Frozen Solid A Novel

8




“DHAKA MAY BE THE ONLY PLACE I KNOW WHERE FEBRUARY IS LIKE July in Washington,” David Gerrin observed cheerily. He was in his late fifties. Dark-haired and with a thin, efficient body, he had been a marathoner until knee injuries had ended the running, a decade earlier. An epidemiologist, not truly famous but with a university laboratory named after him and several books to his credit.

“Could do with a bit less jollity,” said Ian Kendall. “I mean, it’s a bloody steam bath, isn’t it?”

Jean-Claude Belleveau said nothing. Out of respect for the conference, he had worn a suit. White linen, but still sweltering. He wiped his face with an already soaked handkerchief.

It was late afternoon. The three men, walking back to their hotel after the last day of a U.N. global conference on sustainability, were trapped in a mass of bodies on a sidewalk that radiated heat like a giant griddle. Leaving the Bangabandhu International Conference Center, Kendall had suggested a taxi, but Gerrin had pointed out that in the capital of Bangladesh, traffic in the streets moved even more slowly than people afoot. Day and night, masses of bodies clogged sidewalks and alleys and roads and overflowed into main highways, so that solid lanes of exhaust-spewing buses and trucks and cars measured their progress in mere yards per hour.

And it was also true, Gerrin had said, that a walk would keep their Triage focus sharp.

With only the backs of necks and heads to look at in front of him, Gerrin glanced over at a woman sitting by the curb under a sign prohibiting public defecation. The woman was not terribly old, but her mouth showed more gums than teeth and her skin was the color of ashes. She tilted over and slowly fell onto her side, her left arm flung across her body, her right arm trapped under it. Her fingers curled around a few coins in her right hand. Her head hung at an awkward angle, just touching the filthy sidewalk beside her shoulder. Flies lit on her eyes. Others crawled into her nostrils, and her tongue tried to push them out of her mouth.

Arrayed in front of her on a square of green cloth were things she was selling: yellow pencils, a blue pack of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes, cards with images of Jesus Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, packs of chewing gum. She wore a torn yellow dress, and her swollen feet looked like black melons. One eye was opaque with a cataract. She was still alive, Gerrin figured, because the other blinked when flies tried to crawl into it.

Gerrin pulled out his cellphone, dialed the emergency services number. It was not easy, in the jam, keeping the phone close to his ear. He elbowed people who elbowed him. Dhaka was many things, but polite it wasn’t. Gerrin kept listening to the ringing. Then he noticed Belleveau, who had been behind him, plowing through bodies, on a course for the woman.

“Jean-Claude,” he yelled. “Wait!”

Belleveau was already there. Gerrin and Kendall held doctorates, but Belleveau was the physician, the oath taker. He knelt beside the woman and took from his briefcase a CPR face-shield mask with a one-way valve. Gerrin knew that Belleveau never ventured into places like this without one, though truly it was intended for use on his own companions, or even himself. From years spent living and working in New Delhi, he knew that things unimaginable to Westerners were the stuff of everyday life in places like this. Gerrin watched him turn the woman over, feel for pulse and breath, tilt her head back to open the airway. He put the shield mask in place and turned to Kendall. “Ian—compressions, please.”

“Yes, of course.” Kendall, no longer young, clambered down onto his knees.

Gerrin stood, listening to the ringing, keeping some space clear around them. Belleveau and Kendall were busy, but Gerrin had time to look at the faces. The people could have been mannequins for all the feeling they showed. He understood. Death was far from an oddity here; it happened so frequently and so visibly, in fact, that it was only banal, if that.

After a while, Belleveau sat back. “Finished,” he said.

Belleveau and Kendall stood, both sweating so heavily that their dress shirts were soaked through and clinging. One knee of Belleveau’s white trousers was torn. Red, scraped flesh showed through. He cleaned his mouth and hands with sanitizing gel, handed the bottle to Kendall. No one was watching them or the woman now, most people focused on weightier concerns, cool drinks, the approaching dinner hour. Again, Gerrin understood. Not their fault. The way things were. He heard ringing still coming from his phone, forgotten and dangling in one hand. He broke the connection and put it away.

“Someone should do something,” Kendall said, sluicing sweat from his forehead with the palm of one hand. “I mean, someone will come for her, won’t they?”

Their guide had grown up in Dhaka and had told them how, as a child, he’d survived by eating cats and dogs and rats. Now even those had grown scarce.

“Someone will come for her after dark. There are fifteen million people in this city. Half of them are starving.”

