Where Blood Runs Cold, page 18
Hánas batted the air with a gnarly hand. ‘Mining, power lines, wind power. They tell me it’s all in the name of progress. For the future. But tell me, how can it be sustainable to destroy nature itself?’
Dr Kotilla lifted his hands in a don’t-ask-me gesture, which struck Erik as odd, because surely anyone studying climate change should be advocating for electrification. For wind turbines, electric vehicles, the end of fossil fuels. And green technology needed copper, which had to be taken out of the ground. Strange for a scientist to be taking the side of the indigenous people against the drive to help the world economy move beyond carbon.
‘Why do you need the hazmat suits?’ Erik asked. ‘That’s some serious gear you’ve got out there.’ The yellow suits he had seen were the real deal, fully encapsulating chemical entry suits with self-contained breathing apparatus. Almost identical to the one he had seen Elise wearing in a photograph taken by her colleague when they were in Siberia and had to protect themselves from contact with radioactive pollution from used nuclear fuel.
‘Ah, they’re just a precaution,’ Kotilla said. ‘You know what insurance companies are like.’ He thumbed his forehead as if wiping away sweat. ‘In 2012 a polar team taking ice cores in Siberia came across the carcass of a woolly mammoth trapped in the ice for forty-five thousand years. The carcass was largely intact. Flesh, skin, hair. They even found its blood, trapped in the ice below the body.’ He took off his glasses and waved them through the air. ‘But there was concern that there might still be living organisms present – a virus or parasite perhaps.’
‘I think I saw that in a TV show,’ Sofia said. ‘People got infected and started killing each other.’
Erik looked at her and she shrugged it off. ‘I didn’t watch the whole series. I just saw a bit of it at Anette’s house.’
He gave her his sceptical face. ‘Of course you did,’ he said.
Kotilla shook his head. ‘Well, that’s TV for you.’ He pinched a finger and thumb together. ‘They take a grain of science and bury it in nonsense.’
Hánas was saying something about TV being the thing he missed most of all up here, but Erik wasn’t really listening. He was still thinking about the hazmat suits, all hung up like that ready to go.
‘Doctor,’ he said, interrupting Hánas, ‘you must have attended the Climate Conference in Oslo last year?’ Saying the words drew a knot in his chest, because while Elise was at the conference he had taken the girls to London, to spend a few days with his father, and they had gone to the climbing wall in Greenwich. If they’d gone anywhere else. Done anything else. ‘Maybe you know some of the people my wife has worked with,’ he said. ‘She’s with Friends of the Earth Norway.’
Kotilla sat back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the armrests. ‘Sadly I was unable to attend the conference,’ he said, returning Erik’s gaze. ‘But as I always say, I would rather be working up here than talking down there, if you know what I mean.’
Erik nodded. ‘Still, it’s a shame you missed Professor Edwards’ keynote speech. My wife said it was truly inspiring. Wouldn’t stop talking about it!’
Kotilla shifted in his chair. ‘The professor is a brilliant man,’ he said earnestly.
Erik nodded again. In truth, Elise had barely spoken about the conference afterwards, what with the accident and its hideous aftermath, but at some point in the last year he had seen a photo on her phone, taken by her colleague, of Elise shaking hands with Professor Edwards in the Oslofjord Convention Center foyer. And Edwards was a woman.
Why is he lying? And what about those hazmat suits? Erik knew there must be some connection between this lab and the Koppangen copper mine, but he couldn’t make the link.
The phone on the desk rang. Kotilla lifted a hand to Erik in a one second gesture, picked up the receiver and listened, turning his head away and burying the receiver in the crook between his neck and his shoulder. He nodded. Swallowed. His eyes flicked to Hánas and then back to Erik, then he said, ‘Toropit’sya.’ That was all. Then he put the phone down, pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and pressed his thin lips into a smile.
‘So,’ he said, standing, ‘I’ll take you—’
The rest of the sentence never left his lips, because Erik stood abruptly, grabbed the rock on the doctor’s desk and slammed it across his temple, breaking the circuits in the man’s brain so that his legs buckled and he dropped to the floor in a disorganized pile, his glasses skidding across the tiles.
