It was gone seven-thirty in the evening by the time the plane made its final descent into Hanford Airport and almost nine when the cab pulled up outside ZAKRON. Jack paid the driver and stepped out into the night air. Christ it was hot, like a fan-heater on full tilt. He shed his linen jacket.
The ZAKRON building was set back from the highway. It was shaped like a lop-sided dome, not unlike an egg, with the apex sloping away to the back. The shell was burnished metal, or that’s how it looked in the darkness. It was reflecting the orange glow of the interstate, spinning the streetlights to a blur.
As he approached the entrance the smoked-glass doors snapped open. He stepped into the chill of the building and instantly recognized the woman standing there in a white lab coat, loosely buttoned, her blond hair tied back and held neatly in place. She was wearing the same retro glasses that Karin had bought just before she left.
‘Well,’ she said, extending her hand. ‘After all the emails. Tammy Fox.’
‘Jack Raven,’ he said, smiling. ‘Jack. Good to meet you at last.’
‘Not too exhausted? Sorry to drag you from the airport but I wanted you to see him straight off.’
Jack ran his hand through his hair.
‘You got me intrigued. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’
She led him down a corridor towards the lab, swiping the door with a smart-card and flicking on the lights. Then she stood back to allow him through.
‘Here we are,’ she said, pointing to an oblong glass container on the far side of the laboratory. ‘Can’t wait to get your take on it.’
Jack walked across to the container. Its interior was chilled to minus 10 Fahrenheit, so cold that the outer surface was etched with frost. He pressed his hand to the frozen glass. His skin stuck there for a moment, forming a glue-like bond. But then the warmth of his hand melted the thin veil of ice. He took a cloth from his pocket and wiped away the wetness, creating a porthole through which to get a clearer view.
The corpse was naked, deep-frozen, outstretched on his back. Male. White Caucasian. His feet were iced to steel, arms locked stiffly to his side. He had a yellow rubber tag attached to his left ankle, like one of those locker-key straps you get at public swimming pools.
Three halogen spots shone onto the container, their light reflecting off the frosted glass. A fourth had been positioned at the far end, throwing light onto the head. Jack scrutinized the corpse with care, his eyes shifting from the head to the feet and then back to the head. Mid-thirties, he reckoned. Physically fit. Strong boned. His hair was intact, it was dusky-blond, and the skin was as smooth as a pebble. The genital area, often the first part to deteriorate, was in perfect condition, even after all the years that he’d been in the ice.
The left eyelid, frozen ajar, revealed a pupil that was a sharp blue and beautifully translucent, though veiled in frost. The right eye was sealed with a delicate zip of ice. The way he was lying there, frozen like a rock, he could have been a fallen statue, renaissance, Italianate, marble. Perfect muscles, perfect physique.
Jack lifted his gaze and looked back across the laboratory to Tammy. The light was gilding her hair and tracing her profile into a firm silhouette.
‘Just perfect,’ he said with a smile.
She flashed her eyes at him in a questioning sort of way.
‘The corpse, I mean. Completely perfect. Never seen anything -’
He turned back to the container and looked at the body more closely. Something was strange about the curvature of the back and spine. It was as if he had died in his sleep, relaxed, stretched out on a comfortable mattress.
‘Was he like that when he was found?’
‘Pretty much,’ said Tammy. ‘Except he was head down. That’s what’s so strange. It’s like he fell through a hole in the ice. Fell, got stuck and was then unable to get back out. That’s not a pretty death.’
‘No. But I guess not many deaths are pretty.’
She smiled, embarrassed.
‘But surely – ’
He glanced up at her but she broke off mid-sentence.
‘Normally there’d be fractures in the skin,’ he said. ‘You’d get ice cracks here and here.’ He pointed to the eyes and mouth. ‘And I was expecting him to be white. When we found Mallory, he looked like he’d been bleached.’
He paused. ‘Do we have any idea what he was up to in Greenland?’
‘Tom’s been in charge up till now. Tom Lawyer. The boss. Maybe you read about him on the website. You’ll meet him tomorrow. He says we’ve reached the end of the road. Discovered everything we’re going to discover.’
‘But what have you discovered? All I know is the stuff in your last email.’
‘There’s more,’ she said. ‘He had an I.D. bracelet. Just initials - F.C. - but enough to set Tom on track. Name’s Ferris Clark. American. A serviceman. Died in wartime, that’s clear, and Tom’s been going through the military records.’
She hesitated. He sensed she had more to say.
‘But to be honest, even with all this new stuff it hasn’t exactly got us very far. We’ve no idea how he got there. Not even sure what he was doing in Greenland. And we certainly don’t have a clue why he was naked.’
