Gideon's Corpse

by Douglas Preston

  “Gideon,” said Hammersmith, after a long pause, “I know you can hear me—”

  “Reed,” Gideon said, cutting off Hammersmith, “I’m not with these people. I’m not with anyone. I’m here to help you.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “Don’t believe me, then. But hear me out.”

  No response.

  “You say your landlord and landlady are in on it?”

  “Don’t go off script,” warned the voice of Hammersmith.

  “They aren’t my landlady and landlord,” came Chalker’s response, ramping up, hysterical. “I never saw them before! The whole thing’s a setup. I’ve never been here before in my life, they’re government agents! I was kidnapped, held for experiments—”

  Gideon held up a hand. “Reed, hold on. You say they’re in on it and it’s a setup. What about the kids? Are they part of it?”

  “It’s all a setup! Aaaahhh, the heat! The heat!”

  “Eight and ten years old?”

  A long silence.

  “Reed, answer my question. Are the kids acting? Are they conspirators, too?”

  “Don’t confuse me!”

  More silence. He heard Hammersmith’s voice. “Okay, this is good. Follow up.”

  “No confusion here, Reed. They’re children. Innocent children.”

  More silence.

  “Let them go. Send them out here to me. You’ll still have two hostages.”

  The long silence stretched on, and then there was a sudden movement, a high-pitched scream, and one of the kids appeared in the doorway—the boy. He was a little kid with a mop of brown hair, wearing an I ♥ My Grandma T-shirt, and he came out into the light, keening in fear.

  For a moment Gideon thought Chalker was releasing the kids. But when he saw the nickel-plated .45 shoved into the boy’s neck, he realized he was wrong.

  “You see this? I’m not kidding! Stop the rays or I kill the kid! I’m counting to ten! One, two—”

  The mother was screaming hysterically in the background. “Don’t, please don’t!”

  “Shut up, you lying bitch, they’re not your kids!” Chalker turned and fired the gun once into the darkness of the house behind him. The woman’s screaming stopped abruptly.

  With one brusque movement, Gideon stepped out from behind the Plexiglas cubicle and walked into the open area before the house. There were shouts, cops yelling at him—get back, get down, the man’s armed—but he kept walking until he was less than fifty yards from the front door.

  “What the hell are you doing? Get back behind the barrier, he’ll kill you!” Hammersmith shouted into his earpiece.

  Gideon plucked the earpiece out, held it up. “Reed? You see this? You’re right. They were telling me what to say.” He tossed the earpiece on the asphalt. “But not anymore. From now on we talk straight.”

  “Three, four, five—”

  “Wait, for God’s sake, please.” Gideon spoke loudly. “He’s just a child. Listen to him screaming. You think he’s faking that?”

  “Shut up!” Chalker screamed at the boy, and, remarkably, the boy stopped. He stood, trembling and pale, his lips fluttering. “My head!” Chalker shrieked. “My—”

  “Remember when those school groups came to see the lab?” Gideon said, struggling to keep his voice calm. “You loved those kids, loved showing them around. And they responded to you. Not to me. Not to the others. To you. Remember that, Reed?”

  “I’m burning up!” Chalker screamed. “They got the rays on again! I’ll kill him, and the death will be on your head, not mine! You HEAR me? SEVEN, EIGHT—”

  “Let the poor boy go,” Gideon said, taking another step forward. It deeply frightened him that Chalker couldn’t even count straight. “Let him go. You can have me instead.”

  With a brusque motion, Chalker turned, aimed the weapon at Gideon. “Get back, you’re one of them!”

  Gideon held his arms out toward Chalker almost beseechingly. “You think I’m in on the conspiracy? Take your best shot. But please, please, let the kid go.”

  “You asked for it!” And Chalker fired.

  4

  AND MISSED.

  Gideon dropped to the tarmac, his heart suddenly pounding so hard it seemed to knock itself against his rib cage. He squeezed his eyes tight shut, waiting for another explosion, a searing pain, and oblivion.

