Authors: Douglas Preston
The waiting room broke into applause.
G
ideon Crew looked around at the room he had booked at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge on Eighth Avenue. It was surprisingly decent, well appointed, not a trace of blue and orange to be seen. Best of all, it had an iPod dock. He slipped out his iPod, pondered the problem at hand, dialed in Bill Evans’s
Blue in Green
, and docked it. The bittersweet chords of “The Two Lonely People” filled the room. He gulped the last of his quintuple espresso and tossed the cup into the trash.
For several minutes, he sat motionless in the chair by the small desk, allowing the moody, introspective music to wash over him, willing himself to relax muscle by muscle, letting the events of the day sort themselves out in his mind. Just fifteen hours earlier, he’d been fishing for trout in Chihuahueños Creek. Now here he was, sitting in a Manhattan hotel room, with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket, a death sentence on his head, and a strange man’s blood on his hands.
He stood up, shrugged out of his shirt, and walked into the bathroom to wash his hands and arms. Then he stepped out and put on a fresh shirt. Covering the bed with plastic garbage bags, he carefully spread out Wu’s clothes, which had been cut off in the emergency room and already gone into the medical-waste stream. He’d had a devil of a time retrieving them. A heartwarming Christmas story about a broken promise, a Hong Kong tailor, and a lost puppy had finally done the trick—but just barely.
After the clothes were carefully arranged, Gideon laid out the contents of Wu’s wallet, the spare change from his pockets, passport, rollerball, and an old-fashioned safety razor in a plastic case, no blade, which he had found in Wu’s suit coat pocket. That was all. No cell phone, no BlackBerry, no calculator, no flash drive.
As he worked, dawn broke over the city, the hotel windows shifting from gray to yellow, the city waking up with car horns and traffic.
When everything was laid out in geometric precision, he looked it over, finger pensively placed on his lower lip. If the man was carrying the plans for a new kind of weapon, it was not at all obvious where they were—if he had even been carrying them on his person. Clearly, the list of numbers Wu had gasped out to him at the accident scene couldn’t be the complete set of plans—such plans, even in highly compressed form, would take up a significant amount of data. They would have to be stored digitally, which meant he was looking for a microchip; a magnetic or bubble memory device; a holographic image stored on some medium; or perhaps a laser-read storage device such as a CD or DVD.
It seemed logical that the man would have kept the plans on his person—or, more exotically, perhaps embedded within his body. Shuddering slightly, Gideon decided he would deal with the “inside” question later—first he would carefully search all of Wu’s few possessions.
From a group of shopping bags dumped by the door, he removed an electronic device he had just purchased—amazing how in Manhattan you could get anything at any time of the night or day, from bombs to blow jobs—opened the box, and began setting it up. Called the MAG 55W05 Advanced Countermeasures Sweep Kit, it was a device used by private investigators, CEOs, and other paranoid people to sweep areas for bugs. Completing the assembly, he perused the manual quickly, then fired it up.
With painstaking slowness, he moved the device’s sweeping wand over the clothing spread out on the bed. No hits. The wallet and its contents—money, business cards, family photos—were also negative, except for the magnetic stripe on the single credit card Wu carried. When the sweeping wand went over the magnetic stripe, the MAG 55 bleeped and blinked and bars went flickering up and down the LED screen. It seemed there was data on the stripe, but exactly how much he couldn’t be sure: all the MAG 55 told him was that it was less than 64K. He’d have to find some way of downloading and examining it.
Wu’s Chinese passport also contained an embedded magnetic stripe along the outer edge of the front cover, just as US passports did. Using the integrated reader of the device, he was able to determine that this stripe held data, and that it, too, was less than 64K. He scratched his head thoughtfully. That seemed too small to credibly detail the workings of a secret weapon. Advanced technology could compress data a great deal, but he wasn’t sure just how much.
The passport and credit card would have to be further analyzed.
