Текст книги "Gideon's Corpse"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

14

They had spent hours at the FBI field office in Albuquerque, filling out endless paperwork for a pool vehicle and expense account. Now they were finally on the road, driving to Santa Fe, the great arc of the Sandia Mountains rising on their right, the Rio Grande to their left.

Even here, they met a steady stream of overloaded cars heading the opposite direction. “What are they running from?” Fordyce asked.

“Everyone around here knows that if nuclear war breaks out, Los Alamos is a primary target.”

“Yeah, but who’s talking about nuclear war?”

“If the terrorist nuke goes off in DC, God only knows what might happen next. All bets are off. And what if we find evidence the terrorists got the nuke from a place like Pakistan or North Korea? You think we wouldn’t retaliate? I can think of plenty of scenarios where we might see a sweet little mushroom cloud rising over that hill. Which, by the way, is only twenty miles from Santa Fe—and upwind of it.”

Fordyce shook his head. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself, Gideon.”

“These people don’t think so.”

“Jesus,” said Fordyce. “We must’ve spent four hours with those damn people. And only nine days until N-Day.” He used the insider term for the presumed day of the nuke detonation.

They drove for a moment in silence.

“I hate that bureaucratic shit,” Fordyce finally said. “I’ve got to clear my head.” He fumbled in his briefcase, pulled out an iPod, stuck it into the car dock, and dialed in a song.

“Lawrence Welk, here we come,” muttered Gideon.

Instead, “Epistrophy” came blasting out of the speakers.

“Whoa,” said Gideon, amazed. “An FBI agent who listens to Monk? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“What did you think I listened to—motivational lectures? You a Monk fan?”

“Greatest jazz pianist of all time.”

“What about Art Tatum?”

“Too many notes, not enough music, if you know what I mean.”

Fordyce had a heavy foot. As the speedometer crept up to a hundred miles an hour, the agent took the portable flasher out of the glove compartment and slapped it onto the roof, turning on the grille flashers as he did so. The rush of air and humming of the tires sounded an ostinato to Monk’s crashing chords and rippling arpeggios.

They listened to the music in silence for a while, then Fordyce spoke. “You knew Chalker. Tell me about him. What made the guy tick?”

Gideon felt a swell of irritation at the implication that somehow he and Chalker were buddies. “I don’t know what made the guy ‘tick.’”

“What did you two do up at Los Alamos, anyway?”

Gideon sat back, trying to relax. The car approached a line of slower vehicles and a semi; Fordyce swung out into the fast lane at the last moment, the wind buffeting them as they blew past.

“Well,” said Gideon, “like I said, we both worked in the Stockpile Stewardship program.”

“What exactly is that?”

“It’s classified. Nukes get old like everything else. The problem is, we can’t test-fire a nuke these days because of the moratorium. So our job is to make for damn sure they’re in working order.”

“Nice. So what did Chalker do, in particular?”

“He used the lab’s supercomputer to model nuclear explosions, identify how the radioactive decay of various nuke components would affect yield.”

“Also classified work?”

“Extremely.”

Fordyce rubbed his chin. “Where’d he grow up?”

“California, I think. He didn’t talk about his past much.”

“What about him as a person? Job, marriage?”

“He started at Los Alamos about six years ago. Had a doctorate from Chicago. Recently married, brought his young wife with him. She became a problem. She was sort of an ex-hippie, New Age type, from the South, hated Los Alamos.”

“Meaning?”

“She didn’t hide the fact that she was against nuclear weapons—she didn’t approve of her husband’s work. She was a drinker. I remember one office party where she got drunk and started shouting about the military-industrial complex and calling people murderers and throwing things. She totaled their car and racked up a couple of DUIs before they took away her license. I heard that Chalker did everything he could to keep the marriage going, but eventually she left, went to Taos with some other guy. Joined a New Age commune.”

“What sort of commune?”

“Radical, anti-government, I heard. Self-sufficient, off the grid, grow their own tomatoes and pot. Left wing, but the weird kind. You know, the ones who carry guns and read Ayn Rand.”

“Is there such a thing?”

“Out west—out here—there is. There were rumors she’d taken his credit cards, emptied their bank account, and was running through the money to support the commune. About two or three years ago Chalker lost his house, declared bankruptcy. That was a real problem with his work, because of the high-level security clearance. You’re supposed to keep your financial affairs in order. He started getting warnings, and his clearance was downgraded. They moved him into another position with less responsibility.”

“How’d he take it?”

“Badly. He was kind of a lost soul. Not a strong sense of self, a dependent personality type, going through the motions of life without knowing what he really wanted. He started to cling to me, in a way. Wanted to be my friend. I tried to keep him at a distance, but it was difficult. We had lunch together a couple of times, and on occasion he joined me after work for a drink with co-workers.”

Fordyce was now at one twenty. The car rocked back and forth, the sound of the engine and the rush of air almost drowning out the music. “Hobbies? Interests?”

“He talked a lot about wanting to be a writer. Nothing else that I can think of.”

“Ever write anything?”

