“What is she talking about?” Merritt asked. When Hallie had told her about Emily’s murder, she had left out graphic descriptions of the torture.
“Let me have a few minutes with her. The cooperation will increase quickly, I can promise you,” Guillotte said.
Merritt waved him quiet again. “What are you talking about?” she asked Hallie.
This time, Hallie gave her the details. When she had finished, Merritt was pale and looked like she might vomit. She stared at Guillotte. “That was never part of your assignment. Let her go.”
Hallie felt Guillotte’s grip tighten even more.
“What did you do with that video?” Merritt asked.
“I sent a copy of the file to some people in Washington.”
“She’s lying,” Guillotte said. “You know we disabled comms. Nothing goes out or gets in.”
“I told Zack Graeter,” Hallie said.
“You’re lying,” Merritt said.
“No, she is not,” Guillotte said. “Graeter has a copy.”
“Then why isn’t he here?” Merritt asked.
“I have no doubt he will be quickly.” Guillotte shook his head and Hallie felt his grip loosen very slightly. Then he said, “Wait. Why did you come down here if you knew?”
“I didn’t know it was you until just now.”
“Ahh, shit,” Guillotte said. He took his hand from Hallie’s neck and stepped back. “Just once, just one fucking time, I would like for the luck to come my way.”
“You realize what this means?” Merritt said to Guillotte. Her voice was shaking.
“Of course I do. Triage is compromised. To put it simply, we are all fucked. You need to stay calm, Agnes,” Guillotte said. “At times like this, the most important thing is to stay very calm.”
But Merritt was not calm. Terror and fury were overtaking her. “What were you thinking?”
“People like him don’t think,” Hallie said. “They act on instinct. Or something worse. You knew about this, Agnes?”
Merritt turned away from Guillotte to face her. “Not the torture. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“I don’t understand. He’s obviously insane. But you? How could you be involved in something like this?”
Merritt didn’t answer right away. Instead, she stared at Guillotte. Hallie watched Merritt’s face change into a mask of horror, disgust — and guilt. The pain Hallie saw there reminded her of pictures of Dante’s sinners in hell.
This was her chance. “What is Triage really about?” she asked Merritt.
The older woman looked down, then back at Guillotte and shook her head. She turned to Hallie, and when she spoke, there was abject misery in her voice. “A group of people committed to saving the planet from pollution. Human pollution.”
“You’re talking about overpopulation,” Hallie said. She saw the women bleeding to death, Bacon suffocating. “My God. Are you going to start some kind of pandemic?”
“No. That’s the beauty of Triage. No one has to die.”
“Then how can you stop overpopulation?”
“Neutralize the breeders.”
“Kill women? For God’s sake, Agnes …”
“Nobody dies. We don’t kill anybody. We sterilize them.”
“That would take years, even if you could get governments to do it.”
“Governments won’t ever do anything. That’s why we created Triage.”
“Then how—?”
“The women here will fly back to five continents. Each will carry Triage. The spread will be exponential.”
“Like smallpox. What is Triage, exactly?”
“Merritt.” Guillotte’s voice had an edge now. “We need to—”
Merritt waved him to silence. “Quiet. We’re not all like you. It’s a picornavirus carrying a payload: streptococcus engineered to seek and destroy ovarian cells.” Merritt’s full attention was on Hallie now. Perhaps she thought that confessing, or at least sharing, would ease her pain from learning what Guillotte had done. “It only affects those with a certain genetic marker called the Krauss gene. About half the women on earth have it.”
“So it’s eugenics all over again. Modern-day Nazis. But how could you infect the women here? I don’t imagine they all consented to—”
“Doc’s been very busy these last ten days with exit physicals.”
She remembered: the blood drawing and throat swab.
“Now put on your dive gear,” Guillotte snapped.
“What?”
“I said, Put on your dive gear. Now.”
“No.”
Guillotte walked over, fixed black-marble eyes on hers. “You saw what happened to Emily. It would be easy to do similar things to you. Or worse. Gear up. Now.” To Merritt he said, “We will dispose of her first. Then I will deal with Graeter.”
“But if you kill me, you won’t be able to fake a diving accident,” Hallie said.
“Oh, you will be quite alive. The needle did not kill Emily, as you recall. It just helped her … emote. The difference here is that if you don’t obey, when I finish, you will be begging us to let you put on your diving gear. And to die, as well.”
They must have sabotaged some part of her equipment. She had no way of knowing what. So she could gear up now, without coercion, or resist and suffer the consequences. End result the same. If she cooperated, at least she would be in better shape to deal with whatever surprise they had prepared for her.
“Okay,” she said.
Guillotte held her gaze for another few moments. She felt a twinge in her gut. Eyes of the Beast, she thought. Whoever said the devil on earth would look like an ordinary man was right.
They helped her don gear. She thought they would put her into the dry suit that had failed but then understood that they were too smart to do that. She might have told others about the leaks. If she were to be found dead in the flooded suit, it would look suspicious. And even if they didn’t find her body — likely, given the cryopeg’s depth — if she and the failed suit were both missing, it would also give rise to questions. So they gave her one of the station suits. They even switched on her headlamp after securing her helmet over the hood. They would want to make sure that if her body was ever found, everything would be in order. Except the one thing, whatever it was, that they had done to the equipment.
At last she pulled her mask down, seated it properly, and started shuffling forward, Guillotte supporting the tanks from behind. Merritt walked ahead to stand beside the hole. Hallie caught her eye, making one last attempt to connect, but Merritt looked away.
Almost to the shaft, Hallie pretended to catch the tip of one fin on something. She stumbled, pitched forward, grabbed the rack of scuba tanks, and yanked it over with all her strength. As tanks hit the floor, she disappeared beneath the surface of the water in the shaft.
She had feared being positively buoyant, unable to sink fast enough to get away from them. But just the opposite: she plunged like an anchor. She hit the inflator button on her dry suit’s chest.
Nothing happened.
So they had disabled the suit’s inflating system. She kept dropping, and the deeper she went, the faster she sank.
54
If she couldn’t add air, she would have to subtract weight.
She ripped her belt’s quick-release buckle open and dumped twenty-five pounds of lead. Almost immediately her descent slowed. She looked for the white anchor line, but her light beam showed nothing. Her uncontrolled descent had not been dead vertical, then. She would have to make a free ascent and hope that she spotted the line or the shaft mouth on the way up.
Her computer’s luminous green readout showed a depth of thirty-two feet. She had been sucking hard on her mouthpiece but had been too focused on the uncontrolled descent. Only now did she realize that the regulator was not delivering air. It seemed quite possible that water this cold could freeze up even the best technical regulators. She pushed the purge button. Nothing happened. Finning hard to slow her descent, she removed the regulator and knocked it against the heel of one hand. It still didn’t work. She picked up her backup regulator, hanging on a bungee-cord necklace. She pushed it into her mouth, bit down, inhaled.