I made a quick search of the buildings, working my way up to the top. The place was emptier than Vitangelsk. I didn’t waste time looking for the cable: I knew where it was going.

Beyond the buildings, where the mountain got so steep you couldn’t see the top, was the mine head. You couldn’t miss it: a massive concrete retaining wall, six feet thick and twenty feet high, propping up the mountainside. A run-down wooden shack leaned against the base, like the frill of a skirt.

I climbed the wooden steps. There was no lock on the shack door, which surprised me. I was about to let myself in when something on the snow caught my eye. Utgard’s so pristine, any trash stands out a mile. I picked it up: a clear plastic bottle, smaller than a soda. The label said Rhodamine B.

I put it in my pocket for later and went inside. Straight away, it reminded me of the boot room at Zodiac: hooks on the walls, shelves for boots and gloves. I could almost imagine those Commie miners coming off shift, downing tools and getting dressed to go out into the cold, joking about vodka and women.

The back of the shack was the concrete wall, with a slab of something covering the mouth of the mine. In the bad light, I thought it must be plywood — until I touched it. Even through my mitt, I could feel the cold, even colder than the air. I looked closer.

It was a steel door, surrounded by a steel frame riveted into the concrete. No lock, no keyhole, not even a handle. This one was strictly exit-only. Greta’s bolt cutters wouldn’t get me through there. Even oxyacetylene gear might not do it. Whoever put those doors on, they didn’t want visitors.

I stared a while, until the wind rattling the shack walls reminded me I better go. Quam would have a conniption if I didn’t get back.

The day had gotten so dark it turned the ground grey, flat and featureless. Getting home, avoiding the bumps and lumps (and maybe worse) would be a bitch. But if I looked, I could see some not so old footprints breaking up the snow where they’d come out of the shack. I followed them until they stopped at a big dent in the snow near where I’d parked. About right for a snowmobile. And, if you looked, there was the track the snowmobile had made down the mountain, not far from where I’d come up.

I saddled up my snowmobile and followed the line to see where it went — straight back to Zodiac.

Twenty-eight

I made it about five minutes in front of the storm. Sky so black, I needed my headlight; wind blowing the ground snow into blizzards that reached halfway back to the clouds. It almost ripped me off the stairs before I could get through the door.

Annabel saw me the minute I got in. So much for sneaking back.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be locked in here with the rest of us?’

‘Nice to see you too.’

I pulled the empty bottle out of my pocket and tossed it to her. ‘You recognise this?’

‘Have you been stealing my dye bottles? There’s no alcohol in them, you know.’

‘I found it up at Mine Eight, near Vitangelsk.’

She shrugged. ‘Not guilty.’

Interesting. ‘Sure?’

‘There’s no glacier up there.’ She looked at my snowmobile suit, covered in a fine frosting of blown snow. ‘You’ve come a long way. I hope Quam doesn’t find out.’

I took off the suit and clipped my rifle in the gun rack. Part of me wondered if I shouldn’t hold on to it.

‘I’ve been on a snipe hunt,’ I told her. ‘Rare Arctic bird, very hard to catch. It’s endangered, actually.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ she said.

With everyone locked up, you couldn’t move an inch without running into someone. Halfway down the hall, I met Greta coming out of the radio room.

‘How’s your leg?’ she asked.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I slapped my thigh; I must have looked like some kind of idiot. ‘Leg’s fine.’

‘Your telescope. The strut.’

‘Right.’ The lie was so old I’d forgotten it. ‘All fixed. Thanks.’

At the best of times, Greta has a way of looking at you like you don’t exist. Just then, I was certain she saw straight through me.

‘Can I have my bolt cutters back?’

‘I’ll drop them by the shop when the storm’s over.’

‘Quam wants you.’

I bet he did. Quam’s the kid who jerks off, then lies awake all night praying his dick won’t fall off. Ever since I left, he’d have been wishing he hadn’t let me go, worrying how it would look if I got buried by an avalanche or eaten by a bear.

‘I’ll say “hi” when I have the chance.’

I went into my lab before anyone else could grab me. I had a lot to do — but most of all I needed to think. I sat at my desk, listening to the wind howl through the masts above my room. It snapped off pieces of ice and scattered them on the roof, right over my head. It made a sound like a kid tipping out a box of Legos.

There’s an innocent explanation for everything, if you shut your eyes tight enough. But I wasn’t after innocent explanations.

I started with what happened to Kennedy and the big guy in the yellow coat who chased him up the cableway tower. I believed Malick when he said it couldn’t have been one of his people. He was as surprised as me: the antenna, the mine, the cableway. If he was one of the bad guys, he could have shot me when he had the chance. Or let me break my leg falling down a coal hopper in the cableway station.

It had to be someone at Zodiac.

It wasn’t me or Kennedy. After the scene in the cave, Ash crying over a dead bear, I doubted it was him. That left Quam, Fridge, Annabel, Greta and Jensen.

I wrote them all down on a sheet of paper, thought a minute, then put Anderson on the list. He said he’d been in bed all day, but had anyone seen him? Unlikely he’d have made it out, with his head so banged up, but unlikely isn’t impossible.

After another minute, I drew a line connecting Anderson and Greta. I remembered the way they’d both raced off the day he arrived. They’d found Hagger’s body, no doubt about that. But was he dead when they got there?

I added Hagger’s name, off to one side, and put a line between him and Anderson. Then another one between Hagger and Greta. Everyone knew he’d been screwing her.

I’d made a triangle. I sat back and wondered what it meant. Loose ice jittered across the roof. I began to wish I hadn’t asked Greta for the bolt cutters. Had she guessed why I wanted them? Did Anderson know who’d taken his key?

I got out my laptop and opened up the sample I’d grabbed from the antenna. I ran it through some software, cleaning it up and zooming in. Even in that short clip, there was a hell of a lot of data going through the pipe. It took some work, but I had the tools, and the closer I looked the more I recognised repeat patterns in the signal. That gave me an idea what I was looking for.

1010211201020012010201110212.

I was back where I began. The same pattern I’d snatched out of the air before. Now I knew where it went to, at least. I ought to compare it with the original intercept. Except, I’d left that with Tom Anderson.

I stared at the triangle on my paper again. Hagger — Greta — Anderson. Why did Anderson come here? Why did it all go to shit the moment he arrived?

I wrote down another name, Luxor Life Sciences, and drew a dotted line connecting it to Hagger. Biology — biologist. After a minute’s thinking, I added a question mark next to the line.

Companies leave records. I opened my browser and searched for Luxor Life Sciences. The storm made the connection run slow, like the dark ages of dial-up. I clocked it at nearly two minutes before the search results came up.

None of them looked like the magic bullet. No corporate website or Wikipedia entry. I clicked on one of the links at random, then stood. I could get a cup of coffee while it loaded.