  But a second shot did not come. He heard a confusing welter of noise, voices shouting over one another, the rasp of the megaphone. Slowly, slowly, he opened his eyes, looked toward the house. There was Chalker, barely visible in the doorway, holding the boy in front of him. He could tell from the way the man handled the weapon, his shaking hand, his stance and grip, that it was probably the first time in his life he had fired a handgun. And he was shooting from fifty yards.

  “It’s a trick!” Chalker shrieked. “You’re not even Gideon! You’re a fake!”

  Gideon got up slowly, keeping his hands in sight. His heart refused to slow down. “Reed, let’s just do the trade. Take me. Let the little boy go.”

  “Tell them to turn off the rays!”

  Don’t argue with his delusion, they had told him. It was good advice. But how the hell should he respond? “Reed, everything will be all right if you just release the boy. And the little girl.”

  “Turn off the rays!” Chalker crouched behind the boy, using him as cover. “They’re killing me! Turn off the rays or I blow his head off!”

  “We can work it out,” Gideon called. “Everything’s going to be fine. But you have to let the boy go.” He took another step, and another. He had to get close enough for a final rush—if it became necessary. If he didn’t rush Chalker, tackle him, the little boy would die and the snipers would take Chalker out—and Gideon didn’t think he could bear seeing that happen.

  Chalker screamed as if in agony. “Stop the radiation!” His whole body was shaking as he waved the gun around.

  How do you respond to a lunatic? Desperately, Gideon tried recalling the advice Fordyce had given him. Engage the hostage taker, stimulate his humanity.

  “Reed, look into the boy’s face. You’ll see how truly innocent he is—”

  “My skin’s on fire!” Chalker cried. “I was counting! Where was I? Six, eight—” He suddenly grimaced, his face contorted with pain. “They’re doing it again! The burning, burning!” Once again he pushed the gun into the child’s neck. Now the boy began to scream—a high, thin sound, otherworldly.

  “Wait!” Gideon yelled. “No, don’t!” He began walking more quickly toward Chalker with his hands up. Forty yards, thirty—a distance he could cover in a few seconds…

  “Nine, TEN! TEN! Ahhhhhh!—”

  Gideon saw the finger tighten on the trigger and he sprinted straight at him. At the same time, with an inarticulate roar, the male hostage suddenly appeared in the hallway and fell upon Chalker from behind.

  Chalker wheeled backward, the gun firing harmlessly.

  “Run!” Gideon screamed at the boy as he dashed toward the house.

  But the boy did not run. Chalker struggled with the hostage, who was clinging to his back. They spun around together and Chalker slammed him into the wall of the entryway and wrenched free. The man rebounded with a fierce cry and swung at Chalker, but he was a flabby man in his fifties and Chalker deftly sidestepped the blow and punched him to the floor, knocking him senseless.

  “Run!” Gideon yelled at the boy again as he jumped the curb.

  As Chalker swung the gun around toward the father, the boy leapt onto the scientist’s back, pounding him with his small fists.

  “Dad! Get away!”

  Gideon tore up the walkway toward the front steps.

  “Don’t shoot my dad!” the boy shrieked, flailing.

  “Turn them off!” Chalker screamed, whirling around, distracted by the child, swinging the handgun back and forth as if seeking a target.

  Gideon took a flying leap at Chalker, but the gun went off before he made contact. He slammed the sc
ientist to the ground, seized his forearm, and broke it against the banister like a stick of firewood, the weapon tumbling from his grip. Chalker shrieked in agony. Behind him, the boy’s heartbreaking cries shrilled out as he hunched over his father, who was lying prone on the floor, the side of his head gone.

  Pinned, Chalker writhed underneath Gideon like a snake, roaring insanely, spittle flying…

  …And then the SWAT team came bursting through the door and thrust Gideon violently aside; Gideon felt hot blood and body matter spray across one side of his face as a fusillade of shots cut off Chalker’s ravings.

  The sudden, awful silence that followed lasted only a moment. And then, from somewhere inside the house, a little girl began to cry. “Mommy’s bleeding! Mommy’s bleeding!”

  Gideon rolled to his knees and puked.

