Gideon's Corpse

by Douglas Preston

  “Looks like the news finally broke,” Fordyce said. “The shit’s really going to hit the fan now.”

  “It was only a matter of time,” said Gideon. His earpiece was starting to ramp up, voices swamping the public frequencies. The response teams were evidently becoming taxed by panicking people and emergency calls.

  They were moving slowly along Jackson Avenue, amid a wasteland of old warehouses and industrial sites stretching off in every direction.

  “Needle in a haystack,” said Fordyce. “We’ll never find it on our own.”

  “Yeah, and once they find it, we’ll never get in, especially after that stunt we pulled back there.” Gideon thought for a moment. “We’ve got to find a lead that no one else has thought of.”

  “A lead no one else has thought of? Good luck.” And Fordyce turned the wheel and headed the car back toward Queens Boulevard.

  “Okay, I’ve got it!” said Gideon, suddenly excited. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  “What?”

  “We’re going to New Mexico. We’re going to look into Chalker’s past life. The answer to what happened to him lies out west. Face it—we’re not going to accomplish shit here.”

  Fordyce gazed at him steadily. “The action’s here, not there.”

  “That’s exactly why we can’t stay here, wrestling with all these bureaucrats. Out there, at least we’ll have a fighting chance to make a difference.” Gideon paused. “Got a better idea?”

  Unexpectedly, Fordyce grinned. “La Guardia’s only ten minutes away.”

  “What? You like the idea?”

  “Absolutely. And we’d better leave now, because I guarantee you that in a few hours every seat on every plane out of New York City is going to be booked for the foreseeable future.”

  A low-flying helicopter churned overhead, trailing detectors. A moment later a voice cut through the babble on Gideon’s earpiece.

  “I got a hit! I’m getting a plume!”

  It was drowned out in static and other voices.

  “…Pearson Street, near the self-storage…”

  “They got a hit,” Gideon told Fordyce. “A radioactive plume over Pearson Street.”

  “Pearson Street? Jesus, we just passed it.”

  “We’ll be the first on the scene. About time we got a break.”

  Fordyce pulled the sedan into a four-wheel powerslide. A moment later they were screeching around the corner of Pearson. Several helicopters were hovering already, seeking the precise source, and sirens could be heard in the distance.

  Pearson Street dead-ended at the railroad yards. The last buildings on the street were a massive, blank self-storage building, opposite a vacant lot strewn with trash, and some ancient warehouses. At the very end of the road stood a long, decrepit railroad storage shed.

  “There,” Gideon said, pointing. “That shed in the railroad yard.”

  Fordyce looked at him dubiously. “How do you know—?”

  “See the broken lock? Let’s go.”

  Fordyce drove up on the curb, screeching to a stop. They yanked on their suits, Fordyce grabbed two flashlights from the glove compartment, and they ran toward the shed. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence, but there were plenty of holes and tears in the fence and they quickly squeezed through. The sliding doors were chained, but the lock hung from only one link, its hasp cut.

  Gideon shoved open the door. Fordyce switched on his flashlight, then handed the other to Gideon. Their twin beams revealed a disused space full of decaying piles of angle iron, ties, rails, rusted equipment, and piles of salt and crushed rock.

  Gideon looked around frantically but could see nothing of interest. It was just one big, useless space.

  “Damn,” said Fordyce. “Must have been one of those warehouses we passed.”

  Gideon held up his hand, scanned the floor. There had been people walking here recently, a lot of scuff marks in the dust and grime. They led toward a far wall, where he could make out the huge double doors of a freight elevator. He sprinted over.

  “There’s a level below this one,” he said, staring at the elevator panel. He punched the buttons, but they were dead.

  Gideon cast around with his flashlight and quickly located the emergency stairs. He pushed through the door into the pitch dark of a stairwell. The sirens had now converged up above and he could hear muffled radios, slamming doors, loud voices.

