Frozen Solid

1

Setting up its final approach, the C-130 pitched nose down and snapped into a thirty-degree bank, giving Hallie Leland a sudden view of what lay below. It was the second Monday in February at the South Pole, just past noon and dark. Two streaks of light, thin and red as fresh incisions, defined the runway. Half a mile distant, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station appeared to float in a glowing pool. The air here was clear as polished glass, red and white and gold lights sparkling jewel-sharp a full mile below.

“Pilot having a bad day?” Hallie yelled at the loadmaster, the only other passenger. Glum and silent, he had spent the flight reading an old issue of People magazine. The peace had been unexpected and much appreciated. She’d been traveling for four straight days and nights, and her need for sleep was like a desperate thirst. But the aircraft was designed for cargo, not comfort. Her seat was nylon webbing that hung, hammock-like, along the entire length of the fuselage, and four roaring engines made seeking sleep like trying to doze behind a waterfall. So for most of the flight’s three hours she’d alternately revisited the bad parting from Wil Bowman at Dulles and tried to visualize diving a subglacial lake with twenty-two-degree water — her primary reason for coming here.

“Just a little fun.” A bit more cheer in the loadmaster’s voice. “It gets boring, flying McMurdo to Pole and back. Plus, if he goes in, there’s just them up front and us two back here. Know what I mean?”

She wasn’t sure she did. But she was watching, down on the ice, a clump of white light break into jittering pinpoints. “What’s that?”

“There’s a Polie saying: ‘Two best days of your life are the one you fly in and the one you fly out.’ Lot of happy flyouts down there.” He peered at her. “We don’t usually get incomers this late. You a winterover?”

“Looks like you’ll be full heading back to McMurdo.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You don’t sound happy.”

“Most’ll be drunk before they get on. Always a lot of throwing up and fistfights and such.”

“Drunk? It’s noon.”

He looked at her. “First time down here?”

The cowboy up front could fly, Hallie gave him that. She barely felt the Herc’s steel skis kiss the ice, no easy trick with sixty tons in the scant air of thirteen thousand feet. The plane taxied, stopped, lowered its cargo ramp. She paused at the top to don a face mask and pull up her fur-trimmed hood.

“I wouldn’t linger, ma’am. They’ll run you right over.” Beside her, the loadmaster gestured toward the mob down on the ice.

“Sorry. You don’t see that every day, though,” she said, looking up at the southern lights, unfurling like green and purple pennants across the black sky.

He frowned, hunched his shoulders. “Not supposed to look that way at noon.”

On the ice, a wall of bodies in black parkas blocked her way, faces hidden behind fur ruffs, headlamps on top, fog of liquor breath. The pack shuffled and stamped like horses at her family’s farm in Charlottesville.

“Coming through, please,” Hallie called.

“… come through you,” somebody slurred, and a few people laughed, but nobody moved. She walked around them. The loadmaster yelled, “Board!” and jumped aside like a man dodging traffic. Eventually, he dragged her two orange duffel bags down onto the ice.

“Welcome to hell froze over, ma’am. Enjoy your stay!” the loadmaster exclaimed. It was the first time she had heard anything resembling good cheer in his voice.

“How come you’re happy now?” she yelled.

“Ma’am, ’cause I’m flying outta here.”

She watched the plane claw its way back into the thin air, turn toward McMurdo, and then she was alone on the ice. She had never been in a place that looked and felt so hard. The sky shone like a dome of polished onyx etched with the white flecks of stars. The ice could have been purple marble, scalloped into sastrugi. The wind was blowing twenty miles an hour, mild for the Pole, where a thousand-mile fetch delivered hurricane winds all too often.

A digital thermometer hanging from one zipper pull read sixty-eight degrees below zero. The windchill dropped that to about one hundred below. She had heard firefighters describe fire as a living, hungry thing. This cold was like that, seeping through her seven layers of clothing, attacking seams and zipper tracks and spots of thin insulation. The exposed skin on her face felt as if it had been touched with lit cigarettes.

It occurred to her that she could die right here where she had deplaned, with the station in plain sight. She decided that all the sages were wrong about hell. It would not be fire. It would be like this. Cold, dark, dead. She rotated 360 degrees, saw nothing but the station. In this pristine air it looked closer than a half mile, but she knew the distance from maps at McMurdo. She kicked the ice, scarred and dusted with chips like a hockey rink after a game. Her head felt light and airy; silver sparks danced in her vision. Her ears were ringing, she was nauseated and short of breath, and her heart was pounding. Altitude, Antarctic cold, exhaustion — and she had just arrived.

She had brought her own dive gear, and each duffel weighed forty pounds. At this temperature, the ice was like frozen sand. Dragging the bags was going to hurt. She had made this trip on short notice — no notice, really, for such was the life of a BARDA/CDC field investigator. But it was still bad form, she thought, letting a guest freeze to death out here.

“Let’s go, then,” she said. Inside four layers of gloves and mittens, her hands were numbing already. She managed to grab the bags’ end straps and headed for the station, hauling one with each arm. It was like trudging through deep mud — at altitude. After thirty steps she stopped, lungs heaving, muscles burning, body cursing brain for making it do this mule work. The station seemed to have receded, as if she were drifting away from it on an ice floe in black water, like Victor Frankenstein’s pathetic monster.

