Gideon's Corpse

by Douglas Preston

  After the chaos of New York City, Gideon was disturbed to find Santa Fe also in an uproar. While there wasn’t quite the naked panic here that was gripping New York City, there was a strong sense of impending doom lying over a city in turmoil.

  New York, Gideon had to admit, had been on another scale. They had barely escaped La Guardia early that morning. The airport was packed with panicked people, most of whom had arrived even without tickets, trying to get out, anywhere would do. It was a scene of hideous chaos. Fordyce had only managed to get them seats on a plane by ramming his FBI credentials down everyone’s throats and, on top of that, finagling sky marshal duty on the flight to Albuquerque.

  Gideon sipped his coffee as Fordyce groused. The “liaising” in Albuquerque hadn’t helped at all. In addition to being frozen out of the mosque, they were unable to access Chalker’s house, his office up at Los Alamos, his colleagues, or any other person or place of interest. Investigative gridlock had taken hold even out here, with NEST and its cronies given first crack at everything, all the other government agencies jockeying into position in the queue behind. Even the regular FBI was making little headway against the bureaucratic headwind—only those agents detailed to NEST. On top of that, their little escapade back in Queens—getting into Chalker’s apartment—had evidently come to Dart’s attention. Fordyce had gotten a frosty message from the man’s office.

  As Fordyce got up to visit the men’s room, the red-haired waitress came back around and offered Gideon a refill. “Does he want one?” she asked.

  “Nah, better not, he’s wired enough. You can lay one on me, though.” He gave her his most winning smile and pushed his cup forward.

  She refilled his cup with a smile of her own.

  “More cream?”

  “Only if you recommend cream.”

  “Well, I like cream in my coffee.”

  “Then I do, too. And sugar. Lots of it.”

  Her smile deepened. “How much do you want?”

  “Don’t stop until I say so.”

  Fordyce came back to the table. He looked from Gideon to the waitress and back again. And then, as he seated himself, he asked Gideon: “Those antibiotic shots doing anything for your chancres?”

  The waitress hurried off. Gideon turned on him. “What the hell?”

  “We’re working. You can chat up waitresses on your own time.”

  Gideon sighed. “You’re cramping my style.”

  “Style?” Fordyce snorted. “And another thing: You need to lose the black jeans and sneakers. You look like a damn over-the-hill punk rocker. It’s unprofessional and it’s part of our problem.”

  “You forget, we didn’t bring luggage.”

  “Well, tomorrow I hope you’ll dress properly. If you don’t mind me saying.”

  “I do mind, in fact,” Gideon said. “Better than looking like Mr. Quantico.”

  “What’s wrong with Mr. Quantico?”

  “You think looking like a hard-ass FBI agent is going to open doors, get people to relax, talk to you? I don’t think so.”

  Fordyce shook his head and began tapping a pencil against his empty cup. After a few minutes, he said, “There’s got to be a line of investigation nobody’s thought of yet.” His BlackBerry chimed—it had been chiming constantly—and he pulled it out, thumbed up the message, read it, swore, put it back. “Bastards are still ‘reviewing the paperwork.’”

  The gesture gave Gideon a thought. “What about Chalker’s phone records?”

  Fordyce shook his head. “We won’t get within a thousand miles of them. No doubt they’ve been impounded and sealed.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve got an idea about that. Chalker was kind of scatterbrained, and he often misplaced his cell phone or forgot to charge it. He was always borrowing phones.”

  Now Fordyce looked up, faintly interested. “From who?”

  “Various people. But mostly from this woman who worked in the cubicle next to his.”

  “Her name?”

  “Melanie Kim.”

  Fordyce frowned. “Kim? I recall that name.” He snapped opened his briefcase, took out a file, and flipped through it. “She’s already on the witness list—which means we have to get official permission to talk to her.”

  “We don’t need to talk to her. We just need to get her phone records.”

  Fordyce shook his head. “Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. So how are we going to tell her calls from his?”

  Gideon frowned, thinking back. It was a good question. Fordyce went back to tapping his cup.