  Using their flashlights as guides, they made their way quickly down the stairs. The vast room at the bottom was largely empty, save for grids, hoists, and moving racks mounted from the ceiling. But there was an acrid stench of burned paper and plastic in the air, and as Gideon moved into the center of the room he made out, at the far end, a tight warren of spaces with shadowy, abandoned equipment. Fordyce had seen it, too, and they both walked over.

  “What kind of a setup is this?” Fordyce asked, looking around.

  Gideon had recognized it immediately, and it chilled him. “I’ve seen similar setups in historic photos at the Los Alamos bomb museum,” he said. “Old photos of the Manhattan Project. It’s a crude set of rails, poles, pulleys and ropes used to move radioactive material around without getting too close to it. Very low-tech but relatively effective, if you’re in martyr mode and don’t care about exposing yourself to elevated radiation.”

  As he walked past the alcoves, peering into each, he could see more remote-handling apparatuses: crude slides and structures, pieces of shielding and lead boxes, along with discarded HE wires and detonators—and what he recognized, with another chill, was a broken high-speed transistor switch.

  “Jesus,” said Gideon, his heart sinking. “I see everything here they’d need to build a bomb—including the high-speed transistors, maybe the most difficult thing to get besides the core itself.”

  “What the hell’s that?” Fordyce pointed to another alcove, where Gideon could see a cage with bars and some food trash.

  “Dog crate? Big one, by the size of it. Probably a rottweiler or a Doberman—to keep away the curious.”

  Fordyce moved slowly, methodically, examining everything.

  “There’s a fair amount of residual radiation here,” said Gideon, looking at the radmeter built into his suit. He pointed. “Over there, at that apparatus, is probably where Chalker fucked up and the mass went critical. It’s hotter than hell.”

  “Gideon? Take a look at this.” Fordyce was kneeling before a pile of ashes, staring at something. As Gideon walked over, he could hear a babble of voices on the intercom, shouts and footsteps echoing from above. The NEST crew had entered the building.

  He knelt beside Fordyce, trying not to stir the air and thus disturb the delicate pile. Masses of documents, computer CDs, DVDs, and other papers and equipment had been swept up into a large heap and all burned together, creating a gluey, acrid mess that still stank of gasoline. Fordyce’s gloved hand was pointing to one large, broken piece of ash at the top. As Gideon bent closer, his flashlight shone off its crumpled surface and he could just make out what it had been: a map of Washington, DC, with what appeared to be extensive notations in Arabic script. Several landmarks had been circled, including the White House and the Pentagon.

  “I think we just found the target,” said Fordyce grimly.

  There was a pounding of feet on the stairs. A phalanx of white-suited figures appeared at the far end of the room.

  “Who the hell are you?” came a voice over the intercom.

  “NEST,” said Fordyce crisply, standing up. “We’re the advance team—turning it over to you.”

  In the reflected beam of his flashlight, Gideon caught Fordyce’s eye through the visor. “Yeah. Time to go.”

  14

  THEY HAD SPENT hours at the FBI field office in Albuquerque, filling out endless paperwork for a pool vehicle and expense account. Now they were finally on the road, driving to Santa Fe, the great arc of the Sandia Mountains rising on their right, the Rio Grande to their left.

  Even here, they met a steady
stream of overloaded cars heading the opposite direction. “What are they running from?” Fordyce asked.

  “Everyone around here knows that if nuclear war breaks out, Los Alamos is a primary target.”

  “Yeah, but who’s talking about nuclear war?”

  “If the terrorist nuke goes off in DC, God only knows what might happen next. All bets are off. And what if we find evidence the terrorists got the nuke from a place like Pakistan or North Korea? You think we wouldn’t retaliate? I can think of plenty of scenarios where we might see a sweet little mushroom cloud rising over that hill. Which, by the way, is only twenty miles from Santa Fe—and upwind of it.”

  Fordyce shook his head. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself, Gideon.”

  “These people don’t think so.”

