Frozen Solid: A Novel

by James Tabor

  There were certain rules he never broke. Some had to do with killing. Always finishing what he started was another. One of his favorite books was Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, and one of his favorite passages described young Grant’s attempt to ride home, on a short leave, before deployment separated him from family and friends. At one point he had to take a green horse across a rain-swollen river. Mixing fast water and young mounts was a good way to produce dead riders, as Grant, possibly the finest horseman ever to pass through West Point, well knew. But he wrote, “One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go anywhere, or to do anything, not to turn back or stop until the thing intended was accomplished.”

  Bowman had never forgotten that sentence, thought it worth adding to his collection of personal commandments, and allowed it to guide actions large and small. An email was one of those small things that could have very large consequences, and he would not let this one go unfinished. Now, though, he felt the way he imagined Grant’s horse must have, knowing it had to go, wanting like hell not to.

  Walking back to the table, he felt, rather than heard, some disturbance. Might have been a very faint sound like a slap. He stood where he was for several seconds, then went to the kitchen and moved a switch that killed every light in the house. He stepped out onto the small back porch—the noise, or whatever it was, had come from that direction—leaving the door open. He stood there for a long time, listening, feeling the dark, and finally went back in.

  At the table again, he sat and stared at the screen and reeled in his mind when it started to wander. Finally, to break something loose, he sipped coffee that had grown cold sitting next to the computer, took a deep breath, and tried a jump-starting trick a writer friend had once showed him:

  Dear Hallie,

  What I really want to say here is

  Stopped. Waited for more. Waited longer. Rubbed his forehead. Leaned back, closed his eyes, grunted. Stood, cursed, and went to make dinner.

  He rose the next morning before sunrise, had coffee, and set out on snowshoes. Twenty minutes of easy cross-hill climbing brought him to the base of the biggest frozen waterfall. As far as he knew, he was the first to climb it, so he’d had the privilege of naming the fall: Revelation.

  It rose vertically for almost 150 feet. The exit on top was barred by a rounded, bulging cornice that required very careful climbing. Unusual to have the crux of a route so near its end, but the velocity of flow in this stream caused water to shoot out beyond the cliff face, forming the cornice as layer after layer froze. At some point the cornice would break off of its own weight.

  It was about ten degrees and still, perfect weather for climbing here. Everything—rock, ice, snow—was blue in the predawn, though the sun would appear soon, in an hour at most. Above him, the ice looked like giant drips of melted white and blue wax. His passage had silenced the woodpeckers and chickadees, ermine and hares, the wraith deer. The only sounds were his breathing and small, sharp cracks as the ice shifted, compressed, expanded. Every part of it that he could see was frozen solid, but deep inside there was always something happening.

  He stamped a firm circle and stepped out of his snowshoes, clipped into his Grivel crampons, took two leashless Black Diamond Cobra ice tools from their holsters on either side of his climbing harness. Accustomed to solo climbing, he carried just a few carabiners and ice screws. The only other tool was a Desert Eagle Mark XIX pistol in .44 magnum caliber, black stainless steel with internal laser sight, carried under his left arm in a custom Bianchi shoulder holster, which also held two extra eight-round magazines. Bowman never went anywhere unarmed.

  He stepped to the ice, found secure placements for both tools above his head, set one pair of front points, then the other at the same level. He hung straight-armed from the ice tools for a few seconds, knees bent and legs relaxed. He stood up straight, removed and replaced his left tool higher, stepped up with his right foot, moving diagonally to center his body on the tool, set the left front points, set the right tool, and stood again.

  The ice was perfect, solid enough to be secure, with features and porosity for good penetration of the tools’ picks. Then he really began the climb, not stop-go, stop-go, but in a continuous flow, arms and legs always moving, body constantly, smoothly rising, as if he were being hoisted by an invisible cable.

  When he had climbed sixty feet, the sun rose over the treetops and he saw it strike the ice twenty feet below him. He was tempted to hang and let it catch him, because it would feel good to be there like that, sandwiched between the heat of the sun and the cold of the ice.

  He started up again, moving in that easy rhythm, and stopped at 130 feet. The cornice overhang loomed above him. Beneath that, a massive fracture had left a band of clean rock ten feet high and cutting completely through the ice column. He was surprised not to have seen the debris down at the bottom, but then he reasoned that it must have shattered upon impact with the ice column’s solid base. There had been less than full light, too, when he began. He understood that the ice section’s cracking and fall was what he had heard the night before.

  He could try to climb past the smooth swath of granite. It wasn’t the rock he was worried about, though it looked dauntingly clean. Worse, all the ice above that section was now unstable, held in place only by adhesion to the face. It might carry ten climbers his weight or come off with one strike of an ice tool. The sun was moving. Warmth touched his calves like slowly rising water. In ten minutes, maybe less, it would reach that ice hanging above him.

  He leaned back, surveyed the rock band, looking for a line. Saw two ledges the width of a guitar pick that could hold his front points and, above them, a crack that would take the pick of one tool. He could get that far, but the ice above would still be a foot beyond his longest reach. It would require a dynamic move, launching himself off those ledges and swinging the free tool all at once, to reach that ice above, with no guarantee that it would take his weight long enough for him to place the other pick.

