by Tom Clancy
“I beg your pardon,” said Constance Burns.
“Yes, I suppose you do,” Nessa told her. “My name is Nessa Lear and I’m with Interpol. No, thank you, sit here a wee bit, please,” she told the woman, grabbing her arm firmly and pinning it to the table.
Burns’s eyes seemed as if they might pop out and strike her in the face. Nessa flattened her right hand against the underside of the table, ready to overturn it if the bitch tried to get away.
Not that she would get very far. The building was surrounded by the Swiss police.
“My friends at the door there, the very handsome lads in the suits, are with the national police force,” Nessa told Burns. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the German name for it, which they seem to use here; I was never very good with languages in school, and now going from French to German with English in between has gotten my brain in a twist. Plus I’ve had no sleep, tracking you down.”
“Miss—”
“In a few minutes, my friends over there will take you away. You’re wanted in connection with an inquiry in Scotland. Some accidents. Or murders. Definitely murders. But questions have been raised concerning shipments of depleted uranium, and I suspect they will be looking to you for answers.”
Burns jerked her arm, but Nessa held it down firmly. She really was tired; she could feel the burning sensation in her muscle as she pressed against the table.
“Don’t be in such a hurry,” Nessa said. “I was hoping you might help me so that I could help you in your future life, such as it is. I’m seeking Marc Elata.”
“Who is he?”
“A forger. A very good one.”
Burns made a dismissive sound.
“Gabriel Morgan?” Nessa asked.
“The bastard. The bloody, sodding bastard!” Burns screamed, and pounded the table with her free hand. “He’s left me to take the blame for everything, hasn’t he?”
“Everything?”
Burns went silent. Nessa waited nearly half a minute before asking, “Nothing else?”
She waited a few more seconds, then waved over the Swiss detectives. Burns pulled her hand away as Nessa let go, holding it to her chest as if it had been hurt.
Maybe it had. It did look quite red. But perhaps because the two policemen who prodded her shoulders did not appear terribly sympathetic, Burns made no comment as she rose and walked from the room under their escort.
John Theiber, the Swiss liaison—a tall, wide-shouldered man with gorgeous blond hair—came over as they left, saying something in clipped German to the men before turning toward Nessa.
“Your office in Paris wishes you to call,” he said in an English so perfect the Queen would have assumed he was one of her subjects. “A Mr. Jairdain.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
Nessa punched the number as Captain Theiber took a few steps away to accord her privacy.
Such manners.
“Jairdain.”
“What’s up?” she asked.
“About a half hour ago, we received a strange e-mail, beaucoup strange, sent to our public e-mail address,” said the Frenchman. “It was from Elata.”
“Elata?”
“ ‘Picassos at Castello Dinelli now. Quickly. Elata.’ That’s the message.”
“That’s it?”
“There’s also a bank name and address, along with a number in America. We believe—I don’t know if I have it correct, but the FBI liaison believes it is a safety-deposit box—a safe in a bank there. They are getting an order to have it seized. Louis is taking care of it.”
Nessa looked over at the gorgeous Swiss. “Castello Dinelli?”
“An island castle in Lake Maggiore, at the Italian border. Near the border. In the fourteenth century—”
“We need to get there now,” she said, jumping up. “That helicopter you promised—where is it?”
Hal Pruitt had thought landing Pedro Martinez in the pre-season draft to be the deal of a lifetime until it was finally cut, at which point he’d realized he couldn’t live with himself for having gone ahead with it. As Captain Ahab had screamed from the Pequod’s bow moments before he went under with a long sucking sound, his topmost greatness lay in his topmost grief.