She looked up and saw a light detach from the distant glow and dance toward her. Several minutes later, the snowmobile slewed to an ice-spraying stop. Its operator was about the diameter of a barrel and not much taller. He was all in black, right down to his boots. She kept her headlamp trained on his chest to avoid blinding him.

“It was getting cold out here. I didn’t expect a marching band, but—”

“Honey, you ain’t seen cold.” Hoarse, but definitely not a him. Woman with an Australian accent. “Graeter said you were supposed to come tomorrow. Lucky for you, the pilot radioed about an incoming.”

“Graeter?”

“Station manager. Think you can grab maybe one bag?” Hallie heard condescension, irritation, or a combination. She dumped both duffels onto the orange cargo sled.

“So why are you here? Nobody ever comes early for winterover,” the woman said. She sounded angry, though Hallie was hard-pressed to understand why. Chronic ire of the short? But then, going from cozy station to one hundred below for some clueless stranger could do it, too. A coughing fit left the woman gasping. She straightened, breathed in gingerly.

“That sounded bad,” Hallie said. “Bronchitis?”

“Pole cold. Don’t worry, you’ll get it. So are you a winterover?”

The woman got on the snowmobile and motioned for Hallie to sit behind her. The wind had picked up. “Does it always blow like this?” Hallie asked.

“No.”

“That’s good.”

“What I meant, it’s usually stronger.”

Before she gunned the engine, the woman peered over her shoulder at Hallie. “I got it. You’re replacing that Beaker who died, right? What’s-her-name.”

“Her name was Emily Durant,” Hallie said.

2

“Welcome to arse,” the barrel-shaped woman announced. “Stands for—”

“I got it. ASRS. Amundsen-Scott Research Station.” Hallie had regained her breath. “It looks like a Motel 6 on stilts.”

They were standing beside the parked snowmo at the bottom of the yellow stairs that rose to the station’s main entrance.

“Wind blows underneath, stops snow buildup. Otherwise, five years, we’re buried. Just like Old Pole.”

“Everything happens here? Living, research, all of it?”

“Now it does. Summer people are gone. Beakers are finishing up projects. And there’s a skeleton crew of Draggers.”

“Beakers? Draggers?”

“Pole slang. Scientists are Beakers. Support workers are Draggers like me. As in ‘knuckle draggers.’ ”

Inside, they shoved Hallie’s bags against a wall, peeled off outer layers. The other woman was five inches shorter and a good bit heavier than Hallie, who stood five-ten and weighed 135. She wore her brown hair in a crew cut. Her cheeks were pitted with old acne scars, and she had a kicked dog’s wary look. She peered at Hallie, took in the short, almost white-blond hair, high cheekbones, large, turquoise-blue eyes, and whistled softly. “Gonna have your hands full with boy Polies. And some of the girls. So you know.”

“What’s your name?” Hallie asked.

“Rockie Bacon.”

“Rockie?”

“As in Rochelle. What’s yours?”

“Hallie Leland.” She was peering, nose wrinkled, down a long, dim corridor. “Clean, well-lighted place you have here.”

“Energy conservation. Just enough light for safety. Motion sensors turn them on and off as you move along.”

“I was being ironic,” Hallie said.

“Gathered that. I’ve read the story. Faulkner, right?”

Hallie’s nose kept her from setting Bacon straight about contemporary American fiction. “What is that reek?”

“Eau de Pole,” Bacon chuckled. “Diesel fumes, disinfectant, burned grease, and unwashed bodies. You’re here just for five days?”

“Why is the floor vibrating?”

“So you’re one of those.”

“What kind of those?”

“Who answer questions with questions. It’s irritating.”

“Is it?” Hallie could keep the grin off her face, but not out of her eyes.

“Fungees.” Bacon scowled.

“What’s a fungee?”

“Fucking new guy. Or girl.”

Bacon’s cough had sounded bad outside. It was worse inside, without the face mask and the covering noise of wind. She was flushed, her eyes were bloodshot, and her nose ran.

“Picornavirus heaven,” Hallie said. “Everybody sealed in like lab mice, passing germs back and forth.”

“You a doctor?”

“Microbiologist. Where’s the cafeteria? I need water and coffee.”

The U.S. Navy dug the first South Pole station out of solid virgin ice in 1957. Buried thirty feet deep now, that original facility, called “Old Pole,” still survived. So did some vestiges of naval tradition. Thus the current station’s cafeteria was a galley. By any name, it was like the dining hall in a big high school or penitentiary, one open rectangle redolent of fresh floor wax and old grease, crammed with scarred green tables and chairs, and buzzing at lunchtime. The kitchen and serving line were in back. In a fit of festivity, somebody had once strung multicolored Christmas lights from the ceiling. Most were burned out now, and their wires hung like thick green cobwebs.

“How’s South Pole food?” Hallie was in line with Bacon.

“Ever been in prison?”

Before Hallie could say, “Not yet,” a red-haired woman in a lab coat stood up too quickly, knocking her chair over backward. She was clamping a wad of paper napkins to her face, trying to stanch a bad nosebleed. Blood quickly soaked the makeshift compress, ran down the skin of her hands and pale wrists, and dropped in radish-sized spots onto her white lab coat.

For a few moments, nothing more happened. Then the woman’s eyes bulged and her chest convulsed. She coughed out a thick, red stream. Took a step, stumbled, mouth thrown open, blood spewing. She staggered, knocking over chairs. Grabbed for a table. Blood kept pouring out, splashing the front of her lab coat, splattering tabletops, the floor. People scrambled away.

