Frozen Solid: A Novel Page 19

  A knock on the door. Guillotte and Doc came in. Blaine related the conversation with Hallie Leland. Merritt told them about her own.

  “Maynard thinks we should call Gerrin. I’m on the fence. Let’s hear your thoughts.”

  “Do it,” Doc said, his voice unsteady. “Damn the risk. It feels like things are starting to—”

  “Will you take those goddamned glasses off?” Blaine interrupted. “This is a serious discussion.”

  “It hurts my eyes,” Doc said. “You know that.”

  “Stop it,” Merritt said.

  “Leland may not know everything,” Blaine said. “But she knows enough to suspect that there’s a lot more. And she doesn’t strike me as the type who gives up easily.”

  “No,” Merritt said. “She isn’t. But Maynard, Gerrin will want to know what went wrong. It will be his first question.”

  “The answer is that nothing went wrong.” Blaine’s voice got louder. “I engineered a picornavirus that carries a strep bacterium payload. Not a big deal, actually. The real challenge was genetically engineering the streptococcus strain to have affinity for ovarian cells.”

  “He’s not going to care about that,” Doc said. “He will want to know why three women died here after I swabbed their throats and drew blood with contaminated instruments. I want to know that myself.”

  “Keep your voices down, both of you,” Merritt said.

  “You know what he is going to think, Maynard,” Guillotte said. “That you fucked up the genetics.”

  “Something else killed those women, I tell you,” Blaine protested. But it was too quick and too loud.

  “I hope you can do better than that for Gerrin,” Guillotte said.

  “Do you want to know something? That man scares me. Me. There is something in him. A huge anger. Like a grenade about to explode.”

  “Do you think we should call, Rémy?” Merritt asked.

  He shrugged, appearing more concerned about a hangnail. “Call, do not call, makes no difference to me either way. But here is something else. I followed Leland down to the morgue a little while ago.”

  “What?” Merritt snapped. “Why? What did she do?”

  “I am not sure. There is a heavy curtain. I did not want her to know I was there.”

  She looked at each of them in turn. “That’s it, then. We call. What is wrong with that woman?”

  “There are some people who cannot help themselves,” Guillotte said.

  “From doing what?” Blaine asked.

  “The right thing.” Guillotte shook his head.

  “I’ll make the call later tonight,” Merritt said. To Guillotte: “How much longer can you keep comms interdicted?”

  “Four hours. Eight, at most. Even these engineers here will figure a work-around at some point.”

  “This was never about killing women,” Doc said. He was hugging himself.

  “We need to kill her,” Guillotte said, finally pulling the hangnail out with his teeth. He didn’t wince. Blood oozed from beneath his fingernail.

  “That’s Gerrin’s decision,” Merritt said. No one spoke after that.

  Guillotte left first, with Doc right behind him. Before Blaine made it through the door, Merritt said, “Maynard, stay here for a bit. There’s something I’d like you to do.”

  43

  AFTER ANOTHER LONG MEDITATION IN THE WOMEN’S ROOM, HALLIE hurried back to her own. There were things she needed to do: talk to Graeter, check the cultures, look in on Vishnu, try to get a couple of emails out. She started on an email but fell asleep in the middle of writing it. She was still sitting there, arms folded on the keyboard, head on her arms, when someone started hitting her on the head. She woke and realized that there was indeed hammering, but on the room door rather than her. Then a shout, louder than the hammering:

  “It’s Graeter. Answer the door!”

  “Coming!”

  “Weather’s eased,” he said when she opened the door. “We’re going out to look for Fida. I thought you’d want to come.” He started away, said over his shoulder, “Meet me in front of the station in twenty.”

  “What day is this?”

  She expected a strange look, but he must have been accustomed to such questions from Polies. “Wednesday. Little after ten.” He turned to go.

  “Mr. Graeter—wait.”

