Hot Ice (19 page)

“We, the embassy, own an old Morris Minor. Been around so long no one wants to part with it.”

“Perfect.”

After a refreshing shower and change back into khakis at the embassy, it had been a long drive north on the A1(M), made even longer by the Morris’s lack of both interior space and speed. Jason had stopped twice, once to refill the Morris’s tank and call to reset the time of his meeting, and once more to postpone the rendezvous again.

The latter call had resulted in a pause before the peevish reply. “Really, Mr. Peters, we’re getting into the dining hour. Perhaps you’d like to meet me at the Duke.”

“The Duke?”

“The Duke of Wellington. On Darlington Road. Anyone in town can tell you how to find it.”

The professor had been right: everyone on the street could, and did, tell Jason how to find The Duke. Unfortunately, no two sets of directions were alike.

Jason decided to at least enjoy this medieval town built on the hill that was the fifty-seven-acre peninsula formed by a bend in the River Wear. The low skyline was dominated by a Norman cathedral and fortress, stones dragged from a nearby quarry shortly after 1072. The church housed the relics of the Venerable Bede, eighth- and ninth-century historian and ecclesiastic, a sure draw for the mediaeval pilgrim trade. The castle had served as the Episcopal Palace until the bishop gave it up in 1832 to found Britain’s third university there at Durham.

Touring Durham was fine but not the purpose of Jason’s long drive, or, for that matter, the reason for his journey to England.

Near the outskirts of town, a woman was riding a bicycle, her long shadow painted across the road by the late setting summer sun.

Jason pulled the Morris up beside her. “Ma’am? Excuse me, ma’am?”

She shot him a glance but didn’t stop pedaling.

“Can you tell me how to get to the Duke of Wellington?”

Evidently his accent identified him as an American tourist, not one of England’s rare but highly sensationalized serial murderers.

She stopped, putting both feet on the shoulder of the road and pointing. “D’ya see that row of buildings?”

At least, that was what Jason thought she said. The burr was almost as blurred as the Scottish dialect a few miles north. He nodded.

She was still pointing. “D’ya na see the sign, the one that says ‘Duke of Wellington’?”

She rode off before Jason could thank her. If thanks were due.

He parked the Morris and took in the glass-fronted establishment.

Jason stepped inside a traditional British public house. Dark mahogany bar, dim tulip-shaped lights on chandeliers and—unusual in pubs of the past but becoming more common—a small wine selection in a glass case, but … Something was missing. The low murmur of conversation as the clientele leaned against the bar sipping their pints was the same as was the sporadic exclamations from the group gathered around the dartboard on the far wall. The smell was of old beer, fried food, and … no smoke. The clearly visible air, the stale tobacco odor, all gone the way of the red British phone booth and the personal privacy of the royal family.

The health gestapo had prevailed in Great Britain.

Jason waited until there was an opening between the bodies crowding the bar. He stood patiently until the publican spotted him and sidled up, his eyebrows raised in a question.

“Draft bitters,” Jason said, not looking forward to a beer served at room temperature. But then, it seemed all beer in Great Britain was served that way. “And I’m looking for someone, a Professor Nigel Cravas.”

The barkeep was using one hand to hold the pint glass and the other to pull the beer tap. He jutted a jaw to Jason’s left. “That’s him, the chap in the last booth. Will you be having dinner with us tonight?”

Jason put a five-pound note on the highly varnished bar top and waited for his change. “Thanks. I’ll know in a few minutes.”

The smell of old grease made the possibility less than mouthwatering.

Hunched over to protect his glass from patrons not always careful against whom they bumped, Jason made his way to the far booth. “Dr. Cravas?”

The man glanced up from a plate of what looked like cremated beef swimming in grease. A stained napkin hung from his open shirt collar. A glass of tea-colored liquid was at his elbow. The slice of cucumber told Jason it was a Pimm’s Cup, a mixture of dry gin, aperitif, lemon soda or ginger ale, and spices. Like New Orleans’s Sazerac Cocktail, the drink’s origins lay somewhere in the eighteenth century and no two establishments made them exactly the same way. In typical English fashion, the Pimm’s came with no ice.

