Cold Plague
Page 1
Acclaim for the Novels of Daniel Kalla
“Kalla, an emergency-room physician, employs just enough medical realism to carry a wild tale through one cliff-hanger chapter after another.”
—Library Journal on Cold Plague
“Meticulously detailed and carefully plotted.”
—Publishers Weekly on Cold Plague
“Fast-paced and smartly written…Kalla has quickly matured into a force to be reckoned with…. Blood Lies springs several fresh surprises on the reader (including one whopping great shocker).”
—Booklist
“A taut psychological thriller that will pull you into a world of sexual deviancy, murder, and mind games. A very good read.”
—Nelson DeMille, New York Times bestselling author, on Rage Therapy
“Kalla strikes again with another perfect page-turner.”
—Lee Child, New York Times bestselling author, on Blood Lies
“A damn fine read.”
—John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author, on Blood Lies
“Daniel Kalla expertly weaves real science and medicine into a fast-paced, nightmarish thriller—a thriller all the more frightening because it could really happen.”
—Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author, on Pandemic
“An absorbing, compulsive thriller, the sort of book you could stay up too late reading.”
—The Vancouver Sun on Pandemic
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For my girls…
Ashley, Chelsea, and Cheryl
Author’s Note
The Science Behind Cold Plague
Imagine a lake the size of Lake Michigan buried three miles below Antarctic ice at the very coldest spot on earth! When I first heard of this natural phenomenon—the very real Lake Vostok—I knew I had to build a story around it. I decided to tie it in with a medical anomaly equally as mysterious that has long fascinated and frightened me: the prion.
Prions are infectious agents, rogue proteins that lack DNA, which defines life. But these microscopic assassins excel at destroying life. The earliest prion-related disease identified was kuru—a lethal brain disorder that spread among the cannibals of New Guinea through the consumption of infected human brains. In current society, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), though thankfully rare, is one of the most devastating disorders known. CJD kills most victims in under a year, and in that time it transforms the sufferers from healthy to demented, blind, and bed-ridden. At death, these patients’ brains are so moth-eaten that pathologists use the term “spongiform” (spongelike) to describe them. In cows, the same disease is called bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE). But most know it by a simpler name: mad cow disease.
Lake Vostok is one of earth’s largest lakes, but no one has ever seen it. Buried three miles under Antarctic ice near the South Pole, the millions-of-years-old subterranean lake might offer a prehistoric glimpse of our planet. The lake’s water is kept liquefied by geothermal heat from the earth’s core, and it contains enough oxygen dissolved under enormous pressure to support life on earth. Many scientists believe it houses never-before-seen life forms. For forty years—long before they knew of the lake’s existence—researchers have been drilling at the Vostok site for ice core samples. In 2001, they had reached to within a hundred yards of the lake when the drilling was halted for fear that it would contaminate the pristine waters beneath. Since then, scientists have been working on a strategy for sampling the lake without contaminating it.
My story kicks off with a group of scientists successfully tapping an Antarctic lake and drawing its prehistoric water up to the earth’s surface. However, they unearth a lot more than they expect!
The characters and subsequent events in this thriller are fictional, but the science behind them is firmly rooted in reality.
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Acclaim for the Novels of Daniel Kalla
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Vishnov, Antarctica. January 29
The slivers of wind-swept ice swirled around his head, as if heralding a blizzard. But he knew it wasn’t going to snow. It almost never did. Despite ice that ran miles deep below his feet, he was tramping through one of the driest spots on earth. A desert. Even in the height of the austral summer, under a sun that never set, it was usually too cold to snow. But the relentless winds kept those glimmering crystals—sundogs, as the locals called them—whipped in permanent frenzy.
And Dr. Claude Fontaine was sick of it. Sick of the endless arid expanse. Sick of the unyielding cold. Sick of the sundogs. And most of all, sick of Vishnov. But his months of toiling in this frozen hell were close to paying dividends. Despite the restricting layers of cotton, nylon, and wool, Fontaine broke into a jog as he headed for the domed structure that disrupted the monotony of ice in front of him.
