One look at the frost-speckled rocks lining the runway, and Casey started missing the desert. Beyond the rocks, the bay: gray as the streaky clouds, frothy as this smarting wind. His transfer had been stamped ‘permanent’.
He hefted his duffel, containing everything material he owned in this world, and completed the short walk from the airplane to the bus taking the passengers to the terminal.
Two of his TarSys colleagues met him when he cleared customs, his US passport enough to get a wave-through. Technically still Danish territory, the Nuuk airport at least had been rechristened ‘McKinley International’.
“Welcome to Greenland,” said the man, local whatever they called themselves – not quite white but sure whiter than the Indians and Arabs Casey had been around in Abu Dhabi – with a hunter’s face, enormous cheeks that scrunched his eyes into wary sockets.
The woman got his attention. Physically tiny but emanating presence because of those eyes as somber and unsettled as the waters outside. They were further enhanced against her striking alabaster skin, so pale her veins were visible as faint blue shadows.
“I’m Jørgensen, this is Rask,” she said, her Danish accent as pert as her nose. “If you’re ready, we’ll take you to the site now. There’s a body, so if you’re feeling jetlagged, all we can give you is coffee.”
“A body?”
“We’ll talk in the car.”
Rask drove the Mitsubishi Outlander, a silver compact SUV, and Jørgensen took shotgun, leaving Casey in back with his duffel. Nuuk was a sprawl of houses with peaked roofs, their red and yellow-painted sidings not fooling the pervasive gunmetal gloom. Beyond these hovered stubby concrete apartment blocks, dark and still. The most natural color came from the rust-colored weeds and lichen patterning the omnipresent rocks beyond the tarmac.
“This body,” Casey said, “it’s on one of our sites?”
“Station Two,” Jørgensen said.
He’d reviewed the basics. TarSys management was on the outskirts of Nuuk, a fifteen-minute drive to whatever downtown had to offer. Station Two was a short chopper ride north, also near the coast. Station Three was deeper inland, still under construction.
“Local police?”
The two up front exchanged a look.
Rask, turning onto a brand-new road, weaving among steamrollers laying down fresh tarmac, said, “We thought that’d be your job.”
His welcome party was treating him with a courtesy as cold as the fjord.
“And what’s your job?” Casey asked.
“Driver,” Rask said. “Delivery guy. Today I’m delivering you.”
“Corporate communications,” Jørgensen said.
He knew better than to ask what a Dane was doing repping one of the new US corporates. The company had relied on Emiratis to do the same thing in Abu Dhabi. But the United Arab Emirates hadn’t seen any of its territory crowbarred into becoming an American colony.
Instead, Casey said, “I thought there’d be snow.” The low mountains were craggy black molars, but only a few were freckled with ice.
“Used to be, year round,” Rask said. Casey sensed the man’s care, keeping his tone neutral.
TarSys Main Station was cordoned behind two rings of chainlink fence topped with bouquets of barbed wire. Guards in the charcoal corporate uniform scrutinized the car and Casey’s phone QR pass as well as his passport. He saw new, blocky buildings and a basketball court beneath poles flying American and TarSys flags. Beyond this waited a Eurocopter SA-350, rotors already spinning.
Jørgensen led him to the chopper; Rask steered the Mitsubishi back towards town.
The flight took about thirty minutes, bobbing over toothy black mountains, skirting gray fjords streaked by the white tips of formidable waves. They flew over a cluster of sea lions while fishing trawlers dotted the horizon like empty promises of civilization. He remembered feeling the same way when he first got a look at Abu Dhabi, not the fancy towers and museums, but the desert, its all-encompassing flat, hard scrub and sand surrounding the TarSys compound, no dramatic dunes but just lifeless brown terrain that melted into the white sky somewhere on that distant horizon. That had been baking hot, this was uncomfortably cold, but both places were wide-open prisons.
Station Two was bigger than he expected. The chopper approached a chainlink-ringed compound of three buildings—housing, commissary, administration—forming a rough circle around a flagpole with the American and TarSys banners. Over the hill rose an unnatural cloud of white.
