Gideon’s Sword

by Douglas Preston; Lincoln Child

  He pushed open the cabin door and entered the kitchen alcove. Shrugging off the canvas bag, he took out the cleaned cutthroat trout, rinsed them, and patted them dry. He reached over to the iPod sitting in its dock and, after a moment’s reflection, dialed in Thelonius Monk. The percussive notes of “Green Chimneys” floated from the speakers.

  Blending lemon juice and salt, he beat in some olive oil and freshly cracked pepper, then basted the trout with the marinade. Mentally, he checked off the rest of the ingredients of truite à la provençale: onions, tomatoes, garlic, vermouth, flour, oregano, and thyme. Gideon usually ate only one real meal a day, of the highest quality, prepared by himself. It was an almost Zen-like exercise, both in the preparation and the slow consumption. When further sustenance was necessary, it was Twinkies, Doritos, and coffee on the run.

  After washing his hands, he walked into the living area and placed the aluminum fly-rod case into an old umbrella stand in one corner. He flopped down on the ancient leather sofa and kicked his feet up, relaxing. A fire, lit for cheeriness rather than warmth, crackled in the large stone fireplace, and the afternoon sun threw yellow light across a pair of elk antlers hanging above it. A bearskin rug covered the floor, and old backgammon and checkers boards hung on the walls. Books lay strewn about on side tables and stacked on the floor, and a wall of shelves at the far end of the room was crammed with volumes stuck in every which way until no space remained.

  He glanced toward another alcove, covered by an improvised curtain made from an old Hudson’s Bay point blanket. For a long moment, he didn’t move. He hadn’t checked the system since last week, and he felt disinclined to do it now. He was tired and looking forward to dinner. But it had been a self-imposed duty for so long that it was now a habit, and so at last he roused himself, raked back his long straight black hair with one hand, and slouched over to the blanket, from behind which came a faint humming sound.

  He drew back the curtain with some reluctance, the dark space releasing a faint smell of electronics and warm plastic. A wooden desk and a rack of computer equipment greeted his eye, LEDs blinking in the dimness. There were four computers in the rack, of varying makes and sizes, all off-brand or generic, none less than five years old: an Apache server and three Linux clients. For what Gideon was doing, the computers didn’t need to be fast; they just had to be thorough—and reliable. The only brand-new and relatively expensive piece of equipment in the alcove was a high-performance broadband satellite router.

  Above the rack was a small, exquisite pencil sketch by Winslow Homer of rocks on the Maine coast. It was the one remaining artifact from his previous profession: the one he simply hadn’t had the heart to sell.

  Pulling back a ratty office chair on an octopus of wheels, he seated himself at the small wooden desk, kicked his feet up, dragged a keyboard into his lap, and began typing. A screen popped up with a summary of the search results, informing him he had not been in attendance for six days.

  He drilled through to the results window. Immediately he saw that there had been a hit.

  He stared at the screen. Over the years, he’d refined and improved his search engine, and it had been almost a year since the last false positive.

  Dropping his feet to the floor, heart suddenly hammering in his chest, he hunched over the desk, banging furiously at the keys. The hit was in a table of contents released to the National Security Archives at George Washington University. The actual archival material remained classified, but the table of contents had been released as part of a large, ongoing declassification of Cold War documents under Executive Order 12958.

  The hit was his father’s name: L. Melvin Crew. And the title of the archived, still-classified document was A Critique of the Thresher Discrete Logarithm Encryption Standard EVP-4: A Theoretical Back-Door Cryptanalysis Attack Strategy Using a Group of φ-Torsion Points of an Elliptic Curve in Characteristic φ.

  “Mother of God,” Gideon murmured as he stared at the screen. No false positive this time.

  For years, he’d been hoping for something. But this looked like more than something. It might be the brass ring.

  It seemed incredible, unbelievable: could this be the very memo his father had written criticizing Thresher, the memo that General Tucker had supposedly destroyed?

  There was only one way to find out.

