Hot Ice

15

In the hall, Harvor tried the number the nurse had given him, fuming when he reached the doctor’s voice mail. “These doctors! They think they may come and go as they please! Ever since Iceland’s financial crisis a few years ago when the number of free hospitals was reduced, the doctors have forgotten they work for the state, that they are required to be on call twenty-four hours a day. Shameful!”

If you think Iceland’s MDs are hard to get in touch with, Jason thought, try an American doc on a weekend.

“Exactly where is this place where the man in there was found?” he asked the commissioner.

Harvor was still distracted by the independence of his country’s medical profession. “In an area of the glacier called Geitlandsjökull, the southern part of the glacier. But why? … Surely you are not planning on going there?”

“Why not? We can’t get any information from the man in there.” Jason gestured toward the hospital room.

“But as soon as I can reach the doctor—”

“Which may be after dark.” Jason glanced out of a window at the end of the hall. “If it gets dark.”

Apparently despairing of reaching the doctor, the commissioner returned his cell phone to wherever it had come from. “What do you expect to find there?” he asked suspiciously.

“I don’t know,” Jason replied, “but we sure aren’t finding out by standing around here.”

“How do you plan to get there? It is a two-hour drive and the rental-car agencies are closed. It is almost midnight.”

Jason grinned. “I thought you might want to take a look yourself, possibly before the shooter returns.”

Harvor looked at Jason levelly. “What makes you think he will return?”

“The man in there, Karloff, whatever his real name is, was trying to tell me something.”

“Who shot him, no doubt.”

“Maybe, but I think he was giving me directions.”

“To what?”

“We won’t know if we don’t go there. Besides, who knows how long it will be before you have a chance to investigate another shooting in Iceland?”

Jason’s stomach growled, reminding him that he’d had nothing to eat on the plane. “Is there a place I can get a quick bite around here?”

“Bite?”

“Something to eat.”

“There is a very fine restaurant down the street, serves Icelandic specialties.” Harvor looked at his watch. “May be closed by now.”

It was.

Jason tried to ignore his complaining stomach. Reading the menu posted in the window in English and a number of other languages helped assuage his hunger: fresh herring, salt herring, broiled herring, baked herring, fried herring. And, of course, herring croquettes.

He returned to the hospital, convinced that, in this case, hunger was the better alternative.

The ride in the Range Rover took closer to three hours actually. They were no more than a few kilometers out of Reykjavík when the road went from four lanes to two to gravel. It was getting dark now, a dusklike light that would be as close to night as the summer months permitted. Other than an occasional truck headed into the city, there was no other traffic.

Since Jason found it impossible to sleep on airplanes, even in the Gulfstream’s small but comfortable bedroom, he had been awake for more than twenty-four hours. But cars were not aircraft. There was no irrational fear that something might go wrong at thirty thousand feet. The steady sound of the engine, the monotonous hum of the tires on the road were a lullaby. He dozed off, coming awake with a jolt when the car stopped. At first, he was unaware of what he was seeing. The huge white mass shimmering in the twilight seemed luminescent, almost magical, as though an iceberg had floated out of the North Sea and onto land.

“This is it,” Harvor said, getting out of the car, a flashlight in his hand. “Come, I will show you where the shepherd found him.”

Jason was thankful for the heavy sweater as he pulled it tighter around him. “You know the location?”

The policeman stopped, turning. “We may not be as sophisticated as your American police but we do investigate thoroughly, Mr. Peters. The officer who first responded made a map of the location as well as photographs of the scene. Can you see your way without a light?”

“Not well, but I’d prefer not to turn on the light just yet.”

“Oh?”

“In case someone else is in the neighborhood, I’d just as soon not pinpoint our position.”

Jason could see the gray blur of Harvor’s face as the commissioner stared at him a moment. “As you wish. Mind your step.”

Jason was doing just that: watching where he placed his feet. The scree left by the retreating glacier made the path treacherous, all the more so because it was difficult to see in the half-light. He was so intent on trying to avoid tripping over the rubble that he was almost upon it before he saw it.

Something made him look up. Twilight was beginning to fade into the twenty-hour day. Limned against the dove-gray sky of early dawn towered a form vaguely familiar but just out of the reach of Jason’s memory.

He stopped and the commissioner, hearing no steps behind him, turned around. “What is it?”

“That rock formation.” Jason pointed.

Harvor’s voice bore a tinge of annoyance. “There are many rock formations here. The ice cap carves …”

Jason tuned him out. In daylight, he would have missed it, but in the half dark where sight was not three-dimensional, the silhouette had a square, Romanesque tower above … above … a church!

He had heard Boris correctly.

But what had he meant?

Jason was pointing. “We need to take a look at those rocks.”

Harvor reached into a pocket and produced a sheet of paper. “I can’t be sure in this light, but it looks like from the map the investigating officer found your friend there.”

Both men were silent as they climbed the steep slope. Once at the top, they were surrounded by the formation itself.

“We cannot see without the light,” Harvor observed, stating the obvious. “The rocks will block the natural light until the sun is higher in the sky.”