Cravas’s red-rimmed eyes and the slight slur of his voice told Jason this glass was not his first of the evening. He made an effort to stand and sat down hard, settling for a “Mr. Peters! Do have a seat.”

Jason did that, watching Cravas finish off the meat using both knife and fork in the English and European manner. He used the napkin to wipe a dribble from his chin before draining his glass. He was a roundish man of about fifty, his face puffy, jaws beginning to sag into fleshy bags. The burst capillaries along his cheeks were the badge of the heavy drinker.

He put down knife and fork. “Forgive me for not getting up.”

Jason was settling into the seat across from him. “And forgive me for my tardiness. I had a bit of a problem getting out of London.”

“Hmph! And who doesn’t these days? I try to avoid the place whenever possible.”

Jason was unsure where to begin. “How long have you been with the British Institute of Science and Climatology?”

Cravas lifted his glass, noting with disappointment that it was empty. “Ever since I joined the faculty of the college in the eighties. School was only founded in 1972, y’know. Newest college at the newest university.” He gave what could have been either a laugh or a grunt. “Newest and newest. That’s interesting.” He looked toward the bar. “Say, be a good chap and fetch me another libation, would you? Conversation dries my throat. Jake there at the bar knows what I want. He’ll put it on my tab.”

Jason struggled out from the tight confines of the booth even though he had barely taken two sips of his own beer.

He caught Jake’s eye. “Another Pimm’s for the professor.”

Jake was concentrating on filling a pint glass, this time half Guinness, half ale—a black and tan. “And who’ll be paying for the good professor’s glass now?”

Jason had a feeling he knew the answer. “He said to put it on his account.”

Jake handed the drink to a customer, the heavier stout clearly delineated from the lighter ale. “Did he, now? And did he say when he might be paying up? The matter’s gotten more than a month behind.”

Jason put another five-pound note on the bar. “Take the Pimm’s out of this.”

Cravas had been watching. He jerked his head toward Jake and the bar as Jason slid back into his seat. “That dobber! I’ve been patronizing this place for years. They know I’m not going anywhere.”

Jason took a sip of his bitters, which had somehow gotten even warmer in his absence. Time to get down to business. “You, or your institute, hired Boris Karloff to go to Iceland. Why?”

If the abrupt shift in conversation surprised the professor, he didn’t show it. “Karloff? Like the movie actor who played Frankenstein? Is that what he told you his name was?”

“That’s what he told me, but I’m curious as to exactly what he was doing in Iceland and why someone would kill him for doing it.”

“We, the Institute, had been hearing rumors about the ice floe, the glaciers, there. Word was flora, plants, kept showing up in it, plants that don’t grow at that latitude. Not bloody likely the university would put money into any kind of research by someone without the proper degrees, right? It took a bit of arm-twisting, as you Yanks say. Seems the material you sent me from your Dr. Wu has confirmed the rumor is true.”

“He got killed over a rumor?”

Cravas took a sip of his Pimm’s. “I would think at least part of that would be obvious.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“He found something someone didn’t want known.”

Jason drank from his glass. “A piece of a grapevine on a glacier. And what was likely a tool?”

“Quite damning, don’t you think?”

Jason put down his glass and placed both elbows on the table. “Why don’t you explain that to me.”

Cravas reached for his glass, withdrew his hand, and sat back. “As you are no doubt aware, the current scientific bugaboo is so-called global warming, possibly industrially caused by spewing carbon gases into the air. Finding a grapevine in that glacier, particularly an ancient species of grape, would indicate that the climate, at some time, was conducive to growing grapes. In other words, warm. That, in turn, would indicate that warming periods have nothing to do with human activity. There are a number of respected scientists who question the existence of global warming and certainly question any human causation.”

At one time scientists thought the earth was flat, too, Jason thought. But he said, “I thought the polar ice caps are receding.”

“Not quite. In 2007, Antarctica set a record for more new ice since 1979. Only along the Antarctic Peninsula is there significant melting, an area about one-fiftieth the size of East Antarctica, where ice has been growing.

