Frozen Solid: A Novel Read online

She had to work hard enough to progress, but not so fast that she burned through all the oxygen too soon. From rock climbing she had developed the ability to shut out fear and distraction by focusing on the tiniest grains and flakes and color variations right in front of her eyes. She did that here, concentrating on the ice in her headlamp’s white circle.

  Finally she chopped what looked and at first felt like solid snow, felt something change, chopped harder, broke through. Created an opening, made it larger, breathed fresh air. It had been close. Her blood carbon dioxide level was dangerously high. For a while she lay there panting. Then she pulled herself out of the tunnel, into the hallway. The force of the cave-in had splintered the office’s plywood walls on either side of the door frame. Snow and ice had flowed out and now formed a sloping pile that blocked half of the passage.

  Something groaned overhead. A cracking noise. The floor twitched. She looked up, heard another crack, turned and started running. Old Pole was less complex than the Underground, and here there were more landmarks that she’d committed to memory on the way in. Several minutes later, she was standing at the foot of the access shaft. Her light shone all the way to its top.

  There was no ladder.

  Someone had pulled it up. Why would anyone do that? Only two possible reasons: They didn’t want anybody going down into Old Pole. Or they didn’t want her to leave it. Right now it didn’t matter. What mattered was finding a way out. Maybe there were other access shafts. She would have to search the whole complex, corridor by corridor, room by room. There was no telling where else Polies might have gained entrance or where original shafts might exist. At any moment, the whole thing could come down on her. While that was always true in caves, as well, she knew that snow and ice would be less stable than solid rock. Even if she located another shaft, the chances of finding a ladder dangling handily for her convenience were slim. But there was nothing else to do.

  She retraced her earlier route, moving through the galley, stopping at the T intersection. She stepped out into the intersecting passage, searching for some rationale about which way to go. There really wasn’t one. So she would be like a rat in maze, blundering around blind, relying on the most inefficient search method of all: trial and error.

  She had turned right before—a trial in that direction. Not very far, true, but a trial. She turned left, followed that corridor until it dead-ended at a cave-in. She turned around and retraced her steps though that corridor, exploring four other side passages. Two ended in cave-ins, two others with plywood walls. She went back to the point where she had started. Having explored everything the left corridor offered, she would do a more complete search of the right.

  Half an hour later, she was back where she had started. Her primary light was dimming. She was thirsty and shivering and feeling weak. When had she last eaten? Couldn’t remember. Felt dizzy, took two steps, faltered. Stood carefully, one hand on the ice wall to steady herself while her head cleared. Started to move again, stopped. She stood perfectly still, then stepped out into the center of the corridor. Turned a full circle.

  She yanked off her clumsy overmitts and removed the thick wool Dachstein mitts underneath, leaving only a pair of pile gloves. They would keep her hands from going numb for maybe sixty seconds. That should be enough for her to unzip one of the Big Red’s pockets and find what she wanted. It took ten seconds to get the stiff zipper working, another five to pull it open. Ten more to search around in the cavernous pocket, feeling and discarding the energy bar, the multitool, cellphone, spare headlamp batteries. Finally feeling the unmistakable shape of the thing she sought, she removed a small metal cylinder. Unscrewing its top, she withdrew a wooden match, struck it against the cylinder’s abrasive bottom, and waited for the flame to stabilize. Then she very carefully raised it high over her head, as if offering the tiny fire to some ancient deity.

  53

  “SHE DID NOT STRIKE ME AS THE TYPE WHO IS LATE,” GUILLOTTE said.

  “No. We’ll give her another fifteen minutes, then go looking,” Merritt said.

  It only took ten. “We were beginning to worry about you,” Merritt said when Hallie banged through the door. Then, looking at her more closely: “What happened to your face? How did it get all scratched like that?”

  “I’m calling the dive.”

  “What? Why?” Merritt said. Guillotte moved to one side, between Hallie and the door.

