Frozen Solid: A Novel (16 page)

Calm down
.

Breathe
.

Think
.

Act
.

The computer alarm had been her turnaround signal.

One-third of her gas gone.

Time to leave.

Her right knee suddenly felt as if someone had stuck an ice pick into it.

She looked down. A tiny stream of bubbles was flowing from a pinhole in her dry suit. That ice pick was a needle-sharp stream of frigid water, driven by the pressure here at depth, squirting through her inner layers to her skin. How? Tough reinforcing patches covered both knees, so they were the last places a suit failure should have occurred. That was beside the point now. She could feel icy water beginning to accumulate in the dry suit boot on that side. The cold was so intense that it felt like her foot was on fire.

Thank God it was only a pinhole. Not common in professionalgrade, $3,000 dry suits like hers, but not unheard of, either. This suit didn’t have that many dives on it—fifty, maybe. It had seen hard use on deep wrecks, though. She might have damaged that knee on a previous dive, not punctured it completely but stressed it enough that failure would occur later. It would be uncomfortable, but not a true emergency. She had plenty of air and was already starting her return.

She headed back the way she had come, frog-kicking, reeling in her safety line. Halfway to the shaft’s bottom, she felt the leak in her suit grow worse. Her boot was full of water, and her foot was completely numb. The feeling of being on fire was crawling up her leg. Soon it would go numb, as well.

She knew that this was how disasters began: with a single failure that led to two others, each of which led to more, a cascade of events
feeding on itself. She forced herself to breathe evenly and slowly and swam faster. Eventually she spotted the ice screw, untied her line, and secured her reel.

The pain in her leg was excruciating, but she could not rise up through the shaft too fast. In warmer water, an ascent rate of thirty feet per minute would have been possible. Here, in water so cold, that might not give her tissues enough time to off-gas their nitrogen load, and nitrogen caused the bends, a buildup of gas in the joints that could cripple or even kill a diver. With no recompression chamber, she could not risk getting bent. To be on the safe side, she had decided earlier that ten feet per minute would be best. At that rate, it would take her three minutes to ascend to the top of the shaft.

Almost immediately her computers began to beep, signaling that she was violating her preset ascent rate. It had happened without her realizing it, prompted by anxiety. She slowed down, but recognized a new danger. As it filled with water, the dry suit lost buoyancy. Even completely flooded, it would not sink, because the water in her suit would have the same buoyancy as the surrounding water. But without the buoyancy of an intact dry suit to compensate, the weight of all her equipment
would
make her sink.

In addition to the dry suit, she was wearing a buoyancy-control device, which, when inflated, might get her to the surface. But buoyancy was not the worst of her problems. That was hypothermia. She knew that water conducted heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than air. If her suit flooded with twenty-two-degree water, she might well die from hypothermia before buoyancy became an issue. She was facing a Hobson’s choice: ascend too fast and risk the bends or rise too slowly and have her dry suit flood. She checked her depth. Twenty-five feet. Two and a half minutes. It was going to be close, and painful, but she would make it. Probably.

Then two things happened in rapid succession.

A pinhole leak opened over her other knee.

Her helmet light went out.

NIGHT IN THE JUNGLE, AND BARNARD SAW THE BAYONET GLITTERING
gold in the AK-47’s muzzle flashes. Stroboscopic bursts all up and down the line, the smell of cordite and shit, salt sweat burning his eyes. Rounds slapping mud, smacking tree trunks, a scream, curses. A bullet nicked the toe of his boot, felt like a trap snapping on it.

He was pushing and pulling his M16’s charging lever to clear a stoppage, but it was solidly jammed, not a millimeter of travel forward or back, and the NVA soldier was coming at a dead run and Barnard could not take his eyes from that shining bayonet and the NVA was ten steps away, then five, and the bayonet came at his face and Barnard started to scream.

Something woke him from the jammed-gun dream. He had it only rarely now, but it came back when things were stressful in the waking world. At least he wasn’t sweating and gasping, the dream’s occasional aftermath. Lucianne still slept beside him. It was the soft buzzing of his cellphone on the bedside table that had awakened him before the bayonet punched through his eye socket.

