Already flicked through the folders, then shook his head. ‘Some decommissioned Cold War ice station. I don’t have the details.’
‘If that’s their bolt-hole, there must be some significance to it.’ She gestured at the laptop. ‘Can I use your computer?’
Alderley nodded, and Nina opened the machine. ‘What are you looking for?’ Mac asked.
‘Whatever they’re doing up there.’
‘How are you going to find that out?’ Alderley asked dubiously.
She went to the web browser - and loaded the Qexia search engine. ‘To quote their own commercials,’ she said with a grin, ‘just ask.’
It took only a minute for the network of links to produce a result that surprised everyone in the room. ‘That’s his data centre?’ said Eddie, reading the news article, translated from the Danish, that accompanied a picture of Khoil standing before a bizarre structure. ‘Bloody hell. And I thought his house was over the top.’
‘It says it’s over a hundred miles from the nearest settlement,’ said Nina. ‘If you wanted to keep something hidden, it’s a good place.’
‘So what do we do? Fly up there and knock?’
‘If Interpol find anything to tie the Khoils to the Vault of Shiva, then yes - it directly connects them to the attempted theft of the Talonor Codex in San Francisco. As soon as they have something, they can issue an arrest warrant. Am I right, Kit?’
‘The Indian government is flying a team to Mount Kedarnath first thing tomorrow,’ Kit replied. ‘There are two crashed helicopters there. If their tail numbers match the ones hired by the Khoils’ company, we have our connection. We can upgrade the green notice to a red, and work with the Greenland police to search’ - he indicated the strange building on the laptop screen - ‘this place.’
‘Will you be going?’ Nina asked.
He tapped the crutch on the floor. ‘I don’t think so. But we will still need an expert to identify any artefacts that might be found there. If you want to go.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Nina immediately.
‘That wasn’t what I was going to say,’ Eddie grumbled, only half joking. ‘We just got back from the Himalayas, and now you want to go somewhere even colder?’
‘It’ll be worth it to see the expression on the Khoils’ faces when they get arrested.’ She turned to Alderley. ‘Is there anything else you can do to protect the summit in the meantime?’
‘Without any specific threat, all I can do is try to persuade the Indians to raise the security alert level - and it’s already pretty high. But . . .’ He thought for a moment, rubbing his moustache. ‘All the countries at the G20 have intelligence officers in their delegations - my opposite numbers, you could say. I can have quiet words with them, try to get them to take a gander at the Khoils for themselves. If we pool information, we might be able to find something actionable.’
‘How long will it take, though?’ asked Nina. ‘The summit starts tomorrow.’
‘Yeah,’ Eddie added. ‘It won’t help much if whatever Khoil’s planning happens while you’re swanning about at some spooks’ cocktail party.’
‘That’s not quite what I’ll be doing,’ said Alderley irritably. ‘As a matter of fact, I was going to suggest that Mac comes with me to talk to some of these people. And Mr Jindal, too. Getting first-hand accounts from reliable sources can speed things up enormously.’
‘Will you be able to get us security clearance for the summit?’ Mac asked.
‘For an MI6 adviser and an Interpol officer? No problem. It’s not as though you’re disreputable types.’ He looked directly at Eddie, who mouthed an obscenity.
‘I’m happy to help as much as I can,’ said Kit.
‘Great. I’ll make the arrangements.’ He took out his phone. Mac stepped forward to speak to Nina and Eddie. ‘So, off to Greenland? Rather you than me. One of the best things about retiring from the Regiment was knowing that I’d never have to spend another minute on a glacier.’
‘Funny, I thought that too,’ said Eddie. ‘Didn’t quite work out.’
The Scot smiled. ‘Well, best of luck. And wrap up warm.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Nina assured him. ‘I’m not planning to spend one second longer than I have to in the cold!’
31
Greenland
Nina gazed out of the porthole of the de Havilland Twin Otter aircraft at the landscape ten thousand feet below. It was an unbroken, empty swathe of snow, and in the near-eternal night of the Arctic winter there should have been nothing to see . . . but instead, it was one of the most amazing natural sights she had ever set eyes upon.
The sky was alive with the shimmering glow of the aurora borealis, green and red and pink lights coiling across the dark dome above. The blank snowscape became a giant canvas, a piece of abstract expressionism on a grand scale as colours were poured over it from the heavens. ‘Eddie,’ she said excitedly. ‘You’ve got to see this.’
Eddie paused in his discussion with Walther Probst, Interpol’s Tactical Liaison Officer, to glance through another window, ‘Not bad,’ he grunted, turning back to the German.
‘That’s all you’ve got to say? “Not bad”?’
‘I’ve seen it before. The SAS does Arctic training in Norway. After a couple of days freezing your arse off, you stop noticing it. Actually, it’s kind of a pain because it makes you easier to see.’
‘I married a philistine,’ she complained before joining the two men. ‘How long till we get there?’
‘About ten minutes,’ said Probst. The de Havilland was nearing the end of its long northeasterly flight from Greenland’s capital of Nuuk, traversing the vast empty wastes of the huge island’s central glaciers. Its destination was, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere.
As Kit had expected, the tail numbers of the two wrecked helicopters on Mount Kedarnath confirmed that the Khoils’ company had indeed hired them. As a result, he had convinced Interpol to issue a red notice on the Khoils - and now it was going to be enacted.
There were two officers of the Rigspolitiet, the Danish police service, aboard the plane, but their presence was largely a formality; Probst’s team of eight men, all armed and wearing body armour beneath their Arctic clothing, would carry out the actual mission. The objectives were simple - serve the warrant, arrest the Khoils for extradition to Interpol headquarters in Lyon, and search for evidence linking them to the artefact thefts. No advance warning had been sent ahead; the hope was that by the time their lawyers were able to take action, the Khoils would already be on their way to France.
The final preparations were being made, the team examining pictures of the building they would be searching. ‘What is this place?’ one of the men asked.
‘It used to be an American radar station,’ said Nina, having found the background on the giant structure known only as DYE-A unexpectedly interesting, a piece of modern-day archaeological research. ‘Part of a chain going right the way from the Atlantic coast of Greenland across Canada to Alaska. There were four others like it in Greenland, but this one was also part of a secret operation called Project Iceworm, where they tried to hide nuclear missile bases under the ice.’
‘And everyone thought it was the Russians who were supposed to be sneaky,’ said Eddie, raising a few chuckles from those team members old enough to remember the Cold War.