  “I found Fida down in Old Pole. Dead. Then I almost got buried by a cave-in. A few feet one way or the other and I’d still be there.”

  “How did you get out?” Guillotte asked.

  “In caving, you follow moving air to find an exit. It worked in Old Pole, too. When Rockie’s Cat went down, it exposed one of the passageways. I found it by following moving air and climbed out. The hammers I’d used were still there.”

  Guillotte was staring at Hallie with something like admiration, shaking his head. “Incroyable. You are a tough woman to kill.”

  She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “What?”

  “You’re diving,” Merritt said. “Get your gear on.”

  “I just told you I don’t want to dive.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you want.”

  Hallie suddenly understood. “So this is about the extremophile? And money. I didn’t think you were one of those, Agnes.”

  “We need to kill her.” Guillotte might have been ordering escargot. Hallie turned to stare. He said, “I thought yanking out one of those timbers would be the end of you.”

  She was already scanning for a weapon. The workbench was a veritable armory: hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, a couple of blowtorches.

  “Do not even think about that.” Guillotte moved to within arm’s reach of Hallie. “It would only make this much longer and more painful than it has to be.” To Merritt he said, “Let us get to it.” He stepped closer and clamped one hand around the back of Hallie’s neck. He had to reach up to do it, but his grip felt like a band of iron. His breath smelled heavily of alcohol. But not just alcohol.

  Licorice.

  Absinthe.

  “It was you,” she said. “You fucking psychopath. You tortured Emily to death.” She felt her hands ball into fists. His grip on her neck tightened.

  “What is she talking about?” Merritt asked. When Hallie had told her about Emily’s murder, she had left out graphic descriptions of the torture.

  “Let me have a few minutes with her. The cooperation will increase quickly, I can promise you,” Guillotte said.

  Merritt waved him quiet again. “What are you talking about?” she asked Hallie.

  This time, Hallie gave her the details. When she had finished, Merritt was pale and looked like she might vomit. She stared at Guillotte. “That was never part of your assignment. Let her go.”

  Hallie felt Guillotte’s grip tighten even more.

  “What did you do with that video?” Merritt asked.

  “I sent a copy of the file to some people in Washington.”

  “She’s lying,” Guillotte said. “You know we disabled comms. Nothing goes out or gets in.”

  “I told Zack Graeter,” Hallie said.

  “You’re lying,” Merritt said.

  “No, she is not,” Guillotte said. “Graeter has a copy.”

  “Then why isn’t he here?” Merritt asked.

  “I have no doubt he will be quickly.” Guillotte shook his head and Hallie felt his grip loosen very slightly. Then he said, “Wait. Why did you come down here if you knew?”

  “I didn’t know it was you until just now.”

  “Ahh, shit,” Guillotte said. He took his hand from Hallie’s neck and stepped back. “Just once, just one fucking time, I would like for the luck to come my way.”

  “You realize what this means?” Merritt said to Guillotte. Her voice was shaking.

  “Of course I do. Triage is compromised. To put it simply, we are all fucked. You need to stay calm, Agnes,” Guillotte said. “At times like this, the most important th
ing is to stay very calm.”

  But Merritt was not calm. Terror and fury were overtaking her. “What were you thinking?”

  “People like him don’t think,” Hallie said. “They act on instinct. Or something worse. You knew about this, Agnes?”

  Merritt turned away from Guillotte to face her. “Not the torture. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “I don’t understand. He’s obviously insane. But you? How could you be involved in something like this?”

  Merritt didn’t answer right away. Instead, she stared at Guillotte. Hallie watched Merritt’s face change into a mask of horror, disgust—and guilt. The pain Hallie saw there reminded her of pictures of Dante’s sinners in hell.

  This was her chance. “What is Triage really about?” she asked Merritt.

  The older woman looked down, then back at Guillotte and shook her head. She turned to Hallie, and when she spoke, there was abject misery in her voice. “A group of people committed to saving the planet from pollution. Human pollution.”

