Zodiac Station

Thirty-four

Franklin was on his feet. He crossed to the phone on the wall and dialled Santiago.

‘You still got the guard on Anderson’s room?’

‘Affirmative, Captain.’

‘Page him to tell him I’m coming.’

On the bed, Eastman had sat up. His hungry, hollow face stared at Franklin like the grim reaper.

‘Anderson’s here?’

‘We found him on the ice.’

‘You locked him up?’

‘He’s secure.’

‘I hope you chained him down.’

‘I’m going to check on him now.’

Eastman swung his legs off the bed and stood up. The blankets fell in a heap on the floor. ‘I want to see that cocksucker.’

Franklin pointed to the IV drip. ‘He’s going nowhere. You need to take it easy.’

‘Fuck easy.’ Grimacing, Eastman ripped off the Elastoplast strip and pulled the needle out of his arm. Blood welled out of the hole but he didn’t seem to notice. The tube dangled limp, oozing fluid on the floor.

‘He’s a spy who damn near murdered every man on Zodiac to cover his tracks. You bet your ass I’m coming.’

Franklin didn’t like to think how many regulations he was breaking, bringing a hypothermia patient through his ship in bare feet and a smock. Then again, if it turned out he’d unwittingly harboured a mass murderer working for the Russians, he wasn’t going to be short of explaining to do.

‘Did you find Greta?’ Eastman must barely have been able to stand upright, but he never dropped a step back.

‘Not yet. It was one in a million Anderson found us.’

‘Bullshit. You really think that? You were his way out. Heroic survivor, walking across the ice. No one left to spill his secret. He knew exactly where you were. If you search, you’ll probably find he ditched that Sno-Cat a half-mile from your boat. Unless he drove it into a hole in the ice.’

‘What about Greta?’

‘Maybe he killed her too. No witnesses.’

‘My pilot reported he’d heard something that sounded like an emergency beacon out on the ice. I sent a crew to take a look. Could be Greta.’

‘I hope you sent them armed.’

Eastman put his arm to his mouth and sucked off some blood from the IV hole. Franklin waited for him at the bottom of the next flight of stairs. Suddenly, his pager started buzzing. Before he could look at it, someone burst through the door on the deck above and came sliding down the stairs three at a time.

Only one man aboard the Terra Nova hit the stairs that hard.

‘Ops?’

Santiago came around the corner, swinging himself on the rail for maximum velocity. He stopped a couple of inches short of the Captain, breathing hard.

‘What is it?’

‘Anderson’s gone.’