Athabasca. Alistair MacLean
plant.”
“If we have a car here at ten o’clock –”
“How about seven o’clock? Yes, seven will be fine.” Dermott and Mackenzie watched the two men go, looked at each other, emptied their glasses, signalled the barman, then looked out through the windows of the Peter Pond Hotel, named after the first white man ever to see the Tar Sands.
Pond went down the Athabasca River by canoe almost exactly two hundred years before. He did not take too much interest in the sands, it appears, but ten years later the much more famous explorer Alexander MacKenzie was intrigued by the sticky substance oozing from outcrops high above the river, and wrote: “The bitumen is in a fluid state, and when mixed with gum, or the resinous substance collected from the spruce fir, serves to gum the Indians’ canoes. In its heated state it emits a smell like that of sea-coal.”
Oddly, the significance of the words “sea-coal” wasn’t appreciated for more than a hundred years; nobody realised that the two 18th-century explorers had stumbled across one of the world’s largest reservoirs of fossil fuels. But had they not so stumbled, there would have been no Peter Pond Hotel where it is today nor, indeed, the township beyond its windows.
Even in the mid-nineteen-sixties Fort McMurray was little more than a rough, primitive frontier outpost, with a population of only thirteen hundred and streets covered with dust, mud or slush according to season. By now, though still a frontier town, it had become a frontier town with a difference. Treasuring its past, but with an eye to the future, it was the epitome of a boom-town and, in terms of burgeoning population, the fastest-expanding township in Canada. Where there were thirteen hundred citizens fourteen years earlier, there were thirteen thousand. Schools, hotels, banks, hospitals, churches, super-markets and, above all, hundreds of new houses were or were being built. And, wonder of wonders, the streets were paved. This seeming miracle stems from one factor and one factor only: Fort McMurray sits squarely in the heart of the Athabasca Tar Sands, the biggest such known deposits in the world.
It had been snowing heavily earlier in the evening and had still not completely stopped. Everything – houses, streets, car-tops, trees – was under a smoothly unbroken cover of white. Hundreds of lights shone hospitably through the gently falling flakes. The scene would have gladdened the eye and heart of a Christmas postcard artist. Some such thought had occurred to Mackenzie.
“Santa Claus should be here tonight.”
“Indeed.” Dermott sounded morose. “Especially if he brought along some of that peace on earth and goodwill to all men. What did you make of that telephone message to Sanmobil?”
“Same thing you did. Practically identical to the letter Finlayson received up in Prudhoe Bay. Obviously the work of the same man or group of men.”
“And what do you make of the fact that Alaskan oil people got a threatening message from Alberta, while the Albertan oil interests received the same threat from Alaska?”
“Nothing – except that both threats had the same origin. That call from Anchorage. For a certainty, from a public call-box. Untraceable.”
“Probably. Not certainly. I don’t know if you can dial direct from Anchorage to here. I don’t think so, but we can find out. If not, the telephone operator will have a record. There’s a chance that we might locate the phone.”
Mackenzie briefly surveyed Fort McMurray through the base of his glass and said: “That’ll be a big help.”
“It might be a small help. Two ways. That call came in at ten this morning. That’s 6 a.m. Anchorage time. Who except a nut – or some night-shift worker – is going to be out in the black and freezing streets of Anchorage at that hour? That sort of odd behaviour, I suggest, isn’t likely to go unnoticed.”
“If there’s anyone there to notice.”
“State Troopers in a patrol car. Taxi driver. Snow-plough driver. Mailman on the way to work. You’d be surprised the number of people who go about their lawful occasions in the dark watches of the night.”
“I would not be surprised.” Mackenzie spoke with some feeling. “We’ve done it often enough in this damned job of ours. Two ways, you said. What’s the second way?”
“If we locate this pay-phone, we have the police who have the post office remove the coin box and give it to their fingerprint boys. The chances are good that the person who made the call to Fort McMurray used more high-denomination coins than anyone else who went into the pay-box that day – or night. Get two or three large coins with the same prints, and that’s our man.”
“Objection. Coins are handled by many people. You’ll get prints, all right, a plethora, shall we say, of fingerprints.”
“Objection overruled. It’s established that on a metal surface the overlay, the last person to touch such a surface, leaves the dominant print. By the same token, we’d print the area round the dial. People don’t dial in fur mittens. Then we’d check with criminal records. The prints may be on file. If they are, we’ll get the man and ask him all sorts of interesting questions.”
“You do have a devious mind, George. Low cunning, but albeit a mind. First catch your man, though.”
“If we get a description or prints with history, it shouldn’t be too difficult. If he’s gone to ground, it would be different. But there’s no reason why he should think he has to take cover. Might be awkward for him anyway: may well be a pillar of the Anchorage business and social communities.”
“I’ll bet the other Anchorage pillars would love to hear you say that. They’d have the same opinion of you as our friend, John Finlayson, has now. What are we going to do about Finlayson, anyway? Rapprochement doesn’t seem advisable: it’s essential. With the tie-up so obvious –”
“Let him stew in his own juice for a while. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. But just let him worry a while in Prudhoe Bay until we’re ready. He’s a good man, intelligent, honest. He reacted precisely the way you or I would have if a couple of interlopers had tried to take over. The longer we stay away, the more certainly we’re guaranteed his co-operation when we get back. Jim Brady may have been the bearer of bad news, but that call of his couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. Gave us the perfect excuse to make off. Speaking of Jim –”
“I’ve been thinking that I don’t much like any of this. Presentiments. My Scottish forebears, one presumes. You know that Prudhoe Bay and this place here contain well over half the oil reserves of North America. It’s an awful lot of oil. A man wouldn’t want anything to happen to them.”
“You haven’t worried about such things before. An investigator is supposed to be cold, clinical, detached.”
“That’s about other people’s oil. This is our oil. Massive responsibilities. Awesome decisions at the highest levels.”
“We were talking of Jim Brady.”
“I still am.”
“You think we should have him up here?”
“I do.”
“So do I. Must be why I raised the subject. Let’s go call him.”
Jim Brady, that passionate believer in leanness, keenness, fitness and athleticism for his field operatives, stood five feet eight in his elevator shoes and turned the scales at around 240 lbs. Never a believer in travelling light, he brought with him on the flight from Houston not only his attractive, blonde wife Jean, but also his positively stunning daughter Stella, another natural blonde, who acted as his secretary on these field trips. He left Jean behind at the hotel in Fort McMurray, but kept Stella with him in the minibus that Sanmobil had sent to ferry him out to the plant.
The first impression he made on the hard men of Athabasca was less than favourable.