  4

  Midnight. Gideon Crew slouched down the street, hands in his pockets, baseball cap turned backward, filthy shirt untucked beneath a greasy trench coat, baggy pants hanging halfway down his ass, thinking how lucky he was that today was trash day in suburban Brookland, Washington, DC.

  He turned the corner of Kearny Street and passed the house: a shabby bungalow with an overgrown lawn surrounded by a white picket fence only partially painted. And, of course, a lovely overflowing trash can sat at the end of the walkway, a fearful stench of rotting shrimp hovering in the muggy air. He paused at the can, looking about furtively. Then he dove in with one hand, digging deep, groping among the garbage as he went. His hand encountered something that felt like french fries and he pulled up a handful, confirmed they were fries, tossed them back.

  He saw a flash of movement. A scrawny, one-eyed cat came slinking out from a hedge.

  “Hungry, partner?”

  The cat made a low meow and crept over, tail twitching warily. Gideon offered it a fry. It sniffed at it suspiciously, ate it, then meowed again, louder.

  Gideon tossed the cat a small handful. “That’s all, kiddo. Any idea how bad trans-fatty acids are for you?”

  The cat settled down to nosh.

  Gideon dove in again, stirring the garbage with his arm, this time turning up a wad of discarded papers. Quickly sorting through them, he saw they were some little child’s math homework—straight A’s, he noted with approval. Why were they thrown away? Should be framed.

  He pushed them back in, dug out a chicken drumstick, and set it aside for the cat. He reached in again, both hands this time, wriggling downward, encountering something slimy, fumbling deeper, his fingers working through various semi-solid things before encountering more papers. Grasping them and working them to the surface, he saw they were just what he was looking for: discarded bills. And among them was the top half of a phone bill.

  Jackpot.

  “Hey!” He heard a shout and looked up. There was the homeowner himself, Lamoine Hopkins, a small, thin African American man, excitedly pointing his arm. “Hey! Get the fuck outta here!”

  In no hurry, glad of the unexpected opportunity to interact with one of his targets, Gideon shoved the papers into his pocket. “Can’t a man feed himself?” He held up the drumstick.

  “Go feed yourself somewhere else!” the man shrilled. “This is a decent neighborhood! That’s my trash!”

  “Come on, man, don’t be like that.”

  The man took out his cell phone. “You see this? I’m calling the cops!”

  “Hey, no harm done, man.”

  “Hello?” said the man, speaking theatrically into the phone, “there’s an intruder on my property, rifling my trash! Thirty-five seventeen Kearny Street Northeast!”

  “Sorry,” Gideon mumbled, shambling off with the drumstick in one hand.

  “I need a squad car, right now!” shrilled the man. “He’s trying to get away!”

  Gideon tossed the drumstick in the direction of the cat, shuffled off around the corner, and then picked up his pace. He quickly wiped his hands and arms as thoroughly as he could on his cap, discarded it, turned his Salvation Army coat inside out—revealing an immaculate blue trench coat—and put it on, tucked in his shirt, then slicked back his hair with a comb. As he reached his rental car a few blocks off, a police cruiser passed by, giving him only the briefest of glances. He slipped in and started the engine, rejoicing at his good fortune. Not only did he get what he’d come for, but he’d met Mr. Lamoine Hopkins in person—and had such a lovely chat with him.

  That would come in handy.

  From his motel room, Gideon beg
an cold-calling the numbers on Hopkins’s phone bill the next morning. He worked his way through a succession of Hopkins’s friends until on the fifth call he struck pay dirt.

  “Heart of Virginia Mall, tech support,” came the voice. “Kenny Roman speaking.”

  Tech support. Quickly, Gideon turned on a digital recorder plugged into a line-splitter on the phone line. “Mr. Roman?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Eric, and I’m calling on behalf of the Sutherland Finance Company.”

  “Yeah? What do you want?”

  “It’s about the loan on your 2007 Dodge Dakota.”

  “What Dakota?”

  “The loan is three months overdue, sir, and I’m afraid that Sutherland Finance—”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t have any Dakota.”

