Gideon's Corpse

by Douglas Preston

  “I was a friend of Reed’s up at Los Alamos,” said Gideon. “When he converted, he gave me some of his books. I couldn’t believe it when I heard what he’d done in New York.”

  No reaction from the imam. He continued to stare past them.

  “We’re you surprised when you heard?”

  Finally the imam looked at him. “Surprised? I was floored.”

  “You were his mentor. You were present when he recited the Shahada, the Testimony of Faith. Are you saying you didn’t see any sign of his growing radicalism?”

  A long silence. “That’s got to be the fiftieth time I’ve been asked that question. Do I really have to answer it again?”

  Fordyce broke in. “You got a problem with answering that particular question?”

  Ali turned to look at Fordyce. “The fiftieth time, yes, I do. But I’ll answer it anyway. I saw no sign, not any, of radicalism. On the contrary, Chalker seemed uninterested in political Islam. He was focused purely on his own relationship with God.”

  “That seems hard to believe,” said Fordyce. “We’ve got copies of your sermons. In here we find comments critical of the US government, criticizing the war in Iraq, and other statements of a political nature. We’ve got other testimony regarding your anti-war, anti-government opinions.”

  Ali looked at Gideon. “Were you in favor of the war in Iraq? Are you in favor of all the government’s policies?”

  “Well—”

  “We’re asking the questions around here,” interrupted Fordyce.

  “The point I’m making,” said the imam, “is that my views about the war are no different from many other loyal Americans. And I am a loyal American.”

  “What about Chalker?”

  “Apparently, he wasn’t. This may shock you, Agent Fordyce, but not everyone who’s against the Iraq War wants to blow up New York City.”

  Fordyce shook his head.

  Ali leaned forward. “Agent Fordyce, let me tell you something new. Something fresh. Something I haven’t told the others. Would you like to hear it?”

  “I would.”

  “I converted to Islam when I was thirty-five. Before that, I was Joseph Carini and I was a plumber. My grandfather came from Italy in 1930, a fifteen-year-old kid with a dollar in his pocket, dressed in rags. He came all the way from Sicily. He pulled himself up by his bootstraps in this country, got a job, worked hard, learned the language, bought a house in Queens, got married, and raised his kids in a nice, safe, working-class neighborhood. Which to him was like paradise, compared with the corruption, poverty, and social injustice of Sicily. He loved this country. My father and mother felt the same way. We managed to move out to the suburbs—North Arlington, New Jersey. They were so grateful for the opportunities given them by this country. So was I. What other country in the world would welcome a penniless fifteen-year-old kid who didn’t speak English and give him the opportunities he had? And I’ve benefited from those same freedoms here, which allowed me to leave the Catholic Church—which I did for very personal reasons—convert to Islam, move out west, and eventually become imam of this beautiful mosque. Only in America would this be possible. Even after 9/11 we Muslims out here were treated with respect by our neighbors. We were as horrified as everyone else by that terrorist attack. We’ve been allowed to practice our religion unmolested, in peace, for many years.”

  Here he paused significantly. In the silence, the shouts and chants of the protestors faintly filtered in from outside. “At least, until now.”

  “Now, that’s a fine, patriotic story,” said Fordyce, an edge to his voice, but Gideon could see the little speech had taken some of the wind from his sails.

  The rest of the interview limped along, going nowhere. The imam insisted there were no radicals in the mosque. They were mostly converts and virtually all were American citizens. The finances of the mosque and school were an open book; all the information had been turned over to the FBI. The charities they supported were all registered and, again, their books had been thrown open to the FBI. Yes, there was general opposition among the members to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but then again, some of their congregation were actually serving in the Persian Gulf. Yes, they taught Arabic, but that was, after all, the language of the Qur’an, and didn’t imply some sort of hidden allegiance to specific political attitudes or prejudices.

  And then their time was up.

