Arctic Rising

by Tobias S. Buckell

As the door shut, and locked, behind him, he held out a hand. “Ms. Anika Duncan, correct?”

  He wore an expensive suit, already wet in places and crusted with some salt. His thinning hair was whipped loose and crazy by rotor wash.

  Anika twisted to show him her bound hands and so that she could shake his. “Yes.”

  “I’m Gabriel.”

  “No last name?”

  “Not for you.”

  The sound of the ship’s .50-caliber deck gun shook the deck. Anika looked up instinctively. “What’s going on?”

  “I think they’re sinking the catamaran before we move on.”

  “That’s his whole life,” she said. “Couldn’t they have just assigned a few crew to pilot it back?”

  Gabriel carried a small suitcase. He set it on one of the bunks and sat down himself. He waved a hand at one of the others, expecting Anika to sit.

  But she remained standing. It felt good to tower over him. He waved at her to turn around. He pulled out a pair of snips and cut her hands free as he talked. “Prudence Jones is a spy for hire, Ms. Duncan. He is not a patriot, nor a recognized agent of any country. He is, at best, a mercenary, and a cheap one at that. Who knows what he’s involved in? He knows the consequences of his sorts of actions.”

  “So for helping me, you sink his home?” She rubbed her hands. It felt good to move her arms around in front of her.

  “We do not show him the same courtesy as we would another agent, no. It’s not good to trust someone who doesn’t belong anywhere. They are adrift, without borders, without moral compass.” He snapped open his briefcase. “A man is nothing without a country.”

  Anika realized she’d been holding her breath. There were, thankfully, no knives or medieval cutting instruments inside the case. Because that was what she had been expecting.

  There was what looked like a shower cap, with wires leading from it. There were leads and a small readout. It all connected to the case, which had a screen built into the inside of the open top.

  Gabriel pointed for her to sit. This time, she could tell it was not a request. People would be called in if she didn’t.

  He handed her the cap, and she pulled it on over her hair as best she could. He placed electrodes on her wrists, ankles, and then he pointed at spots on her chest and ribs.

  Anika reached under her shirt to place them, and after checking the readouts on the screen, he nodded, satisfied.

  “Lie detector?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. He turned from the screen to look directly at her. “If you knew a nuclear bomb was about to explode somewhere soon, killing innocent people, do you think it would be justifiable to torture someone you knew had the information that could stop it from happening?”

  She couldn’t help it: fear crawled across her skin and her mouth dried. Gabriel looked intense, like a snake about to strike her. She’d never thought about the idea of Canadian special agents much, but here it was. They were the same, she guessed. Dangerous men, all convinced they were playing the world’s most dangerous game.

  And maybe they were.

  All of them, though, were sincere, possessed, and willing to do whatever it would take to get what they thought they needed, she presumed.

  Including flying her out of country to do “what needed to be done.”

  “You would have to know for sure, that the person you had was someone who knew that,” she finally said. “Or you would do something horrible to someone innocent.”

  “Or the person could be innocent and give you the wrong information out of a desire to please, fear, or to mislead or confuse the situation. Yes.” Gabriel looked back at his screen for a moment. “I started out as an observer to the U.S. military during the height of their activities in the Middle East. Historically, see, the trick is not using anything that will leave a physical mark. These turn public opinion against the torturers. It can also be used as a recruiting tool against your cause, whatever that may be. The Americans lost tremendous public credibility at the turn of the century, just as the Soviets did in the middle of the last century.”

  Anika glanced at the electrodes, suddenly nervous.

  Gabriel wasn’t paying attention. “That is why the Americans liked sleep deprivation, or waterboarding, so much. No marks. But even then, the idea that torturing a person and leaving them apparently whole is a viable method comes from a naïve belief that the watchers aren’t being watched. One leak, one person with misgivings, or one person with a social media account and no common sense, and suddenly there is video of the process. And the laity can suddenly model what is happening in their own minds. They can understand that the human body is not designed to be forced into one position for interminable hours. And then, that has the same damage as a physical mark. So where does that leave us, Ms. Duncan?”

