29

“This is absolutely ridiculous.”

Annja sat inside Thomson’s personal shelter surrounded by two armed guards and facing the colonel himself. He’d said nothing for the past five minutes, ever since he had arrived shortly after Annja had been detained. Annja wondered where he was during that time, since it certainly seemed as if breakfast had been temporarily put on hold until Annja could be taken into custody.

The metal handcuffs she wore brought back painful memories of other times and places. None of which cheered her up. Trying to extricate herself from handcuffs was always a challenge.

Thomson stared at her hard. She could see no pupil dilation in his eyes and there wasn’t a nervous facial tick to be seen anywhere. He was definitely used to exerting control over a situation and she suspected he didn’t usually get very many people who defied him.

Finally, after another three minutes of no one saying anything, Annja cleared her throat. “I know this tactic, Colonel. You’re trying to make me uncomfortable. You’re hoping that I will start babbling about something as a way of filling the silence.”

He continued to stare at her.

She frowned. “The truth is, I’m already uncomfortable. Your soldiers applied these handcuffs a little too zealously. They’re cutting off circulation to my hands, and if I don’t get some relief soon, you’ll have to cut them off because I’ll have gotten gangrene.”

She saw the colonel barely nod and then one of the soldiers moved behind her and removed the handcuffs. Annja rubbed her wrists. “Thank you. That’s a huge improvement.”

Thomson removed a pipe from his desk drawer, packed it with tobacco and then lit it. He puffed away for several seconds and then leaned back, chomping on the stem.

Annja coughed slightly. “I thought the military frowned on smoking.”

“I’m grandfathered,” the colonel said. “Something about you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” He blew out a smoke ring and then fixed his eyes on Annja again. “We’ve got quite a situation here.”

“I don’t see it. I’m not guilty of the charges Major Braden accused me of. Espionage? You’ve got to be kidding me,” Annja said.

“Nevertheless, we had an incident yesterday and the trail leads back to you, Miss Creed.”

“What kind of incident?”

“I believe Major Braden already informed you about it. The hacker intrusion into our secure network system. Someone gained access illegally. They poked about in our computers and even gained access to a certain highly classified file.”

The file that Annja hadn’t been able to read yet. She cursed herself inwardly for tripping and knocking herself out. If she hadn’t been so clumsy, she could have spent last evening reading it over and convincing Dave and Zach that there was really something odd going on here.

Instead, the colonel had her in a bind. But did he know she hadn’t read it yet? Probably not. Annja knew she had to bide her time and hope that he would reveal how much he knew.

“What was in the file?” she asked.

The colonel smiled. “Why, Miss Creed, don’t you know? It was the selfsame file that you’ve been obsessing over.”

“Oh, the lab analysis?”

“Indeed.”

Annja frowned. “I don’t think obsessing is the right word in this case. Sure, I’ve been curious, but obsessing? That’s not entirely accurate.”

Colonel Thomson leaned forward. “Let me ask you a question.”

“Shoot.”

“Do you believe in coincidences?”

Annja shrugged. “Well, I don’t know. I mean, there have been times in the past when things just sort of hooked up in time and space. No real rhyme or reason to it. Other times, it definitely seemed like it was a deliberate kind of thing, you know?”

“No. I don’t know. What I do believe, however, is that there are no such things as coincidences. None at all.”

“Don’t you think that perspective is a bit…limiting?” Annja asked.

The colonel ignored her and continued. “So when a scientist like yourself comes around asking to see a classified file and is told that she won’t be given access to it and then a little later on, a hacker infiltrates our supposedly secure system and goes right after that very file, I have to ask myself a question—are they connected?”

Annja tried to grin, but it felt forced. “The answer is no.”

“Actually, the answer is yes. Most definitely, in fact.”

Annja shook her head. “You’ve got no way of connecting me to any hacker operating on his or her own in the outside world.”

Thomson smoked his pipe. “You know, as a matter of fact, we do have a way of connecting you.”

“And how might that be?” Annja asked.

“A phone call went out from this very camp yesterday, shortly before the hacker infiltrated our system.”

“So what? You’ve got plenty of people with cell phones here, don’t you?”

Thomson laughed. “Miss Creed, you don’t expect me to believe that you’re really stupid enough to suggest that a cell phone would work out in this remote wilderness, do you? I mean, come on now…”

Annja almost grinned again. “So how did they make the call?”

“A satellite phone.”

“Ah, well, I don’t have one of those,” she said.

“Of course you don’t. Your gear was searched. However, someone in this camp does have one.”

“Don’t a few people? I mean, in case of an emergency, I’d certainly want a way to reach out to some help.”

“Satellite phones are banned in this camp,” Thomson said. “They’re compromising to our security.”

“Really? I’m afraid I don’t see how that would happen.”

“A call made at the right time of day might give the enemy the chance to pinpoint our position. They could discover what it is we’re up to down here and then threaten our security here.”

