‘Well, yes. I can try.’
‘Then I suggest that you try – because God knows what’s going to happen to this world if you don’t.’
Professor Haraldsen lifted a phone out of his desk drawer and punched out a number. He waited for a long while, trying to give Conor and Eleanor sympathetic smiles while he did so. At last he was connected to somebody. ‘Willy! Yes! Jom Haraldsen! How are you? Well, fine. I’m really fine. Yes, yes, we must try to go back to the Narvik Skisenter soon! Yes, not to fall over this time! Listen, Willy, I have a question about Longyearbyen. Yes, the Spanish flu business.’
He covered the receiver with his hand and said, ‘Willy Bry. He’s in charge of all the public health situations in northern Norway. Very good man. Very thorough. Big man. Beard. But he skis like a girl.’
Willy Bry came back on the phone. Professor Haraldsen asked him question after question about Longyearbyen and nodded a lot and kept saying ‘uh-huh’ and ‘uh-huh’ and ‘uh-huh?’ As he did so, he made some quick incomprehensible notes with a mechanical pencil. Finally he said, ‘OK, Willy. Thanks. Yes. Thanks.’ He returned the phone to his desk drawer and closed it. Then he turned to Conor and Eleanor. ‘Only one expedition has been given permission to excavate the cemetery at Longyearbyen. The health authorities have been very strict. Nobody else will be permitted to go near the cemetery. They have some soldiers on duty there already.’
‘So whose expedition is this?’
‘It’s a joint project funded by Canada, Britain and Norway. It should begin excavation in seven weeks. The expedition leader is Dr Kirsty Duncan, she’s Canadian. A medical geographer and climatologist. And a very dedicated woman, not to be deflected, if you know what I mean.
‘Even so, the authorities will not permit her under any circumstances to take the bodies out of the cemetery: they have to be examined underneath a dome of protective covering, one hundred per cent sealed. Everybody on the team will have to wear full protective clothing. You know, the spacesuits.
‘If there is any difficulty in removing the bodies from the graves, they will have to be examined in their coffins, where they lie. Afterward, their coffins will have to be sealed and buried again, just as deep.
‘They will take out samples from the bodies with a special tool, which is like a hollow drill bit for taking oil samples. All of this material must be kept strictly quarantined.’
‘Your friend didn’t mention anybody called Branch?’
‘Branch? No. No name like that.’
‘And he’s sure that nobody else can get near to the cemetery?’
‘As I said, Willy Bry is a very thorough man.’
Conor stood up and held out his hand. ‘I want to thank you for all of your help, Professor Haraldsen. If I can get back to you whenever I need to …?’
‘Of course. These are very important matters. A virus can live for many, many years. In Uppsala, in Sweden, in 1966, a team of archeologists dug up a mass grave from the days of the Black Death. Nine of them died within three weeks. Think of that. A disease surviving for six and half centuries.’
‘Just one more thing,’ said Conor.
‘Of course. Anything.’
‘Show us where Longyearbyen is, on the map.’
‘My God. You don’t want to go there, do you?’
Conor couldn’t eat any more wolffish and pushed his plate away. ‘It looks like Branch and his people plan to dig up those bodies before the Canadians can get there.’
‘But you heard what your professor said. Nobody else except the official expedition is allowed near the cemetery.’
‘I’m not too sure that a man like Branch is going to let the Norwegian authorities stand in his way.’
‘So what can we do that an army guard can’t do?’
‘I don’t know. But I feel very uneasy about sitting here doing nothing. Besides, don’t forget that we didn’t come simply to stop Branch from infecting the planet with influenza. We came here to recover Davina Gambit’s money, and all the other millions that people had to cough up to save their reputations; and to prove that I’m innocent, too.’
‘We also came to punish Branch for killing our friends,’ Magda added. ‘To give him just as much hurt as he gave to us.’
Eleanor said nothing but looked at Conor and raised one eyebrow. She took out a pack of cigarettes, pushed one into her holder and lit it, but a waitress immediately came over and pointed to the no smoking sign.
‘I’m an American,’ she protested. ‘I’m supposed to know what Royking Forbudt means? Sounds like some second-rate cabaret artiste.’