  He was staring right at her. She had this vague sense of sadness behind his eyes. Like he was looking forward to retirement, because the world had changed, and his job didn’t make sense anymore. “I don’t know, Gabriel.”

  He sighed. “It leaves us considering that one of the best forms of interrogation is Stockholm syndrome, wherein a captor transfers their allegiance to their captors. Counterintuitively, and historically, friendliness has gotten more actionable information than torture.”

  At that, Anika finally relaxed a bit.

  “But the problem is, Ms. Duncan, our situation doesn’t leave us much time.” Now Anika was back to drowning in the room’s odd tension as she tried to figure this man out. He was playing with her, she thought, even though his voice sounded conversational and tired, with a tinge of sadness. “Lives hang in the balance now, and time is short. So, are you friendly?”

  She wet her lips. “I’m friendly. I have nothing to hide. I haven’t done anything.”

  Gabriel relaxed and smiled. “Well,” he said. “That’s good. And fortunately for you, lie detection technology has come a long way since I was wet behind the ears. That thing on your head images your brain, it maps how long you hesitate, and studies whether you’re accessing real memories, or creating new ones.”

  “You’re looking into my mind.” It somehow didn’t feel any less invasive that it was a cap. She still imagined tendrils reaching into her mind, stealing her thoughts.

  “If you create new memories,” the interrogator continued. “If you’re using the areas of your mind associated with your imagination, we can determine that you might well be lying.”

  “And does it work?” Anika asked. “Or is it like those others? Where it works better than half the time, but a lot of people still get false results? Enough to ruin many lives?”

  Gabriel smiled. “It works well enough, Ms. Duncan. So what are you willing to tell me about why you’re on a boat with a spy-for-hire who’s known to work for a drug lord?”

  Anika looked at the screen on the inside of the briefcase, then at Gabriel. “Someone on a ship called the Kosatka shot my airship out of the sky with an RPG after a radiation alarm triggered and we moved in for a closer look. I’ve been trying to figure out why, and what they were hiding.”

  * * *

  Gabriel hardly looked at her for the detailed question and answer session. He kept his attention on the screen, which he had positioned so that Anika could follow it and realize that he had been honest about its capabilities to ferret out the truth. That was part of his interrogation process.

  The gadget was, she decided, accurate enough. Occasionally Gabriel paused the conversation after prompts, tied to colors and alerts mapped over an eerily detailed representation of her actual brain, flashed yellow or red. These were areas of her brain that involved imagination.

  At that point, Gabriel would back the conversation up, and narrow in to yes-or-no questions, creating a flowchart of responses that allowed him to look at her neural reactions to determine if she was lying.

  Knowing what was in her own mind, Anika realized that this was happening as she tried to ascribe motives, or reasons to what was happening.

>   She stuck to just the facts after that. The attack. The explosion. Her killer. Deciding to run away.

  The questions stopped; eventually it was just Gabriel sitting, waiting for her to wrap up her story.

  And then Anika had nothing left.

  Gabriel, after a half-minute détente, folded his hands together. “The man who tried to kill you wasn’t a government agent, but that’s how these things work nowadays. He was a contractor from Florida. Hard to trace back who paid him, though we have some very good forensic accountants working on it.”

  “So you don’t know who the killer was. You don’t seem to know what the radiation was, but the UNPG agents I talked to think it’s a nuclear bomb. So what do you know?”

  “This isn’t a two-way street, Ms. Duncan. Consider yourself lucky. We know you’re honest to a fault. I spoke to Anton, one of your UNPG agents. He worked very hard to convince me you’re a straight arrow caught up in a messy situation. Why don’t we leave this all at that? Walk away. Consider yourself lucky to be alive.”

