Tundra (12 page)

Purkiss said: ‘I’m coming with you.’

Medievsky shook his head curtly. ‘No. The three of us. Gunnar is the engineer. Frank too has some experience with satellite systems. And I am going as leader.’

‘There’s little for me to do here now,’ said Purkiss. ‘I’m coming along.’

‘I said no. If the dish has been damaged by adverse weather, the journey may be hazardous. You are a visitor to the station. I cannot risk your safety in such a way.’

‘There’s a murderer at this station,’ said Purkiss. ‘We’re all at risk.’

‘We do not know this.’ Irritation flared in Medievsky’s voice. ‘I will not discuss the matter further.’

Purkiss thought about saying it. Saying that Medievsky and Haglund would be venturing out with the man who’d butchered Keys, and who had tried to kill Purkiss himself. He held his tongue.

‘We will take one of the phone handsets,’ Medievsky said, turning towards the door. ‘If we succeed in repairing the dish, I’ll call here immediately.’

The three men, Medievsky, Haglund and Wyatt, left the room.

*

P
urkiss wandered the corridors, watching the others as they dispersed throughout the complex. He gave the impression of purposefulness, but really he was coordinating his movements so that he encountered each researcher one at a time and had a sense of where they were heading.

Clement and Budian went straight to the laboratory wing, where Purkiss understood Clement had an office of her own. The two women walked side by side, talking in low murmurs. Montrose followed suit a short while afterwards. Avner was the last to leave, emerging from the mess a full fifteen minutes after the others. As he passed Purkiss he stared up at him, as if he couldn’t quite place his face.

‘You all right?’ said Purkiss.

The younger man said nothing, walked straight on.

Purkiss turned and went after him. ‘Efraim. Are you okay?’

Avner stopped. His back to Purkiss, he said: ‘No, man. I am very far from okay.’

Avner seemed to be heading for the sleeping quarters in the east wing. Purkiss had an idea.

He caught up again with Avner and said, quietly, ‘Being alone now probably isn’t the best idea.’

This time Avner turned his face. Purkiss was struck by the bitterness in the drawn features. ‘Hey, man. We’re
all
alone. Doug Keys sure as shit was. And still is.’

Purkiss waited a beat. Then: ‘Look, Efraim. I’ve no particular expertise in this area. I’ve seen a lot of people traumatised by death, and I still don’t know what the best thing to do is in order to cope. There may not be anything you can do. But if you want to offload, to talk for a few minutes or however long it takes... well, I’ll listen.’

He expected a sarcastic dismissal, and was surprised when Avner launched in, as though the words had been held back by the weakest of threads. ‘None of us liked him. And that makes it worse. You understand? He died knowing he didn’t have a friend here. Probably not a friend in the world. It’s too late to make amends. Ah, shit. Listen to me. I sound like a fuckin’ daytime soap opera.’ He choked angrily on the last words, and stormed off.

Purkiss followed, keeping his distance. When Avner reached one of the doors – room 12 – and opened it, Purkiss called: ‘Can I ask a favour?’

Avner paused.

‘I wanted to ask Frank Wyatt something but he’s gone now. Can you tell me which is his room, so I can slip a note under his door? I might forget later.’

‘First one round the corner on the left,’ Avner said dully, and closed the door.

Purkiss remained in the corridor. He knew what he had to do, but a nagging voice in his head told him to knock on Avner’s door, insist that he be let in. He wasn’t sure what Avner was going to do, or was capable of doing, and he wondered about the risk. About whether a second body might be discovered today.

He decided he couldn’t push it.

Purkiss walked round the corner and came to the door Avner had specified. Number eight.

He tried the handle carefully. As he’d expected, it was locked.

Purkiss had already examined the lock on his own door. It was a basic mortice, an easy one to crack, and the one on the door to number eight looked the same. But Wyatt would have laid traps, just as Purkiss had in his own room, and Purkiss was respectful enough of Wyatt’s professional capabilities that he knew he wouldn’t be able to spot all of them.

He took a notepad from the inside pocket of his jacket, scribbled:
I know it’s not a good time, but could I ask you a quick question about that SODAR system when you get back? Thanks –  John
.

The words were entirely for show.

