Douglas Preston - Gideon's Corpse

“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 straighten 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.

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.”

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.