She fell over backward. Her head hit the floor with a sharp crack. A PA system boomed:

“Code blue in the galley. Code blue in the galley. EMTs to the galley. Repeat, code blue in the galley.”

“Somebody called comms,” Bacon said.

A heavy man in black coveralls knelt beside the woman. He put his face close to feel for breath, shook his head, and began performing chest compressions. Another man knelt by her head with a mask-style ventilator, but there was too much blood flowing to use it.

Two EMTs in blue jumpsuits burst into the galley. They suctioned the woman’s airway, then went to work with a ventilator bag and defibrillator. After ten minutes and four sets of shocks, the instrument’s computerized voice droned, “Victim not responding.”

The EMTs rocked back on their heels. “She’s gone,” one said.

Hallie had seen victims on mountains and in caves badly hurt, drowned, and, several times, killed and disarticulated by long falls, but she had never seen so much blood. The woman lay completely surrounded by an oval, dark red pool. The two men and the EMTs looked like battle casualties.

The big room had been absolutely silent while the EMTs worked. Now it became even louder than before. When she’d entered, Hallie had seen dozens of faces, each one distinct. Now they all looked very much alike, reshaped by horror. Someone — she couldn’t tell whether man or woman — was sobbing softly off to one side.

“What the hell happened here?” Hallie turned to see a tall man dressed in pressed khakis. She was struck by the pallor of his skin and how his clothes hung off his knobby frame. His voice was raspy. Heavy smoker or bad sore throat, she thought. Maybe both.

“I was sitting close.” A woman in the onlooking circle, red-faced, close to tears. One hand was clasping a table edge, the other at the base of her throat. “Harriet stood up all of a sudden. I thought it was Polarrhea. But then she started vomiting blood. I never saw so much blood. Look at it.”

“She wasn’t vomiting,” one of the EMTs said. “No foreign matter there. Just blood.”

“Some kind of hemorrhage,” the other EMT said. He, like everyone else in the room, was still staring at the woman on the floor. Her skin was now almost as white as her lab coat. The smell of her fresh blood overwhelmed the wax and grease and everything else. Hallie’s stomach heaved. With the initial shock wearing off, she felt stunned, sorry for the woman, and, she was honest enough to admit, afraid.

The man in khakis keyed a radio and spoke: “Comms, Graeter. Get Doc and the biohazard team to the galley.” He had a bud in his right ear, so only he could hear the other side. He spoke again: “There’s blood. A lot. One female down. Harriet Lanahan.” To the EMTs he said, “You help them with the body when they get here. Doc will need to see it and take photographs. After, secure it in the morgue. I’ll get a flyout as soon as possible.”

He turned on the crowd of onlookers. Hallie saw anger in the abrupt move and heard it in his voice. Maybe it’s the default condition here, she thought. “I want witness statements in my email by thirteen hundred hours.”

“What if we didn’t see anything?” someone called.

“Then say that in your email, for Christ’s sake. I may talk to some of you later. Listen up: paging response has been shit-sloppy. If you hear your name, I’d better see you in my office pronto or learn a good reason why not. Now let’s clear this area. The bio team will be here soon.”

Hallie started to follow Bacon and the others out, but a hand landed on her shoulder. She turned to see the man in khakis.

“You’re Leland?” he asked.

“I just got here. I was going to see you after—”

He looked as if she had said something offensive. “Zack Graeter. Follow me.”

3

“Wait one,” said Graeter.

His desk was a massive steel relic from the 1950s that occupied practically half of the office. He turned away and began jabbing his computer’s keyboard with two long, stiff index fingers.

She decided to give nice a try. “My grandfather had a Buick about the size of that desk.”

He didn’t look up. There was no other chair and not much to see. The smudged, lima bean — green walls were bare except for a gray metal cabinet hanging behind him and an eight-by-ten color photograph of a woman thumbtacked to the wall opposite him. Throwing darts were stuck in and around the photo, which looked like it had been blasted with No. 8 birdshot. He stopped typing and turned back to her.

“Your ETA was tomorrow.” He made no effort to stand and shake hands, causing Hallie to wonder if he was protecting her from germs or just rude.

He looked rude, if such a thing were possible. There was not much more to him than muscle strung over bone and wrapped in white skin. Steel-wool hair, high forehead, cheekbones like golf balls. A thin, hard mouth cast in a downward curve. His khaki pants and shirt were crisp, his black shoes and brass belt buckle polished to a sheen.

I’ll eat that skinny little tie, thought Hallie, if he’s not ex-Navy.

“McMurdo had a flight with space. I figured an extra day would be valuable, with winterover so close. But—”

He waved off the explanation. “I don’t like unscheduled arrivals. I can’t give you the safety tour today.”

A woman just bled out and we’re talking about schedules? “What happened back there?”

“In the galley?” he asked.

“Unless somebody died in another place that I’m not aware of.”

That got more of his attention. “It looked to me like Dr. Harriet Lanahan suffered a fatal hemorrhage. She was a glaciologist. From the U.K. But Merritt does the Beakers.”

She waited.

He waited longer.

“That’s it?” she asked.

“If you know more than that, please enlighten me.”

“It’s what I don’t know that’s bothering me. First, how could it have happened? And second, I’m struck by your sang … by your lack of concern.”