“Not that I know of.”

“His religious views? I mean, prior to his conversion.”

“I never knew of any.”

“How did he convert?”

“He told me about it once. He rented a powerboat and went out on Abiquiu Lake, north of Los Alamos. I sort of got the impression he was depressed and considering suicide. Anyway, he somehow fell out or jumped out of the boat and found himself drifting away, his heavy clothes dragging him down. He went under a few times. But then, just as he was about to go under for the last time, he says he felt strong arms pulling him out. And he heard a voice in his head. In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful, I think those were the words.”

“I believe that’s the first line of the Qur’an.”

“He managed to climb back into the boat, which he said had suddenly drifted back toward him as if blown by an unseen wind. It was, in his view, a miracle. As he was driving home, he passed the Al-Dahab Mosque, which is a few miles from Abiquiu Lake. It was a Friday and services were being held. He stopped on a whim, got out, and went into the mosque, where he was welcomed very warmly by the Muslims. He experienced a powerful conversion right on the spot.”

“That’s quite a story.”

Gideon nodded. “He gave away his stuff and started living a very ascetic life. He would pray five times a day. But he did it quietly, he was never in your face about it.”

“Gave away what stuff?”

“Fancy clothes, books, liquor, stereo equipment, CDs and DVDs.”

“Did he evince any other changes?”

“The conversion seemed to do him a world of good. He became a much more adjusted person. Better at work, more focused, no longer depressed. It was a relief to me—he stopped clinging. He really seemed to have found some sort of meaning in his life.”

“Did he ever try to convert you, proselytize?”

“Never.”

“Any problems with his security clearance after he became a Muslim?”

“No. Your religion isn’t supposed to have anything to do with your security clearance. He continued on as before. He’d already lost his top clearance, anyway.”

“Any signs of radicalism?”

“The guy was apolitical, as far as I could tell. No talk of oppression, no tirades against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He shied away from controversy.”

“That’s typical. Don’t draw attention to your views.”

Gideon shrugged. “If you say so.”

“What about the disappearance?”

“Very sudden. He just vanished. Nobody knew where he’d gone.”

“Any changes just before that point?”

“None that I could see.”

“He really fits the pattern,” murmured Fordyce, shaking his head. “It’s almost textbook.”

They came over the rise of La Bajada and Santa Fe lay spread out before them, nestled at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

“So that’s it?” said Fordyce, squinting. “I thought it would be bigger.”

“It’s too big already,” said Gideon. “So what’s the next step?”

“A triple espresso. Piping hot.”

Gideon shuddered. He was an inveterate coffee drinker himself, but Fordyce was something else. “You keep guzzling that stuff, you’re going to need a catheter and urine bag.”

“Nah, I’ll just piss on your leg,” Fordyce replied.

15

That evening found them in the Collected Works bookstore on Galisteo Street, their third coffee shop, following Fordyce’s incessant complaints about the quality of coffee in the city. It had been a long afternoon, and Gideon had lost track of how many espressos Fordyce had run through his renal system.

Fordyce drained yet another cup in a single swallow. “Okay, now that’s a coffee. But I gotta tell you, I’m sick of this shit,” he said, smacking the cup down in irritation. “New Mexico’s no better than New York. All we do is stand in line with fifty investigators in front of us picking their noses. We’re twenty-four hours into the investigation and we haven’t done shit. Did you get a good look at that mosque?”

“It couldn’t have been more overrun if bin Laden appeared there, raised from the dead with his seventy-two virgins.”

Their first stop had been a detour past Chalker’s mosque, for which they were still awaiting official access. The large golden dome had been a quarter mile deep in official vehicles, countless lightbars flashing. Their request to gain access, like all their requests, had disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole.

After the chaos of New York City, Gideon was disturbed to find Santa Fe also in an uproar. While there wasn’t quite the naked panic here that was gripping New York City, there was a strong sense of impending doom lying over a city in turmoil.

New York, Gideon had to admit, had been on another scale. They had barely escaped La Guardia early that morning. The airport was packed with panicked people, most of whom had arrived even without tickets, trying to get out, anywhere would do. It was a scene of hideous chaos. Fordyce had only managed to get them seats on a plane by ramming his FBI credentials down everyone’s throats and, on top of that, finagling sky marshal duty on the flight to Albuquerque.

Gideon sipped his coffee as Fordyce groused. The “liaising” in Albuquerque hadn’t helped at all. In addition to being frozen out of the mosque, they were unable to access Chalker’s house, his office up at Los Alamos, his colleagues, or any other person or place of interest. Investigative gridlock had taken hold even out here, with NEST and its cronies given first crack at everything, all the other government agencies jockeying into position in the queue behind. Even the regular FBI was making little headway against the bureaucratic headwind—only those agents detailed to NEST. On top of that, their little escapade back in Queens—getting into Chalker’s apartment—had evidently come to Dart’s attention. Fordyce had gotten a frosty message from the man’s office.

As Fordyce got up to visit the men’s room, the red-haired waitress came back around and offered Gideon a refill. “Does he want one?” she asked.

