by Giles Blunt
“Keith managed to book us a slot at LARS to test our prototype. To tell you the truth, none of us had any idea just how far north that place was. A lot of people don’t realize this country is as tall as it is wide. We’re talking twenty-five hundred miles. It’s not as glamorous as Haughton-it’s only a research and sleep hut and a couple of Parcoll tents and not much else-but we were excited as hell.
“The day we arrived, another team was leaving. They’d been testing spacesuits, I think, so we had the place to ourselves. Let me tell you, the High Arctic is not for everyone. Some people, they get a taste of it, they’re totally addicted, they’re home. But most people are going to find it unsettling to say the least, and others have to be flown right out. Basically, all your moorings are gone.
“We’d already had lots of test runs in Toronto, but in order to make an impact the rover had to work on hard terrain, cold terrain. This was it. There would be no more money, no going back to the drawing board. It was the proverbial throw of the dice-either we’d win, and win big, or we’d be four guys looking for work.
“The plan was to test Rocky-the prototype was called Rocky-on the various types of terrain up there. Rock, snow, gravel, ice. The three most important features were the camera, manoeuvrability and response to command. Obviously, response to command is the most important, otherwise what you have is a paperweight.
“We had set up a series of four tests, and I had put together a logging algorithm that would record what commands were input and where Rocky went as a result.”
“How did you control it?” Cardinal asked. “A joystick?”
“No, no, no. This is not a toy we’re talking about. Every move had to be done by keystroke. It’s the same now. So we take a deep breath and send Rocky off on Mission One. A simple go there, turn left, turn right, pan up, pan down, make a circle, come back. There was no manoeuvrable arm at that point.
“Worked like a charm. This was pretty flat terrain, but it did involve several different surfaces. Let me tell you, there was much rejoicing at the camp that day. So far, so good. Next mission, we send it in a different direction. Pretty much the same sequence of commands, but the terrain was more challenging-a few hills involved-and we left it sitting out in the elements for twenty-four hours. You know what cold can do to batteries. I can tell you, David was sweating through that one.
“Again, went off like clockwork. We were gods, John. Gods. Mission Three was the toughest yet. We knew this one was likely to fail. There was twenty-four-hour sunshine, of course, and aside from slush, which we did not want to mess with, there were areas where the permafrost had melted and the surface was mushy at best. Idea was to test the independent wheel motors and range of motion.
“Well, it didn’t take long for Rocky to bog down. But he came out of it better than any of us expected. Keep in mind, we can’t see those wheels back at the shack-we can only see what Rocky sees, and the camera couldn’t pan down to that angle, not back then. But the rpm readouts told us which wheels were stuck, and I could turn them and try again. It was mostly another triumph. We got him out of several jams and we knew we had a winner-even when we got him stuck in some foot-deep muck and had to go retrieve him. We were totally high by then.
“Unfortunately, we still had Mission Four. We decided to make this one relatively easy. We sent Rocky off in a westerly direction. We wanted him to travel down this long, slow hill, stopping for a video survey every now and then. Then he was to shut down for three nights and we would leave him just sitting there and start him up on the fourth morning. We had plotted out a fairly easy route back to camp on the fourth day.
“It wasn’t cold, really, by Arctic standards, maybe two degrees C. But needless to say, it was a pretty tense few days. Finally the time comes, I fire up the programme, and… nothing. We couldn’t raise him. There was a lot of solar activity that week, unbelievable. There was some storm activity off the western shore as well, but it wasn’t hitting us, and anyway, it’s not storms that screw up radio communications, it’s solar activity.
“Rocky had a beacon on him and we couldn’t even pick up the signal from that, but of course we knew where he had shut down. So we pull on our gear and head out toward his last known address, a few kilometres west. We hike for an hour, get to the spot, Rocky’s not there. We have no clue where he is. The terrain is shale, no tracks. Very bad news.
“It didn’t take long to narrow down the possibilities. Discounting human or animal interference, it was very unlikely and probably impossible that Rocky had gone in any direction other than due west. The question was, how far? How long? Depending on when he started up after we shut him down, he could theoretically be a hundred and fifty kilometres away.
“But that wasn’t truly possible-Heiberg’s not that big. Anyway, he would run into trouble with the first rocky outcropping, the first hummock, anything resembling a pothole. But the four of us hopped on a couple of all-terrain vehicles and headed west. Couldn’t use snowmobiles because half the island was snow-free, depending whether you were windward or not.
“Our biggest fear was maybe he’d driven himself right into open water. At the very least, we expected to find him face down in a gully.”
“Surely it would crash into trees or something,” Cardinal said.
“No trees, John. This is a thousand miles above the treeline-anything taller than six inches is an animal. And there aren’t too many of those either. Lack of trees worked in our favour, of course. It didn’t take too long to find Rocky, and it turned out we’d named him exactly right. He’d got himself into a rocky area and got his front left wheel caught and run his batteries down to nothing.
“We were all relieved, but especially David and Frank, because electrical and mechanical had obviously performed fine. Clearly the issue was going to be software. Why did the little bastard not shut down? Why did he go rogue? In exactly two weeks we had to give our presentation and test data to NASA. There was no way they were going to be interested in a rover with a mind of its own. As we saw it, if this came out, it was a game-ender.”
