Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [15]
‘You see, Bernie had connections with the journals, knew some editors. He could get an article out within a month. Renshaw, as an unknown Ph.D. student, would almost certainly take longer. He thought Bernie was trying to steal his pot of gold. And then when Renshaw discovered metal down in the cavern and he saw that Bernie was going to include that in his article too, Renshaw flipped.’
‘And he killed him?’
‘He killed him. Last Friday night. Renshaw just went to Bernie’s room and started yelling at him. We all heard it. Renshaw was angry and upset, but we’d heard it all before so we didn’t think much of it. But, this time, he killed him.’
‘How?’ Schofield continued to stare at the locked door.
‘He –’ Sarah hesitated. ‘He jabbed Bernie in the neck with a hypodermic needle and injected the contents.’
‘What was in the syringe?’
‘Industrial-strength drain-cleaning fluid.’
‘Charming,’ Schofield said. He nodded at the door. ‘He’s in here?’
Sarah said, ‘He locked himself in after it happened. Took a week’s worth of food in with him and said that if any of us tried to go in there after him he’d kill us, too. It was terrifying. He was crazy. So one night – the night before we sent the divers down to investigate the cave – the rest of us got together and bolted the door shut from the outside. Ben Austin fixed some runners to the wall on either side of the door while the rest of us slid the beam into place. Then Austin used a rivet gun to seal the door shut.’
Schofield said, ‘Is he still alive?’
‘Yes. You can’t hear him now, which means he’s probably asleep. But when he’s awake, believe me, you’ll know it.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Schofield examined the edges of the door, saw the rivets holding it to the frame. ‘Your friend did a good job with the door.’ Schofield turned around. ‘If he’s locked inside. That’s good enough for me, if you’re sure there’s no other way out of that room.’
‘This is the only entrance.’
‘Yeah, but is there any other way out the room. Could he dig his way out, say, through the walls, or the ceiling?’
‘The ceilings and the floors are steel-lined, so he can’t dig through them. And his room’s at the end of the corridor, so there aren’t any rooms on either side of it – the walls are solid ice,’ Sarah Hensleigh gave Schofield a crooked smile. ‘I don’t think there’s any way out of there.’
‘Then we leave him in there,’ Schofield said, as he started walking back down the ice tunnel. ‘We’ve got other things to worry about. The first of which is finding out what happened to your divers down in that cave.’
The sun shone brightly over Washington, D.C. The Capitol practically glowed white against the magnificent blue sky.
In a lavish, red-carpeted corner of the Capitol Building, a meeting broke for recess. Folders were closed. Chairs were pushed back. Some of the delegates took off their reading glasses and rubbed their eyes. As soon as the recess was called, small clusters of aides immediately rushed forward to their bosses’ sides with cellular phones, folders and faxes.
‘What are they up to?’ the US Permanent Representative, George Holmes, said to his aide, as he watched the entire French delegation – all twelve of them – leave the negotiating room. ‘That’s the fourth time they’ve called a recess today.’
Holmes watched France’s Chef de Mission – a pompous, snobbish man named Pierre Dufresne – leave the room at the head of his group. Holmes shook his head in wonder.
George Holmes was a diplomat, had been all his life. He was fifty-five, short and, though he hated to admit it, a little overweight.
Holmes had a round, moon-like face and a horseshoe of greying hair, and he wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses that made his brown eyes appear larger than they really were.
Holmes stood up and stretched his legs, looked