"Wouldn't the project screech to a halt if you were dead?"
"Not anymore," Barrett said with a sad smile. "The way I've got this thing set up, Tris can direct the ships and unleash their power with a minimum of personnel and equipment."
"Who else has an interest in seeing this scheme succeed?"
"There's only one other person I know who's got the inside track. Jordan Gant. He runs Global Interests Network. GIN for short. It's a foundation out of Washington that lobbies for many of the same causes as Lucifer. Abuse of corporate power. Tariff policies that hurt the environment. Arms buildups in developing countries. Tris says Gant's foundation is like Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Party. They can keep their hands clean, more or less, while the IRA is the secret organization that uses the muscle."
"Then a threat to Tris's project would be a threat to Gant's goals as well."
"That's a logical conclusion."
"What's Gant's background?"
"He's an apostate from the corporate world. He was working for some of the same groups we're fighting until he saw the light. He's pretty much a front man. Smooth talker. Lots of oily charm. I can't picture him behind a murder plot, but you never know."
"It's a trail worth following. You say Margrave gave you some material, hoping it would change you mind."
"He said that Kovacs had come up with a way to stop a polar reversal even after it had been started. I said I wouldn't pull out if he could come up with a fail-safe plan."
"Where would he begin to find something like that?"
"There's evidence that Kovacs survived after the war, and that he moved to the U.S., where he remarried. I think his granddaughter knows about the antidote to a polar shift. Her name is Karla Janos."
"Does Gant know this?"
"He would if we're right about Doyle."
Austin pondered the implication of the answer. "Ms. Janos could have a bull's-eye on her back. She should know that she may be a target. Do you know where she lives?"
"In Alaska. She's doing some work at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. But Tris said she's on an expedition to Siberia. She may be cold, but she should be safe there."
"From what you've told me, Margrave and Gant have a long reach."
"You're right. What should we do?"
"We've got to warn her. The safest course for you is to stay 'dead.'
Do you have a place to stay? Someplace Margrave or Gant don't know about?"
"I've got a sleeping bag on my Harley and a pocket full of cash, so I don't have to use credit cards that can be traced. My cell phone calls are laundered through half a dozen remote stations, so they're practically impossible to trace." He pulled the little black box out of his pocket. "I put this together for fun. I can route phone calls to the moon if I want to."
"I'd suggest that you stay on the move. Call me this time tomorrow and we'll have a plan in place by then."
They shook hands and went back to their boats. Austin waved good-bye and pulled off at his house, while Barrett rowed his scull back to the boat rental place half a mile farther along the river. Austin put his boat up in its rack. In the few seconds it took to climb the stairs to the living room, he had put together a plan.
21
Ten thousand years after the last woolly mammoth shook the earth beneath its feet, its bones and tusks are providing the fuel for a booming international trade. The center of that trade is the city of Yakutsk in East Siberia, about six hours by plane from Moscow.
It is an old city, founded in the 1600s by a band of Cossacks, and was long considered the last outpost of civilization for explorers. It gained later fame, or notoriety, as one of the islands in the Gulag system, where enemies of the Soviet state found ready employment as slave laborers in the gold and diamond mines. Since the nineteenth century, it has been the world capital for the woolly mammoth ivory trade.
The Ivory Cooperative is one of the prime distributors in the ivory trade. The cooperative is housed in a dark and dusty warehouse, surrounded by crumbling apartment buildings that go back to the time of Khrushchev. Behind the nondescript, concrete walls and steel door are thousands of pounds of mammoth ivory worth millions of dollars, waiting to be shipped out to China and Burma, where they will be carved into trinkets for the thriving Asian tourist market. The white treasure is contained in crates that are stacked on shelves running from one end of the warehouse to the other.
Three men were standing in one of the aisles. They were Vladimir Bulgarin, the owner of the ivory business, and two helpers, who were holding each end of a huge mammoth tusk.
"This is beautiful," Bulgarin was saying. "What's its weight?"
"One hundred kilos," one of his helpers said with a grunt. "Very heavy."