  Anika ripped the electrodes off and threw the hair cap at him. “Fuck you and fuck your ‘lucky,’” she told him icily. “Tom was a good man, and he leaves his family alone and scared. Violet lost her business, and you know she was mostly legal. Roo—his boat, and equipment. Those MPs who searched my home lost their lives. There is no going back for me. Back to what? Being a pilot for the UNPG? That’s not on the table. This is lucky?”

  Gabriel took the electrodes and popped them off the wires and put them in a small bag. The cap he carefully dusted off and put inside the briefcase. “No one owes you anything,” he said as he did this. “Innocent bystanders die all the time. In the great scheme of history, empires fall, and you’re a statistic sitting next to the debris. You’ll tell your children about how you lived through this pivotal event one day.”

  He snapped the case closed. Anika cocked her head and looked at him. Patronizing, decrepit, creepy little man. She stood up and blocked his way to the door.

  Maybe, she thought immediately, that had been the wrong move. But she wasn’t backing down now.

  “That’s a bad idea, Anika,” he said softly.

  “We’re all going to die, not just the bystanders,” she said. “We’re all just statistics, in the long run. That is true. But in this modern world, I am not some anonymous creature, like a serf in the middle ages. I bow to no man. This is a flat world, Mr. Gabriel. One of information, and democracy, and access. I am your equal. And I am not moving.”

  His nostrils flared. “What is it you want?”

  “Quid pro quo. There is a nuclear weapon floating around the Arctic Circle. You don’t know for sure why, but what do you suspect?”

  For a moment he stood still. Then he looked tiredly over at her. “Use your God-given imagination, Ms. Duncan. I can think of fifteen worst-case scenarios where Canada’s enemies could creatively destroy everyone’s interests out here. You remember Karachi?”

  “What were those globes the ship was transporting?”

  And there, for a moment, she’d scored … something. She wasn’t sure what. But he flinched. Just as hard as if she’d slapped him. His thin lips tightened, his lined face hardened. “That … is none of your business.”

  He hadn’t asked any questions about them, during the interrogation, she realized.

  Anika frowned. He hadn’t been surprised when she’d mentioned them either.

  “It’s time for me to leave,” Gabriel said. In the distance, she could hear the sound of the helicopter starting up.

  “And what happens to me now?”

  “You will remain out of the way.” Gabriel pushed past her. “You will thank me later, when this is all over and settled.”

  Anika opened her mouth. It sounded like Gabriel knew far more than he was letting on, and it looked like he believed he was doing her a genuine favor.

  In her experience, all the people who did harm believed they were doing it because they had to. His conviction only chilled her further.

  But there was nothing she could do as he stepped out, the door clanging shut behind him.

  19

  Anika banged on the door until a young Coast Guard crewman opened it. Her guard. He had a pistol holstered at his hip, and he looked nervous. His name patch said OSTERMAN.

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  “Where are you taking me?” Anika asked.

  “I can’t say, ma’am.”

  She leaned against the door, and he took a step back, hand going to the holster. Anika sighed and stepped back, showing that she wasn’t going to try anything stupid. “Can I have a phone, to call my lawyer?” They’d taken everything from her: extra prepaid phone, the wad of cash Vy had given her, her IDs.

  Osterman looked around, as if seeking support from an officer. But there were none in the corridor outside the room. “No. You can’t,” he said.

  “How is that legal?” Anika demanded.

  Osterman looked miserable. “I can’t comment, ma’am.”

  He took a step forward, one hand still on the holster, and raised the other to close the door again.

  “I need to use the bathroom,” Anika said. “Surely that isn’t something you can’t comment on either.”

  He nodded. “Okay. I’ll take you.”

  This type of patrol ship usually had eighteen or so sailors and two officers crewing it. The ship had maybe six days of range, which meant it harbored somewhere fairly close by. The ship was based on the same Damen Stan hulls that the UNPG used for its small patrol vessels, so it wasn’t too unfamiliar to Anika.