“I don’t understand,” Cardinal said. “It had performed so well up to that point, I would have thought you had a star on your hands.”
“We were poised on the brink of massive success or massive failure-no middle ground. So by the time we found Rocky, we were in total panic mode. We couldn’t budge the rocks around him. So David and I go up to the top of this outcropping with some rope to get some loft into the configuration. We were up there, I don’t know, twenty minutes maybe, and I’m yelling things down to Keith and Frank, who are trying to rig the rope around Rocky so it doesn’t pull his arm or his head off.
“Suddenly David says, ‘Look!’ I turn around and there’s a flare in the sky. It’s quite far off, four, maybe five kilometres. There’s no denying it. The thing is there, burning bright green, arcing down toward the north.
“ ‘They can’t be signalling us, can they?’ David says.
“ ‘It’s probably the sovereignty patrol running some kind of manoeuvre. Or it could be the RCMP practising rescue stuff,’ I said.
“David had pulled out his binoculars and was staring out into this incredibly bleak landscape with them. ‘Really? That what you think it is? That’s your considered opinion?’ David talked like a cowboy even back then.
“ ‘Well, who the hell else is it gonna be? There’s nothing else on this island.’ You have to understand, John, we hadn’t heard of Drift Station Arcosaur at that point. No one had.
“ ‘Maybe it’s someone lost. Maybe some party’s trying to chase off a hungry ursine.’
“Well, of course we both knew you wouldn’t fire a flare into the sky to scare a bear. The camp advisers had drilled us in all that stuff before we even set foot up there. You’d aim it at his feet or just over his head. I could hear in David’s voice that he wanted to believe we were not needed, that there was no one in distress. So I said again that it’s probably the sovereignty patrol and we’d better get Rocky back
to camp or we were all of us staring into the face of complete failure.
“Then David says he sees someone. A man. I ask what he’s doing, and he says it looks like he’s hiking, climbing the rocks. He hands me the binoculars and I take a look. I saw him, John.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever told. Twenty years now, all four of us have kept it secret. When we got back to camp, we all swore we would never so much as mention it, not even to our wives. It poisoned our friendship. We had been working together for years, fresh out of school to the edge of success, but after we got back home and heard that people had actually died, that there were people in serious trouble, well, we couldn’t stand to look at each other, couldn’t stand to be with anyone who knew what we had done-or not done. We decided we were all free to exploit our separate patents and went our separate ways. I called David the other day when his wife was found, and that was the first time we’d spoken in more than twenty years.
“I saw a man through those binoculars. He was hardly more than a blurry speck. Could have been part of the patrol, could have been anything. I saw him stumble, but he got up quickly and then he waved. Waved a cloth or something. That’s the thing I saw that I have not been able to unsee. Not for twenty years. He was signalling us, John. I’m filled with shame as I say it. He was signalling us.
“Before I could say anything, David had called the other two to come up. The four of us had a powwow. David told them we’d seen a flare, we could see a man who seemed to be hiking, but we weren’t sure if it was someone who needed help or if it was nothing. We kept coming back to the sovereignty patrol. It had to be them.
“The full responsibility, the blame, lies with me. I didn’t tell the others I’d seen the man waving at us. I don’t know to this day if David saw him do that. If he did, he kept it to himself. But the other two definitely didn’t. And we couldn’t find the man again in the binoculars.
“None of us were seasoned adventurers, but we all knew you don’t turn your back on someone possibly in distress, not in those latitudes.
“We weighed the options, and it came down to this: no one knew we had been there and it had to stay that way. It would have come out why, that we had a malfunctioning robot, and it would have doomed Rocky and his descendants to oblivion-and us as well. Our little day trip had to be excised from the record if we were to have any future at all.
“It was just the patrol, we told ourselves. Just an exercise. Although I’m sure the others did the same as me later on, and looked up where the sovereignty patrol had been. It had passed Axel Heiberg a month earlier and by now had to be near the northern tip of Ellesmere.
“We did the wrong thing, John. I did the wrong thing. We turned our backs on a man in distress, and now that man has come to balance the account. He has my daughter, John. He’s the one who has my daughter.”
Cardinal reached into his pocket and pulled out his notebook and started flipping through it. “Which parallel did you say you were at?”
“We were at seventy-nine degrees north. Ninety north is the pole.”
“Take a look at these.” Cardinal showed him the page with his various arrangements of the numbers found at the crime scenes. “What do they mean to you?”
“None of these are right,” Babstock said. “Hand me your pen.” He took Cardinal’s pen in his manicured fingers and copied out the figures in a different order. Then he tapped the page with the tip of the pen and read them aloud. “79 degrees, 25 minutes north, 95 degrees west. Add a few minutes west and you have the coordinates of our location. That’s where we found Rocky, and where we saw that man.”
21
Cardinal started the car, and while waiting for it to warm up he checked his phone. North Slave Correctional had sent the information he had requested. He forwarded it to Chouinard and Drexler, then phoned them both.