Wednesday, 3:54
A.M.
, the clock’s luminous numbers said. Moving
carefully, so as not to disturb Lucianne, he eased out of bed and went into the hall, closing the door behind him.

Normally, the ID window in his phone showed who was calling—name and number. Failing that, it said, “Private caller.” Just now, nothing at all appeared. That was a tip-off in itself.

“We need to meet,” Bowman said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

Barnard knew Wil would not be calling like this without good reason. “It’ll take me a few minutes to get dressed. Where are you?”

“Stay in your pajamas. Just make some coffee. I’m in your driveway.”

Barnard examined the manila folder’s label: “Christchurch medical examiner’s report.” They were sitting downstairs at Barnard’s dining room table. Both had cups of fresh black coffee.

“None other.”

“How in God’s name …” Barnard began, then stopped. “I know. Don’t ask.”

“Give it a read,” Bowman said.

Five minutes later, Barnard put the papers on the table in front of him. “Ketamine overdose.”

“Self-administered. That was their finding. Do you see anything wrong with the report?”

“No. Their procedure looked three-P.”

“What’s that?”

“Sorry. ‘Per proper protocol.’ They performed a solid-phase extraction procedure using Bond Elut C18 for ketamine and norket-amine detection in biological fluids and tissues. They analyzed and confirmed the drug using gas-chromatography and mass spectrometry. The procedures yielded ketamine levels of 8.1 and 2.9 milligrams per liter in heart and femoral blood, respectively. Anything above about 6.0 in heart blood would likely be fatal to an otherwise healthy adult.”

“They also found alcohol in her system.”

“Level just .038. That’s not even a DUI.” Barnard pushed the papers away from him. “Emily Durant using drugs? Unthinkable.”

“But there was ketamine in her system.”

“Know much about it?” Barnard asked.

“It’s an anesthetic. Not much beyond that.”

“Was an anesthetic. Today, a recreational drug. ‘Vitamin K.’ Some years back, it was used for monitored anesthesia surgery—twilight sedation. Colonoscopies, some plastic and dental work, minor ophthalmic procedures. That lasted until people started waking up.”

“While they were being operated on, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Bad.”

“Worse. Waking up during a colonoscopy is one thing. In the middle of a face-lift …”

“That happened?” Bowman asked.

“Yes. And wasn’t even the worst of it.”

“What could be worse than waking up while someone was carving you a new face?”

“Not being able to move or communicate about what you were feeling. Ketamine is a short-acting paralytic. So imagine being fully awake, paralyzed, in agony.”

“You said it was being used as a recreational drug, though.”

“Smaller dose levels produce euphoria and disinhibition.”

“But they found no evidence of foul play,” Bowman said.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I don’t believe Emily Durant died from an accidental overdose.”

Bowman set his cup down. “Neither do I.”

Barnard’s head snapped up. “You don’t?”

“I suspected it before. Now I’m sure.”

“What
do
you think?”

“I think somebody killed her.”

“
WHY DO YOU THINK THAT?
”
BARNARD BLURTED
.

“The postmortem found multiple injection sites on the body. Drugs and paraphernalia were in the room.”

“Yes.”

“Injection sites included the femoral vein and artery and the median cubital and cephalic veins of both arms. Typical addict injection sites. But there were also micropunctures under each breast. Not typical.”

Barnard nodded, waited.

“Death from ketamine overdose seems beyond question.”

“And?”

“The microwounds weren’t injection sites.”

“What, then?”

“It was torture, made to look like something else. This is a homicide. And a bad one, at that.”

It took a moment for Barnard to grasp what he was hearing. Homicide was not a thing he had yet considered. And … 
torture
? He became aware of a building rage, could feel his face flushing, his
hands clamping into fists. He started to ask Bowman how he could know such a thing, but Bowman spoke first.

“Every wound site is close to a major nerve or nexus. Femoral, in the upper thigh. Solar plexus. Ulnar, on the inside of each elbow”

“You really think so?” Barnard was still struggling with the idea of torture.

