Frozen Solid: A Novel Read Free Page A

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