  5

  THE CHARGE OF SWAT team responders, CSI coordinators, and emergency medical personnel rolled in like a wave, the area immediately filling with people. Gideon sat on the floor, absently wiping the blood from his face. He felt shattered. No one took any notice of him. The scene had abruptly changed from a tense standoff to controlled action: everyone had a role to play; everyone had a job to do. The two screaming children were whisked away; medical personnel knelt over the three people who had been shot; the SWAT teams did a rapid search of the house; the cops began stringing tape and securing the scene.

  Gideon staggered up and leaned against the wall, hardly able to stand, still heaving. One of the medics approached him. “Where’s the injury—?”

  “Not my blood.”

  The medic examined him anyway, probing the area where Chalker’s blood had splattered across his face. “Okay,” he said. “But let me clean you up a bit.”

  Gideon tried to focus on what the medic was saying, almost drowning from the feeling of revulsion and guilt that overwhelmed him.

  Again. Oh my God, it’s happened again. The presence of the past, the horribly cinematic and vivid memory of his own father’s death, was so strong that he felt a kind of mental paralysis, an inability to work his mind beyond the hysterical repetition of the word again.

  “We’re going to need this area vacated,” said a cop, moving them toward the door. As they spoke, the CSI team laid down a tarp and began setting down their small sports bags on it, organizing their equipment.

  The medic took Gideon’s arm. “Let’s go.”

  Gideon allowed himself to be led away. The CSI team unzipped their bags and began removing tools, flags, tape, test tubes, and evidence Baggies, snapping on latex gloves, putting on hairnets and plastic booties. All around him, there was a sense of winding down: the tenseness, the hysteria, was dissipating, replaced by a banal professionalism: what had been a drama of life and death was now just a series of checklists to be completed.

  Fordyce appeared out of nowhere. “Don’t go far,” he said in a low voice, taking his arm. “You need to be debriefed.”

  Hearing this, Gideon looked at him, his mind gradually clearing. “You saw the whole thing—what’s to debrief?” He just wanted to get the hell away, get back to New Mexico, put this horror show behind him.

  Fordyce shrugged. “The way it is.”

  Gideon wondered if they’d blame him for the death of the hostage. Probably. And rightfully so. He’d fucked up. He felt sick all over again. If he’d only said something different, the right thing, or maybe left the earpiece in, maybe they would have seen it coming, given him something to say… He’d been too close to the situation, unable to separate it from the shooting of his own father. He should never have let Glinn talk him into it. He realized to his dismay that his eyes were threatening to mist over.

  “Hey,” said Fordyce. “Don’t sweat it. You saved the two kids. And the wife’s going to make it—just a flesh wound.” Gideon felt the man’s grip tighten on his arm. “We’ve got to go now, they’re securing the scene.”

  Gideon drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “Okay.”

  As they began to move toward the door, there was a strange ripple in the atmosphere, as if a chill wind had just blown through the house. Through his peripheral vision, Gideon noticed one of the CSI women freeze in place. At the same time he heard a low clicking noise, strangely familiar, but in his fog of guilt and nausea he couldn’t quite place it. He paused as the crime scene investigator stepped over to her bag and rooted around in it, pulling out a yellow box with a gauge and a handheld tube on a long coiled wire. Gideon recognized it immediately.

  A Geiger counter.

  The machine was clicking quietly but regularly, the needle jumping with each beat. The woman looked at her partner. The entire room had fallen silent. Gideon watched, his mouth going dry.

  In the suddenly quiet house the faint clicks were oddly magnified. The woman rose and held the Geiger counter out, slowly panning the room with it. The machine hissed, the clicks abruptly spiking. She jumped at the noise. Then, steadying, she took a step forward, and—almost reluctantly—began rotating it toward Chalker’s dead body.

  As the tube came closer to the body, the clicks climbed quickly in volume and frequency, an infernal glissando that morphed from hiss, to roar, and then finally to a shriek as the instrument’s needle pinned all the way into the red.

  “Oh my God,” murmured the woman, backing away as she stared at the gauge, her eyes widening in disbelief. Suddenly she dropped the unit, turned, and ran out of the house. The instrument crashed to the floor, the roar from its counter filling the air, rising and falling as the tube rolled back and forth.