  Two hours later, climbing gear stowed and coffee poured, Bowman added maple logs to the Defiant and sat at the oak table. Like Hallie, he came to decisions quickly and did not look back. He put the mug down and started typing.

  Dear Hallie,

  I have been at this for some time without producing anything worth sending to you. So I’m going to let words come as they will. I said there were things you don’t know about me. I wasn’t referring to the work. Not directly.

  I was married before, and we had a child. My wife’s name was Arden. Our daughter was named Sarah. One time some people came to where we lived then and killed them both. I was not there to save them.

  It was never my intention to deceive you. Only guilt and shame kept this locked down. It cuts every day.

  You doubtless would have thought me a paltry excuse for fatherhood before. I cannot imagine that this will improve your estimation much.

  Wil

  He sent the email, wondering which would disturb Hallie more: that he had had a family, or that they had been killed, or that he had taken a year to tell her about it.

  His cellphone chimed while he was in the kitchen breakfasting on raw lemons and blood-red otoro.

  “How’s BARDA today, Don?”

  “All good. Are you planning to be in D.C. anytime soon?”

  “Why?”

  “Something I’d like to discuss with you.”

  “About our mutual friend?” Bowman put his chopsticks down. He could not think of another reason Hallie’s boss would be calling him. And if Barnard had been on the phone with good news, he would not have hesitated to speak about it immediately.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll see you in two hours.”

  13

  SITTING AT THE TINY DESK, HALLIE WATCHED A FLY HANGING UPSIDE down from one of the white ceiling tiles. She wondered briefly how a fly might come to the South Pole, much less survive there. Then she wondered if she was seeing things. And then—she was learning the Po
le’s way of deranging thought—she recalled Charles Lindbergh. He had become legend for flying solo across the Atlantic, but it wasn’t true. Not strictly, anyway. Hallie’s father had known one of Lindbergh’s children, who told him something about the flight few people knew.

  After twenty-two hours without sleep, still flying in the dark over the ocean, Lindbergh began to hallucinate. He saw, or thought he did, a fly in the cockpit. He had opened the Spirit’s windows several times during the flight, hoping the cold air would keep him awake, but apparently the fly—or at least his vision of it—hadn’t been blown out. To keep himself awake and help ward off thoughts of death, Lindbergh began talking to the fly. He realized that it was an aviator of sorts itself, and he considered that the hazards his tiny companion had to deal with outnumbered his own many times over. He began to feel something like affection for the fly and conversed with it as he might have with a copilot.

  Now Hallie tried to work up some feeling for the fly on her ceiling, just to see what would happen. Lindbergh had his copilot. She could do with a little confidant. Try as she might, the thing remained an insect that vomited before it ate and thought shit was earth’s greatest treasure.

  But if Lindbergh had his fly, she had the farm in Virginia. At times like this, she found it helpful to close her eyes and visit. It was called Marley, for her ancestor Constant Marley, who had acquired the land virgin in the 1720s and made it into a farm. Fifty acres were in pasture and hay. The remaining hundred were woodland, home to white-tailed deer, black bears, coons, and coyotes.

  And copperheads. In summer, they glittered on gray basking rocks and, for Hallie, inhabited the same mystic realm as mares foaling and springs bubbling from stone. Just beyond striking range, she would sit watching sun glint off their hammered-metal heads. The yellow, black-pupiled eyes and golden, pentagonal scales made her think of jewels and treasure. Still, she understood the danger and always kept a respectful distance.

  Except once. Thirteen, drawn by something in the ancient eyes, she’d inched closer, slow and smooth. She could have touched the snake’s head, and almost did, just to see how it felt. Coiled and relaxed, it swelled and shrank its bellows flanks, and the pink tongue licked the Virginia summer-thick air. The back of her neck reddened, and sweat bubbled from her forehead. It was like staring into fire, a trance, and the world arranged itself around them.

  Then the snake moved.

  It could have been a hawk flashing in the sky, or some threat scent caught by the flicking tongue. In a blink the metallic head rose, its snout stopping a foot from her eyes. Even without being struck, she felt like an electric shock had hit. Adrenaline burned the oxygen in her system, leaving her breathless and weak-muscled. Fear very nearly overwhelmed her. She retained just enough mind to back away, slow as a shadow following sun.

  Even safely distant, it was as though she had grabbed an arcing wire. The shock did not fade for a long time.

  That was how she felt now. And backing away was not an option.

  She awoke from restless drowsing, checked the time. Still an hour before she had to meet Graeter for a station tour. She stood, stretched, rubbed her face. Stared at the door, trying to make sense of everything. The meeting with Merritt was still fresh in her mind. There were only two possibilities about the chief scientist. If Merritt believed that Emily had given herself a fatal overdose, the killer’s ruse was working. If she was lying, she had to be involved in some way. Had Merritt been lying? It was hard for Hallie to imagine the matronly, cookie-baking woman committing or aiding a horrible murder. Merritt’s interest in Hallie as a person made it seem even less likely. Women did kill, of course, but really—one like Merritt?

