Polar Shift

Barrett started to get down on his knees. He was still carrying the portfolio.

"I don't see anything."

"You will," Doyle said. "You will." He slipped a pistol out from under his windbreaker.

Barrett bent lower, and the leather folder dropped from his hand. The thick wad of papers spilled out onto the ground. Some of the sheets were caught by a lake breeze and scattered across the clearing as if they had a life on their own.

Barrett bolted after the wayward portfolio, scooping up the papers with the skill of a shortstop. He managed to gather all the papers before they blew into the trees. He tucked them back into the folder and hugged it close to his chest. He had a grin of triumph on his face as he started to walk back to the plane.

He saw the gun in Doyle's hand.

"What's going on, Mickey?"

"Good-bye, Spider."

He could tell from the tone of Doyle's voice that his friend wasn't joking. His grin vanished. "Why?"

"I can't let you sink the project."

"Look, Mickey. Tris and I can talk this out."

"It's got nothing to do with Tris."

"I don't understand."

"I'll hoist a beer in your name the next time I get back to Cambridge," Doyle said.

The .25-caliber pistol in his hand went pop-pop.

The first bullet buried itself in the leather folder. Barrett felt the thud against his chest, but he was still in a state of disbelief when the second bullet grazed his head. Survival reflexes took over. He dropped the folder, turned and bolted into the woods. Doyle got off a couple more shots, but the bullets dug harmlessly into a tree trunk. He swore and gave chase.

Barrett ignored the low-lying tree branches that slashed at his face and the briers that grabbed at his jeans. His surprise and dismay at being shot by a friend had given way to sheer terror. Blood was trickling down the side of his head and neck. As he crashed through the forest, he saw a silver shimmer ahead. Oh hell. He had circled back toward the lake, but there was no going back.

He burst from the woods onto a sandy beach a hundred yards or so from the plane. He could hear Doyle crashing through the brush just behind him. Without hesitating, he slogged into the water, and then took a deep breath and dove under the surface. He was a strong swimmer, and, even with his boots on, he got several yards from shore by the time Doyle arrived at the water's edge. He went as deep as he could go.

Doyle stood on the shore and carefully aimed at the ripples marking the surface where Barrett had disappeared. He peppered the water with bullets, patiently reloaded and shot off another clip.

The water was crimson where Barrett had disappeared. Doyle decided to wait five minutes until he was sure Barrett wasn't holding his breath, but he heard someone yelling from the other side of a patch of tall weeds growing in the water off to his left.

He glanced back at the stain growing on the surface of the lake and tucked the gun in his belt. Walking briskly, he made his way through the woods and back to the clearing. He gathered up the papers that Barrett had dropped and slipped them into the folder, first noticing the bullet hole in the leather binding. He cursed. Served him right for using a popgun. Minutes later, he was in the plane, flying over the treetops.

As soon as he thought he had telephone service, Doyle punched out a number on his cell phone. "Well?" said a man's voice at the other end.

"It's done," Doyle said. "I tried to talk him out of it, but he was determined to spill the beans."

"Too bad. He was brilliant. Any problems?"

"Nope," Doyle lied.

"Good work," the voice said. "I want to see you tomorrow."

Doyle said he would be there. As he clicked off, he experienced a twinge of Irish sentimentality at having to kill his old friend. But Doyle had grown up in a neighborhood where a friendship could end with a nighttime burial over a drug deal gone wrong or an imprudent comment. This was not the first time he had dispatched a friend or acquaintance. Business, unfortunately, was business. He put Barrett out of his mind and began to think of the riches and power that would soon be in his grasp.

He would have been less at ease if he knew what was going on back at the lake. A canoe had rounded the weed patch. The two fly fishermen in the canoe had heard the pop of Doyle's handgun. They wanted to warn whoever was hunting that people were in the area. One of the men was a Boston lawyer, but, more important, the other was a doctor.

As they emerged from the weeds, the lawyer pointed toward the water and said, "What the hell is that?"

The doctor said, "It looks like a melon with a spider on it."

They paddled until they were a few feet from the object. The melon disappeared, and in its place were eyes, a nose and a gaping mouth. The lawyer raised his paddle and prepared to bring it down on the floating head. Spider Barrett looked up at the two astonished faces. His mouth opened.

"Help me," he pleaded.

13

With a hull displacement of twenty-three thousand tons and seventy-five thousand horsepower produced by its powerful engines, the Yamal-class Russian icebreaker Kotelny was capable of continuously breaking through seven feet of ice. Its sharply angled bow sliced through the slushy spring ice pack like a warm knife through sherbet. As Karla Janos stood in the bow and surveyed the fog-shrouded island that was her destination, she felt as if someone had walked across her grave.

The involuntary shudder that passed through her willowy body had nothing to do with the rawness of the weather in the East Siberian Sea. Karla was bundled in a down parka, and she had become inured to biting cold after two winters with the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where temperatures routinely dropped to forty degrees below zero. She was well enough acquainted with the territory around the Arctic Circle to know that there was little chance Ivory Island would live up to the image of warm whiteness evoked by its name, but she was totally unprepared for the total bleakness of the isolated place.

As a scientist, Karla knew that her reaction was emotional rather than objective, but the island had a forbidding aspect that she couldn't easily shrug off. The most prominent feature of the island was a dead volcano that still had patches of snow around its truncated summit. The overcast skies drained all traces of color from the sunlight so that the sea and land appeared to be bathed in a depressing gray light. As the ship moved closer to the island, she saw that the low rolling hills and tundra around the volcano were broken by a network of ravines whose twisting cliffs, combined with a trick of the slanting sunlight, created an optical illusion, as if the surface of the island were writhing in pain.

"Excuse me, Miss Janos. We'll be dropping anchor in fifteen minutes."

She turned and saw the ship's commander. Captain Ivanov was a sturdily built man in his sixties. His broad face was weathered from the arctic elements, and a white sailor's beard fringed his chin.

The captain was a kindly man who had spent much of his life sailing the frigid waters around the archipelago. Karla and the avuncular Ivanov had forged a strong friendship since she had boarded the icebreaker at its home base on Wrangel Island. She had enjoyed their wide-ranging chats over di