  Before she had gone to sleep, there had been something she’d wanted to tell Graeter. Maybe quite a few somethings. She fought to pull the things up from memory. Got one of them. “I need to show you something in the—”

  “Not now. The goddamned pope could be coming in and he’d have to wait. Search and Rescue takes priority over everything.”

  Thirty minutes later, Hallie stood beside Graeter’s yellow snowmo. She had brought her Leatherman tool, which had all kinds of uses. Left the dive knife behind this time. Around them, operators sat astride six other growling machines, their headlight beams streaking the solid dark. Shimmering green and purple lights flowed across the sky.

  “I know how to drive a snowmobile. Another machine would increase the probability of finding him,” she said.

  He appeared to give that some thought. “Not a bad idea, but SORs say no. Hop on.”

  He checked the emergency box contents, then sat in front of her, pumped his raised fist twice, and snowmo engines screamed as operators fanned out in all directions. Leaving the station, he had explained the protocol: “For a Search and Rescue like this, the station is divided into grids assigned to specific team members. We do regular SAR drills, so a searcher gets to know his grid like a good cop on the beat. That’s the theory, anyway.”

  Hallie wore full ECW gear, including a face mask, and Graeter’s body in front of her on the snowmobile broke the wind, but she felt the cold seeping in anyway, despite the fact that it was “just” seventy-two degrees below zero. She hesitated to think what the windchill factor was on a snowmo going thirty miles an hour.

  As SAR leader, Graeter had no assigned grid. He parked at the end of the iceway, where they could see most of the station and the surrounding area. For an hour they watched the snowmobiles’ headlight beams slashing the dark, stopping, flashing off as team members searched buildings and open spaces. One after another, they began radioing back reports: “Block B2 complete. Nothing found.” When the last transmission ended, Graeter said, “God damn” and walked away, his back to Hallie and the station.

  “Mr. Graeter.” She started after him, caught up, touched his shoulder. He turned. She could see only his eyes. Long experience underwater had taught her that eyes were not just windows on the soul. They were remarkably reliable indicators of a person’s mental state. They showed panic even before a victim knew it was coming, and when that happened they looked like thin glass pushed out of shape by a strong wind. Graeter’s didn’t look like that. Instead, they looked immeasurably sad.

  “Drive that thing back. I need some time,” Graeter said.

  “Sure.”

  But she didn’t leave immediately. She sat on the snowmo, watching him, the phrase “taking a penguin” echoing in her mind. Graeter stood there, staring out into the wasteland, for a long time, then headed back toward her. She had been trying to decide what to tell him about first, Emily’s murder, or the bacteria cultures, or Maynard’s confession. About halfway back, he caught a boot toe on a sastrugi ridge and stumbled, surprising her because until then he had been sure-footed and agile. Seeing it, she thought that the other things could wait. There was enough to deal with here. Neither Maynard nor the bacteria were going anywhere, after all.

  He stood beside the snowmo, still looking out and away.

  “Go ahead, take it back,” he said. “I’ll walk to the station.”

  She stood, nearly as tall as he, and looked him in the eye. “You were not responsible for Fida’s death—if he is dead. Nor Emily’s, nor the other three. There might have been more, if not for you and your SORs.”

  When he answered, his voice had less rasp than she had yet
heard.

  “Everything here is my responsibility, Leland. Every leaking pipe, rusting beam, fuel shortage, sore throat, plugged toilet, broken light, flat tire, power outage. When I go to sleep at night, I hear old faucets dripping and sad people crying.” The words came faster and faster until they just stopped, and Hallie understood that such things and a thousand others must have gnawed at Graeter’s brain every waking minute and invaded his sleep as well. It was the first time she had seen them take over and come flying out, but now he regained control.

  He raised a hand, possibly intending to touch her shoulder. She might have flinched, or he might have thought better of it. The hand dropped.

  “Go ahead and take that thing back,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

  44

  “DAVID, IT MUST BE UNGODLY EARLY THERE IN D.C.,” IAN KENDALL said.

