could never make the fuel stable enough for production on a large scale. We failed again and again, with Pearl refusing to accept that the science just wasn’t there yet. Instead, he would simply blame us for not working hard enough.’

  Lotta exhaled deeply. ‘Then he had us switch to something else. Have you ever heard of the term “iron fertilisation”?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ Bear replied with a shrug. In reality she had read several papers on the subject.

  ‘The theory has been around for a while,’ Lotta explained. ‘You take iron sulphate particles and spread them into the ocean. The iron causes plankton to bloom and, as the plankton grows and completes its life cycle, it sucks carbon dioxide out of the surrounding air. When the plankton dies it sinks down to the bottom of the ocean, thereby locking in all that carbon on to the seabed. People were looking at it as a solution to climate change.’

  ‘And Pearl was one of these people?’

  ‘Yeah, he was. Last summer he had me fronting a team that dumped over a hundred tons of iron sulphate off the islands of Haida Gwaii on the west coast of Canada. Initially, the experiment reacted well and there were traces of huge phytoplankton blooms all around the boat. But then, things started to go wrong . . .’

  Lotta’s lips pursed in disdain, causing her cheeks to pinch a little tighter. ‘We didn’t realise it at the time, but under certain conditions iron sulphate can cause the nitrous oxide level to spike. It sucked the oxygen out of the water and we managed to kill every living organism within a hundred-and-eighty-square-mile radius. We literally created a desert in the blink of an eye.’

  She shook her head, eyes glowing with a mixture of anger and contrition. Over the ensuing months, she had obviously been eaten alive by guilt.

  ‘You know, I grew up by the sea,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘I spent almost my entire childhood there, and now . . .’

  ‘Did you know the iron sulphate could react like that?’ Bear interjected, trying to bring her back on topic.

  ‘The initial tests were inconclusive. No one had ever tried it on such a large scale,’ Lotta answered, then paused, gently shaking her head. ‘Shit. I’m talking like him now. The answer is yes – we knew there was a chance it could happen, and instead of postponing for further testing, we just streamrollered ahead.’

  ‘But it’s over, right? After what happened, Pearl can’t be looking to bleach out any more of the Pacific.’

  ‘You don’t get it. This is not a rational mind we are dealing with here. Pearl is only interested in the quality of the air and the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It all stems from the days he spent in the submarine. I mean, just look at the man – he uses an inhaler when he doesn’t even have asthma and hooks himself up to an oxygen mask when he sleeps.’

  She paused, cheeks flushing a deep red. ‘And the one thing he doesn’t give a shit about is the sea. In fact, it’s the reverse. He actively despises anything to do with it. Pearl believes that if his experiments to combat climate change damage the oceans, well, that’s just collateral damage.’

  Their drinks arrived and Lotta sipped her tequila, wincing slightly at the bite of the spirit.

  ‘After Haida Gwaii, Pearl said the scale wasn’t big enough and everything had to be refocused on finding an alternative to iron sulphate. Something bigger. He then hit on the idea that it wasn’t to do with quantity. When we looked at the numbers, we realised that they were just too big. Essentially, we were never going to be able to dump enough iron sulphate into the oceans to make a difference. Instead, we needed a chain reaction.’

  Bear froze. ‘A what?’

  Lotta seemed to crumple in front of her. She no longer bristled with anger and recrimination. Instead, she looked desperate.

  ‘You don’t understand what it was like. Day in, day out, we were being told we were going to find a solution to climate change – the great ill of the twenty-first century. It was like working on the Manhattan Project, trying to split the atom. Only a handful of us knew the whole picture and we became so engrossed with trying to create the substance that we lost sight of what it would actually do.’

  She ran her fingers through her hair, scraping her nails against the skin of her scalp. The horror of what she had been carrying finally releasing.

  ‘In November we managed to modify a type of irradiated radical that would chain react in saltwater. We created Tetramethylsilane.’

  Bear remained silent, waiting for her to elaborate.

  ‘Tetramethylsilane was specifically designed to trigger a non-reversible event. In the lab we used to call it the “seed”.’

  Bear’s forehead creased as she tried to grasp what had been said. ‘You’re telling me that this seed will trigger plankton to bloom all over the ocean. And that the plankton will suck up the carbon in the atmosphere.’

  Lotta nodded, her eyes locked on Bear’s. ‘That’s exactly what I am saying. The seed could be the panacea for the twenty-first century’s ills, lowering carbon levels by anything up to twenty per cent on a global scale. Or there’s a chance that it could do the same as at Haida Gwaii and decimate an entire ocean.’

  ‘Chance? What kind of a chance?’

  Lotta shrugged, blankness filling her eyes. ‘It’s complicated. Like, really fucking complicated. Do you have any idea how many variables have to go into the modelling?’

  Bear didn’t speak but her eyes pressed for an answer.

  ‘OK . . . you want an answer? The last model I worked on put the probability at somewhere between forty and fifty-five per cent. Maybe they’ve got that narrowed down some more, but right now, all I can tell you for certain is that Pearl is prepared to take that chance.’

  ‘Mon Dieu,’ Bear whispered, shaking her head. ‘What if he is wrong?’

  ‘Then we are not talking about a few dead fish here. We’re talking about an entire eco-system being shut down overnight. It would mean the desertification of one of the richest maritime systems on earth. Just like that.
Everything dies.’ Lotta clicked her fingers to emphasise the point. ‘No one can predict the knock-on effects if this thing goes bad, but one thing’s for sure: it’ll be on a planetary scale.’

  Bear stared across the table in shock. ‘But I don’t understand. Why didn’t you go to someone?’ she asked, voice laden with recrimination despite her best efforts. ‘Why didn’t you inform one of the agencies and get them to stop him? Wouldn’t the DHS have oversight on something like that?’

  ‘Homeland Security! They’re nothing but trumped up beat cops. I went all the way to the goddamn FBI!’

  Bear signalled for her to lower her voice. Despite her flushed cheeks, Lotta slowly seemed to take stock of her surroundings and did as she was asked.

  ‘In December I sent an anonymous email to the FBI. I detailed it all: the dumping off Haida Gwaii, the blueprint structure for the seed, everything they needed to close us – and more importantly, Pearl – down. But there was no response.’ She stared across at Bear, eyes begging her to believe the story. ‘Three weeks later I saw a car parked opposite my house for two nights in a row and I just knew that Pearl was coming for me. But after New York and all that had happened, I’d already planned my exit. I was following it too, until your man tracked me down.’

  Bear didn’t respond. She was still trying to guess the reason why no one in the FBI had reacted to the evidence Lotta had sent them. Did they think it was so improbable it didn’t warrant investigation or had Pearl somehow managed to quash it at source?

  ‘So why did you come out of hiding?’ Bear asked, her mind rapidly switching tack. ‘If you knew Pearl was looking for you, why did you risk everything by coming to see me?’

  ‘Because Pearl is here! Right here in Cape Town. And in only a few days’ time, he is going to try and fly into Antarctica to test the seed.’