The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming Page 9

“What are these, then, the last one?”

  “The third, right. From the weekend, a guy from the Netherlands. He’d been coming here twice a year since you and I were kids, so you have to assume he knew what he was doing up there. Someone thought to shoot these on the spot, because by then this was familiar, but with the first two bodies, this . . . cocoon-thing, let’s call it . . . hadn’t lasted long enough to photograph it later. Nobody knew what to make of it.”

  She shuffled through the stack, lingering longer on each successive shot. The first few set the scene, high in the foothills below the craggier reaches of the mountains, with what looked to be a body lying amid rocks and pines, covered with enough snow that she could barely see the orange of the victim’s jacket.

  “The site is a hundred and forty meters off a snowshoe trail,” Claude said. “Going by the length of what they think was his stride, and the depth of the prints, he was running. Uphill. In snowshoes. Have you ever tried that? You really have to be motivated to do that.”

  She paused at a shot of tracks, big oblong holes punched in the snow spaced a few feet apart. “What do you mean, what they think was his stride? They’re not sure if these were his?”

  “They match the snowshoes. But they only pointed in his direction. They didn’t lead to him, exactly. They terminated about eighty meters off the trail. Somehow he made it another sixty uphill without disturbing the snow in between.”

  Eliminate the obvious, Luna. “More snow blew across later and filled in those particular tracks?”

  Claude shook his head. “The locals say no. I take them at their word. They know their snow here.”

  The rest of the photos were close-ups. With more details visible, what she had taken for snow covering the body . . . wasn’t. At least not like any snow she’d ever seen. It hadn’t accumulated, flakes piling onto flakes. Rather, it looked like strands of ice, spun in directional layers as if to weave a frozen shroud. A bearded face was barely visible inside it, gone deathly white after passing a night in the alpine cold.

  “If they know their snow here, does anybody have any idea why it’s done this around him? It’s . . . weirdly beautiful, actually.”

  “Not a clue. And don’t make of an issue of it. It bugs them that they don’t. Then again, it’s potentially a meteorological phenomenon nobody’s ever seen, so that’s got to be exciting to someone.”

  She looked again. No dead, black skin. Severe frostbite usually seemed to take the nose first, and this Dutchman’s, though bloodlessly pale, didn’t appear disfigured. Should they have expected that? She’d have to ask someone at the hospital.

  “They say it’s a peaceful way to go, after a point. Freezing to death.”

  “Well, that’s another thing,” Claude said. “There’s some question as to whether this guy was actually dead when they brought him down off the mountain.”

  She studied the most detailed close-up. Judging by the visible skin’s lividity, the man was a Popsicle. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. It’s possible he didn’t die until he was in the back of the ambulance.”

  “Based on what?”

  “That he seems to have turned over inside his body bag. The rescue team swears they put him in faceup. When they zipped him open again, he was facedown. With his hands up under his chest instead of down around his waist.”

  “His body couldn’t have shifted during handling?”

  “That’s the rational explanation.” Claude winked, as though he might say it but didn’t really believe it.

  Once she was done with the photos, he gathered them together and tucked them away again. The boyish grin hadn’t aged a day. “When we were growing up, did you ever in your wildest dreams see us someplace like this?”

  No. She hadn’t. There was a time when her imagination couldn’t carry her any farther from home than Madison or Milwaukee. There was a time she had seen herself walking into a church as Luna Bearheart and leaving as Luna LeGoff. A time when her greatest worry was what their children might look like—if one-quarter Ojibwe would be little enough to avoid calling attention to itself. Maybe that would spare them the kind of mockery that had made for her childhood’s most miserable days, at the hands of kids who entertained themselves by coming up with a new name for her every week. Half-Squaw. Princess Running Water. Pocahontas.