  It meant she also could guess that wherever she was going, it would most likely be a day or two away.

  Her personal guard walked her through the crew bunks, and several relaxing members of the crew watched curiously as she was led past them to the bathrooms at the end of the corridor.

  She used some paper towels, the industrial-smelling soap in a dispenser, and water from the basin to wash the stench of the anchor rope off her as best she could. Near the end, her guard banged on the door. “What’s taking so long?”

  “Cleaning up,” she yelled back. “I was hiding in an anchor locker for almost an hour.”

  She opened the door, and he looked suspiciously around and sniffed. She smelled strongly of cheap soap, but had gotten the worst of the dead ocean smell off her.

  “Do you have anything to drink or eat?” she asked.

  He escorted her back to the sparse room. “I’ll call for something.”

  That something was a ham sandwich, a granola bar, and Coke. Anika sat them down on her chosen bunk and ate them as she was locked in again.

  She had a day or two left before she was locked up wherever Gabriel had decided to put her, where she would be out of everyone’s way.

  And what did he mean by that? That he knew what was happening. And it was something big?

  He didn’t mean her harm, she understood that. He did feel he was doing the right thing. And yet, she was still in the dark. She didn’t trust him. And then there was that nuclear device out there.

  Remember Karachi? he’d asked. She’d grown up watching the before and after images of crowded Pakistani markets and streets on Lagos cable channels turned into flattened wasteland. She’d had nightmares about the stains: human shapes etched in black silhouettes on the ground. The famous photo of a woman with a veil half-melted onto her face, waiting for medical help outside a UN tent. A second century had tasted the hell of a nuclear event. Who could imagine more?

  And then there was this question of vengeance that stirred her mind up every time she returned to it. She couldn’t let it go. The anguish in Jenny’s voice. The smack of the car against Karl’s bike, the feel of a killer’s muscles against hers.

  What did it take for evil to prevail? Simply for good people to step aside and let it happen.

  She thought of her father’s stories about what Nigeria was like when he grew up. The violence between the religions, the military crack
ing down too hard while trying to keep order, burning cars in the streets of the small towns far from the stable urbanity of Lagos.

  Even when she grew up, when that was all long past, sometimes she saw the scars when out in the countryside: the skeletons of vehicles in the undergrowth by the side of the roads, or still-abandoned houses with blackened, peeling walls.

  These things had always been around, an unconscious series of tombstones marking conflicts that only existed in an academic sense for her. And yet, as her father had told her stories, they’d solidified and called out to her more and more vividly.

  A brick ruin that was once a grocery store owned by a Muslim man. That empty lot: once a schoolhouse. That new bridge: built over a bombed-out old one.

  Her father worshiped stability and had a love of rights, an indignation about suffering. Anika now found herself surprised to find how thoroughly he had infected her with it, despite the things she had seen once she’d left Nigeria.

  All those years of manning the machine gun in the cabin of the airship, working as a corporate mercenary, and the cynicism that she lived around, had slid off her. Sure, she found herself an outsider, slow to make friends. But that hadn’t made her any less outraged by what had just happened to what friends she had.

  And, she realized, thinking about Commander Michel Claude, friends she might have had without realizing it.

  She couldn’t sit still. And suddenly thought about the kids from the Kosatka, who’d disappeared. Maybe Gabriel was a good liar. Maybe those kids were alive, maybe they weren’t. But that wasn’t going to be her. No one was going to disappear Anika.

  She knew the layout of the ship, how the crews worked. She was going to get out.

  If there was a nuclear device floating around out there, then she was going to help track it down and stop it.

  She wasn’t going to allow chaos to descend into her world and turn it upside down. Not if she could do something to stop it.

  * * *

  She waited until the earliest hours of the morning. There were two watches worth of crew trying to get sleep in their darkened bunks, now. The bustle of the day and clanging of boots on metal floors had faded, which meant only seven or so crew were awake and on watch.