I heard a shuffling noise behind me and turned, but no one was there.
Bruce leaned closer, drawing my attention back, “It’s not a lot of money. But Karen said you were quitting the military. Maybe it’s too early to bring this up?”
“No. Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Lots of people get the bug. That Tilda Swann, the Greenpeace woman. I heard she’s staying on to work here.”
I remembered her fired-up expression, her rage, her face in mine. “You mean, she’s quitting Greenpeace?”
“Keeping a hand in, another way. She might give lectures at the eco lodge. You know, Joe, I had a feeling that time in the roller rink that she had a thing for you. You’ve had a loss. A terrible loss. It’s never premature to think about building a new life.”
“What?” I grew hot. “Premature? Karen’s not even dead a week.”
I heard a whispery noise and turned. Ranjay had come into the room, and stood just two feet behind me. I hadn’t heard him enter, hadn’t heard until he was close.
Bruce gazed up at Ranjay. “You make out in there, Doc, without losing man’s best friend to the cold?”
Ranjay approached the table. I heard Bruce’s chair scrape closer.
“You know, Joe, we, Ranjay and I, that is, feel…”
Then there came more knocking at the door.
Bruce and Ranjay excused themselves, mumbling hello as Lieutenant Colonel Amanda Ng and Captain Raymond Hess entered. The polar spa was a regular Club Arctic today. I didn’t offer coffee. I didn’t offer anything. I said, “Back to check what I say against what Eddie said?”
Hess said, “Sir, Drs. Morgan and Cruz completed their DNA run on the rabies.”
Ng watched and waited. She wanted to see whether I looked frightened or curious, guilty or alert. Hess watched Ng watch me. It was a watch-athon. I was tired of their relentless insinuations.
“I can wait if you can,” I said.
Amanda Ng sighed. “Colonel, looks like we’re dealing with something that came from a lab.”
Here’s the thing about rabies. Imagine three people catching it, one from a bat bite, one from a dog, one from a raccoon, each case thousands of miles from the others. The first victim is a seamstress in Jakarta, the second a kid in Des Moines. The third is a farmer in Yakuta, Siberia. All three fall ill after a short period of incubation. All show the same general symptoms. All, untreated, die.
So you’d think they all had the same exact thing, but that is not true. Sample their brain tissue, strain out the virus, get it under a good microscope, an electron one, one that really shows the spirals and tracks of DNA, and you discover tiny differences. Extra spikes on Indonesia. Fewer coils in Des Moines. Slight discoloration in Siberia.
Those CDC docs from Atlanta, I knew, had brought along with them a thumb drive library of rabies DNA variations… a thousand across the planet, each as identifiable as a fingerprint is to the FBI. Ng was saying that the strain here was different, new, probably man-made.
Hess pulled up a chair now. They’d given up the good cop/bad cop routine two days ago. They looked as tired as I felt. I admired their persistence and resented it. I wished they spent more time on other things, but I supposed that, in their shoes, I’d check out Joe Rush, too.
Hess reasoned, “You’re sent up here specifically to look for new strains. And now, that’s happened!”
“If it’s lab born, it doesn’t mean it came from us.”
Amanda Ng leaned back. “Who then?”
“I have no idea.”
“Colonel, Major Nakamura has told us a very different story.”
“Cut it out. If you even talked to him at all, he said the same thing I’m saying.”
“You’ve been briefed on old military programs. You were warned against disclosure. I can guarantee you immunity if you tell us anything relevant, right now.”
“Immunity? From what?”
“From retribution of any sort should you disclose to us a secret program. This comes from the SecDef himself, get it? A personal guarantee. Did you discover a connection, some old program? Were you ordered to bury information?”
“How many times are we going to go over this?”
Ng stared at me. “So you insist that it’s coincidence? You looking for new strains and one occurring?”
“I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“Someone trying to get you blamed, then?”
“I am being blamed. And you,” I said, “don’t know for sure it came from a lab. It could have evolved.”
They rose. They pulled on their parkas. I had a sense of the cold deepening outside, of the heater inside coughing fitfully, ready to expire.
Ng said, “Chew our offer over. Full amnesty. Hess, let’s go.”
I shot awake. It was 3 A.M. Eddie was still gone and I’d heard footsteps. I turned on the lights, breath frosting once I left the bunk area and went room to room.
No one was there. Jesus!
The next day the submarine was gone. Apparently the ice was freezing up, putting the sub in danger of being crushed. Soon the icebreaker would depart.
I returned to the beach on a walk and saw a sight that amazed me, a large polar bear on his belly, wriggling forward on ice one hundred yards offshore, spread out, hauling himself by claw. An enormous bear can move on ice so thin that a human would plunge through it. It has to do with weight distribution.
Sometimes a thing that seems impossible at first glance stands there right in front of your face, I thought. Go back and look at the old stuff on the F drive again.
I went back inside the polar spa and back to the F drive — the written part of the diary — to the first reversal the Harmons had suffered, a car accident.
Dad says no matter how long it takes, we’re not going home until we finish up at all nine sites. Dad says…
I went back to May again, reread her entries about her crush on a high school English teacher named Mark Wong, her musings on whether her parents were as boring when they were kids as they were now, read about her pet beagle who was too fat, and how cool Mini Cooper cars looked, how Mom and Dad pulled out maps of the North Slope, and pointed out the lakes they’d be taking her to this summer.
B-o-r-i-n-g.
Mom going on about lake number one, and the oil pipeline proposed to cross it. Lake number four, where, in 1839, Russian fur trappers had planted an Imperial flag. Lake number eight lay inside the National Petroleum Reserve, designated a strategic area during World War One, when the nation feared a cut off of Mideastern oil. Bigger lake number nine, Dad had said, and the surrounding tundra, final site they would visit, might one day house a new eco lodge, where tourists would sleep, eat, and view the Arctic tundra on big, heated, rolling glass-sided carriers.
I started to scroll away and stopped.
Eco lodge? Lake number nine?
They never got to lake number nine.
I read:
Dad says that Merlin Toovik and the ASRC board will vote next month on whether to allow the pipeline near lake number one (that he hates) and the eco lodge by lake nine (that he loves).
I envisioned a new eco lodge rising out on the tundra. Wealthy tourists coming from New York, Berlin, Moscow, Singapore. Heated bedrooms. Hot showers. Tundra tours in big-wheeled or tracked vehicles, where Mom, Dad, and the kids could snap photos of bears and caribou, while sipping Coca-Cola or premium champagne.