Athabasca

by Alistair MacLean

  “I think you have it. It fits, anyway.” Mackenzie frowned. “There’s only one thing I see wrong with your scenario. Why should the killer take the gun in the first place? He had a gun of his own.”

  “Sure he had, but he couldn’t use it any more,” Dermott said. “More accurately, he couldn’t afford to keep it any more. Having seen no exit holes at the back of the head he knew he had left two bullets in the region of two occiputs, and that the police could match up the bullets with the gun he was carrying. Which meant he would have to get rid of it. Which meant that he would be gunless, at least temporarily. So he took the engineer’s gun. My guess is that he will have got rid of both guns by this time, and he’s almost certainly got another weapon by now. In these United States—and don’t forget Alaska is the United States—getting hold of a hand-gun is extremely simple.”

  Mackenzie said slowly: “It all fits. We may well be up against a professional killer.”

  “We may well be up against a psychopath.”

  Mackenzie shivered. “My Scottish Highland ancestry. Some ill-mannered lout has just walked all over my grave. Let’s take counsel with the boss. Counsel and something else. If I know our worthy employer, he’ll already have had half the contents of the jet’s bar brought to his room.”

  “And you want his ideas?”

  “I want some of those contents.”

  Mackenzie had exaggerated somewhat. Ferguson hadn’t brought across more than a tenth of the plane’s stock, but even that represented a goodly amount; Mackenzie had already had his first Scotch and was on his second. He looked at Brady, propped up in bed in a pair of shocking heliotrope pyjamas, which served only to accentuate his massive girth, and said: “Well, what do you make of George’s theory?”

  “I believe in the facts and I also believe in the theory, for the adequate reason that I see no alternative to it.” Brady contemplated his finger-nails. “I also believe we’re up against a trained, ruthless and intelligent killer. I don’t doubt that he might be a psychotic on the loose. In fact there may be two psychopaths—an even more unpleasant prospect. The trouble is, George, I don’t see how this advances us much. We don’t know when this nut will hit again. What can we do to prevent it?”

  “We can scare him,” Dermott answered, “that’s what we can do. I’ll bet he’s already worried by the fact that we’re raking in fingerprints and records all over the shop. Let’s try to worry him a little more. I’ll go down to Anchorage tomorrow while you and Mackenzie stay here and do some work.” Dermott sipped his Scotch. “It should be a change for at least one of you.”

  “I could be deeply wounded,” Brady said, “but slings and arrows from an ungrateful staff are nothing new to me. What, precisely, do you have in mind?”

  “Drastically narrowing the range of suspects is what I have in mind. All very simple, really. This is a close-knit community here in Prudhoe Bay. They more or less live out of each other’s pockets. Everyone’s movements must be known to at least a handful of other people, probably a great deal more. Check on everybody and find out who has a definite alibi for being here on the morning the engineers were being killed out in the mountains. If two or more people, say, can honestly tell you that X was here at the time of the crime, you can strike X off the suspects’ list. At the end of the day we’ll know how many suspects we have. Not even a handful, I bet. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were none at all. Remember that Pump Station Four is a hundred and forty miles away, and the only feasible way of getting there is by helicopter. One would have to have the time and opportunity and the ability to fly a helicopter to get there, and there would be no hope of taking a chopper without someone noticing. I think you’ll find it all very straightforward.

  “Less straightforward is the next enquiry—who was in Anchorage on the day that the original phone message was sent from there to Sanmobil? There must have been quite a few. Don’t forget they go on holiday every three or four weeks and, almost without exception, they go to Fairbanks or Anchorage. It will be more difficult to establish alibis: you won’t find many people who have witnesses as to their whereabouts at six a.m. of a black winter morning in Alaska.

  “In this case, though, we’re more concerned about those who are not in the clear than those who are. I’ll bring back a Photostat of the prints they’ve taken. We should be able to get the doubtfuls’ fingerprints without too much trouble, and, with luck, match one set up with the phone booth’s set. I don’t know how this sounds to you, but it seems quite straightforward to me.”

