Authors: Douglas Preston
Gideon darted out and whacked the man across the side of the head with the cosh. With a moan, he sagged heavily to the ground. Fortunately, the rifle did not fire.
Seizing the man under the arms, Gideon dragged him deeper into the forest, tied him to a tree, blindfolded and gagged him, and then—with a certain hesitation—whacked him a second time.
Picking up the M16, he returned to the house, snuck inside, and carefully propped it back against the sofa. He quickly wrote a second note, just in case anyone came by, and left it on the rocking chair:
BACK IN A MOMENT
DON’T WAKE WILLIS!!
That might not fool anyone for long, but it would at least delay things. It had always amazed Gideon how most people chose to obey as a default reaction, even if the command was illogical or stupid. It was a reaction he had relied on many times, to good effect.
He snuck up the stairs. Now he faced the second problem: what to do if Willis had a woman in his room? He didn’t believe for a moment the man was celibate.
He crept softly through Willis’s dark, empty office. The door to the bedroom was locked. Gideon knelt, took out his tools, and—with infinite care and excruciating slowness—unlocked the door.
The room had a night-light—cute—and Gideon saw, to his enormous relief, that Willis was alone.
He walked silently over to the bed, a piece of gaffing tape already unrolled and ready to go. He leaned over Willis, who was sleeping on his back—and then in one smooth motion laid a knee hard across his chest, pinning him, while simultaneously pressing the blade of the straight razor against the man’s neck.
“Cut your throat if you move or make a sound,” he whispered hoarsely into the man’s ear.
He had previously dulled the blade, but Willis didn’t know that. With the razor pressed to his neck, the struggle ended. Willis lay there, the whites of his eyes gleaming in the darkness. His eyes went even wider as he recognized Gideon through the blackface.
Keeping the razor to the throat, Gideon said: “Open your mouth. Wide.”
The man opened his mouth. Gideon placed the muzzle of the Colt Python into it, then removed the razor. “You’re going to do as I say, right? Blink yes.”
After a moment, Willis blinked.
“Stand up nice and slow. Keep the barrel between your teeth.”
He eased himself off Willis and the man stood up, exactly as told.
“Hands behind your back.”
Willis put his hands behind his back and Gideon cuffed them together with the zip ties. He removed the barrel from the man’s mouth, took the roll of gaffing tape, and sealed his mouth.
“Now you and I are going to take a walk. I’m going to keep the muzzle of this gun pressed against the back of your head and I
will
pull the trigger if anything happens. We will walk out of the door, down the stairs, and off the ranch. I repeat: if anyone disturbs us, I shoot you in the head. So it’s up to you to make sure no one disturbs us. Nod if you agree.”
Nod.
“Is there anyone else sleeping up here?”
Nod.
“Point to the room.”
With cuffed hands, Willis indicated the room next door, where Gideon had previously seen the woman lolling on the bed.
“Okay. She wakes up, you die. Now walk down the stairs and out the side door.”
Willis was perfectly obedient. He did everything exactly as instructed. Within a minute they were in the darkness of the trees. Gideon switched on an LED lamp and walked Willis out past the hole in the fence and through the half mile of woods to where he had dug the grave.
When they arrived, Willis saw the grave in the light of the lamp and immediately staggered with fear. Gideon had to physically hold the man up. He made a muffled moan through the tape.
Gideon reached around and ripped it from the man’s mouth. Willis gasped, staggered again. He was beyond frightened.
“Go lie down in the grave.”
“No. Oh my God. No—”
“
In the grave.
”
“Why? Why in the grave—?”
“Because I’m going to kill you and bury you. Get in there.”
Willis fell to his knees, blubbering, the tears streaming down his face. “No, please. Don’t do this. Don’t do it, don’t, don’t…” His voice choked up. He was coming apart before Gideon’s eyes.
Gideon shoved him back and he fell, slipping into the hole, scrambling quickly out again in terror. Gideon took a step forward with the gun.
“Open your mouth.”
“No. Please please
please
please please,
no, no, no
—”
“Then I’ll just shoot you and roll your body in.”