  “A little after midnight.” Gerrin was sitting at the desk in the study of his modest home in the Virginia suburb called Vienna. He lived alone, had never married—had not avoided women, just the entanglements of matrimony. He was looking at Kendall and Belleveau’s video-call images.

  “Shortly past nine-thirty in the morning in New Delhi,” Jean-Claude Belleveau said. “This must be important.”

  “There are complications.” Gerrin described the deaths of Lanahan, Montalban, and Bacon. Merritt had told him about Leland, as well, but he didn’t mention that part of their problem.

  “Is there reason to believe they were related to Triage?” Kendall asked.

  “It can’t be ruled out,” Gerrin said.

  “This is not good,” Kendall said. “How long before winterover flyout?”

  “Tomorrow,” Gerrin said. “If the temperature allows.”

  “God in heaven,” Belleveau said. “What does Orson think about the deaths?”

  Gerrin sighed. “He is afraid. And that makes me afraid. I have worried about him from the beginning.”

  “It was not easy finding a physician sympathetic to our cause and willing to spend a year at the South Pole,” Belleveau said.

  “He might well be afraid,” Kendall said. “It was his swabs and needles did the work, didn’t they?”

  Belleveau said something in French. Then, in English: “How could this have happened?”

  “Conjoining picornavirus and streptococcus was not child’s play, Jean-Claude,” Gerrin said.

  Kendall waved a hand dismissively. Like most Englishmen, he was slow to anger, but once aroused, his temper was fierce. The glow was beginning. “Please, David. Joining bacteria and viruses is nothing new. Fischetti and Schuch discovered new symbiotic relationships between B. anthracis and viruses back in 2009. Even before that, Chisholm and Zeng at MIT figured out that viruses were manipulating genes in both Synechococcus and Prochlorococcus for their own benefit. Conjoining was not the challenge here. It was altering strep’s genetic sequencing to produce ovarian-cell affinity. If Blaine bollixed that and those bacteria are attacking other cell types …” He shook his head, unable to find a term of adequate gravity.

  “Blaine knows his work,” Gerrin said.

  “Victor Frankenstein thought he did, too,” Belleveau put in. “Trite to say, but true nonetheless.”

  “David, we are talking about three dead women.” Kendall sounded more disturbed with each sentence.

  “Four, actually,” Belleveau pointed out.

  “Of course you’re right,” Kendall said. “But the first wasn’t from Triage. What else do we know?”

  “Morbell says that two women exsanguinated. The third suffered some kind of allergic reaction that closed her airway.”

  “What about the people at the station? What are they saying?”

  “He told them that one woman’s death was almost certainly a result of throat surgery. Another had had a difficult cesarean delivery. The third, he’s supposed to be running tests on her blood to detect allergies.”

  “Killing was never part of our plan. Never.” Kendall’s face was red.

  “None of the mice died,” Gerrin said. “Nor any of the dogs or cats or chimps, I remind you.” He paused, held up his hand, let seconds pass. “My friends, we have seen the future. In my country alone, every year half a million children under the age of five starve to death. Stop and really think about that. Starve. To. Death. We witnessed dogs eating corpses in Lagos, and we know people are eating them there and elsewhere. Fifty years from now, or likely sooner, the earth’s population will exceed fifteen billion. Those estimates of nine billion that governments throw out, by mutual agreement, are useful only for preventing panic. There will be famines, resource wars, terminal climate change. People will be eating one another raw. The human race has become a pathogen that will destroy itself and kill this planet in the process. You know all this.”

  “How many women has Morbell inoculated at this point?” Belleveau asked.

  Gerrin closed his eyes, thought. “Thirty-six. No, thirty-seven, counting Leland. What are you thinking, Jean-Claude?”

  “If three out of thirty-seven die, that is roughly eight percent, correct?”

  “Yes.” Gerrin saw where Belleveau was going. Not a destination he wished for, but he could think of no good way to derail the conversation.

  “Bear with me,” Belleveau said. “Approximately half the women on earth carry the Krauss gene—about one and a half billion. The plan was for Triage to infect only those.”

  “Yes,” Gerrin said, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice.

