He thought through the scenario. One of the miners woke in a cabin without windows and was feeling a little queasy. The seas weren’t bad, but some men have no stomach for any kind of ocean roll. He dresses and comes up to the bridge. There’s no place to sit except the captain’s chair, and he knows enough not to use it. There’s a stool in the radio room. The porthole is small and requires a wrench to open, but he can see the horizon and the faint sun clinging to it through some clouds. An hour later, he’s feeling better, and so he heads back to his cabin, passing Bell’s to reach his own and awakening Bell by merely walking past.
It all made sense, and Bell had no reason to suspect otherwise, and yet he found himself opening drawers in the desk under the radio set, until he located a toolkit rolled up in a piece of cloth. He unfurled the bundle of equipment and found an appropriate screwdriver. The wireless transceiver wasn’t particularly powerful, but an antenna only needed to be close or exceptionally large to receive a signal. There was no reason for him to investigate this any further—nothing, that is, except a lifetime of trusting hunches that oftentimes never made sense at first.
There were a dozen screws holding the outer cover to an inner frame surrounding the radio’s internal parts. Bell carefully lifted the shell and placed it on the floor. He touched the exposed crystal. Heat dissipates from the outside inward. The radio’s case was cool, and so was the framework protecting the device’s innards, but at the very heart of the crystal, which vibrated at frequencies powerful enough to traverse the ether, a tiny amount of warmth remained.
The other scenario that Bell had considered when Arn had told him a miner had sat in the radio shack for an hour was far less plausible but no less true. He’d come in here to transmit a message—coded, no doubt, to be short and to the point—and he’d waited for the set to cool down on the off chance Arn or another crewman came in to check. The traitor had waited until the outer case was as cold as the desk and the shelves and the metal walls themselves and then slunk to his cabin, his dark deed done.
The fact he was trying to sneak back to his bunk and was not walking normally like someone returning from the head is what had penetrated Bell’s sleep and woke him with a start.
Bell narrowed his choices to the six miners bunked near his own cabin. Made sense that it wasn’t Brewster or Vernon Hall, who Brewster had been friends with for years according to reports he’d heard back in Central City. Who the message had been sent to was also pretty easy to deduce. There was only one other group of people interested in the byzanium.
* * *
—
As he set the last screw in place and twisted it home, he considered the will it took to work so closely with these men, day in and day out, laboring under truly hellish conditions, sharing untold deprivation and hardship, and knowing all along you were going to sell them out. For as insane as this job had driven Joshua Hayes Brewster, the miner who was going to betray them all had been a psychopath long before he ever set foot on Novaya Zemlya.
Bell said good night to Arn and headed to the forward part of the ship, where Brewster was quartered in a cabin reserved for tw
o harpooners who’d been lucky enough to return to Iceland when the Hvalur was impounded. He didn’t knock and he turned on the light as soon as he entered. Brewster was on his back under a blanket, only his face showing, and for a moment Bell thought he was dead. He was deathly pale, and it looked like he wasn’t breathing at all, but then his eyes reacted to the light filtering through his lids and they fluttered open, confused and teary.
“What’s going on? Where am I?” He spotted Bell standing at the cabin door. “Who are you?”
“It’s me, Brewster, Isaac Bell. You’re aboard a whaling ship. We picked you up yesterday from the island.”
“Isaac who?”
“Colonel Patmore sent me. You and I met in Paris just before the French shipped you and your men to the Arctic to mine the byzanium for them.”
Brewster struggled up into a sitting position and began a coughing fit that only ended when he spit a glob of blood into a trash can. “I’m sorry. My mind wanders now. I have a hard time concentrating.”
Bell asked, “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“We’d closed up the mine. Yeah. That’s it. We’d done it and we closed it up and headed for the cove to wait for . . . you. That’s right. You promised to get us off that rock on April first.”
“I kept my word,” Bell told him. “Do you remember now? We came aboard, and I took you down to the mess. You ate some chowder, and we talked about how the food was poisoning you.”
“Right,” Brewster said absently, scratching at what little remained of his beard. “The food.”
“What happened to Jake Hobart, Joshua? How did he die?”
“I told ya, didn’t I?” Brewster said, suddenly angry now. And suspicious. “I had to have. You need to understand, Bell. You have to know what could happen.”
He could sense that Brewster was on the verge of a full mental collapse. He needed to calm him down or he’d have a stroke or his heart would simply stop. “Easy, Joshua. You told me already,” Bell lied smoothly. “It’s okay. I just want you to tell me again. All right?”
“What? Yes. Okay. Um.” He coughed again, and foamy blood appeared at the corner of his mouth. “I’ve, ah, kept the secret so long I guess it’s gotten to me.”
“You told me he got lost in a storm and died of exposure. Is that what happened?”
“No. That’s what we were supposed to believe, and I didn’t let on that I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Jake was murdered, Mr. Bell. Not sure which one of ’em done it, but someone rammed a steel rod into his ear and killed him dead.”
24
Bell was in motion even as Brewster’s words still hung in the cabin’s cold air. The passenger he first considered to be merely a traitor to his fellow miners he now saw as a murderous fiend willing to kill to protect his secret and escape with whatever reward the Société des Mines had promised him. For three months he’d toiled side by side with Jake Hobart and then had rammed a shiv in his ear and ended the man’s life on the most inhospitable spot on earth so that his body would forever remain frozen in time and place and go unmourned.