Holy Terror (45 page)

Trying not to lose his footing on the frozen moss, he made his way down the sloping hillside that led to the town. It was clustered by the harbor, a snug collection of wooden buildings that looked like something out of a fairytale, with warm lights twinkling and smoke rising from dozens of chimneys
and, across Isfiorden, the immense pale glaciers gleaming.

As he descended the hill, he could see that there was intense activity around the harbor. Floodlights illuminated a small cargo ship with a bright red funnel, and long boxes were being unloaded onto the dock. A Jeep described impatient circles in the rapidly settling snow. The wind sizzled against the back of Conor's hood, and his feet began to itch unbearably.

He was limping by the time he reached the edge of town. He passed two deserted houses and a lumberyard. Then he found himself crossing a wide, snowswept street. Not far away, a dog was barking, and there was a strong smell of coal in the air. The street was criss-crossed with tire tracks, but there didn't seem to be anybody around. He didn't really know what to do next. He had to find out what Dennis Evelyn Branch was doing; but equally importantly, he had to find himself someplace to stay for the night. He passed a wooden shed with its padlock hanging undone, but in this weather it would be suicide to sleep in an outbuilding. With a north-east wind like this blowing, the temperature could easily drop to minus 10 degrees Celsius, or even lower.

Behind him, he heard the sound of an automobile engine. He turned, and the Jeep that had been driving circles on the dockside suddenly appeared at the end of the street and sped toward him. Its lights were blazing and its windshield wipers were furiously flapping against the snow. Conor immediately turned his face away. No point in taking chances. He
glanced in at the front passenger window as it sped past, and he was sure that he saw the sharp, intent profile of Dennis Evelyn Branch himself, in a black fur hat. The Jeep left a fine cloud of snow and the smell of gasoline, and then it was gone, up toward the cemetery.

Around the next corner, Conor unexpectedly found the Puffin Bar, a long wooden building with multicolored lights dangling around its veranda. The wheezing of Norwegian folk music came from inside, mingled with the stamping of feet and shouts of hilarity. Conor knew that it was a risk, going inside. It was more than likely that one or two of Dennis Evelyn Branch's subcontractors would be drinking in here.

But he was freezing, and exhausted, and he needed badly to go to the bathroom. He pulled open the door and stepped inside, and pulled open yet another door, and was met by light and warmth and people talking and drinking and laughing. Along the left side of the room ran a polished pine bar, with barstools; and the right side was taken up with tables with bright red tablecloths. At the very end of the room three young men in jeans and yellow shirts were playing a fiddle and a bass and a piano-accordion. This certainly wasn't a New York bar: the cigarette smoke was so thick that it had practically reached knee level. The clientele was almost entirely under thirty, and male: muscular miners with fuzzy beards and permanently blackened fingernails. At one table in the corner sat a group of serious young men in new plaid shirts and Calvin Klein jeans who were probably climatologists or conservationists or
oil engineers. They were drinking Haakon lager out of the bottle and tapping their feet out of time. At the next table sat three raucous middle-aged women with their roots showing, and one young girl of seventeen or eighteen who had that mysterious blond Norwegian beauty that reminded Conor so much of Lacey: pale eyes, pale eyebrows, a small straight nose, and pouting pink lips.

‘
Ja
?' the barman asked him, with a gappy grin.

‘Toilet?' said Conor.

‘Oh sure. Through to the back, past the musicians, off to the left.'

‘Thanks. And I'll have a whiskey, if you don't mind. Any brand. Double.'

He went to the cramped, cold bathroom and had the longest pee in the history of pees, his eyes closed, his shoulders slumped. While he did so, without disrespect, he said a prayer of thanks that he had arrived here safely, and that God had protected him. When he had finished he took off his parka and brushed off the melted snow. Underneath he was wearing a thick black rollneck sweater and a black wool-mixture shirt. Sitting on the toilet seat, he took off his boots and his soaking socks. He dried the inside of his boots with paper towels, changed his socks, and returned to the bar feeling slightly more human.

Somebody was waiting for him at the bar, a ruddy-faced man with a black peaked leather cap and a thick black beard, brambled with gray.

