‘I don’t remember saying that I had a problem with mental arithmetic,’ growled Warner. ‘Look, you made your point. And I’m too tired to argue. Too tired and too cold.’ He grinned at Jack.
Jack clapped him on the shoulder.
‘I thought you were from Chicago,’ he said. ‘It gets pretty cold in the Windy City, doesn’t it, Professor?’
‘Lincoln, just call me Lincoln. Or Link. Professor makes me sound about as old as I feel right now. Actually I was born up the coast from Chicago. Place called Kenosha, Wisconsin. There were three good things that came out of Kenosha, Wisconsin. The first was the road south to Chicago. The second was Orson Welles. And the third was me, Lincoln Orson Warner. Like most folks in Kenosha, my momma, well, she always had a thing for that old fat man.’
The forty-year-old scientist was not dissimilar to the larger-than-life Welles. Tall, slightly overweight, and with a thin moustache, Warner looked like Welles when the actor had played Othello. Physically he made an impact, like someone who could hardly be contained. And, in common with cinema’s wünderkind, there had been nothing in Warner’s background that suggested the precocious scientific talent that, before he was thirty, made the molecular anthropologist was one of the outstanding minds of his generation. Warner had published a number of important books on the genetic implications of the human fossil record and on the biological nature of the human race. Currently he was embarked on constructing a theory to account for why some people were black and some were white. But it was his work with the DNA sequences of Australian Aborigines and orangutans that persuaded Swift that Lincoln Warner would be an invaluable person to have along, in the event they were lucky enough to capture a living specimen: Warner had argued that the mitochondrial DNA suggested aboriginals and orangutans had split at a different time than African man and African apes. From this, he posited that human-like creatures had evolved separately in several different parts of the world and had merged only subsequently. It was as radical a theory as had been constructed in the world of paleoanthropology during the whole of the previous decade.
The arrival of Cody and Warner took the team up to ten, not including the sirdar and his assistant who oversaw the cook boys, mail runners to carry film, and the ten or fifteen porters who came and went between ABC, Chomrong, and Pokhara.
In Pokhara itself — a small village that was the gateway to Nepal’s more popular trails — the expedition and its supplies were administered by Lieutenant Surjabahandur Tuhte who, like Hurké Gurung, was formerly of the Gurkha Rifles. Over a hundred and fifty kilometres away, in Khatmandu, Helen o’connor, a Reuters news reporter, ran the expedition office from her elegant home overlooking Dunbar Square. Fluent in Nepali and Hindustani, Helen maintained good contacts with the government and, as Jack had discovered on several previous occasions, her knowledge of local bureaucracy and, more especially, Nepalese Customs and Excise, was second to none. It was Helen’s good offices they would have to rely on if the Nepalese authorities got wind of the real purpose of the expedition and its forbidden location.
Connected. The digital revolution had made a tremendous difference not just to the computer nerds but also to the intelligence community. Bryan Perrins could keep in direct touch with any agent in the field through one insouciant touch of a mouse at the beginning of his day. Only a few years before, there had existed whole departments of people manning radio receivers, reading signals traffic, analyzing transmissions, and processing intelligence. Today most of those departments had been radically downsized, and Perrins could open his own e-mail tray and read copies of whichever agent’s reports seemed of greatest relevance. Right now he was most interested in receiving the e-mail addressed to HUSTLER that was coming straight from Nepal. He could even send e-mail straight back via a simple RSVP function that saved him from having to use the agent’s codename, which in this case was CASTORP, or his electronic mail number. It was as hands-on a relationship with an agent as anyone had enjoyed since the French minister of war had slept with Mata Hari.
Normally Perrins disapproved of field personnel including jokes in their reports, but when he read the first piece of e-mail filed from the Annapurna Sanctuary, he could hardly resist enjoying CASTORp’s crack that he had ‘no news yeti of what he was there for.’
‘Goddamn bunch of looney tunes,’ laughed Perrins.
He hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was at all proper for him to respond with an equal amount of levity. After all, CASTORP might be risking his life. But it was still early. The guy had only just got there. Why not? A little light relief might be just the encouragement he needed. So Perrins typed an e-mail back:
YOUR REPORT SHOWS AN ABOMINABLE LACK OF GOOD TASTE, IN FUTURE PLEASE REFER TO SNOW-PERSON. HUSTLER.
It would be the last time that CASTORP would cause Bryan Perrins to feel amused.
Jack had no doubt that it was the CIA who had determined to use his expedition as cover for one of their operations. As to what they were up to, his best guess was that it had something to do with the Indo-Pakistan crisis. Despite the cooling-off period, it was still a crisis. There were few well-informed people who did not think that at the end of the three-month period the two sides would be at each other’s throats again. But precisely what the CIA was up to he could only imagine, since the Annapurna Sanctuary was much closer to Nepal’s border with Tibet than to India. A country controlled by Communist China, Tibet was his next best guess in accounting for the interest of the CIA. Tibet had been invaded and occupied by the Chinese in 1950, and since then it had been almost impossible to gain a permit to climb a Himalayan mountain from the Tibetan side. No reason was ever given by the authorities, but ever since he had been in the Himalayas, Jack had heard persistent rumours that the Chinese were using Tibet to build secret factories for the production of nuclear weapons, as well as building missile bases, radar stations, and dumps for the disposal of radioactive waste. Could the reason the CIA wanted to be in the Sanctuary have something to do with China’s nuclear arsenal?
Jack’s third and last guess also involved the Chinese and was the least comfortable proposition of all. It was that the Chinese intended to take advantage of the crisis between India and Pakistan to invade Nepal through Tibet, just as the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan back in 1979.
Jack would gladly have assisted any operation dedicated to preventing a war in India or one that might frustrate any Chinese military ambitions in the region. But mostly he just felt irritated that he and his expedition colleagues were being used.
Having been on previous expeditions with Mac, Jutta, and the sirdar, he felt little reason to distrust any of them. Swift was beyond reproach, for obvious reasons. So Jack reserved his particular scrutiny for Tsering, Jameson, Cody, Warner, and Boyd, thinking it was only a matter of time before one of them would say something that might give himself away.
And when he did. Jack would be ready for him.
Ten
‘Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine...’
Almost as soon as Lincoln Warner and Byron Cody arrived at ABC, the weather closed in. As dusk fell for a second time on the small group of people camped on the glacier basin, near whiteout conditions prevailed and the wind built up in fury until it was a howling, almost animate gale.