Pandora's curse

through newly fallen snow in the worn paths. Even at low idle, the sound from the plane’s engines was deafening. A blizzard of ice particles blew around the spinning props. Both pilots were on the far side of the aircraft, relieving themselves in the snow.

Once they reboarded the aircraft, Mercer saw Bernhardt Hoffmann, the young worker nearly asphyxiated in Camp Decade, and a passenger he didn’t recognize jump from the rear door. Even with his feet encumbered by tall boots the stranger moved through the snow as if born to it, like a wolf. Greta Schmidt cried out when she saw him and ran into his embrace. This had to be the sometime-boyfriend Werner had mentioned. Greta, who was nearly as tall as Mercer, vanished in his arms. The man was huge. He had the hood of his black snowsuit down around his wide shoulders, so Mercer could see that his nose had a misshapen look that only came from being broken.

They stayed away from the evacuees as they waited for their turn to climb the ladder into the plane. Werner Koenig did come over to Mercer to relay the message Greta had gotten that morning from the office in Reykjavik about the Danish attache. If he was lying about the conversation, his performance was Oscar quality.

“The Danes are adamant about nonessential people leaving until they can send someone to determine if our facility is safe,” he shouted over the growl of the old Dakota’s radial engines.

“What about your team?” Mercer held his mouth close to Koenig’s ear.

“Most of them are out with the core drill taking samples. I’m hoping a safety inspector will be sent soon, so I don’t have to recall them and lose a few days of work.”

“So we’re your sacrificial goats to Denmark’s bureaucracy?”

Werner shrugged. “I’m sorry. My hands are tied.”

If he was telling the truth, Mercer could understand Koenig’s position. “All right,” he said. “No sense blaming the messenger.”

Anika was right in front of him at the boarding ladder when Mercer turned to take perhaps his last look at the camp. If not for traces of cooking smoke rising from the back of the mess hall and the generator enveloped in its own exhaust, the base would have looked completely deserted. The only motion came from the breeze lofting wisps of snow like dust in an old Western movie. Mercer felt like whistling the theme from High Plains Drifter.

Greta Schmidt caught his eye. She must have said something to her companion because he strode over to the plane, cutting the distance in a few strides. In a burst of vindictiveness, Mercer went up the ladder so the German would have to stand in the buffeting prop wash if he wanted to speak with him. He tapped Anika on the shoulder before the Geo-Research official reached the hatch.

“Would you save me a seat? I’d like to talk to you.”

Anika stared at him for a second, a shadow of apprehension behind her fixed smile. “Okay.”

“You are Philip Mercer?” The German’s accent wasn’t bad, but he spoke in a low, rasping snarl as if afflicted by a terminal case of laryngitis.

“I’m Mercer.” Neither man made a move to shake hands. There was an instant antagonism between them. It was instinctive, the coming together of two rival animals.

“I’m Gunther Rath. I recently had a nice talk with Elisebet Rosmunder. She gave me something to give to you. It’s taped to the bulkhead behind the cockpit.” Before slamming the door closed, the man gave Mercer an ugly smile and said, “Have a good flight.”

What the hell was that all about? Mercer turned to find a seat and slammed into Anika, who hadn’t yet moved from the entrance. She looked terrified.

“I’m sorry.” He tried to help her to her feet at the same moment the pilot gave the engines a burst of power to begin taxiing. They both fell back into the slush left melting on the cabin floor.

The pilot’s voice came over the tinny speaker mounted in the ceiling, his Icelandic accent made more unintelligible by the motors’ thunderous bellow. “Sorry about that. With another weather system moving in, I want to get back in the air as quickly as possible. There isn’t even time to unload the supplies we brought.”

As the DC-3 bounced over the uneven glacier, Mercer fought to get Anika and himself into a seat and belted in. He thought he’d hurt her when they bumped because her normally pale face was as white as the snow outside and her eyes refused to focus. He took her hand and found it quivering.

“Anika?”

“I know that man,” she said as if in a trance. “I recognized his voice. I don’t think he realized who I am.” Then she broke out of it. The wellspring of determination he’d seen during the fire in Camp Decade rushed back. Her grip tightened. “Did you get the package from Otto Schroeder?”

Mercer blinked, stunned that she all but admitted her guilt. “So it was you who searched my room.”

“Yes,” Anika replied defiantly. “Did you get it?”

“As a matter of fact I did.” It suddenly occurred to him that she couldn’t know who had sent the package because it hadn’t left his sight since Harry had forwarded it. “How do you know Otto Schroeder?”

Anika paused as the plane’s skis came unstuck from the ice and the DC-3 strained into the air. “I watched that man back there order his death.”

GEO-RESEARCH STATION, GREENLAND

As soon as the hatch closed and the DC-3 began lumbering across the ice, Greta took Gunther Rath by the hand and led him toward her quarters at an urgent pace. He knew by the predatory gleam in her eye what she wanted, and his need surpassed hers. However, now was not the time. He snatched his arm away after a few steps.

“Later, Greta.” His voice was made harsher by the suppression of his own desires. “We don’t have time.”

“Yes, we do,” she breathed, her hand reaching for his groin, not caring if others saw. “It has been far too long.”

“Not for me,” he snapped with intentional cruelty, which only seemed to inflame her more.

“I’ve had to deal with Werner’s sulking for a week. We’re going to my room right now and you are going to screw me until I can’t walk.”

“Keep this up and I’m taking you back to your room to slap you unconscious.”

“You can do that too,” she simpered demurely, reveling in the presence of his overwhelming strength. It was the old game they were playing and invariably she would win. She knew his needs far outstripped hers. And the longer he held out the more violent, and satisfying, was their eventual sex. The heat between her legs grew with anticipation. Touching his groin again, she could feel him swelling.

This time Rath couldn’t stop himself. He grabbed her by the arm. “Which is your dorm building?”

Greta knew not to gloat. She lowered her eyes and pointed.

She wondered who had seduced whom last year when the company Gunther represented negotiated to buy Geo-Research. At the time she had been with Werner for nearly two years, happy, and yet couldn’t explain why she was putting off his marriage proposals. They lived a vagabond existence aboard the Njoerd, working wherever his contracts took them. In all it had been satisfying, but somehow she felt she was being rushed to normalcy. Werner wanted children and a home to come back to from his voyages. Greta had mouthed she wanted those things too and knew she was lying. She didn’t know what she wanted. And then Gunther Rath had come into their lives with a blank check and the promise of noninterference in the company. He’d said purchasing Geo-Research was merely an investment for Kohl AG, a way for them to defer taxes.

She’d known from the first that the expensive suits he wore hid something far different from his corporate image. He retained the unstudied social disdain of the wanna-be rebels who had thrilled her and her girl-friends as teenagers, but grown-up and with a lot more to offer than exciting rides on shoddy motorcycles and small bags of low-grade marijuana. At that first meeting, when Werner stared wide-eyed at the figures Rath was willing to pay for Geo-Research, Greta found herself showing off. Nothing obvious, nothing that Werner would even detect, but Gunther had known it the way a lion can sense a female in estrus.

Whenever the three would meet in the weeks it took to sign over the company, Greta had thought she was