Visibility decayed along the ground despite the glowing incandescence in the void. Liz kept on. The color bursts were masked by the tight growth of trees and by the fog, but she could now hear the whoosh of pressure somersaulting through the woods, something, she thought, like propane sputtering from a barbeque grill valve each time a flare ignited. The bursts had to be gas fires, methane in origin, she guessed. Subterranean heat was the engine driving the billowing fumaroles; it must be forcing methane from lake sediments, bog environments and from long-buried organic deposits. Somewhere, somehow, it was being touched off by an ignition source, turning the forest into a stage inhabited by dancing fire goblins.
A leather boot struck a hard object. Liz fell forward, her belly coming to rest on a seat cushion of a machine. She had stumbled upon a snowmobile in the fog but had not noticed it. It was a Park Service sled that had to be Jamie’s.
Drifting away from the snowmobile was a snowshoe track. If she concentrated, she thought, she could follow it. Liz tested the trail. A hard crust glazed the snows where the snowshoes had passed. Off came the backpack to lighten her footfalls. The crust supported her weight. She took a few steps. Still the snow held.
Wind direction shifted. Where there had been no breeze to speak off, wind began to blow across the great expanse of the lake and into the forests south of Park Point. The lake fog remained thick soup, but an occasional puff from the southwest cleared it out, enhancing the visibility considerably. Liz got her bearings quickly and pushed down the trail before the fog closed in again and made her slow to a crawl.
For a quarter mile, she followed the snowshoe track toward the lake. Now, through the backlit tree trunks, she could see fumarole steam columns writhing. It appeared as if the forest to the south was engulfed in a steam inferno.
The snowshoe trail tipped west directly toward the lake. As she made the turn, the geophysicist sensed something in the trail ninety feet away. As she advanced, a flash of fear raced along her nervous system branches. There was a person down in the trail. She broke into a run, cracked through the surface of the snow and fell up to her hip. To extricate herself, she rolled on her back, bent the knee and pulled the leg out of the crusty snow trap.
A few more seconds along the trail and she sank to her knees beside the form of a man lying face down. The fellow was dressed well for the cold, but the left side of the parka was chewed through with holes. Blood saturated the garment. One shoulder of his parka displayed a Park Service patch. Liz had found Jamie Hebert. She peered down the trail toward the lake. There was bloodstain smeared along its visible length.
Liz reached beneath the torso and rolled the biologist over. In the bright red light of the lava fountains, Jamie’s face turned toward her.
“Oh, lord!” Liz wailed into the night air.
Cruel blisters had erased the man’s facial features. All the skin had ballooned up to shut the eyes, seal off the nostrils, and swell the lips to frame a round hole for a mouth. There was no evidence of searing by flame. These burns were made by water, scalding water. Liz could not imagine a more horrible fate. The geologist pulled her gloved hands to her mouth to quell an urge to be sick to her stomach.
Chapter Twenty-Four
After midnight on the second evening of her last Total Life Skills session at Independency village, Winnie stole from her cabin and hustled to First Day Hall, bundled against a winter wind off the Great Plains. Up two flights of stairs she tiptoed and found her way in the darkened halls to Abel’s office door. He never locked it.
Once in the room, she crossed to the man’s desk, kneeled down and probed the back of the office’s computer. The keylogger was still in place. She settled on the floor, disengaged the little unit, and plugged the keyboard wire back into its allotted slot. Between her fingers, she rolled the bit of technological gadgetry. Its cold silicon microcircuitry had recorded several months of keyboard activity, every number, every letter. What tales would it tell? Down what sparking avenues might the keystrokes lead?
Never had she felt she was trespassing on the private life of an individual she was tracking for a client. Somehow now, though, the thought of pocketing the keylogger was a breach of etiquette, would be an assault on someone who fascinated her rather than repulsed her. The on-the-job killer instinct she could always rely upon drained away into a sinkhole she could no longer plumb.
A light bulb flared somewhere in the building. The sound of steps echoed from a stairway, bounding sounds, coming fast. Winnie leapt off the floor and pitched toward the office door in the dark. The footsteps stopped. Whoever was in the building was one flight down, on the second floor where the video and recording studios were. In a minute, the sound of recorded audio drifted up to the third floor. Someone had ventured forth to work on something late in the evening.
To stay was to invite discovery. Winnie decided she must leave, and she waited until she felt certain that whoever was in the studios was absorbed in some task. Descending to the second floor silently, she approached the door to the video warren. Cautiously, she peered around the door molding. A man with a shaven head and a well-trimmed beard was seated at a control board but operating a computer, eyes fixed on monitors on the walls opposite the door. The agent recognized him but couldn’t recall his name. He was the one with the odd nickname, she thought.
Late night news broadcasts were rolling on two of the monitors, but on a third was what appeared to be a newspaper clipping, scaled up to fill the screen. Something about it looked familiar.
Winnie swept by the open door noiselessly but paused just a moment to try to decipher the headline in the image of the clipping from her vantage point in the hall. She could just make it out. It read, ‘Local Girl Champ in Pie Eating Contest.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
The carbon slick of early morning smothered the stately sandstone buildings of old Fort Yellowstone, standing in thigh-deep snow to one side of the former military parade grounds. Electric light from a few fixtures tumbled out windows in the geo offices. Elizabeth Liz’s Subaru careened headlong toward the illumination. Surely officials had scrambled from their beds in outlying communities and descended on Mammoth Hot Springs. But there were no cars in the lots. People hadn’t made it in yet.
Liz’s boots clattered in the halls. She slammed through doorways, scanning frantically for any observatory inhabitant. Germaine Yardley, standing hunched over a computer and shouldering a phone to his ear, heard the commotion and turned to behold the geophysicist as she barreled the observatory office door aside with a crash.
“Sweet Jesus, woman.”
Liz grabbed for the computer wizard. “Germaine, do you have a handle on what’s happening?”
“Yeah. We’ve got numbers popping. I’ve alerted CVO in Portland. I managed to wake Wes. He’s on his way down.”
“Good.”
“Do you want to see what we’ve got, Liz?”
“See it? I’ve seen it. I just came from the lake.”
“You did?”
“We’ve got methane at the surface.”
“Methane?”
“Get your head out of the computer, Germaine.” Liz grabbed Yardley’s arm and yanked him through darkened halls to a south-facing window. She pushed his body up against the glass and gestured for the man to see for himself. Through the black forest spires, the low southeastern horizon pulsed crimson against pinwheeling stars.
Yardley’s head jerked back suddenly from the window frame. “Holy mother!”