Douglas Preston - Gideon's Corpse

The state trooper remained more or less impassive. A tough one. Well, so be it. He raised his voice to a shout.

“And I might just add, Officer , that if your activities blow our cover, you’ll find yourself at the bottom of the Mariana Shit Trench. We’re on a critical mission and you’ve already wasted too much of our time.”

And now, finally, Fordyce saw the man’s truculent, brick-like face flush with fear and anger. “I’m just doing my job, sir, you’ve no business talking to me like that.”

Fordyce eased off abruptly, exhaled, laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I know. I’m sorry. We’re all just doing our jobs—in a tough situation. I’m sorry for speaking to you sharply, Troop. We’re under a lot of stress here, as you might imagine. But we really do need to keep going. By all means, call in my name and badge number, check it out—but please don’t hold us up.”

The man straightened. “Yes, sir. I understand. I think we’re done here. I’m going to radio your plate number ahead and let everyone know you’ll be coming through on official law enforcement business, so you can exceed the speed limit at least as far as the state line.”

Fordyce gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Appreciate it, Troop. Very much.” He slipped back into the passenger seat and Gideon took off. After a moment, Fordyce said, “Father a state trooper shot in the line of duty? Fucking lame. Lucky I was around to pull your fat out of the fire.”

“You had the badge, I didn’t,” Gideon said. Then he added, grudgingly: “Still, you did good.”

“Damn right.” Fordyce frowned. “Lot of good it’s going to do us. We’re, what, seven hours out of DC and we still don’t have a clue what Blaine’s up to. This laptop is as clean as the driven snow.”

“There’s got to be something in there. You can’t plan a huge conspiracy like this and not have it leak into your work in some way.”

“What if we’re wrong? What if he’s innocent, after all?”

Gideon fell silent. Then he shook his head. “For personal reasons, a huge part of me wishes he was. But he’s behind this. He has to be. Nothing else makes sense.”

With a weary sense of futility, Fordyce went back to OPERATION CORPSE. He knew what he’d find, the same thing he’d found in all the other endless files: the straightforward work of a dedicated and prolific writer.

OPERATION CORPSE was a ten-page outline for a novel, apparently one Blaine had never written—at least, not by that title. Fordyce rubbed his eyes, began skimming the synopsis, then stopped. As he stared at the screen, he felt his heart just about do a flip. He blinked once, twice. Then he went back to the beginning and began again, more slowly this time.

When he reached the end, he looked over at Gideon. “Oh my God,” he said in a low voice. “You aren’t going to believe this.”

Gideon tried to focus on the road as Fordyce began to talk. “There’s a book proposal here, just ten pages. It’s titled OPERATION CORPSE.”

Gideon eased off the accelerator, slowing down to eighty so he could devote more attention to Fordyce. “A book proposal?”

“Yeah. An outline for a thriller.”

“About nuclear terrorists?”

“No. About smallpox.”

“Smallpox? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just listen.” Fordyce paused, gathering his thoughts. “You need to understand some background first. The outline explains that, as a human disease, smallpox was completely wiped out in the wild back in 1977. All remaining viral cultures held in laboratories were destroyed… except for two . One is currently at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Russia. And the other is at USAMRIID, in—” Fordyce paused for effect—“Fort Detrick, Maryland.”

Gideon felt himself go cold. “No shit .”

“The outline tells the story of a gang that plans to steal the smallpox from Fort Detrick. They want to get their hands on it and threaten to release it—in order to blackmail the world. They want a hundred billion dollars and their own small country—an island in the Pacific. They plan to keep the smallpox as protection, a guarantee of sorts, on their island and live out their lives in luxury and comfort.”

“So far, I don’t see the connection.”

“The rub is how they’re going to steal the smallpox: by creating a fake Islamic terrorist plot to detonate a nuke in DC.”

Gideon glanced at the agent. “Sink me.”

“And here’s the kicker: they fake the terrorist plot with an irradiated corpse—left in an apartment in New York City, made to look like it was killed in a radiation accident involving a nuclear bomb core. And the apartment is salted with phony evidence linking the man to radical Islamists and a jihadist terror cell.”

“Chalker,” Gideon said.

“Exactly. Not to mention a calendar with the intended date, and a burned map of Washington with potential targets.”

The wheels in Gideon’s mind began to turn. “Fort Detrick is only forty miles from Washington.”

Fordyce nodded. “Right.”

“So the threat to DC will have drawn off most of the soldiers at Fort Detrick.”

“Exactly,” said Fordyce. “Not only will the nuclear threat empty Fort Detrick of soldiers, but it’ll also strip away most of the security from USAMRIID, leaving the smallpox vulnerable.”

“Unbelievable,” said Gideon.

“In the outline, they have an inside contact who’s given them the codes to get into the vault where the virus is. They walk in, punch in the codes, open the biosafe holding the smallpox, take out a few frozen cultures, and walk out. The smallpox cultures are stored in these cryogenically sealed disks that are so small they can be hidden in your pocket.” Fordyce tapped the laptop. “It’s all here—in a book outline Blaine wrote six years ago . And get this: it says here the idea for the book was based on an actual covert operation launched by the British during World War Two, called Operation Mincemeat. British intelligence floated a corpse off the coast of Spain. Supposedly, it was the body of a high-level Brit officer drowned in a plane crash. In the pockets of the corpse were secret documents indicating that the Allies were going to invade Italy through Greece and Sardinia. But the whole thing was a plant —a scheme to misdirect the Germans from England’s true invasion plans. And it totally fooled the Germans, all the way up to Hitler himself.”

There was a brief silence as Gideon processed this. “British intelligence,” he murmured. “MI6. Just like Blaine.”

“The only difference,” Fordyce went on, “is that Chalker wasn’t a corpse.”

“Even alive, he was damn effective,” said Gideon. “Even a massive dose of radiation takes time to kill. They must’ve kidnapped him, kept him locked up, and performed God only knows what kind of brainwashing on him.”

“That dog crate in the lab we found,” Fordyce said. “It probably wasn’t for a dog, after all.”

“So those crazy rantings of Chalker about being kidnapped, experimented on, weren’t so crazy after all.” Gideon paused. “They framed him for being a jihadist—just like they framed me.”

Fordyce tapped at the keyboard. “Let me read you something. It says in this proposal that, since it’s been forty years since smallpox was seen in the wild, most people alive today have no resistance to it. It would scythe right through the human race. Check this out.”

Variola major , or smallpox, is considered by many epidemiologists to be the worst disease ever to afflict humankind. Depending on the strain, the mortality rate can run as high as one hundred percent. Variola is as infectious as the common cold and spreads like wildfire. Even those who survive are physically scarred for life and often blind as well.