“I know what sangfroid means, Ms. Leland. Annapolis isn’t Harvard, but it’s not a goddamned community college. First, we won’t know how it could have happened until the medical examiner in Christchurch performs an autopsy and issues his report. Second, that wasn’t my first fatality.” He fixed her with what was obviously meant to be a commanding glare. “In case you hadn’t noticed, this is the South Pole. It is very easy to die here.”

She folded her arms, looked around for some clue to this strange man, but saw only the dirty green walls, punctured photograph, and that cabinet.

He sighed, raised beat-up hands. “Would you prefer it if I cried and beat my breast? Tore out some hair?”

Talking with him was like striking flint to steel. But this was terra incognita, after all, the manager and the station and the South Pole. The whole continent, for that matter. Until she understood everything better, she would do her best to be civil. “Had the woman been sick? Was there any warning that this might have happened? A precondition, maybe? There’s a doctor here, right?”

“Why all the questions? You didn’t even know her.”

“First, she’s a human being. Second, I’m a field investigator for CDC. Pathogens are what I do. Third, once the word gets out, reporters will be asking questions. It would be nice if my boss had some answers. Yours might be wanting some, too, I’d bet.”

In his eyes she saw a new flicker — amusement or irritation, maybe both. “If she had been sick, Agnes Merritt would know. She’s the chief scientist. Lanahan was a Beaker and worked for her. If there had been some precondition, Doc might have known.” He hoisted his eyebrows, pointed one bony finger. “For the record, I don’t give a fiddlefuck about bosses, and my job description does not include grief counselor. I won’t bore you with the details of my workload, but with winterover four point five days away I am well and truly — excuse my French—fucked, and you are keeping me from getting unfucked.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. But if you recall, it was you who asked me to come in here.”

“And if you recall, it was not to talk about Dr. Lanahan.”

“What happened to your hands?” They were painful to look at, red and cracked, oozing.

“Pole hands. Basically zero humidity here. Skin takes a beating.”

Pole throat, Pole cold, Pole hands, she thought. What’s next? Pole brain, probably.

“It looks painful.”

“At first. Then the nerves die.”

“Good thing you don’t play piano.”

“Actually, I do. Just not allegro anymore.”

She tried to imagine him banging out show tunes at cocktail parties. The image wouldn’t gel. “That happens to everybody?”

“Pretty much. You don’t look so good yourself, Ms. Leland. Maybe you should think about catching the next flight out.”

4

It was early Monday morning. Don Barnard, who had never been a late sleeper, was sitting with coffee in the study of his Silver Spring home. He was a big man, twenty pounds heavier than in his days playing tight end for the University of Virginia thirty-five years earlier. His hair and mustache were both white and the skin of his face was heavily creased from squinting in the bright sun while sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. His wife, Lucianne, was still in bed.

Barnard glanced at the clock on his desk: 5:12 A.M. It was 5:12 A.M. on Monday at the South Pole, as well. All lines of longitude converged there, so it existed, in a way, out of time. Since the National Science Foundation, just outside Washington, ran operations there, NSF time was Pole time. Not only habit had gotten Barnard out of bed early that morning. He had been awake for at least an hour before rising, thinking about Hallie. And he had suffered the same thoughts, off and on, for two days running.

Donald Barnard, MD, PhD, was the director of BARDA — the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority — created by President George W. Bush in 2006 to counter biowarfare threats. BARDA also conducted a clandestine initiative called Project BioShield. Thus Barnard’s work required that he keep secrets — a good many, really. He was not the kind of man to keep secrets from himself, however. An only child whose father had died when he was seven, Barnard had always envied friends from big families. He had wanted a sprawling family of his own, had entertained visions of himself old and doting, rocking in a large chair in front of a fire, his lap overflowing with grandchildren while his sons and daughters stood around drinking wine and laughing over old sibling dustups.

But then, during his postdoc in Strasbourg, he met Lucianne, and later they got married in the States. It was 1979, and everyone understood that the earth was a lifeboat sunk to the gunwales by proliferating billions. He and Lucianne agreed that having just one child was the right thing to do, and that had been Nicholas. Barnard had never felt bad for their son. There were some drawbacks to being an only child but more advantages, emotional and material both, as he himself knew.

Still, another of the secrets he had not kept from himself was how much he would have appreciated a daughter, and especially one like Hallie Leland. There were many things to admire about her, but perhaps more than anything else he loved that she was a challenger. He sometimes joked that, given the power of speech at birth, she might have questioned the obstetrician about his credentials. She accepted no wisdom as conventional, no practice as standard, and reflexively distrusted authority in all its forms. Barnard hadn’t seen many people like her in his time, and he knew that the few who had the intellect to match their skepticism were those rare and precious creatures called natural-born scientists.

It took one to know others. It also took one to understand how they, especially when young, simmered along in an almost continual state of impatience, waiting for sluggards to deduce what they had discovered long ago. Barnard had been like that earlier in his career. Hallie was like that now. He had not been the easiest person to be around then, and she was not now.

But all of that was old knowledge. This was Monday, and Barnard was dealing with something new. Hallie had flown out on Thursday afternoon. She had called from LAX very early on Friday morning and sent an email from Christchurch on Saturday. Having heard nothing since, he didn’t even know if she had arrived at the South Pole.