  “Jesus,” said Fordyce. “We must’ve spent four hours with those damn people. And only nine days until N-Day.” He used the insider term for the presumed day of the nuke detonation.

  They drove for a moment in silence.

  “I hate that bureaucratic shit,” Fordyce finally said. “I’ve got to clear my head.” He fumbled in his briefcase, pulled out an iPod, stuck it into the car dock, and dialed in a song.

  “Lawrence Welk, here we come,” muttered Gideon.

  Instead, “Epistrophy” came blasting out of the speakers.

  “Whoa,” said Gideon, amazed. “An FBI agent who listens to Monk? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “What did you think I listened to—motivational lectures? You a Monk fan?”

  “Greatest jazz pianist of all time.”

  “What about Art Tatum?”

  “Too many notes, not enough music, if you know what I mean.”

  Fordyce had a heavy foot. As the speedometer crept up to a hundred miles an hour, the agent took the portable flasher out of the glove compartment and slapped it onto the roof, turning on the grille flashers as he did so. The rush of air and humming of the tires sounded an ostinato to Monk’s crashing chords and rippling arpeggios.

  They listened to the music in silence for a while, then Fordyce spoke. “You knew Chalker. Tell me about him. What made the guy tick?”

  Gideon felt a swell of irritation at the implication that somehow he and Chalker were buddies. “I don’t know what made the guy ‘tick.’”

  “What did you two do up at Los Alamos, anyway?”

  Gideon sat back, trying to relax. The car approached a line of slower vehicles and a semi; Fordyce swung out into the fast lane at the last moment, the wind buffeting them as they blew past.

  “Well,” said Gideon, “like I said, we both worked in the Stockpile Stewardship program.”

  “What exactly is that?”

  “It’s classified. Nukes get old like everything else. The problem is, we can’t test-fire a nuke these days because of the moratorium. So our job is to make for damn sure they’re in working order.”

  “Nice. So what did Chalker do, in particular?”

  “He used the lab’s supercomputer to model nuclear explosions, identify how the radioactive decay of various nuke components would affect yield.”

  “Also classified work?”

  “Extremely.”

  Fordyce rubbed his chin. “Where’d he grow up?”

  “California, I think. He didn’t talk about his past much.”

  “What about him as a person? Job, marriage?”

  “He started at Los Alamos about six years ago. Had a doctorate from Chicago. Recently married, brought his young wife with him. She became a problem. She was sort of an ex-hippie, New Age type, from the South, hated Los Alamos.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She didn’t hide the fact that she was against nuclear weapons—she didn’t approve of her husband’s work. She was a drinker. I remember one office party where she got drunk and started shouting about the military-industrial complex and calling people murderers and throwing things. She totaled their car and racked up a couple of DUIs before they took away her license. I heard that Chalker did everything he could to keep the marriage going, but eventually she left, went to Taos with some other guy. Joined a New Age commune.”

  “What sort of commune?”

  “Radical, anti-government, I heard. Self-sufficient, off the grid, grow their own tomatoes and pot. Left wing, but the weird kind. You know, the ones who carry guns and read Ayn Rand.”

  “Is there such a thing?”

  “Out west—out here—there is. There were rumors she’d taken his credit cards, emptied their bank account, and was running through the money to support the commune. About two or three years ago Chalker lost his house, declared bankruptcy. That was a real problem with his work, because of the high-level security clearance. You’re supposed to keep your financial affairs in order. He started getting warnings, and his clearance was downgraded. They moved him into another position with less responsibility.”

  “How’d he take it?”

  “Badly. He was kind of a lost soul. Not a strong sense of self, a dependent personality type, going through the motions of life without knowing what he really wanted. He started to cling to me, in a way. Wanted to be my friend. I tried to keep him at a distance, but it was difficult. We had lunch together a couple of times, and on occasion he joined me after work for a drink with co-workers.”

  Fordyce was now at one twenty. The car rocked back and forth, the sound of the engine and the rush of air almost drowning out the music. “Hobbies? Interests?”

