The Arctic Event

Chapter Twenty-five

Wednesday Island Station

“Shouldn’t you have a warrant or something?” Doctor Trowbridge asked suddenly.

Distracted, Randi looked up from the row of six identical Dell laptops on the laboratory worktable. “What?”

“These computers contain personal documents and information. Shouldn’t you have some kind of a warrant before you go rummaging around in them?”

Randi shrugged and turned back to the computers, tapping a series of on buttons. “Damned if I know, Doctor.”

“Well, you are a government…agent of some nature.”

“I don’t recall saying that.”

The six screens glowed, cycling through their start-up sequences. Of the six, only two demanded access code words: those belonging to Dr. Hasegawa and Stefan Kropodkin.

“Still, before I can allow you to violate the privacy of my expedition’s staff members there must be some kind of…”

Randi sighed, fixing a baleful gaze on Trowbridge. “First, Doctor, I don’t have anyplace to get a warrant from. Secondly, I don’t have anybody to give a warrant to, and finally, I don’t really give a shit! Okay?”

Trowbridge subsided in outraged bafflement for a moment, turning to stare out of the lab window.

Turning back to the computers, Randi methodically set to work, checked the four open systems first, skimming through the e-mail files and address lists. Nothing sprang out at her from the stored correspondence. Professional and personal business, letters from wives, families, and friends. The English boy, Ian, was apparently on very good terms with at least three different girlfriends, and the American girl, Kayla, was discussing a marriage with a fiancé.

No one seemed to be openly chatting up any known terrorist groups or exchanging missives with the Syrian Ministry of Defense. Which, of course, was meaningless. There were any number of covert contact and relay nodes for such organizations infesting the Internet, just as there were any number of simple transposition codes and tear-sheet ciphers that could be used to mask a covert communication. But these days there were better ways to go about things.

Randi moved on, cross-checking the control panels and programming screens and the memory reserves of the laptops. What she was looking for could be hidden, but it would also absorb a fair-sized chunk of hard drive space.

Again nothing sprang out at her. That left the locked-out laptops.

Getting up from the stool she had been using, she stretched for a moment and crossed to her pack that she had lugged in from the helicopter. Opening it, she took out a software wallet and removed a numbered compact disk. Returning to the laboratory table, she popped open the CD drive of the first locked computer and inserted the silvery disk.

The locked laptop made the error of checking the identification of the inserted disk, and in seconds the sophisticated NSA cracking program was raping its operating system. The desktop’s welcome screen came up, the system’s lockout protocols erased and supplanted.

Randi began to repeat the process with the second laptop. “Dr. Trowbridge, please don’t come up behind me like that,” she murmured, not taking her eyes from the screens. “It makes me nervous.”

“Excuse me,” he replied, his footsteps withdrawing toward the stool in the corner of the laboratory. “I was just thinking about going over to the bunkhouse for a cup of coffee.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. There’s a jar of instant coffee, some mugs, and a pot for heating water in the cupboard beside the coal stove.”

The academic’s voice grew heated as well. “So I gather I’m under suspicion of something as well?”

“Of course you are.”

“I do not understand any of this!” It was a vocal explosion.

God, and she didn’t have time for this! She spun around on the lab stool. “Neither do we, Doctor! That’s the problem! We don’t understand how word about the anthrax got off this island. Nor do we understand who may be coming for it. Until we do we are going to be as suspicious as hell of everybody! What you apparently don’t understand is that entire national populations can be at stake here!”

She turned back to the computers. There was a long silence from the far end of the lab, followed by the clatter of coffee paraphernalia.

Dr. Hasegawa used Japanese kanji script on her personal computer, and it wasn’t difficult to learn the great secret she was shyly locking away from the world. The female meteorologist was also a budding novelist. Randi, who was as capable in kanji as she was in several other languages, scanned a page or two of what was obviously a sweeping and rather sultry historical romance set in the days of the shogunate. Actually she’d read worse.

As for the computer of Stefan Kropodkin, he conveniently used English, and there was nothing out of the way on his system beyond a not excessive amount of downloaded cyber porn.

But there was one blip on his scope. Almost nothing in the way of personal e-mail traffic had been saved.

“Dr. Trowbridge, what do you know about Stefan Kropodkin?”

“Kropodkin? A brilliant young man. A physics major from McGill University.”

“That was in his file, along with the fact he holds a Slovakian passport and is in Canada on a student visa. Do you know anything about his family? Was any kind of a background check done on him?”