  “And to me,” said Brady. “I think Don and I can manage that little chore without too much difficulty. Don’t forget, though, that there’s a fairly large community of people down at Valdez.”

  “As you’re my boss,” Dermott said, “I’ll refrain from giving you a withering stare. Who in Valdez is going to fly a round trip of 1,300 miles during a winter night, stopping occasionally for fuel and to giving his identity away? And who’s going to fly or helicopter the 1,600 miles round trip to clobber Bronowski and very possibly do away with Finlayson, especially as he would be immediately recognised as a stranger the moment he set foot in this area?”

  Mackenzie said: “He has a point, you must admit. In fact, two points.”

  Dermott went on: “And don’t tell me they could have come from one of the pumping stations. They don’t have helicopters.”

  “I didn’t say anything of the sort.” Brady sounded aggrieved. “All right, we’ll go along with the assumption that it’s Prudhoe Bay or nothing. But what if we turn up zero?”

  “Then it will be your turn to come up with the next bright idea.”

  “Hard day,” Brady said. “You for bed?”

  “Yes. I had intended to look at those records and prints tonight but the prints aren’t going to be of any use to me until I return from Anchorage. Reports can wait, too. I’ll just hunt up that Edmonton telex and take it down to the Anchorage police and see if they can help me.” He stood up. “By the way: has it occurred to you that you yourself may be in danger tonight?”

  “Me!” It was as if Dermott had suggested some unthinkable form of lèse-majesté. Then a look of vague apprehension crept into Brady’s face.

  “It may not be just your family who are at risk,” Dermott persisted. “Why should these people bother about kidnapping when they could achieve their ends by putting a bullet in your back—which is not, if I may say so without offence, a very easy target to miss? How are you to know there isn’t a homicidal maniac in the room next door to you?”

  “Good God!” Brady drank deeply from his daiquiri. Then he sat back and smiled. “At last, action! Donald, get the Smith and Wesson from my case.” He took the gun, thrust it deep under his pillow and said, almost hopefully: “Don’t you think you two are at risk also?”

  “Sure,” Mackenzie said. “But not nearly, as much as you. No Jim Brady, no Brady Enterprises. You’re the legend. Without either of us, you could still function quite efficiently. This homicidal maniac doesn’t strike me as the type who would go for a couple of lieutenants while the captain is around.”

  “Goodnight, then,” Dermott said. “Don’t forget to lock your door as soon as we’re gone.”

  “Don’t worry. You’re armed, right?”

  “Of course. But we don’t think we’ll be needing any weapons.”

  9

  When Dermott woke up it was with such a heavy-headed feeling of exhaustion that he could have sworn he hadn’t been to sleep at all. In fact, less than an hour had elapsed since he’d switched out the light, closed his eyes and dropped off. He did not wake up of his own volition. The overhead light was on and Morrison, looking as distraught as a senior F.B.I. agent is ever likely to look, was shaking him by the shoulder. Dermott eyed him blearily.

  “Sorry about this,” Morrison began. “But I thought you’d like to come along. In fact, I want you to.”

  Dermott peered at his watch and winced. “For God’s sake, where?”

  “We’ve foun
d him.”

  Sleep, and all desire for it, dropped from Dermott like a cloak. “Finlayson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Murdered?”

  “We don’t know. You’ll need warm clothing.”

  “Wake Mackenzie, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  Morrison left. Dermott rose and dressed for the cruel temperatures outside. As he pulled on a quilted anorak his mind went back to his first meeting with Finlayson. He thought of the neatly-parted white hair, the grizzled Yukon beard, the hobo clothes. Had he been too hard on the man? No good worrying now. He pocketed a flashlight and moved into the passageway. Tim Houston was standing there. Dermott said: “So you know too?”

  “I found him.”

  “How come?”

  “Instinct, I guess.” The bitterness in Houston’s voice was unmistakable. “One of those finely-honed instincts that comes into operation about ten hours too late.”

  “Meaning that Finlayson could have been saved if this instinct of yours had been operational ten hours ago?”

  “Maybe—but almost certainly not. John was murdered.”