From above he got a good look at the station’s true nature. The buildings were atop a butte, surrounded by black hills, but behind them, away from the sea, lay a basin of several square miles. It was completely covered by a glittering patchwork of panels, pipes and many rows of windowless warehouses. In the center arose the unmistakable cooling tower of a nuclear power plant, white steam gushing from its mouth. After they set down by the main buildings, the cooling tower’s effusion lingered over the station, whiter than the clouds.
“That’s Nick Langdon, the director,” Jørgensen told him, and he saw the man in a blue suit, jacket bulging over a nylon vest, waiting in front of the admin building.
TarSys security guys with M&P15 assault rifles flanked the director. Casey had read that even with a license, those were illegal here, but things in Greenland were changing fast; this land had been nuke-free too. Station Two was remote enough, and valuable enough, for the company to ignore local laws.
“Mark Casey?” the suit asked, extending a hand. He had a CEO’s jaw and matinee hair, but his beady eyes and the weird shine of plastic surgery undermined any aura of destiny. “Welcome to TarSys Two.”
“Thanks, Mr. Langdon.”
“You bet. Call me Nick. I appreciate you’ve had a long flight and no time to settle in, but you’re my head of security now, and we’ve got a corpse on our hands.”
Casey eyed the two men with the guns. “Security a problem out here, Nick?”
“Not till this. Asta, that’ll be all,” Langdon said to Jørgensen. She nodded and headed into the admin building, while Langdon guided Casey towards the residential block. The director asked Casey, “You get a look at the project site?”
“Just a glimpse, but it looks impressive.”
“This is just the start. We’re mining about sixteen percent of digital money and we’re almost top ten in AI tokens.How big’s the one in the Gulf, 500 megawatts?”
“Seven fifty.”
“We’re already at that capacity,” Langdon said, not walking into the residence but around it. “This will be a full gigawatt data center by Christmas. Cold weather, see, you can stack servers closer together, less energy to remove the heat. And the Gulf isn’t ours, but this place? We can cover the whole fucking island with silicon if we want.” He patted Casey’s back as if they were ol’ college chums. “And we do want.”
They came to the back of the housing unit, set against rock face. Here there wasn’t much but a dour sliver of sky and the bland, dark brown exterior of the building, its unimaginative array of windows all a blank. One corner of the base of the building was upheld by pylons over a crevasse in the treacherous ground, leaving a crawlspace. The child’s legs stuck out, little boots pointed in either direction.
Casey stared at the legs for a long minute, the shock of it spinning his head to another time, another place, another child’s body.
“If it had just been a lost kid, it wouldn’t be a security matter,” Langdon prompted. “Asta could spin up any old bullshit. But take a look.”
He’d been carrying his gear this whole time. Casey set the duffel bag down and kneeled, palming the ground, levering himself to get a better look. Not that he wanted to. He’d been a cop before he’d become a TarSys grunt. He’d taken out the trash. The stink had never left his hands, but he’d managed to forget about it, at least for a time.
The kid had the face of a teenager, Innuit, preternaturally small but with Asiatic eyes and a big face like Rask’s. His upper body was tangled in wire. Casey had to snuggle in close to see the boy’s hand reached along the wires toward a timer punched into a shadowy block of something adhered to the back of the pylon.
Casey wormed back out, trying to remain steady. “C4 explosive?”
“Looks it,” Langdon said.
“Anyone identify the body?”
“He ain’t from here,” which Casey took to mean not from TarSys Two.
“Who else knows about it? Reported it?”
“So far no one that I know of,” Langdon said. “I’ve got Duxt and Mendez here to keep people away.” The men with the weapons straightened an inch.
Casey knew better than to suggest alerting the local authorities to a crime on TarSys property. Casey wasn’t a cop anymore, and Langdon wasn’t interested in a murder investigation, not even of an adolescent. This was a security issue, first, second, and third. There wasn’t going to be an autopsy. But there sure as hell was going to be an investigation, into the security breach.
“Any tips on disposal?” Casey asked, feeling nauseous from a stench, not one emanating from the kid’s corpse, which was now an icicle, but from something recessed deeper in his mind.