The previous summer Fontaine had overseen the assembly of the insulated dome, watching the Twin Otters and LC-130 Hercules transport planes fly in the pieces. Each square-meter chunk of the three-dimensional jigsaw was clicked meticulously into place under his unrelenting scrutiny. On days when the winds kept the aerial sleds at bay, Fontaine defied the weather and stood fuming at the site. Unfinished, it always reminded him more of abandoned alien ruins than the most significant drilling spot on the planet. Somehow, his team of engineers, geologists, and technicians managed to assemble the dome before May arrived to usher in Antarctica’s dark and lifeless winter. The team returned in late October. By December, they finished widening and stabilizing the old well drilled through three kilometers of solid ice. A mere two hundred meters from their target.
Today was the payoff, Fontaine reminded himself with a smile.
The ice crunched behind him, and he turned to see Georges Manet sprinting to catch up. Below the untamed locks of black hair, Manet’s handsome bearded face was creased in a wild grin. His gray eyes—which, Fontaine bitterly noticed, had an almost hypnotic effect on the few women at the site—shone brighter than usual. Manet threw his arms open wide, crucifix-style. “Claude, mon ami, un jour magnifique de changer le monde!”
Fontaine detected a hint of mockery in his tone but chose to ignore it. He noticed that the happy-go-lucky geologist wore only a jacket and jeans. No hat, no gloves. “You know this spot once registered the coldest temperature on earth?” Fontaine said in accent-free English.
Manet waved the suggestion away. “Seulement en hiver!”
“Georges, it’s always winter here,” Fontaine snapped.
Manet laughed, verging on giddiness. “No, my friend, today is the height of summer,” he said, switching to English.
Before Fontaine could answer, someone called his name from behind them. Fontaine spun to see Jerry Silver lumbering toward them from the direction of the dome. Wound as tightly as a spring and naturally round, the American documentary producer-director was the antithesis of Manet.
“Ah, Jerry,” Fontaine said, his voice now twenty degrees warmer and infused with a rich Parisian accent. “Are you prepared?”
“Yup. Three cameras,” the IMAX director said. “How about you? Ready?”
“I’ve been ready for years, Jerry.” Fontaine clapped the American on the back, his hand sinking into layers of ill-defined softness of clothing and flab. “Shall we make history?”
Without waiting for a reply, Fontaine strode briskly for the dome’s arched entryway. After months spent at the site he was oblivious to the shimmering white structure that resembled a high-tech igloo dropped on the wrong pole of the planet. He pulled the key card from his neck and waved it over the sensor. A musical beep sounded and the steel door slid silently open.
Though cool enough to maintain an ice floor, the temperature warmed noticeably as soon as they stepped inside. Fontaine slipped off his gloves and hat as he surveyed the room. By his quick head count, the whole team was present. Everyone was in motion. A discordant choir of voices joined the buzz of machinery. Fontaine fed off the palpable nervous energy.
As always, his eyes were drawn to the towering platform in the room’s center. Resembling a miniature oil rig, it housed the huge winch that fed a mess of cables deep into the well. Standing at the base of the platform, Pierre Anou hovered as territorially as ever. The lanky engineer, a world expert in glacial core drilling, fussed over the equipment and argued with the technicians around him.
To Fontaine’s right, Akiro Tekano manned the bank of computer terminals under a massive LCD screen that hung on the wall above them. Fontaine could barely stomach Tekano, and his endless Star Trek references, but he wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to guide his probe. In the world of robotics, Tekano was the best.
Voices trailed off and movement ground to a halt as the team members noticed Fontaine standing at the entryway. Only the steady hum of the winch filled the background, and that too stopped abruptly when Anou clicked a button in his hand. Fontaine waited until the two cameramen pointed their shoulder-mounted cameras in his direction before he offered the team his most dazzling smile. “It’s been a long cold year,” he said. “Time to break the ice.”
The comment was met with applause and a few congratulatory hoots.
“Nothing better than a dip in the lake in summer,” Manet chirped from over Fontaine’s shoulder.
A scattering of laughter. Fontaine chuckled too, as he silently vowed to himself, I am going to get rid of you, pest, at the very first opportunity.
Fontaine headed for the bank of computers. The cameramen lowered their equipment while a blond technician with large blue eyes and a pixie-like face threaded the microphone under Fontaine’s turtleneck, flushing slightly as her fingers fluttered over his chest. Fontaine returned her smile. He could still picture her lithe form arched naked above him on his cot, but he drew a blank on her name. Dismissing her from his thoughts, he turned to Jerry Silver, who paced in front of him, a jumble of nerves and excitement.
