nights; then the ice leads closed and you made it back to camp only an hour or so ago. You have no idea what happened to Gupta, Hasegawa, Creston, or Rutherford, and you have no idea who may have killed Kayla Brown here at the camp. Is this essentially your story?"
"Yes, because that is the truth," Kropodkin replied sullenly, after taking a gulp of tea.
"No, it isn't," Randi said matter-of-factly. "You're a liar, and a murderer and probably a number of other unsavory things that we'll find out about."
She rose slowly out of her chair. "To begin with, your name isn't Stefan Kropodkin. I'm not sure what it really is, but it doesn't matter. There are other people tearing your fake past apart right now, and they'll find out. They'll also learn about the Middle European 'businessmen' who are sponsoring your education. That should prove interesting as well."
Kropodkin stared at her warily, the tip of his tongue moving along his chapped lips.
"I suspect you came to Canada, the university, and Wednesday Island for reasons other than higher learning," Randi continued, pacing slowly between the mess table and the cooking counter. "The collegiate ivory towers might make a convenient hideout for a man on the run. It's the kind of place the police or the security services wouldn't look, granted you kept your nose out of the conventional campus radical groups. As I said, we'll learn more about that later.
"But you still wanted to have a secure mode of communications with your backers while you were laying low, just in case. That's why you brought this with you."
Randi slipped one hand into the pocket of her ski pants and produced the transparent plastic evidence envelope that contained the mini hard drive. "I found this where you'd hidden it in the radio shack. The correspondence files on it should be very interesting. I'll also bet you were sloppy enough to leave fingerprints."
Randi returned the hard drive to her pocket. "I'll also wager you were curious enough to make a private visit to the Misha 124 crash site. My friends who are up there now will find out about that. Maybe it was pure curiosity, or maybe you caught the scent of something when your expedition was warned away from the wreck. Be that as it may, you went aboard that old plane and you found out what it was carrying. You recognized that the biowarfare agent aboard the bomber would be worth several fortunes to the right parties, and somehow you knew how to contact those right parties."
Kropodkin had forgotten about his food.
"You told them about the anthrax, and they cut you in on the deal. You were to be their point man on Wednesday. You were designated to eliminate the other members of the expedition, securing access to the anthrax before the arrival of your partners!"
"I deny this!" the Slav exploded.
Randi took a step toward the mess table. "Deny away, but it is the truth. Your new partners weren't quite in position to make the collection yet, but the expedition's extraction ship and the crash site assessment team were on the way. You had no choice but to start the eliminations! You had to thin down the number of witnesses on Wednesday before the odds got worse!"
Her words flowed, precise, steady, and cold, accusing and then supporting each accusation, a prosecutor closing in for the kill. "So while you were out there on the ice with Gupta and Hasegawa you murdered them and hid their bodies. Then you came back here with a story about their disappearance. And when the search party set out after them, you made sure you were carrying the only gun on the island. You led Rutherford and Creston out into the middle of nowhere and you blew them away with two of the shells that were in that gun!"
Kropodkin was crushing the chunk of bread in his hand, the crumbs and margarine squeezing out between his fingers.
"Then you came back here for Kayla Brown, and when you scoped out the camp you found her in the lab building sitting beside a live radio, talking with the Haley. A complication. You had to disable the radio first so she couldn't say anything she shouldn't. But you managed that and then you went in after her and you took her up on that hill and you bashed her brains out with your ice axe."
Randi tapped the tabletop with the muzzle of the MP-5. "Then you came back to