  “Mr. Roman, I understand these are difficult financial times, but if we don’t receive the amount currently overdue—”

  “Look, buddy, dig some of the wax outta your ears, will you? You’ve got the wrong person. I don’t even own a pickup. Suck​—​My​—​Dick.” There was a click as the line went dead.

  Gideon hung up. He snapped off the digital recorder. Then he listened three times to the exchange he’d just recorded. What are you talking about? I don’t have any Dakota, Gideon mimicked aloud. Look, buddy, dig some of the wax outta your ears, will you? You’ve got the wrong person. I don’t even own a pickup. He repeated the phrases many times, in different combinations, until he felt he had the inflections, tone, rhythms down just about right.

  He picked up the phone and dialed again: this time, the IT department at Fort Belvoir.

  “IT,” came the response. It was Lamoine Hopkins’s voice.

  “Lamoine?” Gideon said, whispering. “It’s Kenny.”

  “Kenny, what the hell?” Hopkins sounded instantly suspicious. “What’s with the whispering?”

  “Got a fucking cold. And…what I got to say is sensitive.”

  “Sensitive? What do you mean?”

  “Lamoine, you got a problem.”

  “Me? I got a problem? What do you mean?”

  Gideon consulted a sheet of scribbled notes. “I got a call from a guy named Roger Winters.”

  “Winters? Winters called you?”

  “Yeah. Said there was a problem. He asked me how many times you’d called me from work, that kind of shit.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah.

  “He wanted to know,” Gideon-as-Kenny asked, “if you’d called me on your office computer, using VoIP or Skype.”

  “Christ, that would be a violation of security! I’ve never done that!”

  “Man said you had.”

  Gideon could hear Lamoine breathing heavily. “But it isn’t true!”

  “That’s what I told him. Listen, Lamoine, there’s a security audit going on over there, I’ll bet you anything, and somehow they’re on your case.”

  “What am I going to do?” Hopkins fairly wailed. “I haven’t done anything wrong! I mean, I couldn’t make a VoIP call from here even if I wanted to!”

  “Why not?”

  “The firewall.”

  “There are ways to get around a firewall.”

  “Are you kidding me? We’re a classified facility!”

  “There’s always a way.”

  “For Chrissakes, Kenny, I know there isn’t a way. I’m IT, remember? Just like you. There’s only one outgoing port in the entire network, and all that it allows past is passphrase-​encrypted packets from specific nodes, all of which are secure. And even then the packets can only go to certain external IPs. All the classified documents in this archive are digitized, they’re super-paranoid about electronic security. There’s no way in hell I could call out on Skype! I can’t even send out e-mail!”

  Gideon coughed, sniffed, blew his nose. “Don’t you know the port number?”

  “Sure, but I don’t have access to the weekly passphrases.”

  “Does your boss, Winters, have access?”

  “No. Only, like, the top three in the organization get the passphrase—director, deputy director, and security director. I mean, with that passphrase you could pretty much e-mail out any classified document in here.”

  “Don’t you guys in IT generate the passphrases?”

  “You kidding? It comes down from the spooks in a secure envelope. I mean, they walk the sucker over here. It never enters any electronic system—it’s written down by hand on a piece of frigging paper.”

  “Problem is that port number,” said Gideon. “Is that written down?”

  “It’s kept in a safe. But a lot of people know it.”

  Gideon grunted. “Sounds to me like you’re being framed. Like maybe one of the top guys screwed up and is looking for someone else to take the fall. ‘Let’s pin it on Lamoine!’”

  “No way.”

  “Happens all the time. It’s always the little guys who get shafted. You need to protect yourself, man.”

  “How?”

  Gideon let the silence build. “I have an idea…it might be a really good one. What was that port number again?”

  “Six one five one. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I’ll check some things, call you back at home tonight. In the meantime, don’t say anything about this to anybody, just sit tight, do your job, keep your head down. Don’t call me back—they’re no doubt logging your calls. We’ll talk when you get home.”