  26

  FORDYCE WAS DARK and silent as they left, threading their way out among the throngs of law enforcement. Finally, as they approached the Suburban, he burst out, “The guy’s good. Too good, if you ask me.”

  Gideon grunted his assent. “A real Horatio Alger, it seems. But if he’s a liar, he’s a damn good one.” Gideon refrained from adding, and I should know. “It would be easy enough to check the story out.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’ll check out. A guy like that’s careful.”

  “It might be worth finding out why he left the Catholic Church.”

  “And I’d give you ten-to-one odds he’s hoping we’ll do just that, given the way he emphasized that part of his story.”

  They neared the group of protestors corralled behind police barricades, their shrill, angry shouting like sandpaper in the quiet desert air. Out of the cacophony, individual voices rose and fell.

  Suddenly Fordyce stopped, cocked his head. “You hear that?”

  Gideon paused. Someone was shouting about a canyon and bomb building.

  They walked over to the protestors. Seeing they were finally getting some attention, they redoubled their yelling and sign waving.

  “All right, shut up a minute!” Fordyce boomed at them. He jabbed a finger. “You! What were you just saying?”

  A young woman in full Western dress, boots, hat, and massive buckle, stepped forward. “They go sneaking up into Cobre Canyon just before sunset—”

  “You’ve seen them yourself?”

  “Sure I have.”

  “Seen them from where?”

  “The rim. There’s a trail I ride there, along the rim, and I’ve seen them below, walking up Cobre Canyon, carrying bomb-making materials. They’re building a bomb in there.”

  “Bomb-making materials? Like what?”

  “Well, backpacks full of stuff. Look, I’m not kidding, they’re building a bomb.”

  “How many times have you seen them?”

  “Well, just once, but once is all it takes to realize—”

  “When?”

  “About six months ago. And let me tell you people—”

  “Thank you.” Fordyce got her name and address and they headed back to the car. He slipped behind the wheel, still pissed. “What a waste of time.”

  “Maybe not, if that tip on Cobre Canyon pans out.”

  “Worth checking out, I suppose. But that woman was just repeating a rumor—she didn’t see any of that herself. What really interested me were those two guys following us out of the mosque.”

  “We were followed?”

  “You didn’t see them?”

  Gideon found himself blushing. “I wasn’t looking.”

  Fordyce shook his head. “Don’t know who they were, but I got a good long video of them.”

  “Video? When the hell did you shoot video?”

  Fordyce grinned, lifted a pen from his pocket. “Ninety-nine bucks, Sharper Image. Beats filling out forms in triplicate and waiting weeks to get the official interrogation videotape from NEST.” He started the engine, his face becoming serious. “We’ve pissed away three days. A week until N-Day, maybe less. And look at this mess. Just look at it. Scares the shit out of me.”

  He gestured scornfully back at the sea of law enforcement as he peeled out, leaving a cloud of dust lingering in the thin desert air.

  27

  MYRON DART STOOD inside the Doric fastness of the Lincoln Memorial, staring moodily at the expanse of marble beneath his feet. Although it was a hot early-summer day—the kind of muggy, torpid afternoon that Washington specialized in—it w
as still relatively cool inside the memorial. Dart was careful not to look up at the statue of Lincoln. Something about its awesome majesty, something in the president’s wise and benevolent gaze, invariably choked him up. He couldn’t afford emotion right now. Instead, he turned his attention to the text of the second inaugural address, engraved in stone: With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.

  Those were good words. Dart made a quiet vow to keep them in mind over the next couple of days. He was dog-tired and needed their inspiration. It wasn’t just the pressure: it was the country itself. It seemed to be falling apart, the loud and discordant voices of demagogues, talking heads, and media personalities drowning out the rest. The immortal lines from Yeats’s great poem came to mind: The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. This crisis had brought out the worst in his fellow Americans, from the looters and financial speculators to the religious nuts and political extremists—even to the cowardice of many average people, fleeing their homes willy-nilly. What in the world had happened to his beloved country?