Purkiss folded the note and slipped it under the door as far as it would go.

He stepped back, looked left and right down the corridor, getting a feel for the layout, the dimensions. Then he walked on and took another turn and reached his own room, number five.

He locked his door behind him before laying his briefcase onto the small work table and opening it. On top was a laptop computer, which he set aside. Beneath, the dictaphone he’d used to interview Keys and Budian the night before sat in its foam nest, together with a mains cable, a microphone and a stack of spare batteries.

Purkiss lifted the equipment out and felt along the edges of the exposed base of the briefcase until he located the tiny clasps, accessible only with the tips of his fingernails. He unclipped the base and raised it. Beneath, in the false bottom, were the leads and transmitters and receivers of a different set of apparatus. He slipped a couple of components into the pocket of his jacket.

As he’d done the day before, Purkiss moved one of the chairs into the middle of the room and, standing on it, reached up and pushed away one of the ceiling panels. Once again he hauled himself up, this time pulling himself fully into the crawlspace above the ceiling.

He peered about, trying to estimate the distance and direction of Wyatt’s room. It was difficult in the darkness. He began clambering awkwardly across the metal lattice that constituted the framework of the ceiling, taking care not to lean his weight on any of the ceiling panels, which wouldn’t bear it.

Had he gone too far? Purkiss had no way of knowing. When he gripped the edge of one of the panels below him and prised it aside, the room below was in semidarkness, illuminated faintly by the morning glare off the snow beyond the unseen window. The room itself, or what he could see of it, appeared similar to his own. There were no features to distinguish it even as being occupied by a man or a woman.

But there, near the door, was a folded slip of paper. The note Purkiss had pushed through. He had the right room.

For a moment, he considered climbing down into the room. Once again, he thought of the traps Wyatt would have set.

He replaced the panel and pressed it into place. Reaching blindly into his pocket, the narrow space restricting his ability to manoeuvre, Purkiss brought out the transmitter, no bigger than a fifty pence piece. Kneeling precariously on two steel beams, the ceiling pressing against his back, he attached a tiny clip to the transmitter and affixed it to the edge of one of the beams, in a spot where it wouldn’t be knocked free if the ceiling panels beneath were pushed aside. The transmitter jutted up like a small stud. It would be discovered easily if anything more than the most cursory search was carried out. But it would have to do.

Purkiss turned within the space in a wide, ungainly arc, and made his way back to the gap in the ceiling above his own room. Once inside, he stowed the rest of the apparatus in the false bottom of the briefcase. There was no use for it yet, not until Wyatt returned.

*

O
n his way towards the west wing and the laboratories, Purkiss tried to fit the pieces together.

In the early hours of the morning, someone had accosted Keys in the infirmary, overpowered him, and strangled him, cutting his wrist to make it appear he’d committed suicide. The deception was a clumsy one, and wouldn’t stand up to proper forensic examination, but Purkiss assumed that wasn’t the point. The illusion of suicide was supposed to be a short-term one, to divert suspicion temporarily. Which meant that the killer – Wyatt – was buying time.

Why had Keys been in the infirmary at that hour of the night? It was possible he’d gone for a heroin fix, but it seemed an odd time for an addict to need one. No: Purkiss thought Keys had been lured there. Either someone – Wyatt – had summoned him, citing acute illness, or whoever it was that had leverage over Keys, that knew about his addiction, had demanded a meeting there.

Wyatt remained the most likely perpetrator. But Purkiss was aware of the dangers of dismissing other possibilities out of hand, no matter how fanciful they seemed. It was plausible that one of the others was blackmailing Wyatt, and had met him in the night to issue further threats and to question him about what he had told the journalist Farmer earlier that evening. An argument might have intensified into a physical struggle, and the killing may have been an unintended consequence.

There was the other matter of the disrupted communication with the outside world. It could turn out to be the result of weather damage to the satellite dish. But Purkiss knew that was a coincidence too far. Somebody – and this time Wyatt was the only plausible candidate – had sabotaged it, either the dish itself or some other component in the communications chain. Medievsky had said the dish was located forty kilometres to the west of Yarkovsky Station. Wyatt could have taken one of the snowmobiles in the dead of night, either before or after he’d killed Keys, and made the round trip in an hour, assuming the weather and terrain permitted it.

