“They were adamant, sounds like.”
“I’ll say!”
“Maybe they told him — when he persisted — not to bother asking again, next year. That they would never change their minds.”
“How did you know?” Dr. Liz Willoughby asked sadly. “Dr. Harmon’s comparative study work required a ten-year spread. That will all be worthless now, at that lake.”
It was the word worthless that did it. I hung up and looked out at a Berkshire blizzard. Snow drove sideways into the house. The fireplace was lit downstairs. It was toasty in here. January in Massachusetts.
In my mind, I saw lake number nine, a cabin reduced to cinders, charred bodies in sizzling snow. I’d looked for secret explanations. I’d sought overcomplicated ones. Worthless, Liz Willoughby had said. I heard her in my head again. Worthless.
You went back to burn evidence, Jens. What would that evidence have been? Equipment? It would be dumb to leave equipment? Files? In a busted-up cabin? No way! Clothes? F drive? Photos?
What would constitute logical evidence in this case?
I sat up straight.
My heart started racing. I probably should have called the admiral at that point. But I didn’t do it. I wanted to do this last step by myself.
When it comes to government science grants, most can be found in public records. I accessed the websites of the three principal agencies funding U.S. Arctic research: NOAA, NASA, National Science Foundation. I knew which agencies they were because almost all the researchers last summer had been funded by one of them, at least.
I cross-referenced grants with the name Dr. Bruce Friday, way back when, before he retired, to see what he’d claimed to study. I read his applications and grant descriptions. I started with the latest one and went back to when he was still a professor, years before he got involved in the polar bear stuff.
Bruce Friday had used Jens Erik Holte as a pilot.
There it was.
I sat back. I felt my blood coursing. My head hurt where I’d hit it in that ice cellar, but maybe this was ghost pain. The moon was up when I made a few calls to Alaska. Dawn was breaking, snow was blowing, and the clubfooted moose was straggling past when I called the airlines and booked a flight.
SAS jets to Oslo leave Newark airport around 9 P.M., daily, early enough to catch local, connecting flights out of Norway’s capital. From Oslo you must hurry to catch the early connection to their Arctic capital. But Oslo has a small airport. Immigration is efficient and posted signs show you the right way to go. I made my second flight with moments to spare, just as the doors were closing.
Two hours later I was wide awake when the Airbus pilot announced our landing. I looked down. Tromso lies along what looked like a deep fjord, or harbor. It is situated at the same latitude as Barrow, but thanks to the warm air from the Gulf Stream, that’s where similarities end.
The city of seventy-five thousand looked like a mix of quaint old and sleek new, all emanating clean; deep blue water, steeply rising snow-covered bluffs on two sides, a neat downtown, a sprawling college campus, and modest, steeply roofed homes rising in tiers from the commercial area by the water, to the residential one in the heights. It was Currier and Ives in the Arctic. It radiated comfort.
On any given day, in January, the temperature differential between Barrow and Tromso can be as much as one hundred degrees. A check of Google told me that Barrow was suffering fifty below zero temperatures that day. Even the hardy Iñupiats would stay indoors. Venture out and the thickest parka would feel like paper. Sled dogs would huddle in their little homes. Karen, my beautiful Karen, would have bundled up in waffle clothing, explained one more time how the waffle pattern had come from research on Arctic fox skin, gone for a short hike, joked about windchill.
But in Tromso, same day, it was a balmy thirty degrees, bright and sunny, and featherlike snowflakes fell, as if out of some 1950s Paramount Christmas classic: Santa’s Home. The airport was bright, clean and modern. A new Mercedes taxi took me into town and the chatty driver explained in perfect English that the fare for the ten-minute drive was sixty dollars, since, he said proudly, Norway’s currency was the strongest on Earth, after Switzerland’s. “From our northern oil and gas,” he bragged.
It had been hard to book a hotel in early January, since that week Tromso hosted its annual State of the Arctic Conference. I’d read on the plane, in the online New York Times, that the meeting attracted heavyweights from around the world, experts in northern geopolitics, oil company reps, military types, scientists, biomed people, explorers, and Eskimos. There would be shippers speculating on profits from new shortcut trade routes. There would be generals at cocktail parties at the university, talking about defense. There would be adventurers seeking publicity, trying to raise money for expeditions.
Valley Girl had confirmed, after accessing Bruce Friday’s credit card records, that he was here, too.
The cab dropped me at a boutique-like hotel where I sipped lobby coffee and waited for a room to be cleaned. Departure hour was 3 P.M. I eavesdropped on a trio of French, Italian, and Colorado-based journalists, in the lobby, speaking English, deciding which presentation at the conference they planned to cover this late afternoon.
Diamond discoveries, or extinction threats?
I asked directions to the university. The lovely blond concierge said I could walk, but that would take forty-five minutes. Could she call a cab for me? Sure. The journalists, overhearing, asked to split the fare.
I said I’d rather not. I had not come to make friends.
The streets were freshly plowed, and piles of snow flanked cobblestone thoroughfares. Schoolchildren wearing cartoon logo backpacks walked by, holding hands. The campus lay on a hill, and there, an hour later, I spotted Bruce Friday in a packed auditorium, as house lights went out, as a screen lowered. Arctic University is the northernmost institute of higher learning in the world.
On screen I saw: “Tromso! Hot Spot for Cold Biotech.” The speaker was a Norwegian government speaker bragging about Tromso’s “biotechnology cluster.”
“Our university is a nexus of research in the High North. We have several successful biotech companies headquartered here. Our government offers aid: Innovation Norway and The Research Council of Norway to spur discoveries. And there is no dearth of private investors! Quite the contrary! Norinnova and KapNord Invest support aggressive research here. We are confident that many helpful discoveries from the Arctic will assist future medical and molecular diagnostics. To say it simply”—she grinned—“much profit for all!”
Bruce Friday sat alone, nodding, midway down the center row. He was recognizable from the mop of chestnut hair, back sloped from bad posture and, glimpsed from the side, the out of style wire-rimmed glasses.
The audience was a mixed bag of academics and business people, some in suits, others dressed casually. The speaker was trim and fortyish, in a dark blue pantsuit and white shirt. “The infrastructure for commercial science is great,” she said. “Documentation labs, bio-center lab, marine processing facility, all right on this very campus.”
How could I have missed this?
Bruce took notes. The audience was riveted. I saw lots of Chinese reps, sitting in tight groups, which is how you knew they were from China, instead of somewhere else. I saw the journalists from my hotel standing in back. Bruce occasionally said something to a woman beside him. The screen presented a roll call of local bio-companies: ArcticZymes, which sought enzyme products from cold-adapted life-forms; Ayanda, pharmaceuticals; Calanus, which harvested zooplankton and might already have come up with a product that worked against type-2 diabetes; Chitinor, which manufactured high-quality biopolymers from cold-water shrimp, for use in cosmetic procedures; OliVita, which supplied dietary supplements, including seal oils.