Frozen Solid: A Novel

by James Tabor

  Someone had lit a candle.

  Still too dark for sharp resolution, but better than the other recording. Hallie watched as one person and then another climbed up onto the bunk. Both sat with their backs against the wall. She could see the tops of their heads, shoulders, and their thighs. She could not see their faces.

  One was a woman—Hallie could make out the swell of breasts under a skin-tight black suit of some kind. A wet suit? Indoors? No, a leotard. White stripes on the tops of the thighs suggested a skeleton costume. Emily. The figure next to her was larger, with bigger shoulders and hands. He had coarse black hair and what looked like bolts sticking out of his neck at the base. A baggy shirt with ragged sleeves.

  A skeleton and the Frankenstein monster. So they must have come from a costume party. Or were going to one.

  The man produced a metal flask, unscrewed the top, and drank. He passed it to Emily, who almost dropped it. He caught the flask and handed it to her more carefully. She drank, appeared to cough, waved a hand in front of her mouth.

  She and the man talked. There was no sound, but it was easy to recognize what they were doing by their nods and touches and body movements. Occasionally they drank from the flask. After several minutes, the man peeled off fake scars and removed the plastic bolts that had been held in place by a semicircular wire running behind his neck. He pulled off the wig, which was attached to a bulging rubber forehead. He tossed all of the costumery down onto her desk chair. He was undisguised, but the overhead camera angle still kept Hallie from viewing enough to allow her to recognize him if she saw him later.

  Emily half-turned and kissed the man, put her arms around him, pulled him closer. They kissed more seriously.

  She had a lover. Well, good for her. A year is a long, long time. But, Hallie thought, should I keep watching this? It doesn’t feel right, spying on her like this.

  Think. This is a surveillance camera. If she had wanted to make a sex tape, they would have used something else.

  Emily lay down on her back, giving Hallie the first direct look at her face. Painted skull-white, it was brighter than anything else in the frame. The man lay down beside her, his face buried in her neck, nuzzling, kissing, hidden from the camera. His thigh slid over hers. One hand scurried over her body, nibbling, rubbing, pausing longer here and there. Emily’s back arched as though in spasm, and Hallie saw her mouth open, a silent moan.

  She whispered something in his ear.

  And fell asleep.

  That seemed very strange. Emily never used drugs, rarely drank more than a beer or two, and here she was passing out?

  The man sat back against the wall and watched her. It was maddening—Hallie could see the top of his head and shoulders and thighs, but nothing else. After several minutes, he climbed down from the bunk and out of the picture. When he reappeared, he had on tight-fitting latex gloves. Working carefully and without haste, he unzipped Emily’s leotard and pulled it off, leaving her in bra and panties.

  The son of a bitch. He’d drugged her. With that flask? He’d been drinking from it, too. Or maybe just pretending. Something else, before they got to the room?

  Hallie’s breath came faster. She felt angry and afraid for Emily. Said, out loud, “You better not touch her.”

  He disappeared from the frame and reappeared with two hypodermic syringes. The barrels were the same size, but the needle on one was much longer. Using the smaller syringe, the man injected something into the vein, in Emily’s right arm, from which blood was typically drawn. Hallie watched with growing horror.

  “Leave her alone!” She said that aloud, too.

  Oddly, he was dressed. A date rapist would have been naked by now. He stood beside the bunk, watching. Emily was still asleep, her chest rising and falling slowly. After several minutes, her eyes floated open. She didn’t move or try to speak. Hallie strained, but she still could not see the man’s face.

  He climbed up onto the bed and knelt between Emily’s parted legs, holding the syringe with the long needle up for her to see. Her blink rate and respiration increased. He took a deep breath, shoulders rising and falling, leaned closer, and began using the needle. Emily’s eyes stretched wide and her whole body tensed, but she didn’t move.

  He had given her some kind of short-acting paralytic. Oh God.

  Hallie thought she might vomit. Shaking with rage, she had to pause the video. It was some time before she could turn it on again. Now there was no question about watching. It was a thing she had to do.

  The man went back to work.

  God. Please make him stop.

  He did not stop. Horror washed Hallie’s mind clear of words. Her jaw was clenched so tightly it ached. Her stomach churned, and she pulled the wastebasket close.

  There was no blood. Only agony. He kept at it until Emily’s body went limp.

  Tears of grief and rage were running down Hallie’s cheeks, blurring her vision. She brushed them away, blinked her eyes clear.

  I will find you, she vowed. If it takes the rest of my life, I will find you. Wil Bowman will help me. And you will pay.

  The man climbed down off the bunk. She still could not see his face, but the bulge of an erection was unmistakable.

  Emily was unconscious but still breathing. He tapped his gloved fingers against the inside of her right elbow to bring up the vein and, with the smaller syringe, pierced it in several places without injecting anything. Then he took her right hand and pressed her fingertips to the syringe, her thumb to the top of the plunger, and moved to the vein inside her left elbow. He performed a smooth venipuncture and pushed the plunger all the way in, emptying the syringe. He left it attached to her arm.

  He put the spent vial on her bunk and laid several more, still full, beside her body. He moved out of frame for a few moments, and when he came back into view he had the flask. He moistened a paper towel and used it to swab Emily’s lips, neck, other places where his mouth had touched her.

  DNA wipe. He wants people to think she overdosed. Why in God’s name would anybody do this?

  The man disappeared from the frame one last time. Seconds passed, and the wavering light went out.

  He’d snuffed the candle.

  The video played for three more minutes, then stopped.

  She could not remember anything more horrible than what she had just watched. She grabbed the wastebasket and vomited. She tried to look out the window, but it was solid black. She could almost touch both walls with her arms outstretched. It felt as though the room were shrinking.

  Something was trying to claw out of her. She felt sick, disgusted, enraged. If the man had been there, she might have attempted to kill him with anything in the room that would tear flesh and break bone. Including her bare hands.

  A sound, part sob and part howl, erupted from her throat. She buried her face in the pillow, sat on the floor, and wept until her belly hurt. Exhausted, she stood, one hand on the bunk’s edge for support, trying to think rationally. The images of the man and the things he had done to Emily stayed where they were. Might as well try to push black clouds out of the sky, she told herself.

  Keening wind suddenly hit the station, which jumped and shook like a plane flying through turbulence. The ceiling light blinked several times, and somewhere in the room a fly began to buzz. A final gust, strongest of all, and the room went dark. Dizzy, she lost her balance, flailed at empty air for some firm hold, finally grabbed the bunk.

  The light came back on, flickered, then died and stayed out.

  She thought: What if that man is still here?

  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.”

  9

  THE IDEA OF SLEEPING IN THE BUNK WHERE EMILY HAD BEEN TORTERED and killed revolted Hallie. She sat on the floor, in the dark, sick and seething, full of feelings she had never experienced before. Feelings without names, animal and raging. Far beyond those even her father’s death had aroused. But that one had been natural.