Conor said, ‘Tomorrow morning I think we ought to split up. You and Magda fly back to Oslo, I’ll find a way to get myself to Longyearbyen. I don’t exactly know what I’m planning to do yet, but I need to lay my hands on Branch before he digs up those bodies and leaves. The only way I’m going to be able to force him to give all that money back is if I have him alive.
‘I don’t want him arrested by the Norwegians, either. If that happens, they won’t let me anywhere near him. In fact they’ll probably arrest me, too, if the NYPD have posted my name on the Interpol database.’
‘And what, pray, are we going to do in Oslo?’
‘Wait. Please, that’s all you can do. Wait until I call you and tell you that I’ve got my gun pointing at Dennis Evelyn Branch’s brain, and that he’s willing to release all of the money in his bank account.’
Eleanor said, ‘You realize how ridiculous this idea is, don’t you? What chance do you think you have of landing on some remote island in the middle of no place at all, catching Dennis Evelyn Branch and putting a gun to his head? My God, Conor, you’re not James Bond.’
‘I told you: that’s only a rough outline of what I’m going to do. I can fill in the details when I get there. Improvise.’
‘I only knew two people who were any good at improvisation. One was Dean Martin and the other was Lucille Ball.’
That afternoon he found a helicopter charter company on Strandgata. He was greeted by two matching young men in tinted aviator glasses and shortsleeved pilot’s shirts. They brought out their map. Yes, they could fly him to Spitsbergen. No trouble at all, so long as die weather didn’t close in. But when he said that he needed his arrival to be secret, they were horrified. You would have thought that he had asked them to commit sodomy in the street. Didn’t he realize it was against safety regulations not to inform Tromso air-traffic control of any flights, and it was forbidden to land aircraft anywhere on the Svalbard archipelago without special permission? Besides, it was too dangerous to land in the Longyear valley, in the dark, without lights. They would have to refuel before they returned to Tromso, wouldn’t they? How could they do that, if their arrival was going to be secret? Why did it have to be secret? What was he carrying? Was he a drug-runner? Perhaps they should tell the police what he had asked them to?
‘OK, OK,’ said Conor, raising both hands to silence them. ‘Forget I ever came in here. Forget everything.’
All the same, they were still pouting in outrage as he left their office and headed toward the harbor. One of them was making heavy weather of refolding the map.
At last, in a stifling wooden shed close to the Nordjeteen, where scores of herring-boats clanked at anchor, he found a fisherman who was prepared to land him on the south shore of Isfiorden, to the east of Longyearbyen harbor, so that nobody would know that he had come ashore. The man wore a peaked cap and a blue padded waterproof suit that rustled whenever he moved. Everything smelled of fish and tobacco. On the wall of his little shed was a calendar with a photograph of the Empire State Building on it. Conor, for a moment, felt a sharp pang of homesickness.
After their evening meal in the Aurora Restaurant, they had a last drink in the bar and then went up to their rooms. Conor was still searching through the TV channels when there was a soft knock at his door. He opened it up and it was Eleanor.
‘Do you want another drink?’ he asked her. ‘I think I still have s
ome vodka left in the mini-bar.’
‘No, no. I’ve had enough for tonight. I shouldn’t drink at all, the pills I’m taking.’
‘How about an orange juice?’
She shook her head. The light from the television flickered across her face as if she were a character in a 1930s movie. ‘The thing of it is, I’ve come to ask you not to go.’
‘Don’t get me wrong, Eleanor. I’m not going because I relish the idea.’
‘It’s far too much of a risk. You don’t speak Norwegian, you won’t know anybody there. And you know how ruthless Branch and his people can be.’
‘Eleanor, I have to go. Branch extorted tens of millions of dollars and I have to get it back. I have to get my reputation back. I have to get my life back.’
‘Your life is worth more than any amount of money. And you don’t have to retrieve all those millions of dollars to prove that you’re innocent. I’ll help you. I mean it. I know some of the best lawyers in New York.’
‘And supposing Branch digs up this virus and spreads it all around the world? Supposing Professor Haraldsen’s right, and it can kill countless millions of people? How will I feel about that?’
