Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (32 page)

She said, “I turn on the TV and every channel says something different happened. What did happen, sir?”

I’m going to find out.

•   •   •

“LET’S GO OVER IT ONE MORE TIME,” SAID AMANDA NG AS HESS TOOK
notes. “I know you’re tired. I really appreciate this. Did Jens . . . the man who said he was Jens . . . did Jens ever mention anything about the Mideast, or a connection with a foreign terrorist group?”

“I told you. No.”

“Domestic, then. There are several groups in rural Alaska that concern us.”

“He didn’t mention any connections.”

“You said that the men who got out of the plane were speaking Russian.”

“No, I said I thought it was Russian. Jens said it was Russian. I don’t speak Russian. It could have been something else.”

“Did Jens ever say anything to lead you to believe that whoever did this intended to do it again, elsewhere?”

“No.”

“Did he make even any casual mention of another U.S. location, even in passing?”

“No.”

“Did you ever get the impression that this infection in Barrow was a kind of test run?”

“Test run?”

“You know, try it out in one place, do it in another.”

“What’s the point of a test run? If you have an infectious agent and you use it, the whole world knows it instantly. Test run? It wasn’t a test run. He told me what it was.”

“You believe him?” Hess said. Apparently Hess had doubts.

“My turn to ask a question. You said last time that you’ve put out Jens’s photo on TV. Anyone recognize him?”

“We’re getting a lot of calls, but no.
It’s my father who disappeared! It’s Uncle Ed, the pervert! It’s the slob who lived next door and used to play loud Irish music!
”

“What about the eco lodge connection?” I said.

Hess sighed. Ng took it more seriously. “There isn’t any that we can see. Why? Did Jens mention the eco lodge?”

“No, but he was there! I’m tired. I need to sleep.”

•   •   •

“YOU’RE LOOKING BETTER.” BRUCE FRIDAY BEAMED. “WE ALL CAME TO SEE
you. Happy birthday!”

They’d flown down on the morning 737 from Barrow, and they were in the room when I was wheeled back from physical therapy. They’d brought a lemon cake. Deirdre McDougal lit candles. I blew them out, watched smoke drift before their faces. Calvin DeRochers lugged in a suitcase. He was headed back to Arkansas when the visit was over, to begin the next year of planning for a return.

“Calvin expects to hit it big next year,” he said.

Mikael Grandy brought a gift-wrapped book,
The Eskimo and the Oil Man,
about Barrow. He looked incomplete when he wasn’t holding a camera. He stayed back, didn’t talk much. I’d heard that HBO had accelerated the release of his film. It would be coming out in ten days, while Barrow still filled headlines across the world.

Mikael was booked on an evening flight to New York, with a stop in Minneapolis.

“Sure you don’t want some New York bagels?” he said.

“I’m sure.”

The McDougals brought a care package from the North Slope Wildlife Department; reindeer sausage, caribou stew, and an assortment of homemade fruit pies that we convinced the nurse to store in a staff break-room refrigerator down the hall. They all had business in Anchorage. The trip was not just to see me. McDougal would attend one more Arctic symposium to be held this week at the Cook Hotel. Bruce would speak on “The Great Polar Bear as the Arctic Warms.”

“All this attention in Washington might benefit our effort to protect these magnificent creatures,” he said.

Merlin was in town for a meeting of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, and a final vote on whether to support Longhorn’s offshore drilling proposal. Dave and Deborah were back in Anchorage for the year. Leon Kavik had come to scout the University of Alaska campus. The mayor was visiting his sister, who worked in the office of the lieutenant governor.

“Brought you some Tito,” said Dave Lillienthal, leaving a gift-wrapped package by the window, with a red ribbon on top. He winked. “I told the nurses it’s books.”

Tilda Swann pushed to the front of the group.

She looked good in leg-hugging jeans, sharply toed dark leather boots, and a turtleneck beneath a fawn-colored jacket. She wore a silk scarf, moss-green, which highlighted her red hair. Brashness still marked her, but her voice was toned down, at least at first.

