Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

this morning. The police are sure to apply for a warrant to search
this property and I’ll see what I can do to contest it.’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Erika.
    ‘With Nico gone, there are all kinds of questions,’ said Dieter. ‘Not the least of which is money. Nico was the only one of us who knew where all of it is. And there were some
Icelandic volunteers we were planning to draft in to help with the editing. What shall we do about them?’
    Erika sighed. ‘Yes, I am sure there are lots of good questions to be answered, lots of difficulties to be overcome. Anything from Apex on when the video will be ready?’
    ‘I just checked,’ Dieter said. ‘Eleven a.m. at the earliest.’
    ‘OK,’ Erika said. ‘We are all exhausted, and we have a lot of work ahead of us. It’s now five-thirty. I suggest we sleep until ten-thirty, then get some breakfast and
start work. Ask me all your questions then.’
    Relieved to have permission to collapse, the team melted away to the various crowded bedrooms.
    Erika was sharing a room with Zivah, who had taken the floor, leaving Erika with a single bed. But rather than collapsing into it, she pulled on running clothes.
    She had to get out of there.
    She ran hard uphill along Thórsgata towards the massive spire of the church, a smooth sweeping silhouette against the lightening sky in the east. From the church she pounded down the
empty narrow streets towards the bay. In a few minutes she was speeding along the bike path by the shore, the air cold and fresh in her straining lungs. She upped the pace until she was sprinting,
the wind tearing through her hair, the blood pumping in her ears, the muscles in her legs screaming in pain and anger.
    Finally she could go no faster and stopped, bending down for a few moments. She stood up, her chest heaving, her heart thumping. In front of her, just across the narrow fjord at the edge of the
bay, was a broad ridge of rock, topped by snow, glimmering pink. Mount Esja, Ásta had called it. She was right, it looked completely different than it had the previous afternoon.
    With Nico gone, Erika felt alone, and vulnerable, here in this tiny northern capital, with its clear light and cold air, a thousand miles from the nearest civilization.
    The others were all relying on her to do the right thing. And she would do the right thing. She knew what her duty was. She knew that from somewhere deep inside her she would find the
strength to see this through.
    But it was going to be difficult. Very, very difficult.
    She took a deep breath, and screamed into the wind.
    It was a spectacular dawn up on the glacier. The clouds had rolled away to the south, nudged by the red ball slowly emerging over the eastern horizon. Pinks, oranges, golds and
purples streaked sky and ice. The beauty was breathtaking, like no other crime scene Magnus had visited.
    Magnus had been up all night in Hvolsvöllur police station. Chief Superintendent Kristján had managed to persuade Viktor not to press charges against Árni, but had not allayed
the MP’s suspicions about Magnus’s CIA connections. The forensic team had driven out from Reykjavík to meet Magnus at the police station before five a.m. and, together with one
of Kristján’s officers, they had set off up to the volcano through driving snow. But suddenly, as they mounted Mýrdalsjökull, the snow had ceased and clear sky had
appeared.
    The surface of the glacier was pristine, covered with new snow, brushed pink in the dawn light. The multitude of vehicle tracks that the local cop explained usually criss-crossed the route
towards the volcano had completely disappeared. The two police jeeps proceeded cautiously westwards towards a plume of smoke.
    The volcano.
    They crested a ridge and a clear view of a broken landscape of ice, steam, cooling lava and rock spread out before them. A dome of rock thrust out from the saddle between the two glaciers,
Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull, and nestling in the broken crown of this dome was a glowing pool of orange.
    ‘That’s odd,’ said the policeman. ‘It’s gone quiet.’
    ‘Yeah. I was expecting sparks and plumes of lava,’ said Magnus, who had seen the eruption several times on TV over the previous couple of weeks. The glow fascinated him, signifying
as it did the subterranean power of the earth to create and destroy, but it fell short of the pyrotechnics he had been expecting.
    They pulled up next to the only vehicle in front of the volcano,