  “He talked a lot about wanting to be a writer. Nothing else that I can think of.”

  “Ever write anything?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “His religious views? I mean, prior to his conversion.”

  “I never knew of any.”

  “How did he convert?”

  “He told me about it once. He rented a powerboat and went out on Abiquiu Lake, north of Los Alamos. I sort of got the impression he was depressed and considering suicide. Anyway, he somehow fell out or jumped out of the boat and found himself drifting away, his heavy clothes dragging him down. He went under a few times. But then, just as he was about to go under for the last time, he says he felt strong arms pulling him out. And he heard a voice in his head. In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful, I think those were the words.”

  “I believe that’s the first line of the Qur’an.”

  “He managed to climb back into the boat, which he said had suddenly drifted back toward him as if blown by an unseen wind. It was, in his view, a miracle. As he was driving home, he passed the Al-Dahab Mosque, which is a few miles from Abiquiu Lake. It was a Friday and services were being held. He stopped on a whim, got out, and went into the mosque, where he was welcomed very warmly by the Muslims. He experienced a powerful conversion right on the spot.”

  “That’s quite a story.”

  Gideon nodded. “He gave away his stuff and started living a very ascetic life. He would pray five times a day. But he did it quietly, he was never in your face about it.”

  “Gave away what stuff?”

  “Fancy clothes, books, liquor, stereo equipment, CDs and DVDs.”

  “Did he evince any other changes?”

  “The conversion seemed to do him a world of good. He became a much more adjusted person. Better at work, more focused, no longer depressed. It was a relief to me—he stopped clinging. He really seemed to have found some sort of meaning in his life.”

  “Did he ever try to convert you, proselytize?”

  “Never.”

  “Any problems with his security clearance after he became a Muslim?”

  “No. Your religion isn’t supposed to have anything to do with your security clearance. He continued on as before. He’d already lost his top clearance, anyway.”

  “Any signs of radicalism?”

  “The guy was apolitical, as far as I could tell. No talk of oppression, no tirades against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He shied away from controversy.”

  “That’s typical.
Don’t draw attention to your views.”

  Gideon shrugged. “If you say so.”

  “What about the disappearance?”

  “Very sudden. He just vanished. Nobody knew where he’d gone.”

  “Any changes just before that point?”

  “None that I could see.”

  “He really fits the pattern,” murmured Fordyce, shaking his head. “It’s almost textbook.”

  They came over the rise of La Bajada and Santa Fe lay spread out before them, nestled at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

  “So that’s it?” said Fordyce, squinting. “I thought it would be bigger.”

  “It’s too big already,” said Gideon. “So what’s the next step?”

  “A triple espresso. Piping hot.”

  Gideon shuddered. He was an inveterate coffee drinker himself, but Fordyce was something else. “You keep guzzling that stuff, you’re going to need a catheter and urine bag.”

  “Nah, I’ll just piss on your leg,” Fordyce replied.

  15

  THAT EVENING FOUND them in the Collected Works bookstore on Galisteo Street, their third coffee shop, following Fordyce’s incessant complaints about the quality of coffee in the city. It had been a long afternoon, and Gideon had lost track of how many espressos Fordyce had run through his renal system.

  Fordyce drained yet another cup in a single swallow. “Okay, now that’s a coffee. But I gotta tell you, I’m sick of this shit,” he said, smacking the cup down in irritation. “New Mexico’s no better than New York. All we do is stand in line with fifty investigators in front of us picking their noses. We’re twenty-four hours into the investigation and we haven’t done shit. Did you get a good look at that mosque?”

  “It couldn’t have been more overrun if bin Laden appeared there, raised from the dead with his seventy-two virgins.”

  Their first stop had been a detour past Chalker’s mosque, for which they were still awaiting official access. The large golden dome had been a quarter mile deep in official vehicles, countless lightbars flashing. Their request to gain access, like all their requests, had disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole.