I almost shot him out of sheer frustration. That’s what power can do: overload you.

‘This place has a good, strong door,’ Malick said. ‘There a lock?’

I nodded.

‘Not when I arrived. How’d you get through?’

‘I found the key.’

‘Uh-huh.’

I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. The gun in my hand felt solid and dangerous. ‘Don’t try to imply—’

‘Jesus, Bob, listen to yourself. You asked for this meet. You chose the place. If I was what you say I am, you think I’d have come in here, no gun, no backup? You’re the guy with the gun. You’re the guy with the key. Tell me, if the cops showed up now, who’d look like the bad guy?’

‘Hagger had the key.’ I wished I hadn’t have said it. ‘But—’

He knew where I was going and cut me off. ‘I didn’t give it to him, if that’s what you think.’ Leaning forward, on the attack. ‘Hagger worked for you guys.’

‘You too,’ I reminded him.

‘One small job. For you, he was full-time.’

When you’re looking down the barrel of a gun, it’s easy to ignore what the other guy’s saying. But I had just enough sense in me to hear it. What if DAR-X was a decoy? What if the Russians sent them up here, not to run the radar program, but to double bluff us. We’d be so busy looking at them, we’d never guess the real bad guys were right under our noses. Inside Zodiac.

I put the gun down. Losing it made me physically nauseous, like when you’re so hungry you want to puke. My hand hovered over it, in case Malick made a move

He gave me a fake smile that was supposed to reassure me. ‘Now. You want to tell me what this is about?’

For a minute, I just stared at him. But either he was lying, in which case he knew already; or he was being truthful, and he could maybe help me. I told him in three sentences: the Russians, the satellite radar, the base station.

‘Well I’ll be goddamned,’ Malick said, like a guy who’s just found his wife in bed with his pastor. He looked up at the needle pointing into space over our heads, the taut wires holding it in mid-air. ‘That’s why we had radio trouble.’

He pulled off his heavy mittens and wiped his nose. He noticed the wire that ran down into the black box on the wall.

‘Where does that go?’ he asked.

I gave it a glance. Not for more than a second — but that was all he needed. You don’t make it in the oil industry, not in places like Athabasca and Prudhoe Bay, if you can’t handle yourself. He shot out his arm. Before I even knew it, he had his hand on the rifle barrel and was twisting it away.

My grip was too slack. I snatched, but he had it before I could grab hold. He took a step back, reversed the weapon and pointed it at me just too fast for me to wrestle it back off of him. His finger danced on the trigger, warning me.

Now I understood why he took off his mittens.

‘I really hate having a gun pointed at me.’ He squinted down the barrel, right at my chest. ‘Right now, I’m sure you appreciate that.’

Oh fuck! Panic raced through me. I realised how cold I’d gotten. I’d been standing still in that room a long time. I was shaking.

‘You’re a good liar,’ I told him. ‘You played me just right.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know shit about this radar thing. But you …’ A jab of the rifle. ‘You seem real familiar with it.’

My mind raced. It sounds dumb, but I had to know how much I could believe him. Was he one of the bad guys? Or just pissed off because I pointed a gun at him?

‘I only know what I told you.’ I couldn’t take my eyes off that gun. ‘Please. You have to believe me.’

I hated myself for begging. I didn’t think it made me sound any more truthful, either.

‘I’m keeping an open mind. And a slug in the chamber.’ He nodded toward the loose cable that hung down from the needle, though the gun never left me. ‘Where does that go?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Let’s go see.’

We went down through the hatch and outside, round the side of the building. Malick followed me all the way with the rifle. Now we knew what we were looking for, we saw it right away. A black cable coming out the brick and down the wall, like a TV antenna. Hiding in plain sight. It vanished under the snow.

‘You gonna tell me you don’t have a clue where that goes?’ Malick said.

I looked him in the eye. White pearls of frost beaded his eyebrows.

‘I know why you don’t trust me. I get it. But if neither of us has anything to do with this, we’re on the same side. We can figure it out together.’

‘That’d be fine.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘So long as you go first and keep your hands where I can see them.’

Every snowmobile carries a shovel with the emergency pack in case we have to dig a snow shelter. I fetched it, and dug away the surface where the cable went under the snow. A few inches down, it had already hardened to ice, but I could see the cable running below it like a vein. I scraped away more snow, peeling back the line. It pointed up the hill, towards the coal-processing buildings on the top level.

‘I checked there yesterday.’

‘Maybe you missed something.’

We tracked the cable under the ice, pausing every ten feet or so to check we had it right. It went pretty straight, not hard to follow. Up the hill, and into a big corrugated-iron barn on the north-east edge of town.

‘This is where the coal came in,’ I said, to break the silence. Any silence is awkward when there’s a gun pointed at you — and this was a freaky place. The front of the building faced away, out to the cableway towers that went across the mountainside to the mine. Around the barn, elevated tunnels and rusted gantries led off to satellite buildings; cranes drooped from the sky and icicles hung off of the rails. The whole thing made a hell of a tangle, plenty of steel waiting to collapse on your head. Plenty of places for someone to watch.

A beating noise broke the cold silence. I spun around, trying to see where it came from. Snow fell from one of the gantries. A white bird flew into the sky, almost invisible against the grey. Probably a ptarmigan. Behind me, Malick had the gun raised like a hunter. If he’d been faster, he could have had it for dinner.

He saw me watching him and swung the gun back down to cover me. ‘Don’t get any cute ideas.’

I put up my hands. ‘I’m as scared as you are.’

He didn’t argue the point.

We picked our way over the crap on the ground to the big barn. There was no entrance at ground level, just a creaky flight of stairs going up the side of the building to a door. They hadn’t put a lock on this one. Or a handle.

‘Open it,’ Malick told me.

He was behind me, a couple of steps down. If I’d been Jackie Chan, I could maybe have knocked the rifle out of his hands and kicked him down the stairs. But that shit’s only for the movies. And tell the truth, I was more interested in finding where that cable went to. So long as Malick wanted that, we were on the same team.

It’s a weird thing to say about a guy with a gun at your back, but I was starting to trust him. I believed he didn’t know about the radar. Sure, he could have been pretending, but why bother? Now all I had to do was stay alive long enough to convince him he could trust me too.

I put my shoulder against the door and pushed. The only thing holding it shut was ice; it creaked like Scotch tape being peeled off. I opened it an inch, paused, then kicked it in and jumped inside.

The metal stairs outside clanged as Malick ran after me. But I wasn’t trying to get away from him. I just didn’t want a bullet in my face the moment I stepped through the door. Not that my Delta Force impression would’ve fooled anyone.

There wasn’t a sound. And — so far as I could see through the gloom — no one there.

I was in a long corrugated-iron shed, thick plank floor, no windows, but open at one end where the cableway brought the coal buckets in from the mine. It gave enough light to see by. A few of the buckets still hung off of the cables. In the centre of the room, I saw a rusted mess of gears and axles, and a huge flat wheel at head height that used to drive the cableway.