Philip Kerr - Esau

Connected. The digital revolution had made a tremendous difference not just to the computer nerds but also to the intelligence community. Bryan Perrins could keep in direct touch with any agent in the field through one insouciant touch of a mouse at the beginning of his day. Only a few years before, there had existed whole departments of people manning radio receivers, reading signals traffic, analyzing transmissions, and processing intelligence. Today most of those departments had been radically downsized, and Perrins could open his own e-mail tray and read copies of whichever agent’s reports seemed of greatest relevance. Right now he was most interested in receiving the e-mail addressed to HUSTLER that was coming straight from Nepal. He could even send e-mail straight back via a simple RSVP function that saved him from having to use the agent’s codename, which in this case was CASTORP, or his electronic mail number. It was as hands-on a relationship with an agent as anyone had enjoyed since the French minister of war had slept with Mata Hari.

Normally Perrins disapproved of field personnel including jokes in their reports, but when he read the first piece of e-mail filed from the Annapurna Sanctuary, he could hardly resist enjoying CASTORp’s crack that he had ‘no news yeti of what he was there for.’

‘Goddamn bunch of looney tunes,’ laughed Perrins.

He hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was at all proper for him to respond with an equal amount of levity. After all, CASTORP might be risking his life. But it was still early. The guy had only just got there. Why not? A little light relief might be just the encouragement he needed. So Perrins typed an e-mail back:

YOUR REPORT SHOWS AN ABOMINABLE LACK OF GOOD TASTE, IN FUTURE PLEASE REFER TO SNOW-PERSON. HUSTLER.

It would be the last time that CASTORP would cause Bryan Perrins to feel amused.

Jack had no doubt that it was the CIA who had determined to use his expedition as cover for one of their operations. As to what they were up to, his best guess was that it had something to do with the Indo-Pakistan crisis. Despite the cooling-off period, it was still a crisis. There were few well-informed people who did not think that at the end of the three-month period the two sides would be at each other’s throats again. But precisely what the CIA was up to he could only imagine, since the Annapurna Sanctuary was much closer to Nepal’s border with Tibet than to India. A country controlled by Communist China, Tibet was his next best guess in accounting for the interest of the CIA. Tibet had been invaded and occupied by the Chinese in 1950, and since then it had been almost impossible to gain a permit to climb a Himalayan mountain from the Tibetan side. No reason was ever given by the authorities, but ever since he had been in the Himalayas, Jack had heard persistent rumours that the Chinese were using Tibet to build secret factories for the production of nuclear weapons, as well as building missile bases, radar stations, and dumps for the disposal of radioactive waste. Could the reason the CIA wanted to be in the Sanctuary have something to do with China’s nuclear arsenal?

Jack’s third and last guess also involved the Chinese and was the least comfortable proposition of all. It was that the Chinese intended to take advantage of the crisis between India and Pakistan to invade Nepal through Tibet, just as the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan back in 1979.

Jack would gladly have assisted any operation dedicated to preventing a war in India or one that might frustrate any Chinese military ambitions in the region. But mostly he just felt irritated that he and his expedition colleagues were being used.

Having been on previous expeditions with Mac, Jutta, and the sirdar, he felt little reason to distrust any of them. Swift was beyond reproach, for obvious reasons. So Jack reserved his particular scrutiny for Tsering, Jameson, Cody, Warner, and Boyd, thinking it was only a matter of time before one of them would say something that might give himself away.

And when he did. Jack would be ready for him.

Almost as soon as Lincoln Warner and Byron Cody arrived at ABC, the weather closed in. As dusk fell for a second time on the small group of people camped on the glacier basin, near whiteout conditions prevailed and the wind built up in fury until it was a howling, almost animate gale.

Emerging from the shaft that led down to the appropriately named Hotel Snowland, Byron Cody found the wind literally taking his breath away. Even through his pioneer’s beard it felt like a sandblasting machine against his face, and he was glad that someone had thoughtfully erected a rope handrail between the lodge and the clamshell.

‘What a night,’ he muttered, and fired a flashlight in front of him, picking out the various surrounding supply dumps tied down with ground sheets — shaking in the wind as if the earth was racked by a violent fever — and then picking out the clamshell itself.

A sound like a footfall made him stop on the rope and point the powerful beam of light around the campsite. He peered into the gloomy blizzard to see if the mysterious noise would come again.

‘Is someone there?’ he shouted.

But there was nothing. Taking hold of the rope again, he bent into the wind and carried on walking to the clamshell. It was a distance of less than twenty metres, but by the time he had covered it, wearing a Berghaus fleece and a pair of thick ski pants, Cody felt quite numb with cold.

The first person he spoke to as he came through the airlock door was Jack.

‘I thought I heard something out there,’ he said, rubbing his hands together and shivering.

‘Oh? Want me to come and take a look?’

Cody shrugged. He didn’t relish the idea of going back outside and hunting around for something in the storm.

‘No, I guess it was nothing,’ he said, grinning nervously. ‘Airy nothing. Except perhaps my own imagination. How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear! Or maybe a yeti. Ever since I could read I’ve been afraid of the dark, and believe me I was a precociously early reader. This place is rather spooky in the dark. It’s got me jumpy already.’

‘The wind blows all kinds of shit around up here,’ said Jack. ‘Some of it right through your head.’

‘It’s a hell of a night though,’ shivered Cody. ‘If it’s like this down here, then what the hell’s it like up on the south face of Annapurna?’

Jack grimaced. ‘A hell of a long way from comfortable.’

‘You tried to climb that sonofabitch, didn’t you?’

‘Tried and failed, Byron. And there’s no son that comes into it. It’s just a bitch, all the way. Annapurna means Goddess of Bountiful Harvests. It may have been someone’s idea of a goddess, but it sure isn’t mine.’

Cody sniffed the air like a hungry dog. ‘What’s for dinner?’

Jack grinned and jabbed a thumb back across his shoulder.

‘Microwave’s over there. Help yourself to an MRE.’

While the porters stayed wrapped up in their sleeping bags in the Annapurna Sanctuary Lodge, getting an early night after their exertions, the team and the two Sherpa leaders gathered under the clamshell to have their evening meal, listen to the radio, and talk. Chairs and tables had been borrowed from the lodges, and with the temperature inside the inflatable building a reasonably warm fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit the team sat around eating their MREs and trying to ignore the storm outside on the glacier. Now and then they would hear an especially loud, howitzer-sized gust of wind and someone would emit a quiet whistle and lay a hand on the fabric of the clamshell, wondering how it managed to hold up against the storm.