hell are you?” came a voice over the intercom.
“NEST,” said Fordyce crisply, standing up. “We’re the advance team—turning it over to you.”
In the reflected beam of his flashlight, Gideon caught Fordyce’s eye through the visor. “Yeah. Time to go.”
14
THEY HAD SPENT hours at the FBI field office in Albuquerque, filling out endless paperwork for a pool vehicle and expense account. Now they were finally on the road, driving to Santa Fe, the great arc of the Sandia Mountains rising on their right, the Rio Grande to their left.
Even here, they met a steady stream of overloaded cars heading the opposite direction. “What are they running from?” Fordyce asked.
“Everyone around here knows that if nuclear war breaks out, Los Alamos is a primary target.”
“Yeah, but who’s talking about nuclear war?”
“If the terrorist nuke goes off in DC, God only knows what might happen next. All bets are off. And what if we find evidence the terrorists got the nuke from a place like Pakistan or North Korea? You think we wouldn’t retaliate? I can think of plenty of scenarios where we might see a sweet little mushroom cloud rising over that hill. Which, by the way, is only twenty miles from Santa Fe—and upwind of it.”
Fordyce shook his head. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself, Gideon.”
“These people don’t think so.”
“Jesus,” said Fordyce. “We must’ve spent four hours with those damn people. And only nine days until N-Day.” He used the insider term for the presumed day of the nuke detonation.
They drove for a moment in silence.
“I hate that bureaucratic shit,” Fordyce finally said. “I’ve got to clear my head.” He fumbled in his briefcase, pulled out an iPod, stuck it into the car dock, and dialed in a song.
“Lawrence Welk, here we come,” muttered Gideon.
Instead, “Epistrophy” came blasting out of the speakers.
“Whoa,” said Gideon, amazed. “An FBI agent who listens to Monk? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What did you think I listened to—motivational lectures? You a Monk fan?”
“Greatest jazz pianist of all time.”
“What about Art Tatum?”
“Too many notes, not enough music, if you know what I mean.”
Fordyce had a heavy foot. As the speedometer crept up to a hundred miles an hour, the agent took the portable flasher out of the glove compartment and slapped it onto the roof, turning on the grille flashers as he did so. The rush of air and humming of the tires sounded an ostinato to Monk’s crashing chords and rippling arpeggios.
They listened to the music in silence for a while, then Fordyce spoke. “You knew Chalker. Tell me about him. What made the guy tick?”
Gideon felt a swell of irritation at the implication that somehow he and Chalker were buddies. “I don’t know what made the guy ‘tick.’”
“What did you two do up at Los Alamos, anyway?”
Gideon sat back, trying to relax. The car approached a line of slower vehicles and a semi; Fordyce swung out into the fast lane at the last moment, the wind buffeting them as they blew past.
“Well,” said Gideon, “like I said, we both worked in the Stockpile Stewardship program.”
“What exactly is that?”
“It’s classified. Nukes get old like everything else. The problem is, we can’t test-fire a nuke these days because of the moratorium. So our job is to make for damn sure they’re in working order.”
“Nice. So what did Chalker do, in particular?”
“He used the lab’s supercomputer to model nuclear explosions, identify how the radioactive decay of various nuke components would affect yield.”
“Also classified work?”
“Extremely.”
Fordyce rubbed his chin. “Where’d he grow up?”
“California, I think. He didn’t talk about his past much.”
“What about him as a person? Job, marriage?”
“He started at Los Alamos about six years ago. Had a doctorate from Chicago. Recently married, brought his young wife with him. She became a problem. She was sort of an ex-hippie, New Age type, from the South, hated Los Alamos.”
“Meaning?”
“She didn’t hide the fact that she was against nuclear weapons—she didn’t approve of her husband’s work. She was a drinker. I remember one office party where she got drunk and started shouting about the military-industrial complex and calling people murderers and throwing things. She totaled their car and racked up a couple of DUIs before they took away her license. I heard that Chalker did everything he could to keep the marriage going, but eventually she left, went to Taos with some other guy. Joined a New Age commune.”
“What sort of commune?”
“Radical, anti-government, I heard. Self-sufficient, off the grid, grow their own tomatoes and pot. Left wing, but the weird