But communication wasn’t the thing bothering him most. It was, rather, the South Pole assignment itself, which he had given her. Had been directed to give her, more precisely, by his own boss, DCDC — Director, Centers for Disease Control. He could have pushed back, of course; he’d been around long enough and earned enough respect to do that. CDC directors were political appointees, came and went, and he had seen more arrive and depart than he cared to remember. At the time, though, there had seemed no reason to object. And Hallie herself had been thrilled, as he’d known she would be, with the opportunity. Most microbiologists would spend their entire careers without getting to the South Pole, one of the most extreme — and coveted — research postings on earth.

But by Friday afternoon, something had started bothering him, a mental splinter that at first he could not tease out. He looked at the possible reasons, one after another. The South Pole was a dangerous place, true, but no worse than other realms Hallie’s work had taken her into. The previous year, for instance, she’d almost died in a Mexican supercave called Cueva de Luz, Cave of Light, which had been full of traps. A swamp of bat shit teeming with pathogens. Acid lakes. Five-hundred-foot sheer drops. Flooded tunnels. At least the South Pole was aboveground, settled, and civilized. So the problem wasn’t where he had sent her.

The work itself — technical ice diving — was also hazardous but, again, not worse than other diving her work had required, in caves like that vast Mexican labyrinth or on deep wrecks involving possible biohazards, to name just two. So it wasn’t what he had sent her to do, either.

He had known where he was sending her and what she would be doing, and he had been, if not happy with those challenges, at least comfortable that she was equal to both. It was only after some time that he’d realized that his unease derived not from the destination or the work.

He had called the director back. Laraine Harris had taken her PhD from Tulane and retained a rich and musical Louisiana accent. Barnard could have listened to her talk all day long, about pretty much anything, just for the sound of her voice.

“I had a question about Emily Durant,” he said.

“The scientist who died,” Harris said.

“Right. When you told me about Emily, I didn’t think to ask how she died. Do you know, by any chance?”

If Harris thought his question odd, her tone didn’t suggest that. “I asked them — NSF — the same question.”

“What did they say?”

“I’m sorry, that information isn’t available. Quote, unquote.”

“Does that seem”—what was the right word here? — “unusual?”

“Maybe a little. But it was an official personnel request, not a next-of-kin notification. They might not know themselves.”

That rang true. Communication in Washington was as complex and nuanced as a Japanese tea ceremony. Laraine had just described one of the invisible rules. If someone said information wasn’t available, back off. Frontal attacks rarely worked here. Much better to find and exploit the vulnerable chink or flank.

They said goodbye, and he sat staring out a window. The view from his office wasn’t much: a big parking lot, mostly empty this late on a Friday, followed by vacant buildings and warehouses. Beyond those, the green woods were usually pleasant to look at. Today, though, was standard winter weather in Washington, and the distance held only gray fog.

He became aware of a big paper clip that he had twisted and bent, without realizing it, while they’d talked. He set it aside, picked up the white meerschaum pipe he hadn’t smoked for sixteen years, then set that down, too. Stared at the blank legal pad he kept on the right side of his desk, toyed with the fountain pen stationed on top of the pad. He picked up the pen and wrote one word:

Bowman

He added a question mark: Bowman?

Not yet, he thought. Wait to see if Hallie calls. But not much longer.

5

“Thanks for your concern. Truthfully, I don’t feel so good,” Hallie told Graeter. “Which isn’t surprising because it took four days and nights to get here, and I can’t recall when I really slept last. But don’t worry on my account. I’ve been to twenty-four thousand feet on mountains and almost two miles deep in caves.”

He snorted.

“You find that funny?”

“We get lots of climbers down here, all full of themselves. ‘I got this high on Mount Rumdoodle’ or whatever.” Shook his head. “You stay on one of your mountains, what, a week or two? Hit maybe forty below? Deal with fifty-, sixty-knot winds? People stay at Pole for a year. It averages one hundred and five degrees below zero in winter. Hurricanes with hundred-knot winds can last a week. Crevasses big enough to swallow locomotives. So yes, I do chuckle at the ignorance of fungees.”

She waited, understanding that he was enjoying himself, impressing a newcomer.

“You’ll feel worse, believe me,” he went on. “There’s something called T3 syndrome. Your thyroid shrivels up. Memory goes. Wild mood swings. Some people start seeing things, hearing them.”

“There’s a thing in deep caves called the Rapture. It—”

“That movie, The Shining? Where Nicholson starts chasing his family with an ax?”

“Yes?”

“T3 syndrome. You probably won’t be around long enough to get a bad case. But a lot of people here have been. So you know.”

She needed to tell him something else. Or maybe ask. What? Altitude addlement leading to brain cramp. Buy some time. She nodded at three framed photographs of young men in Navy whites on his desk.

“Your sons?”

“No.”

She waited again.

So did he, again. The hell with small talk, then.

“You probably know this already,” she said, “but, for the record, I’m here on temporary assignment from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, BARDA, part of CDC, in Washington. On loan to the National Science Foundation to help Dr.… um …” What the hell was his name? Lots of syllables.

“Fido Muktapadhay,” Graeter said. Mook-ta-POD-hay. “Who everybody calls Fido, for obvious reasons.”

“Right. To help complete his research project. CDC rushed me down here. I was told that he and Emily Durant were working on deep ice-core samples and found something unusual. Finishing before winterover was urgent.”

“Was there a question in there somewhere?”

“Do you know any more about their research?”

“No. More importantly, you haven’t been briefed about this place.”

“I did talk with—”

“Not by me. My point.”