Pruitt sighed and leaned back in his seat, hands linked behind his head, elbows winged out to either side. He was alone at a computer console on the lower level of Cold Corners’ main facility, only thirty minutes into his four-hour security/communications shift. In the heat of the chase, Martinez had seemed a bargain at any price. Still did, looking at it purely from the standpoint of what the guy brought to his team’s pitching roster. This was Pedro here. Multiple Cy Young Award winner. A career earned run average of two bucks, two and change. Maybe the best arm since Koufax. Arguably the most dominating modern-day pitcher in the game, though it was Pruitt’s steadfast opinion that Roger Clemens edged him out as king of the hill by virtue of his stare-you-in-the-eye gutsiness, ability to bear down in tight situations, and of course his longevity. With eighteen major league seasons under his belt and a zillion broken strikeout records, the Rocket’s critics could wet their diapers about his high-and-ins all they wanted. He had stuff in humongous abundance. That, and a plush red carpet waiting to be rolled out for him at the door to Cooperstown.
Hal Pruitt guessed he liked Clemens better than anybody who’d ever fastballed a batter at the plate, which was why he’d outbid the McMurdo Skuas by nineteen dollars to pick him up for his own fantasy team, the Cold Corners Herbies, this year . . . five dollars over and above what he’d laid on the auction block for him the year before. Of course it didn’t hurt that Clemens had been wearing a New York Yankee uniform in real-world baseball since the ’99 season, but that was another story. Sort of. Anyway, Pedro was the issue right now. Pedro, whom Pruitt had gone after like obsessed old Ahab stalking the White Whale—towards thee I roll! Pedro, the final jewel in his crowning lineup of starters, guaranteed to put his team in position to outstrip the competition. Pedro Martinez, who also happened to be a star player with the real-life Red Sox, hated arch-rivals of Pruitt’s beloved Bronx Bombers since the earliest hominid species emerged from the steaming veldts of Africa to club stones at each other across diamond-shaped patches of turf.
Pruitt leaned forward on his chair, his hands poised over his computer keyboard like those of a master pianist about to launch into some intricate concerto, thinking he needed a nimble, delicate touch for the e-mail he was writing to Darren Codegan, GM of the Palmer Base Polecats, in an effort to make himself right with some kind of trade before the April 1st season kickoff. As he listened to the lunatic wind rattle outside the building walls, it was hard to imagine spring training was almost at an end within the neatly demarcated borders of civilization, where the sun went up and down rather than around and around in hanging circles. But the final exhibition games were in fact being played in Florida and Arizona, with home stadium groundskeepers getting their gorgeous green grasses groomed and ready for opening day. Pruitt knew he very definitely had to move fast.
He chose to believe that he looked at baseball with a capitalistic, pragmatic eye, treating it as a business that was more or less the same as any other. It was not without good reason that his Herbies, which he’d named after an Antarctic slang word for the very sort of hurricane/blizzard crossbreed that was now roughing up Cold Corners and the rest of his neighborhood, had won three consecutive on-line Ice League championships. If the other GMs in the league wanted to criticize him for raising the bar on individual salaries, fine. If they wanted to scoff at his handing over a quarter of his team’s capped payroll to a single player, let them go ahead. Pedro was a unique talent. Well worth $65, plus Shane Spencer and a couple of AAA infield prospects from the Yankees farm system.
Pragmatically speaking, Pruitt thought.
The problem with this latest deal was that it had suddenly banged him up hard against the limits of that pragmatism. It was true some had called his attitude into prior question because of his tendency t
o stack his team with players who either wore, or had once worn, the midnight-blue pinstripes and interlocking NY on their caps—see ya, Kay and Sterling, oh, exalted voices of the New York airwaves—but again Pruitt knew this was because they possessed duller entrepreneurial minds than himself. These were the Bombers they were talking about here. Winners of almost thirty World Series titles they were talking about here. You wanted the best in the big leagues, you picked from the top of the heap, so of course his franchise was going to be something like ninety-five-percent Yanks. And what about his first baseman, Jason Giambi? Or Kenny Lofton in his outfield? Neither of them had ever called the hallowed Stadium home.
