Authors: James Tabor

Frozen Solid: A Novel (19 page)

“Let’s hear it.”

“After the initial screening, three scientists were left in the bottom of the pan. Dr. Alston Sinclair, an astrophysicist. For some years, a man with whom he had had a homosexual affair had blackmailed him. Then the payments had suddenly stopped.”

“Do we know why?”

“The blackmailer died.”

“Murdered?”

Bowman shrugged. “The death occurred while Sinclair was at the Pole. Police ruled it an accident.”

“Doesn’t sound like the kind of wrinkle we’re looking for.”

“Next is Dr. Elaine Graydon. Biochemist and a rising star in her field. Until she left the Harvard faculty in mid-semester and later went to the South Pole.”

“People don’t usually jump that ship,” Barnard said. “Do we know why?”

“Got caught having an affair with a dean’s wife. Very messy.”

“Ugly, but not really sinister.”

“Number three is a genetic virologist named Maynard Blaine. Works for a biotech startup called Advanced Viral Sciences.”

“What stuck out about him?”

“He left a teaching job at Rutgers several years ago to go with AVS. Doubled his salary. Blip. Then his travel changed. Blip. He’s a bachelor. Before leaving Rutgers, he took one vacation every year, and it was always some Club Bed–type cruise. After changing jobs, no more Love Boats. Instead, he went to Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, twice; New Delhi twice; Lagos, Nigeria, once. Blip, blip, blip.”

“Not vacation spots.”

“Filthy, overcrowded, disease-ridden, and dangerous.”

“Sounds like you’ve been.”

Bowman only smiled. He said, “Where did he stay? Who did he meet? Credit card use? And a lot more.”

“And?”

“He met three men on each trip. One is a retired geneticist from England named Ian Kendall. Another is a French medical doctor, Jean-Claude Belleveau, who practices in New Delhi, of all places. And the third is an epidemiologist.”

“Name?”

“David Gerrin.”

Barnard gaped. “Director of Antarctic Programs.”

“None other. You’ll want to keep that appointment,” Bowman said.

AFTER BARNARD LEFT, DAVID GERRIN SAT BEHIND HIS DESK AND
gazed at a large, framed photograph of Dhaka that hung on his wall. Barnard had asked about it. Once they learn where I came from, he thought, they all ask the same things. Is that rush hour? How many people live there? When do the typhoons hit? What are the slums like?

From television news they knew about the storms, floods, and famines, epidemics, genocide, death tolls in the hundreds of thousands. Some recalled a concert to raise funds, very famous musicians and entertainers. So many years later, though, not many knew much beyond its name.

We were so poor, Gerrin thought now, staring at the picture, reflecting on Barnard’s visit. Not poor as they understand the term in this country. The poor here live like royalty by comparison. They walk into some office once a month and are handed money, free and clear. They do nothing for it.
Nothing
. Unimaginable for a Bangladeshi.

He recalled sitting beside his mother—these were his first memories—in a vast, steaming, stinking dump that stretched as far as
he could see. That was his world. There was simply no way to tell people here about the smell: rotting food, putrefying flesh, burning shit. And
hot
. One endless compost heap. She had to keep picking him up so that he would not be burned. When she found anything edible—apple cores, fish bones, moldy bread—she ate half and made him eat the other half.

They lived in Karail, Dhaka’s worst slum. Perhaps the world’s worst. He pissed and shat in any open space, as the urges struck. Most water was life-threatening. He and two brothers and two sisters and his mother slept underneath an abandoned truck trailer. The trailer itself was full of others. He did not remember his father, who died of typhoid when he was still an infant. They scavenged clothes from people who were dead or dying. They ate dogs and cats when they could catch them. He saw people eating corpses.

He remembered his mother dying from malnutrition and dysentery when he was eleven. She had grown too weak to move, had lain in her own filth, blanketed with flies, unable to eat or drink at the end. After, both sisters were taken away by men who, he learned later, raped ugly women to death and sold pretty ones to pimps. He watched from a hiding place while a gang killed one of his brothers for the clothes he wore. They did not want to soil the shirt and pants with blood, so they strangled him with a soft rope. The second brother disappeared one night while he slept, and Gerrin had not seen him since.