  “About six months ago,” Gideon said slowly, “Chalker dropped his iPhone. Busted it. For a week he kept borrowing her phone to make his calls.”

  Fordyce seemed to brighten. “You got a time frame on this?”

  Gideon racked his brains. “Wintertime.”

  “That’s a help.”

  Gideon cursed his poor memory. “Wait. I remember Melanie got all pissed off because she was trying to plan a New Year’s Eve party and he kept borrowing her phone and not returning it for hours on end. So it was before New Year’s.”

  “And it must have been before Christmas, then. You wouldn’t have been at work between Christmas and New Year’s.”

  Gideon nodded. “Right…And Christmas vacation began December twenty-second last year.”

  “So we’re talking the week or so before that?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I guess we’d better start the paperwork,” said Fordyce wearily.

  Gideon stared at him. “Screw the paperwork.” He took out his own iPhone, began dialing.

  “Waste of time,” said Fordyce. “By law a telecom provider can’t release cell phone records, even to the customer, except by mail to the customer’s address of record. On top of that, we’d need a subpoena.”

  Gideon finished dialing. He punched through the menu selections and finally ended up with an operator.

  “Hello, dear?” he asked, putting on an old lady’s quavering voice. “This is Melanie Kim. My phone was stolen.”

  “Oh no,” said Fordyce, plugging his ears. “I’m not hearing this. No way.”

  The operator asked for the last four digits of her Social Security number and her mother’s maiden name. “Let’s see…” warbled Gideon. “I can’t seem to find it…I’ll have to call you back with that information, dear.” Gideon hung up.

  “That was lame,” said Fordyce, removing his fingers with a snort.

  Gideon ignored him and called Melanie Kim herself, whose number he had on his own cell. She answered.

  “Hey, it’s Gideon.”

  “Oh my God, Gideon,” said Kim, “you won’t believe it, but the FBI have been here questioning me all day—”

  “Tell me about it,” Gideon said, gently interrupting her, keeping his voice at a whisper. “They’ve been giving me the third degree, too, and you know what? All the questions are about you.”

  “Me?” There was instant panic in her voice.

  “They seem to think you and Chalker were…well, you know, an item.”

  “Chalker? That asshole? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Listen, Melanie, I got the distinct impression they’re going to steamroll you. I felt like I had to warn you. They’re out for blood.”

  “No way. I had nothing to do with him. I hated the guy!”

  “They were even asking me questions about your mother.”

  “My mother? She died five years ago!”

  “They hinted around that she was a communist while a student at Harvard.”

  “Harvard? My mother didn’t come here from Korea until she was thirty!”

  “Your mother was Korean?”

  “Of course she was Korean!”

  “Well, they kept pressing me and I finally told them I thought she was Irish, you know, mixed marriage and all…I don’t know where I got that impression. Sorry.”

  “Irish? Irish? Gideon, you moron!”

  “What was her maiden name? So I can straight
en this out.”

  “Kwon! Jae-hwa Kwon! You’d better straighten it out!”

  “I’ll fix it, I promise. One other thing…”

  “Oh please, no.”

  “They asked a lot of questions about your Social Security number. They said it wasn’t a valid number, hinted that you might have committed identity fraud, you know, like to get a green card or something.”

  “Green card? I’m a damn citizen! I can’t believe these idiots. What a horror show—”

  He’d really gotten her going now, pushing all her hot buttons. Gideon felt a pang of guilt. Again, he gently interrupted her. “They were especially focused on the last four digits of your Social. Thought they were weird.”

  “Weird? What do you mean?”

  “That they would just happen to be one two three four. Sounds, you know, made up.”

  “One two three four? It’s seven six zero six!”

  Gideon cupped the phone and whispered hoarsely, “Oh no, gotta go, they’re calling my name again. I’ll do what I can to defuse this. Listen, whatever you do, don’t let on that I warned you.”

  “Wait—!”

  He shut the phone, leaned back in the chair, exhaling. He could hardly believe what he had just done. And the next step was going to be even worse.