“We’re going to do this from the top, right?” Silver said. “We’ll cut whatever footage we don’t need, but I want you to go over the details as if we’ve never heard—”
“Of course, Jerry.” Fontaine patted his shoulder reassuringly. You idiot! he thought. We’ve already covered this ten times. “I will begin from the beginning, oui?” Then he glanced at his robotics engineer. “Is the probe positioned?”
“Ten feet, Captain Kirk,” Tekano answered in his machine-gun inflection.
Fontaine nodded. “On my cue, transfer the reformatted radar image to the big screen. Advance the probe only when I say so.” He turned back to the director. “Anytime, Jerry.”
Silver snapped his fingers at the cameraman and pointed to Fontaine. Both cameras focused on the Frenchman again. Fontaine stood silently, waiting. Years of lecturing at conferences and fundraisers had taught him the value of a dramatic pause.
When he finally spoke, his voice was friendly and relaxed but tinged with the promise of revelation. “Welcome to the Vishnov Research Station, only a few kilometers west of the geomagnetic South Pole.” He pointed to the ground, drawing out the moment. “We are standing at an elevation of almost four thousand meters, thanks to the accumulation of millions of years of ice—ice that never melts—beneath our feet.” His voice echoed slightly in the now silent dome. His pronunciation was perfect, his accent deliberately prominent—Jacques Cousteau on land. “I am standing above a massive body of water. But it was only after the invention of ground-penetrating radar that we learned of the existence of Lake Vishnov buried three kilometers below us. And what a lake she is!” He extended his palms and swept them through the air. “As big as Lake Michigan and as deep as Lake Tahoe. She is kept in a liquid state by geothermal vents at her basin that warm the water in much the same way as do volcanoes in the depths of the Pacific.”
Fontaine dropped his hand to his side. “Since the Soviets opened this research station over forty years ago, scientists have drilled for ice core samples unaware that they were working above the largest geographical find of the century. By the time the lake was discovered at Vishnov, the researchers had drilled to within two hundred meters of the water. They had to stop for risk of contaminating the lake. However, we know from those samples that the ice contains oxygen dissolved under great pressure. Enough oxygen to support life.”
Another pause, as Fontaine’s face lit with disclosure. “And there is life in those deep core samples! Bacteria frozen in a dormant state. Microorganisms that came not from above but from the lake herself.” His smile faded. “The dilemma facing scientists has always been this: How do we sample the lake without contaminating the pristine waters within? The three-kilometer-deep Russian well has been kept open with thousands of liters of Freon and other chemicals. Had we kept drilling into the lake, the toxic spill would have contaminated her water forever.”
Fontaine tapped a finger above his eyebrow. “But today we have a solution.” He pointed above him to nothing in the air, knowing that later, in the editing suite, Silver would add a visual for what he was about to describe. “It’s called a Philberth probe. A cigar-shaped robotic drone with a heater at its tip to melt the ice and to allow it to descend by gravity. Its path freezes behind it.” Fontaine pointed to the giant winch beside him. One of the cameras followed. “The probe will carry this cable into the lake.” He waited two long breaths. “And for the first time in millions of years, Lake Vishnov will communicate with the surface of the earth.”
“And I’ll be the first person in eons to have a sip of her!” Manet cracked from across the room, breaking the solemnity of the moment.
“Merde, Georges!” Fontaine snapped.
Jerry Silver bustled over to Fontaine, waving his hands frantically. “Don’t mind him. We got exactly what
we needed. You were perfect.”
Fontaine mustered another smile. He looked from the cameras to the rest of the team, who stood watching him. “I think you’ve waited long enough. Let’s sample this lake.”
Heads nodded in unison. Instinctively, Silver slipped away from Fontaine’s side as the cameras found him again. Fontaine nodded to Tekano. Suddenly, all the screens in the room filled with the computer-enhanced image of the probe he had described. Silvery-gray, it resembled a nose-down artillery shell buried in the whiteness of the ice. Roughly three of its lengths below the ice, the white gave way to the dark blue ultrasonographic representation of water.
Even though the image was entirely static, the prickly warmth of anticipation overcame Fontaine. He was poised on the cusp of fame. The next three meters would decide his fate.
Without looking at Tekano, he nodded a second time. On the screen, the nose of the probe started to glow faintly red. The incandescence grew steadily as its tip heated. Slowly, the shell began to nudge through the white ice. As the probe slid forward, the gentle drone of the winch broke the silence in the room.
Even Fontaine held his breath as the nose seamlessly cut through the last of the white ice and dropped into the blue water below.