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front doors allowed for a plane that would never really come, which was why the hangar doubled as the barn for the cows, and tripled as the garage for the facility’s two vehicles. At the base of the left-hand sliding door was a normal, man-sized entrance. Colding waddle-ran to it and slipped inside.
    Inside,
heat
. Thank the powers that be. He walked to one of the heaters and pressed the
higher
button again and again, cranking it up to full. He heard natural gas hissing through the PVC pipe as he stripped off his gloves and held his hands in front of the grate. The security-room computer controlled this heater and the fifty or sixty just like it that were spaced along the ground and up on the ceiling, but the temporary override was like heaven.
    “Oh, come on,” a high-pitched voice called out. “You’re turning up the heat? It’s frickin’ toasty in here.”
    “That’s because you’re a mutant from Canada,” Colding called over his shoulder. “You were probably born in an igloo.” He jerked his hands back as the heat nearly burned him. There, that was better.
    Colding put his gloves back on, trapping the heat radiating off his warm skin. He turned, saw the thick-bodied Brady Giovanni start up the diesel engine of the small tanker truck they used to refuel Bobby Valentine’s helicopter.
    The hangar wasn’t exactly
toasty
, as Brady had said, but it was well above freezing. The seventy-thousand-square-foot building held fifty Holstein cows at the far end. They were over sixty yards away, a testament to the building’s size. The big black-and-white animals chewed on feed.Occasionally one of them let out a
moo
that echoed off the hangar’s sheet-metal roof some seven stories above.
    On this end of the hangar sat the fuel truck and a Humvee. The Hummer saw very little use other than weekly eyeball checks of the off-site data backup, which sat at the end of the facility’s one-mile-long landing strip, and for taking Erika Hoel to weekly checkups of Baffin Island’s two backup herd facilities. Each facility was a miserable thirty miles away—a sixty-mile round-trip with Hoel was about as much fun as a barbed-wire enema.
    Brady eased out of the fuel truck, leaving the engine to idle. “All set for Bobby,” he said. “I’ll start refueling his chopper as soon as he lands.”
    “It’s cold as hell outside this morning,” Colding said. “After you open the doors, make sure you adjust the heat so the cows don’t get chilled.”
    “Sure thing. I’ll crank the heat for them. You might say it will be a hot time in the old town … this
morning.”
    Brady laughed at his own joke, as usual, leaving Colding to smile and nod vaguely as he politely tried to grasp the humor. Brady’s laugh sounded much like his voice: high-pitched, more at home in the body of a fifteen-year-old girl than a six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound man. As a security guard, Brady cut an imposing figure. No one understood his jokes, not even Gunther or Andy Crosthwaite, who had both served with the man in the Canadian Special Forces.
    Speaking of Andy … Colding checked his watch. A little past 10:30 A.M . Imagine that, Andy “The Asshole” Crosthwaite was late.
    “Brady, you heard from Andy?”
    Brady shook his head.
    “Shit. Well, he’ll be out here soon to help you with the refueling. I’m gonna step outside for a second. Hold down the fort.”
    Brady laughed his high-pitched laugh. “Hold down the
fort
. That’s good!”
    Colding smiled, nodded. Hard enough not getting Brady’s jokes—now he apparently didn’t get his own.
    He walked out of the hangar’s small personnel door and back into the subzero morning’s blazing white. His feet scrunched the facility’s packed snow as he walked away from the hangar, until they sank calf-deep into undisturbed drifts. He stood alone, staring out at the white expanse of Baffin Island. With his back to the lab, there wasn’t a building in sight.
    Three years. Fuck sleeping, he should