“I do like that part.”
“This is exactly what I told Karen that I wanted to do this morning. Exactly what I said when we were sitting in our kitchen and…”
My mouth slammed shut. I thought back to the early morning, before the quarantine began. I went over our talk, starting in the bedroom, moving into the kitchenette, rambling over my theories. Laying it out, just as, in the privacy of that hut, I’d been laying out thoughts for days.
No, no, no, no, no.
There’s no way someone could have heard, I thought.
Then I thought, A four-digit combination lock to the front door. Hell, half the time the neighbors would just walk in when we were there. How long does it take to install one of those stick-on mikes? Thirty seconds?
Homza said, “If I give you what you want, you’ll need some backup, some way to talk to me.”
“Major Nakamura. But that’s it. You, me, and Eddie.”
Homza said, “If I do this, Colonel Ng will still be all over you. This isn’t a pass. You’re a cover-up suspect until you’re cleared. All three of you, actually. Her, too.”
“I lost it back there, but I’m over it.”
“No you’re not.”
“For now, I mean.”
He stared at me, making up his mind. He hummed softly for several seconds. Not a tune, just a single flat note. He was a humming thinker.
I pushed. “Sir, Atlanta will analyze the samples. Police on forensics. So give Amanda Ng what she wants. You were probably going to take me off investigations anyway. We both know that whole chat back there with her was an act.”
Homza turned red.
“My condolences,” he said. “Okay, do it. Now get out.”
If you’re in charge of quarantining an American city, and if you’ve ordered electronic jamming across town, you’re going to give yourself the ability to call the White House. A spot free of jamming. Encrypted override equipment. A way to phone home if no one else can.
My two Ranger babysitters stood twenty feet off as I punched in numbers. I had no doubt that Homza would have Lieutenant Colonel Ng double-check whoever I called. I was on the weather tower three hundred yards beyond the lab building, on a steel platform twenty feet above the tundra. At my back was an unmanned trailer-cabin filled with passive electronics enabling NASA and NOAA to monitor Arctic weather at four altitudes, as well as tundra methane release, incoming ultraviolet light, outgoing albedo effect (heat radiation back to space), and probably about nine hundred other streams of information normally forwarded to Washington, New Mexico, the Pentagon, the Energy Department, or Woods Hole.
“Prezant College Science Department! Melissa speaking.”
I turned my back to the wind to make reception clearer. I told the secretary — she sounded about fifty — that I was a Marine colonel phoning from Alaska, that this call constituted an emergency, that I needed to talk to the head of the department right away.
“I’m sorry, but Dr. Willoughby is in a thesis defense. It should be over around noon and then she has lunch with the provost after that.”
“Did you hear me say emergency? Get her on the line!”
The voice that replaced hers five minutes later — she’d had to physically go find Dr. Willoughby down the hall — was sixtyish, female, and southwestern. This voice was heavy with shock and sorrow. I felt sympathy from her, cooperation.
“I’m Eliza Willoughby, Colonel. You’re in Barrow right now? You knew the Harmons then?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Awful, awful, awful. I’ve known Ted and Cathy for more than thirteen years. I’ve had them to my home. Kelley plays—played—lacrosse with my nieces. I don’t know what I can tell you that might help you figure out what happened, but please ask anything you want.”
I asked for a rundown of the Harmon project. She hesitated a moment, then gave the same basic explanation that Kelley had in her diary, and that her boyfriend, Leon, had told me at the Heritage Center. The Arctic was warming. Species were dying out. Scientists were behind the curve in understanding what was there in the first place.
“Not enough studies have been done,” she said. “So the Harmons basically collected everything at their nine sites. Then they shipped samples back and spent the year analyzing.”
“Any practical or commercial applications to this?”
“Like I said. Basic work. To find out what’s there.”
“And the Norway part?”
I heard a soft intake of breath. I was not sure if that constituted surprise on her part, or more thinking.
“Oh, you know about that,” she said.
“Tell me what you know about it, please.”
“Well, I guess you could say there is possible commercial application on that end. We’ve partnered up with the Arctic University in Tromso. Tromso is Norway’s Arctic capital, you know. Ever been there, Colonel?”
I curbed my impatience. I didn’t need a travel log. I said, politely, “No, ma’am.”
“Call me Liz. Well, Tromso lies at the same latitude as Barrow,” she said. “But what a difference! Glass cathedral. Excellent hotels. Fine restaurants and a splendid university. Lovely as a Currier and Ives postcard. Just top-notch.”
“What’s the connection with the Harmon project?”
“The Norwegians are way ahead of us in the Arctic, as is every other northern country. When they collect biological samples — they’re not interested in the DNA yet — they check commercial applications first.”
“Please explain.”
“Drugs. You probably know that many useful drugs — natural substances — have come from tropical rainforests. The rosy periwinkle, for instance, a flowering bush. Those alkaloids upped the cure rate on childhood leukemia to eighty percent. A miracle, really, from the jungle.”
“And in the Arctic?” I said, looking out at the expanse of white stretching south for hundreds of miles.
“That’s the point. Nobody knows what’s there yet,” she said. “So the Norwegians have bioprospecting companies. They go out on the ocean, in big ships. They suck up everything on the bottom and grind it up and test the compounds against all kinds of ailments. Systematic.”
I tried to envision an enormous ship plunging through white-capped Arctic waves off of Europe, 3 A.M., floodlights shining down from A-frame winches, nets hauled from the turgid sea, filled with life.
“They test everything?” I said. “Plants? Fish?”
“Mostly bottom life, but some fish, test it to see if it’s worth analyzing. They grind tissue into compounds they mix in with diseases, bacteria, virus. If they find an application, a possible drug, if the target microbe dies, they decipher DNA. You see in the tropics, researchers have it easier. You’ve got more people there. Folktales or shamans identify cures. When tropical researchers go into a jungle, they find locals, ask questions, track stories, and send samples back to labs.”
“But in the Arctic?”
“Impossible, especially a mile down in the sea. The Norwegians just grid the sea and suck it all up and test.”
“Sounds like a long process.”
I envisioned her nodding, getting into the academics of it. “Laborious, yes. It takes months just to analyze what you pull up on one trip. But they’ve had successes! A herpes drug came out of Tromso last year. They’ve got another compound that shows promise against nerve damage, and a product out now that does a pretty good job against acne. All new! So when they approached us, about sharing our Arctic work, we signed an agreement with them.”
“With the university there? Or a company?”
“It’s connected there. It’s socialist. Better, if you ask me. Look at their health-care system! The best in—”