‘This one's on me,' he said, passing Conor his double Scotch. ‘Welcome to Longyearbyen.'

‘Thanks,' said Conor, and tipped it back in one.
He just hoped that it would penetrate down to his feet. He held out his hand and said, ‘Jack Grady. Nice to know you.'

‘Pal Rustad. Nice to know
you
, Mr Grady. And all of your friends. I think you will make this a very good winter for us, for a change.'

‘Well, we hope so,' said Conor, although he didn't have any idea what the bearded man was talking about. ‘We always aim to please.'

‘Personally, I don't think you'll find anything,' said the man, pouring himself a shotglass of
akvavit
from a bottle on the bar. ‘After eighty years? It's not possible. You can't keep anything alive for eighty years.'

‘You never know, do you?' said Conor. ‘It's worth a try.'

‘Well, it will be worth it for us, when all of the TV and the newspapers come here. Everybody here will make some money.'

‘The TV? The newspapers? When are you expecting them?'

‘I don't know. Maybe next week sometime. This is just the advance party, yes?'

‘The advance party?' Conor suddenly realized how Dennis Evelyn Branch had explained his arrival here, several weeks before Kirsty Duncan's expedition. He must have simply shipped in all of his equipment and pretended that he and his people were here to clear the ground. He had enough money, after all, to forge any documentation that was needed, and to bribe any Norwegian shippers who needed bribing.

‘You're taking a break?' asked Pal Rustad. ‘All of
the rest of your people are up at the cemetery. They said you were going to be working day and night.'

‘Oh, yes, sure. But my specialty is microorganisms. They won't need me till they've finished digging.'

‘I still don't think you'll find anything,' Pal Rustad commented. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie, that's what I say.'

The party in the bar went on till way past three in the morning. The fiddlers were replaced by the Norwegian version of a barber-shop quartet, singing what sounded like very ribald songs. ‘They say, I want to sail my longboat up your fiord, my darling one,' the bearded man translated. Conor nodded and said, ‘Very subtle.'

He ate an elk steak garnished with boiled potatoes and sauerkraut. The meat was tough but it had a good strong gamey flavor and he was very hungry. His bearded friend introduced him to a big, handsome dark-haired woman in a
bunad
, a traditional Norwegian costume with an embroidered vest and a long black skirt. Her dress was very feminine but she looked as if she were quite capable of throwing him across the room.

‘Everybody is happy that you come here,' she grinned. ‘It was such a good surprise.'

‘I'll bet,' said Conor. He looked at his watch. ‘Is there anyplace that I can sleep for a couple of hours? I don't have to go up to the cemetery till later and I'm bushed. Tired, that is.'

‘You're not staying at the Polar Hotel, like the rest of them?'

‘Well, I have to share with three other guys, and you know … it's not very restful.'

The woman turned to the barman and spoke to him rapidly in Norwegian. ‘He says you can sleep in the back. There's a couch.'

The barman looked at him expectantly. Conor said, ‘What?' He hoped the woman didn't think that he wanted to sleep with
her
. But then he suddenly realized what the barman was waiting for. He took out his wallet and gave him 1,000 krone.

‘Sleep good,' said the barman, making his hands into an imaginary pillow.

He was woken by a scratching noise. He sat up, straining his ears. The party in the bar must have finished a long time ago, because the room was pitch dark and totally silent. He listened and listened, and there it was again.
Scratch – scrrattch – scratch
.

Cautiously he felt for his rucksack, slid open the zipper and took out his waterproof flashlight. He waited until he heard the scratching again, then he switched it on. A huge elk head was staring at him, with massive antlers and black glassy eyes. ‘
Ah
!' he shouted, and jumped away – even as he realized that it was nothing more than a head, hanging from the wall on a wooden shield.

‘Asshole,' he told himself. Quickly he flicked the flashlight beam from one side of the room to the other. At last he saw a scruffy gray dog fast asleep in the far corner, almost indistinguishable from the shaggy reindeer pelt that he was lying on. The dog must have been dreaming of chasing something,
because his front paws kept scratching against the wooden wall in a fitful running movement.