  “Shot? Knifed? What?”

  “Nothing like that. I didn’t examine him. I knew that Mr Morrison and you wouldn’t want me to touch him. I didn’t have to examine him. He’s outside, it’s thirty below, and all he’s wearing is a linen shirt and jeans. He’s not even got shoes on. That makes it murder.”

  Dermott said nothing, so Houston continued. “Apart from the fact that he’d never have crossed the outside doorstep voluntarily without his Arctic clothing, he’d never have been permitted to do so anyway. There are always people in the reception area, besides a person who mans the central telephone fulltime. By the same token, it would have been impossible for anyone to carry him out.”

  “Lugging corpses is conspicuous. So?”

  “He wouldn’t even have had to be a corpse. I think he was silenced in his own bedroom and bundled straight out the window. The cold would have finished him off. Here come your friends. I’ll go get some more flashlights.”

  Outside, the cold was breathtaking. The temperature, as Houston had said, stood at thirty below. The forty-mile-per-hour gale brought the combination of temperature and chill-factor down to minus seventy. Even double-wrapped as a polar bear, without an exposed inch of flesh, the fact remains that one still has to breathe—and breathing in those conditions, until numbness intervenes, is a form of exquisite and refined agony. In the initial stages it is impossible to tell whether one is inhaling glacial air or super-heated steam: a searing sensation dominates all else. The only way to survive for any length of time is to breathe pure oxygen from a suitably insulated tank—but those are not readily available in the Arctic.

  Houston led them round the right-hand corner of the main building. After about ten yards he stopped, bent down and shone his flashlight between the supporting pilings. Other beams joined his.

  A body lay face down, an insignificant heap already half-covered by the drifting snow. Dermott shouted: “You have sharp eyes, Houston. A lot of people would have missed this. Let’s get him inside.”

  “Don’t you want to examine him here, have a look around?”

  “I do not. When this wind drops we’ll come back and look for clues. In the meantime, I don’t want to join Finlayson here.”

  “I agree,” Morrison said. His teeth chattered audibly, and he was shaking with the cold.

  Recovering the body from under the building provided the four men with no problem. Even if Finlayson had weighed twice as much, they would have had him out in seconds flat, such was their determination to regain shelter and warmth as soon as possible. As it was, Finlayson was slightly-built, and handling him was like handling a 150-pound log, so solidly frozen had he become. When they were clear of the pilings Dermott looked up at a brightly lit window above and yelled through the wind: “Whose room is that?”

  Houston shouted: “His.”

  “Your theory fits, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.”

  When they brought Finlayson into the reception area, there were perhaps half-a-dozen men sitting or standing around. For a moment nobody said anything. Then one man stepped forward and, with some diffidence, asked: “Shall I bring Dr Blake?”

  Mackenzie shook his head, sadly. “I’m sure he’s an excellent doctor, but no medical school has yet got round to offering a course on raising a man from the dead. Thanks all the same.”

  Dermott said: “Have we got an empty room where we can put him?” Houston looked at him and Dermott shook his head in self-reproach. “Okay. So my mind’s gummed up with cold or lack of sleep or both. His own room, of course. Where can we find a rubber sheet?”

  So they took Finlayson to his room and laid him on the rubber sheet on top of his bed. Dermott said: “Is there an individual thermostat control in here?”

  “Sure,” said Houston. “It’s set on seventy-two.”

  “Turn it up.”

  “What for?”

  “Dr Blake will want to do a post-mortem. You can’t examine a person who’s frozen solid. We’re getting experienced at this sort of thing. Too experienced.” Dermott turned to Mackenzie. “Houston thinks Finlayson was silenced in this room. Killed, knocked out, we don’t know. He also thinks that our friends got rid of him by the simple expedient of opening the window and dumping him on to the snow-bank beneath.”

  Mackenzie crossed to the window, opened it, shivered at the icy blast of air that swept into the room, leaned out and peered down. Seconds later he had the window firmly closed again.

  “Has to be that. We’re directly above the spot where we found him. And it’s in deep shadow down there.” He looked at Houston. “Is there much traffic along there at night?”

