Frozen Solid: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

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 retainedenough 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:
    Hi Wil
    Sixty-eight below and pitch-dark when I stepped onto the ice—at
noon
. Beats my previous record low by about 25 degrees. I’m exhausted already, four days and nights in planes and terminals, and work hasn’t even started. The South Pole is a very strange place. The people, too—so far, anyway. Mostly, what you notice right off is the dark. Dark outside for thousands of square miles. It’s even dark
inside
.
    At Dulles, you asked why I didn’t tell you sooner. I didn’t know myself right then. Now I do. I was afraid you’d say that I had no business even thinking about being a mother. And that you might have been right.
    So it was all me. Nothing about you.
    Love,
    Hallie
    She sent that email, then wrote one to Don Barnard, shorter, saying that she had arrived safely, describing the place. She turned offthe 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