Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

April 2010
    Erika emerged through the double doors of the arrivals hall and scanned the dozen or so people waiting. She knew Nico would have arranged for someone to pick her up, but
she had no idea who it would be.
    There were a couple of signs in the hall, and one of them had her name scrawled on it, with a smiley face. She approached the young woman holding the scrap of cardboard. ‘Hi, I’m
Erika.’
    The woman smiled and held out her hand. She was thin with short dark hair, pale skin and big blue eyes. She was wearing jeans and a thick tan coat. And a clerical collar around her throat.
    ‘Ásta,’ she said. ‘Welcome to Iceland.’
    The woman led Erika out of the terminal to a beaten-up old Peugeot, which needed a wash. Erika wasn’t entirely surprised by her host – Freeflow’s volunteers came in all shapes
and sizes – but this was the first priest she had come across. Certainly the first female one. Erika checked to see whether anyone was following them; she didn’t think so, but it was
hard to tell.
    ‘I’ll take you to the house,’ Ásta said in flawless English. ‘It’s right downtown. A great location.’
    ‘I doubt we’ll be going outside much,’ said Erika. ‘Who does it belong to?’
    ‘The owners live abroad. We’ve rented it for a couple of weeks.’
    ‘We won’t need it that long. A week at most.’ Ásta eased the Peugeot out of the car park and on to the road to Reykjavík. Forty-six kilometres, according to the
yellow road sign.
    ‘You speak very good English,’ Erika said.
    ‘Thank you. You’ll find most Icelanders speak English, especially the younger ones.’
    ‘Yeah, I remember that from last time I was here,’ said Erika. ‘Do you always wear that thing?’
    ‘What thing?’
    ‘The dog-collar thing.’
    ‘Oh, no. But I want to while I’m helping you out. I think what you are doing is good. There should be more openness in Iceland, and more in the Icelandic Church. I guess I’m
making a point. Christians believe in telling the truth.’
    ‘So do Muslims and Jews,’ said Erika. ‘And atheists. Or the majority of them do anyway: their governments are a different matter.’
    Erika was wary. All kinds of people tried to win Freeflow over to their cause. But independence was everything. Independence from any one country, any political ideology and any religion.
    Ásta smiled. ‘Oh, don’t worry, I won’t try to influence what you are doing. I saw you on Silfur Egils when you were here last year, by the way. I was impressed. A
lot of people here were.’
    Silfur Egils was the biggest TV chat show in Iceland. Erika had used her appearance to encourage the Icelanders to set up a haven for free information. The idea seemed to have gone down
well. ‘I’m glad you remember it,’ Erika said.
    ‘I might have something for you,’ Ásta said.
    ‘About the banks?’ Freeflow received information from all over the world, some of it big, some of it small. It had published the details of one of the Icelandic bank’s loans
several months before, but had also received several pieces of unsubstantiated gossip that it had left unpublished.
    ‘No. About the Church here in Iceland. Certain things that happened here in the past.’
    ‘OK,’ Erika said. ‘But, Ásta, if you do decide to leak something to us, you should do it anonymously. Upload it to our website or mail it to us on a CD. We go to great
lengths to protect our sources, and the best protection is if we don’t know their identity ourselves.’
    ‘But if you don’t know who they are, how can you tell if they are reliable?’
    It was a common criticism of Freeflow, but one Erika had answered many times. ‘We are very careful to check and double-check the information we are given. That works much better than a
subjective judgement on whether a source is reliable or not.’
    ‘I see,’ said Ásta.
    They were out on the highway now, a long straight strip of black through the barren lava field that separated the airport at Keflavík from the capital. Checking behind her, the only
vehicles Erika could see were two large trucks: not the vehicles of choice for surveillance teams. No trees anywhere, nor grass. Grey sea on one side; black mountains beyond the lava on the other.
A small mountain rose up ahead in a perfect cone. Bleak. A sign to the right pointed to the Blue Lagoon and Erika saw steam leaking out from behind a fold in the lavascape a few miles in that
direction. Erika had seen the