‘What the hell?!’ Hánas said, jumping up from his chair in shock. Sofia hadn’t moved, but now stared up at him, her mouth hanging open, her eyes bulging in her exhausted face.
‘He’s lying,’ Erik told them. ‘We have to get out of here.’
‘Lying about what?’ Hánas said, stepping forward to look down at Kotilla, who lay there unconscious, blood bright in his grey hair.
‘Everything,’ Erik said. ‘The word he said on the phone was Russian.’
Hánas nodded. ‘He said hurry.’
‘And who do you think he was talking to?’ Erik asked them both.
‘Shit,’ Hánas said.
Erik took Sofia’s coat from the back of her chair and thrust it at her. ‘Put it on. Quickly.’
‘What’s happening, Pappa?’ she asked as she put the coat on again.
Erik bent down by Kotilla and took the key card off the retractable reel attached to the doctor’s trouser belt loop. Then he stood and put his hands on Sofia’s shoulders. ‘We’re leaving now,’ he said. ‘It’s not safe here.’
‘But we can’t go back out there,’ she said, desperation thick in her throat.
‘We can’t stay here. I think the tall man is coming. I think that’s who Dr Kotilla told to hurry. This place has something to do with the copper mine and the people who murdered Lars and Karine.’
A tear rolled down his daughter’s cheek and she looked at Hánas. Hoping.
‘Your far’s right,’ he told her. ‘We need to get out of here.’
She nodded. Looked down at Dr Kotilla, who was coming round, groaning pitifully.
‘Stay together and stay calm,’ Erik said. He took a deep breath, opened the office door and the three of them stepped out into the dark corridor.
13
HE LED THEM along the passage, back the way they had come. Abruptly, he stopped and stuck out an arm to grab Sofia. People were coming. He could hear them talking and the clatter of their shoes on the metal grid floor, growing louder as they came closer.
Hánas lifted his chin to indicate a dark corridor leading off on their left. Erik nodded, following Hánas into the dark with Sofia. Suddenly the LED lighting along the passage flickered on. Hánas stopped dead.
‘It’s on a sensor,’ Erik said, gesturing for Hánas to go on. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was behind them, but when he turned back around, Hánas had not moved.
‘Pappa,’ Sofia whispered. She and Hánas were standing by a door, looking through a rectangular glass viewing panel. One of Sofia’s hands was at her mouth, her other stretched out towards her father, who joined them at the door. Hánas stepped away to let Erik peer through.
It was a small room beyond some sort of inflatable anteroom. Almost empty. Dark but for a shaft of light reaching through the glass from the corridor. There was a steel table and on it lay a body. A skeleton almost, with dark skin like tanned rawhide stretched tight over tendons and the sharp angles of the bones beneath. One arm bent across its ribcage. Black slits for eyes, shrunken lips and gums pulled back from the teeth in an eternal expression of savage glee. A mummified corpse lying in a haze of what Erik guessed to be liquid nitrogen, pumped in from somewhere to preserve the body. He could feel the cold coming off the glass and the door itself.
‘What the hell has this got to do with climate research or biodiversity?’ Erik muttered under his breath.
They moved on to the next door and looked through the window. Another steel table. Different corpse. As gnarled and twisted as the first, this one had a mane of brown hair and a tuft of beard jutting from its chin. The lips looked to be gone but the teeth were there, fixed in a terrible grimace, as if enough of the human spirit yet clung to the body to be resentful of the cold it was being made to endure. Its eyes were wide open, greyish white and swollen in their sockets.
‘What’s going on, Pappa?’ Sofia said, still looking through the glass.
He shook his head because he had no answer to give her.
Hánas growled something. He was peering through the glass of another door further along the passageway, and now he turned to Erik, his dark brows drawn together over narrowed eyes.
Erik had a bad feeling. His hand found Sofia’s and together they crept to the next door.
The three of them gazed through the viewing window and the PVC anteroom window beyond. This body lying in the dark was different. Only the face was exposed, the torso and legs covered with blankets. But this face was not mummified like the others. Pale and gaunt, yes, eyes closed, yes, but without the sunken, empty-vessel look of the dead.
