“Those were from last year. I just got around to posting them.”
Wendell started to walk away, and Cole grabbed his arm. Wendell turned on him, his right fist swinging for Cole’s head. It was a telegraphed punch and Cole had plenty of time to get ready for it. Despite the persistent ache in his shoulder, Cole easily turned into the punch. He pulled Wendell’s arm into his chest and gently flipped him onto the floor. He pinned him there. Several other patrons moved away from the grappling pair.
“Hey! Take that shit outside!” the bartender yelled.
“Cole, you asshole, let me go!”
“Calm down, Charlie, or you’re going to get hurt.” Cole could feel the pain in his shoulder and knew he wouldn’t be able to hold the struggling man much longer.
“Outside!”
Cole released Charles, and the young man stood up and straightened his jacket.
“Shall we?” asked Cole, pointing to the door.
Charles looked around the bar. Half the establishment was watching them. He walked toward the door, Cole a dozen feet behind him.
When Cole stepped through the door, he had little time to react to the patio chair that hit him in the chest and face. He fell backward into the door, rattling it. He pushed the chair off in time to see Wendell running down Sparks Street Mall.
FORTY-TWO
OTTAWA, ONTARIO. SEPTEMBER 12.
“YOU SCARED THE SHIT OUT of me,” Cole complained when he opened his hotel room door and found Nancy sitting on the bed.
“What happened to you?” she asked. He was holding a bloodstained cloth napkin to his mouth.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Don’t act so happy to see me. I got an earlier flight. I wanted to surprise you.”
“I’m surprised.” Cole stepped into the bathroom and spit a stream of blood into the sink.
“What happened?” she repeated.
“I got hit with a chair.” Cole told her what had happened. He spit into the sink again and fished around in his mouth with his fingers, looking for loose teeth or cuts. He found a few rents but nothing missing. He rinsed, spit, and mopped up more blood with a white hand towel.
“Jesus, Cole, let me do that.” Nancy came up behind him, but he shrugged her off. “You’re making me regret coming early, Cole.”
“Nobody asked you to.”
Nancy stood behind him, her arms crossed. Cole could see her in the mirror. “Is something else wrong?” she asked.
He spit again for emphasis. “You mean, besides having just been hit in the head with a chair? Besides having a bullet hole in my shoulder? Besides looking behind me every ten steps to see if someone is following me?”
“Yeah, besides that.”
“You didn’t tell me that you talked with Inspector Reimer about my father, Nancy.” Cole turned to face her.
Nancy seemed to struggle to place the event. “Cole, that was … almost a year and a half ago.”
“So what? You didn’t tell me. You went to the cops about my family. You talked to the person who made my life hell in Oracle. Of all the people in the world, you went to her.”
“Cole, calm down—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down. I thought that was all behind us, you snooping around in my personal life. Now I find out that you actually went to talk with the RCMP about it.”
“I came clean about talking with your mother and with Walt.”
“Only after you got caught. And now this?”
“I didn’t want to make things worse. We didn’t talk for months after Port Lostcoast. Then the whole thing with Sean last year. When we finally got back together, a year had passed since I’d talked with Reimer. I just thought I’d let it go. I just thought—”
“I trusted you. I thought you were in this for me. Not some fucking story.”
“I am. But you’ve got to calm down. Get your shit together or I’m going to walk out that door and you’re not going to see me again.”
“I trusted you.”
“You still can. I’m sorry. It was a long time ago. I didn’t know what to think. I was scared of what I thought you had done.”
“I thought I was done with this. This anger. But it’s all still there. I don’t know what I have to do to get rid of it.”
“Just let it go, Cole.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“I know.” She put her arms around him, and he slumped into her.
FORTY-THREE
OTTAWA, ONTARIO. SEPTEMBER 13.
IN THE MORNING, THEY ATE an early breakfast at the Mayflower Restaurant. “What did Reimer say about the connection between Brian and Charles?” Nancy asked.
Cole had called and reached the inspector’s cell phone while she was at her morning workout. “She’s going to ask Charles to come in and voluntarily talk with the Mounties here in Ottawa.”
“Do you think he could have killed Brian?”
“I think he wanted to. The kid isn’t exactly stable. But he doesn’t strike me as being a criminal mastermind, and frankly, that’s what all of this adds up to. You don’t post photos on your Facebook page if you’re trying to sneak into a remote backcountry wilderness and kill someone.”
Nancy drank her coffee. “So we’re talking about a professional.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re talking about.” He looked around the crowded restaurant. “You saw the material that Brian put on ice. What do you make of it?”
“God, I don’t know. What do we know about the Chinese ambassador? Nothing. And this guy Lester Thompson? I’ve got a call in to a colleague at the Casper Star-Tribune. We’ll see what they come back with.”
“Do you think that this Thompson guy could be behind all of this?” asked Cole.
“He could be. It’s possible. You told me that Brian was poking around both the tar sands and the fracking issue. He poked this guy Thompson in the eye more than once. Maybe he got into something that he shouldn’t have.”
