Blood and Ice

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

December 26, 9:30 a.m.

SINCLAIR HAD MADE a studied assessment of his two jailers, trying to decide which one it would be wiser to move against.

While the fellow named Franklin was plainly the less intelligent of the two, he was also the more wary. Like a private in the army, he took his orders seriously and didn't like to think about them very much. He'd been told to stay clear of the prisoner, and he did. He even refused to engage in conversation, keeping his nose buried in one of those scandalous gazettes for the duration of each of his shifts.

The one named Lawson, on the other hand, was more intelligent, more sociable, and in general more curious. He was fascinated, Sinclair could see, by an unexpected visitor from another time and, despite the fact that he'd no doubt been given the same orders Franklin had, he thought nothing of defying them. When he came in to conduct his watch, Franklin couldn't leave fast enough, and Lawson positively settled in, stretching out his legs and leaning back against a crate for a nice long talk. Sinclair had noted that his boots looked very sturdy, with thick soles and heavy laces, and were in far better condition than his own riding boots, one of which had been torn by the sled dog.

Today, Lawson had brought with him a large book with many colored pictures in it. Sinclair could not see what it was, but he knew he would find out in good time. Lawson could not resist talking. After a few minutes, during which Sinclair silently waited him out, Lawson finally said, “Everything okay with you?”

Sinclair gave him a puzzled, but utterly benign, look.

“Oh, sorry. That just means: Is everything all right? You need me to call the doctor or anything?”

The doctor? Surely that would be the last request Sinclair would ever make. “No, no-not at all.” Sinclair gave him a forlorn smile. “It's the enforced idleness, that's all. Our friend Franklin provides little in the way of company.”

Why not flatter this fool?

“Oh, Franklin's a pretty good guy,” Lawson said. “He's just following orders.”

Sinclair chuckled. “If there's a swifter route to damnation than that, I'd like to know what it is.” He knew that such pronouncements only served to pique Lawson's interest. His fingers, he noted, drummed on the cover of the big book.

With a weary pro forma air, Sinclair asked about Eleanor and her welfare-no one ever told him anything of substance, but he asked, nonetheless-and received the usual vague reply; on this subject, even Lawson apparently knew enough to keep mum. But just what were they keeping from him? Sinclair wondered. Was she truly well? How could she be? How could she be satisfying the peculiar need that neither of them could ever confess to anyone? Sinclair did not know how much longer he could last himself. And he'd recently had the benefit of the slaughtered seal.

But Lawson eventually turned the topic, as Sinclair knew he would, to his own interests. His fascination with Sinclair's odyssey had become evident over their past few sessions together, and the purpose of that big book became clear, too. It was an atlas, and there were little colored pieces of paper attached to the edge of certain pages. It was to these pages that Lawson threw the book open in his lap.

“I've been trying to map out your journey,” he said, like some schoolboy swotting for an examination, “from Balaclava to Lisbon, and I think I've got most of it.”

The man was a born cartographer.

“But I got a little lost around Genoa. When you and Eleanor left, did you sail across the Ligurian Sea to Marseilles or take the overland route?”

Sinclair remembered every step of the journey quite well, even after all this time, but he pretended to be confused. In fact, they had traveled by coach-he recalled stopping at a public house in San Remo, not far from Genoa, where he had won a large sum at the game of telesina, a local variation on poker. Another player had accused him of cheating, and Sinclair had of course demanded satisfaction. The man had assumed he meant a duel, and though that was accomplished the same night-Sinclair ran him through with his cavalry saber-true satisfaction took a bit longer. When Sinclair had finished with him, he washed the blood from his face in a fragrant grove of lemon trees, before returning to Eleanor at the inn where they were staying.

“I'm not sure I recall the name of the town,” Sinclair said now, as if struggling, “but it was in Italy-it might have been San Remo. Can you find it there?”

He saw Lawson bend his head closer to the map and try to trace some route with his finger; he had one of those silly kerchiefs on his head, like some common seaman. It would only be a matter of time before Sinclair was able to persuade him to come closer and show him the map itself.

Then… he would shake off his chains and reclaim his stolen bride.

