“It has been a very long day, I am afraid. This is not a good time.” He glanced at his watch. “But if you call my office tomorrow, you can—”
“Have a seat on the couch.” Bowman had walked, and Gerrin had backed, through the entrance hall and into the living room.
“It won’t take long,” Barnard said, following. He was surprised at how much traffic noise he was hearing. An older house, built even before the nearby Beltway.
Gerrin seemed not to notice. He looked from one to the other and placed his cellphone on the coffee table in front of him.
“Amazing devices,” he said. “Especially the voice activation. Someone is breaking into your house in the middle of the night? One word brings the police with sirens screaming. Very comforting.”
“When it works,” Bowman said.
Gerrin picked up the phone, put it down again. “No reception bars. How strange.”
“Everything disappoints, sooner or later,” Bowman said. Earlier, he had explained to Barnard, “Some signal jamming, highly localized. Easy on, easy off.”
“So,” Gerrin said, “how may I help you gentlemen?” His irritation had passed, and he seemed composed. Barnard thought, If a man like Bowman had just pushed into my home …
“The South Pole,” Barnard said.
“Which we discussed in my office.”
“I have some more questions.”
“Really? I thought we addressed your concerns well enough.”
“We know that you lied to Dr. Barnard,” Bowman said. “We need to know why. And we need truthful answers. Lives may be at stake here.”
Gerrin locked eyes with Bowman, and Barnard had to admire that. “Or what? You’ll spirit me away to some distant land for extreme rendition? Waterboarding and such?”
“We wouldn’t need to spirit you far. Waterboarding is medieval and messy. This is the twenty-first century, Doctor. We’ve come a long way.” Bowman took a smartphone from his pocket, started a video, and handed it to Gerrin. After twenty seconds, the slender man turned pale. When he gave the phone back, his hand shook.
“Emily Durant,” Bowman said. “Why did you ask for Hallie Leland to replace her?”
“The government personnel system computer asked for her, actually. She had the specialized skills needed to finish an important project.” Gerrin looked from one man to the other. “You must have known that already. Why did you come to my home? Really, I mean. What is this about?”
“Dr. Durant’s death may not have been accidental,” Bowman said.
“How would you know? No one has seen the medical examiner’s report.”
“We have. Tell us what you know about her death. The truth.”
Gerrin sighed, set his cup on the table, leaned forward, elbows on knees. His composure had returned, which Barnard found very strange. “All right. I will appreciate your discretion here with what I am about to say. I was told — we are talking back-channel now — that drugs might have been involved.”
“Why did you lie to me about that?” Barnard asked. “You said you didn’t know.”
“Please consider my position. A stranger comes to your office asking for details about the death of a senior scientist in a facility for which you are responsible. There is no official report on this death yet, but you have unconfirmed information that could do huge damage to the dead person’s reputation, as well as to your organization. Not to mention your own career.”
Barnard started to ask another question, but someone knocked on the front door. Gerrin looked at them, eyebrows raised.
“Go ahead,” Bowman said.
Gerrin left them and returned with a young man Barnard recognized at once. “Gentlemen, this is my assistant, Muhammed Kandohur Said. He kindly offered to look at a computer here that has been misbehaving. Muhammed is an exceptional young man. Graduated magna cum laude from MIT two years ago. He is from Karail, in my native country. Have you heard of it?”
“No,” Barnard said.
“Not surprising, really. Few Americans have. Muhammed, this is Dr. Barnard and, ah, his associate.”
The young man, polite and diffident, shook hands with each in turn. To Gerrin he said, “My friend Hasim is dropping me off. We weren’t sure you would be home yet. Shall I tell him to go now? He will pick me up later.” To Bowman and Barnard, sheepishly: “I still do not have a license to drive.”
“Yes, go and do that,” Gerrin said. “Then we will look at the computer. My friends here were just leaving.”
“What did you think?” Bowman asked, when they had driven a few blocks.
“I thought about how much effort it took to keep from wrapping my hands around his neck and squeezing some truth out of the bastard,” Barnard said. He shook his head. “Haven’t wanted to do that for a long time, Wil.”
52
When she heard the cracking sound, Hallie dove under the desk and crouched in the kneehole, an instinct-driven reaction, too fast for conscious thought. She huddled and prayed that the massive desk was as strong as it looked.
This collapse took much less time than the avalanche — not more than three seconds, ending with a huge whoomp. She didn’t move, wanting to make sure the cave-in had stabilized. She was unhurt and breathing but would exhaust the air in her little cave quickly. When the carbon dioxide load became too great, she would fall unconscious and then suffocate.
She had the headlamp and two handheld lights. Her cellphone, which would be useless. An energy bar. Matches. The Leatherman multitool. Light would not be the problem. Nor food and water. She would live or die by air.
She guessed her hole to be about two feet high, three feet wide and deep. She had waited out mountain storms in snow caves not a whole lot bigger, and worked through cave passages a good deal smaller. Here, she was crouched on her knees, bent over sideways in the hole, perpendicular to the way she wanted to go.
She pulled off her mittens, found her Leatherman tool, and formed it into a pair of pliers with tapered jaws.
You have to breathe easy, she told herself. Don’t overexert. This will take time.
With her mittens back on, she jabbed the pliers’ point into the wall of frozen material blocking the front of the kneehole. It was not as compacted as concrete-hard avalanche debris. The snow above Old Pole had never slid and melted. It had compressed, yes, but that was different. When she jabbed the pliers in and pulled, fist-sized chunks popped out.
Trying to tunnel up was out of the question. Her only hope was to work her way horizontally toward the room’s doorway. The room’s ceiling beams were long and could support less weight than those in the narrow hall. Maybe the collapse had been limited to this one office.
She kept her breathing as shallow as possible, but soon she started to feel oxygen hunger, a constant, low burning in her chest coupled with an urge in her brain to suck in a huge, deep breath. Bothersome, but something she could control. She did know that at some point the rising carbon dioxide level in her blood would trip an autonomic response. Then she would gasp involuntarily. For a few seconds she would feel relief, but then the urge to breathe would again become irresistible. The cycle would repeat itself over and over until, by exhausting the oxygen in her space, it would kill her.
She kept digging, lying on her belly, shoving icy debris back behind her as it accumulated in front of her face. Halfway out of the kneehole, she stopped and hollowed out a space in front of the desk’s lower drawer. She was gambling, and it was taking extra time and air, but it might be worth it. When she had a space big enough to open the drawer halfway, she pulled it out. Inside were four sturdy metal dividers, more common back in the days when files still meant only paper. They were rigid steel the size and shape of a file drawer’s interior. Little arms on their sides ran along horizontal tracks in the drawers. There was some proper way to get them out, which Hallie didn’t recall or maybe never knew. She grabbed one with both hands, wrenched it around, and it popped free. It would become her shovel. She could move ten times as much ice and snow with each stroke as she had been chipping out with the pliers.