  But she’d had friends too. As kids, as teenagers, she and Claude had banded together with a few like-minded pals on a mission, confident that Mitford would be safe as long as they were on the job. “The Junior G-Men,” they’d called themselves. They watched out for Russians . . . and by god, one day they’d found them. While out hoofing it on one of his rambles, Claude had spotted a suspicious crew moving into a mansion that had been sitting vacant for enough years that everybody called it the “Witch House.”

  Not everything was as it appeared, though.

  People you’d respected all your young life could turn out to be working against the entire human race. Beyond the veil of everyday life there could turn out to be gods and monsters that wanted through. And despite what you heard almost every day, there were good Russians too, willing to stand against that, even pay with their lives rather than let it happen.

  So back in Mitford, for Luna and for Claude, plenty had changed after all.

  Live through an experience like that, and you came out the other side with two choices. You could will yourself to forget it ever happened and pretend everything was normal again. Nothing but a future of malt shops and movies on the weekend, and high school football, as far as the eye could see.

  Or you could admit that what you’d seen was real, and there was no going back. You could never again believe the fairy tales, the pacifying lies. There were enemies infinitely worse than Russians that wanted the world in their grip, and you couldn’t stand back content to hope it didn’t come to pass in your lifetime. You had to sign up for the fight.

  Which was a great deal easier when you had a name like Claude rather than a name like Luna, as it turned out.

  Forty-two years ago, when he’d assumed command of the bureau, one of the earliest changes J. Edgar Hoover made was making sure its ranks were for men only. The first female special agent in FBI history didn’t quite make two years on the job before she was out—within two months of him taking over. Alaska P. Davidson—four decades lay between them, but still she felt a kinship with the woman.

  Ancestors could be bound by more than blood.

  The medical center was a cluster of buildings near the tip of the triangle where the Inn zigzagged to the north and back, but this fourth casualty wasn’t hospitalized inside any of them. Someone had taken the uncertainties about the Dutchman seriously enough to try adapting to them and give this latest victim a fighting chance. They’d brought him back in the hold of a refrigerated truck, outfitted with a gurney and some monitors, and there he’d remained, most of his shroud of snow intact, while the medical staff had waited for some experimental new gear to be flown over from Zürich.

  Fact: People had been found seemingly frozen, yet still alive. Bringing them out of it was a tricky process, with a risk of shock and excruciating pain, as the blood returned to their extremities.

  Conjecture: Suppose these four victims, by means unknown, had ended up in a state of hypothermia so deep it was indistinguishable from death. And suppose their Dutchman, presumed dead and loaded in the back of an ambulance, had warmed sufficiently to rouse out of it, and move around in the bag before succumbing—undetected, sadly, because who watched a body during transport?

  A grim thought, especially if there was any chance he could have been saved, and the two before him. It was an oversight the locals were unwilling to make again.

  This fourth one had been identified as a man named Herriot, a cross-country skiing enthusiast with the lean and weathered look of an Alpine sportsman—but one who’d run into more mountain than he could handle. The color was all but bleached from his face, and his hair lay plastered against his skull with frozen sweat.<
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  The experimental system they’d brought in started with sleeves that slipped onto Herriot’s arms up to the elbows—something about the hands and the bottom of the forearms being nexus points for heat transfer—and were connected by wires and hollow tubes to a machine the size of a steamer trunk. It had an intravenous component, as well, plus a puffy vest they fitted over his torso and inflated with air pumped from a compressor. It all looked very patchwork and prototypal.

  A few minutes along, one of the medics reported what she thought was a pulse, beyond faint, slower than any living heart was ever supposed to beat. Four times per minute? Impossible.

  Soon, wisps of steam began to rise from him, and however minuscule the movements—a finger, an eyelid, a twitch of his jaw—Herriot began to stir. He’d seemed past saving, yet he was coming back.

  Claude nudged her with his elbow. “Breathe,” he whispered.

  Right. She’d forgotten.

  Herriot’s skin tone began to take on the semblance of life again, a blush of pink blooming on each ivory cheek and the cleft of his chin. The color spread, the spots widening, then merging, as a ripple of excitement went through the medics and technicians gathered around him.

