“I understand.”
“Do you?” It was the first time real emotion cut through the icy reserve she had maintained so far. “You’re the best we had, Frank, and I went out on a limb for you. And now you’ve cut off the damn limb, too.”
When she hung up, he stood there in the communications tent for a few seconds, gathering his thoughts, watching as his entire career went up in smoke, until Sergeant Groves, covered with snow, came through the flaps. Slater quickly slipped his face mask back on, and held up a hand to keep Groves at a distance.
“The lab tent’s clear?” Slater said. “No sign of the wolf?”
“Long gone,” Groves replied, fitting his own mask back over his mouth and nose. “I left Rudy on watch. But there is something you’ve got to see.”
“Is it about Eva? Is she okay?”
“No change, as far as I know.”
“Nika?” He had confined her to her tent until further notice.
“No, it’s none of that,” Groves said. He beckoned Slater to follow him out of the tent.
Slater, who’d had no more than a couple of hours’ sleep, pulled his coat and gloves on over his fresh hazmat suit and followed Groves out into the storm. There was only a feeble light in the sky, and to keep the wind from blowing him off his feet he had to cling to the ropes lining the pathway. Groves plodded across the colony grounds to the church, but detoured at the front steps to go around the side. There, he stopped beside a patch where the snow, much disturbed, had a raspberry tinge. It didn’t take long for Slater to make out the mangled remains of a body and the shreds of a blue work uniform … or to recognize them as belonging to that guy named Russell, whom he’d first seen at the bar, then at the memorial service at the Lutheran church. He was part of Harley Vane’s pack.
“How long do you think he’s been here?”
Groves shrugged. “Can’t be that long. We’d have seen it on the regular patrols.”
Slater wondered if he’d been alone on the island, or if he’d brought Harley. Or the third musketeer, the one named Eddie something. Were the others, in fact, possibly still around?
And if they were, what were they doing here? Had they been responsible for that hole in the cemetery? Why on earth would they have been trying to dig up graves, much less now, with his own contingent there?
“Looks like the wolves got him,” Groves said.
“Among other things,” Slater replied, solemnly. He wasn’t sure what these guys were capable of, but Nika would have a much better idea. For now, it was just another wild card to add to the rapidly accumulating stack. In the snow, he saw a soggy old book, with a torn binding, and picked it up. It looked like a ledger, in Russian.
“Dry this out, then let Kozak take a crack at it.”
“Will do. And the body?”
“Bag it, under hazard wraps, and we’ll send it back to Port Orlov when the chopper gets here.”
“When’s that?”
Slater wished he knew. Looking at the sky, he saw nothing but roiling gray clouds, giving way to banks of blacker thunderheads moving in across the strait. Whenever the helicopter arrived, it would be a bad time.
“And don’t mention it to anyone else yet,” Slater said. Groves nodded. On missions like these, they both knew, information was given out only on a need-to-know basis.
Going into the church, he was surprised not to see Kozak sitting on the stool outside the quarantine tent that had been set up around Lantos; he’d been assigned to guard the premises and listen for any sign that Lantos had become conscious again. The Demerol drip should have kept her quiet and sedated, but you never knew. Slater looked toward the far end of the church, where he could see a flashlight beam moving back and forth across the great heap of broken pews and tangled ironwork.
“You’ve abandoned your post,” he said, as he approached the professor. “In wartime, you could be shot for that.”
Kozak was supposed to be wearing a gauze face mask, too, part of the costume Slater required for quarantine duty, but he’d let his dangle down around his neck. Slater gestured for him to raise it again, but before he did, Kozak declared, “Do you know what this is?”
“Looks like a pile of junk to me.”
“Look behind the junk,” Kozak said, finally lifting the mask back into place over his neatly trimmed silver beard. “The junk has been put here to hide the screen that shielded the altar.”
“There’s an altar back there?”