A hollow frustration filled my belly. “What about the bodies pulled from the fire? Prints? Clothing? Anything?”
“Burnt up. Teeth smashed. Fillings generic. What I want to know is why, if he’d escaped, he wasted time going to that cabin? He could have reached Canada if he headed there from the get-go. What was at the cabin?”
“Whatever was there isn’t there anymore.”
A sudden stabbing in my leg made me shift position, and the move shoved photos off the bed so they separated and drifted onto the floor. There they lay, clues without answers, dead men, charred sites.
“We have nothing then,” I said, bitter.
“No, One. You found the vial, which we took from your pocket. You enabled them to end the quarantine. You found rabies. All Jens had to do when he wanted to infect someone was stroll over to the supermarket and put a few drops in a food. If it wasn’t for you, it would have worked. The phony outbreak would have ended. We all would have gone home.”
A pretty red-haired nurse appeared. She told Eddie and Merlin that they had to leave. She said I needed rest. She said they could come back in a few hours.
“We’ll be nearby,” Eddie said.
Merlin said, “Eddie sleeps in the hall, Colonel. He won’t leave here.”
When they were gone, the nurse fussed over me and gave me more orange juice and said I needed fluids and said that I must be important because of all the reporters downstairs and all the VIPs who kept calling and asking how I was, telling the doctors to treat me like royalty. She said that yesterday night, when she stopped at a bar after work, a reporter from a Los Angeles — based rag sheet, Creeps and Celebs, had offered to buy her dinner and slip her a thousand dollars to take a couple of photos of me in bed.
She said, “I turn on the TV and every channel says something different happened. What did happen, sir?”
I’m going to find out.
“Let’s go over it one more time,” said Amanda Ng as Hess took notes. “I know you’re tired. I really appreciate this. Did Jens… the man who said he was Jens… did Jens ever mention anything about the Mideast, or a connection with a foreign terrorist group?”
“I told you. No.”
“Domestic, then. There are several groups in rural Alaska that concern us.”
“He didn’t mention any connections.”
“You said that the men who got out of the plane were speaking Russian.”
“No, I said I thought it was Russian. Jens said it was Russian. I don’t speak Russian. It could have been something else.”
“Did Jens ever say anything to lead you to believe that whoever did this intended to do it again, elsewhere?”
“No.”
“Did he make even any casual mention of another U.S. location, even in passing?”
“No.”
“Did you ever get the impression that this infection in Barrow was a kind of test run?”
“Test run?”
“You know, try it out in one place, do it in another.”
“What’s the point of a test run? If you have an infectious agent and you use it, the whole world knows it instantly. Test run? It wasn’t a test run. He told me what it was.”
“You believe him?” Hess said. Apparently Hess had doubts.
“My turn to ask a question. You said last time that you’ve put out Jens’s photo on TV. Anyone recognize him?”
“We’re getting a lot of calls, but no. It’s my father who disappeared! It’s Uncle Ed, the pervert! It’s the slob who lived next door and used to play loud Irish music!”
“What about the eco lodge connection?” I said.
Hess sighed. Ng took it more seriously. “There isn’t any that we can see. Why? Did Jens mention the eco lodge?”
“No, but he was there! I’m tired. I need to sleep.”
“You’re looking better.” Bruce Friday beamed. “We all came to see you. Happy birthday!”
They’d flown down on the morning 737 from Barrow, and they were in the room when I was wheeled back from physical therapy. They’d brought a lemon cake. Deirdre McDougal lit candles. I blew them out, watched smoke drift before their faces. Calvin DeRochers lugged in a suitcase. He was headed back to Arkansas when the visit was over, to begin the next year of planning for a return.
“Calvin expects to hit it big next year,” he said.
Mikael Grandy brought a gift-wrapped book, The Eskimo and the Oil Man, about Barrow. He looked incomplete when he wasn’t holding a camera. He stayed back, didn’t talk much. I’d heard that HBO had accelerated the release of his film. It would be coming out in ten days, while Barrow still filled headlines across the world.
Mikael was booked on an evening flight to New York, with a stop in Minneapolis.
“Sure you don’t want some New York bagels?” he said.
“I’m sure.”
The McDougals brought a care package from the North Slope Wildlife Department; reindeer sausage, caribou stew, and an assortment of homemade fruit pies that we convinced the nurse to store in a staff break-room refrigerator down the hall. They all had business in Anchorage. The trip was not just to see me. McDougal would attend one more Arctic symposium to be held this week at the Cook Hotel. Bruce would speak on “The Great Polar Bear as the Arctic Warms.”
“All this attention in Washington might benefit our effort to protect these magnificent creatures,” he said.
Merlin was in town for a meeting of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, and a final vote on whether to support Longhorn’s offshore drilling proposal. Dave and Deborah were back in Anchorage for the year. Leon Kavik had come to scout the University of Alaska campus. The mayor was visiting his sister, who worked in the office of the lieutenant governor.
“Brought you some Tito,” said Dave Lillienthal, leaving a gift-wrapped package by the window, with a red ribbon on top. He winked. “I told the nurses it’s books.”
Tilda Swann pushed to the front of the group.
She looked good in leg-hugging jeans, sharply toed dark leather boots, and a turtleneck beneath a fawn-colored jacket. She wore a silk scarf, moss-green, which highlighted her red hair. Brashness still marked her, but her voice was toned down, at least at first.
She said, “I came to say how sorry I am for your loss, Colonel.” But her voice was stiff, her eyes, locked on mine, seemed more wary than sympathetic. Of all the people there, she and Leon were the only two who were not friends.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question, Tilda?”
She seemed surprised. The others watched. She said, “That’s what I’m in Anchorage for today, to answer questions. After you, I’ll be talking with the guy from the New York Times.”
Somehow, when she said it, it sounded like a threat, or at least a challenge. I said, “You’ve got a job with the new eco lodge, I heard.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I do.”
“To give lectures.”
“That’s right. I like Barrow. I like the people. I like the remoteness. And that lodge will show people there’s an alternative way to make money without giving them,” she said disdainfully, nodding at Dave Lillienthal, “carte blanche to wreck one more pristine place on Earth.”
“Did you meet the owners of the lodge?” I asked.
Her gaze hardened. Sympathy only went so far. “Uh-huh.”
“Did they tell you if it’s just a lodge, or whether they’ll be doing anything else out there?”
Her mouth snapped shut. She shook her head. She was one of those people whose anger appears instantly in the form of blushes, which in her case started at the freckles and burst outward and across the skin, mass by mass.