Hánas lifted his hand and tapped his knuckle against the glass.
‘What are you d—? Oh God!’ Erik’s blood ran cold, because the man lying in the dark had opened his eyes.
Hánas gripped the door handle but it wouldn’t turn.
‘We’ve got to go,’ Erik hissed.
Then the man sat up, or tried to, but Erik could see now that he was strapped to the table.
‘Hánas, we have to go.’
The man in the dark was straining against his bonds now. Thrashing this way and that like a fish on a hook. His head, though, remained still, his bulging eyes fixed on Hánas. The movement drew Erik’s attention to the intravenous drip in the captive’s arm and the bag of fluid swinging on its stand in the shadows beyond. The man was shouting but the sound was muffled behind the thick metal door.
‘I know him,’ Hánas said. ‘His name is Ivvár.’
‘You know that man?’ Erik’s mind raced.
‘He’s a guide for the mining company, last I heard.’
‘Novotroitsk Nickel?’ Erik said.
Hánas nodded and Erik looked back through the window. The man looked beyond terrified. But already his strength had drained away and he could barely hold his head up from the steel table he was strapped to. ‘You can imagine how that went down with my people,’ Hánas muttered.
‘We’ve got to go,’ Erik said. He pictured Dr Kotilla back in his office, clambering to his feet now, stumbling to the door to raise the alarm.
‘What have they done to him?’ Hánas said, pressing his palm against the glass.
‘Hánas,’ Sofia said, tugging at the sleeve of the herder’s coat.
He looked at her and nodded, and the three of them continued down the hall and turned a corner. This brought them to the back of the dimly lit lab. Four metres away, a man sat at his desk with his back to them, intent on a document on his computer screen. They trod as lightly as they could on the metal floor, all watching the man’s minor movements as he focused on the monitor. Hearts pounding in their chests, they tiptoed as lightly as they could over the metal floor, past the banks of little blue and green lights.
The man coughed and they froze in midstep, holding their breath. He turned and slid open a drawer, delved inside for a tissue and hawked into it, before dropping it into a metal bin.
His attention returned to the screen ahead and, after a moment’s further pause, Erik and the others continued across the rest of the lab unseen. They turned down another hallway and came to the boot room.
Ahead of them, another door swung open. Into the room came a woman carrying a mug of steaming coffee. She faltered in her step, surprise written across her face.
Erik gave a broad smile. ‘Dr Kotilla said we could make another hot drink,’ he told the woman, nodding towards the small kitchen area behind her.
‘Well, I would stick to the filter coffee if I were you,’ she said with no discernible accent, smiling back at Erik and then at Sofia. Hánas, she seemed to ignore. ‘The machine will make a cappuccino but it’s all foam.’
Erik thanked her for the tip, and she headed past them and along the corridor. When she was out of sight, they slipped into the boot room and gathered their skis and poles as well as the pulk and their rifles.
Erik made sure Sofia fastened her jacket properly and put on her gloves and hat, before carrying the pulk round to the exit with Hánas. For a moment they stood there, the three of them sharing a few seconds of silence and unspoken questions, and he wanted to curse a god he didn’t believe in for forcing him to take his daughter back out into the freezing dark. A foreboding flash of the one-eyed man appeared to him and he blinked it away.
Then he fumbled at the handle with the better of his two traitorous hands and opened the door and the cold air was a ferocious slap in his face.
‘Ready?’ he asked Sofia.
She nodded.
They stepped out into the snow. Erik felt first the hairs in his nose freeze and then the sear of the air in his lungs. He strapped the pulk harness on while the others clipped into their skis, and despite the inner panic rising in his belly at being back out in the snow-whipped twilight, there was some strange comfort in fastening on the pulk and stepping into his own ski bindings. Perhaps this was his purgatory, he thought, and he was doomed to endure it for ever. But it wasn’t fair on Sofia. He looked across at her. She was standing ready, her poles planted in the snow. Looking at him. Waiting for him.
‘He’s here,’ Hánas said.
