Doyle said he would be there. As he clicked off, he experienced a twinge of Irish sentimentality at having to kill his old friend. But Doyle had grown up in a neighborhood where a friendship could end with a nighttime burial over a drug deal gone wrong or an imprudent comment. This was not the first time he had dispatched a friend or acquaintance. Business, unfortunately, was business. He put Barrett out of his mind and began to think of the riches and power that would soon be in his grasp.

He would have been less at ease if he knew what was going on back at the lake. A canoe had rounded the weed patch. The two fly fishermen in the canoe had heard the pop of Doyle's handgun. They wanted to warn whoever was hunting that people were in the area. One of the men was a Boston lawyer, but, more important, the other was a doctor.

As they emerged from the weeds, the lawyer pointed toward the water and said, “What the hell is that?”

The doctor said, “It looks like a melon with a spider on it.”

They paddled until they were a few feet from the object. The melon disappeared, and in its place were eyes, a nose and a gaping mouth. The lawyer raised his paddle and prepared to bring it down on the floating head. Spider Barrett looked up at the two astonished faces. His mouth opened.

“Help me,” he pleaded.

NUMA 6 - Polar Shift

13

WITH A HULL DISPLACEMENT of twenty-three thousand tons and seventy-five thousand horsepower produced by its powerful engines, the Yamal-class Russian icebreaker Kotelny was capable of continuously breaking through seven feet of ice. Its sharply angled bow sliced through the slushy spring ice pack like a warm knife through sherbet. As Karla Janos stood in the bow and surveyed the fog-shrouded island that was her destination, she felt as if someone had walked across her grave.

The involuntary shudder that passed through her willowy body had nothing to do with the rawness of the weather in the East Siberian Sea. Karla was bundled in a down parka, and she had become inured to biting cold after two winters with the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where temperatures routinely dropped to forty degrees below zero. She was well enough acquainted with the territory around the Arctic Circle to know that there was little chance Ivory Island would live up to the image of warm whiteness evoked by its name, but she was totally unprepared for the total bleakness of the isolated place.