“I’da thought that’s why you’re here, Mark, deciding things like that.”
*
The sun hadn’t come out but it didn’t go away, either. It just lingered behind cloud, hour after hour, so that everything looked washed out. He’d finally entered his new living quarters, a generous two-bedroom apartment with expensive if anodyne comforts. He showered for a long time. Not that it helped much.
Work was always the best distraction. They’d stocked the fridge and against his better wisdom Casey cracked open a bottle of beer while he nosed among his messages and digital admin.
And then he focused on the personnel files. Rask, the driver careful with his tone, for a start.
Casey preferred work to small talk, and wasn’t up for meeting people socially, but he was too tired to deal with a new kitchen. There were three eateries at TarSys Two: a sports bar, a café and a formal dining room. Not to mention Langdon’s private dining room up top on the executive floor. The sports bar was loud, boasting eight screens showing different games and betting platforms, and Casey decided the din and distraction was a good way to avoid conversation.
He took a booth to himself and looked at the wagers scrawling across the screens. Just in dollars and the usual tokens. He scrolled his treasury app. He was still on the Gulf economy, and grimaced at the rates being offered for his dirhams; only in the American system did anyone still think dollars were worth so much.
He had renminbi, too, not technically illegal––in the sandpit, everybody used them––but frowned upon by theTarSys brass. Mostly he held a jumble of tokens, all of them depreciating at varying rates, including a bunch of corporate reward coins and tradable vouchers. Add it up, could place maybe one meaningful over/under bet on the Suns against the Lakers, and that’s what he did.
“Didn’t take you for the gambling type,” Asta Jørgensen said, plate of food in hand.
She had surprised him. “Didn’t take you for the chitchat type,” he said, gesturing at the empty booth seat.
She hesitated. “Am I interrupting?”
“Nah. Sit.” He put down his mobile and regarded his own half-eaten burger, afraid to look at her and her eyes. He had gotten through most of her file and knew whom she was sleeping with. But he didn’t know what was inside her pretty head. “There are worse things than betting on basketball spreads.”
“That’s true,” she agreed, poking at her fried shrimp. “Like breaking up drunken fights and avoiding paperwork. I gather that was how your predecessor spent his time.”
“I’m leading an inquiry into the boy’s accidental death.”
“Is that how I’m supposed to spin it, an accident?”
“I don’t think you need to spin anything,” he said. “This is just internal. Avoiding paperwork, remember?”
She spun linguini around a fork. “Then good.”
He didn’t think she had just casually decided to shoot the breeze. “But I am going to need your help,” he said.
“I liaise with Copenhagen and with the local media. Don’t see what help I can be, if this is an internal matter.”
“You’re Danish but you were born here.”
The linguini spinning came to a halt. “That’s right.”
“So you speak…”
“Kalaalisut.”
“Yeah.”
“I also speak Tunumiisut, which is what they speak in East Greenland. In case that wasn’t in my file.”
He pretended to have known that was a thing. “Is that why you stayed? Most of the Danes have left.”
“Your country has been so charming towards us, I can’t imagine why.”
He looked around at the few other patrons, but they were buried in their screens or watching the games. “But you like the paycheck.”
“I’m a realist. I love Greenland. This is my country. There’s only sixty thousand of us. If we’re destined to be a colony, then we should be a rich one.”
“Not everybody thinks that way.”
She resumed eating. “That’s politics.”
“This investigation, it’s going to be political.”
“I understand the body belongs to a Greenlander.”
“An Innuit, yeah. The cause of death isn’t clear. I need an autopsy to determine if he was murdered and left under there, or if something happened to him while he was…”
“While he was what?”
“I can’t tell you. Not yet, anyway.”
“And you can’t call the local police, move the body to a morgue?”
He sipped his beer.
She said, “And the body…still exists?”
“Yes.” He leaned forward. “I’d appreciate it if you kept that to yourself.”
“The body is not supposed to exist.”
“I need to get it to a doctor, forensics, someone who understands signs of trauma.”
“We have medical staff on site. Langdon can make sure they don’t talk.”
