Early on in his career—fresh out of training, his sheriff’s star still shiny and new, with his security work for TransAnt still years away—he’d learned to use the tactic on prison guards who hadn’t liked some of his more distasteful methods of keeping the general population under control. The formula had been simple. Shove them, alone, into the cage with a three-hundred-pound lifer jacked up on hooch and looking at solitary for six months. Give them a baton or a can of pepper spray. Faced with taking a beating or dishing one out, the whistleblowers suddenly seemed more open to the idea of using violence to maintain order. Once the potential whistleblowers had become part of the so-called problem, complaints to oversight boards and humanitarian agencies simply evaporated. Balance was restored.
It was the reason he’d counseled Hanratty to allow Ayres and Deb into their little circle. If the time ever came when they had to answer for the extreme measures they’d taken to keep order at Shackleton, the very people who’d opposed them and could report on their actions the most accurately were suddenly culpable. Extend the idea out to include everyone on base—whether they were willing participants or not—and your ass was covered. As much as it could be with the clusterfuck that had become this year’s winter-over.
Unfortunately, that didn’t seem likely to happen. Hanratty had convinced himself that all that was needed to salvage the crew’s tattered confidence and flagging morale was a stern, honest talk. The man thought he was some kind of great orator, capable of leading the masses by the power of his voice.
The station manager lacked authority—with a single summer and a disastrous winter under his belt, he wasn’t veteran enough to impress anyone—but more importantly, he didn’t seem to have even a rudimentary feel for people, and more than once Taylor had sensed a bit of false theatricality, as though Hanratty had learned how to lead people from reading it in a book or during a weekend seminar. The possibility that he was a fake scared Taylor more than anything that had happened, because he’d seen what happened when a dangerous population sensed a poser. They turned on you, became a mob, and then there was no getting their trust—or fear—back.
He felt that same danger now that he’d felt walking the halls in lockup. Jennings was the spark that had lit the fuse to the powder keg. A chunk of the crew had stopped working after her performance in the galley, preferring instead to hole up in their berths or hunker down together in labs or workstations to wait. Wait for what, nobody knew, but backing into a corner was an instinctive reaction to danger. The next step was to lash out.
At least he’d convinced most of the operations people to keep going. The cooks and fuelies and other maintenance specialists understood that their collective survival depended on keeping the base running. The scientists, oblivious to the need to keep the infrastructure going, seemed to be the ones who wanted to either pull the blankets up over their heads or come out swinging.
He closed his eyes briefly. It wasn’t anything they couldn’t handle. As long as they could keep the general population calm or at least subdued, they could start splitting individuals off for questioning until they found the goddamned Observer and stopped the next harebrained stress test.
A shout from the outer admin office jerked Taylor’s head up a second time. Several voices, men’s voices, swelled, each trying to be heard over the others. You didn’t have to hear the words to know the emotion: they were angry. He shot to his feet and headed for the door, the report forgotten. He had a feeling that the spark had reached the keg.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
As it probably had for every prisoner in history, the sound of the key turning in the lock woke Cass, pulling her up like a fish from an ocean of sleep.
With her heart thudding like a trip hammer, she rolled to a sitting position, ready to defend herself, attack, or run, not knowing which option was best. The door opened a crack, then widened by cautious inches until Biddi stuck her head into the room like a turtle poking its head out of its shell. “Anyone home?”
“Oh, my Jesus Christ.” Cass almost cried at seeing the familiar moon face. “How glad am I to see you?”
“Loads and loads, I hope,” her friend said, coming into the room and shutting the door behind her quietly. She gave Cass a hug, holding her at arm’s length and looking her over. “You’re keeping well.”
“Jokes? At a time like this?”
Biddi motioned for them to sit on the edge of the bed. “Is there a better time? The bloody world—by which I mean our little microcosm of said here at the South Pole—has gone barking mad. If you can’t laugh now, there’s no hope for you. And, look, they even installed you in the VIP suite. The last person to grace this room was a senator.”
“It’s because it has its own bathroom,” Cass said bitterly. “Not because they want to treat me well.”
“Oh, well. At least it has a queen-sized bed, love.”
Cass sighed. Lovable, unflappable Biddi. But what she needed was information, not a cheerleader. “So, nothing’s changed? They’re not letting me out?”
A look of sympathy said it all. Cass’s heart sank, but it had been a forlorn hope to begin with. Hanratty wouldn’t have sent Biddi to spring her if they’d changed their mind—he would’ve done it himself or sent Taylor or Deb to do it—but she’d had a wild hope that that’s why her friend had showed up.