Lincoln Child - Terminal Freeze

He felt his breathing accelerate, matching his heart. Ninety seconds. That’s all. In and out.

He moved forward, sweeping the camera left and right as he went, careful not to trip over any obstacles. The doorway was a pool of blackness, perforated by the small yellow cone of the camera’s light. Again his hand felt along the nearest wall; again he snapped on the old-fashioned bulky switch.

The lights came up and immediately the view through the lens went solid white. Stupid mistake-he should have turned the light on before he entered, given the camera time to compensate. As the saturated white faded somewhat and the room shapes resolved themselves, he saw the examining table in the center. The body lay on it, wrapped tightly in plastic sheeting. Thin smears of blood ran along the underside of the sheeting like stripes on a candy cane.

Breathing still faster now, he got a good establishing shot of the room, then maneuvered slowly around the table, panning the camera along the length of the sheeted corpse. This was good. Conti’s instincts had been right. They’d edit the content down, add a few jump cuts, let the viewers’ imaginations fill in the gaps. He laughed through his panting breaths, forgetting in his excitement to continue the audio commentary. Wait until Fortnum sees this…

That was when he heard it. Although “heard” wasn’t quite right-it was more like a sudden change in air pressure, a painful sensation of fullness, felt through the pulmonary cavity of his chest and-especially-the deepest channels of his ears and nasal sinuses. Something nearby, something he instinctually understood to be perilous, made Toussaint take instant notice. His head jerked away from the viewfinder and-with the atavistic certainty of a million years of prey-locked his gaze onto the dark doorway in the far wall of the exam room.

Something lurked there. Something hungry.

His breath was coming even faster now, rough gulps of air that somehow weren’t enough to fill his lungs. The camera was still rolling, but he no longer noticed. His mind worked frantically, trying to tell him this was crazy, just an attack of nerves, completely understandable under the circumstances…

What the hell was he so worried about all of a sudden? He hadn’t seen anything, heard anything-not really. And yet something about the perfect blackness of that far doorway set his instincts ringing five-alarm.

He stepped back, swinging the still-whirring camera wildly, the beam of light lashing across the walls and ceiling. His retreating back bumped heavily against the corpse and it pushed back with the sickening stiffness of rigor.

Just turn around, he told himself. You’ve got the shot. Turn around and get the hell out.

He wheeled, preparing to flee.

And yet he could not flee. Deep inside he knew that if he didn’t look now, he’d never dare to look, ever again. And he sensed something else-something even deeper-telling him that, if his instincts were right, running wouldn’t make the least difference anyway.

Lifting the camera, fitting the viewfinder to his eye, panting audibly now, Toussaint turned back and-very slowly-aimed the beam of light into the darkness beyond the far doorway.

And into the face of nightmare.

“I got your message,” Marshall said as he stepped into Faraday’s lab and closed the door behind him. “You’ve found something?”

Faraday glanced up at Marshall, then at Chen, then back at Marshall. The biologist’s eyes looked wide and anxious behind the round tortoiseshell frames. But this in itself didn’t disturb Marshall -Faraday wore a nervous look on even the best of days.

“It’s more an interesting succession of facts than a hard theory,” Faraday said. He was standing behind-almost hiding behind, it seemed-a bewildering array of test tubes and lab equipment.

“Not a problem.”

“I can’t corroborate any of it. Not from here, anyway.”

Marshall crossed one arm over the other. “I won’t tell the NMU board of regents if you won’t.”

“And I warn you that Sully’s going to-”

Marshall sighed in exasperation. “Just let me hear it.”

One last hesitation. “Okay.” Faraday cleared his throat, straightened the soup-stained tie he insisted on wearing under the lab coat. “I think I understand. About the melting in the vault, I mean.”

Marshall waited.

“I told you we went back up to get more ice samples from the cave. Well, we’ve been examining them with X-ray diffraction. And they’re very unusual.”

“Unusual how?”

“The crystalline structure is all wrong. For normally occurring precipitant ice, I mean.”

Marshall leaned against a lab table. “Go on.”

“You know how there are many different kinds of ice, right? I mean, other varieties beyond the kind we put in our lemonade or chop off our car windows.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “There’s ice-two, ice-three, five, six, seven, and so forth, up to ice-fourteen-each with its own crystalline structure, its own physical properties.”

“I remember something about that in my graduate-level physics course. It takes great pressure or extreme temperatures for the solid-state transformation to take place.”

“That’s right. But the really unusual thing about some of these types of ice is that-once they’ve formed-they can remain solid well above the freezing mark.” He handed Marshall a sheet of paper through the forest of test tubes. “Look. Here’s the structure diagram for ice-seven. Look at its unit cell. Under sufficient pressure, this form of ice can remain in solid form up to two hundred degrees centigrade.”

Marshall whistled. “That hot? We could have used that kind of ice in the vault yesterday.”

“But here’s the thing,” Faraday went on. “I read an article in Nature last month describing another type of ice that could theoretically exist: ice-fifteen. Ice that has just the opposite qualities.”

“You mean…” Marshall paused. “You mean, ice that would melt below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit?”

Faraday nodded.

“The key word is ‘theoretically,’” Chen added.

“And the unusual crystalline structure of this melted cave ice-does it match ice-fifteen?”

“There’s no way to be sure,” Faraday said. “But it may well.”

Marshall pushed away from the lab table, paced back and forth. “So possibly-just possibly-that ice melted on its own.”

“They were slowly raising the temperature overnight,” Faraday said. “And in all the commotion of finding their prize missing, nobody bothered to check the temperature in the vault. To verify it was actually above freezing inside.”

“That’s right.” Marshall stopped. “Nobody would have thought it necessary. They just left the door wide open and went off searching.”

“Allowing the temperature inside the vault to quickly return to the ambient level,” said Chen.

“So there might have been no saboteur at all,” Marshall said. “The thawing process was proceeding properly. It’s the ice itself that was the culprit.”

Faraday nodded.

“How would this unusual ice have formed?” Marshall asked.

“Therein lies the rub,” said Chen.

A brief silence settled over the lab.

“That’s a very interesting speculation,” said Marshall. “But even if you’re right, and there was no thief, no saboteur, the question remains: What happened to the cat?”

No sooner had he asked the question than he saw Faraday’s nervous expression deepen. “No, don’t tell me,” he went on. “Let me guess. It let itself out.”

“You saw my photographs of the vault flooring. Those marks were of something getting out, not in. And they weren’t saw marks, either.”