Hunger never left him. His body ached constantly. There were times when his bones felt like they were on fire. He became covered with sores that would not heal, and living scabs of flies covered the sores. He passed blood from all his orifices and walked about nearly blind some days, barely able to think with a starving brain. Much of the time he was too weak to defend himself, and people took advantage of him constantly. He did the same to others who were even weaker.

To survive, he did horrible things. Even now he had nightmares about them. Many people would rather die than do the things he had
done. Others had the will but lacked the wits. He had been born with unusual intelligence. Pure luck of the draw, as they said here. The brain in his head kept him alive.

A year after his mother died, he broke into a black Mercedes-Benz. He would never forget the silver circle with the three-pointed star that was a few inches from his face as he slid under the car. He had learned how to defeat alarm systems from beneath. He smashed a window, let himself in, and was looking for anything of value when a huge hand wrapped around his neck and pulled him out. The man held him up in the air with his feet dangling. He was that skinny, and the man was that strong. He had very white skin and a reddish beard so perfectly trimmed that each hair was clearly visible, like a nest of wires.

He expected that the man would beat or maybe kill him. It happened all the time to thieves who ventured out of the slums. No one knew or cared.

“Tell me why you broke into my car,” the man said.

No one had ever asked him such a question. Lies would earn him a beating. He told the truth as clearly as he could: He was starving to death. His parents were dead. His sisters and brothers, too. He began to describe his life.

The man set him down and listened. Anger changed to mild interest and eventually became attention. The way he spoke, how his eyes worked. He did not know it then, but he understood later: intelligence recognizes itself.

Finished, he simply stood before the man and waited, watching his hands, because when they clenched into fists he would curl up into a ball and take the beating lying down. But they never turned into fists.

“I want you to come with me,” the man said.

They drove in his car to a place like an orphanage. It was that but, as he learned later, full of children who were, like him, extraordinarily intelligent. So began his journey out of Karail, from which only one in ten thousand escaped.

Here, in the beginning, he had told people about that time of his
life. But seeing faces contort with disgust and pity was as unpleasant for him as hearing details about Karail was for them. So he’d learned to keep it short and, if not sweet, at least devoid of horror.

Thus he had not told Dr. Donald Barnard any of that, though he’d sensed that Barnard might have listened with more attention and less revulsion than most. Gerrin was no stranger to the land of nightmares, and he thought that Barnard had seen and probably done some of the things that black dreams are made of. He looked about the right age to have fought in Vietnam. Intelligence was not the only thing that recognized itself.

Barnard’s reason for coming seemed genuine: a decent man’s desire to know how a valued former subordinate had died. But surviving a place like Karail instilled an exquisite sensitivity to threat. Something felt odd about Barnard’s interest in someone so far removed from him by time as well as work.

He’d pretended not to know who had been sent to replace Durant, and felt confident that the lie had passed unnoticed. Deceit had been another essential survival skill in Karail. It was, as they said here, like riding a bicycle. Once learned, it stayed with you forever, ready to be retrieved as needed.

But of course he knew exactly who had been sent to replace Durant. That person had been chosen with great care. Emily Durant had been the only female scientist at the station who, before winterover, would be returning to North America. She’d made her own death inevitable after becoming suspicious and asking too many questions about Triage. Her death was not the problem, at least not by itself. But it meant that one entire continent would be left uncovered when Triage launched. And after everything they had done, all the planning and testing, the money spent, risks taken—that was simply unacceptable.

HALF IN A DAZE, HALLIE WALKED ALONG THE CORRIDOR OF LEVEL
1, heading for Fida’s room. Two women were coming the other way. Both wore overalls, black bunny boots, and heavy wool work shirts. She saw one of the Draggers turn and say something to her companion. After that, both of them gave her hard stares as they approached. As soon as they passed, she heard one say, making no effort to whisper, “That’s her. She’s the one.”

