The Deep Zone: A Novel (18 page)

Barnard started to retort, but stopped. “You don’t mean to suggest that Hallie was actually selling secrets?”

Lathrop shook his head. “No. I believe, as you do, that somebody set her up, for reasons we don’t yet understand. Set
us
up, too. And if that’s the case, it’s possible the person is still in place. Anyway, she’s down in that cave.”

“But you think the two incidents are connected.”

“I suspect so, but I don’t know. And I don’t know how to know. But the important thing is to focus on what’s happening now.”

“Can we get NSA on this?” Barnard could not tolerate the thought of some spy in his labs. It was repulsive, like discovering a cockroach in his morning bowl of oatmeal.

“I would like to say yes. But NSA is brutally overtasked. Has been since 9/11. The Joint Chiefs are convinced this is some kind of bioterror attack and have all their critical assets pointed at AfPak.”

“What do you suggest? For here at BARDA, I mean.”

“Sometimes the best detection system is the human gut. Think about people. If something twitches when a name comes up, let me know. We can take it from there.”

“Jesus, Late. I’ve got a hundred and fifty scientists and support people working here.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy. And there’s something else. Something I haven’t shared with higher-ups or anyone else until just now. Could be very important but needs to stay between us until—” Lathrop’s phone vibrated. He pulled it from a vest pocket, looked, touched the screen. “Yes, Mr. Secretary. Yes, sir. I understand, sir. Right away. Yes, sir, I
do
understand that. I’m moving now. Yes, sir. Really, as in
now
, sir.”

Lathrop stood up, pocketed the phone, gulped the last of his coffee, and hurried toward the door. “Secretary Mason,” he said, by way of explanation.

“Late.” Something important had been left unsaid, clipped by an order from Hunter Mason, and Barnard didn’t like leaving loose ends. “Just a second.”

But Lathrop was already at the door. He stopped, waved. “Gotta go, Don. The secretary is one man you do not
ever
want to keep waiting. I’ll brief you on this other thing ASAP, F2F only.”
Face to face
. Then he was out the door and Barnard heard him trotting down the hall, the brisk clicking of his steps like small bones cracking.

Barnard went to his desk and took out a yellow legal pad. On his computer he brought up his department’s personnel roster. He wrote the first name on the list at the top of the pad:

Abelson, Leonard M.
Leo Abelson
. Very tall, played basketball for Rutgers, amazing hands. Dedicated scientist. Good man. Barnard moved to the next person on the list.

Twenty minutes later he opened his eyes and realized that he had dozed off while staring at the computer screen. He got up, walked around his desk, dropped to the floor, and fired off twenty push-ups. He stood up and slapped himself in the face, twice, hard, then sat down again. This was going to take a while, he knew, because the only way to find a mole was to dig deep.

HALLIE WENT DOWN FIRST. SHE WAS AN EXPERIENCED ROCK
climber and had been on this wall before, though with standard vertical gear, seat harnesses and rappel racks attached to stout, eleven-millimeter static caving rope. This descent would be very different indeed.

She eased over the edge of the pit, facing toward the cave wall. She attached one foot to the rock, then the other, then both gloves. Five hundred feet of empty space yawned beneath her. If she fell, it would take six seconds to hit bottom, and those would be long seconds indeed unless a wall hit knocked her out. One good thing about such places in caves—the
only
good thing, really—was that she could not see the distant bottoms of pits such as this one. The darkness prevented her brain from lurching immediately into self-preservation mode, with all its tension and fear, which only made the climbing harder, even for one with her experience.

She peeled her right foot off, lowered it twelve inches, and touched it to the wall again. When her boot made contact, it felt as though the rock were opening and closing around it, so secure was the bond between boot and rock. She eased her left foot down beside the right. Same thing. Brought her two hands down, one at a time.

Hanging there without the security of a rope
was
unnerving, seeing bottom or no. A couple of years ago, she had free-soloed some rock climbs, including several challenging 5.12s, doing the routes without belayer or rope for protection, just to see how it felt. She had never been more than a hundred feet off the ground, but that was enough to kill her very dead if she came off. It had required every ounce of effort and concentration not to panic. Easily the most unpleasant experience on rock she had ever had. Some few climbers thrived on free soloing, Hallie knew, but the experience had taught her that she would never be one of them.

Now she did as she had learned to do climbing in the world of light, concentrating on the rock inches in front of her face, breathing deeply and slowly, and using the big muscles in her legs. Foot, foot. Hand, hand. She was about fifty feet down when Bowman called out, “How’re you doing, Hallie?”

“Good! These things are unbelievable, thank God.”

“Thank DARPA.” He was being ironic, but she heard more relief in his voice than she’d expected, and that pleased her. “I’m going to start the others down. They’ll be on different lines, so don’t worry about rockfall.”

The only tricky thing, she found, was peeling the gloves off the wall. If she didn’t do it at just the right angle, they wouldn’t let go. It was like peeling very sticky Velcro strips apart. After almost an hour, about halfway down, she stopped to catch her breath, hanging straight-armed from the glove attachments to let her skeleton take the weight and her muscles rest. At that moment Haight appeared fifteen feet to her left.

“Hey. I am just plain blown away. Can y’all imagine builderin’ with these?”

“I don’t think DARPA would be happy about that. But it occurred to me, too.”

“Do y’all mind if I go on down?”

“My guest.”

Hallie was a good climber and knew it, but she also knew truly artistic work when she saw it. Haight was as smooth as a great ballroom dancer, so effortless did he make the descent seem. It was
not
effortless, she knew, not by a long shot, but the very best could make it look as though it were.