  Fordyce stared at him, an unreadable expression on his face.

  Gideon called the phone company back. In his little-old-lady voice, cracking with confusion and upset, he gave the operator Kim’s personal information and reported that her phone was stolen; he wanted the phone canceled, the cell number, data, and address book all switched over to her son’s iPhone, who was getting a BlackBerry and wanted to move his account. Then Gideon gave her his own phone number, Social, and mother’s maiden name. When the operator said the transfer would take up to twenty-four hours, Gideon began to cry and in a weepy voice told a confused tale of a baby, a deformed puppy, cancer, and a house fire.

  A few minutes later, he hung up. “Expedited. We’ll have the info in thirty minutes, max.”

  “You’re one rotten SOB, you know that?” And Fordyce smiled approvingly.

  16

  IN THE WEEK before December twenty-second, Kim’s call register listed seventy-one outgoing calls during work hours. They quickly discarded the calls that came from numbers in Kim’s address book and focused on the rest. There were groups of them, implying Chalker had borrowed the phone to make bunches of calls at the same time.

  When they listed all of these calls, there was a total of thirty-four.

  They divvied up the work, Gideon calling while Fordyce used his computer to access an FBI reverse-lookup database and gather personal information on the numbers. In half an hour they had identified each number and compiled a list.

  They both stared at the list in silence. It seemed innocuous enough, consisting of work associates, a doctor’s office, dry cleaners, a Radio Shack, several to the imam of the mosque, and a scattering of other miscellaneous calls. Fordyce got up and ordered another triple espresso, returning with the empty cup, having already consumed it on the way back to the table.

  “He called the Bjornsen Institute of Writing three times,” said Gideon.

  Fordyce grunted.

  “Maybe he was writing something. Like I said, he had an interest in writing.”

  “Call them.”

  Gideon called. He spoke for a moment, hung up, gave Fordyce a smile. “He took a writing workshop.”

  “Yeah?” Fordyce was interested.

  “It was called Writing Your Life.”

  Another long silence. Fordyce gave a low whistle. “So he was, what, writing his memoirs?”

  “Seems so. And that was four months ago. Six weeks later, he dropped out, disappeared, and joined the jihad.”

  As this sank in, Fordyce’s face lit up. “A memoir… That could be pure gold. Where’s this institute?”

  “Santa Cruz, California.”

  “Let me call them—”

  “Wait,” said Gideon. “Better if we just go. In person. You call them ahead of time, that’ll open up a can of worms. If the official investigation gets wind of it, we’ll be shut out.”

  “I’m supposed to clear all our movements through the field office,” said Fordyce, almost to himself. “If we fly commercial, I’d have to get permission…” He thought for a moment. “But we don’t have to fly commercial. We can rent a plane at the airfield.”

  “Yeah, and who’s going to fly it?”

  “Me. I’ve got a VFR license.” And he began dialing a number.

  “Who are you calling?” Gideon asked.

  “Local airfield.”

  Gideon watched Fordyce talk animatedly into the phone. He wasn’t too keen on flying, especially in a small private plane, but he sure didn’t want Fordyce to know that.

  Fordyce put down the phone. “The FBO at the airfield can rent us a plane—but not for a few days.”

  “That’s too long. Let’s drive there instead.”

  “And waste all that investigative time just sitting in a car? Anyway, I’ve got an appointment in the FBI Albuquerque field office tomorrow at two o’clock.”

  “So what do we do in the meantime?”

  This was followed by silence. Then Gideon answered his own question. “You remember I told you Chalker gave away most of his stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He offered me some of his book collection. Novels. Thrillers. I wasn’t interested, and so he mentioned something about giving them to the library of one of the Indian schools around here. San Ildefonso, I think.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “A pueblo on the way to Los Alamos. They’re a small Indian tribe, known for their dances and black pottery. Chalker was a fan of the dances, at least until he converted.”

  “Did he donate his computer? Papers?”

  “No, he just gave away the stuff he considered decadent—books, DVDs, music.”

