Harley turned back to the room; the only thing worth stealing in here might be the laptops, or maybe the microscopes, and they’d be a bitch to carry back. At the far end of the tent, there were ripped plastic curtains that extended from the floor to the ceiling. It looked like some kind of inner sanctum, but one that had been busted into. That alone was good enough for Harley.
He walked down the center of the room, noting that there was blood here, too, and even more on the strips of plastic. Even Eddie was hanging back.
Harley poked his head into what was left of this chamber, and nearly threw up on the spot.
A dismembered corpse was lying on a stainless-steel table, and there were bowls and basins of blood and organs on surgical carts and counters.
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” Eddie said, though he was so revved up he walked in mesmerized. Standing over the body and flipping back the flap of scalp concealing its face, he said, “I wonder who he was.”
One of the old Russians, Harley thought, though why they’d do something like this to him now …
“Looks like a wolf got at him, too.”
“What are you talking about?” Harley said, afraid to look too closely. How was Eddie managing it?
“Paw prints,” Eddie said, and now Harley glanced over long enough to see that Eddie was actually right about something. There were bloody paw prints—and pretty fresh-looking ones at that—on the tabletop.
Harley spun his gaze around the tiny chamber, as if a wolf might still be lurking somewhere, but all that caught his attention this time was a fridge with a wheel on it like you’d see on a bank vault.
But given everything else in the room, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to open it.
“What’s in there?” Eddie said excitedly.
Harley had come this far; there was no point in stopping now. He turned the wheel, there was a hissing sound as the seal was broken, and a bright white light came on inside.
Again, there was an array of flasks and vials, many of them marked with stickers and labels, but there was also the unmistakable sparkle of white diamonds—three of them, embedded in an old brass icon of the Virgin Mary. Eddie saw it, too, and made a grab for it, knocking over half of the bottles and tubes in the fridge, but Harley wedged it into his own breast pocket and said, “We’ll fence it in Nome.”
“Damn straight we will,” Eddie said, “and this, too.”
It was an old scrap of paper, rolled up like a scroll, and Eddie snatched it off the shelf and scrabbled it open, the page crackling and breaking in several spots.
It was a few lines long, black ink that had faded to gray, and written in Russian.
“What’d you think it was going to be?” Harley sneered. “A treasure map?”
“Maybe it is, for all you know,” Eddie said, stuffing it into the pocket of his parka. Then, to Harley’s dismay, he grabbed some of the test tubes and vials and stashed those in his pocket, too.
“That stuff’s not worth shit,” Harley said. “What are you doing?”
“It might be worth something to somebody,” he replied, “and they can pay me to get it back.” When he realized his own pocket was full, he crammed a couple more into Harley’s pockets, too. “And they can pay you, too!” Harley batted him away again—more and more, he wished he’d checked everyone’s backpacks for drugs and booze before they’d left Port Orlov—and closed the freezer door. For good measure, he gave the wheel a spin.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Harley said, and after Eddie had cast one more look at the mutilated corpse—what was he thinking of stealing now, Harley thought, a kidney?—they stepped out into the lab.
“The laptops?” Eddie said, but Harley shook his head. They were government-issue, and probably traceable; besides, he just wanted to get the hell out of this damn slaughterhouse. They had slunk no more than ten or twenty yards away when he saw a burly black guy, in an Army coat, running toward the lab tent with one of the Coast Guardsmen right behind him. They were carrying rifles and they were loaded for bear … or wolf.
Ducking behind the generator shed, Harley threaded his way back through the stockade wall. But even with the aid of the night-vision binoculars, it would be nearly impossible to find his way through the woods at night; the surest route would be to stick to the ridgeline and simply follow it around until he returned to the cove where, if he was lucky, the Kodiak might by some miracle be afloat.