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 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:
BrickHouse XtremeLife DVR Camera
SXp1w3r
PIR Motion Detection
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.