“All this time we’ve been hunting for a motive to point us in the right direction. Maybe this is it. Brian figured out that the Canadian government, and the department his friend Rick Turcotte is parliamentary secretary for, was going to build a nuclear power plant to fuel growth in the tar sands.”
“But where does Lester Thompson come into this?”
“I don’t know what the connection is between Thompson and the tar sands. I do know that Brian got mixed up with his business on the Blackfeet Reservation. Brian wanted to work with the tribe to build windmills. Thompson is making a play to frack the place. Brian was getting in the way.”
“That’s motive number two.”
“And then we have Charles Wendell.”
“You dismissed him.”
“Yeah, but there’s no denying that punk has been to Waterton, and he certainly hated Brian.”
“Three motives, three possible scenarios, three possible killers?”
Cole shrugged and then closed his eyes against the pain in his shoulder.
“The first two scenarios you lay out aren’t state secrets, Cole. So there’s got to be something else.”
Cole looked up suddenly. He reached into the envelope and pulled out the photo of the three men fishing. “There is something else,” he said. “I’m so stupid!”
Nancy looked first at him and then around the room to see if they were being watched. “What?”
Cole pointed to the Chinese ambassador.
“I’M GOING TO spend my day in a room with a stack of paper five feet tall, while you get to muckrake over at the Hill?” Nancy and Cole walked up Elgin Street toward the War Memorial.
“Sounds fair to me,” said Cole.
“Sounds like hell to me.”
“I thought you reporters loved that stuff. In the movies, it looks so glamorous.”
“In the movies, you can’t smell the nervous sweat, and the scene only takes two minutes. I’ll be lucky if I see daylight again today.”
Cole hailed her a cab. �
�Let me know if there is anything I can use.”
“You’re a bastard, you know that?”
He kissed her and held the cab door open for her. “I know. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
The cab sped off toward Gatineau. As Cole watched it go, he considered the nature of forgiveness. Since leaving home at seventeen, he’d struggled with the notion that you could just let someone off the hook. What he realized now was that love made absolution much easier.
Cole picked up his pace as Parliament came into view. It felt good to be back in the thick of things. He had called a friend who worked for the Opposition and had gotten him a ticket for Question Period that afternoon. In the meantime, he had some digging to do. He dialed Tara Sinclair’s number. “Tara, we still on?”
“This better be worth it. Do you have any idea how busy the parliamentary bureau chief of the Globe and Mail is on the first day of the fall sitting? I’m in the press gallery now. I’ll have an intern come down and get you.”
The Globe intern met him and showed him to the Jean-Marc-Poliquin Lounge, where the Hill media relaxed or held social events. Today it was packed with visitors. Cole could feel the electricity in the air, and for a moment he missed the buzz. The press gallery itself was a warren of cubicles where the parliamentary reporters worked when the House was in session. All the papers and networks had offices across the street in the National Press Building, but here they had a space only a few hundred feet from the Commons, and close to all of the ministers’ offices on Parliament Hill.
Cole gave Tara a hug when they met. “Come on,” she said, walking between the leather couches to a well-dressed man who was fiddling with his Blackberry while talking with another reporter. “Sandy, this is Cole Blackwater.”
The man extended a hand. “Sandy Biggs.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Oh, we met before. I was with Report on Business when Nancy worked here. We met at the correspondents’ dinner one year. So what have you got?”
“What do you know about the relationship between the Minister of Natural Resources and the Chinese ambassador?”
Biggs looked at the science reporter like she had brought in a feral animal. “Tara?”
“China is a major player in the tar sands. They’ve made a huge investment over the last five years. No doubt that involves a lot of hand holding by the minister,” said Tara.
Biggs looked at Cole. “Why?”
“I think China is into something in the tar sands that everybody is working hard to keep under the radar,” Cole answered.
“There’s been nothing in the House about this. Not that I recall.” Biggs turned and snatched the phone from a nearby desk. “Give me Report on Business. Yes, Terrance Wong. Thank you.” Biggs paused. “Terry, it’s Biggs. Listen, can you tell me what you know about a deal in the tar sands involving China that might be directly related to David Canning?”
“Or his PS,” said Cole.
“Or his parliamentary secretary, Rick Turcotte.” Biggs listened for a moment. “Hold on, I’m putting you on speaker. I’ve got our science reporter and this Cole Blackwater character here. Hold on …” Biggs looked over his glasses and punched the speaker button on the phone. “Terry Wong does Asian business for the Report,” Biggs said to Cole and Tara.
“What kind of deal are you talking about?” Wong asked. “There have been a lot of deals in the hopper.”
“This is Cole, Terry. I think this has something to do with nuclear.”
“I thought you said tar sands.”
“Nuclear in the tar sands.”
“Hold on.” Terry could be heard typing. “I’ve got a piece from our Asian bureau when Turcotte was in China last year to promote the tar sands. He met with the Chinese Nuclear Power Corporation. Does that listen?”
“It sure does. Do you have that piece?” asked Cole.
“You got digits I can send it to?”
“I just have a phone.”
“Send it to me,” said Tara.
“Okay, it’s off.”
“Thanks, Terry.” Biggs disconnected the line.
