Zodiac Station

Twenty-eight

I made it about five minutes in front of the storm. Sky so black, I needed my headlight; wind blowing the ground snow into blizzards that reached halfway back to the clouds. It almost ripped me off the stairs before I could get through the door.

Annabel saw me the minute I got in. So much for sneaking back.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be locked in here with the rest of us?’

‘Nice to see you too.’

I pulled the empty bottle out of my pocket and tossed it to her. ‘You recognise this?’

‘Have you been stealing my dye bottles? There’s no alcohol in them, you know.’

‘I found it up at Mine Eight, near Vitangelsk.’

She shrugged. ‘Not guilty.’

Interesting. ‘Sure?’

‘There’s no glacier up there.’ She looked at my snowmobile suit, covered in a fine frosting of blown snow. ‘You’ve come a long way. I hope Quam doesn’t find out.’

I took off the suit and clipped my rifle in the gun rack. Part of me wondered if I shouldn’t hold on to it.

‘I’ve been on a snipe hunt,’ I told her. ‘Rare Arctic bird, very hard to catch. It’s endangered, actually.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ she said.

With everyone locked up, you couldn’t move an inch without running into someone. Halfway down the hall, I met Greta coming out of the radio room.

‘How’s your leg?’ she asked.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I slapped my thigh; I must have looked like some kind of idiot. ‘Leg’s fine.’

‘Your telescope. The strut.’

‘Right.’ The lie was so old I’d forgotten it. ‘All fixed. Thanks.’

At the best of times, Greta has a way of looking at you like you don’t exist. Just then, I was certain she saw straight through me.

‘Can I have my bolt cutters back?’

‘I’ll drop them by the shop when the storm’s over.’

‘Quam wants you.’

I bet he did. Quam’s the kid who jerks off, then lies awake all night praying his dick won’t fall off. Ever since I left, he’d have been wishing he hadn’t let me go, worrying how it would look if I got buried by an avalanche or eaten by a bear.

‘I’ll say “hi” when I have the chance.’

I went into my lab before anyone else could grab me. I had a lot to do — but most of all I needed to think. I sat at my desk, listening to the wind howl through the masts above my room. It snapped off pieces of ice and scattered them on the roof, right over my head. It made a sound like a kid tipping out a box of Legos.

There’s an innocent explanation for everything, if you shut your eyes tight enough. But I wasn’t after innocent explanations.

I started with what happened to Kennedy and the big guy in the yellow coat who chased him up the cableway tower. I believed Malick when he said it couldn’t have been one of his people. He was as surprised as me: the antenna, the mine, the cableway. If he was one of the bad guys, he could have shot me when he had the chance. Or let me break my leg falling down a coal hopper in the cableway station.

It had to be someone at Zodiac.

It wasn’t me or Kennedy. After the scene in the cave, Ash crying over a dead bear, I doubted it was him. That left Quam, Fridge, Annabel, Greta and Jensen.

I wrote them all down on a sheet of paper, thought a minute, then put Anderson on the list. He said he’d been in bed all day, but had anyone seen him? Unlikely he’d have made it out, with his head so banged up, but unlikely isn’t impossible.

After another minute, I drew a line connecting Anderson and Greta. I remembered the way they’d both raced off the day he arrived. They’d found Hagger’s body, no doubt about that. But was he dead when they got there?

I added Hagger’s name, off to one side, and put a line between him and Anderson. Then another one between Hagger and Greta. Everyone knew he’d been screwing her.

I’d made a triangle. I sat back and wondered what it meant. Loose ice jittered across the roof. I began to wish I hadn’t asked Greta for the bolt cutters. Had she guessed why I wanted them? Did Anderson know who’d taken his key?

I got out my laptop and opened up the sample I’d grabbed from the antenna. I ran it through some software, cleaning it up and zooming in. Even in that short clip, there was a hell of a lot of data going through the pipe. It took some work, but I had the tools, and the closer I looked the more I recognised repeat patterns in the signal. That gave me an idea what I was looking for.

1010211201020012010201110212.