An event Jason was unsure took place in these latitudes.

“OK, let’s take a look.”

The policeman played the flashlight’s beam across rocks so black Jason guessed the blood from Boris’s wound would be invisible.

“Can you tell from the diagram exactly where in this stone jumble he was found?”

Before Harvor could answer, something twinkled in the light to Jason’s left. “Play the light over there.”

The flashlight’s beam revealed a space between two of the huge rocks, a narrow passage. Just beyond, something sparkled. Jason sucked in his stomach and squeezed through.

From behind him, Harvor protested, “I don’t think I can get through there.”

The portly policeman was right. “Go around that pillar to your right.”

As Harvor came puffing up, his light picked up something shiny.

Jason squatted but did not pick it up. “Looks like a bullet casing. I’d guess nine millimeter.”

Harvor leaned over. “You have experience in such things?”

Jason was turning it over with a ballpoint pen, careful not to touch it. Inside what amounted to a roofless room of stone, the ejected shell could not have gone far. The shot must have been fired within a few feet of here.

He stood, extending he brass shell on the tip of the pen for the policeman’s inspection. “Your investigating officer must have missed it.”

“Or it wasn’t here when he was,” the cop offered defensively.

How many Icelanders own handguns, Jason thought, let alone went about firing them indiscriminately?

But he said, “You might want to keep that in case there are partial prints on it.”

Harvor looked at him suspiciously, his expression now visible in the increasing light. “You did not answer my question, Mr. Peters: You have experience in such things?”

“I watch Law & Order.”

Harvor was clearly making a decision as to whether to let the matter rest as Jason slowly turned around, his eyes searching the stone chamber. Wordlessly, he took the flashlight from the policeman’s hand, shining it across the face of the rock that surrounded them.

There was a noise Jason could not believe he was hearing. It sounded like, but could not be … a cell phone’s beep. Following the persistent chirps, Jason came to a crevice that gave back the light from his flash. In one step, Jason was reaching into it. His groping fingers touched something cold, metal that had absorbed the ambient temperature of the brief night.

His hand closed around it and he drew it out. A cell phone.

He flipped it open. “Yes?”

The reply was both distinctly British and, equally certain, irritated. “See here, Karloff! We are not paying you to ignore our calls. I’ve been trying to reach you for hours!”

“I’m sorry,” Jason mumbled, trying to imitate Boris’s voice. “I’ve been busy. I—”

The tone went from annoyed to wary. “You’re not Karloff. Where is he?”

“Er, indisposed at the moment. With whom am I speaking?”

There was a moment of silence before the phone went dead. The tiny screen displayed a number Jason recognized as being somewhere in the British Isles. He committed it to a memory long ago trained to recall names, words, and numbers.

“Who was that?” Harvor demanded.

“Someone who clearly didn’t want to speak with me.”

“He gave no name?”

“That is correct.”

Harvor reached for the phone. “We can determine the source of the call.”

Reluctantly, Jason handed it over as he stuck his other hand back into the fissure. This time he touched another, much smaller, piece of metal and what his fingers told him was a piece of string. No, a twig.

Harvor extended the hand not holding the phone. “Those, too, Mr. Peters.”

“And I will take both those and the cell phone,” said a voice.

Harvor and Jason turned to see a man holding a gun. His face could have been the surface of the moon it was so pocked with scars. Acne? Jason thought he recognized the black matte polymer of a Russian made GSh-18, the original, if brief, replacement for the Makarov as the standard Soviet military sidearm. The fact the man had his finger curled around the square trigger guard instead of the trigger itself reminded him the weapon had a Glock-like safety that was automatically released when the trigger was squeezed.

The stranger was no amateur.

“Unless you are a police officer, you have no permit for that weapon,” Harvor said with a huff. “You can be sent to prison for even possessing such a thing.”

Jason didn’t take his eyes from the stranger. “I don’t think he’s overly worried about the possibility. I’d suggest you do as he asks.”

The man gave a sharklike smile exposing teeth the color of old ivory. “And I suggest, Commissioner, that you do as Mr. Peters says.”

The English was near perfect, yet there was an accent. Russian? Eastern European?

Jason kept his face frozen, unwilling to register surprise the man with the gun knew his name.

Harvor did not. “How did you …?” He faced Jason indignantly. “Did you know this man was here?”

Jason shook his head. “No, but it was a good guess.”

The intruder extended the hand not holding the gun, motioning for the demanded items. “The phone and whatever else you found. Questions later.”

There might not be a “later.” Jason had no doubt this man had intended to kill Boris, most likely to protect whatever secrets the camera-enabled phone, the twig, and the scrap of metal might reveal. Why would he spare two strangers who discovered what Boris had hidden? As soon as he had what he wanted, it was probable Jason and Harvor would suffer the same fate.

Jason swore at himself silently. The Glock was still in his bag in the car. He had hesitated to strap on the holster in front of Maria, listen to her reproachful reminder that this was a mission to get information, nonviolent.

Harvor was extending the phone. If Jason was going to act, now was the time, gun or not.