Frozen Solid A Novel

69




IAN KENDALL’S WIFE HAD DIED TWELVE YEARS EARLIER. WITHOUT children or close relatives, he’d kept the home in Chiswick, a leafy, pub-strewn London suburb. The house was two stories of beige brick with red-stone accents at its angles and peaks, tall windows, and matching yews in the front yard.

Built in the reconstruction frenzy after World War II, it was sound except for a crack that had opened five or six years ago in the brickwork of the back wall. The crack started at the foundation and rose almost to the eaves. It had opened a little more with each passing year, not a structural threat—yet, anyway—but clearly visible.

Kendall had brought in a man to affix a trellis to the wall and plant English ivy, which grew eight feet a year. By now, the crack was completely hidden behind a façade of snaking vines and slick, shiny leaves.

Shortly after his wife’s death, Kendall had hired a large, meticulous Jamaican woman named Gardenia to keep house. On Wednesdays she rode the tube out from the city. She cleaned, did laundry, changed linens, and “neatened” the place. He always let her know when he was going away so that she could find other work if she chose.

Thus she was surprised, this particular day, when Kendall didn’t answer her knocking. A friendly and courteous man despite having done something important in science, unlike so many of the arrogant and disdainful she cleaned for, he never kept her waiting on the small porch. She knocked again, louder, and a third time, and still no one came.

He had shown her a spare hidden key, after forgetting his own in the house or losing it once too often while out. It was so unlike him to be away without calling that she retrieved the key from beneath a flower pot and let herself in.

“Dr. Kendall, are you here, sir?” she called, two steps inside the door. “Dr. Kendall?”

She put the key on a kitchen counter and thought about what to do next. Elderly people who lived alone tended to die alone. Often, after becoming very unpleasant, they were discovered by landlords or housekeepers. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, steeling herself. Dr. Kendall had treated her well for more than a decade. He deserved better than being found by some stranger.

He was not downstairs. She climbed to the second floor and searched it all, leaving his bedroom for last. The door was closed. She knocked, waited. Knocked again. Swallowed, afraid of what she would surely find, and eased the door open.

The bed was neatly made, everything in place. The room smelled musty, in need of a good airing, but not like death.

Back downstairs, she had to admit that this time he’d simply forgotten to let her know he would be away. Not so surprising, really. He was almost eighty, after all. She would mention it to him when he returned, and he would reimburse her for her tube fare. He might even offer to pay her for the whole day. She would not come back here, though, until he called. It was a long way from Brixton Station to Chiswick.





70




SHORTLY AFTER GARDENIA VISITED IAN KENDALL’S HOUSE, THE Times of India newspaper reported a crime in South Delhi’s Jor Bagh district. A Delhi police spokesman stated that a victim had been found in an alley, dead of multiple stab wounds, not far from the free medical clinic where he practiced. His wallet and cellphone had been stolen. His watch, wedding band, clothing, and a solid silver crucifix had not. Police said they believed the assailant could have been interrupted in the act.

The brief report appeared below the fold on page 3. Delhi was the crime capital of India and had been for nine years. Homicides were nothing special, and this particular victim, whose name was being withheld pending notification of next of kin, was not even Indian.





71




DAVID GERRIN WAS WALKING BACK TO HIS HOVEL IN KARAIL WITH two plastic jugs of water. The new home was a shack of plywood and cardboard and rusting metal. He and a dozen families shared an open pit toilet beside which lay a bag of lime no one used. The nearest water he considered less than life-threatening lay almost half a mile away, and he waited until the sun was long down before starting such a trek, even in February.

Difficult, all of it, but better some time here than life—or death—in an American prison. He could endure it all for months—a year, even—in exchange for the anonymity this vast and teeming slum engendered. Eventually he would work his way back into the world, slowly, patiently, one stratum at a time, all the while shedding layers of his old self like a molting snake.

He believed that Karail was the last place authorities would suspect him of going. In addition, the Dhaka police were perfectly useless. His call for the dying woman had demonstrated that, as he had known it would. She would never have made a breeder, so he had thought it worth a try at least. Horribly corrupt and rarely visible even in the city proper, the Dhaka cops had written Karail off completely years ago. It was a world all its own, seething and primal, but if you knew its ways, as he still did, you could survive. Not easily or pleasantly, but it was possible.

He kept to himself, dressed badly enough to blend in, went unshaven and dirty, though it would not be long before he had to wash in muddy Gulshan Lake, which formed Karail’s border. Now he was halfway home from the well, a trip that had taken him farther than he liked to go from the slum’s steaming center, when he came upon a boy standing over a woman on the sidewalk. He was trying to pull a cloth bag out of her hand. The boy could not have been more than twelve. His shirt and shorts were ragged, his feet bare. His calves were almost as big around as his thighs.