He rubbed his palms, a nervous tick he’d nurtured since his days on the force. It usually preceded an insatiable thirst for booze, but that part he had learned to ignore. “I want someone who can arrange a decent burial. Or cremation. Or whatever you do here.”
“A head of security who gambles and has a sentimental streak.” She smiled for the first time. “That sounds like an unreliable combination.”
*
The next day he got the corporate charm offensive: lunch with Langdon in the executive dining room on the sixth floor. From here they had a view of the valley-sized data center, gleaming grayly from the millions of silicon barnacles clinging to the mountainsides, the reflection beaming off their jagged surfaces broken by the vagaries of steam churning out of the power plant.
“This your third year with the firm,” Langdon noted over his lobster, a glass of Riesling to hand, its stem clinking against the chunky class ring on Langdon’s finger.
“Yes, sir.”
“But you’re originally Arizona PD, that right?”
“Gilbert police, outside of Phoenix.”
“And you went from there to the Middle East?”
“Yes, sir, to get a break from the heat,” Casey said, the joke on automatic.
Langdon guffawed. “That’s a good one. But stop with the Sir, sir…c’mon, Mark, it’s Nick. This is a small community, tight, very close. We’re all family here. Except when I’m on the video with Dallas, that’s when you do your bowing and scraping.”
“Okay. It does seem friendly here,” he said, thinking of Duxt and Mendez and their fingers near the triggers of those assault rifles.
“Even the locals we have on station,” Langdon said. “I assume you’ll be investigating them.”
“I might need some help, with the language.”
“They all speak English.”
“In Abu Dhabi we have some locals the company trusts. Pretty senior people, Emiratis or other Arabs, Indians. The native touch could be useful for situations like these. When you need to get into the subtleties of things.”
“There’s nothing subtle about terrorism,” Langdon said. “And there’s nobody here like that.”
Casey decided against mentioning Jørgensen, so he just said, “All right.”
Langdon was getting worked up, pointing the tines of his fork at Casey. “These elements have been there, in the shadows. For every Injun we give a dollar, there’s another one trying to throw a spear at us.” Jab. “Go to Kangaamiut, go to, what the fuck’s that place called, Kangerluss something. Kanga, Kanger, fuck it, Mark, it’s kangaroo-land.” Jab jab jab. “And we’re dealing with a bunch of—” Punching the table. “Ungrateful aboriginals who are getting aid from the Chinese or the Danes or…hell, from Greenpeace, anyone who can talk these local teenage hotheads into attacking our assets, murdering our people, just because they hate us, they hate what we stand for, like technology and progress and wealth and the American way. So you investigate every single Injun and Eurotrash on the books: here, in Nuuk, even up at Station Three. You find the leads, and then you go into kangaroo-land and you find the ringleaders. And if you don’t have the balls to pull the trigger yourself, that’s fine, no one’s asking you to do anything extrajudicial like that. You just tell me who to punish. Because these animals tried to blow up a building full of American civilians.”
Casey drained his glass of wine while Langdon raged. “Okay, Nick.”
Langdon switched gears, surprising him. “And that kid’s body, it’s gone, right? Any traces gone poof?”
“Like it never existed,” Casey lied.
*
Night wasn’t black, just dim, the sun coy below the sea’s horizon. In the semi-illuminated eve, Casey hooped the duffel bag over his shoulder and walked out of the residential complex. He didn’t need an excuse to venture off-site: he had told Langdon he wouldn’t rely just on drone footage, that he wanted to reconnoiter the nearby villages on foot.
Jørgensen was another story. He didn’t have time to gin up an excuse for her absence, though, so he’d have to improvise. She was where she said she’d be, a hard mile off the small tarmac surrounding TarSys Two. For him, a mile of carrying precious cargo over steep crags, while knowing the odds of being spotted by a company drone were high. Well, he’d learned that over time, over enough hands, after enough bets, the house always wins. It was just her turn to try her luck. His turn too, but he reckoned he’d already lost.
She stood near the pensive sea, a tiny figure in black, black parka, black woolen cap. He didn’t need to be close to recall the angles of her face, skin so white she looked spectral, but eyes so sad and intelligent that there was no way Asta could be anything but alive. This made him feel sorry for her.
