Frozen (4 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Frozen
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“Where is it now?”
“It's still at the University of Alaska. They've got a pretty impressive lab up there, and they're keeping him frozen. They thawed him out once to get samples.”
“Bone and tissue, I assume?”
“Yeah, exactly.” Maura nodded. “About a gram from his hip. Which was damaged when the hikers pried him out of the ice. The first analysis was sort of confusing.”
“Let me guess,” the voice said. “They got a lot of different sequences.”
“Exactly, exactly. How did you know that?”
“We see that at crime scenes a lot. You try to do a mitochondrial test, but you end up getting a lot of different sequences because you're working with the surface. It's a lot like picking up a dozen different fingerprints at a scene because the victim's been handled so much.”
“That's it, that's it,” Maura said, still nodding. “That's why they did a second test, cutting away the outside tissue. When they assayed the core they got one clean sequence. And that got everybody excited.”
After a long pause the voice said, “I suppose we should get together and take a look at the thing.”
A spurt of cold adrenaline traveled through Maura's belly. She couldn't believe that this was actually going to happen. Screw the “Paleolithic Diet”—Maura County was going to win the damn Pulitzer Prize after all! But in the midst of all the sudden excitement was a momentary hiccup of doubt in the back of her brain. Something about the profiler's voice bothered her. This guy Grove didn't sound right. He was saying all the right words, but the
tone
of his voice sounded wrong. It sounded reluctant, maybe even a little sad. And for a brief instant Maura wondered if she was about to involve the wrong man in this amazing, all-important, once-in-a-career project. But almost as quickly as the notion had crossed her mind, she brushed it off and said, “Great, fantastic . . . then I guess the next step is setting up a meeting in Alaska.”
The voice said that sounded good.
 
 
The following Monday, which was the fifth of May—a mild time of year for Alaska—Maura County found herself waiting in the outer lobby of the Heinrich Schleimann Building, which housed the university's archaeology laboratory, on the northwest corner of the campus. It was a clear day, and the mountain sun was a sledgehammer, pounding down through the skylights and battering the carpeted floor with yellow fire. It was nearly three o'-clock, and the profiler was late, and Maura was starting to wonder whether he was going to show up at all. She kept thinking back to the sound of the man's voice over the phone that previous week: that weird reluctance beneath his words. Maybe this was all a big mistake.
Snubbing out her third cigarette in a canister near the glass doors, Maura continued to pace and worry. Her compact body was adorned that day in a very uncharacteristic corporate pantsuit—the pin-striped slacks creased so sharply they looked dangerous. Even her hair was sedate—pulled back, swept up, and pinned against her skull. She felt ridiculous in the conservative attire, but she was representing the magazine that day, and she wanted to make a good impression on Ulysses Grove. She didn't know what kind of man to expect.
From the sound of his phone voice, she had gotten the impression that he was middle-aged, white, probably midwestern. He had a friendly manner, if somewhat guarded, and his voice radiated confidence. But what about that name,
Ulysses
? It sounded blue bloody, pompous, and southern, and yet the voice had been void of any accent. Maybe Grove was one of those slick, Clinton-ian, corporate types from the “New” South. Maura knew the type all too well. She had encountered more than her fair share of arrogant bureaucrats in the world of academia. But this was her show now. This was her idea, and her article, and her magazine, and she would not let some cocky, middle-aged, white asshole from the FBI push her around.
She was finishing up her fourth cigarette, lost in her thoughts, when the tall figure entered the lobby through the revolving glass door.
Maura whirled. “Special Agent Grove?”
“Miss County?” the man said with a perfunctory smile, and came over to her with his hand extended.
“Maura, please, call me Maura,” she said, and shook his slender, concert-master's hand.