Pruitt released another deep exhalation. All would have been fine and dandy if Pedro hurled for Baltimore, Kansas City, maybe Toronto. Better yet if the Devil Rays or Tigers had been the ones to steal him from Montreal back in ’98. But the fact was that Pedro Martinez pitched for Boston, the Evil Nemesis. And since a GM’s victory in fantasy baseball was determined by his players’ average rankings at season’s end, Pruitt had put himself on a torturer’s rack by acquiring him. Who was he now supposed to root for when the Yanks and Bosox had a Bronx blast or Fenway face-off? What if they were in a neck-and-neck pennant race come September? Despite Pruitt’s quest to win that Ice League pot—which came to a sweet two grand—the pull between commerce and loyalty had gotten well nigh unbearable for him weeks before the first regular season crack of home-run wood even went echoing into the blue American sky. It was a sure thing six more months of it would sap his very will to live . . . especially because he’d been forced to give Shane Spencer, the Yank utility man who’d heroically worked his way back to the majors after suffering a right knee ACL tear, to GM John Ikegami’s Snow Petrels over at Amundsen-Scott in exchange for the finances he’d required to close on the Pedro deal with Cadogan’s thin-benched, low-slugging Polecats.
There was no way around it, he thought. Pedro had to be ditched. Spence had to be reacquired. A transaction had to be transacted. And Pruitt had the Machiavellian makings of one very clearly in mind.
Ichiro was the linchpin of his scheme. John Ikegami had dropped out of the frantic Suzuki auction in a frustrated snit, surrendering him to the Petrels after he’d emptied the last of his $260 purse on Hideo Nomo, Kozuhiro Sasaki, and Tomo Ohka for reasons he adamantly denied had anything to do with matters of ethnic pride. Pruitt really didn’t care about Ikegami’s reasons for coveting Suzuki, who would be a valuable asset to any team in the league. It was enough just to know he did want him with a passion. Because now Pruitt was thinking he would dangle Pedro Martinez and the heavyweight bat Jason Giambi in front of Cadogan, provided Cadogan was willing to give Ichiro to Ikegami for Spencer, the two Yank minor leaguers, and a large handful of cash, all of which Pruitt would then get in return from Cadogan as part of a three-way swap. His purchasing power recharged, Pruitt would be able to go after a replacement starting arm to fill the hole left by Pedro. Maybe Andy Pettite. With Mike Stanton to strengthen his bullpen if there were some leftover funds. Either that, or he could see what the Air Guard Herkybirds over in Christchurch were asking for Jose Visciano.
Pruitt skimmed over the language of his message again. It could use some minor refinements, one more quick but careful pass before it was ready to go.
He lowered his fingers back onto his keyboard, and was about to make the first of his changes when a loud electronic warning tone grated from the console beside him, a row of color-coded chicklet lights to one side of his console blinked on in startling sequence, and the e-mail on his display screen was displaced by the base security program’s automatic pop-up window.
Pruitt’s response was practiced and immediate, his mind cleared of everything except for a task list that would need to be executed in a hurry. Bolt-erect at his station, he palmed his computer mouse, clicked to zoom, clicked again to recall and isolate an image, his eyes wide with rapidly building shock and astonishment as they confirmed what they were seeing was no bogie.
Less than fifteen seconds after the alert sounded, he flipped the redline radio switch on the panel beside him and got hold of Ron Waylon.
“It’s the desalinization plant,” Waylon told Nimec. He was breathless from his urgent hustle to the security station. “The images are from those FLIR thermacams behind the ceiling panels . . . ones we installed to replace the outside cameras when they went inoperational.”
Nimec nodded tensely. He recalled Waylon showing him their locations during their base tour just hours ago, while explaining that his people hadn’t yet gotten around to removing the weather-damaged external units. Both men were standing behind Pruitt as the thermal infrared pictures on his monitor shifted through their color palette. They could see four intruders—actually the spectral radiant heat signatures of four intruders—moving about inside the dome, heading toward the door. And Nimec knew that wasn’t the worst of it.
“Look.” He indicated three bright red streaks on the image, matching them against assigned colors on a horizontal measurement bar at the bottom of the screen. “Something’s burning in there.”
“Fires,” Waylon said. “They have to be fires. And they’re damned hot.” He breathed, pointed. “Jesus Christ, looks like one’s on an inflow pump . . . and over here, this is the seawater pipeline . . . I don’t know what the hell’s going on. . . .”
Nimec looked at him, his heart pounding.