  And then the entire room was in panicked motion, scrambling back, pushing, shoving, trying to get out. The CSI team broke into a run, followed by the photographers, cops, and SWAT members; in a matter of moments everyone was fleeing willy-nilly, clawing and shoving their way out the door, all sense of procedure vanishing. Gideon and Fordyce were carried along on the human wave. A moment later Gideon found himself out on the street before the house.

  Only then did it begin to sink in. Gideon turned to Fordyce. The agent’s face was deathly pale.

  “Chalker was hot,” Gideon said. “Hotter than hell.”

  “It would seem so,” the agent said.

  Almost without thinking, Gideon touched the sticky blood drying on the side of his face. “And we’ve been exposed.”

  6

  THERE HAD BEEN a dramatic change in the crowd of police officers and professionals assembled behind the barricades. The scene of focused activity, the purposeful coming and going of uniformed people, dissolved. The first sign was a wave of silence that seemed to ripple outward. Even Fordyce fell silent, and Gideon realized someone was talking to him through his earpiece.

  Fordyce pressed his finger against the earpiece and went still paler as he listened. “No,” he said, vehemently. “No way. I didn’t get anywhere near the guy. You can’t do this.”

  The crowd had become motionless as well. Even those who’d fled the house had paused, watching and listening, as if collectively stunned. And then, abruptly, the crowd moved again—a rebound motion away from the house. The retreat was not exactly a rout, but rather a controlled recoil.

  Simultaneously the air filled with fresh sirens. Soon choppers appeared overhead. A group of white, unmarked panel trucks began to arrive outside the barricades, escorted by additional squad cars; their rear doors opened up and alien-garbed figures began pouring out, hazmat suits emblazoned with biohazard and radiation symbols. Some were carrying riot control gear: batons, tear gas guns, and stun guns. Then, to Gideon’s consternation, they began setting up barriers in front of the moving crowd, blocking the retreat. They shouted for people to stop moving, to stay where they were. The effect was dramatic—as people saw they might be prevented from fleeing, panic really began to take hold.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Gideon asked.

  “Mandatory screening,” replied Fordyce.

  More barriers went up. Gideon watched as a cop started arguing and tried to push past a barrier—only to be fo
rced back by several men in white. Meanwhile, the new arrivals were directing everyone into an area being hastily set up, a kind of holding pen with chain link around it, where more figures in white were scanning people with handheld Geiger counters. Most were being released, but a few were being directed into the backs of the vans.

  A loudspeaker kicked in: “All personnel remain in place until directed otherwise. Obey instructions. Stay behind the barriers.”

  “Who are those guys?” Gideon asked.

  Fordyce looked both disgusted and frightened. “NEST.”

  “NEST?”

  “Nuclear Emergency Support Team. They’re from the DOE—they respond to nuclear or radiological terrorist attacks.”

  “You think terrorism might be involved?”

  “That guy Chalker designed nuclear weapons.”

  “Even so, that’s quite a stretch.”

  “Really?” Fordyce said, slowly turning his blue eyes toward Gideon. “Back there, you mentioned something about Chalker finding religion.” He paused. “May I ask…which religion?”

  “Um, Islam.”

  7

  ANYONE WHO SET off the Geiger counters was shoved into the vans like cattle. The partying rubberneckers had fled, leaving their funny hats and beer cans strewn about. Teams of monkey-suited hazmat people were going door-to-door, moving people out of their homes, sometimes forcibly, creating a scene of both pathos and chaos, with weeping elderly shuffling along in walkers, hysterical mothers, and wailing kids. Loudspeakers droned on about staying calm and cooperating, reassuring everyone it was for their own protection. Not a word about radiation.

  Gideon and the rest squeezed together on parallel benches. The doors slammed shut and the van started up. Fordyce, opposite him, remained grimly silent, but most of the other people stuffed in the van looked shit-scared. Among them was a man Fordyce identified as the psychologist Hammersmith, whose shirt was bloodied, and a member of the SWAT team who had shot Chalker at point-blank range and who was also now decorated with his blood. Radioactive blood.