Erik’s guts twisted. He looked up at the high ground where some pale light lingered as if reluctant to cede to the night. ‘Where?’
Hánas was holding up his old rifle, scoping the ridge. ‘Two o’clock. Knows what he’s doing. He’s moved off the brow of the hill to hide his outline.’
Erik brought his own rifle up, sweeping it from left to right. Then he saw him. A dark shape a quarter of the way down the dusky slope.
‘Go!’ he told Sofia. ‘Go!’
She performed a perfect kick turn, thrust down with both poles and he saw the snow thrown up on the spot where she had stood just a heartbeat before.
‘Go, Sofia!’ he shouted again, taking off after her as the suppressed report of the tall man’s rifle rolled down the hill in their wake. Hánas fired the Mosin-Nagant, flame blooming from the barrel like the Devil’s tongue, noise filling the world, echoing off the lab and the ice like a thunder crack.
‘Faster!’ Erik called after the girl. He was moving fast himself now, racing after her, and heard Hánas behind him working the bolt of the Russian rifle. The next shot rang out, making him duck instinctively and throwing him off balance, but he stayed on his feet and kept going. Kick and glide, kick and glide. Because the bastard had been aiming at Sofia and that thought was an adrenaline syringe pumped right into the hot beating muscle of his heart.
He saw another gout of ice thrown up by a round hitting the snow a foot to Sofia’s right, but now he had caught up with her and got as close as he dared without running the risk of fouling her skis and sending them both face first into the snow.
‘I’m here!’ he called out, holding himself more upright than was comfortable, staying as tall as he could because he needed to shield her. ‘I’m with you.’
Then he glanced to his left because Hánas was off his shoulder, skiing in his fluid, economical style, seemingly unencumbered by his thick reindeer-skin coat.
‘I didn’t get him,’ Hánas said.
‘Where are we going?’ Erik asked.
‘The ravine I told you about. We can still make it.’
‘Hánas,’ he said, driving on, watching the girl in front of him, not letting more than a metre of ground grow between the back of her skis and the front of his own. ‘If I don’t make it … you keep her safe.’
‘Pappa!’ Sofia said.
‘You’ll make it,’ Hánas said.
‘But if I don’t—?’
‘You’ll make it.’
He gritted his teeth, hating himself for letting the girl see his fear. His weakness. But he had needed to say it. He was already breathing hard. The adrenaline was wearing thin and soon it would be gone. His legs felt empty. His arms too. The muscles in his stomach were screaming, but it was OK. Pain was OK. Pain was good. What he feared was his body failing him. Betraying him as his hands had done. In his mind he could go on for ever. He could love her for ever. Even after he was gone. He didn’t know how it worked. He didn’t know if anyone else had ever made it work and he didn’t care. But he would love her still when he was nothing. Love was not reliant on his body, his muscles and tendons, his beating heart and his lungs inflating and deflating like bellows fanning a fire. Sooner or later, though, his body would be unable to go on. The fire would go out. Then what?
‘Keep going, Sofia, we can make it,’ he said, ploughing through the deep snow. ‘We’re strong. We are not the kind of people who give up.’ He grimaced, feeling the cold on his teeth. Thinking about his next words. They came up into his throat and for five or six strides he kept them in his mouth.
‘And Emilie is with us now,’ he said. ‘I know you feel it too.’
It came out of him like someone had ripped his soul from his body. And there it was, in that small space between them, so that he could almost see it. And tears came to his eyes. ‘Your sister is with us now, Lillemor, and we’re strong.’
Sofia didn’t answer. But her stride lengthened. Maybe it was his imagination, but it seemed that her poles landed with more strength behind them.
She led them into the blizzard. Into the teeth of the wind.
He couldn’t see how they could get away from the tall man now, because he would be on their trail before their tracks silted up. Was probably skiing in their tracks now, saving himself the effort of breaking new snow. But maybe, if they could stay ahead of him until dark, there was a chance. The Russian knew they were armed. Two rifles against his one. If they could make it until dark, they could set a trap for him. Lay a trail into the night, then double back and lie in wait and put him down like an animal.