“Could this wait until I get some sleep?”

“Here’s the quick and dirty. I’m in command here. Just like the captain of a ship. I can marry you and bury you. The only law at Pole is SORs, and I enforce them.”

“SORs?”

“Didn’t you read your prep material?”

“Nobody gave me prep material.”

“Jesus Christ. SORs are the Station Operating Regulations. They must be obeyed to the letter. Failure to do so gets people hurt. Or dead. Clear?”

She gave a curt nod. Poked in the chest like this, Hallie was more inclined than most to poke back harder. She had inherited that tendency not just from her soldier father but also from her horse-trainer mother. Growing up with two older brothers had sharpened it nicely. Now, standing half-asleep and fully irritated in the stinky closet of an office, she was finding it harder not to poke, terra incognita be damned.

Then he woke her up a little. He opened a desk drawer, removed a black leather ID folder and what she recognized as a SIG Sauer semiautomatic pistol. He flipped the folder to show a brass, star-shaped badge, then set it and the pistol on his desk, the gun’s muzzle pointing to one side, watching her all the while.

Maybe we’re going to play spin the pistol, she thought, immediately recognizing the weirdness of that idea. Be serious. He wants to see how I do with guns.

“Something else you need to know,” he said. “The station manager is a deputy U.S. marshal. Sworn and trained. So I am the law here. Literally.”

At its deepest, exhaustion was like being drunk; it dissolved restraint, invited mischief. Her next action had a life of its own.

“May I?” Before he could speak, she picked up the SIG, released the magazine, caught it in her left hand, worked the slide to eject the chambered round, caught that spinning in the air in her palm beside the magazine. It pleased her no end to see how much effort it took for him to look unimpressed. “You like the forty-cal better than the three fifty-seven?” she asked.

“So you know guns,” he said. “Fine. Now put my pistol down.”

“Grew up on a farm in Virginia. I like the magnum’s muzzle velocity, myself.” She popped the magazine back into place, thumbed the slide release and then the trigger release, set the pistol back on the desk, and stood the fat ejected round beside it. “I don’t like one chambered. No safety on a SIG,” she said.

“The forty-cal is what they issue. Safeties are great for target punchers. Slow in a fight, though.” He put the badge folder and gun away. “To finish up, just so we’re clear. Merritt keeps the research going. I keep people alive. You, just long enough to ship out in a few days.” It was the first time anything resembling pleasure had crept into his voice. That did it.

“Mr. Graeter, what could I possibly have done to piss you off so much in the very brief time we’ve been acquainted?”

His expression did not change. Did the man have any muscles in that face? “Bringing you down here pissed me off.”

“Why would it do that? I’m here to help. And we’ve never met.”

“Nothing personal. This is the easiest place on earth for the inexperienced and unwitting to die.” He fixed her with a hard stare, but not before his eyes flicked to the photographs on his desk.

“I’m experienced. And, most of the time, relatively witting.”

If he appreciated the irony, it didn’t show. “Nice to know. Keep this in mind at all times: we are like an outpost on Mars, except colder and darker.”

“I get it. I really do.” She just wanted some sleep.

“One last thing: do not go near the Underground or Old Pole.”

“What are they?”

“Read your station manual.”

“I didn’t get a station manual.”

“Jesus keelhauling Christ.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. “Did the CDC at least take care of you?”

“Centers for Disease Control? In Washington, you mean?”

“Clothing Distribution Center. At McMurdo. For your extreme-cold-weather gear.”

“Yes.”

“Wait one.” He unlocked the gray cabinet on the wall behind his desk. Scores of door keys hung from small numbered hooks. He removed one. The keys on all the other hooks were duplicates. There was no key left behind on the hook from which Graeter had taken this one.

“Where’s the backup?” She pointed to the empty hook.

For the first time, he looked more uncomfortable than angry. “Missing.” He locked the cabinet and pushed the key across his desk. “Dorm wing A, second level, number two-three-seven.” He told her how to find it. “Believe in ghosts, Ms. Leland?”

“Yes.” It pleased her immensely to see that he wasn’t expecting that.

“Good. You may have company. It was Emily Durant’s room. That bother you?”

“Not one bit. We were good friends. I hope she visits.” Ha, she thought. Got him again.

“You knew Durant?”

“She worked at BARDA before NSF. We did a lot of things together. She saved my life one time, after we got avalanched climbing Denali. It’s been a few years, though. Do you believe in ghosts, Mr. Graeter?”

His eyes flicked again to the black-framed photographs. “No,” he said, and even though she had just met the man, she knew he was lying. Maybe she would find out why. At this point, she was too tired to care. But she was curious about one thing.

“Why that room?”

“With winterover so close, the field units are closed and all personnel, Beakers and Draggers alike, have moved into the station. Every room is occupied. Durant’s opened up when she passed. Come see me tomorrow at noon. We’re finished here now.”

“Actually, we’re not. No one in D.C. knew much about Em’s death. How did it happen?”

His face changed, and it was like watching water suddenly freeze. “See Merritt. I told you. Durant worked for her. She found the body.”

“Maybe, but you’re the station manager. I’d appreciate hearing—”

“I just said to see Merritt. In the Navy, once was enough, Ms. Leland.”

“Doctor Leland. And this isn’t the Navy.”

She waited for him to snap or shout. The more someone did that, the calmer she became — you couldn’t see to fight if you were blind with rage. But his voice was flat.