  He must not think of that now, must stay focused on the job at hand. He turned and left the memorial, pausing briefly on the top step. Ahead, the Mall stretched away to the distant Washington Monument, the monument’s needle-like shadow striped across the greensward. The park was empty. The usual sunbathers and tourists were gone. Instead, a convoy of half-tracks rumbled down Constitution Avenue, and two dozen army Humvees were parked behind concrete barricades installed on the Ellipse. There was no civilian traffic to be seen anywhere. The leaves hung limp on the trees, and in the distance sirens droned on and on and on, rising and falling in a monotonous, post-apocalyptic lullaby.

  Dart walked briskly down the steps to the approach road, where an unmarked NEST van was idling, flanked by several National Guard troops armed with M4 carbines. He stepped up to the double doors in the rear of the van and rapped on them with his knuckles. The doors opened and he climbed in.

  The interior of the van was chilly and dark, illuminated only by the green and amber glow of instrumentation. Half a dozen NEST employees were seated, some monitoring a variety of terminals, others murmuring into headsets.

  Miles Cunningham, his personal assistant, approached out of the gloom. “Report,” said Dart.

  “The Lincoln Memorial hidden cameras and motion sensors are installed and online,” Cunningham said. “The laser grid should be operational within the hour. We’ll have real-time surveillance capability for a quarter mile around the monument. A mouse, sir, won’t be able to move without us observing it.”

  “And the Pentagon, the White House, and the other possible targets?”

  “Similar nets are being put in place, all scheduled to be one hundred percent operational by midnight. Every security net will feed back through dedicated landlines to a centralized monitoring node at the command center. We have banks of trained observers ready to work in shifts, monitoring twenty-four seven.”

  Dart nodded his approval. “How many?”

  “About five hundred, with another thousand NEST personnel in support—not counting, of course, the military, National Guard, FBI, and other liaison agency assets and personnel.”

  “What’s the total of deployed personnel?”

  “Sir, it’s impossible to say in such a rapidly evolving situation. A hundred thousand or more, perhaps.”

  Way too many, thought Dart. The investigation had been, inevitably, a monstrosity from the very beginning. But he said nothing. Practically the entire complement of NEST was on the ground in Washington, pulled in from across the country, resources stretched to the breaking point. But then, it was the same with the army, the marines, the National Guard: the elite of the armed forces of an entire nation had descended on the city, at the same time that residents and government workers were leaving.

  “The latest from the Device Working Group?” Dart asked.

  Cunningham removed a file. “Here, sir.”

  “Summarize it for me?”

  “They’re still disagreeing on the size of the device and its potential yield. Size depends greatly on the technical sophistication of the fabricators.”

  “What’s the latest estimate range?”

  “They say it could be anything from a heavy suitcase bomb weighing fifty kilograms to something you’d have to carry around in the back of a van. Yield from twenty to fifty kilotons. A lot less if the bomb misfired, but even in that case there would be an enormous spread of radiation.”

  “Thank you. And the New Mexico branch of the investigation?”

  “Nothing new, sir. Interrogations at the mosque have been inconclusive. They’ve got hundreds, thousands of leads, but so far they’ve turned up nothing of real note.”

  Dart shook his head. “The fire is here, not there. Even if we knew the name of every single terrorist in on the plot, it wouldn’t help much. They’ve gone to ground. Our real problem now is interdiction and containment. Get Sonnenberg in New Mexico on the horn. Tell him that if he doesn’t start getting results within twenty-four hours, I’m going to start redeploying some of his assets back here to Washington, where they’re really needed.”

  “Yes, sir.” Cunningham began to speak again, then stopped.

  “What is it?” Dart asked immediately.

  “I had a report from the FBI liaison out there. Fordyce. He requested, and received, permission to subpoena Chalker’s ex-wife. She’s living in some kind of commune outside of Santa Fe. He also plans to interview other persons of interest.”

  “Did he mention who the other suspects were?”