‘Conor,’ said Eleanor, taking hold of his hand between both of her hands. ‘It’s not your responsibility to stop him. You’ve done enough. Come back to Oslo with us tomorrow morning and we’ll fly straight back to the States.’
Conor thought about tomorrow. Tomorrow he had arranged to meet the fisherman down by the harbor at six o’clock sharp, long before it grew light. Then he was faced with nearly two days of sailing toward the Svalbard archipelago, on sea scattered with ice floes. He had asked the fisherman about Longyearbyen and without taking out his cigarette the fisherman had said: ‘One large coal mine, four small hotels, five restaurants, twenty shops, and all the snow you could want.’ And after that: Dennis Evelyn Branch.
He would have given almost anything not to go.
‘Eleanor … it’s too much of a cliché to say that a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. But this is one of those times. I’ve lost a lot these past few weeks. My child, my lover, my friends, whole pieces of the person that I thought I was. I’ll have to say that I’ve nearly lost my religion, too, which is kind of ironic, when you consider what I’m going to be doing. But don’t ask me to lose my soul.’
Eleanor’s lips tightened and her eyes filled with tears. ‘I would never ask you to do that. But I can’t tell you how much you mean to me. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.’
He didn’t say anything, but gave her a questioning look.
‘I suppose you’ll think that I’m just a sentimental old woman. But when you walked into my office you reminded me so much of my son, James. You’re taller than him, darker than him, but there’s so much about you that’s just the same. Reckless, but always determined to do the right thing. And the way you look sometimes, when you’ve got something on your mind. I can almost see James looking out of your eyes.’
‘You don’t get to see him any more?’
‘He’s dead. Died two and a half years ago, at the age of thirty-one. His horse threw him, and he broke his back.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Eleanor wiped her eyes. ‘It can’t be helped. Crying isn’t going to bring him back. But I want you to know that you’ve given me so much pleasure … so much of what I’ve missed. Why do you think I’m here? I called Davina Gambit before we went to see her, and asked her to insist that I come along. When I told her why, she told me that she lost a child, too, a long time ago, and that she quite understood.’
‘I still have to go to Longyearbyen tomorrow.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m just being selfish. For one ridiculous moment I thought that I could get my life all back together again … with Sidney, and you. The life that I should have had, but never did.’
She paused, and then she said, ‘James was Sidney’s child. I never told him that I was going to have a baby. He would have run off even quicker! And, if you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t tell him now.’
‘Eleanor …’ Conor began, but she pressed her fingertip against his lips.
‘You don’t have to say anything. Just promise me you won’t do anything too dangerous.’ She paused, and sniffled. ‘God … I wish I was Magda. I could hypnotize you into coming back to New York with me.’
There was a knock at the door. It was Magda, in a black satin nightdress, her long black hair shining on her ice-white shoulders. She smelled of some very strong, dominant perfume. ‘I came to say goodbye,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to remember me the way I look when I’ve just woken up.’
She looked at Eleanor and frowned. ‘Is everything OK? What’s happened?’
Eleanor smiled. ‘Nothing, dear. Just saying our goodbyes.’
On Thursday morning, 473 miles north of Tromso, the sun appeared through the fog as a wan yellow smudge. Per Rakke, the fisherman, coughed and said, ‘We’ll have plenty of cover today. What about some coffee? There’s a flask over there.’
Conor was sitting by the misted-up cabin window, looking out at the choppy metallic waves. The strong current was flowing diagonally across the bows of Per Rakke’s 35-foot fishing boat, so that it dipped and lurched sideways with every swell. Sometime during the night they had started to run into fragments of broken ice: Conor had heard them tumbling against the hull. Now there were larger lumps all around them, and soon after the sun came up Conor saw an iceberg the size of a small family house in Queens.
The cabin stank of fish and diesel oil and Per Rakke’s strong cigarettes, and Conor was beginning to wonder if it had been wise of him to eat that breakfast of bread and cheese so hurriedly.