“Just as glaciers in Iceland, Norway, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, and the Himalayas are advancing. Even some in your country, like the Nisqually and Emmons glaciers on Mount Rainier are growing, as are some in Alaska. In fact, over ninety percent of the world’s ice caps are growing, not shrinking. Hardly conclusive evidence of global warming.”

Was this guy drunk, or was what he was saying real? “But I’ve seen pictures …”

This time Cravas did take a drink. “Dear boy, the pictures are rubbish. You take a photo in the winter when the glacier is at its greatest size, then photograph it again in the summer. The loss of ice is entirely seasonal. Have you heard of the hockey stick?”

Jason wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. “Hockey stick? The thing hockey players use?”

Cravas reached under the table and retrieved a briefcase Jason had not noticed. He drew out a sheaf of papers, spreading them on the table. He pointed to a horizontal squiggly line that curved upward at one end like the blade of a hockey stick.

“This is a graph prepared from various data fed into a computer by a geoscientist from the University of Massachusetts named Michael Mann in, I believe, 2004.” He pointed. “See the dates along the bottom? You will note the sudden upward swing in about 1900, just the time widespread use of coal and natural gas for heating were putting significant amounts of carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere. This graph gave credence to every man-caused global warming advocate on Earth.

“The problem is, Mann mishandled his data, as revealed by a couple of Canadian scientists a few years later. In fact, Mann’s programs magnified data that tended to increase the hockey-stick effect while minimizing that which didn’t. Mann and his theories have been pretty well debunked. Just like the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia here in Britain.”

“Climatic Research Unit?”

“Back in ’09, someone hacked into the center’s computers, published a number of e-mails that clearly demonstrated data adverse to the theory of man-made global warming was being destroyed, particularly when Information Act requests were made. The advocates of man-made global warming have a history of, shall we say, less than academically honest research. For that matter, the disgraced CRU director, Phil Jones, admitted global temperatures have remained essentially the same for the last fifteen years.”

“There are a lot of politicians that don’t know that.”

“Or don’t want to admit they do.”

“But what about the melting glaciers causing rising sea levels, inundating small Pacific islands?”

“What islands?”

“I read about—”

Cravas waved a dismissive hand. “More rubbish! Dr. Paul Kench of Auckland University measured twenty-seven small Pacific islands where historical data showed sea-level increases of two millimeters a year over the last twelve to sixty years. Only four of the twenty-seven had diminished in size. The other twenty-three had remained the same or increased. The natives of those islands know an opportunity when they see it: The industrialized world has caused something that threatens their land. They want ‘compensation.’ In American vernacular, ‘Pay up, sucka!’”

Jason took another sip of his insipidly warm bitters, not sure what to believe. “I still don’t understand why someone would kill over something that is, at best, a theory.”

Cravas looked at him the same way he probably regarded one of his students who had come up with a wrong answer. “Good God, man! Do you have no idea of the billions, if not trillions, of dollars spent by private industry on the ‘green’ craze? Low- or no-emissions automobiles and hugely expensive modifications to power plants are just a couple of examples. Not to mention the amount of money various governments have and will continue to spend to rid the air of CO2? To suddenly announce that global warming was so much bunk or that mankind had nothing to do with it would cause entire economies to collapse. Worse, it would make politicians look foolish, not to mention a great number of scientists who have staked their reputations on the phenomenon. And think of the institutions like Greenpeace and the Greenies! Why—”

Jason’s head jerked up. “Say that again.”

Cravas was confused. “Say what? About the ruined reputations?”

“No, I thought I heard you say ‘Greenies.’”

“Oh, that’s what we call Grünwelt, one of the biggest, most aggressive, and well-funded environmental organizations in the world.”

Not weenies, not meanies, but Greenies. Jason finally understood what Boris had been trying to tell him.

“What can you tell me about Grünwelt?” he asked.

Cravas went a long way toward emptying his glass. “Not much that I haven’t already. Extremely vocal about environmental causes. Some consider the blokes ecoterrorists. Hasn’t been proved, of course, but there are those who connect them with ‘accidents’ in coal mines in Wales, sabotaging oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve had more than one threat I suspect they might be behind. Chaps aren’t real good at tolerating views that don’t coincide with theirs.”