“We’re being hit,” he said. “Pull together some men, we have to get out there now.”
A long, narrow room on the main building’s upper level, the Meat Lockers had metallic walls, bar, tables, and chairs that were washed with a reflective tungsten-blue radiance from overhead truss lighting to create a decor and ambience that wryly suited its name.
The crowd of off-duty ice people assembled inside was subdued but not altogether cheerless. Their awareness of the missing three was weighable as they marked the passage of the storm, but these were men and women whose rigorous living conditions demanded a unique spirit and adaptability, and it was understood that brooding would do nothing to help the situation. Morale was bolstered in different ways. During work rotations their stresses were redirected toward productive effort, a conscientious attendance to shared and individual responsibilities. And while it had been some days since anyone commandeered the small corner stage where they would showcase variable degrees of musical talent on better night/rec cycles—and sing karaoke when the prospects for diversion were lean—it seemed out of the question to concede that the fate of Scarborough’s team had been decided. Hence, many of them continued to gather here in their downtime, drinking together, making small talk, amusing themselves, determined to carry on as well as possible in spite of their common fears.
Annie Caulfield sensed all this as she gazed across the room and watched a group of CC’s staffers shoot their own idiosyncratic version of darts. With each successive round a moveable bull’s-eye, striped red and white like the Geographic South Pole’s traditional marker, was peeled off the board and reaffixed slightly further below center, mirroring the annual thirty-three-foot movement of the polar marker as it shifted with the ice cap. Eventually, Megan Breen had explained, the bull’s-eye would meet the scoring ring and get stuck back in the middle of the dartboard.
Annie noted the game’s out-of-whack humor with an appreciative smile, then turned back toward Megan to resume their meandering conversation.
“So I’ve told you how much it hurt when Pete backed off from me, and you’ve told me how much it hurt your FBI director when you backed off from him,” she said. “Does that about cover things?”
Megan looked at her across the barroom table.
“The story thus far,” she said. “Sounds simple.”
“Mm-hmm,” Annie said. “But feels complicated.”
Megan nodded.
“I’ll drink to that,” she said.
“Here, here,” Annie said.
The women raised their tumblers of Barbayannis Aphrodite ouzo, cl
inked, and took long sips.
Loose, glassy-eyed, they sat quietly at the table, picking away at plates of olives, sliced hydroponic tomatoes, and cheese to moderate the ouzo’s strong licorice flavor and absorb enough alcohol to keep their heads barely afloat. At somewhere around eighty or ninety proof, the liqueur was CC’s recreational drink of choice, perfect for shaking off the cold and remedying cabin fever.
“Anyway, here’s a question. Well, actually two questions.” Annie had snatched at a drifting thread of thought. “You’ve been at Cold Corners . . . how long now? Three months?”
“Three months, twelve days”—Megan paused, checked her wristwatch—“fourteen hours.”
“Three months plus then.” Annie said. “I’m curious . . . what’s the one thing you miss most about home?”
Megan shrugged.
“Easy,” she said. “My kitchen.”
Annie flapped a dismissive hand in the air.
“Come on, be serious,” she urged. “I’m asking as somebody who had hopes of being the first woman colonist on Mars.”
Megan shrugged again.
“I’m completely serious,” she said. “I like to cook.”
“Cook . . .”
“And bake.”
“Bake . . .”
“European pastries, especially croissants,” Megan said, gulping more ouzo. Her voice was a little dreamy. “Maybe because making the crusts is such a challenge. About two years ago I had the kitchen professionally re-modeled with all commercial appliances. My range is the best. It’s one of those great big stainless-steel jobs . . . dual-fuel, you know. Six gas burners, an electric oven that keeps the temperature right where you set it.”
Annie looked at her a moment. Then she suddenly ducked her head, clapping a hand over her mouth.
Megan leaned forward. The damn ouzo, she thought guiltily. There were more than a few staffers who could down it like lemonade without showing any effects, but poor Annie was a vacationer, only a few hours out of a helicopter from Amundsen-Scott. How could Megan have even considered suggesting that she order it?
