Gideon's Corpse (26 page)

He sat up and clasped his hands around his knees, coughing and shivering and fighting to regain his breath. He’d lost both the stage gun and the real gun somewhere in the rapids. Upstream, he could hear the faint roar of rapids, and he made out the dull line of whitewater where the canyon opened up. He was sitting on a low sandbar that curved for hundreds of yards along an inside bend of the river. Before him the river ran sluggishly, the moon dimpling its moving surface.

Both upstream and downstream he could see the lights of helicopters, see the downward play of spotlights in the darkness. He had to get out of the open and under cover.

He managed to rise unsteadily to his feet. Where was Alida? Had she survived? This was too terrible—this was never part of the plan. He’d sucked an innocent woman into his problem, just as he had with Orchid, back in New York. And now, thanks to him, Alida might be dead.

“Alida!” he practically screamed.

His eye roamed the sweep of sand, shining in the moonlight. Then he saw a dark shape lying partway out of the water, one hand held crookedly over its head, frozen in place.

“Oh no!” he cried, stumbling forward. But as he approached he saw it was twisted, misshapen—a driftwood log.

He sank down on it, gasping for breath, immeasurably relieved.

The closest chopper was working its way down the river toward him—and he abruptly realized he was leaving telltale footprints in the sand. With a muffled curse, he picked up a branch and worked his way back, erasing his prints with it. The effort warmed him a little. He crossed the sandbar, still sweeping, waded across a side channel, reached the far side, and dove into a thicket of salt cedars just as the chopper roared overhead, its blinding searchlight moving back and forth.

Even after it had passed by he lay in the darkness, thinking. He couldn’t leave this stretch of river until he found Alida. This was where the fast water slowed into a broad, sluggish flow, and this was where—if she were still alive—she would probably reach shore.

Another chopper roared overhead, shaking the bushes he was hiding in, and he covered his face from the flying sand.

He crawled out and peered up and down the river again, but could see nothing. There was a cutbank on the far side: if she was anywhere, she’d have to be on this side of the river. He began creeping through the heavy brush, trying to stay silent.

Suddenly he heard crackling behind him, and a heavy hand clapped onto his shoulder. With a shout he turned.

“Quiet!” came the whispered reply.

“Alida! Oh my God, I thought—”

“
Shhhh!
” She seized his hand and dragged him deeper into the bushes as another chopper swept toward them. They lay low as the backwash rattled the scrub.

“We’ve got to get away from the river,” she whispered, pulling him to his feet and scooting through the brush up a dry creek. Gideon was disconcerted to find her in better shape than he was. He gasped for breath as they climbed a boulder-strewn wash, which grew progressively narrower and steeper.

“There,” she said, pointing.

He looked up. In the dim moonlight he could see the jagged remains of an old basaltic flow, and at the base of it the dark opening of a cave.

They struggled up a scree slope, Alida pulling him along when he faltered, and in a few minutes they were inside. It wasn’t a true cave—more like a broad overhang—but it shielded them from above and below. And it had a smooth floor of hard-packed sand.

She stretched out. “God, does that feel good,” she said. There was a brief silence before she continued. “A really crazy thing happened back there. I saw this log lying on the shore, could’ve sworn it was your dead body. It really…well, really shocked me.”

Gideon groaned. “I saw it, too, and thought it was you.”

Alida gave a low laugh, which gradually trailed off into silence. In the darkness, she reached out and took his hand and gave it a squeeze. “I want to tell you something, Gideon. When I saw that log, the first thing that came into my mind was that, now, I wouldn’t ever get the chance to say it. So here goes. I believe you. I know you’re not a terrorist. I want to help you find out who did it—and why.”

Gideon was momentarily speechless. He tried to come back with a wiseass response, but could think of nothing. After all that had happened—after being framed, attacked by his partner, shot at, chased across the mountains, pursued through the tunnels, run into the river, and almost drowned—he felt a surge of emotion at this sudden expression of trust. “What changed your mind?” he managed.

“I know you now,” she went on. “You’re sincere. You’ve got a kind heart. There’s just no way you could be a terrorist.”