I was back where I began. The same pattern I’d snatched out of the air before. Now I knew where it went to, at least. I ought to compare it with the original intercept. Except, I’d left that with Tom Anderson.

I stared at the triangle on my paper again. Hagger — Greta — Anderson. Why did Anderson come here? Why did it all go to shit the moment he arrived?

I wrote down another name, Luxor Life Sciences, and drew a dotted line connecting it to Hagger. Biology — biologist. After a minute’s thinking, I added a question mark next to the line.

Companies leave records. I opened my browser and searched for Luxor Life Sciences. The storm made the connection run slow, like the dark ages of dial-up. I clocked it at nearly two minutes before the search results came up.

None of them looked like the magic bullet. No corporate website or Wikipedia entry. I clicked on one of the links at random, then stood. I could get a cup of coffee while it loaded.

Something hit the roof so hard, the whole room shook. I ducked. I heard more thuds, ringing on the steel roof like footsteps. Some monster piece of ice must have broken off of something.

The screen flashed. ERROR — THE CONNECTION WAS LOST.

I hit ‘reload’. After a long wait, the machine flashed up the same message again. I tried my email. Couldn’t connect. That bump must have knocked out the communications antenna.

Fuck.

‘Bad day?’

Kennedy came in and sat down on my spare chair. He was holding a piece of paper.

‘Where have you been all day?’ he said. He sounded pissy. Jesus, it was like being thirteen again.

‘Did something come up?’

‘I should say so. Anderson worked out Hagger’s password. He checked his email.’

That might be something I could use. ‘And …?’

He handed me a printout. ‘We found this.’

The header said it was to Hagger, from some guy at Cambridge University. Not that you can always trust an email address. The subject said, bold letters, URGENT — NATURE — RETRACTION.

‘Read it,’ said Kennedy.

There was a whole lot more, which I scanned. All I saw was science stuff: chemicals, concentrations, shit I haven’t thought about since AP Chem. The point seemed to be that Hagger had faked the data on a big research paper.

‘I don’t get it,’ I told Kennedy. If Hagger was a fraud, that wasn’t irrelevant. But it wasn’t a smoking gun, either.

‘The time-stamp.’ He pointed to the top of the page. ‘This came in at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning.’ He dragged me down the corridor to the front door and flipped open the field log. ‘You see?’

I read what he wanted to show me. ‘Hagger left the base at nine a.m. So, he never saw the email. So what?’

Kennedy hustled me into the pool room. ‘I spoke to Quam two days ago. He knew about all this, Hagger’s problems, the retraction.’

‘Wasn’t it common knowledge?’

‘That Hagger had been having problems with his data, yes. But a wholesale retraction from the world’s most prestigious journal? That’s a whole different kettle of fish. And look at the message. He says he’s writing in confidence.’

‘You know what academics mean when they say “in confidence”. It means they didn’t post it on their blog. Anyhow, Quam has the administrator password for the whole Zodiac network. He can read anyone’s emails.’

‘That’s it!’ Kennedy thumped the side of the pool table, like I’d just answered the million-dollar question.

‘You want to explain?’

‘When I saw Quam on Wednesday, he told me about the retraction. But he also said he’d brought it up with Hagger. “I told him to his face I was sending him home.” Those were his exact words. “I told him to his face.”’

He was looking at me like he expected the light bulb, like he’d given me everything I needed.

‘Tell me in words of one syllable.’

‘The email came in at eleven a.m. Quam read it, using his master password, and was so shocked he confronted Hagger about it.’

I got it. ‘Except Hagger had already gone up to the glacier.’

‘And never came back.’

I stared at him over the pool table, spinning a ball in place. A heavy gust of wind hit the outside wall. The Platform shivered.

But it wasn’t so cut and dried. ‘Quam was around that afternoon. There’s no way he could have gotten up to the Helbreen and back again in time. Not without the helicopter. And Jensen was out all day.’

Our eyes met. Jensen had already lied once about what he did that day, we both knew it. What if he hadn’t come completely clean?

‘We need to talk to Jensen.’