Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

Dave turned back and faced him. “And why should this be a concern of mine?”

“Because it looks like Skehan’s organizing a posse, and you’re right smack in his radar.” Cal stepped closer to him. “Skehan’s trying to figure out who really killed that reporter Emmett had up in his camp, and you’re on that list, too. I’m not the only one who got a little paranoid. You get it?”

“So what?”

“Valena Walker is ‘so what.’ Watch out for her, man.”

Dave closed his eyes. The image of his companion of the afternoon sitting in the seat of the Challenger smiling, filled his mind. Beautiful Valena smiling. That smile fading as the conversation careened toward what was so clearly troubling her. He shook his head, but it didn’t free him. So he did the one thing he could do for himself: he kept his hands in his pockets and walked away.

IN HER DORM ROOM, VALENA PACKED AND THEN RE-packed her duffels for field deployment. As she moved through the task, she nibbled at her dinner, which she had brought from the galley on a take-out plate. She had laid the dish on the bunk below hers, chancing spilling chop suey on the comforter, but she was too wired to be concerned with such details. If food spilled off the plate she’d deal with it and take things from there. This seemed a metaphor for the way her entire life seemed to be playing out of late. Besides, on the comforters and Army blankets issued from Housing, a spill might go unnoticed. Like everything else in Antarctica—the so-called furniture in the room, the buildings, the Deltas, the whole town of McMurdo—they had a scavenged look to them. Skuaed , thought Valena, remembering the local term. Picked over by predatory gull-like birds.

When she was done eating and confident that she had forgotten nothing she would need to survive in a remote Antarctic field camp—short of the equipment she would check out from the Field Center in the morning—she sat down with Emmett Vanderzee’s computer on her lap. She began to skim through the files she had noticed before, looking for anything that seemed connected to his arrest.

She began with a transcript of the article Frink had published in the Financial News almost two years earlier. It purported to debunk a scientific paper Emmett had published in a scientific journal. She knew the paper backward and forward: it examined data from a wide range of paleoclimate records, including ice cores, lake cores, ocean cores, tree rings, and historical records, and showed that the modern-day climate was warmer than it had been at any time during the last two thousand years. It also showed that this increase had occurred during the last fifty years. The increase was so large and abrupt, in fact, that the graph of temperature increase versus time looked like a hockey stick laid on its side. For the first 1,950 of those two thousand years, the shaft of the hockey stick lay horizontally, with little or no increase. Then in the last fifty years—the puck end of the stick—the temperature had shot upward. AI Gore had emphasized this information by standing on a lift in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth , rising with the line on his graph in a horrifying swing toward the ceiling.

Frink’s article attacked Emmett’s findings by stating that his data were scant, self-contradictory, and subject to misinterpretation, and concluded with a strong statement about Emmett’s motivation for having published his analysis: “Clearly, Mr. Vanderzee wishes to scare citizens back into the Stone Age. One wonders to what lengths he will go to obtain his next dole of grant money from public funds.”

“Whoa!” said Valena out loud. She read on. The next file in the sequence was a compendium of letters to the editor of the Financial News that had been sent in response to the article. Emmett had written an eloquent rebuttal to the article, as had Jim Skehan and other scientists. Following each letter was a transcript of the way each had actually been published in that newspaper. As Skehan had told her, the letters had been severely edited, changing them into confused prattle.

Rebuttals to the edits followed, Skehan’s particularly vitriolic. Responding e-mails from the editor stated only that they were “looking into the matter.” Next in the file were a flurry of e-mails from colleagues indicating that the edited letters to the editor had done their damage within the scientific community.

Things got even worse from there. The next file was a scanned photocopy of a letter to Emmett Vanderzee from the United States senator who chaired the committee on science. The letter “requested” that he come to Washington to appear before the committee and explain his analysis of the data. The senator demanded a list of documents: not only Emmett’s published analysis but also his raw data, his colleagues’ data, a listing of his funding sources, and justification for all current and planned climate studies. Finally, it required that he open his books, showing how all project funds were being spent.

The letter was a shotgun approach to fact finding, a witch hunt, an attempt to intimidate, so outrageous that Valena thought at first that it must be a joke letter sent by a colleague, and she reexamined the letterhead to make certain that it was authentic.

Why would the US Senate presume to review scientific research? Was that within their purview or, more sensibly, within their expertise?

She understood more fully now why Emmett had invited Frink to his camp. He had wanted to teach the man how science was done, and what it meant. He had wanted the journalist to understand that while scientific interpretations of data were open to debate, that debate belonged between people who understood not only how to analyze the data but also how those data had been gathered. He had wanted Frink to call off his dogs.

But instead of Frink, he had gotten Sweeny. What was Sweeny’s piece in all of this? Why was a political reporter looking into science?

Valena read on. After Sweeny’s death, the Financial News articles went for Emmett’s jugular not just as a scientist but as a man, painting him blacker and blacker through innuendo and almost direct statement that he had set Sweeny up to die. “Emmett Vanderzee, who is under investigation by the Senate Committee on Science, was not content to take criticisms,” began one article, and, “Having attempted to incite widespread panic with his flawed analysis of climate variations, Vanderzee greeted criticism by leading Morris Sweeny to his death,” read another. There were accusations that he “would do anything to protect his funding.”

The date of the latest article was three days before Emmett had invited her to join him this year in Antarctica. Was that because Schwartz and Lindemann had just that minute jumped ship?

Flicking the cursor back into the list of programs, she opened her professor’s stored e-mails and set the pointer to group them alphabetically by sender. She scrolled to F for Frink, but there was nothing there. She then scrolled to S for Sweeny and found a short list. The first few were no surprise, questions about what to expect in the camp and what to bring. They were all dated within just weeks of Sweeny’s arrival on the ice, suggesting that he had signed on late in the game. The last one caught her interest:

Mr. Vanderzee

Am in receipt of the image taken in your camp yesterday. Wanting to know name of second man from right. Is this Edgar Hallowell?

She backed up one e-mail and found what she expected: Sweeny’s original request for a photograph of all personnel who were working with him that year. Why would he want that? And who was Edgar Hallowell, and why was Morris Sweeny interested in him? She closed her eyes, concentrating. The only name even close to that is Ted, which could be a nickname for Edgar. But why would a political reporter coming to Antarctica to learn about climate change be interested in a guy who blows things up?