  “You’re talking about overpopulation,” Hallie said. She saw the women bleeding to death, Bacon suffocating. “My God. Are you going to start some kind of pandemic?”

  “No. That’s the beauty of Triage. No one has to die.”

  “Then how can you stop overpopulation?”

  “Neutralize the breeders.”

  “Kill women? For God’s sake, Agnes …”

  “Nobody dies. We don’t kill anybody. We sterilize them.”

  “That would take years, even if you could get governments to do it.”

  “Governments won’t ever do anything. That’s why we created Triage.”

  “Then how—?”

  “The women here will fly back to five continents. Each will carry Triage. The spread will be exponential.”

  “Like smallpox. What is Triage, exactly?”

  “Merritt.” Guillotte’s voice had an edge now. “We need to—”

  Merritt waved him to silence. “Quiet. We’re not all like you. It’s a picornavirus carrying a payload: streptococcus engineered to seek and destroy ovarian cells.” Merritt’s full attention was on Hallie now. Perhaps she thought that confessing, or at least sharing, would ease her pain from learning what Guillotte had done. “It only affects those with a certain genetic marker called the Krauss gene. About half the women on earth have it.”

  “So it’s eugenics all over again. Modern-day Nazis. But how could you infect the women here? I don’t imagine they all consented to—”

  “Doc’s been very busy these last ten days with exit physicals.”

  She remembered: the blood drawing and throat swab.

  “Now put on your dive gear,” Guillotte snapped.

  “What?”

  “I said, Put on your dive gear. Now.”

  “No.”

  Guillotte walked over, fixed black-marble eyes on hers. “You saw what happened to Emily. It would be easy to do similar things to you. Or worse. Gear up. Now.” To Merritt he said, “We will dispose of her first. Then I will deal with Graeter.”

  “But if you kill me, you won’t be able to fake a diving accident,” Hallie said.

  “Oh, you will be quite alive. The needle did not kill Emily, as you recall. It just helped her … emote. The difference here is that if you don’t obey, when I finish, you will be begging us to let you put on your diving gear. And to die, as well.”

  They must have sabotaged some part of her equipment. She had no way of knowing what. So she could gear up now, without coercion, or resist and suffer the consequences. End result the same. If she cooperated, at least she would be in better shape to deal with whatever surprise they had prepared for her.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Guillotte held her gaze for another few moments. She felt a twinge in her gut. Eyes of the Beast, she thought. Whoever said the devil on earth would look like an ordinary man was right.

  They helped her don gear. She thought they would put her into the dry suit that had failed but then understood that they were too smart to do that. She might have told others about the leaks. If she were to be found dead in the flooded suit, it would look suspicious. And even if they didn’t find her body—likely, given the cryopeg’s depth—if she and the failed suit were both missing, it would also give rise to questions. So they gave her one of the station suits. They even switched on her headlamp after securing her helmet over the hood. They would want to make sure that if her body was ever found, everything would be in order. Except the one thing, whatever it was, that they had done to the equipment.

  At last she pulled her mask down, seated it properly, and started shuffling forward, Guillotte supporting the tanks from behind. Merritt walked ahead to stand beside the hole. Hallie caught her eye, making one last attempt to connect, but Merritt looked away.

  Almost to the shaft, Hallie pretended to catch the tip of one fin on something. She stumbled, pitched forward, grabbed the rack of scuba tanks, and yanked it over with all her strength. As tanks hit the floor, she disappeared beneath the surface of the water in the shaft.

  She had feared being positively buoyant, unable to sink fast enough to get away from them. But just the opposite: she plunged like an anchor. She hit the inflator button on her dry suit’s chest.

  Nothing happened.

  So they had disabled the suit’s inflating system. She kept dropping, and the deeper she went, the faster she sank.

  54

  IF SHE COULDN’T ADD AIR, SHE WOULD HAVE TO SUBTRACT WEIGHT.