“But why,
why
? I’ll do anything,
anything
, just tell me what you want!” His voice dissolved into a choking wail, his frame racked with sobs, a dark stain spreading from his crotch. And then he puked, once, twice, heaving and choking.
“I’ll do anything…” he managed to squeak out, heavy drool hanging from his mouth.
It was time.
“Tell me about the nuke,” Gideon said.
A silence, accompanied by a blank stare.
“The nuke,” said Gideon. “Tell me your plans for the nuke. The nuke you plan to detonate in DC. Tell me about that and I’ll let you go.”
“Nuke?” Willis looked at him with utterly uncomprehending eyes. “
What nuke?
”
“Don’t play stupid. Tell me about it and you’re a free man. Otherwise…” And Gideon gestured toward the grave with the gun.
“What…what are you talking about? Please,
I don’t understand…
” Willis stared at the gun, wide-eyed, his pleas turning into incoherent babbling.
Gideon looked at him, an awful realization dawning: this man knew nothing. He might be the leader of a cult, an egocentric and paranoid man with delusions of grandeur, but he was patently innocent of nuclear terror. Gideon had made a terrible mistake.
“I’m sorry.” Gideon reached down, grasped Willis, and pulled him up. “I’m sorry. My God, I’m so sorry.”
He cut off the ties and holstered the gun. “Go.”
Willis stared blankly.
“You heard me, get out of here!
Go!
”
Still the man wouldn’t run. He just stared blankly, dazed, still paralyzed with fear. With a curse of self-disgust, Gideon turned, walked into the bushes, got in the Jeep, started it up, and drove away, skidding through the dirt, slewing around, and gunning the engine, wanting nothing more than to get away as quickly as possible.
B
Y THE TIME
Stone Fordyce arrived back at Los Alamos from an inspection of the teams dragging the lake and combing the banks of the river, it was past midnight. Midnight: it marked the turn of another day.
One day to N-Day.
He was dead tired but that thought woke him up fast. As he approached the Tech Area, he was directed to the new command and control center being set up in a disused warehouse just outside the security perimeter. It amazed him how fast things had moved in his absence.
As he flashed his badge at the entrance, the guard said: “Stone Fordyce? The boss wants to see you. In the back.”
“The boss? Who’s that?”
“Millard. The new guy.”
The boss wants to see you.
Fordyce didn’t like the sound of that.
He brushed past the guard, walked by the acres of cheap desks, each with its own computer and phone, to a cubicle hastily erected in the back corner, occupying one of the few areas of the warehouse with a window. The door was open, revealing a small, lean man in a suit standing behind a desk, back turned, speaking into the phone.
Fordyce gave a polite tap on the open door. All his professional instincts told him that this was not going to be a good meeting.
The man turned, held up a finger, kept talking. Fordyce waited. He didn’t know Millard, hadn’t even heard the man’s name before, but that didn’t surprise him in an investigation like this, with everyone jockeying for inches of turf. And someone had to take charge on a local level—things had become increasingly chaotic, with many people in charge and no clear lines of command.
He studied Millard while waiting for him to get off the phone. He was a good-looking man in a WASPy sort of way: high cheekbones, fine green eyes, mid-fifties, a distinguished shock of gray hair at the temples, athletic and lean. He had an easygoing face and a mild-mannered voice. Fordyce hoped it would extend to his personality. But he doubted it.
Millard remained on the phone for a few more minutes, hung up, then gave Fordyce a smile. “Can I help you?”
“Agent Fordyce. I was told you wished to see me.”
“Ah, yes. Name’s Millard. Please, sit down.”
They shook hands. Fordyce sat in the only other chair in the cubicle.
“This is a unique investigation,” Millard said, his voice pleasant, even melodious. “We’ve got something like twenty-two law enforcement and intelligence agencies directly involved, along with sub-agencies and black agencies. Things get confusing.”
Fordyce nodded in a noncommittal way.
“I think you would be the first to admit that things have gone seriously off-track in the New Mexico branch of the investigation. But now Sonnenberg’s been sent back east, and I’ve been appointed by Dart to take charge of all aspects of the investigation. No more confusion.”
A pleasant smile.
Fordyce smiled back, waited.