  The normal procedure, she assumed, would be to tell Graeter, with his claim to be a marshal. The man was a martinet, and a nasty one at that. Did that make him a murderer? Definitely not. But Graeter was also angry down to his core and obviously hated women. Did all of that make it easier for Hallie to see him killing a woman? Definitely so.

  What about Maynard Blaine? He seemed about as likely to commit murder as Merritt. But that was only an assumption. If she knew nothing else, at least she knew one thing, and Guillotte had said it:

  A place where everything you know is not true.

  For the time being, she would obey an ironclad rule: Assume nothing.

  The secret would have to stay where it was.

  “Talk to me, Em,” she said.

  Silence.

  What did she expect, really? Ghostly voices from the ether? Apparitions floating around the room? She looked at the window, which showed nothing and reflected nothing, and only then realized that the room had not one mirror.

  She needed to write to Barnard and Bowman. But how secure would the servers be? Some people always had access. IT techs and managers like Graeter and Merritt certainly would. God knew who else. And the off-and-on comms. Even if they were up, email would have to wait.

  She sat back, looking around, wishing there had been something of Emily’s left behind. Then: maybe there was. Think like a cop. What would one of them do? Start with the body. Lacking that, the death scene.

  She turned over the mattress, examined its underside, felt it all over for bumps or bulges. The bunk’s plywood platform was bare and clean. She checked under the computer’s CPU, examined its monitor and stand, picked up the keyboard and the mouse. She searched the inside of every cabinet and, standing on the desk chair, looked at their tops. Then she worked her way around the room, moving the chair, lifting and peering above all the other acoustical tiles.

  Nothing.

  She sat back in front of the computer desk. What the hell. Worth a try. Get some sleep.

  She rose, but the space under the desk was so tight that her foot caught between the computer tower and the desk frame. She called the computer a foul name and started to yank her foot loose.

  Then she stopped.

  She hadn’t searched everywhere.

  14

  SHE BOOTED UP THE COMPUTER.

  “Talk to me, Em,” she said again, and accessed the hard drive. Found the usual: Word, Excel, Explorer, Outlook. All the libraries—documents, music, pictures, videos—were empty. Someone must have cleaned them out as carefully as they had scrubbed the room. Not surprising, really—standard procedure in any organization after an employee left. So she would find nothing on the hard drive.

  Wait.

  Not on the hard drive.

  What about in the hard drive?

  From her own laptop she transferred to the room computer a program called Golden Retriever, given to her by Bowman. It was like the data-recovery programs you could buy on the Web but much more powerful. She searched for documents created by “Durant.”

  In 0.976 seconds, it displayed a message: No matches.

  She would try more search terms. First, an adjustment. The computer keyboard lay flat on the desktop, and Hallie preferred typing on a tilted keyboard. She turned this one over and unfolded the plastic legs from their compartments on the underside. When she popped out the right one, something fell, hit the desktop, and bounced to the floor. The light was so dim in the room that she had to crawl around on her hands and knees to find the object. It was a blue microSD card the size of the nail on her little finger.

  She was about to insert the card into a port in the station’s computer. Then she stopped and disconnected her laptop. She pushed the tiny card into one of that computer’s ports. There were thirteen folders, “date created” numbers showing that they started with the previous year’s January and ended with January just past. The folders held varying numbers of files—all .wmv format.

  It was a video log. Emily had been an avid amateur shooter, loved video calls and YouTube. It was natural that her journal would be in this form. She had arrived in January of the previous year. Hallie opened the first file from that month and suddenly there was Emily looking back at her from the screen. She double-clicked on the image, and Emily spoke.

  “So. This is J
anuary sixth. My first full day here at Pole and my first entry into the video log.”

  Hallie hit the Pause symbol and wiped away the tears that were filling her eyes. Emily looked like the young woman Hallie had known at BARDA—auburn hair, freckles, lively green eyes, an infectious smile. And a honey-sweet Georgia accent. So full of energy that Hallie could feel it coming through the monitor. Involuntarily, she found herself smiling back through the tears. She recalled things she and Emily had done together, the great climb on Denali, the avalanche, Emily digging her out, their decision to keep going, making the summit, all the hard-ass climbers cheering and buying them endless rounds when they stumbled back into the Talkeetna Lodge.

  “Emily,” she said.

  She touched one finger to the side of Emily’s cheek on the screen. Gave herself a few moments, then hit Play, and Emily started talking again.

  “This is such an amazing place. It’s dark twenty-four hours a day and cold as hell—seventy-one below outside right now, according to the intranet. Makes Alaska seem almost tropical. Everything is just … extreme. I can’t wait to look around more. It’s like being out in space, totally alone. There’s even a greenhouse where they grow vegetables. Somebody said they grow pot in there, too.” She frowned, shook her head. “The vegetables are a good idea, anyway.

  “This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I’m going to keep a record of my time here. I can record footage of other things in the station and here in the room and outside with my video camera and produce something later when I have time.”