Conor checked his watch. It was 5:35 – time he was leaving, anyhow. He felt bruised all over, but at least he was warm and fed and reasonably refreshed. In the freezing-cold men's room he washed his face and stared at himself in the misted-up mirror over the washbasin. He wondered if James Bond had ever felt lonely.

He walked through the bar and let himself out. The whole town was quiet and blanketed in snow, but even from here he could hear the grinding of the Caterpillar excavator and occasional bursts of jack-hammering. His boots squeaked in the snow as he made his way along the street and started to climb the hill. It wasn't long before the cemetery came into view. The site of the exhumation was completely covered now by a semi-transparent nylon dome, over fifty feet across, illuminated from within by floodlights. Shadowy figures in protective white spacesuits were moving around inside it, so that it looked like a recently landed UFO, with its alien crew.

The snow was falling more lightly now, but the north-easterly wind was still keen, and it made the tents rumble and flap. As he neared the cemetery, Conor skirted around in back of them, keeping himself well out of the light. He opened up the nearest tent and cautiously peered inside. There was nobody there, but there were stacks of black plastic boxes marked Biohazard, as well as a trestle table crowded with scientific equipment that Conor couldn't even put a name to.

He tried the next tent. There was nobody in this one, either, only crates of drilling equipment and reels of cable and boxes of spare halogen lamps. As he approached the third tent, however, a man suddenly stepped out of it, dressed in a bulky protective suit complete with oxygen tanks, and carrying his helmet under his arm. He was a big man, the same height as Conor but very much bulkier, with a black woolly hat and the slitted eyes of a Sami.

‘
Hej
!' he shouted, and rattled off a guttural burst of irascible Norwegian, which Conor took to mean that he should get the hell out of here before he was ripped in very small digestible pieces and fed to the polar bears.

‘Sorry,' said Conor. ‘No speaka da Norsk.'

The man came toward him with a threatening look. He waved his hand two or three times to shoo Conor away.

Conor said, ‘OK, I'm going. But look – I've got something for you!' He tugged off one of his gloves with his teeth and unzippered one of his pockets. The man watched him, perplexed, as he took out the small foil pack of burundanga that Magda had given him, and beckoned him closer. The man took two or three steps forward. Conor edged around so that the wind was behind him, opened the foil, and blew the dust directly into the man's face.

Burundanga had put Conor into a trance, instantly, but he had never seen it used on anyone else and for one moment he didn't believe that it was going to work. The man flapped his hand in front of his face, coughed, then stood completely still, staring
at Conor with the blankest expression that he had ever seen.

Conor stepped back. Then he stepped closer. ‘Can you hear me?' he said. He prodded the man in the chest. The man stayed where he was, his eyes focused on something that Conor couldn't even imagine.

He couldn't give the man verbal instructions, but he took hold of his arm and said, ‘Come on, buddy, this way,' and led him across to the tent full of drilling equipment. Obedient as a Labrador, the man shuffled along beside him, and waited patiently while Conor opened up the tent-flap. Once they were inside, Conor said, ‘Stay still, OK?' while he closed the flap behind them. Then he stood in front of the man and mimed to him that he should take off his protective suit. At once – and without any protest at all – the man unfastened the seals at his wrists, took off his gloves, and proceeded to undress. Conor helped him to lift off his oxygen tanks, and even let him hold onto his shoulder to balance himself while he climbed out of his pants. Underneath the suit he was wearing a soiled gray sweater and a pair of thick black tracksuit bottoms tucked into two pairs of cheesy, sweat-stained socks. Conor just prayed that he wasn't lousy.

He guided the man to a pile of crates at the far end of the tent, all stenciled BUGGE DRILLS A/S. He indicated to the man that he should sit down on one of the crates and stay where he was. Then he took off his parka and struggled into the protective suit himself. He zipped all the zippers and popped all the poppers and fastened all the seals. It took him two
or three minutes to figure out how the helmet locked onto his head, but eventually it closed with a well-engineered
ker-lick
. He twisted the knob of his oxygen regulator and took three deep, pressurized breaths.

He said another prayer: Mary, Mother of God, please make sure that I have put on this suit properly, and that I don't get infected with the Spanish influenza. Because many people need me, even those people who think they don't, amen. And even those people who would rather see me dead, double-amen.