Frozen Solid A Novel

4




IT WAS EARLY MONDAY MORNING. DON BARNARD, WHO HAD NEVER been a late sleeper, was sitting with coffee in the study of his Silver Spring home. He was a big man, twenty pounds heavier than in his days playing tight end for the University of Virginia thirty-five years earlier. His hair and mustache were both white and the skin of his face was heavily creased from squinting in the bright sun while sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. His wife, Lucianne, was still in bed.

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.