  “None. Nor during the day. No call for it. Track leads nowhere.”

  “So the killers left either by the front door or by this same window. They did the obvious thing—just stuffed him under the building, hoping the snow would have drifted over him before daylight came.” Mackenzie sighed. “He couldn’t by any chance have felt sick, opened the window for some fresh air, fell and crawled under the building?”

  Dermott said: “You believe that’s possible?”

  “No. John Finlayson wouldn’t get a breath of fresh air that way. He caught his death of it. Murder.”

  “Well, I think the boss should be told.”

  “He’s sure going to be pleased, isn’t he?”

  Brady was furious. His black scowl accorded ill with his heliotrope pyjamas. He said: “Progress on all fronts. What do you two intend to do?”

  Mackenzie said pacifically: “That’s why we’re here. We thought you might be able to give us a lead.”

  “A lead? How the hell can I give you a lead? I’ve been asleep.” He corrected himself. “Well, for a few minutes, anyway. Sad about Finlayson. Fine man, by all accounts. What do you reckon, George?”

  “One thing’s for sure. The similarities between what happened here tonight and what occurred at Pump Station Four are too great to be a coincidence. As with the two engineers, so with Finlayson. They all saw or heard too much for their own health. They recognised a person or persons they knew well and who knew them, and those people were engaged in some things that couldn’t be explained away. So they had to be silenced in the most final way.”

  Brady thought for a moment, and asked: “Is there a direct connection between Bronowski being clobbered and Finlayson being killed?”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” Dermott said. “Tie-up looks too obvious. You could argue that Bronowski escaped because he didn’t catch his assailants red-handed in whatever they were doing, and that Finlayson died because he did. But that’s too easy, too glib.”

  “What does Houston think?”

  “He doesn’t appear to have any more idea about it than we do.”

  “‘Appear’.” Brady seized on the word. “You mean he may know more than he�
��s telling?”

  “At the moment he’s not saying or telling anything.”

  “But you don’t trust him?”

  “No. And while we’re at it, I don’t trust Bronowski.”

  “Hell, man, he’s been savagely assaulted.”

  “Assaulted. Not savagely. I don’t trust Dr Blake, either.”

  “Because he’s unhelpful and unco-operative?”

  “A good enough reason.”

  Brady became tactful. “Well, you do tend to ride a bit roughshod over people’s feelings.”

  “To hell with their delicate sensibilities! We’re dealing here with three cases of murder. Come to that, I don’t trust Black either.”

  “You don’t trust Black? General manager, Alaska?”

  “He can be the King of Siam for all I care,” Dermott said forcefully. “Some of the most successful businessmen in history number in their ranks the biggest swindlers ever. I’m not suggesting he is a swindler. All I say is that he’s crafty, cagey, cold, and unco-operative. In short, I don’t trust anyone.”

  “Look, friends. We’re looking at this from the wrong angle,” Brady suggested. “We’re on the inside trying to look out. Maybe we should be on the outside trying to look in. Think of it this way. Who wants to hit the pipeline here and the tar sands of Athabasca? Do you see any significance in the fact that here they receive their instructions from Edmonton while in Alberta they come from Anchorage?”

  “None.” Dermott was positive. “May be just coincidence, at best a crude attempt to confuse us. Surely they can’t be so naïve as to try to convey the impression that Canada is trying to interfere with America’s oil supplies and vice versa. Idea’s ludicrous. In these times of an acute oil shortage, what have two friendly neighbours to gain by cutting each other’s throats?”

  “Then who has to gain?”

  Mackenzie spoke quietly.

  “O.P.E.C,” he said.

  Mackenzie was just as positive as Dermott had been. “If they could put a stranglehold on the two countries’ supplies from the north, they stand to gain immensely in both profits and power. Both our governments have made it clear that they’re prepared to go to any lengths to shake free once and for all from this crucifying dependence on O.P.E.C. oil. This wouldn’t suit our foreign friends at all. They have us over a barrel—an oil barrel, if you will—and they want to keep it that way.”