Douglas Preston - Gideon's Corpse

“Are you serious? Oh my God, I can’t believe it. Why would someone do that to me? I’ll kill him, I swear I will.” Chu was already turning to his monitor. “When did this happen?”

Gideon considered the time line. He had to have been framed at some point between the plane crash and his attempted arrest. “Between, um, four days ago and very early yesterday morning.”

“Wow,” Warren said, staring at his screen. “Your account’s been frozen. And they never told me!”

“That’s because they suspect you.”

Chu practically pulled at his long hair. “I can’t believe it. Who would do this?”

“Is there any way to get into my account and take a look around? Maybe we could figure out who did it, you know, before it gets out and security comes down on you like a ton of bricks.”

“Hell, yes. I have the clearance to override this. If they haven’t taken that away.”

Gideon’s heart quickened. “Really?”

“Sure.” Chu’s fingers were beating a furious tattoo on the keyboard. “How’d the hacker get your password?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me.”

“You write it down somewhere?”

“Never.”

“You ever log on in front of anyone?”

“No.”

“Then it would have to be someone with high-security clearance.”

Gideon watched intently as a series of numbers scrolled by on the screen, faster and faster. Chu was the very picture of nerdy outrage.

“Gonna find the mother,” said Chu, clicking away. “Gonna find the mother… There—I’ve broken into your account!”

A final, triumphant rap of the keyboard and Gideon stared at the screen. It showed his post-login home page. Where would the incriminating “jihadist love letters” be?

“Let’s check my email,” he said.

Chu continued typing, and Gideon’s secure email account popped up. Again Chu was forced to override the locked-up account.

Looking at the mass of emails, Gideon had an idea. “Are there any to or from Chalker?”

“Reed Chalker?” Chu seemed uneasy, but typed in the request. A list popped up, dating back to the months before Chalker disappeared. Gideon was stunned by the number of messages; he couldn’t remember ever having corresponded with Chalker.

“Looks like you guys had a lot to talk about,” said Chu. “How’s this supposed to help us find the hacker?”

“Those emails were planted,” said Gideon. “Planted by the hacker.”

“Yeah?” Chu sounded doubtful. “That would have been quite a job.”

“I never emailed Chalker. Well, hardly ever.” Gideon reached past Chu, bent over the keyboard, highlighted a year-old email innocuously titled “vacation,” and hit the ENTER key.

Salaam Reed,

To answer your question: you remember what I said about the world being divided into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb—the House of Islam and the House of War. There is no middle ground, no halfway place. You, Reed, have now personally entered the House of Islam. Now the real struggle begins—with the House of War you left behind.

Gideon stared in disbelief. He’d never written that. It didn’t just make him look like a co-conspirator with Chalker; it made him look like his recruiter . He quickly opened the next.

My friend Reed, Salaam:

Jihad is not just an internal struggle, but it’s also external. There can be no peace for you as a good Muslim, no cessation of struggle, until all the world becomes Dar al-Islam.

He began paging forward through the emails. This was clearly a complex, highly sophisticated and exhaustive fraud. No wonder Fordyce had been taken in. He noticed a more recent email, opened it.

The time is now. Do not hesitate. If someone receives the message of Islam and dies rejecting it, they are forever destined to Hellfire. Anyone who truly believes in the message, their previous sins are forgiven and they will spend eternity in Paradise. If you have belief, act on it. Do not worry what anyone else thinks. Your eternal life is at stake.

It continued in a similar vein, persuading Chalker to convert. Gideon read on with mounting outrage. Not only had he been framed, but he had been framed in a most sophisticated fashion— by someone on the inside .

Warren Chu gazed at the emailed messages with growing horror and disbelief. These were not planted. How could they be? Nobody but a chief security administrator could do that.

He slowly turned and looked at Gideon, staring at him, as if seeing him for the first time. A thought went through his mind: you just never could see inside another person. He never would have guessed.

“I can’t believe you wrote this,” he burst out, almost without thinking.

“Damn it, Warren, I didn’t,” Gideon told him forcefully. “Those emails were planted!”

Chu was taken aback by his vehemence. Again, he wondered how such a thing could be done. It seemed highly unlikely. Not only that, but that business about himself being targeted as well? It was starting to smell phony.

He cleared his throat, tried to sound normal. “Right. Okay. Let me work on this for a while. See if I can figure out who did this, and how.”

“You’re a real pal, Warren.” Gideon crammed the rest of the cheesecake donut into his mouth.

A beat. “Gideon, um, would you mind? I can’t work with someone staring over my shoulder.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Gideon retreated to the other side of the office, at the same time—Chu noted with irritation—helping himself to yet another donut. The guy acted as if he hadn’t eaten in days.

Chu opened another email, then another. This was scary stuff. The secure network ran as a Type II Virtual Machine environment: was it possible somebody had leveraged the VM monitor, maybe gained root access or swapped out the guest OS, then planted a keylogger or compromised the secure login feature somehow? It was theoretically possible—but it would take more skill than Chu himself had.

The more he thought about the robustness of the VM architecture, the isolated address spaces, and the virtual memory abstraction, the more difficult the hack seemed. And he had always thought Gideon just a little too independent…sketchy, even. But that meant—if these emails hadn’t been planted—that Gideon was a terrorist, a traitor to his country, a potential mass murderer… Chu, overwhelmed by the thought, felt his bowels loosening.

What in God’s name should he do?

Suddenly he realized that the woman who had come in with Gideon, the new employee, had come up behind him. He jumped as she laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, hard enough to send a message. He glanced up, looked around. Gideon was at the door now, looking out, left and right, down the halls, keeping a lookout. For the first time, Chu noticed a handgun stuffed into the waistband of his pants.

She leaned over him and whispered. “If you’ve got an alarm, activate it. Now.”

“What?” Chu didn’t quite understand.

“Gideon’s with them. The terrorists.”

Chu swallowed. Confirmation.

“Just do it and keep cool.”

Chu felt unreality take hold. His heart surged in his chest and he felt the sweat glands on his face prickle. First Chalker, now Gideon. Unbelievable. But there were the emails, staring him right in the face—practically a smoking gun.

Casually, he reached beneath the desk, found the button, pressed it. He’d never done this before and wasn’t sure what would happen.

A low siren went off. In the hallway, red lights began to flash.

“What the hell ?” Gideon spun away from the doorway.

“Sorry, pal,” said the woman, turning toward Gideon and crossing her arms in front of her. “You’re busted.”