He threw himself in a wing chair, closing his eyes. He hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. He listened to the rich chord progressions of “Very Early,” letting his mind wander through the swirling colors and rhythms. His father had been a jazz aficionado and he remembered him every evening in his easy chair, head bent over the hi-fi, listening to Charlie Parker and Fats Waller, his foot tapping to the music, his bald head nodding. It was the only music Gideon listened to, and he knew it well, very well…
The next thing he knew, he was waking up, the closing bars of “If You Could See Me Now” fading on the player.
He got up, went into the bathroom, stuck his head under the faucet, and turned on the cold water. Toweling his head dry, he emerged with a new spring in his step. Gideon had an ability to get by on very little sleep, and to wake from catnaps feeling completely refreshed. It was now almost nine
AM
, and he could hear the maids talking in the hall.
Packing away the sweep kit, he began a painstaking visual examination of Wu’s clothing with a jewelry loupe, using an X-Acto knife to open up seams and double layers. The clothing was stiff, soaked with blood in places, with bits and pieces of metal, glass, and plastic stuck to it. He removed each piece with tweezers, laying it on a paper towel for further examination. The trousers in particular were bloody and shredded. Where the blood was thick and caked, he carefully soaked the area with wet paper towels, then blotted it dry, picking out every little piece.
Four hours later he had finished. Nothing.
Now for the shoes. He had saved the most likely hiding place for last.
Noon. He hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, a sandwich up in the mountains, and now the only substance inside his stomach was a dozen espressos. It felt like he’d drunk a pint of battery acid. No matter: he picked up the phone and ordered a triple espresso from room service, hot, hot.
He took the shoes out of a paper bag and set them on the coffee table. They were Chinese-made knockoffs of John Lobbs. Both were caked with hardened blood—Wu’s legs had been crushed. One shoe was horribly mangled and had been cut off the foot; the other was merely caked in gore. In the summer heat, they had already begun to smell.
Clearing a space, he examined the right shoe with the sweep kit. Nothing. A knock came on the door and he went outside—keeping the door mostly shut—took the coffee, tipped the bellhop, and drank it down with a single gulp.
Ignoring the boiling feeling in the pit of his stomach, he went back to work, taking the shoe apart, methodically, piece by piece, and labeling each with a felt-tipped pen. First the heel came off; then he unstitched the sole and detached it, laying the pegs and stitches in neat rows to one side. With the X-Acto blade, he unstitched all the leather pieces and laid them out. The heel was of leather, built up in layers, and he carefully separated each layer and laid them side by side. A second sweep revealed nothing. Still using the X-Acto knife, he split every piece of leather, examining both sides and sweeping them all again. Yet again, nothing.
He repeated the process on the other shoe without success.
Gideon packed everything away in ziplock bags, labeling each one, and then sorted and stacked it all into a large Pelican case he had bought for the purpose, locking it up tight. He leaned back in the chair. “Sink me,” he muttered exasperatedly. This was getting tedious. The thought of all the money Glinn had promised revived him a little.
Now for the inside work. It seemed unlikely, but he had to be thorough. But first: Music to Search Entrails By. Something a little more stretched out. He decided on Cecil Taylor’s
Air
.
He picked up a thick manila folder from the bedside table—the complete suite of ER X-rays, head to toe, to which he was entitled as Wu’s “life partner.” Pulling the shade off the lamp, he held up the first X-ray to the bulb and examined it with the loupe, inch by careful inch. The head, upper chest, and arms were clean, but when he came to the lower midsection his heart just about stopped: there was a small white spot indicating metal. He grabbed the loupe and examined it, and was immediately disappointed. It was indeed a fragment of metal, but nothing more than a twisted piece that had obviously gotten embedded in the car accident. It was not a microchip, or a tiny metal canister, or secret spy gizmo.
There was nothing in the stomach or intestinal tract indicating any sort of container, balloon, or storage device. Nothing in the rectum, either.
