Gideon shook his head. "I want to talk to a lawyer."
"You aren't in the criminal justice system, Mr. Malcolm. You're involved in a present military threat to the security of this nation. I suggest you cooperate with this debriefing. There's more at stake here than I think you realize."
"Are you sure about that?" Gideon asked.
"Let's start when you left the hospital—"
"I want something."
"You aren't in a position to make deals, Mr. Malcolm."
"You don't have a clue what Zimmerman's up to, do you?"
The room was silent for a long time. The Colonel was looking at him as if he was trying to discern some hidden meaning from his expression. He said, "What do you mean by that?"
"You can't figure out why Zimmerman left, what she's trying to do . . ."
"Do you, Mr. Malcolm?"
"I have an idea."
"What?"
"Like I said, I want something."
There was a long time before the Colonel said, "Let's hear it, then."
"I want you bastards to do right by my brother. We both know it wasn't the Secret Service there. I want the people responsible for that mess to help his widow and his children."
"I think we can manage—"
"That's not all."
"What else?"
"You have to bring Zimmerman in alive."
There was silence, as if it took a long time for the audacity of Gideon's request to sink in for the Colonel.
"That's not much of a promise, Colonel," Gideon said. "You need her alive. Otherwise, you'll never know how compromised you actually are, will you? If she dies, it's just as bad for you as if she never turns up again. You'll have to assume that everything she ever worked on for you is in enemy hands."
"You think it isn't?"
"I think Julia's agenda isn't terrorism."
The Colonel leaned forward and shook his head. "What makes you think you know this situation so well?"
"I think I know Julia."
"You've never even met the woman."
Gideon almost objected. He felt as if he had met Julia Zimmerman. He felt as if he had been living with her for weeks . . . Instead, he told the Colonel. "Give me those promises, and I'll cooperate with you."
Slowly, the Colonel nodded. "We can give you that. You're right. We do need Zimmerman alive. Now you tell me what you think is going on."
There it was. For a few long moments, Gideon didn't know what to do. He wanted some sort of guarantee, but he had no way of getting one, and the Colonel here didn't have the means to provide one. He had been prepared to remain silent until his demands were met, but the Colonel's acquiescence made him hesitate.
However, in the end, he really had no choice.
Gideon told him.
Gideon told him of a woman who had replaced God with Number. A woman to whom mathematics wasn't a profession, but a faith. The ET Lab was only part of her work at MIT; another part—a much more private part— was a cult that called itself the New Pythagorean Order, named for the ancient Greeks who worshiped Number as the genesis of all things.
Zimmerman had believed in a perfect numerical world since childhood. At MIT she envisioned the data inside their computers as that world, and she had found people who could share her specific, peculiar faith. People who believed that their studies in artificial life were just that, life. People who believed a computer virus was as "alive" as its biological cousin.
The Colonel asked him what he was getting at.
Gideon told him that Julia's experiments in the ET Lab weren't explorations in mathematics. They were experiments in her religion. They were explorations in a virtual world that she believed was the perfect expression of her faith, at least the most perfect representation of it she could achieve.
"So she worships computers?"
Gideon shook his head.
Not computers. Nothing about Julia's beliefs embraced the physical world. It was the data, the information that the computers arranged and stored. To Julia, it wouldn't matter if a representation of her work was on a Daedalus, on an Apple II, or a spiral notebook. That wasn't the important thing. What the computers did was allow a much more efficient manipulation of the data.
What, exactly, Julia was working toward, Gideon was unsure. But he was positive that it was this work—this expression of faith—that Julia had stolen from the MIT labs, not the relatively mundane work she was doing in the public half of the ET Lab.
"You think that work was mundane?"
"In comparison," Gideon said. "Even though I suspect that it was her work on the Riemann Hypothesis and the implications that meant for factoring large numbers that got her a job in the NSA in the first place. Wasn't it?"
The Colonel was impassive enough that Gideon suspected that he was making an effort not to react to the statement. Enough of an effort that Gideon suspected that he had hit a nerve.
"Shall I extend my theory a little?" Gideon said. "She joined you and started working in cryptanalysis.
She gave you a number of algorithms relating to prime numbers that were useful enough to be very classified—and then she moved, at her own request, to work in information warfare."
The Colonel leaned back, and Gideon could tell that he had scored. Gideon continued, "I'd also venture a guess that she was much more adept at that sort of work, especially in engineering viruses, than her professional credentials would have suggested. You were hiring a pure mathematician who worked with computers, and you received, unexpectedly, a computer scientist."
"Why do you draw these particular conclusions?"
"Because that's what she wanted to do."
Julia had been learning the field, probably since before she started at MIT. While she worked at the ET Lab, her interest wasn't the Riemann Hypothesis, it was the evolutionary algorithm they were using. When she came to the NSA, her interest wasn't cryptography and cryptanalysis, but the virus.
The thing that drove Julia was her faith, her belief in that perfect mathematical world, her exploration of that world. She left the NSA, and that meant there was something she needed to do that she could not do there. If the IUF was involved, Gideon doubted that they knew any more of her full agenda than MIT or the NSA did—although he suspected they thought they did.