She squeezed his hand again; and at that, with all the stress, the disbelief, the exhaustion, the inner loneliness, hearing a sympathetic word did something to Gideon. He began to choke up. Entirely against his will, he felt tears springing into his eyes and leaking down his face—and then he found himself sobbing like a baby.

48

A
FTER A WHILE
he managed to get himself under control. He wiped his eyes with his damp sleeve, then raised his head. He felt his face growing scarlet with shame.

“Well, well,” Alida said. “A man who can cry.” She smiled at him in the darkness, but it was a gentle smile, with no trace of irony.

“How embarrassing,” he muttered. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. He hadn’t even cried on his mother’s deathbed. It might have been on that terrible day in 1988, on the blazing green grass outside Arlington Hall Station, when he’d realized that his father wasn’t still alive, after all, but had been shot dead by a sniper.

“I don’t know what got into me,” he said. He felt mortified to have broken down in front of Alida, of all people. But at the same time, a part of him felt relief. She seemed to sense his embarrassment and did not pursue the subject. For a long time they lay side by side, in silence.

Gideon propped himself up on an elbow. “I’ve been thinking. When Fordyce and I arrived in New Mexico, we interviewed just
three
people. We must’ve scored a direct hit and never realized it. One of those people was so frightened by that interview that he tried to kill us. First he sabotaged our plane, and when that didn’t work, he did a frame job on me.”

“Who are they?”

“The imam of the local mosque. A cult leader named Willis Lockhart. And then…of course, your father.”

Alida snorted. “My father is no terrorist.”

“Granted, it seems unlikely, but I can’t rule out anyone. Sorry.” A pause. “Why does he call you ‘Miracle Daughter,’ anyway?”

“My mother died giving birth to me. Since then, we’ve only had each other. And he’s always looked on me as some kind of miracle.” She smiled again despite herself. “So tell me about the other two.”

“Lockhart runs a doomsday cult at a place called the Paiute Creek Ranch, in the southern Jemez Mountains. Chalker’s wife had an affair with him and joined the cult, and it could very well be that Chalker was drawn into it, too. They’re looking forward to apocalypse. They’re no slouches when it comes to technology. They’ve got incredibly sophisticated communications and computing facilities, all run on solar power.”

“And?”

“And, well, maybe—just maybe—they’re trying to hasten along the apocalypse. You know, give it a little nudge by detonating a bomb.”

“Are they Muslim?”

“Not at all. But it occurred to me that the cult might be planning to set off a nuke and see it
blamed
on the Muslims. Great way to start World War Three. It’s the Charles Manson strategy.”

“The Manson strategy?”

“Manson and his followers tried to start a race war by murdering a bunch of people and making it look like it was done by black radicals.”

She nodded slowly.

There was a long silence before Gideon spoke again. “You know, the more I think about it, the more I feel in my bones that Lockhart and his cult are behind this. The imam and the members of his mosque seem like nice, rational people. But I get really bad vibes from Lockhart.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“I’m going to confront Lockhart.” Gideon inhaled deeply. “It means crossing the mountains again to get to the Paiute Creek Ranch. We’re going to head parallel to the river until we reach—”

“I’ve got a better plan,” Alida interrupted.

He fell silent.

She held up a finger. “First, we take these wet clothes off, build a fire, and dry them out. Because it’s cold and getting colder.”

“Fair enough.”

“Second, we sleep.”

Another beat.

“Third, we need help. And I know just the person: my father.”

“You’re forgetting he’s on my short list of suspects.”

“Knock it off, for God’s sake. He can hide us up at the ranch he has out of town. We’ll use that as a base while we figure out who framed you.”

“And your father is going to help a suspected nuclear terrorist?”

“My father is going to help
me
. And trust me, if I tell him you’re innocent, he’ll believe me. And he’s a good man, with a strong sense of justice, of right and wrong. If he believes you’re innocent—and he will—he’ll move heaven and earth to help you.”

Gideon was too weary to argue. He let the matter drop.

