“Welcome to our little observatory, Mademoiselle Labelle. Hope the trip from the outside wasn't too arduous. My name is Hank Thurston. I'm Bernie's colleague. This is Craig Rossi, our assistant from Uppsala University,” he said, gesturing at a young man in his early twenties, “and that's Derek Rawlins, who's writing about our work for Outside magazine.”

As Skye shook hands, Renaud brushed by the others and went over to the wall to examine a vaguely human figure that was locked in the ice.

“As you can see, this gentleman has been frozen for some time,” Renaud said. Glancing at Skye, he said, “Not unlike some of the women I have encountered.”

No one laughed at the joke. Skye stepped past Renaud and ran her fingers around the perimeter of the dark shape. The limbs were twisted in grotesque positions.

“We found him when we were enlarging the cave,” Thurston explained.

“He looks more like a bug on a windshield than a man,” Skye said.

“We're lucky he's not just a big greasy smear,” Thurston said. “He's in pretty good shape, considering. The ice at the bottom of a glacier, and anything in it, is squeezed like putty by hundreds of tons of pressure.”

Skye peered at the vague form. “Are you assuming that he was on top of the glacier at one point?”

“Sure,” Thurston said. “With a valley glacier like Le Dormeur or some of the others you'll find in the Alps, a reasonable amount of snowfall moves pretty fast through the ice.”

“How long would it take?”

“My guess is that it would take a hundred years, more or less, to get from the top to the bottom of Le Dormeur.” It would only work for an object near the head of the glacier high in the mountains, where ice flows vertically as well as horizontally."

“Then it's possible that he was a climber who fell into a crevasse?”

“That's what we thought at first. Then we took a closer look.”

Skye put her face closer to the ice. The body was dressed almost entirely in dark leather, from his boots to the snug Snoopy-type cap.

Tufts of fur lining poked out here and there. A gun holster, pistol still in it, hung from a belt.

Her gaze moved up to the face. The features were unclear through the ice, but the skin was burnished to a dark copper color, as if he had lain out in the sun too long. The eyes were covered with a pair of goggles.

“Incredible,” she whispered, then stepped back and turned to Renaud. “But what does this have to do with me?”

Renaud smiled and went over to a plastic storage container and reached inside. He grunted as he lifted out a steel helmet. “This was found near the man's head.”