“No. But this is my office, and I have work to do. Go see Merritt.” A beat. “If you please.”

He turned around and began typing on his computer keyboard. She stopped with her hand on the doorknob, looking at the photograph on the wall. The woman had shoulder-length brown hair. Her red blouse’s two top buttons were undone to show swelling breasts. Good skin, upturned nose. Cheerleader-cute rather than model-beautiful. But eye shadow too thick, lips too red, and dark-circled eyes too old for the face spoiled the cheerleader image.

Hallie knew the type. Every branch had them. Picture-pretty, nail-hard, girls who had fun when the men were gone. She didn’t know what the Navy called them. In the Army, they were known as layaways.

“Ex-wife, am I right?” It just slipped out. Like the thing with the gun.

Graeter’s head snapped up.

“Wonder what she’s doing with your picture.”

He turned away, the creased back of his neck reddening. He started typing again, and it sounded like little machine guns firing.

6

It would take two trips to get the duffel bags to her room. She bent down, reached for one. Silver sparks filled her eyes and she had to stand quickly, one hand on the wall.

“Please allow me to help with those.”

She turned toward a light touch on her shoulder. A smiling, very muscular man put out his hand. He wore jeans, work boots, and a black turtleneck stretched by bulging pectorals and undulating abs. His legs, in tight jeans, were skinny and short. Wil Bowman, the man in her life, had once talked about “prison muscles” on men with massive upper bodies and bird legs. But this fellow did not look like one who had done time. No knuckle tattoos, a firm but not painful handshake, eyes direct but showing hello rather than some odd hunger. A Cousteauean nose and black watch cap worn askew gave him a jaunty, faintly nautical air.

“Rémy Guillotte,” he said. Ghee-YOTT. “You are just arrived, I think.”

“I didn’t hear you come up. And yes, you are looking at a total fungee.”

He laughed. “So you are learning to speak Pole already. Excellent. Dr. Leland, am I right?” He pronounced it Lee-LAND. “I heard you were meeting with Mr. Graeter. I am the station’s dive operations manager, so we will be working together while you are here.”

It just popped out: “Did you work Emily’s dives?”

His expression changed. “Poor Dr. Durant. No. That man flew out several days ago. I am a winterover.”

She would want to see all his certifications and credentials, but not now. “We can talk about the diving later. I really need to get some sleep.”

He flipped both bags up onto his shoulders. Forty pounds each, she thought. “So let us go find your room.”

She gathered up her ECW gear and followed. Sensors turned overhead lights on as they approached and off again when they had passed. It was like flowing in a luminous bubble through dark tunnels. Similar to cave diving, in fact. They saw only three people. One had his head down and appeared to be talking to himself. The other two went right on by, slack-jawed, eyes fixed in thousand-yard stares.

After they passed, Guillotte said, “I heard what happened in the galley.”

“I saw it,” Hallie said.

“Is it true that Dr. Lanahan was vomiting blood?”

“Probably not vomiting. A hemorrhage, more likely.”

“This is so tragic,” he said. “In just a few days she would have been flying back to home.”

“What’s it like? Living here, I mean?”

He looked thoughtful, considered before answering. “A good question to ask. It is strange at first. A place where everything you know is not true.”

“How so?”

“Here the sun comes up once and goes down once in a year, for starters. It all flows from there.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t thought of that.

“After some time, you adjust. Or, some people, not.”

Room A-237 was in the middle of one of the second-level dorm wings. Guillotte opened the door with one hand. The bags stayed balanced on his shoulders.

“Unlocked?” she asked.

“Apparently so. The cleaners probably forgot after they are finished.” He followed her in, set the bags down gently, switched on the room light.

“Thank you very much,” she said. “I could have gotten them myself, but—”

“Of course you could have. Clearly you are in very fit shape. But this was better, I think. Until you are acclimatized.”

“You’re right. I’m grateful.”

“And I am happy to help. Maybe I can show you around later. There are many unusual things here in this Pole place.”

Alone, she leaned back against the door, too tired to wonder how he had known her name and which room was hers. It was tight even by Motel 6 standards — no bigger than a supermax cell, really — and furnished like a college dorm: white acoustic-tile drop ceiling; single, high bunk bed with drawers underneath; a tall, narrow window that could have been a sheet of black marble. Under it sat a tiny desktop with a computer monitor and keyboard. The computer’s boxy CPU was on the floor beneath the desk.

She knew what she should do: email Don Barnard, her boss, and Wil Bowman. Her last contact with Barnard had been by email at Christchurch, so he wouldn’t know she’d arrived. Her last with Bowman had been the previous Thursday and less than pleasant. As such scenes are wont to do, this one kept replaying in her mind despite her best efforts to make it stop. It was like trying not to think of a camel after someone says, “Don’t think of a camel.”

Bowman drove her to Dulles. Minutes from the departures area, she said, without preamble, “I have always been regular as a clock. Every four weeks on the dot. This time, I was eight days late. Until night before last. I really was starting to think …” She let the rest of it trail off.

“Why didn’t you say anything before?” It took a great deal to discomfit Wil Bowman, but her statement clearly had.

“I wanted to be sure.”

Something in her tone must have caught his ear. “That wasn’t the only reason, though.”