She turned to face him.
‘Naked for Chrissakes. That’s just weird.’
‘You’re right. It is weird.’
‘And that’s why I had to get you over. Find out how he died. If you can’t come up with an answer, I guess no one can.’
She went over to the desk at the far side of the room and rummaged through a couple of files, as if she was looking for something.
‘Tom pretends it’s all solved, of course, but he’s not even close to giving us a cause of death. Murder? Suicide? It’s like all the balls are in the air.’
She lowered her voice, even though the only other person in the building was the night security guard. ‘And then there’s the whole question of why he’s so well preserved.
‘I worked on the George One case. Three Second World War pilots found in the Antarctic. And I can tell you one thing, they looked a million miles different from Ferris Clark.’
Jack went back over to the glass box that was housing the body, nodding slowly as she spoke.
‘Why was he brought here?’ he asked. ‘Why ZAKRON? I checked your website, saw all the stuff you’ve done. But there’s other places that can do this.’
‘One or two. But well, I guess it was cos of George One. It was us, right from the outset. They brought him straight from Greenland. Delivered him to the military airport just down the road. You must have passed it on your way here. And then he was brought to us.’
She ran through the events of the evening the corpse had arrived. Twenty-ninth of June. They’d unpacked him, weighed him and measured him, calculated his body mass, etcetera, etcetera. And then they’d transferred him to the vitrification box.
‘And this thing,’ she said, pointing back to the glass container, ‘is real state of the art. Even NASA couldn’t do better. Equipped with optic sensors, thermostatic control panels, the works. Keeps him at a constant temperature. Even scans his organs.’
While Jack looked over the equipment, Tammy picked through a bulging file marked F. Clark. It was filled with charts, tomographic scans and computer print-outs.
‘You’ll get a good look through them tomorrow. But, well, we’ve run through pretty much everything, as you’ll see. Body scans, organ scans, internal probes, blood analyses. White and red corpuscles. Dioxides. I’ll get you the whole set in the morning, if I can persuade Tom to hand them over.’
‘Brain scans? DNA?’
‘Yep, brain scans and DNA. Haven’t seen those. Tom’s got them in his office.’
Another pause.
‘Everything points in the same direction. Froze the very second he died. Like he was tipped into liquid nitrogen. You’re right about him being perfect. Exactly what I thought the moment we unpacked him. It’s like he’s too perfect, if you get what I mean.’
She reached for a second file and pulled out a glossy print of the dead man’s heart.
‘Check this.’
Jack took it from her hands.
‘Jeez, Tom’ll kill me. Shouldn’t be showing you any of this without his say-so.’
Jack put down the high-res scan for a moment while he took out his glasses. Then he held it close to his face and studied it more closely. Frozen corpses had a peculiarity of their own, he knew that more than anyone. The three Austrian soldiers they’d pulled from the Forni glacier - brain, liver, lungs, they’d scanned them six, seven times. Every image revealed those tell-tale whitish spots. Each spot was an ice crystal of shattered blood cells, the inevitable result of death by freezing. Cells explode and fragment as they turn from liquid into ice.
But this scan was flawless.
*
‘You’re all over the internet,’ said Tammy brightly. ‘Jack Raven, forensic archaeologist. I checked out your website. You make it sound somehow – ’ she paused – ‘romantic.’
‘Romantic!’ He laughed.
‘Jack Raven with that body in a peat bog. Jack Raven on Everest clutching George Mallory. Jack Raven with a human skull. I get this feeling you’d hack through the Amazon if there was a dead body at the end of it.’
‘It’s a job like any other,’ he said.
‘Not really,’ she said with a smile. ‘It’s not like you’re a trucker. Or an accountant.’
‘True. To be honest, most people think it’s a totally weird thing to do.’
‘And all this stuff with death masks.’
‘Ah, that – ’
He paused, changed tack. ‘And you?’
‘I do the labs. Keep them clean. Wash them down. And that’s anything but romantic.’
She looked up at him again.
‘One thing I didn’t tell you. I should have said something before you left England. But I thought you wouldn’t come.’
‘Oh?’
‘Tom and Hunter, they’ve only just found out about you. It was all my idea, see. I’m the one that got you over from England. Tom was on vacation. And – ’
She turned to face him directly. ‘Tom’s, well, a bit of a hard-ass. Takes no crap, particularly right now, what with his divorce and all that. And with you here -’
Jack laughed again. ‘We’ll get on, I’m sure of it. After all, I’ve come to find him some answers.’
‘And that’s the problem,’ said Tammy with a frown. ‘Answers are the very last thing Tom wants.’