  “Not suspects, sir, just individuals they’ll be contacting. And, no, there were no other names.”

  “Has he submitted a report on the ex-wife yet?”

  “No. But subsequent interrogations of her by NEST personnel turned up nothing useful.”

  “Interesting. A commune? That’s worth following up on, even if it is a little far-fetched.” Dart glanced around. “As soon as the security nets are in place, I want the beta-testing to begin. Assemble the probe teams, start them running. Check for any holes or weak spots in the grids. Tell them to be creative—and I mean creative.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dart nodded. He grasped the handle of the rear door.

  “Dr. Dart, sir?” Cunningham asked diffidently.

  “What?”

  Cunningham cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, you should take a break. You’ve been going for over fifty hours straight, by my reckoning.”

  “We all have.”

  “No, sir. We’ve all taken breaks. You’ve been driving yourself without letup. May I suggest you go back to the command center, get a few hours of rest? I’ll let you know if anything urgent comes up.”

  Dart hesitated, refrained from making another sharp retort. Instead, he made an effort to soften his tone. “I appreciate your concern, Mr. Cunningham, but I’ll sleep when it’s over.” And with that, Dart opened the door and stepped out into the sunlight.

  28

  THE WEST SANTA FE Airfield dozed under a limpid sky. As Fordyce pulled into the parking lot, Gideon made out a single hangar, with a cinder-block building affixed to one end as if an afterthought.

  “Where’s the runway?” he asked, looking around.

  Fordyce gestured vaguely past the hangar toward a large expanse of dirt.

  “You mean, past that dirt area?”

  “It is the dirt area.”

  Gideon was a poor flier on the best of occasions. In a comfy first-class seat in a roomy jet, with the overhead lighting low and his iPod fired up, noise-canceling headphones, and a cabin attendant to refresh his drink, he could get by, pretend he wasn’t trapped in a flimsy metal tube blasting through the air miles above the ground. He glanced uneasily at the scattering of small planes parked on the dirt. There would be no pretending in one of those.

  Fordyce grabbed a briefcase from the backseat
, then got out of the car. “I’ll go see the FBO about that rental I told you about. We were lucky to get the Cessna 64-TE.”

  “Lucky,” Gideon said unhappily.

  Fordyce strolled off.

  Gideon sat in the car. He’d always managed to avoid small planes before. This was not good. He hoped he wouldn’t panic, make an ass of himself in front of Fordyce. Too bad the man had a pilot’s license. Calm down, idiot, he thought. Fordyce can handle himself. There’s nothing to worry about.

  Five minutes later, Fordyce emerged from the box-like building and waved at Gideon. With a hard swallow, Gideon got out of the car, arranged his face into a semblance of unconcern, and followed the agent past the hangar, past a row of parked planes, to a yellow-and-white craft with an engine on each wing. It looked like a tin bug.

  “This is it?” Gideon asked.

  Fordyce nodded.

  “And you’re sure you can fly it?”

  “If I can’t, you’ll be the first to find out.”

  Gideon gave him the broadest grin he could manage. “You know what, Fordyce? You don’t really want me along. Why don’t I stay here in Santa Fe and follow up on some of the leads we’ve developed. That wife, for example—”

  “Nothing doing. We’re partners. And you’re riding shotgun.” Fordyce opened the pilot’s door, climbed in, fiddled with a few of the controls, then got back out again. He started walking around the plane, peering at this, touching that.

  “Don’t tell me you’re the mechanic, too.”

  “Preflight walkaround.” Fordyce inspected the ailerons and tail elevator, then opened a little door and pulled out what looked like an oil dipstick.

  “Wash the windows while you’re at it, please,” Gideon said.

  Ignoring this, Fordyce ducked under one of the wings, at the same time pulling something from his pocket that looked like an oversize syringe with a soda straw inside it. He opened a small cap, pushed the device up into the wing. Bluish liquid drained into the syringe, which Fordyce then held up to the light. A little ball sat in the bottom of the straw-shaped section.