At least he was warm. He was wearing thick black canvas jeans and insulated boots, and a huge off-white parka with a fur-lined hood. He had zipped Toralf’s .22 pistol in his pocket. It had a full clip but he had been tempted to buy more ammunition for it. In the end, though, he had decided against it. Norway had strict handgun laws and he hadn’t wanted to attract the attention of the Troms county police.
Occasionally another fishing boat would pass them in the fog; or they would sail close to a bleak snow-capped skerry. It wasn’t hard to see why Norwegian folk stories were crowded with tales of sea serpents and sirens and the ghosts of Viking longboats.
‘It’s warm today,’ said Per Rakke. ‘You should come up here in the winter. It’s so cold that the smoke freezes as soon as it comes out of the funnel. If you’re not careful a puff of smoke can drop on your head and kill you.’
‘I’ll keep an eye out,’ Conor smiled. ‘What’s the ambient temperature now?’
‘Six degrees below.’
‘What’s that in Fahrenheit?’
‘It’s easy. You double the Celsius figure and add twenty-nine. So, seventeen degrees Fahrenheit.’
Conor poured Per Rakke some coffee. The fisherman swallowed it in three blistering gulps, bulging out his cheeks as he drank. ‘You hungry? There’s some pickled herring in that bag.’
The boat dropped sharply into a trough, and spray splattered against the windows. ‘Maybe later,’ said Conor.
‘Well, ja, OK. All the more for me.’
As the afternoon wore on, they sailed up the western coast of Spitsbergen, keeping its snow-covered peaks faintly visible through the freezing fog. They entered Isfiorden with lumps of glacial ice knocking against the hull. Per Rakke steered his boat close in to the southern side of the fiord and slowed his engine to a hoarse, asthmatic chug. On the north side, vaguely, Conor could see spectral white mountains, and scores of glaciers, each of them calving icebergs into the sea.
They passed Longyearbyen harbor – a smattering of lights on their starboard side. Conor could see a row of skeletal pylons along the shore and asked Per Rakke what they were. ‘Those are the cable cars that used to carry the coal from the mine to the wharf. The kibb.’
They couldn’t have been making more than three knots when – without
warning – a black granite headland came looming out of the fog. Per Rakke spun the fishing boat’s wheel and began to bring her about. ‘This is the nearest I can sail to the harbor without anybody seeing us,’ he said. ‘It’s only an hour to walk from here. Not more.’
Conor opened the cabin door and stepped out onto the slippery deck. There was very little wind but the fog was bone-cracking cold, and his breath smoked. The shoreline here rose almost vertically out of the sea, and the upper reaches of the crags were draped in snow. Seagulls screamed around the boat, even though they had no catch aboard. Maybe they had caught the scent of Per Rakke’s breath, thought Conor.
‘Where can I go ashore?’ he called out.
‘There’s a place beyond that point. The rocks slope gently right down to the sea. You’ll be able to land the rubber boat there, no trouble at all.’
No trouble at all? thought Conor as they rounded the point. The place where the rocks were supposed to slope gently down to the sea was a tumble of enormous granite boulders, leading up to a narrow crevice. The tide continually rushed around the point, thick with broken fragments of ice the size of dining-tables for twelve. ‘There,’ said Per Rakke. ‘Perfect. Almost like a holiday beach.’
‘If you say so,’ said Conor. He waited by the rail while Per Rakke brought the fishing boat within seventy feet of the shore. A seagull hovered so close to him that he could have touched it and he wondered whose soul it was. Per Rakke dropped anchor and then he came forward with a wet cigarette stuck to his lower lip. A faded orange raft was lashed to the deck. He tugged the straps free and pulled the toggle. With a sharp hiss and a succession of crumpling bangs the raft inflated, filling the fore-deck. Per Rakke handed Conor two polyurethane paddles and said, ‘Row this way, toward the point. The current is very strong. It will sweep you onto the shore. If you can’t make it the first time, I’ll pull you back on the line, so that you can try again.’
‘Some holiday beach. What happens when I get ashore?’
‘Then I pull the raft back; and then, my friend, then you’re on your own. I’ve given you Aslak Bolstad’s address … when you’ve finished whatever it is you’re doing, you go to him. He’ll find you someone to bring you back to Tromso.’
Holy Terror Page 33