“What kind of a background check were we supposed to do?” Trowbridge swore softly as he struggled with the lid of the jar of powdered coffee. “This was a purely scientific research expedition. As for his family, he doesn’t have one. The boy is a refugee, a war orphan from the former Yugoslavia.”

“Really?” Randi sat back on her stool. “Then who is financing his education?”

“He’s on a scholarship.”

“What kind of a scholarship?”

Trowbridge spooned coffee crystals into his mug. “It was established by a group of concerned Middle European businessmen specifically for deserving refugee youth from the Balkan conflicts.”

“And let me guess: this scholarship was established shortly before Stefan Kropodkin applied for it, and so far, he’s the only deserving refugee youth to receive it.”

Trowbridge hesitated, his spoon poised over his steaming cup. “Well, yes. How did you know?”

“Call it a hunch.”

Randi refocused on Kropodkin’s laptop. Again, that unaccounted-for block of hard drive space she was looking for wasn’t present.

She bit her lip. All right, somebody was being smart again. If it wasn’t locked up in one of the computers, it must be somewhere else. Where might that be?

She closed her eyes, resting her hands on her thighs. Let’s say he’s being very, very smart and very careful. Where would he hide it?

In his personal effects? No, there would be a risk in that. The same with carrying it on his person. It would be elsewhere.

Maybe where it would be employed.

Randi slipped off her stool. Crossing to her cold-weather gear on the wall hooks, she took her thin leather inner gloves out of her parka pocket. Donning them, she brushed past Trowbridge, recrossing the lab and entering the radio shack.

It was little more than a large closet containing only the radio console, a single swivel chair, a small filing cabinet for hard copy, and a second small cabinet containing tools and electronic spares.

It wouldn’t be inside the radio chassis or in the cabinets, simply because other people might have reason to poke around in there.

The floor, ceiling, exterior walls, and interior partition were solid slabs of insulated fiber ply; the window, a sealed double thermopane. No hiding places. But where the wall and ceiling panels joined, there was a narrow ledge above man height and maybe an inch in depth. Carefully Randi started to feel her way around it.

When her fingertips finally came to rest on it, she said, “Got you!” aloud.

“What is it?” Trowbridge had been watching her actions from a wary distance.

Randi carefully held up a chewing gum-sized stick of gray plastic. “A remote computer hard drive. Somebody hid it in here where it would be nice and convenient.”

Randi returned to the lab table. Popping the end cap off the mini hard drive, she plugged it into the USB port of the nearest computer and called up the removable-disk access prompt.

“Got you!” she repeated with greater exaltation. Randi lanced around to find Doctor Trowbridge trying to ease a look at the screen. “Be my guest, Doctor,” she said, stepping aside.

“What is it?” he repeated, staring at the title screen.

“It’s an Internet security program,” Randi replied, “used to encrypt e-mails and Internet files that you don’t want the world at large to be able to read. This one is a very sophisticated and expensive piece of work, totally state-of-the-art. It’s available on the open market, but usually you’d see something like this only in the hands of a very security-conscious business firm or government agency.”

Randi’s gloved fingers danced over the keyboard for a moment. “There’s a secured document file in here as well. But even with the program, I can’t open it without the personalized encryption key. That will be somebody else’s job.”

For the first time she looked around at Trowbridge. “Why would anyone at this station need something like this?”

“I don’t know,” Trowbridge said, all trace of his former belligerence erased. “There would be no reason. This was all open research. Nothing secretive was being done here.”

“That you know of.” Randi delicately removed the minidrive from the computer and dropped it into a plastic evidence envelope.

“Do you think…” He hesitated. “Do you think this has something to do with the disappearance of the expedition staff?”

“I think this is the way the word about the bioweapons aboard the Misha 124 got out,” Randi replied. “But this leaves us an even more interesting question.”

“What’s that, Ms. Russell?” For the moment, in the face of this discovery, they were at a truce.

“This island has been a totally sealed environment for over six months. Somebody brought this thing here long before that bomber was ever found, for some totally different reason. Its use in this situation is a coincidence, not a cause.”

Trowbridge started to protest. “But if it’s not for the bomber, why would anyone have a reason…”

“As I said, Doctor, that’s a very interesting question.”

Rosen Trowbridge had no answer. Instead he turned to the little coal stove with the little pot of water steaming atop it. “Would…would you care for a cup of coffee, Ms. Russell?”