She said, “I came to say how sorry I am for your loss, Colonel.” But her voice was stiff, her eyes, locked on mine, seemed more wary than sympathetic. Of all the people there, she and Leon were the only two who were not friends.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question, Tilda?”

She seemed surprised. The others watched. She said, “That’s what I’m in Anchorage for today, to answer questions. After you, I’ll be talking with the guy from the
New York Times
.”

Somehow, when she said it, it sounded like a threat, or at least a challenge. I said, “You’ve got a job with the new eco lodge, I heard.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I do.”

“To give lectures.”

“That’s right. I like Barrow. I like the people. I like the remoteness. And that lodge will show people there’s an alternative way to make money without giving
them
,” she said disdainfully, nodding at Dave Lillienthal,
“
carte blanche to wreck one more pristine place on Earth.”

“Did you meet the owners of the lodge?” I asked.

Her gaze hardened. Sympathy only went so far. “Uh-huh.”

“Did they tell you if it’s just a lodge, or whether they’ll be doing anything else out there?”

Her mouth snapped shut. She shook her head. She was one of those people whose anger appears instantly in the form of blushes, which in her case started at the freckles and burst outward and across the skin, mass by mass.

“I don’t believe this,” she snapped. “Even now? That lodge is a win-win, and you’re trying to link it to what you guys did? Disgusting! Why don’t you admit there was a government testing program that went wrong! All this bullshit! Phony hand-wringing. A cover-up was what it was!”

She stormed out. I watched her on CNN that evening, fulminating, her angry face superimposed over a background shot of a herd of caribou,
Live from Alaska.
Her fury seemed magnified, and her British accent gave weight and heft to the accusations spewing from her lovely mouth.

“The North Slope is an American Serengeti,” she said. “One of the last unspoiled spots on Earth. We intend to keep it that way.”

Eddie sat beside me. “Fiery in bed, I bet,” he said with amusement.

“If she’d shut up.”

“Hey, you’re back,” exclaimed Eddie.

I wasn’t back. It was wishful thinking. She’d given me an idea, though. I picked up the phone, called Valley Girl.

“It’s three
A.M.
in Washington?” she moaned, even her complaints phrased as questions. “I’m sleeping?”

“Perfect time to go to work,” I said.

It took a while. But I found him.

Crises bloom and get replaced in Washington. What seems crucial one day is history the next. Who planned the shooting of John F. Kennedy? Did Franklin Roosevelt have advance warning that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor? Did George W. Bush lie to America when he sent troops into Iraq, saying that country hid weapons of mass destruction? Was the quarantine of Barrow a military cover-up, or not?

After the hearings, the talking-head speculations and accusations, after my secret testimony in closed hearings before Congressional subcommittees on terrorism and biowarfare, the admiral let me retire early.

Joe Rush, ex-colonel, at the rural post office, collecting a pension check.

They say you can’t go home again, but, as is often the case, they are misinformed. You can always go home again. Or rather, what is home is inside you, what you carry from childhood. It gets buried during the rest of your time on Earth, but it never completely goes away.

Smith Falls didn’t look much different than I’d left it. The hamlet still ran for three hundred yards along a Berkshire river. The church remained the anchor of town. The mechanics and home repair guys still gathered for crisp bacon, fried eggs, and strong opinions at the general store at 6
A.M
., where the
Berkshire Eagle
carried the news, not the
Washington Post
. Most of them didn’t know who I was. Then word got around, from a clerk at the store.

There was satellite TV in town now, and the kids going past on the school bus were hooked to iPhones, or sending text messages. I stayed away from it, and long-distance calls for the most part. At least personal ones.

I found a small house on a dirt road, a thirty-year-old A-frame built originally for a New York lawyer, and after three decades of life the shabby construction needed upkeep, which gave me something to do. There was a big bedroom downstairs and a small one in the loft up top for an office. The house had propane heat and a woodstove for backup. I was pretty good with the chainsaw. The pile of ash logs grew higher as more trees outside fell sick. Up here, it’s the vegetation suffering from fatal disease.