Millard leaned forward, clasping his hands. “I’m not going to beat around the bush. Your involvement in this case has been less than successful. You failed to identify your former partner as a suspect until it was pointed out to you, you failed to arrest him at the movie set, failed to locate him in the mountains, failed to apprehend him when he entered Los Alamos, and then allowed him to escape down to the river. Your people can’t find his dead body—if in fact he did drown. You’ve been in law enforcement long enough to know that this is not an acceptable record, especially in a case like this, with a city at risk, the entire country in a panic, the president and Congress having a fit, and most of Washington shut down.”
He paused, folding his hands. His voice had remained quiet and pleasant. Fordyce said nothing. There was, in fact, nothing to say. It was all true.
“I’m going to move you out of the field and into the office, here, where your new responsibilities will be R and A.”
R&A. Research and analysis.
That was the fancy term the FBI used for that most odious of jobs, given to new agents as a sort of rite of passage.
Research and analysis
. He thought back to his own early days in the Bureau, one of a hundred agents parked in a windowless basement room, loaded up with stacks of gray metal cabinets full of files to read, search, and summarize. An investigation like this generated literally tons of paper every day—wiretap transcripts, financial records, emails by the bushel, interrogations, and much more—all of which had to be digested and summarized, with the relevant facts plucked out of the mass of useless information like poppy seeds tweezered out of a soggy cake…
“But before you assume your new responsibilities, take the weekend off,” Millard said, breaking Fordyce’s chain of thought. “You’ve been killing yourself. Frankly, you look like hell.”
Another friendly smile and then Millard rose, extended his hand. “Are we okay?”
Fordyce nodded, taking the hand.
“Thanks for being a sport,” he said, giving Fordyce a friendly pat on the back as he exited the office.
Fordyce paused outside the door of the warehouse, gulping air as he walked toward his car. He felt slightly sick. His career was over. Millard was right: he had fucked up big time. Once again, he felt a swelling of black anger at Gideon Crew.
But along with the anger came a certain uneasiness. Again. It always came down to two things. The biggest was Gideon leaving incriminating emails on his work computer. The more Fordyce had seen Gideon in action, the more he’d realized the guy was as smart as hell. The computer wasn’t the only evidence against him, apparently: they had found a Qur’an and prayer rug in his cabin, along with some DVDs of radical Islamic preachers. But those discoveries, too, gave him pause. They seemed lame. Because at the same time, the CIA hadn’t been able to break into Gideon’s RSA-encrypted, security-protected home computers, despite the most sophisticated hacking tools in the toolkit of the CIA. A guy that careful, and that good, would not leave jihadist DVDs lying around.
The second was that Gideon had sabotaged the plane, putting himself at risk. Sure, if he were a jihadist he’d be looking for martyrdom. But he remembered Gideon during that flight; the guy was genuinely terrified.
He paused. If Gideon had been dirty, Fordyce felt sure he would have sensed it, felt
something
was wrong. But he hadn’t. The guy felt genuine.
Maybe he hadn’t fucked up, after all. Maybe everyone else had. Maybe Gideon
had
been framed.
With a muttered curse, he resumed walking to his car. He had his gun, badge, and a few days to satisfy himself whether or not Gideon really was guilty.
F
ORDYCE CONSULTED THE
GPS built into his pool vehicle. The house was in a cul-de-sac, with pine forest and mountains rising up behind. It was well after midnight but the lights were on, the blue flicker of a TV seen through the gauzy curtains. The Novaks were still up.
This was clearly one of the prime lots of the suburban neighborhood: the last house on a dead-end lane, bigger than the others. Not to mention the Mercedes in the driveway.
He drove in, blocking the Mercedes, then got out and rang the bell. A moment later a woman’s voice asked who it was.
“FBI,” said Fordyce. He unfolded his shield, showed it through the narrow side window.
The woman opened the door immediately, almost breathlessly. “Yes? What is it? Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine,” said Fordyce, stepping inside. “Sorry to be bothering you at such a late hour.” She was a fine-looking woman, very fit, trim little waist and a shapely butt, great skin, wearing white slacks and a cashmere sweater with pearls. Funny outfit for midnight television.