“Yes. Whoever did it was good enough to avoid collateral trauma, which would have alerted a medical examiner.” He paused, looked at Barnard. “Sorry to tell you this, but I would bet that a more thorough postmortem would disclose damage to the optic nerves and possible others.”

“My God,” Barnard said. “Whoever did this has to be insane.”

A scientist, Barnard normally dealt with new information in a systematic, linear fashion:
If that is so, then this must follow; and if this is so, then it is reasonable to believe …
But a revelation like this defied such orderly dissection. The questions came tumbling out of his brain faster than he could articulate them. Why had this happened? Who had done it? How could they have done it without being discovered, in such a contained environment? What he finally said was “Criminal investigation is not my field. I’d better get on the horn to the FBI.”

“Maybe not quite yet,” Bowman said.

“Why not?”

“Let’s think this through first. Who, and why?”

“Jealous scientist,” Barnard said.

“Possible. Maybe she made a discovery that someone else wanted credit for.”

“Or a jilted lover,” Barnard suggested.

“More likely, I’d say. Hell hath no fury. And a place like that could magnify anger. If there are any cracks in a mind, a place like the Pole will make them worse.”

“Or it could have been a stark raving lunatic,” Barnard said.

“Yes. Somebody who was unstable before or became so after arriving. Now let’s look at why.”

“Another scientist might want to take false credit,” Barnard said.

“A jilted lover would want revenge.”

“And psychopaths just kill.”

“Killing is one thing. Torturing is another,” Bowman pointed out.

“Hard to see anyone but a psychopath torturing.”

“For every psychopath, there are hundreds of sanctioned torturers. All wanting one thing: information.”

“So they might have suspected Emily knew something she shouldn’t.” Barnard rubbed his face. “God. This is hard, Wil.”

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“Hallie is down there, and I sent her,” Barnard said.

“You had no idea. Have you reached her yet?”

“Tried email and sat phone both. Still no luck, so I did some inquiring. A NASA launch has preempted most of the station’s satellite time. And there was a solar event, as well.”

“I didn’t get through, either,” Bowman said.

“If
you
can’t, it has to be a complete blackout. I guess now we call the FBI.”

“We could try. But the Bureau is very buttoned up and brutally overtasked. The official report shows death from overdose. It would take a lot more than our suspicions for them to fly agents down there.”

“Even if you talked to them?”

Bowman chuckled. “I play for a different team. Crosstown rivals. Coming from me could hurt more than help. Stupid, but how much in government isn’t?”

“What the hell do we do then? If you’re right about this, a murderer is running loose around the station. Unless he already flew out,” Barnard said. He was feeling something close to panic, a sensation he had not experienced for a very long time.

“We have to go on the assumption that he’s still there. Or she.”

“So Hallie could be in danger,” Barnard said miserably. “
Everybody
could be in danger. We should at least reach out for the station manager.”

“He might be the one who killed Emily.”

Barnard started. “How likely is that?”

“We have no way to know.” Then Bowman was quiet for some time.

“What, Wil?” Barnard asked.

“I was thinking how long a ride it would be in the back seat of an F-35.”

“I didn’t know they had two-seaters.”

“Prototypes for the Israelis.”

“You could do that?”

“Yes. But it would take most of today for authorization, half the night for them to find a plane and pilot, eight hours for the trip, including travel time to an air base. They couldn’t land in New Zealand. So Australia, then civil aircraft to McMurdo …” Bowman shook his head. “Not fast enough.”

“What about contacting McMurdo?” Barnard asked.

“I did, before coming here. They can’t communicate with the Pole, either. And it’s too cold for planes to land there.”

“So they’re completely cut off.”

“Yes.” Bowman sat still, hands flat on the table, staring straight ahead, jaw clenched. Barnard recognized the look in his eyes, knew it had been in his own at one time. Trapped in a room with no doors and life at stake. Finally Bowman said, “How many scientists are down there?”

“Can’t be many, this late. Why?”

“We’ll keep trying Hallie. Meantime, let’s put the scientists under a microscope.”