He smiled as he approached, her presence lifting the weight of the task at hand, when a boulder moved and the man twice her size stood beside her and held her hand.
Casey felt his spirits sag as he approached and recognized Daavi Rask. Casey hadn’t picked this up when they met him at the airport, a whole drive together. But he’d combed through their files and connected the dots. Even so, seeing them holding hands stabbed at his gut. Either because Rask was also putting his job at risk, or because Casey was woman-starved and jealous.
“Is this a good idea?” he said to her, gesturing at Rask.
“You think I can just walk into a Greenlander village and get this kind of help?”
“It’s all of our asses,” Casey grumbled. Talking to smother his budding regrets.
“Need help with…that?” Rask offered.
Casey shook his head. “My burden. So what now?”
They walked another mile along the rocks and puffins and ptarmigans. They came to a weathered shack, belonging to God only knew, a lean-to shielding a pair of rowboats, and beside those a trio of ATVs, all-terrain vehicles, militarygreen with single seats hoisted high above big, aggressive wheels.
“Before we’d need snowmobiles, but these days,” Rask said.
“They’ll make a lot of noise,” Casey said.
“You want to hike fifteen k? With that?” Rask walked to an ATV. “Let me get some bungee cords.”
From here they drove along trails that he would have never discerned. The mountains enveloped them as seascapes dwindled. The sun must have risen because the skies and then the black hills brightened. Casey looked up for a telltale gleam in the sky, saw nothing, and returned his attention to the treacherous ground, the duffel bag secured laterally behind his seat.
It was hard, muscular work to direct the vehicle over the jagged inclines, but he also allowed himself to be surprised by the changing vistas. His initial impression of this place as a frozen desert had been wrong. It was dry, desiccated, yes, and Nuuk and the TarSys compounds were as formless as what he’d experienced in the UAE. But the land here was different, more ancient, its secrets being slowly stripped away as the ice disappeared, revealing a wizened face, one more vulnerable than he would have thought.
The village was a jumble of the same buildings he’d seen in Nuuk, older red, blue, yellow-painted houses with peaked roofs, and darker concrete apartment buildings of newer vintage. There was no tarmac here, only the crisscrosses of snowmobile and ATV tracks, a partly frozen river with skiffs moored along its banks, and off to one side, a forest of crosses piled into the unforgiving ground, too many it seemed for such a small habitation, and clustered too tightly. Beyond was a gray bleakness that raised into a wall of fog. He couldn’t understand why anyone would have put a village here.
They drove into the center. People seemed to expect them. Villagers waited hands in coat pockets, fur-lined hoods over heads. One of the men had a rifle slung over his shoulder. Casey cut his engine as Rask dismounted and approached the locals. The abrupt silence was weighty, and he suddenly understood the fullness of what he had set in motion.
“I can’t do this,” he thought, only he said it out loud.
“What do you mean?” Jørgensen said with an unforgiving tone.
Casey didn’t answer. He was trapped. He had trapped himself. Taken a step backward, a step into the past. A direction he had sworn he’d never take. An oath that had been true whether drunk or sober. He flushed with panic and it paralyzed him.
He watched Rask embrace a woman, foreheads and noses pressing into the other’s cheek, the locals’ intimate greeting. Then Rask held her hands, she nodded, and Rask returned to the ATVs, the woman in tow. She wore dark clothes and had black hair that whipped around a face made beautiful by the light bouncing off the tundra but was now on the verge of cracking into ugliness. Casey knew that look all too well, so did most cops. But you weren’t supposed to have to play both roles at the same time, not be the victim and the bearer of bad news. This woman, her boots crunching towards his vehicle, her composure melting as if they were in the Phoenix wet bulb, she only had to play one part, and he resented her for it.
*
It had been day six of the Southwest heat dome, temperatures breaking a hundred but the humidity—the humidity in dry Arizona—like nothing else. The sidewalks weren’t just handing out third-degree burns, they were cracking, disintegrating. The roads, all that asphalt, melting. The first-responders were getting wiped out, ambulance tires were merging into blacktop, and so the cleanup relied on people like Casey. Gilbert, half hour’s drive from Phoenix, was a beautiful town swooning in the Sonoran Desert, but now it had become a hellscape.