Tara pulled out her iPhone and pulled up the email from Terry. She held the screen for Cole to see. “Canada discussing energy options with Chinese officials,” read the headline. Cole squinted at the caption: “The Minister of Natural Resources, David Canning, met with the head of China’s Nuclear Power Corporation last week to discuss 21st-century energy solutions in Asia and at home.” Cole scanned the story. He could clearly see that the third man in the photo was Senator Lester Thompson. “What the hell is the CEO of a US energy company doing on a Canadian trade mission?” Cole asked.
Biggs took the phone out of his hand. “You’re kidding me.”
“Do you have time to set this up for Question Period?” asked Cole.
Biggs whispered to Tara, “Get that intern there to call the Opposition House Leader. Tell them we’ve got something in the bag for them for QP. And be quiet. I don’t want any of these other bloodsuckers to hear.” Biggs looked at Cole. “Now, young man, you tell me what you know.”
COLE FOUND A quiet place in the corridor outside of the press gallery. He dialed Nancy’s cell. “Do you have any idea how much bullshit the government is willing to pile onto this situation to keep us from finding out what is going on?” she said by way of greeting.
“You have no idea,” Cole replied.
“What? What have you got?” He told her about Senator Thompson’s presence on the trade mission. “And you got this from who?” she asked.
“The Globe and Mail,” he said, bracing himself.
“The fucking Globe ?”
It was his turn to say it. “Calm down.”
“Are they going to run with it?”
“They had the original story. They just didn’t know what they had.”
“I’ve got to call Pesh.”
“Nancy, you’re part of this story. Can you write it?”
“Goddamned right I can.”
“Okay. Do you want to wait for Question Period?”
“What you just told me helps make some sense of what I’m reading here. I don’t have the text. It’s redacted. What I do have is a letter from the Minister of Natural Resources to the Minister of Justice dated July 18. What I can see in the letter is that the minister has no objection to the extradition of a blacked-out Canadian citizen to the United States.”
“That’s the day we went to Claresholm and I was questioned. Count the spaces for the name.”
“One, two … oh shit. Fourteen, plus a space.”
“Cole Blackwater.”
FORTY-FOUR
OTTAWA, ONTARIO. SEPTEMBER 13.
COLE SAT IN THE PUBLIC Gallery above the House of Commons. Half of the MPs were already in their seats and the others were filing in. Tara Sinclair sat next to Cole. He fitted the earpiece that rested on the arm of the chair into place. Its purpose was to provide simultaneous translation, but from long experience Cole knew that once Question Period started, he wouldn’t be able to hear the MPs’ questions and answers over the heckling.
The first two questions from the leader of the official Opposition were on jobs and the economy, but when the pendulum swung around again, the Opposition’s Natural Resources critic rose to her feet and read her question. “Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Natural Resources. In March of last year, the minister was on an official trade mission to China to sell Canada’s dirty tar-sands oil to that country. While on that trade mission, the minister also met with the head of China’s Nuclear Power Corporation. Also in that meeting, Mr. Speaker, was the former chair of the US Senate Committee on Energy, who is now the CEO of a major US energy company. My question, Mr. Speaker, is why was the head of a US company in a meeting with this Canadian minister and a Chinese company?”
Cole pressed the earpiece tighter so he could hear over the outburst of derision. David Canning rose to his feet. “Mr. Speaker, Canada and the United States are part
ners in continental energy exploration and development. Our meeting was between old friends seeking mutually beneficial export opportunities for ethical oil from Canada to China.” He sat down amid catcalls.
The Opposition critic was on her feet before the minister had finished. “Mr. Speaker, be that as it may, the minister wasn’t meeting about so-called ethical oil exports or markets. He was meeting with the man who controls the development of China’s nuclear power plants. My question for the minister is this: isn’t it true that this government is considering a bid from the Chinese state-controlled Nuclear Power Corporation to build a nuclear power plant to fuel unprecedented growth of the tar sands, and that it is doing so in collusion with the US company High Country Energy?”
MPs jumped to their feet, yelling and jeering. The Speaker of the House rose and called for order. It took more than a minute for the speaker to impose decorum on the House. When he did, it was Rick Turcotte who rose in defense of the government.
“Mr. Speaker, I don’t know where the Honourable Member gets off slinging such baseless accusations in this House. If she has proof, then let her table it here and now, or she can sit down and keep her accusations to herself!”
Cole leaned into Tara Sinclair as the House once again roared with catcalls. “When the government can’t defend itself, the first thing it does is go on the attack.” Cole pulled his earpiece and put it back on the chair.
“Where are you going?”
“To get some real answers.”
“WAS IT JUST like the good old days?” asked Nancy. Cole was standing outside Parliament, talking with her on his cell.
“Not really. I don’t know, maybe I’m just out of practice, but bagging the minister that way wasn’t very satisfying.”
“Pesh wants me to stay here and write the story for the chain.”
“I think you should. There’s a lot more to it. This is going to be a major catastrophe for the government.
“This is going to be all over the news by tonight. I’m going to fly back to Calgary and then drive down to Wyoming to the headquarters of High Country Energy.”
The Glacier Gallows Page 19