  She ripped her belt’s quick-release buckle open and dumped twenty-five pounds of lead. Almost immediately her descent slowed. She looked for the white anchor line, but her light beam showed nothing. Her uncontrolled descent had not been dead vertical, then. She would have to make a free ascent and hope that she spotted the line or the shaft mouth on the way up.

  Her computer’s luminous green readout showed a depth of thirty-two feet. She had been sucking hard on her mouthpiece but had been too focused on the uncontrolled descent. Only now did she realize that the regulator was not delivering air. It seemed quite possible that water this cold could freeze up even the best technical regulators. She pushed the purge button. Nothing happened. Finning hard to slow her descent, she removed the regulator and knocked it against the heel of one hand. It still didn’t work. She picked up her backup regulator, hanging on a bungee-cord necklace. She pushed it into her mouth, bit down, inhaled.

  Nothing.

  Forty-eight feet.

  She understood. It wasn’t only the dry suit’s inflator mechanism. After she’d tested both regulators on the surface, they had simply turned off her air and argon supplies while she’d been shuffling toward the shaft. It would have been easy for Guillotte to do that, without her feeling a thing, as he walked behind her.

  It was one of the oldest and most common causes of fatalities, overeager divers killed by their rush to get in the water. They hurried through all the predive donning and forgot the most important thing of all: opening valves to send air to regulators and the buoyancy-control system. How many dead divers had she read about who were found with their air turned off? Too many to count. Since divers used the same gas they breathed to inflate their buoyancy compensators and dry suits, they hit the water and, unable to arrest their descents, plunged too deep to reach the surface on the one lungful of air they had taken with them into the water. It was possible to reach back and turn on the air oneself, but an uncontrolled descent’s suffocating panic and bursting eardrums destroyed many a diver’s presence of mind. She tried that now, but with so many layers and the thick dry suit, she couldn’t even come close to the valve knobs.

  Finning furiously, she arrested her descent and began slowly rising, looking desperately for the line or shaft, seeing nothing. At thirty feet her chest was on fire. Her hands and face tingled, and her peripheral vision started to close down. She was near the point where spasms would start convulsing her diaphragm, a result of the autonomic system’s involuntary attempt
to breathe. She might resist that for a few seconds, but then the carbon dioxide buildup would trip a switch in her brain. Her mouth would open wide, and a silent, final gasp would fill her lungs with water.

  Her peripheral vision narrowed. As though looking through the wrong end of a telescope, she saw what seemed to be blobs of liquid, molten silver trapped against the ice ceiling. It was exhaled air from Emily’s and her own dives. She knew that it had only about 5 percent less oxygen than fresh air.

  She aimed for the largest silver bubble she could see, one about the size of a watermelon, in a cavity in the ice ceiling. She spat her regulator out and pressed her lips into the silvery mass. The hole in the ceiling was almost a foot deep, allowing her to push her face into the air pocket. She opened her mouth and breathed.

  She held the air deep in her lungs for several seconds to let her system extract the maximum amount of oxygen. She put her face back in the water, exhaled bubbles away from the pocket to keep the air in it fresh, then took in more air. She did this until she felt her body’s air hunger fade, and then she kept doing it longer to stabilize her blood oxygen level.

  She filled her lungs and pushed down, away from the ceiling, rotating 360 degrees, trying to light up the white guideline with her headlamp beam. She saw nothing but cloudy water. She exhaled, breathed again from the air pocket, and this time added the illumination from handheld lights to her headlamp beam. The extra lumens did it. She spotted the line twenty feet to her left.

  She exhaled deeply to exhaust as much residual air as possible, then filled her lungs as fully as she could. She swam into the shaft mouth and started ascending. She had not been down long enough to worry about decompression sickness, and the water’s pressure, which had worked against her descending, now helped, especially without the weight belt. Pockets of gas in her dry suit expanded, speeding her rise, as did the air in her lungs, forcing more oxygen into her system.

  She looked up at the bright circle of the shaft’s mouth and hoped that it would be enough.