  There was a silence.

  “So maybe we should go over to San Ildefonso,” said Gideon. “Check out those books.”

  Fordyce shook his head. “They’re from his pre-conversion days. They won’t tell us anything.”

  “You never know. There might be papers stuck into them, notes in the margins. You said we had to do something—so here’s something to do. Besides—” and Gideon leaned forward—“it’s the one place we can guarantee there won’t be a line in front of us.”

  Fordyce stared out the window. “You’ve got a point.”

  17

  DR. MYRON DART sat in the conference room of the Department of Energy’s Emergency Response Center, eight stories below the streets of Manhattan. A single black folder rested on the polished wood of the conference table. The clock on the wall behind him read two minutes to midnight. He knew he was exhausted and running on fumes, but there could be no letup. It was times like these he was grateful for his marine training, where they pushed you to the limit, then beyond, and then even beyond that.

  The door to the room opened and the tall, wraith-like form of Miles Cunningham, his personal assistant, entered. He nodded at Dart, his ascetic features betraying no emotion. Every day Dart offered thanks for his almost supernaturally competent, monk-like assistant, who seemed to have transcended the vagaries of human emotion. Behind Cunningham trooped in the rest of the NEST top hierarchy. They took their seats around the table in perfect silence.

  Dart glanced over his shoulder, saw the minute hand click over. Midnight exactly. He tried to cover up his pleasure at the exactitude. He had trained his staff well.

  Now he opened the black folder that lay before him. “Thank you for attending this emergency meeting on such short notice,” he began. “I’m going to brief you on the latest developments.”

  He looked over the top sheet. “First, some very good news: the cryptanalysts at the FBI broke the encryption on Chalker’s computer. We also have in hand the forensic analysis of what Chalker was carrying in his pockets, and we’ve analyzed the content
s of his apartment.” He glanced around at his deputies. “The salient points are as follows. The computer is still being analyzed but so far we’ve found little beyond files of jihadist rantings, streaming-video AVIs of the preaching of various radical clerics, and religious tracts relating to common jihadist goals such as the usual ‘smiting of the infidel’ stuff. His browser history showed numerous visits to radical websites. Unfortunately, from what we’ve found so far the material is quite generic. We didn’t find specific email exchanges with individuals, no direct links to individual terrorists, al-Qaeda, or other radical groups. In short, we haven’t yet found information about the specific identity of his co-conspirators, specific details of the plot, or on how the nuke was actually acquired.”

  His gray eyes moved around the table again. “Does anyone have any thoughts on what we might infer from this?”

  There was a moment of silence. Then somebody spoke up. “The computer was a backup machine?”

  “My thoughts exactly. Anything else?”

  “Could it have been planted? As bait, perhaps?”

  “Another possibility.”

  A short discussion ensued and when it had reached its fruitful end Dart skillfully brought the conversation back around to the next point.

  “I’ve instructed the teams to keep looking for another computer, or computers. However—” and here his tone developed an edge—“Chalker’s machine did include extensive photographs and videos of five Washington landmarks: the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, the Pentagon, the Smithsonian Castle, and the White House. There was nothing on any New York landmark.”

  There was a low murmuring around the table. “Washington?” someone said.

  “Correct.”

  “Could this be a plant? A diversion?”

  “At first we thought that might be the case, and then we analyzed the contents of Chalker’s apartment and the contents of his pockets. As you’ll recall, we recovered in his pocket a scrawled web address. This address proved to be quite revealing. The website it referenced was encrypted, and it had been shut down and the information removed from the server—located in Yemen—but we were able to recover a mirror image of it via the CIA’s classified web archiving department. They put their best people on it and finally broke the encryption. There we did learn some details of the bomb design, plus the same list of five targets in Washington, along with three others that seem to have been discarded at some point in the past: the Air and Space Museum, the Dirksen Senate Office Building, and the Cannon House Office Building. Beyond that, the site was woefully short on specifics. Remember, however, that among the contents of his pockets was an admission stub to the National Air and Space Museum.”