Frozen Solid: A Novel (3 page)

Barnard glanced at the clock on his desk: 5:12
A.M
. It was 5:12
A.M
. on Monday at the South Pole, as well. All lines of longitude converged there, so it existed, in a way, out of time. Since the National Science Foundation, just outside Washington, ran operations there, NSF time was Pole time. Not only habit had gotten Barnard out of bed early that morning. He had been awake for at least an hour before rising, thinking about Hallie. And he had suffered the same thoughts, off and on, for two days running.

Donald Barnard, MD, PhD, was the director of BARDA—the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority—created by President George W. Bush in 2006 to counter biowarfare threats.
BARDA also conducted a clandestine initiative called Project BioShield. Thus Barnard’s work required that he keep secrets—a good many, really. He was not the kind of man to keep secrets from himself, however. An only child whose father had died when he was seven, Barnard had always envied friends from big families. He had wanted a sprawling family of his own, had entertained visions of himself old and doting, rocking in a large chair in front of a fire, his lap overflowing with grandchildren while his sons and daughters stood around drinking wine and laughing over old sibling dustups.

But then, during his postdoc in Strasbourg, he met Lucianne, and later they got married in the States. It was 1979, and everyone understood that the earth was a lifeboat sunk to the gunwales by proliferating billions. He and Lucianne agreed that having just one child was the right thing to do, and that had been Nicholas. Barnard had never felt bad for their son. There were some drawbacks to being an only child but more advantages, emotional and material both, as he himself knew.

Still, another of the secrets he had not kept from himself was how much he would have appreciated a daughter, and especially one like Hallie Leland. There were many things to admire about her, but perhaps more than anything else he loved that she was a challenger. He sometimes joked that, given the power of speech at birth, she might have questioned the obstetrician about his credentials. She accepted no wisdom as conventional, no practice as standard, and reflexively distrusted authority in all its forms. Barnard hadn’t seen many people like her in his time, and he knew that the few who had the intellect to match their skepticism were those rare and precious creatures called natural-born scientists.

It took one to know others. It also took one to understand how they, especially when young, simmered along in an almost continual state of impatience, waiting for sluggards to deduce what they had discovered long ago. Barnard had been like that earlier in his career. Hallie was like that now. He had not been the easiest person to be around then, and she was not now.

But all of that was old knowledge. This was Monday, and Barnard was dealing with something new. Hallie had flown out on Thursday afternoon. She had called from LAX very early on Friday morning and sent an email from Christchurch on Saturday. Having heard nothing since, he didn’t even know if she had arrived at the South Pole.

But communication wasn’t the thing bothering him most. It was, rather, the South Pole assignment itself, which he had given her. Had been directed to give her, more precisely, by his own boss, DCDC—Director, Centers for Disease Control. He could have pushed back, of course; he’d been around long enough and earned enough respect to do that. CDC directors were political appointees, came and went, and he had seen more arrive and depart than he cared to remember. At the time, though, there had seemed no reason to object. And Hallie herself had been thrilled, as he’d known she would be, with the opportunity. Most microbiologists would spend their entire careers without getting to the South Pole, one of the most extreme—and coveted—research postings on earth.

But by Friday afternoon, something had started bothering him, a mental splinter that at first he could not tease out. He looked at the possible reasons, one after another. The South Pole was a dangerous place, true, but no worse than other realms Hallie’s work had taken her into. The previous year, for instance, she’d almost died in a Mexican supercave called Cueva de Luz, Cave of Light, which had been full of traps. A swamp of bat shit teeming with pathogens. Acid lakes. Five-hundred-foot sheer drops. Flooded tunnels. At least the South Pole was aboveground, settled, and civilized. So the problem wasn’t where he had sent her.

The work itself—technical ice diving—was also hazardous but, again, not worse than other diving her work had required, in caves like that vast Mexican labyrinth or on deep wrecks involving possible biohazards, to name just two. So it wasn’t what he had sent her to do, either.

He had known where he was sending her and what she would be
doing, and he had been, if not happy with those challenges, at least comfortable that she was equal to both. It was only after some time that he’d realized that his unease derived not from the destination or the work.

He had called the director back. Laraine Harris had taken her PhD from Tulane and retained a rich and musical Louisiana accent. Barnard could have listened to her talk all day long, about pretty much anything, just for the sound of her voice.

“I had a question about Emily Durant,” he said.

“The scientist who died,” Harris said.

“Right. When you told me about Emily, I didn’t think to ask how she died. Do you know, by any chance?”

If Harris thought his question odd, her tone didn’t suggest that. “I asked them—NSF—the same question.”

“What did they say?”

“I’m sorry, that information isn’t available. Quote, unquote.”

“Does that seem”—what was the right word here?—“unusual?”

“Maybe a little. But it was an official personnel request, not a next-of-kin notification. They might not know themselves.”

That rang true. Communication in Washington was as complex and nuanced as a Japanese tea ceremony. Laraine had just described one of the invisible rules. If someone said information wasn’t available, back off. Frontal attacks rarely worked here. Much better to find and exploit the vulnerable chink or flank.

They said goodbye, and he sat staring out a window. The view from his office wasn’t much: a big parking lot, mostly empty this late on a Friday, followed by vacant buildings and warehouses. Beyond those, the green woods were usually pleasant to look at. Today, though, was standard winter weather in Washington, and the distance held only gray fog.

He became aware of a big paper clip that he had twisted and bent, without realizing it, while they’d talked. He set it aside, picked up the white meerschaum pipe he hadn’t smoked for sixteen years, then set that down, too. Stared at the blank legal pad he kept on the right side
of his desk, toyed with the fountain pen stationed on top of the pad. He picked up the pen and wrote one word:

Bowman

He added a question mark:
Bowman?

Not yet, he thought. Wait to see if Hallie calls. But not much longer.

“
THANKS FOR YOUR CONCERN. TRUTHFULLY, I DON’T FEEL SO
good,” Hallie told Graeter. “Which isn’t surprising because it took four days and nights to get here, and I can’t recall when I really slept last. But don’t worry on my account. I’ve been to twenty-four thousand feet on mountains and almost two miles deep in caves.”

He snorted.

“You find that funny?”

“We get lots of climbers down here, all full of themselves. ‘I got this high on Mount Rumdoodle’ or whatever.” Shook his head. “You stay on one of your mountains, what, a week or two? Hit maybe forty below? Deal with fifty-, sixty-knot winds? People stay at Pole for a year. It
averages
one hundred and five degrees below zero in winter. Hurricanes with hundred-knot winds can last a week. Crevasses big enough to swallow locomotives. So yes, I do chuckle at the ignorance of fungees.”

She waited, understanding that he was enjoying himself, impressing a newcomer.

“You’ll feel worse, believe me,” he went on. “There’s something
called T3 syndrome. Your thyroid shrivels up. Memory goes. Wild mood swings. Some people start seeing things, hearing them.”

“There’s a thing in deep caves called the Rapture. It—”

“That movie,
The Shining
? Where Nicholson starts chasing his family with an ax?”

“Yes?”

“T3 syndrome. You probably won’t be around long enough to get a bad case. But a lot of people here have been. So you know.”

She needed to tell him something else. Or maybe ask. What? Altitude addlement leading to brain cramp. Buy some time. She nodded at three framed photographs of young men in Navy whites on his desk.

“Your sons?”

“No.”

She waited again.

So did he, again. The hell with small talk, then.

“You probably know this already,” she said, “but, for the record, I’m here on temporary assignment from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, BARDA, part of CDC, in Washington. On loan to the National Science Foundation to help Dr.… um …” What the hell was his name?
Lots
of syllables.

“Fido Muktapadhay,” Graeter said.
Mook-ta-POD-hay
. “Who everybody calls Fido, for obvious reasons.”

“Right. To help complete his research project. CDC rushed me down here. I was told that he and Emily Durant were working on deep ice-core samples and found something unusual. Finishing before winterover was urgent.”

“Was there a question in there somewhere?”

“Do you know any more about their research?”

“No. More importantly, you haven’t been briefed about this place.”

