Charon's landing

hostess. “Do you remember my friend at the Savoy? Well, it seems he needs our help.”

“Don’t tell me he knows my husband is a member of Parliament?”

“My dear,” Trevor took one of her slim hands in his, pushing aside a plate of fine Scotch beef to get to what he really wanted. “Nothing so pedestrian. Tomorrow morning, you are going to be a harem master. And I shall be your harem.”

“I thought all members of a harem were virgins?”

“True, but after tonight I fear that you’ll have corrupted me.”

MV Hope

The heat coming from the central system had a dry, ozone tang that made the cabin smell like an electrical appliance that had just shorted. The antique system rattled every time it cycled water through the creaking pipes, popping so loudly that Aggie, already edgy, jumped when a pipe sounded off like a pistol shot. Outside the porthole, the late afternoon sun was hidden by layers of clouds and a wispy fog. Icy rain pelted the glass, driven by a stiff wind blasting down from the barren reaches of the Arctic Circle. According to the digital thermometer hanging near the cabin door, the outside temperature was twenty-eight degrees, but with the windchill it hovered in the midteens.

It was only the middle of October, and winter had already begun to grip the Land of the Midnight Sun.

The interior of the cabin was a comfortable seventy, but to Aggie it seemed much, much hotter. She’d just finished fifty sit-ups and was now lying on her back, her long legs held at a thirty-degree angle above the floor so that the rippled muscles of her stomach quivered. She’d been working out for two hours doing isometrics, aerobics, and step exercises, using a metal footlocker. She’d done two hundred advance lunges from her fencing lessons, each attack so focused she could almost feel an imaginary blade striking an opponent. Perspiration glossed her body and held her hair plastered to her head. Her sweat shorts and T-shirt clung like a second skin.

Getting up to begin her warm down, Aggie caught her reflection in a wall-mounted mirror. Used to seeing herself after exercising, she wasn’t much concerned with her hair or her clothes or the sweat that dripped from her chin. But her eyes… they still burned with a cold emerald fury. The hours of exercise hadn’t dimmed any of the anger that burned within her.

“Men,” she spat at her reflection.

She’d spent her entire life proving her independence, taking on challenges, facing them and more often than not vanquishing them with relative ease. Her master’s degree was her own, her sleek body, once gawky and angular, was the result of her own effort, her personality validated years of fighting the influences of her parents and their warped lives. She had earned the respect that was her due, paid for it with time and dedicated work. But in the past twenty-four hours she’d been treated as if she were just a piece of furniture, or maybe a pet.

“Screw them both!”

Jan, with his mysterious errand and his ravings about making oil so repugnant no one would want to use it ever again. Mercer, with his patronizing order to leave Alaska for her own safety. This wasn’t the nineteenth century, and she wasn’t some simpering damsel needing to be rescued. They both acted as if they knew what was best, as if her wishes and her opinion meant nothing. Jesus Christ!

For all practical purposes, Jan had raped her last night. The man who wanted her hand in marriage had forced himself on her with little regard for her feelings at all. She could have been an inflatable doll for all he cared, a masturbatory toy. She’d thought she loved him — his mind and feelings were so similar to hers — but now she saw, for the first time, how different he was. She’d known all along about his ego and self-absorption, but now she saw how driven he was by them. Even thinking about him made her uncomfortable, as if some multilegged insect was crawling across her flesh.

And what of Mercer, with his testosterone-charged assault this morning, guns drawn and orders shouted, as if they were storming some highjacked airliner? And his threatening to arrest everyone on his authority? He should have done it; everyone on the Hope was willing to go to jail for their beliefs. This was just another way for him to patronize her. A little slap on the wrist for the trust-fund environmentalist. Be careful, Aggie, she could almost hear his voice. You’re playing with grown-ups now, and we don’t want you to get hurt.

Hey, I’m an adult too, she thought bitterly. I know what I’m doing. A month shy of her thirty-second birthday and he was treating her like a six-year-old. So many men in her life had taken that attitude with her, treated her like some precious object that must be protected at all cost. Her father, especially, had hidden his problems with her mother until it was too late, fearing that a divorce or even a separation would hurt Aggie too much. That was a laugh. Like her mother’s suicide wouldn’t bother her?

And what in the hell did Mercer mean by “I want to be able to say I hate you too, but I can’t”?

To her amazement, Aggie saw her eyes soften in the mirror, the tension in her face easing, and the scowl almost but not quite becoming a smile.

She knew what he meant.

“All right, Dr. Mercer, you’re going to get what you want.” Aggie spoke aloud, steel in her voice. “I’m going to leave. I’m going to leave Jan and Alaska and, most especially, I’m going to leave you. But not before I have my say and put a stop to this silly crush that should have ended years ago.”

When Jan and she had talked about marriage, he had not given her a diamond ring. He’d said that he could not condone the devastation caused by mining and thus would not help the industry by buying into their popularist notion that a diamond signifies a lasting love. The ring he had given her as an engaged-to-be-engaged present was fashioned from antler. It seemed quaint and appropriate for what they both believed. She dug it out of her luggage, its tiny velvet box too elaborate for the simple beige bauble.

“You’re a cheap bastard,” Aggie scoffed and left it on Jan’s desk, the lid open as if the little box was laughing.

She took a shower and dressed, hiding her wet hair under a baseball cap. She packed a few things into a knapsack, ignoring most of the clothing and “essentials” she’d brought with her to Alaska. She’d buy what she needed when she got to San Diego, the home of an old college friend. Aggie just wanted to leave everything behind: Jan, Mercer, PEAL, this whole wasted year of her life. She’d played close to the edge, and it was time to return to normalcy.

Aggie knew the name of Mercer’s hotel from the dinner receipt she’d found in his jacket pocket. She thought about calling him but decided surprise would be much more effective.

Mercer lay against the headboard of his hotel bed, the television bringing him a great college football game between Florida State and Georgia. It was the third quarter, the score only ten to fourteen, both defenses able to thwart numerous well-executed drives just short of field goal range. A beer rested within reach on the nightstand, a thick ring of condensation surrounding the smoky bottle of ale like a medieval moat.

Taking a sip, he flashed a look at his watch and hoped that the rest of the waning afternoon would pass quietly. Since the raid, Mercer hadn’t strayed more than a few feet from his phone, fervently wishing it wouldn’t ring but knowing it would.

He was having that feeling again. Something was very wrong. Jan Voerhoven not being aboard the Hope was just the most obvious sign, but there were others, things he couldn’t explain, even to himself. Mercer ran through the connections again, the little things that made him so certain. This kind of second-guessing was unnecessary and dangerous, but it was also his nature to keep working at a problem, no matter how easy the solution seemed to be.

It started with tons of liquid nitrogen being smuggled into the state. Why? Who would do it and for what purpose? Second, the most radical environmental group in the world is already in Alaska, its leader missing on some mysterious mission that his girlfriend didn’t know about. Then there was Ivan Kerikov, an international terrorist or, more accurately, a terror broker. A man with no loyalty except to himself but with seemingly unlimited resourcefulness. He was in Alaska, too, with a couple of Arabs. What was their role in all of this?

Now what would a former KGB agent, a couple of Arab henchmen, and an environmental group do with liquid nitrogen on the eve of the opening of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge? The presence of even one of these elements was enough to give pause. But there was more.