Frozen Solid: A Novel Page 3

  “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?”

  “Yes.” It pleased her immensely to see that he wasn’t expecting that.

  “Good. You may have company. It was Emily Durant’s room. That bother you?”

  “Not one bit. We were good friends. I hope she visits.” Ha, she thought. Got him again.

  “You knew Durant?”

  “She worked at BARDA before NSF. We did a lot of things together. She saved my life one time, after we got avalanched climbing Denali. It’s been a few years, though. Do you believe in ghosts, Mr. Graeter?”

  His eyes flicked again to the black-framed photographs. “No,” he said, and even though she had just met the man, she knew he was lying. Maybe she would find out why. At this point, she was too tired to care. But she was curious about one thing.

  “Why that room?”

  “With winterover so close, the field units are closed and all personnel, Beakers and Draggers alike, have moved into the station. Every room is occupied. Durant’s opened up when she passed. Come see me tomorrow at noon. We’re finished here now.”

  “Actually, we’re not. No one in D.C. knew much about Em’s death. How did it happen?”

  His face changed, and it was like watching water suddenly freeze. “See Merritt. I told you. Durant worked for her. She found the body.”

  “Maybe, but you’re the station manager. I’d appreciate hearing—”

  “I just said to see Merritt. In the Navy, once was enough, Ms. Leland.”

  “Doctor Leland. And this isn’t the Navy.”

  She waited for him to snap or shout. The more someone did that, the calmer she became—you couldn’t see to fight if you were blind with rage. But his voice was flat.

  “No. But this is my office, and I have work to do. Go see Merritt.” A beat. “If you please.”

  He turned around and began typing on his computer keyboard. She stopped with her hand on the doorknob, looking at the photograph on the wall. The woman had shoulder-length brown hair. Her red blouse’s two top buttons were undone to show swelling breasts. Good skin, upturned nose. Cheerleader-cute rather than model-beautiful. But eye shadow too thick, lips too red, and dark-circled eyes too old for the face spoiled the cheerleader image.

  Hallie knew the type. Every branch had them. Picture-pretty, nail-hard, girls who had fun when the men were gone. She didn’t know what the Navy called them. In the Army, they were known as layaways.

  “Ex-wife, am I right?” It just slipped out. Like the thing with the gun.

  Graeter’s head snapped up.

  “Wonder what she’s doing with your picture.”

  He turned away, the creased back of his neck reddening. He started typing again, and it sounded like little machine guns firing.

  6

  IT WOULD TAKE TWO TRIPS TO GET THE DUFFEL BAGS TO HER ROOM. She bent down, reached for one. Silver sparks filled her eyes and she had to stand quickly, one hand on the wall.

  “Please allow me to help with those.”

  She turned toward a light touch on her shoulder. A smiling, very muscular man put out his hand. He wore jeans, work boots, and a black turtleneck stretched by bulging pectorals and undulating abs. His legs, in tight jeans, were skinny and short. Wil Bowman, the man in her life, had once talked about “prison muscles” on men with massive upper bodies and bird legs. But this fellow did not look like one who had done time. No knuckle tattoos, a firm but not painful handshake, eyes direct but showing hello rather than some odd hunger. A Cousteauean nose and black watch cap worn askew gave him a jaunty, faintly nautical air.

  “Rémy Guillotte,” he said. Ghee-YOTT. “You are just arrived, I think.”

  “I didn’t hear you come up. And yes, you are looking at a total fungee.”

  He laughed. “So you are learning to speak Pole already. Excellent. Dr. Leland, am I right?” He pronounced it Lee-LAND. “I heard you were meeting with Mr. Graeter. I am the station’s dive operations manager, so we will be working together while you are here.”

  It just popped out: “Did you work Emily’s dives?”

  His expression changed. “Poor Dr. Durant. No. That man flew out several days ago. I am a winterover.”

  She would want to see all his certifications and credentials, but not now. “We can talk about the diving later. I really need to get some sleep.”

  He flipped both bags up onto his shoulders. Forty pounds each, she thought. “So let us go find your room.”

  She gathered up her ECW gear and followed. Sensors turned overhead lights on as they approached and off again when they had passed. It was like flowing in a luminous bubble through dark tunnels. Similar to cave diving, in fact. They saw only three people. One had his head down and appeared to be talking to himself. The other two went ri
ght on by, slack-jawed, eyes fixed in thousand-yard stares.

  After they passed, Guillotte said, “I heard what happened in the galley.”