He’d answered a call over on Greenfield Road, and the house seemed familiar. Just walking from his cruiser parked by the mailbox to the front porch was to be wrung lifeless, but passing the GMC Yukon SUV outside the garage, he saw the window decal of the high school’s black dragon. The suffocating heat and humidity combo seemed to rob Casey of his wits, and it wasn’t till he reached the porch that he realized this was where Adam’s best friend lived.
He rang the bell, then knocked, then pounded on the door, then peered through the window into the kitchen and saw the pair of legs prone on the floor, yellow sneakers pointing in different directions. He called it in, letting the training and mechanics of the job dominate his mind, returned to the porch—like in those dreams where he’d be running through molasses—and pulled his sidearm and shot the lock.
The whole block had lost power and the air inside was thick with death. He flung his elbow around his nose. The coroner’s report later would say the kids had been in there for twenty-four hours. The wet-bulb temperatures had been cruel to the bodies. When Casey found Adam, wearing nothing but shorts and his yellow sneaks, he vomited, adding to the stench and the liquifying mass.
Marie blamed him for everything and divorced him, taking most of what he’d been able to cobble together on a policeman’s salary. His personal leave bled into a timeline he couldn’t track. They’d have fired him for the drinking, but his chief had suggested Casey could quit first, salvage what reputation remained. Target Systems, one of the big new contractors, backed by hefty Silicon Valley money, was looking for security personnel, here and abroad. You want to get the hell out, find a way to move on? Well, sign here, son, start over.
And he found himself in another desert, this one foreign and dour, but that had been just fine for Mark Casey. He’d kept on living, sometimes being useful, sometimes being cynical, always swallowing the company line, even when they sent him to savage those foreign protestors chanting about data centers, emissions, heat waves. He’d shut them up good. TarSys had come to like him, while he’d buried his hatred of them so deeply he forgot it was ever there. They offered him a promotion if he’d move to Greenland, where business was in full swing.
He hadn’t given a shit about anything until he saw that kid’s legs poking out from beneath the building at TarSys Two.
*
Casey carefully released the bungee cords and picked up the duffel. Lay it down or keep it on the ATV? Take the body out or leave it in? This was going to be worse than he ever imagined. He unzipped it. The Greenland dry cold had preserved the body well. The face looked probably like what the boy’s face ought. But there was no dodging the unnatural vacancy in the eyes. Casey quickly but gently palmed the eyelids closed before the mother reached his side.
She saw her son and collapsed on him in a terrible wail. Two of her friends tried to hold her, chanting words that he didn’t recognize but understood. Rask was in low conversation with the stricken men.
Jørgensen stood apart, very small and still.
She noticed his gaze and walked over. “This has been hard for you, hasn’t it?”
He gestured at the mess of crosses to change the subject. “Now what?”
“They’ll bury him under rocks. It’s too frozen here to bury people in the ground. I think they just hammer a cross for them.” She smiled up at him. “You did a good thing today, bringing their boy home.”
He spotted the drone as it peeked over the ridge they’d descended. It was followed by two more.
“I don’t know about that,” he said.
“Don’t be—”
He pointed at the drones. She had to turn around to see them. “Shit.”
“Langdon’s going to send a team here,” he said. “That boy’s body was found with explosives. Doesn’t matter if the kid was a culprit or a victim, TarSys will hurt or kill anybody they want to in revenge. You’d better get out of here, survive this thing. Daavi too. You won’t be any help to these villagers if you get disappeared.”
“What are you saying, Mark? You’re scaring me.”
“I know what they’ll do because I’ve helped guys like Langdon do it,” he said.
“You mean in the Middle East?”
“You’re wasting time, Asta.”
“What about you?”
He sat on the cold ground, cross-legged, and watched the men ease the boy out of the duffel bag and carry him up into the barren inclines, the women clustered around the mother, guiding her behind. He didn’t have anything to say; the days of words had died long ago. Casey closed his eyes and let his naked hands press against the undressed earth.