  When his eyes opened, Herriot seemed cognizant, if confused, unable to process where he was, what was happening. His gaze rolled upward, to the roof of the truck, then his limbs began to stir. They held him down so he wouldn’t tear loose of the connections. With a gasp he began to bend backward. The steam intensified and his color continued to deepen, from pink to rose and darker—if he kept going, he’d soon be the color of a brick. That he was in pain became distressingly obvious. As a stream began to flow down his face, it seemed impossible that he could progress from half-frozen to sweating in a matter of minutes, yet he had. There was no ice left on him to melt. He was definitely sweating now.

  With a gasp and a coil of steam gusting from his throat, he got out a word. Burning, someone translated from what Luna thought sounded French. I’m burning up.

  His heels drummed against the gurney, and the tempo of the cardiac monitor spiked as though an unseen hand was cranking a dial. Someone shouted to cool him down again, that they were still going too fast, but with one last cry of anguish it was done. A moment after Herriot slumped back onto the gurney, he flatlined.

  Time of death, 11:14 A.M. It was all over but the paperwork, so they left the truck, stepping back into the light of a day that felt too clean and crisp for what she’d just witnessed.

  “It’s not that I hope there are any more of them that turn up,” Claude said. “But if there are, I wish they could keep one alive long enough to tell us the last thing they remember seeing.”

  They finished the day up on the mountainside, walking in the footsteps of dead men.

  They’d had to go back to their room and suit up with extra layers—while they’d dressed warmly enough for the truck, it wasn’t warm enough for a few hours outdoors, especially once afternoon started tipping toward evening. A pair of snowshoes each, rented from the lodge, and they were good to go.

  Above the city, they crunched along a network of trails that meandered across stretches of open ground and through belts of evergreens whose branches sagged under robes of snow. Claude had a trail map inked up with four Xs and other annotations about the recovered bodies.

  “This isn’t just some weather phenomenon. If that’s all it was, we wouldn’t be here,” she said. “But is it even true there was some sort of Bigfoot sighting up here the night the second victim went missing? Even Brady seemed kind of embarrassed when he was briefing me on that.”

  “That part’s genuine, actually. It’s what got this flagged for us in the first place. There’s something that came through in Lovecraft’s writings called the Mi-go, but he seems to have been muddled about them. In a couple of sources he describes them as these winged, alien crustaceans. Nothing hominid about them at all. But the word itself is a mangled version of a Tibetan word for Yeti, and in another source he equates them with Abominable Snowmen.”

  She had to laugh. “That’s . . . not helpful.”

  “So until there’s a reason to re-evaluate, I think we can ignore it for now. It’s a wild card that doesn’t fit with everything else. There weren’t any other footprints in the snow around the victims.”

  “Because what Bigfoot worth his name isn’t going to leave prints behind?”

  Claude stopped for a slow look along the valley, from west to east, a plume of breath jetting from his mouth. “I’ve been here enough time, you already qualify as fresh eyes. What do you notice?”

  Luna rooted herself while staring out across the sea of roofs below, toward the Nordkette on the far side. Its implacable peaks rose from the valley floor like a monstrous wave, mottled green toward the base and pure white at the top, which threatened to break over the city.

  “The victims were all found on this side, right? Nobody over there?”

  “Right.”

  “Is that significant?”

  “Maybe. But with only four, who can say?”

  “Until we know better, it still suggests . . .” Luna paused, not sure what, exactly. “Preference? Access? Better knowledge of the terrain over here?”

  Claude nodded, liking where this was going. “Anything else?”

  With the nearest trees a couple minutes’ slog away, Luna supposed that if she let her imagination get the better of her, she could feel open and exposed. Vulnerable to the elements, or to something potentially worse.

  “Everything happening on this side might also suggest . . . a clear shot, maybe? The victims being in range?” She went over that again in her head, if only to consider the implications. “Were these guys targeted?”