For an infinitesimal moment, Maura had to consciously blink away the urge to gawk at him. It wasn't the fact that he was black (although that was part of it). Nor was it because he was so dapper and well put together in his Burberry coat and tailored suit, his attaché gripped at his side like an appendage. What made her stare for that brief instant was the lack of guile on the man's face. This guy was the antithesis of a smug bureaucrat. He looked like a visitor from another time, a nineteenth-century abolitionist or poet, his dark eyes radiating passion.
“Maura it is,” he said, his face warming. “If you'll call me Ulysses.”
“You got it,” she said. “And I really appreciate you coming all the way up here.”
“I just hope I can offer something.”
“I'm sure it'll be fascinating. How was the trip up?”
“Had a little problem with connections, had to take a puddle jumper from Anchorage that felt like it was powered by rubber bands.”
Maura grinned. “Welcome to Alaska.”
“Quite a facility they got here.”
She nodded and indicated the inner doors on the opposite side of the lobby. “Why don't I give you a little tour? I believe the project leader's waiting for us back in the lab.”
Grove nodded. “Lead the way.”
They crossed the high-gloss tile floor and vanished through the double glass doors.
 
 
The University of Alaska's Paleo-DNA Laboratory is the largest of its kind in North America. Housed in the lower levels of the Schleimann Building, temperature and humidity controlled, the facility rivals the Pentagon for length and breadth of security. Its endless labyrinth of fluorescent corridors and access tunnels spread across nearly a hundred acres. Any significant archaeological find in the Western Hemisphere eventually finds its way here to be dated, sampled, sequenced, analyzed, catalogued, studied, or exhibited. The university has priority over the lab's teaching facilities, but the facility's main purpose is research. Which is why the lab is infused with millions of dollars annually from corporate endowments. Every multinational from Exxon to Union Carbide has money in this place, and controversies regularly rage on campus among environmental groups fed up with the corporate hijacking of the scientific community. But the lab continues to run smoothly, partly because of the constant influx of dollars, and partly because of the iron-fisted management style of the senior analyst and laboratory director, Dr. Lorraine G. Mathis.
In fact, only moments after Ulysses Grove was introduced to the prim, fiftyish woman in the white lab coat, he could tell that she was a bundle of paranoia and passive aggression.
“We're going to be taking a left at the end of this corridor,” she was saying, leading the group along a narrow, carpeted hallway of glass display cases filled with skeletons of various exotic mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. “Which will bring us to the wet room, where the initial cleaning and sorting of archaeological remains goes on.”
There were three other people in the group, hurrying to keep up with the bombastic Dr. Mathis as she marched along the corridor with the rigor of an SS officer: Grove, Maura County, and a young researcher named Michael Okuda. Thin as a razor in his lab coat, with delicate Asian features, Okuda was the first scientist to see the mummy on the side of Mount Cairn nearly a year ago. He had been summoned by one of the initial investigators, and had made the hundred-and-fifty-mile trip out to Lake Clark expecting to find nothing more than a frozen hiker from some time around the Carter administration. But the moment he saw that brittle, leathery corpse lying on a parkway near a ranger shack, he knew he had stumbled upon something epochal. He knew it from the desiccated animal skins still clinging to the mummy's spindly arms, and from the grass-stuffed hides around the perfectly intact feet, and from the primitive axe blade lying near the body.
Dr. Mathis paused in front of a secure door, fished in her pocket, and pulled out a magnetic card. “The problem with all this media monkey business,” she muttered as she angrily snapped the card through the electronic lock, “is the condition of the mummy. The remains need to be stored at a constant twenty degrees Fahrenheit with ninety-eight percent humidity in order to maintain preservation. Every time he's thawed out for examination or sample extraction—or this kind of nonsense—the tissues dry and the cells break down further.”
