Frozen Solid A Novel

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 right 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.”