Douglas Preston - Gideon's Corpse

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.

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.

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 was 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.”