"What is her full agenda?"
"That, I don't know," Gideon said. "But the suggestion that she might have had one was enough to have the IUF make an attempt on our lives."
The Colonel nodded. "It's all an interesting theory. Thank you for telling us. However, the purpose of this debriefing is to go over your movements and activities. If we could start going over that. . ."
Gideon did as the Colonel asked, keeping watch on him to see if his revelations about Julia Zimmerman had made any impressions. He couldn't tell.
However, the questions about his movements were much more formal. Like any numbers of questionings he'd been involved in as a cop, it lasted for hours, and involved a lot of repetitive questions. Gideon could understand the frustration of everyone he'd ever interviewed like this. It felt as if the interviewer was constantly trying to catch the interviewee in some sort of contradiction.
Of course, he was.
Even though Gideon understood the process intimately, it was still irritating going over the same territory again and again. It was even more irritating when some fault of memory made him contradict himself on some minor point, and the Colonel would hammer on the single point for what seemed to be hours.
When Gideon got to the gentleman with the Uzis, the Colonel went through it once and called the interview to a stop.
"I'm going to have to bring someone else in to listen to this." He stood up and extended his hand. Gideon stood and took it.
"We'll pick this up tomorrow," the Colonel said. "I think they'll have dinner waiting for you."
Gideon looked at his watch at that. He had been here over eight hours.
3.01 Thur. Mar. 25
THE debriefing lasted
for days.
Gideon went through the process with more than a few mixed emotions. It began to feel that he was betraying Julia, and somehow letting Rafe down. Of course thinking he was letting Raphael down was perverse, Rafe had been an FBI agent through and through—if he had been in Gideon's place, there was little question that he would cooperate with the government. Rafe would have been on the Colonel's side.
Somehow, that didn't make things easier.
True to his word, the Colonel brought in a series of people. Not only people to hear about the Israelis, but a series of others, each of whom wanted to hear some specific bit of his story. The eight-hour session that introduced him to the Colonel had seemed long, but the subsequent interviews were much longer. The plain-clothes Marines would bring in food so they didn't have to take any breaks. The sessions were over twelve hours; each time three or four people would participate in questioning him.
The process was exhausting. Each day he was escorted out of his little room first thing in the morning, and each evening they led him back, and all he could do was collapse on the cot they gave him. He wondered if they were keeping Ruth in the same building, but his interviewers were very good at keeping his mind running in the tracks they wanted it to. It was hard for his mind to wander when he was constantly harassed with questions about the minutiae of his movements.
Even when he was alone, sprawled on his cot, his mind still ran over the events since the shooting.
After the third day of questioning, it seemed as if he'd barely laid his head down when the door to his room opened and a series of Marines surrounded his cot.
"Come with us, sir."
Gideon pushed himself upright and picked up his watch. He felt as if he had barely gotten to sleep. He hadn't. His watch read 1:05. He looked up at the trio of Marines and said, "Do you know what time it is?"
"Yes, sir. Now would you please come with us."
Gideon pushed off the thin excuse for a blanket and started getting dressed. He pulled on one of the shirts and a pair of pants that they'd provided him, got up, and took a step to the bathroom.
A Marine seized his arm, the bad one, and Gideon could feel the strain on his barely-healed injury. "I'm afraid you have to come with us now, sir."
The problem with these guys was there was no room to negotiate. Gideon was really in no mood to test them. He yawned and nodded his head. He let them lead him back out, toward the Colonel's office.
That wasn't where they were taking him.
Gideon felt something sick in the pit of his stomach. He didn't exactly trust the Colonel; he didn't even know the guy's name. Any change in the routine they'd established set off warning signals.
The Marines were leading him back toward the elevators that had brought him here. They were moving him. The fact that they were doing it without any warning made Gideon extremely nervous. When they reached the bank of elevators, another trio of Marines were standing there already, escorting Ruth Zimmerman. She looked as tired and confused as he felt.
She blinked at him, as if her eyes were still adjusting to the stark florescent lighting. "Gideon? What's happening? Where are they taking us?"
Gideon shook his head. "I don't know." They were standing in front of the elevator, and at first Gideon thought that was what they were waiting for. After a while it began to dawn on him that they were waiting for something else, another member of the exodus. At first he thought it was the Colonel they were waiting for. Then he heard the Colonel's voice from down the hallway. The man did not sound happy.
"What do you think you're doing? You can't come into a live operation like this—"
Gideon heard another, calmer voice respond. "Don't engage me in a jurisdictional argument. You may have some tactical authority, but I have an executive order from the President of the United States. This is my operation. Not yours, not Fitzsimmons', not the General's . . ."
The two speakers turned the corner, and Gideon got a good look at the new gentleman. He was short, and wore a dark, expensive-looking suit. He wore a pair of thick glasses that made him resemble a thinner Peter Loire. Gideon recognized him—
"Emmit D'Arcy." Gideon whispered.
"What?" Ruth said.
The short man nodded at Gideon and at Ruth. "Mr. Malcolm, Miss Zimmerman. I'm here to take you back to Washington for a more thorough debriefing."
