It was Purkiss’s cue.
As he strode towards the door, the eyes of Avner and Budian and Clement following him, he heard the argument behind him: Heading out? from Montrose, and Medievsky’s clipped reply, and a grunt of disbelief from Haglund.
He had access. It was of a kind he could have done with two days earlier, but there was no point in looking back.
Purkiss headed down the corridor towards the west wing, hurrying before the door of the mess opened behind him and someone noticed where he was going.
He used Medievsky’s office, finding it locked but cracking the mechanism within thirty seconds. The computer took frustratingly long to boot up. Purkiss tried to ignore the distant whine of the wind outside, and the way it suggested the scream of approaching jet engines.
The file was a spreadsheet, organised by date and time and logging each excursion over twenty-four hours by the individual team members, as well as their destinations. Purkiss took a minute to familiarise himself with the system.
He selected December of the previous year. Beginning at the start of the month, he scanned through the records, day by day. He noted the clustering on two or three days of every week, while on others there appeared to be no recorded trips outside the station.
Most of the excursions had been undertaken by five members of the team in particular: Avner, Budian, Montrose, Wyatt, and Nisselovich. Clement or Medievsky appeared on about one third of the trips. Haglund had gone out a handful of times, and there was only a single recorded instance of Keys leaving the station, presumably to attend to some kind of medical problem or injury. As Medievsky had said, the team members always went out in groups of two or more, never singly.
The last inclusion of Nisselovich’s name was on the twenty-eighth of December, the day before his disappearance. He’d gone out with Wyatt, Avner and Clement to a location with an unfamiliar code number. On the night Nisselovich disappeared, Medievsky and Montrose and Haglund and Wyatt were recorded as having left the station at ten thirty and returned at eleven fifty. For once, no destination was specified for their journey. Purkiss assumed this had been the search party looking for Nisselovich.
Purkiss glanced around Medievsky’s office, saw a laminated map pinned to one wall. It was a smaller-scale reproduction of the large map of the surrounding region he’d studied in the main laboratory. He peered at it, scanning it systematically until he found the code number of the last recorded location Nisselovich had visited. It was a spot some twenty kilometres west of the station, and meant nothing to Purkiss.
His eyes were drawn to the area near the upper left-hand corner of the map, and the site marked Nekropolis. By his estimation it was eighty or ninety kilometres away. Between it and Yarkovsky Station, three coded locales were marked on the map.
Purkiss memorised the codes, and turned his attention back to the spreadsheet on the screen before him. He used one of the program’s drop-down menus to sort the information from the entire spreadsheet, not only for December but for the two months since and the six months preceding, filtering the data by the team members’ names and the three location codes from the map.
There’d been thirty-one recorded field trips to the three locations over the last eight months, over half of them in the previous four. Wyatt’s name came up most often in connection with the visits, followed closely by Nisselovich and then Budian and Medievsky, despite his overall record of fewer excursions than the others. Montrose had taken the trip a handful of times, the rest not at all.
Frustration knotted Purkiss’s stomach. What did it mean, if anything? His idea had been that whoever was taking an interest in the crashed Tupolev might have suspected it was somewhere in the vicinity of the Nekropolis, and might therefore have visited the sites nearby in order to investigate further. But none of the names stood out as obvious suspects.
Time was running out. Perhaps, Purkiss thought, he’d have to abandon the notion of identifying the enemy before they fled the station, would have to accept that he’d be journeying with a group of people one of whom could potentially turn on the rest of them at a crucial moment.
He stared at the monitor, willing a clue to present itself, when the door opposite him opened and he tensed and Patricia Clement stepped into the room.
Twenty-four
‘You think it’s me, don’t you?’
She perched on the edge of the desk, her gaze unwavering as ever, the same half-smile playing at her lips. She’d closed the door behind her.
Purkiss said: ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because of my reaction to all of this. The way I seem unfazed.’
Purkiss shrugged. ‘The thought had crossed my mind, yes. On the other hand, your apparent nonchalance wouldn’t be very effective cover. It’s a bit obvious.’
‘Fair enough.’ Her expression became a shade more serious. ‘I know what you’re trying to do.’
She couldn’t see the monitor from where she was sitting. Purkiss waited.
‘You’re looking at the movement logs. Trying to work out if anyone slipped up, left a trail. I suspect you haven’t been successful so far.’
He watched her. ‘How did you know I was here?’
‘I assumed you hadn’t gone to your room, so the west wing was the next choice. I’ve been trying doors, seeing if you were using any of the offices. Bingo.’
‘Why were you looking for me?’
‘I may be able to help. The night Feliks Nisselovich disappeared, there was… something. It might be significant, might not.’
‘What?’
She glanced away, as if remembering. ‘The last time anyone recalls seeing him was around nine in the evening. He and Efraim and Frank Wyatt were in the mess, shooting the breeze, and eventually he wandered out. I was in my office at the time, working on some notes. At ten after ten, Gunnar knocked, asking if I knew who’d taken one of the snowmobiles, saying he’d been to the hangar and discovered one of them was missing. I didn’t know. Next thing, there’s a big panic and Oleg gathers us together. Feliks is gone. Everybody knew he was pushing to head out to collect the plant samples, everyone knew he was crazy to think about it because of the storm that was headed our way.’
She touched her fingertips to her lips.
‘So there’s a debate. Frank, Oleksandra, Gunnar, they think we should go after him, try to find him and bring him back. Efraim and Ryan, also Doug Keys, don’t agree, say it’s too dangerous, that there’s no point more of us risking our lives. None of the satellite handsets are missing, so Feliks hasn’t taken one and can’t be contacted that way. In the end Oleg decides to lead a search party. They make it halfway to the location where Feliks was headed when the storm hits. Oleg and the others are forced to turn back. He raises the alarm with Yakutsk, but weather conditions are so severe that they aren’t able to despatch assistance until the middle of next morning. By which time it’s too late, and Feliks is lost.’
For the first time, Purkiss saw something in her expression other than ironic amusement. There was a sadness there.
He said, ‘You mentioned you had something that might be significant.’
‘Yes. After Oleg and the others had left to find Feliks, I met Doug Keys in the corridor, here in the west wing. This would have been around eleven. Keys was looking perplexed. I asked what was wrong. He stared at me vaguely, like he couldn’t quite place me, and said, “I just saw Nisselovich”. I asked where, and he said, “Outside, through the window.” I told Keys to show me. He took me back into the infirmary, pointed out the window. There was no sign of anybody. I said he must have misinterpreted something, and asked if he might be having a hypo — he was pale and sweaty, the way he used to get. He became agitated, almost shouting, and grabbed my arm, insisting he knew what he’d seen. I managed to persuade him to take a glucose sweet and he calmed down a little, but he stalked out, saying he was going to find someone who’d believe him.’