  “And there’s the $64,000 question.”

  The longer they stood here, the more Claude seemed so much more on top of the situation than she was.

  “They told me there were frozen bodies, odd circumstances surrounding their conditions, and maybe a monster,” she said. “Have I been briefed fully? It doesn’t feel like it.”

  “Fresh eyes, remember.” Claude genuinely seemed to want to soothe a sting she doubted he even understood. “If you’re not already thinking along a certain track, you can see the situation differently. It might help you be more intuitive.”

  “That’s how they put it to you? Intuitive?” It almost sounded plausible. Unless you were the one living the indignity of it. “That’s bullshit, Claude. Brady may have been the one telling you this, but it’s Hoover’s voice he’s talking in.”

  The more she reconsidered it, the less Director Brady had seemed embarrassed than borderline ashamed when he’d descended on Quantico to whisk her out of the HPL Academy and into the field. In an age of change, it was beginning to feel like she was over here to prove a point, the only one J. Edgar Hoover was prepared to accept—that she didn’t belong here in the first place. Neither her, nor any other woman, still.

  The old man wanted her to start behind and have to play catch-up. If she let herself, she could feel sick.

  “What’s this situation really about, Claude?”

  They got moving again, snowshoes crunching through the crust.

  “It started with the usual CID analysts sifting through the usual intel chatter,” he said. “A couple months ago, from the Olde Fellowes back channels we’ve tapped into, they picked up a cluster of references to Innsbruck. No context to make sense out of it, but there it was, all of a sudden on the radar. Then the Yeti sighting, which may or may not have been valid, but the bodies have been real enough, and a puzzle of their own. Finally it came down the chain of command, from someone way above our pay grades, that while you and I should be sitting down to Christmas goose in a few weeks, there’s going to be a high-level NATO summit here in Innsbruck, that’s supposed to be under the radar. Key players only.”

  “That doesn’t sound ominous at all,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “You saw earlier this year that China set off their third
test nuke?”

  “I heard.”

  “Over the past ten years, China and the Soviets have fallen out with each other. Better for us, obviously. Better for everybody. The rift started under Khrushchev. But as of a couple years ago, with Khrushchev out and Brezhnev in, within two days of China joining the nuclear club, there’s been a faction in the Kremlin pushing to get cozy with China again. It’s gaining strength. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, that kind of thing.”

  A terrifying thought. Nobody in their right mind would want to see such an alliance restored. Three nuclear powers that didn’t trust each other was a white-knuckle state of affairs for the world; but there was a deranged stability to it, a tripod of mistrust. Two against one, though? Things could get truly scary then.

  “That’s all I know, really, about this summit,” Claude said. “It’s an emergency meeting on how to sabotage friendly Sino-Soviet relations and maintain the status quo. No idea too outlandish, probably.”

  She started to see the big picture. “Except the Olde Fellowes thrive on instability, so it’s in their best interests if this fails. Are they sending somebody in to . . .”

  No, wait—there were bodies already, weeks ahead of the summit.

  “Where security for something like this is concerned, Innsbruck is pretty tight,” Claude said. “It’s manageable. There are a limited number of ways in, and they’re easy to keep an eye on. That’s why it was chosen. But it doesn’t matter how strong your locks are if the killer’s already inside with you. It’s looking like the Olde Fellowes may have allied themselves with somebody who was already here. Or, for all we know, they could’ve been funding him for years, and this is something that fell into their lap and they decided it was too good not to take advantage of.”

  “Funding who?”

  “His name is Dr. Gerhardt Portner. He’s one of the Nazis who got away. During the war, he was in charge of one of those secret projects the German high command was so in love with. It seems to have been an offshoot of their rocketry program. . . . an energy weapon they were trying to develop, using liquid nitrogen to super-cool pulses and streams of plasma.” He held his gloved hand several inches in front of his face and blew a gust of frosty breath at it. “Call it what it was, though: a freeze-ray.”