The woman was too old to be a breeder, so Gerrin set his water jugs down, walked up to the two of them, and pushed the boy away from her.

“Stop this,” he said in Bengali to the boy. To the woman: “Go away.” She rose and scuttled off.

He turned to face the boy and caught the familiar stench of garbage and filth, smells he himself was absorbing. This boy was one of those deep-slum denizens who ventured out to hunt the edgelands at night, where things like an old woman with a bag of spoiled lemons might be found. As Gerrin himself had done so long ago.

The light here was dim, only a couple of unbroken streetlamps in two full blocks. Even so, the boy’s eyes shone, huge and white and bright with hunger, but with something else as well, very intent, scrutinizing, registering. Gerrin thought he saw something familiar in the boy’s face, those eyes. Intelligence recognized itself.

“Tell me why you were robbing that woman,” Gerrin said, thinking he knew already how the answer would form.

“I am so sorry, sir.” The boy’s voice was as thin as the rest of him, but he spoke clearly, keeping his eyes on Gerrin’s. “I will tell you. Please do not beat me. My sisters are starving to death, and so am I.” The boy put his head down and his hands behind him, in a pose of submission. “Please, sir.”

He did not think this man would beat him, though. He had been beaten often enough that he could tell, in seconds, what would happen next. This man was not one of those. He had a heart. The boy had learned many valuable things about the human heart.

Gerrin saw one of the boy’s hands come from behind his back. It held a rusty knife. Gerrin stepped away and said, “I am no threat to you. And I have nothing worth stealing.”

“There is always something worth stealing.” The boy moved toward Gerrin and raised the knife for a stab to the left side of his chest.

A hiss, and he froze in mid-strike, his hand at the top of its arc. A small red spot appeared over his heart. Gerrin watched blood run down the boy’s torso. The boy gazed at it, his mouth open. The knife fell from his hand, his hand dropped from the air, and he collapsed like a pile of disconnected parts onto the sidewalk.

Two men stepped out of the shadows. One held a pistol with a short silencer, muzzle pointed down. Both were Bangladeshis, dark-skinned, with close-cut black hair and clothes so absurd—pressed gray slacks, shined black shoes, short-sleeved shirts with tropical flowers and birds—that for a moment Gerrin thought they might be lost tourists. But no tourist would be reholstering such a pistol beneath the loose shirttail.

“Dr. Gerrin, you will come with us.” The voice was neither polite nor abusive, just barely civil, as though he were talking to a waiter.

“Who are you?”

“It is only a short distance. You can shower and put on clean clothes. It must be difficult for a man like yourself, going about so.”

They moved like a big scoop, one on either side, bringing him along.

“You are not from the city police,” Gerrin said.

The two exchanged glances and laughed. “No, that we are not. Thanks be to God.”

“What is your name?” Gerrin tried to sound authoritative. In his condition, it was not possible.

He understood that this had to do with Triage, and that somehow they had tracked him down, despite his certainty that no one could. Escaping from two such as these was not an option. The best he could hope for now was a trial before the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

The worst … For a moment his knees felt weak, and he knew it was not from hunger. Then he reminded himself that there was no death penalty with the ICC. He might spend twenty or twenty-five years in a relatively comfortable prison. He would be old when they released him, but there would be some years of life remaining. He would make the most of them. Perhaps he would even write a book while in prison. Surely some publisher would pay for the true story of the notorious Triage plot.

The first flash of terror passed, and he was surprised to find himself feeling something almost like relief. Carrying the secret of Triage for so long had corroded something within him horribly, and he knew it. Living in Karail, even briefly, had been worse than horrible and had brought back so many unspeakable memories that at times he’d thought his mind might crumble. No, a clean, well-lighted cell would not be the worst place on earth. He had just walked away from that.

They turned right at the end of the block. It was so dark that Gerrin did not see the black Mercedes until a third man opened its door and the dome light went on. The driver touched a remote control, and the trunk popped open. Gerrin’s two escorts picked him up—one could have done it easily enough—put him in, and closed the lid. As much as he hated being treated like this, it was easy to understand why they would not want him in such a car. He hoped that was the reason, in any case. The trunk was hot, but even here a Mercedes was lined with a velvety plush. Other than him, it smelled not bad for a trunk—the spare tire’s fresh rubber, that clean fabric, a sweet gasoline tang.

He thought about where they were taking him. A clandestine office of some kind, hallways echoing, most rooms dark. The messengers—for that was all they really were, fancy car aside—would deliver him to a security official in an off-the-rack dark suit, a white shirt too big in the neck, and a horrendous tie. He might be invited to sit, or perhaps not, given his condition. He would be told the reason for his detention and informed of whatever rights he had left, which, this being Bangladesh, were assuredly minimal.