Two hours later, they stood on a twelfth-floor hotel room balcony.

The light was failing, and through the haze Dhaka shimmered like a city under foul water. A putrefying reek rose even this high. Clots of red taillights blocked every street and highway as far as they could see.

“Behold the future,” Gerrin said.

“London in fifty years, give or take,” Kendall said. He was a blocky man with a boxer’s face and an earl’s accent. His appearance, which included an ear like a handful of hamburger, came not from prizefighting but from four years of Oxford rugby. A geneticist, he was old and brilliant enough to have worked under Francis Crick and was, as well, the kind of Englishman who never made mention of that.

“Paris, as well. France, for that matter,” Belleveau said. He had remained slim despite a childhood overly rich in every way. His skin was pale and, after kind, curious eyes, his best feature was lustrous curly black hair. Born to wealth, he had earned a medical degree from the Sorbonne and could have practiced obstetrics and gynecology in a gilt-edged seizième arrondissement office suite. He worked in New Delhi instead, caring for any and all, payment accepted but never requested. Mostly he delivered babies and, as frequently these days, aborted them. He had come, as had Kendall, to meet with Gerrin one last time before Triage launched. After that, there would be no stopping it, and thus no reason to meet again.

“But for Triage.” Gerrin raised his tumbler of Laphroaig, and they touched glasses.

They drank, watched the darkness congeal, and no one spoke. Sometimes there was only waiting. Then Gerrin’s phone chimed. He answered, listened, hung up. From the room’s wall safe he retrieved a Globalstar satellite phone. He walked out onto the balcony, adjusted the long antenna, input a string of numbers, waited. Again he listened, very briefly this time, hung up without saying a word.

“The replacement has arrived,” he told the other two.

“Thank God.” Kendall sounded like a man breathing air after surfacing from great depth. He drank, shook his head, looked straight out, away from Gerrin and Belleveau. “We’ve always been honest with each other, haven’t we? So I must tell you that I am afraid, a little anyway, now that we are almost there.”

“No shame in that, Ian, given what we are about,” Gerrin said. “Galileo was lucky not to be burned at the stake.”

“One wonders how many others were burned, doesn’t one?” Kendall asked.

“Your countryman Edward Jenner,” Belleveau said. “Accused of serving Satan. Cutting children and scraping animal pus into their wounds. His own son. He was fortunate to escape the gallows.”

“Given druthers, some might’ve drawn and quartered poor old Darwin,” Kendall said.

“Still,” Gerrin said, and the others smiled.

“I, for one, am glad that capital punishment is no longer used,” Belleveau said.

“Tell that to Saddam Hussein. And bin Laden,” Kendall said.

“We are not like them.” Gerrin was their firebrand, Belleveau their heart, Kendall their diplomat.

“Of course not. Such a comparison is odious,” Belleveau agreed. “But the point is that their actions would be viewed as mischief compared to Triage.”

“Without Triage, this planet is doomed.” Gerrin turned to look directly at them.

“We all agree on that, David,” Kendall said, his hand on Gerrin’s shoulder. “Else we would not be here, would we?”

“No. We would not.” Gerrin drank his whiskey, his expression softening. “I’m sorry. I think we are all a bit on edge.”

“I wonder if this is how the men who flew to Hiroshima felt? Just before it dropped?” Belleveau asked.

No one spoke for a moment. Then Gerrin said, “Not even close, my friend. Not even close.”

“We are certain that the threat to Triage no longer exists?” Kendall asked.

“Absolutely certain.” Gerrin did not smile often, but now he did to support his reassuring words. Triage had been long in the planning, and they had known one another for some years. From anyone else he would have found the question annoying, might have snapped off a retort, but he understood how this man’s spirit was tuned.

“Might there be others, though?”

“It’s not impossible. Our security asset is looking into that.”

“And if he finds others?”

“Then he will do more to earn the considerable sum we’re paying him.”

No one spoke for a time. Belleveau looked up from his drink. Gerrin knew that, as a physician, he was concerned perhaps more than the others about such things. Necessary, unavoidable—these concepts he understood. But still … that oath. “Would it be accident or suicide?” Belleveau asked.

“Too many accidents might draw undue attention, though, mightn’t they?” Kendall asked.

“It would take more than a few,” Gerrin said. “Death is no stranger there. You know that was one reason we chose it.”

“Yes, and because it is the world’s best containment laboratory,” Belleveau said.

“You’re right,” Gerrin agreed. “The South Pole certainly is that.”