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.”
“The Demon Core?” Fordyce asked.
“A plutonium bomb core that was mishandled twice. It went critical each time, killing the scientists handling it and irradiating a bunch of others. It was finally used in the ABLE shot in ’46. One thing they learned from the Demon Core was that a high dose of gamma radiation makes you go crazy. The symptoms are just what you saw with Chalker—mental confusion, raving, headache, vomiting, and an unbearable pain in the gut.”
“That puts a whole new spin on things,” said Hammersmith.
“The real question,” said Gideon, “is the form that craziness took. Why would he claim they were beaming rays into his head? Experimenting on him?”
“I’m afraid that’s a classic symptom of schizophrenia,” said Hammersmith.
“Yes, but he didn’t have schizophrenia. And why would he say his landlord and landlady were government agents?”
Fordyce raised his head and looked at Gideon. “You don’t think that poor fuck of a landlord was a government agent—do you?”
“No. But I wonder why he kept talking about experiments, why he denied having lived in the apartment. It doesn’t make sense.”
Fordyce shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s starting to make sense to me. A lot of sense.”
“How so?” Gideon asked.
“Put it together yourself. The guy works at Los Alamos. Has a top-secret security clearance. Designs nuclear bombs. Converts to Islam. Disappears for two months. Next thing, he shows up irradiated in New York City.”
“So?”
“So the son of a bitch joined a jihad! With his help, they got their hands on a nuclear core. They mishandled it just like that Demon Core you mentioned, and Chalker got his ass irradiated.”
“Chalker wasn’t a radical,” Gideon said. “He was quiet. He kept his religion to himself.”
Fordyce laughed bitterly. “It’s always the quiet ones.”
There was a silence in the entire van. Everyone was listening intently now. Gideon felt a growing sense of horror: what Fordyce said had the ring of truth. The more he thought about it, the more he realized the man was probably right. Chalker had the personality for it; he was exactly the kind of insecure, confused person who would find his calling in jihad. And there was no other way to explain the intense dose of gamma rays he must have been exposed to, to make him so very hot.
“We’d better face it,” said Fordyce as the van slowed. “The ultimate nightmare has come true. Islamic terrorists have got themselves a nuke.”
8
THE VAN DOORS opened into an underground, garage-like space, where they were herded through a tunnel of plastic. To Gideon, who knew their radiation exposure was probably secondary and fairly minor, it seemed like overkill, more designed to follow some bureaucratic protocol than anything else.
They were shunted into a high-tech waiting area, all chrome and porcelain and stainless steel, with monitors and computer displays winking softly from all angles. Everything was new and had obviously