Once again, the reasons for the sabotage weren’t clear. Sooner or later, contact would be re-established, not least because the outside world would start to get suspicious and investigate. It suggested again that Wyatt was buying time, or more accurately borrowing it. Which meant he had something pressing on his mind, some action or event.

But by breaking the line of communication with the outside, Wyatt was cutting himself off as well. Two explanations came to mind. Either he was operating entirely independently, and had no need to keep in touch with anyone beyond the station. Or, more likely, he had some other method of contact, perhaps a link via a second satellite dish which was unknown to Medievsky and the others.

Purkiss suspected the second, which was why he’d planted the surveillance device in the ceiling above Wyatt’s room. It was a long shot. Wyatt might not even be communicating from his room. But Purkiss’s options at this point were limited.

He hadn’t brought any kind of weapon to Yarkovsky Station, not least because he wouldn’t have got it past the several airport security checkpoints he’d passed through on the journey from London. The surveillance equipment was more easily smuggled, and from the outset Purkiss had been looking for an opportunity to use it.

He found Montrose in the main laboratory with Budian, both of them working at separate desks. Montrose glanced up as Purkiss put his head round the door. The harsh light from overhead flashed off his spectacles.

‘Dr Montrose. Ryan. Could I have a word?’

He’d expected reluctance, but Montrose stood up immediately and came over, his face grim. ‘What is it?’

‘In private?’ Purkiss murmured, glancing over at Budian, who didn’t look up. She still looked ashen. Next to Avner, she seemed to be taking Keys’s death more badly than any of them.

Montrose led the way down the corridor to his own office. Inside, after he’d closed the door, he said again, ‘What?’

‘I’m at a loose end here now,’ said Purkiss. ‘I can’t continue with the interviews, not after what’s happened.’

‘And?’

‘You’re in charge of the station in Oleg’s absence. I wanted to ask if I could be of some use.’

‘How?’

‘I have some IT skills. Let me use one of the computers, see if I can work on the internet connection.’

‘It’s the satellite system that’s down. The dish, probably. The fault’s not with the computers.’

Purkiss pulled a flash drive from his pocket. ‘I have a program on here that runs an advanced diagnostic check on connection problems. It’s worth a try, even if only to confirm what we already suspect.’

Montrose peered into Purkiss’s face. ‘Why didn’t you mention this earlier?’

Purkiss glanced away in embarrassment. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t think of it. I’d forgotten I had the program with me. It was only a few minutes ago, when I was working on my laptop and inserted this drive for something else, that I noticed it.’

Montrose took a step back. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Why?’

Montrose blinked, as if he hadn’t been expecting Purkiss to question him. ‘Because there’s classified data on these machines. We can’t have some journalist accessing them.’

‘So find me a spare. A PC that’s linked up but doesn’t have anything on it I shouldn’t be looking at.’

Montrose hesitated. Purkiss could almost hear the calculations gong on in the man’s mind. If Purkiss succeeded, Montrose could share the credit for it. It would be one in the eye for Medievsky.

Purkiss shrugged. ‘Look, it was just a thought. Forget it.’ He turned for the door.

Montrose opened it, jerked his head. ‘Come with me.’ His face was impassive, but Purkiss knew he’d won.

Back in the laboratory, Montrose indicated a desktop computer that looked at least five years old. ‘That one doesn’t get used much.’

Purkiss seated himself at the office chair and started up the computer. He said, ‘You can watch over my shoulder if you want. Make sure I’m not stealing anybody’s secrets.’

‘I’ll do that.’

The computer took an age to boot, the back-and-forth whirring cutting through the silence of the laboratory. Purkiss waited patiently. He’d noticed the two USB ports on the body of the unit as he sat down.

At last the desktop presented itself on the monitor, together with a prompt for a username and password. Montrose said: ‘Avert your eyes,’ and reached in past Purkiss. He tapped on the keyboard.

Purkiss looked again after a safe interval. The wallpaper was a motif featuring the flags of the five nations participating in the Yarkovsky Station project. He plugged the flash disk into one of the USB ports.