  “I saw it,” Hallie said.

  “Is it true that Dr. Lanahan was vomiting blood?”

  “Probably not vomiting. A hemorrhage, more likely.”

  “This is so tragic,” he said. “In just a few days she would have been flying back to home.”

  “What’s it like? Living here, I mean?”

  He looked thoughtful, considered before answering. “A good question to ask. It is strange at first. A place where everything you know is not true.”

  “How so?”

  “Here the sun comes up once and goes down once in a year, for starters. It all flows from there.”

  “Oh.” She hadn’t thought of that.

  “After some time, you adjust. Or, some people, not.”

  Room A-237 was in the middle of one of the second-level dorm wings. Guillotte opened the door with one hand. The bags stayed balanced on his shoulders.

  “Unlocked?” she asked.

  “Apparently so. The cleaners probably forgot after they are finished.” He followed her in, set the bags down gently, switched on the room light.

  “Thank you very much,” she said. “I could have gotten them myself, but—”

  “Of course you could have. Clearly you are in very fit shape. But this was better, I think. Until you are acclimatized.”

  “You’re right. I’m grateful.”

  “And I am happy to help. Maybe I can show you around later. There are many unusual things here in this Pole place.”

  Alone, she leaned back against the door, too tired to wonder how he had known her name and which room was hers. It was tight even by Motel 6 standards—no bigger than a supermax cell, really—and furnished like a college dorm: white acoustic-tile drop ceiling; single, high bunk bed with drawers underneath; a tall, narrow window that could have been a sheet of black marble. Under it sat a tiny desktop with a computer monitor and keyboard. The computer’s boxy CPU was on the floor beneath the desk.

  She knew what she should do: email Don Barnard, her boss, and Wil Bowman. Her last contact with Barnard had been by email at Christchurch, so he wouldn’t know she’d arrived. Her last with Bowman had been the previous Thursday and less than pleasant. As such scenes are wont to do, this one kept replaying in her mind despite her best efforts to make it stop. It was like trying not to think of a camel after someone says, “Don’t think of a camel.”

  Bowman drove her to Dulles. Minutes from the departures area, she said, without preamble, “I have always been regular as a clock. Every four weeks on the dot. This time, I was eight days late. Until night before last. I really was starting to think …” She let the rest of it trail off.

  “Why didn’t you say anything before?” It took a great deal to discomfit Wil Bowman, but her statement clearly had.

  “I wanted to be sure.”

  Something in her tone must have caught his ear. “That wasn’t the only reason, though.”

  “No, it wasn’t the only one,” she said. She knew he was waiting for her to say more, and she knew, as well, that she should. Why couldn’t she? And why hadn’t she told him sooner? She wasn’t really afraid that he would be angry. In their year together, she’d seen him genuinely angry only three times, and two of those had been with himself. He was not, by any stretch, meek or mild. He was perhaps the most balanced, synchronous man she had ever met, and he was certainly the most dangerous—though not to her. She understood that his work for some unnamed entity buried deep in the intelligence labyrinth occasionally involved killing—“but only those who really need it,” as he’d once said. The thought that he might up and leave had never entered her mind.

  As he sensed and she admitted, there was something else. The trouble was that she hadn’t then understood what, and that was why she hadn’t said anything until they were almost to the airport. Didn’t want to fly off holding a secret, but didn’t want to talk in detail until she’d had more time to sort things out.

  He was already double-parking in front of the soaring terminal. Fifty-five minutes until her flight boarded and her with two huge bags, one full of dive gear that would certainly catch the TSA agents’ attention. Cars were stacking up. A taxi honked. Wind whipped grit against their faces, into their eyes, as they stood by the curb. He tossed her bags onto a redcap’s wagon, then drew her aside.

  “We need to talk more, Hallie.”

  “We do. But I have to go.”

  He held her with his eyes. “There are things you don’t know. About me.”

  That surprised her. He never spoke like that, hated the international-man-of-mystery air some people in his profession affected. She retained enough composure to say, “And about myself, apparently,” which seemed to startle him as well.

  She glanced at the terminal, saw automatic doors clamping shut on a suitcase towed by a limping woman. Those doors weren’t supposed to do that. Electric eyes or infrared sensors. She looked back at Bowman.

  “I have to leave now, Wil.” She kissed him. He held her shoulders lightly, kissed her back, then again, and touched her face. That a man his size could touch so softly never failed to amaze her. “I’ll call from LAX.” She motioned to the redcap, who followed her into the terminal.