“Tomorrow,” Murphy repeated, leaning on the back of his desk chair. “The supply plane's coming tomorrow, at eight in the morning,” and he ran one hand nervously through his hair again. The other hand clutched a red marker, with which he had just circled the next day's date on the whiteboard mounted on the wall behind his desk. “And you're going back on it,” he said to Michael.

“What are you talking about?” Michael protested. “My NSF pass is good until the end of the month.”

“We've got another massive low-pressure system moving in, and by the time it's passed, the crevassing will be even worse out there than it is already. The plane won't be able to land.”

“Then I'll take the next one out.”

“Where the hell do you think you are?” Murphy said. “There's not gonna be a next plane out, not till maybe February.”

Michael's mind was reeling. How could he possibly leave the next day? He'd made a promise to Eleanor, and he was not about to break it. He looked over at Darryl, sitting beside him, but all Darryl could do was return a sympathetic glance.

“What are you planning to do with Eleanor-and now Sinclair?” Michael said. “I'm the one who found them in the first place.”

“And don't I wish you hadn't. Don't I wish I was rid of them both.”

“No one has their confidence the way I do.”

“Oh really?” Murphy replied. “Last time you visited Sinclair, I seem to recall you calling for reinforcements. What happened? Your trust break down?”

Michael still regretted that, but as Darryl jumped in to explain about some promising blood work he'd been doing in his lab, his thoughts kept racing ahead. Was this the time to broach his idea? When would he have another chance? Interrupting Darryl's monologue, he blurted out, “Then they should both go back with me.”

Darryl stopped talking and turned toward him, while Murphy shook his head in exasperation. “And how do you suggest we arrange that?” he said, throwing up his hands. “This ain't the bus station in Paducah. The plane doesn't land-at pole, for Christ's sake-and pick up three passengers when the manifest calls for just one.”

“I know that,” Michael said, “but bear with me.” He was fitting the pieces of the plan together even as he sat there. “Danzig's wife knows he died, but she doesn't know when to expect the body to be returned. Right?”

“Right. Somehow I never got around to calling her back to tell her that he'd turned into a zombie and was floating around somewhere under the polar ice cap. Kind of a hard call to make, don't you think?”

“And what about Ackerley?” Michael persisted. “Does his mother know when his body is supposed to be returned to the States?”

“I'm not sure she knows it will be,” Murphy said, starting to sound intrigued. “I told you, she was pretty out of it.”

“Let me think,” Michael said, putting his head down and concentrating with all his might. “Let me think.” It was outlandish, but it was all coming together in his head. And it could, conceivably, work. “Danzig's wife-”

“Maria,” Murphy supplied. “Maria Ramirez.”

“She works for the county coroner's office in Miami Beach.”

“Yeah, that's where she met Erik. He was driving a hearse in those days. In fact, he once told me-”

“Tell Maria that I'm accompanying her husband's body, and Ackerley's, to Miami Beach.”

“But you're not,” Darryl said, perplexed. “Danzig's never going to turn up again, except maybe in my nightmares.”

“And frankly, she didn't want him to,” Michael replied. “Remember, she said that he was never happier than when he was down here? And that, if he'd had his way, that's where he'd have wanted to be buried?”

“Yeah, but I told her Antarctic burials are prohibited by law,” Murphy said.

“But what about Ackerley? You're going to dispose of his remains right here, aren't you?” Michael persisted. “Or were you planning to send back a corpse with a bullet in its head?” Murphy squirmed in his chair, and that's when Michael knew he had him. “A bullet from your gun, no less?”

Darryl frowned quizzically at that, and asked Murphy, “Now that it's come up, what did you do with Ackerley's remains? I know he asked to be cremated, but that would have been a contravention of the Antarctic protocols.”

“That's right, it would have been,” Murphy said, staring Darryl straight in the eye and holding it. “Officially, Ackerley went down a crevasse while doing his fieldwork.”

Michael was relieved to hear it. “That's perfect.”

“I'm still not following,” Murphy said.

“Don't you see? If we want to, we can put two body bags on that plane, both of them fully accounted for. But the bodies inside don't have to be the same ones as the names on the tags.”

Michael could see that the light had gone on in Murphy's head. He just had to press ahead convincingly with his case.

