Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

Flora called to her assistant, “Erika, look up Andreas Campbell, male, late forties, early fifties.”

“Andreas? Our mail carrier?”

“Yes. Start with pharmacy records.”

The Group had long ago established methods for consulting the medical history, bank statements, and credit reports of virtually anyone in America, and they were working toward global access. Any individual would be fairly well delineated with just those sources.

Flora rushed from the building, the front door slamming behind her. Down Ninth Street she heard a siren abruptly shut off. By the time she got to the Augustine Apartments the ambulance doors were closing, Andreas Campbell behind them. She grabbed the nearest bystander, an older man walking his Yorkshire terrier, who was straining toward the blood as far as its leash would allow.

“Did he die?” Flora asked.

“We don’t know.”

“What was it, what was the matter?”

“Something bad,” the man replied. “I heard a paramedic say it looked like he bled out half his body.”

The crowd watched the ambulance drive away and then slowly, conspiratorially dispersed.

“Leave it, Bisco!” the old man snapped as the terrier growled and strained toward the mess. The man yanked definitively on the lead and the two of them walked away, leaving only Flora and the maintenance man to contemplate the remains. Flora crouched down on her haunches as close to the vomit as she could get without contaminating the pool of blood.

“Ma’am, what do you think you’re doing?”

Flora quickly stood and transferred a twenty-dollar bill from her pocket to the maintenance man’s hand. She then pulled out her debit card.

“Whatever you’re going to do, do it quick before the cops come and turn this into a crime scene,” the man said.

Holding the edge of her suit jacket over her mouth and nose, Flora used the tip of her debit card to shift through the puddle of vomit. It was filled with one-inch, pale, squirming objects, hundreds of them, if not thousands. Flora stood up just as her phone rang. It was Erika.

“Our friend has friends, Dr. Davies. He’s got a prescription for albendazole, which is—”

“I know,” Flora said. “Intestinal parasites.”

“Yes. Herring worms, specifically,” Erika said. “How did you know?”

“I think his pals just ate him from the inside out.”

Erika made a gagging sound as Flora hung up. She used a tissue to wipe off her card.

“You all done here, lady?” the maintenance man asked.

“Yes, I’m quite through with that,” she said, motioning at the ruddy mixture. “Make sure you tell the police to bag it and use disinfectant. Don’t let them hose it into the gutter.”

“Why? Is it dangerous?”

“Only if a dog or pigeon or some other unfortunate ingests it.”

The man looked at her in disgust and gave a short nod of his head. “Whatever you say, lady.”

As Flora walked back to the mansion, Arni, the dead researcher, was heavy on her mind. Upon entering the building she asked Erika if there had been anything else special about Andreas Campbell: mental irregularities, any psych meds?

Erika reported nothing unusual about Campbell, ruling out a potential link to Arni, who was a synesthete.

Flora sat at her desk and flipped open her laptop, calling up a map of her neighborhood. Then she remembered Andreas had just been at the mansion. She had heard the mail slot flap open and shut. Fifteen minutes later he was falling catastrophically ill two-thirds of a block away with parasites that never caused that much damage that fast. Yet it had happened, in the brief time that Flora was—

In the basement. With Adrienne and the Serpent.

First Mikel came back with the stone, then the rats stampeded, then Arni literally melted, then intestinal parasites went wild. By no reasonable yardstick was this a coincidence.

She switched to an advanced mapping program and drew two vectors, one from the Augustine to the mansion, the other from the mansion to the arch in Washington Square Park, the origin point for the rats. Her skin crawled as she remembered the undulating mass of clawing, twitching rodents that had covered the arch before they ran down and past her.

Like the grid of New York, the two vectors on-screen made a right angle crossing at the mansion.

All right, so what? she thought. Then she caught herself. The Group’s mansion wasn’t important. It was the stone that was important. Quickly she looked up the e-mail from Mikel that explained approximately where the Serpent had been collected in the Southern Ocean. She expanded the map and drew a vector from the Serpent’s origin point to the mansion. Next, she marked the location where Mikel said he saw the iceberg calved from the Brunt Ice Shelf, with an airship lodged inside, and connected it to the mansion as well.

What else, what else… Mikel’s albatrosses. Uruguay; hadn’t it been near the Montevideo airport? She added that point to the map, then descended on Erika, demanding immediate research for any unusual animal behavior around the world over the previous couple of weeks.

“Whale beachings, haven’t we been seeing reports on that?”

“A slight uptick—”

“Penguins leaving the Antarctic, we saw a lot of that. Look up any other weird flocking, dog or cat attacks, maulings at zoos, anything.”

Erika’s research was limited by what the media considered newsworthy, but within an hour Flora had virtual flags all across her map, with a line drawn from each to the mansion. A nexus of whale beachings in Hudson Bay. A dolphin attack , of all things, on a motorboat near Sea Gate. A man who lost his flock of homing pigeons when they dove, apparently in a mass suicide, into the ocean off of Breezy Point. An increase in jaguar attacks in Amazonas and parrots falling from the sky, already dead with no known cause, in Rondônia, Brazil. A sea lion reserve in Necochea, Argentina, that lost a third of its sea lions when they attacked each other.

Flora sat back in her chair. The lines drawn to her mansion were as obvious as the spokes of a fan, but she leaned forward and drew in the most important line anyway—the edge of the fan, the vector connecting all of the incidents, including the arch and the points where Mikel found the Serpent, where the iceberg broke, and where Andreas died.

Of course the line looked curved on the globe, but Flora triple- and quadruple-checked. It was a path as straight as a sword leading from the research station Halley VI to the stone’s current resting place.

However, there was one giant anomaly. The albatrosses in Montevideo missed the vector by nearly two hundred miles.

She picked up her phone and dialed Mikel’s number.

Bored out of his head at a pub in Stanley on the larger of the Falkland Islands, Mikel picked up on the first ring. His mind was foggy, directionless, wheels spinning in the mud. Two whiskeys had failed to sharpen it.

“I was just about to call,” he said. “You’ll need to arrange this one.”

“Mikel—”

“Look, there are no ships going anywhere near the ice shelf and the only flight is the British Antarctic Survey. I’ve tried with them but they’re suspicious as soon as I start talking.”

“Suspicious of you? What have you been saying?”

“No, it’s got nothing to do with me. They’re petrified of something.”

Flora took a restrained breath. “Mikel, what do you think it might be?”

“If you got me on that flight I’d be able to ask them, wouldn’t I?”

“I will overlook your tone, Mr. Jasso.”

“Sorry, I’m tired—”

“And I will arrange your transport. It seems we’ve more reason than ever to get you to Halley VI.”