Frozen Solid: A Novel by James Tabor Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    She had just witnessed a murder.
    A murder by torture.
    Of a friend.
    By someone who might be living in the next room, for all she knew.
    On Denali, climbing with Emily, she had been buried by an avalanche. One second she was leading a pitch on the Cassin Ridge route; the next, the avalanche had swept her away, consolidated around her, and encased her like cement. Only her tongue and one eyelid could move. She could not even struggle.
    That was how she felt now, on the floor in the dark.
    So many questions. Why was there a surveillance camera in the room? Emily must have placed it herself. If someone else had put it there, they surely would have removed it before Hallie arrived. Whatreason could Emily have had for doing something like that? She must have been afraid, but why, and of what? Of
whom
? Hallie knew that Emily had been an inveterate video blogger. Maybe she just wanted to record time spent in the room without having to activate a camera every time she returned.
    What should
she
do now? Tell somebody? Who? Not tell anyone? But then what? Was the killer still here in the station? Killers, plural? Who else was in danger? Was concealing evidence of murder a crime in its own right?
    She was suddenly, intensely claustrophobic. A very experienced cave explorer, she had not felt that way for years. She did now, squeezed into the tiny room, gripped by the dark station, trapped by the wasteland that stretched a thousand miles in every direction. Ironic in a way, feeling like that in a place with more empty space around it than any habitation on earth. Like an outpost on Mars, Graeter had said. Just words at the time. Not any longer.
    She awoke where she had fallen asleep, sitting on the floor, back against the wall, feeling no less confused and exhausted. She stood, breathed deeply, and the licorice smell, faint before, now was stronger, heavy and cloying. Almost as unpleasant as the smell of her own body after five days without bathing. In gray sweat clothes, towel in hand, she stepped into the hall and nearly ran into a bulky man. He had long, greasy hair and needed a shave. He wore black bunny boots and Carhartt coveralls that had been tan when new but were now dark with oil and hydraulic fluid.
    He looked her up and down, with bloodshot