“No, it wasn’t the only one,” she said. She knew he was waiting for her to say more, and she knew, as well, that she should. Why couldn’t she? And why hadn’t she told him sooner? She wasn’t really afraid that he would be angry. In their year together, she’d seen him genuinely angry only three times, and two of those had been with himself. He was not, by any stretch, meek or mild. He was perhaps the most balanced, synchronous man she had ever met, and he was certainly the most dangerous — though not to her. She understood that his work for some unnamed entity buried deep in the intelligence labyrinth occasionally involved killing—“but only those who really need it,” as he’d once said. The thought that he might up and leave had never entered her mind.

As he sensed and she admitted, there was something else. The trouble was that she hadn’t then understood what, and that was why she hadn’t said anything until they were almost to the airport. Didn’t want to fly off holding a secret, but didn’t want to talk in detail until she’d had more time to sort things out.

He was already double-parking in front of the soaring terminal. Fifty-five minutes until her flight boarded and her with two huge bags, one full of dive gear that would certainly catch the TSA agents’ attention. Cars were stacking up. A taxi honked. Wind whipped grit against their faces, into their eyes, as they stood by the curb. He tossed her bags onto a redcap’s wagon, then drew her aside.

“We need to talk more, Hallie.”

“We do. But I have to go.”

He held her with his eyes. “There are things you don’t know. About me.”

That surprised her. He never spoke like that, hated the international-man-of-mystery air some people in his profession affected. She retained enough composure to say, “And about myself, apparently,” which seemed to startle him as well.

She glanced at the terminal, saw automatic doors clamping shut on a suitcase towed by a limping woman. Those doors weren’t supposed to do that. Electric eyes or infrared sensors. She looked back at Bowman.

“I have to leave now, Wil.” She kissed him. He held her shoulders lightly, kissed her back, then again, and touched her face. That a man his size could touch so softly never failed to amaze her. “I’ll call from LAX.” She motioned to the redcap, who followed her into the terminal.

She had needed time to understand her own behavior. Four days and nights of travel with the scene replaying in her head like an endless film loop had been enough. She composed an email on the room’s station computer:

She sent that email, then wrote one to Don Barnard, shorter, saying that she had arrived safely, describing the place. She turned off the light, jumped up onto the chest-high bunk, and fell asleep still dressed.

Guillotte reached the end of Hallie’s corridor, turned into another. After looking up and down that one, he used his cellphone.

“You may make the call now.”

7

She and emily were swimming in frigid water, thick as syrup, green and purple swirls coiling around them. In a black sky, iridescent birds circled, screaming. Hallie sank away from Emily, floating slowly down, flapping her arms, trying to breathe water now as viscous and silver as molten mercury.

She awoke and lay still, pulling herself up out of the dream, watching false light images glowing and sparking in her eyes. The room smelled of Lysol and, thanks to four days of traveling without a shower, her. And something else, so faint she had not noticed it until then. Licorice, of all things. She turned on one side, sniffed. The scent, barely discernible, was coming from the bunk mattress. Emily had had a sweet tooth, though more for dark chocolate than licorice, as Hallie remembered. Doubtless a year in this place could change a person in many ways, and who knew — licorice might have been the only candy she could get.

It had been a long time since Hallie had slept in a top bunk. She sat up, swung her legs over the side, stretched tall, and accidentally punched two of the ceiling’s acoustic tiles, which lifted out of their frames and then fell back into place. For a few moments she didn’t move. Then she got down and turned on the light.

She climbed back up and knelt on the bunk. Using both hands, she raised one of the tiles she had accidentally hit and laid it aside. She reached up through the vacant space and carefully explored the back of the second tile. Her fingers touched something metallic, shaped like a deck of cards, but with sharp edges and corners. She lifted the tile carefully out of its metal frame and set it on the mattress.

There was product information on the object:

Two wires ran from sockets in the surveillance unit’s case. One connected to a microcamera that looked like a metal toothpick half an inch long with a tiny bulb at one end. That had been pushed down into a hole in the tile. The other was connected to a shorter, thicker metal tube — the motion sensor, she guessed. It, too, had been inserted into a hole. Hallie worked both loose, freeing the device, and saw a USB port on one side of its case.

She connected it to her laptop computer and set it on the bunk so that it was almost at eye level. On the screen appeared a black camera shape with the same information she had seen on the case. PIR, she knew, stood for “passive infrared,” the same motion-detection system that worked intrusion alarms and automatic lights like those in the halls. And — strange to think of it now — that should have prevented the airport door from clamping down on the crippled woman’s suitcase as Hallie had said goodbye to Bowman.

She double-clicked on the icon and a new screen appeared, showing nine MPEG-4 files. Hallie watched the first, created on January 23. It showed what the microcam had seen: a fish-eye view that included half of the room. There was no audio, and just enough ambient light for the camera to record grainy images. That light, Hallie reasoned, might have been coming from luminous numbers on a digital clock somewhere in the room, or perhaps from a night-light, or both. She saw a shape moving onto the bunk, vague but discernible as a woman. Emily, caught by her own camera. Or — someone else’s? Emily’s eyes closed; her breathing slowed. She fell asleep almost immediately.

Hallie kept watching. The camera recorded for three more minutes, then stopped. She thought it was probably set to turn off automatically after detecting no motion for a predetermined period. Hallie fast-forwarded through a number of false alarms triggered by Emily’s movements while asleep. Then she opened the most recent file, from January 31. Sixteen days ago. The same scene, so dark she could see only shadows moving. Then a flare and, after that died, soft and wavering light.

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.”