Gideon heard Ruth groan.
The Colonel stood, holding a sheet of paper in his hands. "I can't protest this strongly enough."
The short man nodded, and took off his glasses. This was Emmit D'Arcy, the National Security Advisor to President Rayburn. Kendal had said that there were rumors of D'Arcy's interest in what was happening, but Gideon had never expected to meet the man personally. Whatever Julia was involved in, Gideon didn't think he merited this kind of attention. What the hell was D'Arcy doing here!
D'Arcy pointed his glasses at the Colonel. "You don't know the depth of what you're dealing with. I need these people in Washington." He pressed a button for the elevator.
"Do you know?" The Colonel looked at Gideon. "There are some disturbing elements—"
D'Arcy replaced his glasses. "I've been privy to your interviews. That's why we have to handle it in Washington."
The elevator dinged, and the doors opened. There were two men in suits waiting in the elevator. They didn't look like Marines. The Marine escorts led Gideon and Ruth to the elevator and stepped back out to let D'Arcy in.
"You know there're security problems. Moving these people now is dangerous."
"Their security is no longer your concern," D'Arcy told him as the elevator doors closed.
Ruth sobbed. It sounded more frustration than anything else. Gideon put his arm around her. "What do they want from us?" she muttered.
D'Arcy heard her. "Only your cooperation," he said.
The elevator doors opened on the parking garage. There were two cars waiting for them, engines idling. At first Gideon thought they were going to separate him from Ruth again. It would make sense from a security standpoint.
He was wrong.
The two men escorted them into the rear car, a tan Ford sedan that looked like an unmarked police car. Then the men walked to the lead car, a black Oldsmobile, and got in with D'Arcy.
The setup made Gideon feel nervous. Since he'd gotten here, every time they moved him around they'd used a trio of Marines. Now all they had was the driver. His mind kept going back to what the Colonel had said, that moving them was dangerous.
The Olds pulled out and the Ford followed. Ruth was still leaning against him and asked, "What's going to happen to us?"
The driver spoke, and after dealing with the Marines for days, hearing someone engage in a conversation was a bit startling. "Don't worry, madam. We're just going straight to JFK. No problem."
JFK? Gideon thought. Isn't La Guardia closer?
"Want to hear some music?" the guy asked. He slipped a CD into the car's stereo and the car was suddenly filled with the sound of Mozart.
They spent some time on the Long Island Expressway as the night deepened. It was close to two-thirty as they took the exit for JFK. They still had a ways to go on the Van Wyck Expressway. The lead car, with D'Arcy in it, was little more than a set of taillights ahead in the distance.
The Olds seemed to have pulled ahead quite a bit since they'd gotten on the exit. That alarmed Gideon, especially when he checked their own speedometer and saw that they were going ten over the speed limit. He was about to ask the driver if he shouldn't catch up, when their car was washed by the brights from a vehicle behind them.
Ruth must've felt the same unease. She turned to look behind them just at the same time as Gideon did.
The lights behind them were coming from a truck or a van, Gideon couldn't make out the silhouette past the glare of the headlights. As he watched the vehicle close on them, he saw another set of headlights drift into the passing lane.
Gideon turned toward the driver, but the man was aware that something w
as wrong. The needle on the speedometer was already passing seventy. The guy was muttering, "Fuck, fuck, fuck . . ." He was barely audible under the whine of the engine and the pulse of a Mozart symphony. Gideon saw their driver only had one hand on the wheel.
He grabbed Ruth and said, "Get down."
He saw a look of panic on her face and he had to yell at her, "Get down!"
The vehicle in the passing lane had pulled up next to them. It was a Dodge pickup four-by-four, the side of it a sheer metal wall blocking in the Ford.
Gideon was thrown against the front seat as their follower touched the rear bumper. Gideon looked behind and could just make out the grille of another giant pickup beyond the glare. Then he was thrown to the side as the truck next to them drifted into the side of the Ford.
Gideon threw himself on top of Ruth as their driver cursed and leveled an automatic at the driver's window. But there was nothing for him to shoot at but the passenger door. The truck was too close for him to aim at anything else.
The truck next to them made contact again, and the rear driver's side window shattered, covering Gideon and the back seat with safety glass. From the sound of abused metal, the truck stayed in contact and began pushing them to the right, off the road. Their driver did the only thing he could, he tried to accelerate away, but at the angle he was at, he was fighting the mass of the truck. The only way he could go was the way he was being herded.
The driver took that as their only chance and peeled off to the right. He took an exit that was so fortuitous that Gideon wondered if they were meant to take it.
That question was answered once the Ford peeled out onto the surface street. The two pickups still shadowed them, and a third turned off of a side street ahead of them and reversed toward them in their lane. The Ford had to swerve around the truck to avoid a collision, and that effectively cut off their exit down the side street.
All three pickups were on them in no time. The Ford couldn't outrun them. The driver was on the radio yelling for backup, help, anything. He yelled the names of cross streets into the radio, and then a truck was slamming into the passenger side of the car.
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