“I…” Trowbridge stammered for an instant; then his sleep-puffy features tightened in resolve. He could not have been so totally wrong. “No, I am not! Ms. Russell! I must protest. This man has obviously undergone a serious ordeal! Could you at least put off this inquisition until after he’s had a chance to rest and have a hot meal?”
Randi’s eyes still didn’t shift from Kropodkin, and her slight smile held the chill of the polar katabatics. “That’s an excellent idea, Doctor. He should have something to eat.”
Standing, she removed a paratrooper’s knife from the slit pocket of her ski pants and thumbed the button that snapped out the hook-shaped shroud cutter. “Turn him loose, Doctor.” She set the open knife in the center of the table. “He can fix himself a meal.”
Trowbridge picked up the knife. “I’ll do it for him,” he said, self-righteousness trembling in his voice.
“I said he fixes his own meal, Doctor!” Randi snapped, catching up the MP-5. “Just cut off the cuffs and don’t block my line of fire. Then go to your bunk, put on your pants, and stay out of the way.”
Wordlessly, but red-faced with anger, Trowbridge cut the disposacuffs from Kropodkin’s wrists. Keeping the student covered, Randi reclaimed her knife and pulled her chair to the farthest corner of the bunk room. With her back to the wall, she settled down once more, the stock of the MP-5 tucked under her arm, and the barrel leveled.
“Okay, Mr. Kropodkin, you can stand up and fix yourself something to eat now. But don’t get funny. It would be a very bad idea.”
The room went quiet beyond the wind moan and the clatter of pans and cutlery. Kropodkin heated a can of stew and a kettle of water on the bunkhouse’s primus cooker. Occasionally he cast his eyes in Randi’s direction, but every time he found the barrel of the submachine gun tracking him as if guided by radar fire control. Something hovered in the air of the room…expectancy, but her glittering jet eyes were totally unreadable and unrevealing.
“May I pick up a knife to cut myself a slice of bread?” he asked with biting politeness.
“If you make a move I don’t like, you’ll find out about it.”
In the far corner of the bunkroom Trowbridge finished dressing, regaining his pomposity along with his trousers. “I think, Ms. Russell, that it is time for us to clarify a few things…”
“And I think, Doctor, that you had better shut up.”
The academic’s voice started to lift. “I am not accustomed to being spoken to in this manner!”
“You’ll get used to it.”
Trowbridge had no choice but to subside.
Kropodkin set his dishes on the mess table and wolfed into his tea, stew, and bread, eating rapidly and glancing between Trowbridge and the woman silently covering him.
Randi let him get half the meal down before she spoke. “Okay, let’s get this finished. Your name is Stefan Kropodkin, you are a Slovakian citizen of Yugoslav descent, and you’re attending McGill University on a scholarship and student visa.”
“The doctor must have told you that,” Kropodkin said around a mouthful of bread and margarine.
“He did. He also said you were a top-flight student and a very capable individual. That’s how you got the posting to this expedition.” Randi leaned forward in her chair. “Now, let’s get on to what you say. You say you were on a science party with two other members of your expedition, the doctors Gupta and Hasegawa, when suddenly the two of them disappeared. You came back here and reported their disappearance. Then you went out on the search party with Dr. Creston and Ian Rutherford. You went out onto the pack ice while searching; then Creston and Rutherford vanished as well. You were trapped on the ice by an opening water lead. You just happened to be the man with the shotgun, and you just happened to fire two shots from it.
“You were stuck out there for almost two full nights; then the ice leads closed and you made it back to camp only an hour or so ago. You have no idea what happened to Gupta, Hasegawa, Creston, or Rutherford, and you have no idea who may have killed Kayla Brown here at the camp. Is this essentially your story?”
“Yes, because that is the truth,” Kropodkin replied sullenly, after taking a gulp of tea.
“No, it isn’t,” Randi said matter-of-factly. “You’re a liar, and a murderer and probably a number of other unsavory things that we’ll find out about.”
She rose slowly out of her chair. “To begin with, your name isn’t Stefan Kropodkin. I’m not sure what it really is, but it doesn’t matter. There are other people tearing your fake past apart right now, and they’ll find out. They’ll also learn about the Middle European ‘businessmen’ who are sponsoring your education. That should prove interesting as well.”
Kropodkin stared at her warily, the tip of his tongue moving along his chapped lips.
“I suspect you came to Canada, the university, and Wednesday Island for reasons other than higher learning,” Randi continued, pacing slowly between the mess table and the cooking counter. “The collegiate ivory towers might make a convenient hideout for a man on the run. It’s the kind of place the police or the security services wouldn’t look, granted you kept your nose out of the conventional campus radical groups. As I said, we’ll learn more about that later.
“But you still wanted to have a secure mode of communications with your backers while you were laying low, just in case. That’s why you brought this with you.”
Randi slipped one hand into the pocket of her ski pants and produced the transparent plastic evidence envelope that contained the mini hard drive. “I found this where you’d hidden it in the radio shack. The correspondence files on it should be very interesting. I’ll also bet you were sloppy enough to leave fingerprints.”
Randi returned the hard drive to her pocket. “I’ll also wager you were curious enough to make a private visit to the Misha 124 crash site. My friends who are up there now will find out about that. Maybe it was pure curiosity, or maybe you caught the scent of something when your expedition was warned away from the wreck. Be that as it may, you went aboard that old plane and you found out what it was carrying. You recognized that the biowarfare agent aboard the bomber would be worth several fortunes to the right parties, and somehow you knew how to contact those right parties.”
Kropodkin had forgotten about his food.
“You told them about the anthrax, and they cut you in on the deal. You were to be their point man on Wednesday. You were designated to eliminate the other members of the expedition, securing access to the anthrax before the arrival of your partners!”
“I deny this!” the Slav exploded.
Randi took a step toward the mess table. “Deny away, but it is the truth. Your new partners weren’t quite in position to make the collection yet, but the expedition’s extraction ship and the crash site assessment team were on the way. You had no choice but to start the eliminations! You had to thin down the number of witnesses on Wednesday before the odds got worse!”
Her words flowed, precise, steady, and cold, accusing and then supporting each accusation, a prosecutor closing in for the kill. “So while you were out there on the ice with Gupta and Hasegawa you murdered them and hid their bodies. Then you came back here with a story about their disappearance. And when the search party set out after them, you made sure you were carrying the only gun on the island. You led Rutherford and Creston out into the middle of nowhere and you blew them away with two of the shells that were in that gun!”
Kropodkin was crushing the chunk of bread in his hand, the crumbs and margarine squeezing out between his fingers.
“Then you came back here for Kayla Brown, and when you scoped out the camp you found her in the lab building sitting beside a live radio, talking with the Haley. A complication. You had to disable the radio first so she couldn’t say anything she shouldn’t. But you managed that and then you went in after her and you took her up on that hill and you bashed her brains out with your ice axe.”