  “Eight percent of one and a half billion is one hundred and twenty million,” Belleveau said, with finality.

  “David,” Kendall said. “My God. I can’t even begin to imagine that.” There was an audible tremor in the older man’s voice.

  Not in Gerrin’s. “I must remind you that we don’t know Triage caused their deaths.”

  “But we goddamned bloody well have to assume it did, don’t we now?” Kendall shouted. “This was never part of what we were about. God in heaven.”

  “I do not think he is listening to us anymore,” Belleveau said. To Gerrin: “We need to discuss alternatives. What happens if we decide to stop now?”

  “We would have to remove the women,” Gerrin said.

  “Remove? To where?” Belleveau asked.

  “I believe he means ‘excise,’ ” Kendall said. “That was the word you used for the first one, wasn’t it, David?”

  “Not possible,” Belleveau said. If Kendall now sounded horrified, Belleveau sounded appalled.

  “It is possible, actually,” Gerrin said. “A plan for that contingency has been in place since the beginning. An accident. No connection to us.”

  “You never told us anything about that,” Kendall said.

  “No. But such a plan was essential.”

  “What would happen?” Belleveau asked.

  “There are options depending on a number of variables. The most likely involves an accidental explosion. Earlier in the year it would not have worked because people were living outside the station. Now everybody is in that one place, so …”

  The silence stretched. Kendall said, “Someone would have to survive, though, wouldn’t they? I mean, whoever made this happen would presumably not want to take his own life in the process.”

  “That has been accommodated,” Gerrin said. “Our security asset will facilitate the explosion. He will wait at the runway, believing a plane will retrieve him.”

  “Believing?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there will be no plane?”

  “No.”

  “But excising the women means excising the men, as well, does it not?” Belleveau said. “I’m sorry. I cannot accept this. I will not be a part of it.” He sat back and crossed his arms, his expression grave.

  “There are only two options, Jean-Claude,” Gerrin said. “This, or take the greater risk.”

  “That’s not correct, actually.” Kendall sat forward, new energy in his voice. “There is another option.”

  “N
o,” Gerrin said. “There is not.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “What do you see that we are missing, Ian?” Belleveau asked.

  “We tell the people they are infected. Not just the women. Everybody. Quarantine them long enough to find a countermeasure.”

  No one spoke for some time. Then Gerrin said, “We might as well walk into the International Criminal Court and confess.”

  “No. Listen to me,” Kendall said. “Morbell could announce that he has identified the pathogen that’s making people sick. Say it was in the blood samples he’s already obtained. Nothing about having created it. Nobody would know where it came from. The people would believe that, wouldn’t they? The station could be placed under strict quarantine. No one comes or goes until a countermeasure is produced.”

  “They would all have to winter over. Are their facilities adequate for such research?” Belleveau directed the question to Gerrin.

  “Yes,” he said. “Some things at the Pole are skimped on, but science is not one.”

  “Well then. Wintering over is the best possible containment, isn’t it? They could involve other government labs. Even private industry, if they saw fit, couldn’t they?” Kendall asked.

  “It is even possible—remotely—that an existing antibiotic might prove effective,” Belleveau mused. “It won’t against the viral component, though.”

  “The viral component is of no consequence,” Kendall said. “That is simply the carrier. It’s the streptococcus payload that Blaine engineered to destroy ovarian cells. We don’t know what antibiotics might work against it.”

  “Do we know what antibiotics they may have on hand down there?” Belleveau asked.

  “Stockpiles of amoxicillin, ampicillin, and ciprofloxacin sufficient to deal with infections during winterover,” Gerrin said. “Protocol for any serious illness before winterover is evacuation to McMurdo and Christchurch.”

  “Too bad they don’t have clindamycin or lincomycin. Effective against strep,” Belleveau said.

  “But this strep? We don’t know, do we? We could get lucky, though,” Kendall mused. “They might be able to air-drop things, even if they can’t land. That’s been done in previous emergencies, I believe.”