Working together, they built a small fire in the back of the shelter, concealed from the outside. The thin stream of smoke rose and trickled along the roof, exiting through a narrow crack. Alida blew on the fire until it was blazing merrily, then rigged up a couple of sticks to use as drying racks.

She held out a hand. “Let me have your shirt and pants,” she demanded.

Gideon hesitated a moment, then reluctantly stripped. She pulled off her own shirt, bra, pants, and panties, and hung everything together on the line. Gideon was simply too wiped out to go through the motions of averting his eyes. It was, in fact, pleasant to watch the firelight play off her skin as she moved. Her long blond hair fell in wild tangles down her bare back, swaying with the movement of her body.

She turned to him and, somewhat reluctantly, he glanced away.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, with a laugh. “I used to go skinny-dipping with the boys in the stock tank at our ranch all the time.”

“Okay.” He looked back and found her eyes also lingering on him.

She quickly adjusted the wet clothes, added a few more sticks to the fire, then sat down.

“Tell me everything,” she said. “About yourself, I mean.”

Slowly, haltingly, Gideon began to talk. Normally, he spoke of his past to no one. But whether it was the exhaustion, the stress, or simply having an interested and sympathetic human being nearby, he started to tell her about his life: how he became an art thief; how easy it had been to rip off most historical societies and rinky-dink museums; how he was able to do it most of the time without the victims even knowing they had been robbed. “A lot of those places don’t take care of their art,” he told her. “They don’t display it or light it well, and nobody sees it. They may have an inventory list, but they never check it against their collections, so years might go by before they realize they’ve been robbed. If ever. It’s the perfect crime, if you don’t set your sights too high, and there are literally thousands of places out there just begging to be victimized.”

Alida pulled a stray strand of damp hair away from her forehead with a finger. “Wow. Are you still doing it?”

“I quit years ago.”

“Don’t you ever feel guilty?”

Gideon couldn’t quite put out of his mind the fact that he was talking to a nude woman. He tried to put it in perspective—after all, the fellows in
Le déjeuner sur l’herbe
didn’t seem to have thought much about it. The clothes on the racks were starting to steam and would be dry soon, anyway. “Sometimes. Once in particular. I got arrogant and went to a fund-raising cocktail party at a historical society I had ripped off. I thought it would be funny. I met the curator in charge of the collection and he was all shaken up, upset. Not only did he notice the little watercolor was gone, but it turns out that was his particular favorite in the whole place. It was all he could talk about, he felt so bad. He really took it personally.”

“Did you give it back?”

“I’d already sold it. But I gave serious thought to stealing it back for him.”

Alida laughed. “You’re terrible!” She took his hand in hers, gave it a little caress. “How’d you lose the end of your finger?”

“That’s a story I never tell anyone.”

“Come on. You can tell me.”

“No. Really. I’m taking that secret to the grave.”

Saying this, Gideon suddenly remembered that the grave, for him, might be a lot closer than for most people. It was a fact he recalled every single day, almost every single hour—but this time, sitting in the cave, the remembrance came on him like a blow to the gut.

“What is it?” Alida asked, sensing it immediately.

Without hesitating, he knew he was going to tell her. “There’s a good chance that I’m not long for this world myself.” He tried to laugh, his attempt to make light of it falling flat.

She stared at him, her brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “I allegedly have something called a vein of Galen aneurysmal malformation.”

“A
what
?”

Gideon stared into the fire. “It’s a tangle of arteries and veins in the brain, a big knot of blood vessels in which the arteries connect directly to the veins without going through a network of capillaries. As a result, the high arterial pressure dilates the vein of Galen, blowing it up like a balloon. At a certain point it bursts—and you’re dead.”

“No.”

“You’re born with it, but after the age of twenty it can start to grow.”

“What can they do about it?”

“Nothing. It’s inoperable. There are no symptoms and no treatment. And it’ll kill me in about a year, more or less. I’ll die suddenly, without warning, boom, sayonara.”

He fell into silence, still staring into the fire.

“This is one of your jokes, right? Tell me you’re joking.”