Annja shrugged. “Well, what exactly are we up to down here and who is the enemy?” Annja asked.

“There’s no we anymore, Miss Creed. You are no longer a member of the scientific research team assigned to this unit.”

“Great. Send me on home, then,” Annja said.

“We’ve already gone over that.”

“Yeah, well, I thought I’d try again.” Annja sighed. “So where’s the big bad evidence you have that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was responsible for yesterday’s intrusion?”

Colonel Thomson looked beyond her to the soldiers standing behind Annja. “Bring it in.”

One of the soldiers walked outside. Annja waited, her heart beating a little bit faster. Surely they wouldn’t have found Dave’s phone. Wasn’t he one of them anyway?

Thomson continued staring at her through the smoky haze. He kept puffing on his pipe, generating more smoke and making Annja extremely uncomfortable. Her eyes hurt from the smoke.

The door reopened and Thomson looked up. “Did you get it?”

“Yes, sir.”

The soldier walked over and handed Thomson a satellite phone. It was the exact model that she’d used yesterday to connect to the Internet. She couldn’t tell if it was really Dave’s, but it sure looked like it.

“This is the satellite phone you used to make a call to an Internet service provider yesterday morning.”

“I’ve never seen that before in my life.”

Thomson nodded. “We thought for sure you would say that, so we took the liberty of having it dusted for fingerprints.”

“And?”

“We also took the liberty of taking your fingerprints last night while you slept that nasty concussion off.”

Annja frowned. She thought her hands had smelled odd this morning. But she’d chalked it up as part of the medical evaluation she’d undergone as a result of her misfortune in the cave.

“Did you get a match?”

Thomson smiled. “A partial, actually.”

Annja wanted to laugh at him. Of course they’d only gotten a partial. Annja had wrapped the sat phone back up the way Dave had hidden it. The friction would have destroyed much of her prints.

“Partials aren’t enough to convict, Colonel. You’re grasping at straws here and you know it,” Annja said, hoping her bluff would work.

But the colonel seemed unfazed. And Annja’s stomach continued to ache.

What does he have? she wondered. What does he have that he can use to pin this on me? Her laptop? Had they cracked her personal security codes?

She frowned. They had Dave’s phone. And they might know about her laptop. Was Dave working with them, after all? Or was he something else entirely?

“Are you all right, Miss Creed?”

She glanced up. Thomson was looking at her with a renewed sense of interest.

“I’m fine.”

“Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t seem fine. In fact, I’d even go so far as to suggest you’re feeling a bit nervous right now.”

“Nonsense.”

“Could it be that you’re wondering what else we have to connect you with yesterday’s crime?”

“I’m wondering how soon I can get out of here and go back to work.”

“Ah, but I’ve already told you there will be no more work for you. You’re off the team. Permanently.”

Annja sighed. Zach was going to kill her.

“The time to come clean is now, Miss Creed. If you want to tell me everything about your conspiracy, I might be inclined to be more lenient on you than if you continue to cling to the notion that you are an innocent in all of this.”

Annja eyed him. “More lenient?”

“It’s going to be a very long winter. Temperatures, as you know, dip well into the negative fifties at night. All this darkness, this isolation, anything can happen. And if we have no way of getting you back to the authorities at McMurdo, we’ll just have to dispense our own justice out here.”

So that was it. He was going to kill her? For hacking his computer? Talk about a little baby, she thought. “That seems a bit extreme for a crime like this. I mean, what happens if someone steals your lunch around here?”

Thomson didn’t rise to the bait. “The compromising of security is a very serious offense. People’s lives are at stake here, and hard decisions have to be made regarding the operational security of this establishment. If that means severe punishments for violators, I am granted that authority by virtue of my rank and position within the United States armed forces.”

“I wouldn’t think the hacker would want anyone to get hurt, Thomson. That’s being a bit far-fetched,” Annja said.

“I take my job very seriously. And the lives of my men depend on that fact. I want to bring them all home alive. That won’t be possible if we’ve got people who insist on sabotaging our efforts.”

“Well, as I said before, you’ve got the wrong woman. I’m not guilty of hacking your system. I don’t care if you’ve got a partial print match or not—it wasn’t me.”

The colonel smiled and then leaned forward again. The air was thick now. Annja coughed and tried to take a deep breath.

“So that’s it, then?” the colonel said.

“What?”

“You’re going to insist that you’re innocent?”

“Absolutely,” Annja said.

Thomson sighed. “Very well. You leave me no choice.”

Annja looked up. “No choice?”

Thomson nodded at the soldiers. “Do it.”

The doors behind her opened, blowing a fresh stream of frigid air into the shelter. Fortunately it cleared out some of the smoke. Annja heard footsteps behind her and looked up.

Garin walked in.

Thomson smiled. “Major Braden. You have something for me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Annja saw the movement and then looked as Garin slid Annja’s laptop computer onto the colonel’s desk.

Colonel Thomson looked at Annja. “This, I believe, is yours.”