Giles Blunt - Until the Night

Ronnie Babstock goes to work. He cannot be at home. He cannot be alone. It might be smart to let us protect you, Cardinal had said. Durie hasn’t come after the other men, but you’re the last on the list and he might see you as the ultimate target.

“I hope he does come for me,” Babstock had told him. “I’d be glad to die if it meant Hayley would live. Christ, John, she’s so young. This is a girl who’s never hurt anyone.”

There is plenty of work to do. The next Mars launch is less than six months away. The wheels on the latest iteration of Marti are refusing to fully retract, making a landing impossible. And the developer of the alpha-particle spectrometer can’t seem to keep the specs straight. In both cases, communications between team leaders and department heads have reached a pass where only a quiet talk at the top is going to move things forward.

He can’t bring himself to make the calls. His daughter’s face is before him. It is an obsession he has not experienced since the year he fell in love with her mother and it was far from certain she would marry him. His mind had held her close the way his arms could not. Time was erased.

Now his daughter is before him in all her ages, from burping, crawling infant to knobby little skater girl to trampy teen in torn sweatshirts to frightening Goth poet to student and scholar and teacher. From his office on Airport Hill he can see across Algonquin Bay to the frozen bay itself, blue sky, the strange, snowless expanse of the lake. He is seeing none of it. He is seeing Hayley’s face. He tries to select favourite moments: his visits to Toronto, all too infrequent, when Hayley takes him to dinner with colleagues, drags him to the AGO, even a poetry reading. His daughter the adult, the person he is still just getting to know. This person he has known all her life, suddenly a new friend.

He couldn’t stand sitting there anymore, he had to be out and moving. He put on his coat and had just opened the office door when his computer made the sound of an incoming Skype call. Few people knew how to reach him directly that way.

He looked at his assistant. “Grace, did you just relay something to my Skype?”

“We haven’t got anything out here.”

He went back into his office and sat down.

Incoming Call From: Hayley Babstock.

Hayley didn’t have a Skype account, as far as he knew. He clicked on the answer button.

An image of a newspaper clipping appeared onscreen.

“Hayley? Hayley, are you there?”

The cops had a trace on his phone lines but they wouldn’t be able to trace this, not in time. He clicked Record.

The image zoomed in on the sidebar to a main article from twenty years ago. SCIENTIST PERISHES AFTER SURVIVING DRIFT STATION DISASTER. There was a photo. The young woman with her beautiful hair and shy smile. Twenty-seven. A specialist in Arctic cloud formation and energy exchange. He had never forgotten her face, though he had seen it only once, the day the story broke.

“Mr. Babstock, this is Karson Durie.” There was just the voice and the clipping. The voice was polite, calm. “I wanted to make sure you knew who she was.”

“Rebecca Fenn. I know who she was. She was young and beautiful and full of promise.”

“Much like your daughter.”

“Mr. Durie, I will do anything you ask, pay any price, give up my own life-anything-if you let my daughter live.”

“There’s nothing you can do. You did it many, many years ago.”

“I’ve regretted it ever since.”

“That makes no difference to me.”

“Look, hate me. Hate me all you want. But not my daughter. Not Hayley. She’s not someone you could possibly hate if you got to know her for even five minutes.”

“I don’t hate her. I don’t even hate you. I’m indifferent. Just like you were. You were indifferent to a man and woman who were dying at your feet. Indifferent as the Crusoe Glacier, the Piper Ridge, the Steacey Ice Cap. It’s the natural state. The remarkable thing is that there was ever in the history of mankind an instance of anyone who wasn’t indifferent.”

“I wasn’t indifferent. I was greedy, selfish, stupid, ambitious, reckless, immature.”

“Mid-thirties by my estimate-hardly a child.”

“I know. And I won’t lie to you-we saw the flare. And I know you don’t ignore a flare in the Arctic. We had a lot at stake, and we made the wrong choice. It was wrong, and I am sorry for it. I’ve wanted to undo it for many years, but it just isn’t possible. I will tell the world about it, if that will help in any way.”

“It won’t.”

“May I see my daughter, please?”

“Of course.”

It had been a while since the squad had had occasion to open the “war room.” This was a grand name for the closet that housed special operations materiel. Each detective was issued a shotgun and full Kevlar, along with backup magazines and speed-loaders for the Berettas.

In the middle of all this, Cardinal had to go out to the meeting room to try to calm down Ronnie Babstock. He’d showed up with a laptop that he opened on the board table to the video recording of his daughter. She was dressed like the other victims, in blue down jacket, new boots, no gloves, no scarf. Nothing else visible in the frame but ice.

Her breaths were shallow, visible intermittently as fog against the blue of her jacket. She appeared to try to speak, but no words came out.

“She’s going to die, John. I need to know what is being done.”

“Ron, we looked at this the minute you zapped it over. It doesn’t contain anything we can use, and we have another lead to follow up right now-a strong lead. We’re heading out in a few minutes. You go back home and I’ll call you soon as we know.”

“He’s on Axel Heiberg, John. Tell me the Mounties are there.”

“They’re on their way. They don’t have an outpost on that island, but they’re in the air right at this moment. Listen, Ron, that is only to make sure. We don’t think he made it up there.”

“He left the numbers. The coordinates.”

“Yes, it was his plan. He wanted us to arrive too late. But he was in a car accident. He’s injured. There’s no way he could fly a plane that far. We believe he’s here now. There’s nothing in the video that couldn’t be right here in Algonquin Bay.”

“This is a recording.” Babstock pointed to the laptop, the image of his daughter curled up on the ice, a chain winding out of the bottom of the frame. “It wasn’t even live when he sent it.”

The cottage was near the tip of Cole’s Landing. The assault had to be coordinated with Jerry Commanda and OPP SWAT. He had asked Cardinal what they could expect.

“We don’t know. Durie’s sister told us the cottage never contained any weapons of any kind when they were growing up. Their father wasn’t a hunter or anything. But he’s had plenty of time to stock it up with whatever he wants. We’ve had plainclothes get as close as they can. So far, there’s no signs of life, no signs of recent activity. We don’t know if he’s in there or if the girl’s in there alone, or what. If she’s with him, he could shoot her the minute he sees us.”

A stillness had settled over the lake, no trace of last week’s freak wind, or any wind at all. Sun hanging low over the Manitou Islands, radiating nothing but cold. The quiet sawn in two by a snowmobile heading out through the fishing shacks. Not too many of those would be occupied on a day like this. Thirty below, and that was in the sun. It was hard to believe anyone could die on such a beautiful day, but if Hayley Babstock was out in this, she surely would.

“Jesus, this is hellish,” Cardinal said, “and we’re dressed for it.”

Delorme said nothing. She had been keeping her distance all morning. He had congratulated her on the Priest case and wanted to arrange a dinner or some time they could catch up, but she had pulled out her cellphone and feigned sudden interest in a text.