Gideon's Corpse (3 page)

“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 scientist 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

T
HE 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

T
HERE 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 forced 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

A
NYONE 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.

“We’re fucked,” said the SWAT team guy, a big beefy fellow with hammy forearms and an incongruously high voice. “We’re going to die. There’s nothing they can do. Not with radiation.”

Gideon said nothing. The ignorance of most people about radiation was appalling.

The man moaned. “God, my head’s pounding. It’s starting already.”

“Hey, shut up,” said Fordyce.

“Fuck you, man,” the man flared. “I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

Fordyce said nothing, his jaw tightening.

“You hear me?” The man’s voice was rising. “I didn’t
sign up
for this shit!”

Gideon looked at the SWAT team member and spoke in low, measured tones. “The blood on you is radioactive. You’d better strip. And you, too.” He looked at Hammersmith. “Anyone with the hostage taker’s blood on any article of clothing, take it off.”

This set off a frantic activity in the van, the sense of panic rising, a ridiculous scene in which everyone was suddenly stripping and trying to get blood off their skin and hair. All except the SWAT guy. “What does it matter?” he said. “We’re fucked. Rot, cancer, you name it. We’re all dead now.”

“Nobody’s going to die,” said Gideon. “Everything depends on just how hot Chalker was and what kind of radiation we’re dealing with.”

The SWAT guy raised his massive head and stared at him with red eyes. “What makes you such a radiation rocket scientist?”

“Because I happen to be a radiation rocket scientist.”

“Good for you, punk. Then you know we’re all dead and you’re a fucking liar.”

Gideon decided to ignore him.

“Lying peckerwood.”

Peckerwood?
Exasperated, Gideon looked up at him again. Could he be crazy from radiation poisoning, too? But no, this was simple, mindless panic.

“I’m talking to you, punk. Don’t lie.”

Gideon combed his hair out of his face with his fingers and looked back down at the floor. He was tired: tired of this jackass, tired of everything, tired of life itself. He didn’t have the energy to reason with an irrational person.

The SWAT team member rose abruptly from his seat and seized Gideon’s shirt, lifting him out of his seat. “I asked you a question. Don’t look away.”

Gideon looked at him: at the engorged face, the veins bulging in his neck, the sweat popping on his brow, the trembling lips. The man looked so utterly and completely stupid, he couldn’t help himself: he laughed.

“You think it’s funny?” The SWAT guy made a fist, getting ready to strike.

Fordyce’s punch to the man’s gut came as fast as a striking rattler; he gave an
oof!
and fell to his knees. A second later Fordyce had him in a hammerlock. The agent bent over and spoke into his ear, in a low voice, something Gideon did not catch. Then he released the man, who collapsed on his face, groaned, and—after gasping for air—managed to rise back up to his knees.

“Sit down and be quiet,” said Fordyce.

The man quietly sat down. After a moment he began to cry.

Gideon adjusted his shirt. “Thanks for saving me the trouble.”

Fordyce said nothing.

“Well, so now we know,” Gideon went on after a moment.

“Know what?”

“That Chalker wasn’t crazy. He was suffering from radiation poisoning—almost certainly gamma rays. A massive dose of gamma radiation scrambles the mind.”

Hammersmith raised his head. “How do you know?”

“Anyone who works up at Los Alamos with radionuclides has to learn about the criticality accidents that happened there in the early days. Cecil Kelley, Harry Daghlian, Louis Slotin, the Demon Core.”