S. Swann - Zimmerman's Algorithm

Mecham sat down himself. "Yes, I know. I don't dispute that."

"You have a reservation about something."

Mecham nodded. "I have reservations about Zimmerman. She wasn't taken. She left with an almost obsessive amount of premeditation and planning—"

"As Williams said, if the IUF has her, she went willingly."

"But why? Have you read her psychological profile?"

"Five times."

"Then you know what's bothering me. She's not an ideologue, barely a political bone in her body. Her personal life is practically antiseptic. No debts, and she cares little for money. Her strongest beliefs are about mathematics. How can someone like that be recruited by the IUF, of all people? She had the best hardware, the most sophisticated forum possible for doing her work, which is all she really cares about. You couldn't bribe her away from that. She doesn't have anything you can blackmail her with—even her family, she hasn't communicated with any of them in a couple of years."

"I've read the same things you have. Assuming the profile isn't wrong—and someone with her intelligence would be able to intentionally skew our profile, and hide her true feelings— assuming it isn't wrong, what conclusions are you drawing?"

"Zimmerman would only have left—and I don't care who might have facilitated it, because I doubt she would've—if it meant she could do work that, for one reason or another, she couldn ’t do here. She would never have left here just so she could reconstruct old information warfare viruses she's already designed for us. Doing old work would be pointless to her."

"What kind of work would she be doing?" D'Arcy asked. He leaned forward, his expression suddenly showing an intense interest in what Mecham was saying.

"Something that requires a Daedalus. Other than that, I don't know, and that's frightening." Mecham shook his head. "I suspect it has something to do with her work at MIT, since people from the Evolutionary Theorems Lab are working with her—but what it could be, I don't know. I'm not a mathematician, and, until now, I had thought that everything she did here was a logical extension of her work there."

D'Arcy nodded and leaned back. "True, perhaps, but nothing you've said means we change how we deal with this. Zimmerman is still a threat, probably more so than we ever thought. We still have to keep a tight watch on every Daedalus out there. Eventually the IUF will move on one of them, and then we have her."

"I just wish we hadn't lost Malcolm . . ."

Gideon and Ruth spent a good part of the evening on the subway. They went as far as Queens and back again, switching trains a number of times in an effort to foil any pursuit. Ruth was exhausted and spent most of the time asleep, leaning against Gideon's shoulder. Gideon was too keyed up to sleep. He spent most of the time staring at other passengers, wondering which ones were planning to attack them.

The rest of the time he thought about what was happening. Why was he here, next to Dr.

Zimmerman's sister, on the New York subway system?

"Julia, who are you?" he asked a mental image of the Doctor. "What are you doing?"

His only response was an enigmatic stare from those depthless gray eyes. What made her turn away? From her parents, from her sister, from her colleagues . . . ?

Christ, tell me why I turned away?

He must have been too tired, because that kind of question bore on things that he never wanted to think about.

Ruth must have felt him tense up because she sat up next to him and looked at him. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine." The words were a whisper through clenched teeth.

"You're crying."

Gideon shook his head, but he raised his hand to his cheek and found wetness there. "It's just the smoke."

"It's all right," Ruth whispered. "You've been through a lot."

"It's not all right. It's never been all right." Gideon rubbed his forehead as if he could push the thoughts away, distract himself with what was going on around them now. "I'm a fraud," he whispered.

Ruth rubbed his shoulder.

"I couldn't hack it as a Fed," Gideon said. "I shouldn't be a cop either. I'll deserve it when IA pulls my badge."

"You aren't responsible—"

"My brother, my ex-partner . . . I got them both killed. Just because I wanted, someday, to be Rafe."

Ruth was silent for a long time before she said, "Rafe was your brother?"

Gideon nodded.

"I know what it is like to live in someone's shadow."

They were on the return trip from Jackson Heights, and morning light was streaming into the car as they rode over northern Queens. Ruth looked around as if she was looking for some reason to change the subject. "Where are we?" she finally asked.

"Queens," Gideon said, relieved to be talking about something else. "Going back to Manhattan."

She looked at the rest of the car. It was packed with people making the morning commute. Standing room only. She shook her head and whispered, "Is that safe?"

"I think we're all right now. The Israelis did us the favor of separating me from all the tracking devices—" Gideon felt the Micro-Uzi in his pocket. He'd had to strip off the silencer to allow it to fit.

"We should go to the FBI," Ruth whispered.

That was the easy answer, wasn't it? Gideon had been thinking the exact same thing for most of the night. There was one problem with it, though. "I can't."

"What do you mean, you can’t?"

"I can take you to them," Gideon said. "I can't stop."

Ruth's voice lowered even further. "Don't you realize that people are shooting at you?"

Gideon rubbed his healing leg and said, "I know." Not just at me. His voice was slow, halting, as he tried to explain why he needed to continue. Why he couldn't ask anyone for help. "I still have to find out

what's happening. Why." He closed his eyes and wondered how much of what he was saying was rationalization. "I can't back off now. I go to the Feds now, and the best that will happen is they'll hand me over to IA while they try and bury all their embarrassing mistakes." And I have to prove to myself that I can do this. Every time I've hit a snag, I've turned to someone to bail me out. Dad, Rafe, Kendal—

Ruth leaned back and sighed. Even with the motorcycle jacket, perhaps because of it, she looked very small and vulnerable. "You think I don't want to find Julie? She's my sister."

Gideon nodded. The train shot into a tunnel under the East River, briefly exchanging day for night. Gideon's hand drifted back toward the pocket with the gun. I'm doing this for Rafe. What he did for me has got to mean something.

Later on, as they rode under Manhattan, Gideon asked, "Do you think Julia could be working with the IUF?"

"Are you kidding? Why would she do that? It'd be pointless."

"She planned her disappearance," Gideon said. "Just like MIT. She even wiped her own home computer. Wherever she went, she planned to go there."

Ruth laughed. The sound was half derisive and half nervous. "You can't be suggesting that after all these years that Julie suddenly became political—not to mention political for these guys."

The train slowed for a stop, and the packed cars began to gradually empty out.

"What could they offer her?"

"To get her to jump ship at the NSA?" She shook her head. "You don't understand. All she really cares about is her work, it's almost a divine mission for her. From what I heard, the NSA gave her the best environment to conduct her work that she could possibly have."

Gideon thought back to their conversation in the restaurant. "Something she'd need a Daedalus for," he muttered.

"What?"

"What if they were watching us, had a man near us? What if something we did or said triggered the attack? What if we stumbled on something the IUF didn't want anyone to know?"