Frozen Solid A Novel

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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cked. You need to stay calm, Agnes,” Guillotte said. “At times like this, the most important thing 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.