“I did talk with—”

“Not by me. My point.”

“Could this wait until I get some sleep?”

“Here’s the quick and dirty. I’m in command here. Just like the
captain of a ship. I can marry you and bury you. The only law at Pole is SORs, and I enforce them.”

“SORs?”

“Didn’t you read your prep material?”

“Nobody gave me prep material.”

“Jesus Christ. SORs are the Station Operating Regulations. They must be obeyed to the letter. Failure to do so gets people hurt. Or dead. Clear?”

She gave a curt nod. Poked in the chest like this, Hallie was more inclined than most to poke back harder. She had inherited that tendency not just from her soldier father but also from her horse-trainer mother. Growing up with two older brothers had sharpened it nicely. Now, standing half-asleep and fully irritated in the stinky closet of an office, she was finding it harder not to poke, terra incognita be damned.

Then he woke her up a little. He opened a desk drawer, removed a black leather ID folder and what she recognized as a SIG Sauer semiautomatic pistol. He flipped the folder to show a brass, star-shaped badge, then set it and the pistol on his desk, the gun’s muzzle pointing to one side, watching her all the while.

Maybe we’re going to play spin the pistol, she thought, immediately recognizing the weirdness of that idea. Be serious. He wants to see how I do with guns.

“Something else you need to know,” he said. “The station manager is a deputy U.S. marshal. Sworn and trained. So I am the law here. Literally.”

At its deepest, exhaustion was like being drunk; it dissolved restraint, invited mischief. Her next action had a life of its own.

“May I?” Before he could speak, she picked up the SIG, released the magazine, caught it in her left hand, worked the slide to eject the chambered round, caught that spinning in the air in her palm beside the magazine. It pleased her no end to see how much effort it took for him to look unimpressed. “You like the forty-cal better than the three fifty-seven?” she asked.

“So you know guns,” he said. “Fine. Now put my pistol down.”

“Grew up on a farm in Virginia. I like the magnum’s muzzle velocity, myself.” She popped the magazine back into place, thumbed the slide release and then the trigger release, set the pistol back on the desk, and stood the fat ejected round beside it. “I don’t like one chambered. No safety on a SIG,” she said.

“The forty-cal is what they issue. Safeties are great for target punchers. Slow in a fight, though.” He put the badge folder and gun away. “To finish up, just so we’re clear. Merritt keeps the research going. I keep people alive. You, just long enough to ship out in a few days.” It was the first time anything resembling pleasure had crept into his voice. That did it.

“Mr. Graeter, what could I possibly have done to piss you off so much in the very brief time we’ve been acquainted?”

His expression did not change. Did the man have any muscles in that face? “Bringing you down here pissed me off.”

“Why would it do that? I’m here to help. And we’ve never met.”

“Nothing personal. This is the easiest place on earth for the inexperienced and unwitting to die.” He fixed her with a hard stare, but not before his eyes flicked to the photographs on his desk.

“I’m experienced. And, most of the time, relatively witting.”

If he appreciated the irony, it didn’t show. “Nice to know. Keep this in mind at all times: we are like an outpost on Mars, except colder and darker.”

“I get it. I really do.” She just wanted some sleep.

“One last thing: do not go near the Underground or Old Pole.”

“What are they?”

“Read your station manual.”

“I didn’t get a station manual.”

“Jesus keelhauling Christ.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. “Did the CDC at least take care of you?”

“Centers for Disease Control? In Washington, you mean?”

“Clothing Distribution Center. At McMurdo. For your extreme-cold-weather gear.”

“Yes.”

“Wait one.” He unlocked the gray cabinet on the wall behind his desk. Scores of door keys hung from small numbered hooks. He removed one. The keys on all the other hooks were duplicates. There was no key left behind on the hook from which Graeter had taken this one.

“Where’s the backup?” She pointed to the empty hook.

For the first time, he looked more uncomfortable than angry. “Missing.” He locked the cabinet and pushed the key across his desk. “Dorm wing A, second level, number two-three-seven.” He told her how to find it. “Believe in ghosts, Ms. Leland?”