Changing of the Guard

34

A week after his meeting with Cox, nothing new had developed on that front. The constant surveillance — which was costing a considerable amount of his budget — had not produced so much as a glimpse of Natadze and Cox together.

Thorn invited Marissa to dinner. He chose a small but sophisticated place where they could talk. He wanted to get to know her better, but he also wanted her take on some things that were bothering him, and he wanted them both without interruption.

After they had eaten and were lingering over coffee, he turned the conversation back to the party they’d attended. “You stood and listened to him taunt us,” he said. “We know he is guilty, but we don’t have the proof.”

“What do we know that he’s guilty of?” she said.

“He had at least one person we know of killed, albeit that one was a Russian agent and not a great loss to the world. And he had somebody shoot Jay Gridley — though he survived. The only thing that makes sense is that he was afraid of something Jay was working on, and my guess is that he’s listed on that file of Soviet agents — that would explain him having the Russian taken out. It doesn’t make much sense, a rich man spying for the Communists, but nothing else computes. The man was a spy. Maybe he still is.”

He sighed. “I’m sure he did other things at least that bad along the way, but we don’t have what we need to get him.”

“That’s how it works sometimes,” Marissa said. She paused. “Let me tell you a story.”

“Another story? You ought to have your own show on PBS,” he said. “ ‘Marissa the Wise Woman Speaks.’ ”

“That’s true, I should. Good of you to acknowledge it.”

He laughed.

She said, “Where there’s a will, there’s usually a way. We’re tropical creatures, our bodies are designed for warm climates, grasslands, trees. But we’ve come up with clothes that let us walk around at the South Pole, created machines that let us cover great distances at speed, allow us to cross land, the oceans — or to go deep under water, if we want. We’ve even been to the moon, through a cold vacuum where you’d die in seconds unprotected.”

“Yeah, we’re adaptable. So?”

“So, we don’t always come up with the ultimate answer, but for every question, we usually come up with something. Consider the mata-you.”

“What’s a mata-you?”

“Nothing’s the matter with me. What’s a matter you?”

He laughed again.

“One born every minute. Okay, let’s talk about snow runners.”

He took a sip of his coffee. “Okay, I’ll bite, what is a snow runner? Some kind of extreme sport?”

“Back in the hot summer days before refrigeration you usually drank your beer warm. If you wanted something to plop into your drink to cool it, you had three choices: Wait for winter; collect and store a whole lot of ice in a cool dark place during the winter, like a cave or an ice house; or go to where there was natural ice and fetch it. In temperate or even tropical countries, you can usually find such places.”

Thorn considered it for a moment. “Mountains,” he said.

“Right,” she said. “So while it might be ninety in the shade down in the flats, five or ten thousand feet up the local hills, there could be snow on the ground, frozen ponds, like that.”

“Uh huh.”

“The Romans, the Europeans, and even the South Americans had snow runners. Say you were the local king of the Incas down in Peru about the time Pizarro came to call, and you had a fondness for cold chocolate in the hot summer. What you did was, you sent your snow runners up to collect it for you. These were fleet-footed fellows who could run for marathon distances at a goodly clip — at least for the part where they got to the base of the mountain. They had to slow down some on the uphill leg, and coming down, they had these big, watertight baskets lined with leaves and wrapped in some kind of insulation, holding forty or fifty pounds of densely packed snow or ice chipped from a frozen stream, depending on the boss’s tastes. The stuff would start to melt pretty quick once you were below the freezing level, of course, so you had to be fairly swift. By the time you got back to the temple, or wherever the king liked to hang out, much of it would be melted, so you’d be heading back up the mountain soon, and if the king was having a party, well, you’d be hustling.”

“A busy life.”

“Kind of like being a mail carrier,” she said. “Lots of exercise outdoors, and the pay was relatively good. The snow runners would have eaten well, they needed to be in shape. But my point, Tommy, is that you might not be able to get at him directly, but it’s like ice in your drink in the summer. You can find a way if you want it bad enough.”

He sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right. You just need to use that sharp brain of yours to come up with something that will do the job.”

He nodded. She was right, of course. If only it were as easy as she made it sound.