  “I can’t believe this. Listen, thanks, Kenny. Really.”

  Gideon coughed again. “Hey, what are friends for?”

  5

  Hanging up the phone, Gideon Crew began flinging off his clothes. He slid open the closet door and laid a garment bag on the bed. From it he removed a fragrant, custom-cut Turnbull & Asser shirt, shifted his lanky frame into it, and buttoned it up. Next came a blue Thomas Mahon bespoke suit. He pulled on the pants, belted them, whipped on a Spitalfield flower tie (where did the English get those names?), tied it with a crisp tug, shrugged on the jacket. He massaged some hair gel between his palms and used it to slick back his floppy hair. As a final touch, he combed a smidgen of gray into his sideburns, which added an instant five years to his age.

  He turned to look at himself in the mirror. Thirty-two hundred dollars for the new persona—shirt, suit, shoes, belt, tie, haircut—twenty-nine hundred for travel, motel, car, and driver. All on four brand-new credit cards obtained and maxed out for just this purpose, with virtually no hope of being paid off.

  Welcome to America.

  The car was already waiting for him in front of the motel, a black Lincoln Navigator; he slipped into the back and handed the driver the address. Gideon settled himself into the soft kid leather as the car pulled away, arranging his face, composing himself, and trying not to think of the three-hundred-dollar-an-hour price tag. Or, for that matter, the much higher price tag attached to the scam he was about to perpetrate, if he were to get caught…

  Traffic was light and thirty minutes later the car pulled into the entrance to Fort Belvoir, which housed INSCOM’s Directorate of Information Management: a low, 1960s-modern building of exceptional hideousness set amid locust trees and surrounded by a huge parking lot.

  Somewhere inside the building sat Lamoine Hopkins, no doubt sweating bullets. And somewhere else inside the building was the classified memo written by Gideon’s own father.

  “Pull up to the front and wait for me,” said Gideon. He realized his voice was squeaky with nervousness, and he swallowed, trying to relax his neck muscles.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but it says No Standing.”

  He cleared his throat, producing a smooth, low, confident voice. “If anyone asks, say Congressman Wilcyzek is meeting with General Moorehead. But if they insist, don’t make a scene, just go ahead and move. I shouldn’t be more than ten minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gideon exited the vehicle and headed down the walkway; he pushed through the doors and headed for the r
eception/information desks. The broad lobby was full of military personnel and self-important civilians briskly coming and going. God, he hated Washington.

  With a cold smile, Gideon went up to the woman at the desk. She had carefully coiffed blue hair, neat as a pin, clearly a stickler for procedure—someone who took her work seriously. Couldn’t ask for better. Those who followed the rules were the most predictable.

  He smiled and​—​​speaking into the air just a few inches above her head​—​​said, “Congressman Wilcyzek here to see Deputy Commander General Thomas Moorehead. I’m…” He glanced at his watch. “…three minutes early.”

  She straightened up like a shot. “Of course, Congressman. Just a moment.” She lifted a phone, pressed a button, spoke for a moment. She glanced at Gideon. “Excuse me, Congressman, can you spell your name, please?”

  With a sigh of irritation he spelled it out, making it abundantly clear that she should have known the spelling already—​​indeed, he was careful to cultivate an air of someone who expected to be recognized, who had only contempt for the ignorance of those who did not.

  She pursed her lips, got back on the phone. A short conversation followed, and then she hung up. “Congressman, I’m terribly sorry, but the general is out for the day and his secretary has no record of the appointment. Are you sure…?” She faltered when Gideon fixed her with a severe look.

  “Am I sure?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Her lips were now fully pursed, her blue hair beginning to quiver with suppressed offense.

  He looked at his watch, looked up at her. “Mrs.…?”

  “Wilson,” she said.

  He slipped a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. “You can check for yourself.”

  It was an e-mail he had concocted, allegedly from the general’s secretary, confirming the appointment with the general he’d already known would be out. She read it and returned it to him. “I’m very sorry, he doesn’t seem to be in. Shall I call his secretary again?”