Jarvis leaned back in his chair and looked out the window between the gaps in the blinds at the rows of aircraft parked beneath the twinkling lights.
‘And did you find any?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Cutler said. ‘Anything left in that apartment was completely incinerated. If there was blood there its presence might be traceable but that’s all. There won’t be any means of identifying who it belonged to.’
Jarvis drained his coffee and crushed the cup in his hand before looking at Cutler.
‘Tyler Willis was working on a project regarding a particular type of bacteria that can infect and live in the human body. The blood he took was from a man named Hiram Conley, who was subsequently killed in a fracas with state troopers outside Santa Fe. My problem is that Tyler Willis told only two people about the blood he took: Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez. So, how could Donald Wolfe have known about that blood and sent your team down here, if he hadn’t himself been told by someone else where that blood was?’
Butch Cutler opened his mouth to reply, then hesitated.
‘He must have been tipped off,’ he said finally. ‘Maybe by a concerned citizen?’
‘Not likely,’ Jarvis said. ‘Tyler Willis was conducting his work under the utmost secrecy — he hadn’t even told his own secretary what he was doing. Ethan Warner talks to him, the labs come under attack and then Tyler Willis goes missing. Warner searches for Willis and the chase leads to SkinGen, where’s he’s convinced Tyler is being held against his will. You guys then get another mysterious “tip-off from Donald Wolfe and Willis later turns up dead.’
Cutler frowned as he thought.
‘Oppenheimer?’
‘The only way Donald Wolfe could have known about that blood is if either Tyler Willis or his abductor told him about it. Colonel Wolfe is involved in the homicide of Tyler Willis, either willfully or inadvertently.’
Cutler slowly raised his hands to his face and drew them down his cheeks as Jarvis watched a terrible realization set in.
‘I called the bribe in to Wolfe,’ he said, and then a new horror blanched his face. ‘And I pulled Warner out of SkinGen. Tyler Willis might have been just a few yards away.’
‘You weren’t to know,’ Jarvis said, convinced that whatever Donald Wolfe was up to, Cutler almost certainly had nothing to do with it. ‘We need to get Wolfe in custody and out of the loop before he can cause any more damage.’
‘What do you mean? What’s he been doing?’
Jarvis tossed the photographs of the SkinGen jet at Bethal airfield in Alaska, and explained the colonel’s missing flight hours.
‘He visited a place called Brevig Mission, right out on Alaska’s west coast, before flying from there direct to New York City. You got any idea why he might do that?’
Cutler shook his head.
‘None whatsoever,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing up there that I’m aware of that would hold any interest for USAMRIID. Nothing that’s not already frozen under the permafrost anyway.’
‘So there may be something?’ Jarvis pressed.
Cutler rolled his big shoulders in a shrug.
‘Most departments have at one time or another traveled to habitats bordering the Arctic Circle, mainly to study the victims of novel diseases. Their bodies are preserved by the cold when they’re interred, sealing in whatever killed them for future study.’
Jarvis felt something cold slither through his veins as he considered what Cutler had said.
‘Like infectious diseases,’ he suggested. ‘The plague, for instance.’
‘Sure,’ Cutler nodded, ‘a whole bunch of viruses and bacterial infections.’
Jarvis’s mind began racing as he plotted Colonel Wolfe’s movements in his mind.
‘Why is Donald Wolfe in New York City?’ he asked.
‘He’s there to present a key-note speech on population before the United Nation’s General Assembly. What he says will probably shape global pandemic policy for decades to come.’
A vision of the United Nations building, set in the heart of one of the most populous cities on earth, flashed dark and foreboding through Jarvis’s mind.
‘How many nations will be attending?’ he asked.
Again, Cutler shrugged. ‘All of ’em, I think. A hundred ninety-two.’
Jarvis nodded slowly. It was a little-known fact that although Western nations generally guided UN policy, the United Nations was mostly representative of developing nations who outnumbered their developed brethren by two to one. Gripped by a sense of impending disaster, Jarvis leaned forward on the table.
‘Whatever Wolfe is planning, it’s not pretty,’ he said finally. ‘I’m going to need your help to stop him.’
Cutler gathered himself together and looked at Jarvis with a steady eye.
‘What do you need me to do?’
54
A brutally cold wind swept in off the peninsula, chased by the feeble light of the midnight sun just below the horizon as FBI Special Agent Pete Devereux led three men across the tundra. The small town of Brevig Mission with its spindly church shrank behind them in the strange blue shadows cast across the snow fields. Devereux was following an Inuit guide who was almost entirely concealed by thick coats and a fur-lined hood.
Devereux’s voice seemed weak as it was snapped away by the wind.
‘You sure they were out here?’ he asked, shouting to be heard.
The Inuit nodded, gesturing ahead of them.
‘They were here. Two men. They did not ask the elders to dig here, and refused to talk to us.’
Devereux looked out across the frozen wastes to where magnificent mountains crouched against the cold vista. He was about to say there was nothing to see when he spotted a series of geometric shapes huddled in a small knot amidst rippling clumps of hardy grass. A different kind of chill enveloped him as he realized what they were.
Gravestones.
The Inuit led the FBI team to the edge of the stones, and pointed to a spot on the ground some ten feet away.
‘This is where the man was working. He had tents and a vehicle. He stayed for a few days, and then he must have died here because another man came and took the tents away.’
Devereux looked at the ground. Half hidden by snow and ice he could just see where tent posts had been driven into the permafrost. Trampled, muddled snow and ice betrayed the presence of men in the last few days. His eye traced the ghostly outline of the tent, and he realized it had surrounded a single grave. Treading carefully, Devereux stepped across the snow and looked down at the grave. He lifted one foot and placed it on the earth in front of the gravestone, and instantly felt it give slightly beneath him.
Devereux turned to his companions.
‘Unpack the shovels.’
The Inuit tracker looked at him, his tiny eyes squinting against the bitter wind and little specks of ice encrusting his eyelashes.
‘This is not proper,’ he said. ‘You disrespect our people by digging here.’
Devereux shook his head as one of the agents began handing out shovels.
‘It’s not our choice,’ he said. ‘Your people have already been disrespected, we’re just trying to put it right. We’ve been ordered to do this for public safety. Whatever the people here were doing, it may not have been safe.’
The Inuit frowned.
‘I’d have thought that was obvious.’
Devereux stared at the Inuit as the agents behind him began driving their shovels into the icy earth. He was about to join them when, over the shoulder of the Inuit, he saw the town of Brevig Mission in the distance. The church spire of the Lutheran Memorial Church caught his attention. With a sudden jolt of memory, he recalled seeing an entire graveyard behind the church as they’d passed by.