  She had needed time to understand her own behavior. Four days and nights of travel with the scene replaying in her head like an endless film loop had been enough. She composed an email on the room’s station computer:

  Hi Wil

  Sixty-eight below and pitch-dark when I stepped onto the ice—at noon. Beats my previous record low by about 25 degrees. I’m exhausted already, four days and nights in planes and terminals, and work hasn’t even started. The South Pole is a very strange place. The people, too—so far, anyway. Mostly, what you notice right off is the dark. Dark outside for thousands of square miles. It’s even dark inside.

  At Dulles, you asked why I didn’t tell you sooner. I didn’t know myself right then. Now I do. I was afraid you’d say that I had no business even thinking about being a mother. And that you might have been right.

  So it was all me. Nothing about you.

  Love,

  Hallie

  She sent that email, then wrote one to Don Barnard, shorter, saying that she had arrived safely, describing the place. She turned off the light, jumped up onto the chest-high bunk, and fell asleep still dressed.

  Guillotte reached the end of Hallie’s corridor, turned into another. After looking up and down that one, he used his cellphone.

  “You may make the call now.”

  7

  SHE AND EMILY WERE SWIMMING IN FRIGID WATER, THICK AS SYRUP, green and purple swirls coiling around them. In a black sky, iridescent birds circled, screaming. Hallie sank away from Emily, floating slowly down, flapping her arms, trying to breathe water now as viscous and silver as molten mercury.

  She awoke and lay still, pulling herself up out of the dream, watching false light images glowing and sparking in her eyes. The room smelled of Lysol and, thanks to four days of traveling without a shower, her. And something else, so faint she had not noticed it until then. Licorice, of all things. She turned on one side, sniffed. The scent, barely discernible, was coming from the bunk mattress. Emily had had a sweet tooth, though more for dark chocolate than licorice, as Hallie remembered. Doubtless a year in this place could change a person in many ways, and who knew—licorice might have been the only candy she could get.

  It had been a long time since Hallie had slept in a top bunk. She sat up, swung her legs over the side, stretched tall, and accidentally punched two of the ceiling’s acoustic tiles, which lifted out of their frames and then fell back into place. For a few moments she didn’t move. Then she got down and turned on the light.

  She climbed back up and knelt on the bunk. Using both hands, she raised one of the tiles she had accidentally hit and laid it aside. She reached up through the vacant space and
carefully explored the back of the second tile. Her fingers touched something metallic, shaped like a deck of cards, but with sharp edges and corners. She lifted the tile carefully out of its metal frame and set it on the mattress.

  There was product information on the object:

  BrickHouse XtremeLife DVR Camera

  SXp1w3r

  PIR Motion Detection

  Two wires ran from sockets in the surveillance unit’s case. One connected to a microcamera that looked like a metal toothpick half an inch long with a tiny bulb at one end. That had been pushed down into a hole in the tile. The other was connected to a shorter, thicker metal tube—the motion sensor, she guessed. It, too, had been inserted into a hole. Hallie worked both loose, freeing the device, and saw a USB port on one side of its case.

  She connected it to her laptop computer and set it on the bunk so that it was almost at eye level. On the screen appeared a black camera shape with the same information she had seen on the case. PIR, she knew, stood for “passive infrared,” the same motion-detection system that worked intrusion alarms and automatic lights like those in the halls. And—strange to think of it now—that should have prevented the airport door from clamping down on the crippled woman’s suitcase as Hallie had said goodbye to Bowman.

  She double-clicked on the icon and a new screen appeared, showing nine MPEG-4 files. Hallie watched the first, created on January 23. It showed what the microcam had seen: a fish-eye view that included half of the room. There was no audio, and just enough ambient light for the camera to record grainy images. That light, Hallie reasoned, might have been coming from luminous numbers on a digital clock somewhere in the room, or perhaps from a night-light, or both. She saw a shape moving onto the bunk, vague but discernible as a woman. Emily, caught by her own camera. Or—someone else’s? Emily’s eyes closed; her breathing slowed. She fell asleep almost immediately.

  Hallie kept watching. The camera recorded for three more minutes, then stopped. She thought it was probably set to turn off automatically after detecting no motion for a predetermined period. Hallie fast-forwarded through a number of false alarms triggered by Emily’s movements while asleep. Then she opened the most recent file, from January 31. Sixteen days ago. The same scene, so dark she could see only shadows moving. Then a flare and, after that died, soft and wavering light.