I could not see the nearest neighbor, or rather, it seemed to be a clubfooted, ill-tempered moose that, at 5
A.M.
some mornings, limped past, and continued out of view, munching leaves, as if punching a clock.

Most mornings I woke at 4:30 and, in darkness, did the painful exercises I’d learned in physical therapy. Walking was an education. The nature of balance had changed. But soon I was doing a mile a day, then three, and then I ramped it up, walked faster, started running, started running hills, running trails. The toe loss was a stare gatherer at the town beach.

Not that I cared.

The front stairs needed a new buttress. A century-old pine tree out back leaned dangerously toward the house and had to come down. I stripped off weathered, ant-eaten siding, plugged a gap by the chimney where rainwater was getting past flashing, stripped off the old and put in the new. That’s not hard if you’re dealing with something inanimate, like a house.

Word got around town that Joe Rush was back, and some of my old classmates dropped in: fatter, older, redder, but awkwardly, if temporarily, welcome.

We reminisced. Would I stay? Did I remember our fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Wilberforce, and the way she wore glasses around her neck on a red string? Did I remember the time that we climbed into the condemned Brady Textile Mill grounds, got sick-drunk on scotch, almost got caught by the Lee cops? Did I remember diving competitions on summer nights at the old granite quarry in Becket?

A world without the admiral, Eddie, and terrorists. A world in which microbes gave you a flu, at worst. They didn’t threaten to wipe out a town.

Late at night, I searched.

I sat in the second-floor study, computer glow on my face, and followed the progress of the Barrow eco lodge, on Tilda’s Swann’s “Save the North Slope” blog. I took phone calls from Valley Girl, who was working for me off the clock. I think the admiral knew she was doing this, and let it go. He’s that way.

Eddie called once a week, checking in, giving me space. Galli called once a month. He was waiting for me to get bored, or anxious, or just to miss Washington. He was hoping I would come back. Forget it.

It was a bad Christmas, very cold for Massachusetts, not so cold for the North Slope. I heard from Calvin, who had tracked me down, and wanted to know how I was doing. He must have told the others. Next I heard from Bruce, the McDougals, Merlin, and Deb Lillienthal. Their e-mails were casual and caring, filling me in on their lives, sometimes shyly mentioning Karen, wondering if I’d be in Barrow next summer season, doing more research.

Oh, just checking in, Joe.

On New Year’s Day I phoned Dr. Liz Willoughby, head of the department of sciences at Prezant College, New Jersey, at home. She seemed subdued and said that the FBI had stopped coming around, asking about the Harmons. She said their project had been taken over by an ex-grad student, now an assistant professor. She missed the Harmons, and had not gotten over their loss.

I let her think that I was still actively involved in the investigation, and asked if the ex-grad student would be going out to the lakes again this coming summer and following up, as Ted Harmon would have done?

“Not on lake nine. Dr. Untermeyer will be doing the other lakes. But nine is off limits now.”

“Why is that?”

“There was trouble getting permission from the new owners, that hotel going up, up there.”

I leaned forward. “The eco lodge?”

“Hotel. Eco lodge. Whatever. They were
rude,
Craig told me
.
They said no research of any kind will be permitted on the property. They turned down Dr. Untermeyer, even after he offered to stay at the lodge and pay full rate.” She paused protectively. “Dr. Untermeyer’s grant wouldn’t allow that. But he has family money. He would have supplemented the grant with that.”

I listened, sipping coffee, watching a deer wandering around the side of my screened-in porch. It looked how I felt. Lost.

She said, “Craig told them he’d be quiet. All he wanted was to row a boat out and use a net to take samples. No machines. No loud noises. He even offered to give lectures to guests for free, about the Arctic.”

“But they didn’t want lectures, did they?”

“No.”

“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.