It horrified him to look at the X-rays of the legs. Embedded in them were more than a dozen bits of metal—all showing as irregular white spots, along with grayer pieces that he guessed were fragments of glass and plastic. The X-rays had been taken from several directions, and he was able to get a crude idea of the shape of each piece—and none of them even remotely resembled a computer chip, a tiny canister or capsule, or a magnetic or laser storage device.
He had a vision of the owlish man descending the escalators, frightened and peering about, small, serious—and courageous. For the first time Gideon considered the risk the man had taken. Why had he done it? It would be a miracle if the man ever walked again. If he even survived. At the hospital, Wu had remained in a coma; they’d had to cut a hole in his cranium to relieve the pressure. Gideon reminded himself that this hadn’t been an accident. It was attempted murder. No, with the death of the innocent cabdriver and half a dozen bystanders it was actual murder—mass murder.
Shaking off these thoughts, he slid the X-rays back into their manila folder and rose, going to the window. It was late afternoon—he’d been at it all day. The sun was already setting, the long yellow light spilling down 51st Street, the pedestrians casting gaunt shadows.
He’d hit a dead end—or so it seemed. What now?
His growling stomach reminded him it was high time to put something in there besides coffee. Something good. He picked up the phone, dialed room service, and put in an order for two dozen raw oysters on the half shell.
T
he police junkyard was located on the Harlem River in the South Bronx, in the shadow of the Willis Avenue Bridge. Gideon stepped out of the cab to find himself in a bleak zone of warehouses, and industrial lots stacked with old railroad cars, abandoned school buses, and rusting containers. A smell of muck and dead clams came drifting off the river, and the white-noise of evening rush-hour traffic on the Major Deegan Expressway hummed in the air like a hive of bees. He’d lived in a neighborhood not much different from this—the last in a succession of increasingly squalid homes he’d shared with his mother. Even the smell was familiar. It was an intensely depressing thought.
A chain-link fence topped with concertina wire surrounded the facility, fronted by a rolling gate on wheels next to a guardhouse. Beyond the fence sat an almost empty parking lot fringed by dying sumacs, behind which squatted a long warehouse. Beyond that and to the right lay an open-air junkyard of stacked and pancaked cars.
Gideon strolled up to the guardhouse. A swarthy-looking cop sat behind the plastic windows, reading a book. As Gideon approached, he slid open the street-side window with a hammy arm covered with gorilla hair. “Yeah?”
“Hi,” said Gideon. “I was wondering if you could help me?”
“What?” The cop still had his nose in the book. Gideon shifted to see the cover: he was surprised to see it was
City of God
by Saint Augustine.
“Well,” said Gideon, putting on his most fawning, obsequious tone, “I’m so sorry to bother you.”
“No bother,” said the cop, finally putting down the book.
Gideon was relieved to see that, despite the beetling Neanderthal brows and heavy five o’clock shadow, the man had a friendly, open face. “My brother-in-law,” Gideon began, “Tony Martinelli, he’s the cabbie that was killed in that accident last night. The one where a guy ran him off the road on a Hundred Sixteenth Street—you read about that?”
Now the cop was interested. “Of course. Worst traffic accident in years—it was all over the news. He was your brother-in-law? I’m sorry.”
“My sister’s really broken up about it. It’s just terrible—got two babies at home, one and three, no money, big mortgage on the house.”
“That’s really tough,” said the cop, laying the book aside and appearing genuinely concerned.
Gideon took a handkerchief from his pocket, mopped his brow. “Well,” he said, “here’s the thing. He had a religious medallion hanging from the rearview mirror. It was a beautiful one, sterling silver, owned it forever. Saint Christopher.”
The cop nodded in understanding.
“Tony went to Italy, the Jubilee Year in 2000—and the pope blessed that medallion. Blessed it personally. I don’t know if you’re Catholic, but Saint Christopher’s the patron saint of travelers, and he being a cabbie and all—well, that medallion was the most precious thing he owned. That moment with the pope was the high point of his life.”