“Nah, better not, he’s wired enough. You can lay one on me, though.” He gave her his most winning smile and pushed his cup forward.

She refilled his cup with a smile of her own.

“More cream?”

“Only if you recommend cream.”

“Well, I like cream in my coffee.”

“Then I do, too. And sugar. Lots of it.”

Her smile deepened. “How much do you want?”

“Don’t stop until I say so.”

Fordyce came back to the table. He looked from Gideon to the waitress and back again. And then, as he seated himself, he asked Gideon: “Those antibiotic shots doing anything for your chancres?”

The waitress hurried off. Gideon turned on him. “What the hell?”

“We’re working. You can chat up waitresses on your own time.”

Gideon sighed. “You’re cramping my style.”

“Style?” Fordyce snorted. “And another thing: You need to lose the black jeans and sneakers. You look like a damn over-the-hill punk rocker. It’s unprofessional and it’s part of our problem.”

“You forget, we didn’t bring luggage.”

“Well, tomorrow I hope you’ll dress properly. If you don’t mind me saying.”

“I do mind, in fact,” Gideon said. “Better than looking like Mr. Quantico.”

“What’s wrong with Mr. Quantico?”

“You think looking like a hard-ass FBI agent is going to open doors, get people to relax, talk to you? I don’t think so.”

Fordyce shook his head and began tapping a pencil against his empty cup. After a few minutes, he said, “There’s gotto be a line of investigation nobody’s thought of yet.” His BlackBerry chimed—it had been chiming constantly—and he pulled it out, thumbed up the message, read it, swore, put it back. “Bastards are still ‘reviewing the paperwork.’”

The gesture gave Gideon a thought. “What about Chalker’s phone records?”

Fordyce shook his head. “We won’t get within a thousand miles of them. No doubt they’ve been impounded and sealed.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got an idea about that. Chalker was kind of scatterbrained, and he often misplaced his cell phone or forgot to charge it. He was always borrowing phones.”

Now Fordyce looked up, faintly interested. “From who?”

“Various people. But mostly from this woman who worked in the cubicle next to his.”

“Her name?”

“Melanie Kim.”

Fordyce frowned. “Kim? I recall that name.” He snapped opened his briefcase, took out a file, and flipped through it. “She’s already on the witness list—which means we have to get official permission to talk to her.”

“We don’t need to talk to her. We just need to get her phone records.”

Fordyce shook his head. “Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. So how are we going to tell her calls from his?”

Gideon frowned, thinking back. It was a good question. Fordyce went back to tapping his cup.

“About six months ago,” Gideon said slowly, “Chalker dropped his iPhone. Busted it. For a week he kept borrowing her phone to make his calls.”

Fordyce seemed to brighten. “You got a time frame on this?”

Gideon racked his brains. “Wintertime.”

“That’s a help.”

Gideon cursed his poor memory. “Wait. I remember Melanie got all pissed off because she was trying to plan a New Year’s Eve party and he kept borrowing her phone and not returning it for hours on end. So it was before New Year’s.”

“And it must have been before Christmas, then. You wouldn’t have been at work between Christmas and New Year’s.”

Gideon nodded. “Right…And Christmas vacation began December twenty-second last year.”

“So we’re talking the week or so before that?”

“Exactly.”

“I guess we’d better start the paperwork,” said Fordyce wearily.

Gideon stared at him. “Screw the paperwork.” He took out his own iPhone, began dialing.

“Waste of time,” said Fordyce. “By law a telecom provider can’t release cell phone records, even to the customer, except by mail to the customer’s address of record. On top of that, we’d need a subpoena.”

Gideon finished dialing. He punched through the menu selections and finally ended up with an operator.

“Hello, dear?” he asked, putting on an old lady’s quavering voice. “This is Melanie Kim. My phone was stolen.”

“Oh no,” said Fordyce, plugging his ears. “I’m not hearing this. No way.”

The operator asked for the last four digits of her Social Security number and her mother’s maiden name. “Let’s see…” warbled Gideon. “I can’t seem to find it…I’ll have to call you back with that information, dear.” Gideon hung up.

“That was lame,” said Fordyce, removing his fingers with a snort.

Gideon ignored him and called Melanie Kim herself, whose number he had on his own cell. She answered.

“Hey, it’s Gideon.”

“Oh my God, Gideon,” said Kim, “you won’t believe it, but the FBI have been here questioning me all day—”

“Tell me about it,” Gideon said, gently interrupting her, keeping his voice at a whisper. “They’ve been giving me the third degree, too, and you know what? All the questions are about you.”

“Me?” There was instant panic in her voice.

“They seem to think you and Chalker were…well, you know, an item.”

“Chalker? That asshole? You’ve gotto be kidding.”

“Listen, Melanie, I got the distinct impression they’re going to steamroll you. I felt like I had to warn you. They’re out for blood.”

“No way. I had nothing to do with him. I hated the guy!”

“They were even asking me questions about your mother.”

“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 betterstraighten 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.

16

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 haveto 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.”