They had mentioned a shower and fresh clothes. Prison garb, perhaps. He would be remanded to a holding facility while extradition proceedings played themselves out. There were only two possibilities that he could imagine: the ICC or the United States. Gerrin had not prayed in many years—in fact, for as long as he could remember—but he did now, briefly. Anything was worth trying to avoid the latter destination.

After a shorter time than he had expected, the car stopped. Sounds of doors opening, the soft rasp of leather soles on pavement. The trunk opened.

“You can get out now.”

Gerrin looked around. It was even darker here than the place where they had started. He saw no government offices, no safe house, no buildings of any kind, in fact. Behind the two men, there was a strip of littered, empty land, then a ragged chain-link fence, and beyond that, only empty darkness.

“I am fine. This is not so uncomfortable.” He understood how ridiculous that sounded, but he could not make his muscles remove him from the trunk.

The two men lifted him out as easily as they had put him in. He extended his legs, tested them, his ex-runner’s knees aching. “What are we doing?”

“You are not a young man any longer. We cannot have you suffer a heart attack or some such thing before we deliver you.” The two men exchanged glances, smiled.

“We walk a little.”

Deliver me? “I feel perfectly well.”

They scooped him along again, one on either side, to the chain-link fence. The ground was littered with trash, bottles, blowing paper. He could see that someone had cut a gash in the fence and peeled back the two sides. Nothing but darkness beyond. Like the mouth of a cave. Or hell.

The man who spoke reached toward his holster, and Gerrin could not stop himself from making a sound, half whimper and half groan. From his pocket, the man withdrew a slim metal case, rectangular and shining. He opened it, offered an unfiltered cigarette to his partner, and took one himself. The other man lit both, and they stood there smoking with great relish.

“Do I n-n-ot get one, too?” Gerrin asked. He was losing control of his mouth.

“You don’t smoke.”

“A last cigarette. I should get a last cigarette. It’s how they do it.” Babbling, he disgusted himself, but he could not stop the words.

The two laughed and shook their heads. When they were finished smoking, they flicked the butts away. The companion urinated with gusto. They put Gerrin back into the trunk.

They traveled for what he estimated to be about an hour. Then he felt several stops and starts, heard snatches of conversation that he could not understand. Lifted from the trunk, he stamped his feet to restore circulation, stretched his hands and shoulders.

When he opened his eyes, having finished his stretch, the two men and the driver were gone. Standing before him was a huge man with short, straw-colored hair, his cheeks rough with stubble, a red-checked shemagh wrapped around his neck. He wore dusty jeans, a khaki shirt, and a monstrous automatic pistol in a shoulder holster. Gerrin recognized him. The giant who had come with Barnard.

Behind the man stood two others dressed similarly. They had holstered pistols and carried assault rifles, neither M-16s nor AK-47s but a kind he had never seen. It would have been impossible to take the men for anything but Americans. Tall, thick with muscle, well-fed, and, most of all, the gun-muzzle eyes.

“Dr. Gerrin,” the big man said, and Gerrin shuddered. You hoped to hear a voice like that only once. He had the eyes of a natural predator—one who would know very well how prey went to ground, and where.

“Why do you not just kill me here and save us all the t-t-trouble?” Gerrin’s fear was talking again, words just bubbling out. It wanted to know what would happen to him, and he could not make it stop.

“What?”

“Just do it. Get it over with. Those others were supposed to, but they lost their nerve. So go ahead.”

“That’s not how we operate,” the other man said, and he glanced over his shoulder. Gerrin noticed for the first time a hangar with an odd black helicopter crouching inside.

“What will you do with me, then?”

“The right thing.”





72




HALLIE WALKED OUT OF THE JET BRIDGE AT DULLES AND ALMOST ran straight into Bowman. She no longer asked about things like how he could be in a secure area without a ticket. She dropped her carry-on and hugged him long and hard while the crowd flowed around them.

“Let’s go someplace.” He carried her bag and most of her—exhausted after four days and nights of traveling, again, on top of the Pole time—away from the busy gate area. In a deserted one nearby, they stood facing each other.

“Did you get my email?” she asked.

“No,” he said, and she looked surprised.

“Did you get mine?” he asked.

“No,” she said, and he looked just as surprised. “I thought you were mad, Wil.”

“I wasn’t. I thought you were,” he said.

“I wasn’t either,” she said.

It took a moment for their brains to sort everything out.

“As you were leaving, you told me there was something else,” she said.

“So did you,” he said.

