“Surely it would crash into trees or something,” Cardinal said.
“No trees, John. This is a thousand miles above the treeline-anything taller than six inches is an animal. And there aren’t too many of those either. Lack of trees worked in our favour, of course. It didn’t take too long to find Rocky, and it turned out we’d named him exactly right. He’d got himself into a rocky area and got his front left wheel caught and run his batteries down to nothing.
“We were all relieved, but especially David and Frank, because electrical and mechanical had obviously performed fine. Clearly the issue was going to be software. Why did the little bastard not shut down? Why did he go rogue? In exactly two weeks we had to give our presentation and test data to NASA. There was no way they were going to be interested in a rover with a mind of its own. As we saw it, if this came out, it was a game-ender.”
“I don’t understand,” Cardinal said. “It had performed so well up to that point, I would have thought you had a star on your hands.”
“We were poised on the brink of massive success or massive failure-no middle ground. So by the time we found Rocky, we were in total panic mode. We couldn’t budge the rocks around him. So David and I go up to the top of this outcropping with some rope to get some loft into the configuration. We were up there, I don’t know, twenty minutes maybe, and I’m yelling things down to Keith and Frank, who are trying to rig the rope around Rocky so it doesn’t pull his arm or his head off.
“Suddenly David says, ‘Look!’ I turn around and there’s a flare in the sky. It’s quite far off, four, maybe five kilometres. There’s no denying it. The thing is there, burning bright green, arcing down toward the north.
“ ‘They can’t be signalling us, can they?’ David says.
“ ‘It’s probably the sovereignty patrol running some kind of manoeuvre. Or it could be the RCMP practising rescue stuff,’ I said.
“David had pulled out his binoculars and was staring out into this incredibly bleak landscape with them. ‘Really? That what you think it is? That’s your considered opinion?’ David talked like a cowboy even back then.
“ ‘Well, who the hell else is it gonna be? There’s nothing else on this island.’ You have to understand, John, we hadn’t heard of Drift Station Arcosaur at that point. No one had.
“ ‘Maybe it’s someone lost. Maybe some party’s trying to chase off a hungry ursine.’
“Well, of course we both knew you wouldn’t fire a flare into the sky to scare a bear. The camp advisers had drilled us in all that stuff before we even set foot up there. You’d aim it at his feet or just over his head. I could hear in David’s voice that he wanted to believe we were not needed, that there was no one in distress. So I said again that it’s probably the sovereignty patrol and we’d better get Rocky back to camp or we were all of us staring into the face of complete failure.
“Then David says he sees someone. A man. I ask what he’s doing, and he says it looks like he’s hiking, climbing the rocks. He hands me the binoculars and I take a look. I saw him, John.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever told. Twenty years now, all four of us have kept it secret. When we got back to camp, we all swore we would never so much as mention it, not even to our wives. It poisoned our friendship. We had been working together for years, fresh out of school to the edge of success, but after we got back home and heard that people had actually died, that there were people in serious trouble, well, we couldn’t stand to look at each other, couldn’t stand to be with anyone who knew what we had done-or not done. We decided we were all free to exploit our separate patents and went our separate ways. I called David the other day when his wife was found, and that was the first time we’d spoken in more than twenty years.
“I saw a man through those binoculars. He was hardly more than a blurry speck. Could have been part of the patrol, could have been anything. I saw him stumble, but he got up quickly and then he waved. Waved a cloth or something. That’s the thing I saw that I have not been able to unsee. Not for twenty years. He was signalling us, John. I’m filled with shame as I say it. He was signalling us.
“Before I could say anything, David had called the other two to come up. The four of us had a powwow. David told them we’d seen a flare, we could see a man who seemed to be hiking, but we weren’t sure if it was someone who needed help or if it was nothing. We kept coming back to the sovereignty patrol. It had to be them.
“The full responsibility, the blame, lies with me. I didn’t tell the others I’d seen the man waving at us. I don’t know to this day if David saw him do that. If he did, he kept it to himself. But the other two definitely didn’t. And we couldn’t find the man again in the binoculars.
“None of us were seasoned adventurers, but we all knew you don’t turn your back on someone possibly in distress, not in those latitudes.
“We weighed the options, and it came down to this: no one knew we had been there and it had to stay that way. It would have come out why, that we had a malfunctioning robot, and it would have doomed Rocky and his descendants to oblivion-and us as well. Our little day trip had to be excised from the record if we were to have any future at all.
“It was just the patrol, we told ourselves. Just an exercise. Although I’m sure the others did the same as me later on, and looked up where the sovereignty patrol had been. It had passed Axel Heiberg a month earlier and by now had to be near the northern tip of Ellesmere.
“We did the wrong thing, John. I did the wrong thing. We turned our backs on a man in distress, and now that man has come to balance the account. He has my daughter, John. He’s the one who has my daughter.”
Cardinal reached into his pocket and pulled out his notebook and started flipping through it. “Which parallel did you say you were at?”
“We were at seventy-nine degrees north. Ninety north is the pole.”
“Take a look at these.” Cardinal showed him the page with his various arrangements of the numbers found at the crime scenes. “What do they mean to you?”
“None of these are right,” Babstock said. “Hand me your pen.” He took Cardinal’s pen in his manicured fingers and copied out the figures in a different order. Then he tapped the page with the tip of the pen and read them aloud. “79 degrees, 25 minutes north, 95 degrees west. Add a few minutes west and you have the coordinates of our location. That’s where we found Rocky, and where we saw that man.”
21
Cardinal started the car, and while waiting for it to warm up he checked his phone. North Slave Correctional had sent the information he had requested. He forwarded it to Chouinard and Drexler, then phoned them both.
“And you think he’s headed up there?” Drexler said. “To the exact spot where it happened?”
“Why else would he leave those numbers at the scene? He knows how to fly a plane, and I think he gave us the coordinates so we could attempt to mount a rescue-a rescue that would arrive too late.”
“All right. I’ll call the Horsemen. They’ve got outposts way the hell up there. Somewhere.”
“We need people watching private airfields-the smaller the better. He’s travelling with a person who’s unconscious. He’s going to avoid security as much as possible.”
Cardinal drove over to Parliament Street and down to King, cursing streetcars the whole way. Then he had to fight a gauntlet of one-way streets, mostly grey with big-city snow, to find the address he was looking for. He parked on a filthy slag heap of old snow and walked up the front path of a red brick townhouse. In the front window, red curtains framed a grand piano.
Alison Durie was slim and elegant and not happy to be visited by an out-of-town detective. She looked about fifty-five-but still with a bloom in her cheeks and something regal about the way she carried herself, an easy grace. There was no wedding ring.
Cardinal asked if he could come in and ask a few questions.
“No, you may not. What’s this about?”
“Maybe you could just tell me if you’ve seen your brother recently.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but why should I answer that question?”
“He’s wanted for questioning in connection with a major crime.”
“Rubbish. What crime?”
“I’m sure you’ve read about the abduction and murder of Marjorie Flint and Laura Lacroix.”
Ms. Durie laughed. “That’s so preposterous I don’t even have any response to it. Really, you have to find