Standing behind the scientist, waiting to follow her into the lab, Grove noticed a number of things rippling through the group. The young underling, Okuda, glanced away for a moment as though embarrassed by his supervisor's gall. The journalist from
Discover
, a nice enough woman in Grove's estimation, gazed down at the floor and let out an almost imperceptible sigh of exasperation. Grove assumed that the crack about “media monkey business” was aimed directly at her. Grove detested rudeness of any kind, and already felt a vague dislike for this pious administrator. But worse than that, the dizziness was returning. Grove's gorge was rising, and he felt as though the walls of the man-made subterranean cavern were closing in on him. He needed to get out of there as soon as possible.
The door hissed open, and Mathis led the group into a narrow room that reeked of disinfectant and something else, something subtle just beneath the surface, something like the sweet stench of rotting meat. The air droned with voices, beeping, and whirring centrifuges.
“We're the only facility in North America equipped to house such a find,” Mathis blathered on as she strode through the crowded dry lab. Half a dozen researchers in white coats shuffled about electron microscopes, banks of computers, and tables laden with rock samples. None of them even looked up as the group passed, as though Dr. Mathis might snap a ruler across their knuckles if they showed such insolence. “We're set up for both radiocarbon and luminescent dating, isotope analysis, and fluorescence spectrometry,” she went on. “We can also do nondestructive gamma analysis, which we've already done on the specimen's teeth and bone tissue, as well as DNA analysis.”
Finally they reached a thick, metal door with a narrow pane of safety glass down the left side. A placard above the lintel read
CAUTION—WET SPECIMEN CONTAINMENT—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
.
Grove glanced through the screened glass but couldn't see much more than a narrow examination room, and maybe a part of a table or gurney in the center, radiant with halogen light. He glanced over at Maura County, who had taken a step back and now stood behind Okuda with a sheepish look on her face. She gave Grove a nervous yet encouraging smile. Grove smiled back. He liked this woman. There was a frantic sort of honesty about her that was refreshing.
Mathis reached over to a metal lockbox mounted next to the door, spun a few tumblers, and opened the lid. From inside the container she pulled out a couple of sealed packages. In one package was a sterile mask. In another was a pair of rubber surgical gloves. She handed the packages to Grove and nodded at them. “You have four minutes, Mr. Grove,” she announced without ceremony or emotion.
The door wheezed open.
Ulysses Grove took a deep breath, set down his attaché, put on the mask and gloves, then went inside the suite.
 
 
He didn't need four minutes. He didn't even need four seconds. All he needed was one good look at that six-thousand-year-old corpse and everything changed. Everything rearranged itself inside Grove like tumblers in his brain clicking into some horrible new combination, altering his world forever, causing an icy rush of gooseflesh along his spine. He didn't make a sound, didn't move. All he did for several agonizing moments was stand there gazing down at that narrow stainless steel examination table in the center of that sterile room.
The Iceman lay there in a pool of silver light, a runner of gauze beneath him and the metal table. Even to an uneducated eye it was obvious that this was an ancient cadaver, the skeletal arms and legs sheathed in flesh the color of burnt tobacco, so old it looked vacu-formed around the bones and tendons. The body was so well preserved its eyeballs were still intact—two overdone quail eggs gazing up emptily at the miracle-light of a future millennium. In life the mummy had been diminutive by modern standards—perhaps no more than five feet tall—with the prominent jaw of early Homo sapiens.
But in death, it had taken on an eerie tableau of a toy posed by a disturbed child.
Dizziness jumped on Grove again, and he reached for something to hold on to. There was nothing to grab—only the examination table—so he staggered slightly. Then he stood there, blinking away the bewilderment.
One time when he was only eight years old, a group of class bullies lured him into the school gymnasium at night, locking him in, and then proceeding to torment him with ghostly projections shone through skylights with a jury-rigged slide projector. It had taken the young Ulysses over an hour to overcome his terror and analyze the situation, eventually figuring out the source of the “ghosts.” But during that hour, the utterly debilitating
confusion
had almost been worse than the fear. He hated
not understanding
something. And on that terrible night, especially during that first hour, he just kept on thinking,
There's an explanation, a logical explanation for this
.

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