“What did you mean?” she asked.

He told her what he had written in his email.

Once over her amazement at such a misapprehension, she told him what she had written in hers.

A small boy tugged on his mother’s hand. He was bouncing along the Dulles concourse in the kind of sneakers whose heels blinked with colored lights at every step. They were passing a gate area that was empty save for a tall blond woman and a giant of a man. The two were holding on to each other as if afraid of being pulled apart by something. Like a big storm, the boy thought. Giant wind. Shaped like a funnel. He could see it, but he couldn’t remember the name.

“Mama, what’s the thing called that picked Dorothy and her house up?”

“A tornado,” she said. “Why?”

“Those people,” he said. “What’s wrong with them?”

She glanced quickly. “Don’t point. Nothing’s wrong. They’re just so happy to see each other.”

“Why is she crying if they’re so happy?”

“Sometimes happiness hurts,” his mother said, which he thought was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. Still, he found it hard to stop watching them. They were—what was the right word?—different.

Just then the blond woman happened to look straight at the boy. The man followed her eyes. Caught by both, he froze.

“I told you not to stare.” His mother frowned and squeezed his hand.

The woman held his gaze. Then she looked at the man and pointed at the twinkling sneakers and they both smiled. She waved to the boy. He waved back. Then she and the man hugged some more.

“See? She’s not mad,” he informed his mother, who dropped his hand and told him to keep up.

Tornado. A storm that tore. Ripped things apart. Plucked up houses and barns and cows. And people. But looking back at them one last time, he thought that even a tornado might not tear apart those two.





AUTHOR’S NOTE




The construction of this novel’s dark atmosphere required certain modifications to real life at Pole. Food, amenities, and Polies themselves all suffered somewhat in the translation. Let me acknowledge at the outset that those who toil at the bottom of the world are for the most part competent, companionable, and sane.

That said, it is a hellish environment that can exact extreme tolls from both body and mind. Murders and mayhem are not common, but neither have they been absent. One source of inspiration for this novel was the mysterious 2000 death of scientist Dr. Rodney Marks. For reasons unclear, to this day U.S. agencies have stonewalled New Zealand police attempts to investigate. NZP senior sergeant Grant Wormald said several years ago, “I am not entirely satisfied that all relevant information and reports have been disclosed to the New Zealand police or the coroner.” In January 2007, a document pried loose with the Freedom of Information Act stated that “diplomatic heat was brought to bear on the NZ inquiry.” The case remains open to this day, with an interesting coda for those inclined to conspiracy theories: one of the few Polies in a position to know what really happened disappeared, also mysteriously, at night from a ship in polar waters not long after Marks died.

There is no disputing the fact that the South Pole station is awash in good liquor (and, according to more than a few, other mood enhancers) that fuel Thing Nights and more. One Polie noted, “There is an unbelievable amount of alcohol down here. Pallets of booze were flown in.” And while all is usually calm on the southern front, things do happen. In 2008, two intoxicated Polies brawled over a woman. One suffered a broken jaw and both were summarily flown out—sans jobs. It’s safe to say that lesser disputes which don’t break bones (and get people fired on the spot) are more common and less publicized.

And while some of this novel’s elements required poetic license—in reality, cellphones cannot be used at Pole—the novel’s central theme, overpopulation, required none. Though a solution to the crisis would ameliorate the planet’s biggest threats—climate change, global warming, environmental degradation, water shortages, famines—overpopulation goes largely unaddressed in the public square. Because population control involves white-hot issues like contraception, abortion, and sterilization—voluntary or otherwise—it has become virtually a taboo topic for politicians, scientists, and major media. For those who wish to know more, one rational take on the topic is 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, by Dr. Jorgen Randers, a professor at the BI Norwegian Business School.

Frozen Solid is, of course, a work of fiction, but the science is very much grounded in reality. It examines what would happen if highly capable vigilante scientists decided to solve overpopulation on their own, with means available today. Though it hasn’t happened, a pathogen (meaning a conjoined bacterium and virus) like Triage is certainly possible. Hallie Leland cites one example of research in this area and it is very real, conducted by Dr. Vincent Fischetti and Dr. Raymond Schuch at Rockefeller University. They confirmed that the survival of the deadly anthrax bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, “is directed and shaped by the DNA of bacteria-infecting viruses.” The bacterium provides a home for the virus, which in turn prolongs anthrax’s life and directs its actions—classic symbiosis. Would it be impossible for scientists to reverse-engineer that kind of relationship, for good or evil? To me, the answer seems obvious. In fact, though my research didn’t uncover an extant microbial “depopulator,” I would not be a bit surprised if one were flourishing in government or private-sector labs—maybe in both.