She glanced over her shoulder and saw that they had both stopped and were standing there, watching her go.

She understood. The only new arrival in weeks, she might have brought in some pathogen that was responsible for two inexplicable deaths. Now three, although they wouldn’t know that yet. What was it they called such a person on the old sailing ships? A Jonah. One who brought inexplicable misfortune to ship and crew. And one who sometimes disappeared, just as inexplicably, when seas were heavy and the sky held no moon.

It wasn’t hard to understand how Polies, like sailors at the mercy of natural forces, could harbor superstitions. But there was nothing she could do about that now. She knocked on Fida’s door, softly at
first and then, when she got no answer, harder. Down the hall a door flew open and a woman’s face popped out. She was pale and had dark, arched eyebrows. The bags under her eyes were so severe that it looked like there were black circles around them. It was the same woman who had pointed her out during the all-hands meeting. “You want to stop that fucking noise, please?” the woman said. “People’re
trying
to sleep.”

“Sorry.”

The woman started back, then stopped, peering around the door, recognizing Hallie. She shook her head but said nothing more and disappeared into her room.

Hallie needed to talk to Fida. There were too many complications flying around in her head. It might not be saying much, given his condition, but she thought he was the best person to help her sort them out. She wasn’t exactly sure what that said about her own condition.

She tried the laboratory where Fida and Emily had been working, and where she had secured the halophile sample, but he wasn’t there, either. In addition to everything else, they needed to decide what to do with the new biomatter. He had said that their other samples had survived as long as they were kept in water taken from the cryopeg but died soon after removal. She didn’t want to repeat that mistake.

She called and had Fida paged. Once again she went to the cafeteria and sat at a table with a cup of chlorinated coffee to wait. After fifteen minutes she grew impatient, and after thirty she started to worry.

She knocked on Graeter’s door, heard a growl that sounded something like “Enter,” and went in. She saw that he had replaced the woman’s picture on his wall with a fresh one, which, as yet, showed only a few punctures. Six darts lay neatly aligned on the right side of his desk. A stack of forms sat in front of him.

“Mr. Graeter, we need to talk.”

“Can it wait? You can’t imagine the paperwork required when someone dies here. And three?” He shook his head.

“No. Look, I’m a microbiologist. You know that. You’re probably
an engineer by education. You think in numbers and angles. I think in pathogens and infections.”

She at least had his attention. “And?”

“You know that old saying, ‘Once an incident, twice a coincidence, three times a pattern’?”

“Heard it somewhere, yes.”

“Well?”

“You think the three women’s deaths are somehow connected.”

“I think it would be wise to assume they are and see where it leads.”

“That’s your take on what happened. Mine is different.”

“What is it?”

“Pole kills in lots of ways.”

What the hell is wrong with these people?
she wondered. “That’s pretty much what Merritt said. But it sounds to me like you both are trying to explain these deaths away. I understand the reasons why you might want to do that. But wouldn’t it be wise to at least consider other possibilities?”

“I am considering them. I had Doc look into what happened, as you know. He can’t do much, but it’s all we have until conditions change and planes can land. You heard his statement about Lanahan and Montalban. His preliminary opinion is that an allergic reaction caused Bacon’s death.”

“And you buy all of that?”

He looked up sharply. “Did you go to medical school?”

“I don’t buy it. Bacon had been here almost a year, right?”

“I’m not an allergist. Neither are you, last time I checked. Doc is running some blood tests.”

“Did he say what kind? How long they would take?”

“What difference could it make?”

“Is he doing anything else? Growing cultures?”

“Jesus. I don’t know. Can you grow cultures from blood samples?”

“Are all the bodies down in the morgue?” she asked.

“You don’t need to worry about them.”

“I’m worried about what they might have left behind up here.”

“I have no reason to believe there’s danger to anyone else,” Graeter said.