Choosing caution over speed, Hallie took another half hour to cover the remaining 250 vertical feet. Finally, she stepped back onto the cave floor, moved away from the base of the cliff, and found a nice, waist-high boulder with a flat top to rest against. Haight, enthralled, was climbing back up. It was nice to have a few minutes alone here, away from the chatter and distractions of the team.

She said to the cave spirit,
“Chi Con Gui-Jao, es bueno estar con ustedes de nuevo.”
It is good to be with you again.
“Rezopor tu bendición y la promesa de no causar daños.”
I ask for your blessing and promise no harm. Then she sat and waited.

Fifteen minutes later, Cahner stepped down onto the cave floor. “Unbelievable.” Panting but obviously pleased, he came to sit beside her. “It makes one wonder what other things they’re doing at DARPA.” He paused. “You are an amazing climber.”

“Thank you. It helps that I started as a teenager and loved it right away. But for a
real
artist, you have to watch Ron.”

“He’s something. I caught glimpses of him while I was coming down.”

“Hey, Al, does it seem to you like Rafael is taking a long time on the wall?”

“Yes, now that you make mention of it.”

“Nothing to do but wait, I guess.”

They talked for another ten minutes before Arguello and Bowman dropped down together. Bowman hopped off the wall, then helped Arguello.

When the two of them had joined the others, Haight asked, “How do we get the things off?”

Bowman held up his two open hands in front of his chest, fingers splayed out. “Watch.” He touched the tips of his fingers and thumbs together. For a moment nothing happened; then the gloves appeared to inflate slightly. Bowman slipped them easily from his hands. “They neutralize each other’s forces when aligned in a certain way, as I just demonstrated. Go on, try it.”

It felt to Hallie like the loosening of a blood pressure cuff, and the gloves did slip off easily after that. She watched while Bowman brought his feet together, touching the inside surfaces of his overshoes to each other. They loosed just as the gloves had, and he removed them with a light pull. It made her think of Dorothy, clicking her heels in
The Wizard of Oz
.

“We need to keep moving,” Bowman told them. “Hallie, what’s the route from here?”

“This level chamber we’re in now ends after a couple of hundred yards. There’s an exit passage we named Frankenstein’s Staircase because that’s what it’s like—a series of big shelves interrupted by vertical down-climbs. That runs for about a half mile. Then we hit Satan’s Anus.”

“It
looks
like Satan’s Anus,” said Arguello when they arrived.

He and the others were standing around a ragged-edged pool twenty feet in diameter through which black water swirled. On the pool’s far side, blank cave walls rose straight up, barring any farther progress on the surface.

Bowman unwrapped a chocolate bar, broke off equal sections, and handed one to each of the others. After chewing a bite he looked around and said, “Anybody else feeling it?”

“For sure,” Haight said. They two of them looked at the others.

“Yep,” Hallie acknowledged.

“Indeed,” Cahner said.

“Oh, yes,” Arguello said.

Hallie knew what “it” was. A slowly but steadily increasing sense of—how to describe it?—“dread” was the best word she could think of. It was the caving analogue to what climbers called exposure, by which they meant a fear of falling that grew sharper and harder to ignore with every vertical foot climbed. She had felt it before in very big caves and was feeling it now, a gnawing anxiety that kept her looking over one shoulder or the other and intensified with every foot they down-climbed. It was annoying but not a serious hazard—as long as the thing stayed in its cage. Broken free, it could devour sanity in an instant.

“I always think it’s best to talk about such things,” Bowman said. “Helps defuse them.”

“What exactly is happening?” Arguello asked.

“Remember back at BARDA we talked about the Rapture?” Hallie said. “This is how it starts. It’s manageable now. But at some point it might not be. And it’s different for every person, so you need to pay very close attention to how you’re feeling, because once it hits, you go around the bend in two heartbeats and it’s really hard to come back. The key is to understand what’s going on before that happens.”

“But what if one of us does feel it coming on?” Arguello asked. “What can be done?”

“The only thing that helps is going up. So you’d have to ascend on your own until you felt better and wait for the rest of us to pick you up on the way back out.”

Arguello shuddered. “I do not know which would be worse,” he said. “Losing the mind or spending days alone in here waiting.”

“Hobson’s choice,” Hallie said, and could think of nothing worth adding. Nor, apparently, could the others. They stood around quietly after that, munching snacks, drinking from their poly bottles. After ten minutes, she spoke again:

“Let me brief you on the dive. We go in here. The entrance to the sump is like dropping down into a manhole for about twenty feet. Then the tunnel slopes at forty-five degrees, passing through the underwater face of that wall over there, drops to eighty feet,
levels off, and continues straight for about two hundred feet. At that point, it makes a sharp turn to the right and narrows. If we were diving on conventional scuba, we’d have to doff our tanks and push them ahead of us. That’s how we got through on my first trip, and it was not fun. But with these new rebreathers, we should be able to pass through.”

“Wait a second. How narrow is
narrow
?” Arguello sounded worried.

“After the right turn, the tunnel shrinks to about five feet in diameter. Big enough to pass through with the packs—barely—but not big enough to turn around in. Any problems before the halfway point, you have to back your way out. I don’t recommend it. It stays level like that for three hundred feet, then rises at an easy angle for about five hundred feet. That long, slow ascent takes care of any decompression obligation, so you won’t want to hurry there. You’ll surface in a place we named Grand Central Cavern.”

“About the rebreathers.” Bowman held up his own. “We briefed in Reynosa, but let’s do a quick check again. They have heads-up displays for all critical functions. Self-activating, triggered by submersion. Basically all you have to do is breathe and swim.”

“A couple of other things,” Hallie said. “The silt in here is really bad. We don’t have fins so we’ll be pulling with our hands, which means the last to come through are going to have zero viz, or close to it. But I’ll be going first and running a safety line, so you can maintain contact with that.”