“And you think he’s headed up there?” Drexler said. “To the exact spot where it happened?”
“Why else would he leave those numbers at the scene? He knows how to fly a plane, and I think he gave us the coordinates so we could attempt to mount a rescue-a rescue that would arrive too late.”
“All right. I’ll call the Horsemen. They’ve got outposts way the hell up there. Somewhere.”
“We need people watching private airfields-the smaller the better. He’s travelling with a person who’s unconscious. He’s going to avoid security as much as possible.”
Cardinal drove over to Parliament Street and down to King, cursing streetcars the whole way. Then he had to fight a gauntlet of one-way streets, mostly grey with big-city snow, to find the address he was looking for. He parked on a filthy slag heap of old snow and walked up the front path of a red brick townhouse. In the front window, red curtains framed a grand piano.
Alison Durie was slim and elegant and not happy to be visited by an out-of-town detective. She looked about fifty-five-but still with a bloom in her cheeks and something regal about the way she carried herself, an easy grace. There was no wedding ring.
Cardinal asked if he could come in and ask a few questions.
“No, you may not. What’s this about?”
“Maybe you could just tell me if you’ve seen your brother recently.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but why should I answer that question?”
“He’s wanted for questioning in connection with a major crime.”
“Rubbish. What crime?”
“I’m sure you’ve read about the abduction and murder of Marjorie Flint and Laura Lacroix.”
Ms. Durie laughed. “That’s so preposterous I don’t even have any response to it. Really, you have to find something else to do with your time, Detective.”
“The man we’re looking for has a limp, and probably a prosthetic hand.”
The regal facade faltered. Alison Durie’s slender, ringless hand levitated toward her throat, pale fingers touching her collar. “Even if he was the murderous creature you take him for, why would he do these things? How could he? Why? Many people limp, and my brother has no connection to these women.” She started to close the door.
“Ms. Durie, wait. Did he ever talk to you about what took place up north? At the drift station?”
“Karson would never kill anyone. And if you think he would ever harm a woman, you’re grotesquely mistaken. When he first came here after his release from prison, our mother was living out the last months of her life. He could not have been more attentive, more tender. Even two decades in prison had failed to destroy that. In any case, I haven’t seen him for at least two months now, and I’ve no idea where he is.”
“I think you do. Tell me where to find him. If he’s innocent, that shouldn’t be hard to prove.”
“How dare you say that? We have no reason whatsoever to trust the justice system. My brother served eighteen years and was denied parole repeatedly. Repeatedly. Well, now he’s out, he’s a free man, and it’s nobody’s business-not yours, not anybody’s-where he might be.”
“He was denied parole because he showed no remorse.”
“He showed no remorse because he was innocent. He was innocent then and he’s innocent now.”
She closed the door and Cardinal stood there staring at it. He reached into his jacket and took out a business card and put it through the mail slot.
When she woke up again, Hayley had the idea that she was somewhere near a place that sold motorcycles. Every ten minutes or so, from somewhere in the distance, there would come that ragged, ripping sound of an inadequately muffled engine.
She was lying on her back on a sofa, too tired and dazed to move. She tried to turn her head, but a rush of nausea stopped her. The ceiling, country pine, was awash with light. It was light of a very particular softness combined with brightness, and it took her a while to register what it reminded her of. The ski chalet at Collingwood. The light was coming from snow. The motorcycles must be snowmobiles. She must be somewhere up north, perhaps near a lake, with the sunlight bouncing off the snow and filling thi
s room.
The terror came back as the drug, whatever it was, wore off. She could turn her head now. The man limped by her, shirtless, with a makeshift bandage around his rib cage. He sat down with a grunt of pain. After a while his breathing became heavy and slow. Sleeping.
Her wrists, underneath her, were fastened together. Ankles too. The moment she worked at the bonds, a bolt of pain shot through her. Her wrists were already torn from trying to escape. She remembered the truck. She remembered the needle. Then nothing.
The man woke up and rose from his chair with a gasp. Had he been shot? Could that have happened without her being aware of it? She listened to him moving about the house, or cottage. A fridge opening. A cupboard. Running water. And then the smell of toast, the clack of the toaster, the rasp of a knife spreading butter or jam. She had the feeling he knew his way around this cottage, this house.
Hayley wasn’t sure if he could see her from wherever he stood at the moment. She worked at the gag with her tongue, strained her neck to stretch the fabric, worked at it again. It was the only thing that felt any looser.
Sound of a chair scraping. Something falling to the floor. A curse. Then footsteps and the sound of a bathroom cabinet opening. The rattle of a pill bottle, then water running.
She strained at the gag, lifted her head and turned her neck from side to side, forcing down nausea. Working at the fabric with her tongue, her chin, her jaw, she managed to get the gag out of her mouth. It was now tight against her lower lip. She would be able to scream.
A scream would likely go unheard. It would also bring what? The needle-or perhaps worse. She raised her head to look around. Large chalet-type room. Books everywhere. A baby grand piano.
The man came back, limping, slow. He came close, looking down at her. His eyes catching her gaze, moving to the gag. He leaned toward her, reaching for it.