“Eleanor and Sinclair may not be able to leave the Point as passengers on that plane, but they can leave as cargo. Just use some of that bureaucratic pull you've got to book me-and them-back to Santiago, and from there on to Florida.”

There was a silence in the room, punctuated only by the ticking of the clock. Finally, Murphy broke it by saying, “But it's a nine-hour flight just from Santiago to Miami. They'll die in transit.”

“Why would they?” Michael said. “They've suffered far worse. Try a century of suspended animation. If they could live through that, this would be a piece of cake.”

“It's different now,” Murphy countered. “They're alive and kicking, and they've got a big problem that you seem to be conveniently forgetting.”

“That's what I was trying to address,” Darryl said, “before I was so rudely interrupted.”

Michael slumped in his chair, more than happy to have someone else carry the ball a few yards downfield. But he quickly realized that Darryl wasn't looking for a first down; he was heading straight for the end zone. After proudly describing some of his laboratory breakthroughs with the Cryothenia hirschii, he strongly hinted that he might have found a cure-”or at least as close as we're going to come to one”-for the disease afflicting both Eleanor and Sinclair. If Michael understood him correctly, he was suggesting that he could extract the antifreeze glycoproteins from his fish specimens and transfuse them into the humans’ bloodstream. Doing so apparently allowed the blood to carry oxygen and nutrients without constantly needing to be replenished by foreign supplies of hemoglobin. It seemed irrational, it seemed insane, it even seemed impossible-but it was also the first, and only, slender thread on which Michael could hang any hope. Michael would take it.

“It all sounds pretty cockamamie to me,” Murphy said, “but I'm not the scientist here. How do you know it would work?”

“I don't,” Darryl replied. “So far, the recombinant blood has been tolerated by the fish. But as for Eleanor and Sinclair, that's another question.”

And there wasn't time, Michael reflected, to do any trial runs.

“But you've got to remember,” Darryl reiterated, in portentous tones, “they're going to wind up in the same predicament my fish are. If their tissue touches ice, they're goners.”

For the next half hour, the three of them debated and discussed how all the elements of the scheme might work. Murphy, by his own admission, had not been dutifully recording all the events of the day in the NSF logbooks-”I just couldn't find the right way to explain how corpses were coming back to life”-and he was particularly worried about what Michael had already told his editor. Michael assured him that he had already unwound that knot-”though it means I may never be trusted with another decent assignment for the rest of my days”-and they called a halt only when a conference call about the oncoming storm came in from McMurdo Station. Murphy waved them out of his office as he recited the barometric pressure readings recorded at Point Adelie in the past twenty-four hours.

In the hall outside, Michael and Darryl stopped to take a breath and contemplate everything that had just been said. Michael was so on edge he felt like he had electric current running through his veins.

“So, this transfusion,” he said. “How soon can you try it?”

“I just need another hour or two in the lab. Then I'll have the serum ready.”

“But we're surrounded by ice,” Michael said, still fearful.

“Which they're never going to touch. They're going straight from the infirmary and the meat locker into the body bags. What's the alternative? You plan to oversee the procedure on your own, in Miami?”

That, Michael knew, would never work.

“If they're going to have a bad reaction,” Darryl went on, “we'd better know it now, before they're zipped into the bags and shipped out.”

“Eleanor first?”

“Sure,” Darryl said. “From what I know of Sinclair, he may need more in the way of persuading.”

Darryl was already turning away, when Michael took his elbow to stop him. “You think it will work?” he said. “You think Eleanor will be cured?”

Darryl hesitated, as if weighing his words carefully, then said, “If all goes well, I think that Eleanor-and Sinclair-will be able to live reasonably normal lives.” He held Michael's gaze, as Murphy had earlier held his, and added, “But that's only if you consider living like a snake, who has to warm itself by lying in the sun, to be normal. With the help of an occasional booster shot, Eleanor will no longer feel the need she does now. But she will carry this contagion to the end of her days.”

The words weighed like stones on Michael's heart.

“But so will Sinclair,” Darryl added, as if that made things better. “They'll pose no danger to each other.”

Michael mutely nodded, as if he, too, saw the wisdom and symmetry in that. But it didn't make the stones any less heavy.