“He called the Bjornsen Institute of Writing three times,” said Gideon.
Fordyce grunted.
“Maybe he was writing something. Like I said, he had an interest in writing.”
“Call them.”
Gideon called. He spoke for a moment, hung up, gave Fordyce a smile. “He took a writing workshop.”
“Yeah?” Fordyce was interested.
“It was called Writing Your Life.”
Another long silence. Fordyce gave a low whistle. “So he was, what, writing his memoirs?”
“Seems so. And that was four months ago. Six weeks later, he dropped out, disappeared, and joined the jihad.”
As this sank in, Fordyce’s face lit up. “A memoir… That could be pure gold. Where’s this institute?”
“Santa Cruz, California.”
“Let me call them—”
“Wait,” said Gideon. “Better if we just go. In person. You call them ahead of time, that’ll open up a can of worms. If the official investigation gets wind of it, we’ll be shut out.”
“I’m supposed to clear all our movements through the field office,” said Fordyce, almost to himself. “If we fly commercial, I’d have to get permission…” He thought for a moment. “But we don’t haveto fly commercial. We can rent a plane at the airfield.”
“Yeah, and who’s going to fly it?”
“Me. I’ve got a VFR license.” And he began dialing a number.
“Who are you calling?” Gideon asked.
“Local airfield.”
Gideon watched Fordyce talk animatedly into the phone. He wasn’t too keen on flying, especially in a small private plane, but he sure didn’t want Fordyce to know that.
Fordyce put down the phone. “The FBO at the airfield can rent us a plane—but not for a few days.”
“That’s too long. Let’s drive there instead.”
“And waste all that investigative time just sitting in a car? Anyway, I’ve got an appointment in the FBI Albuquerque field office tomorrow at two o’clock.”
“So what do we do in the meantime?”
This was followed by silence. Then Gideon answered his own question. “You remember I told you Chalker gave away most of his stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“He offered me some of his book collection. Novels. Thrillers. I wasn’t interested, and so he mentioned something about giving them to the library of one of the Indian schools around here. San Ildefonso, I think.”
“Where’s that?”
“A pueblo on the way to Los Alamos. They’re a small Indian tribe, known for their dances and black pottery. Chalker was a fan of the dances, at least until he converted.”
“Did he donate his computer? Papers?”
“No, he just gave away the stuff he considered decadent—books, DVDs, music.”
There was a silence.
“So maybe we should go over to San Ildefonso,” said Gideon. “Check out those books.”
Fordyce shook his head. “They’re from his pre-conversion days. They won’t tell us anything.”
“You never know. There might be papers stuck into them, notes in the margins. You said we had to do something—so here’s something to do. Besides—” and Gideon leaned forward—“it’s the one place we can guarantee there won’t be a line in front of us.”
Fordyce stared out the window. “You’ve got a point.”
17
Dr. Myron Dart sat in the conference room of the Department of Energy’s Emergency Response Center, eight stories below the streets of Manhattan. A single black folder rested on the polished wood of the conference table. The clock on the wall behind him read two minutes to midnight. He knew he was exhausted and running on fumes, but there could be no letup. It was times like these he was grateful for his marine training, where they pushed you to the limit, then beyond, and then even beyond that.
The door to the room opened and the tall, wraith-like form of Miles Cunningham, his personal assistant, entered. He nodded at Dart, his ascetic features betraying no emotion. Every day Dart offered thanks for his almost supernaturally competent, monk-like assistant, who seemed to have transcended the vagaries of human emotion. Behind Cunningham trooped in the rest of the NEST top hierarchy. They took their seats around the table in perfect silence.
Dart glanced over his shoulder, saw the minute hand click over. Midnight exactly. He tried to cover up his pleasure at the exactitude. He had trained his staff well.
Now he opened the black folder that lay before him. “Thank you for attending this emergency meeting on such short notice,” he began. “I’m going to brief you on the latest developments.”
He looked over the top sheet. “First, some very good news: the cryptanalysts at the FBI broke the encryption on Chalker’s computer. We also have in hand the forensic analysis of what Chalker was carrying in his pockets, and we’ve analyzed the contents of his apartment.” He glanced around at his deputies. “The salient points are as follows. The computer is still being analyzed but so far we’ve found little beyond files of jihadist rantings, streaming-video AVIs of the preaching of various radical clerics, and religious tracts relating to common jihadist goals such as the usual ‘smiting of the infidel’ stuff. His browser history showed numerous visits to radical websites. Unfortunately, from what we’ve found so far the material is quite generic. We didn’t find specific email exchanges with individuals, no direct links to individual terrorists, al-Qaeda, or other radical groups. In short, we haven’t yet found information about the specific identity of his co-conspirators, specific details of the plot, or on how the nuke was actually acquired.”
His gray eyes moved around the table again. “Does anyone have any thoughts on what we might infer from this?”
There was a moment of silence. Then somebody spoke up. “The computer was a backup machine?”
“My thoughts exactly. Anything else?”
“Could it have been planted? As bait, perhaps?”
“Another possibility.”
A short discussion ensued and when it had reached its fruitful end Dart skillfully brought the conversation back around to the next point.
“I’ve instructed the teams to keep looking for another computer, or computers. However—” and here his tone developed an edge—“Chalker’s machine did include extensive photographs and videos of five Washington landmarks: the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, the Pentagon, the Smithsonian Castle, and the White House. There was nothing on any New York landmark.”
There was a low murmuring around the table. “Washington?” someone said.
“Correct.”
“Could this be a plant? A diversion?”
“At first we thought that might be the case, and then we analyzed the contents of Chalker’s apartment and the contents of his pockets. As you’ll recall, we recovered in his pocket a scrawled web address. This address proved to be quite revealing. The website it referenced was encrypted, and it had been shut down and the information removed from the server—located in Yemen—but we were able to recover a mirror image of it via the CIA’s classified web archiving department. They put their best people on it and finally broke the encryption. There we did learn some details of the bomb design, plus the same list of five targets in Washington, along with three others that seem to have been discarded at some point in the past: the Air and Space Museum, the Dirksen Senate Office Building, and the Cannon House Office Building. Beyond that, the site was woefully short on specifics. Remember, however, that among the contents of his pockets was an admission stub to the National Air and Space Museum.”
A pause as Dart carefully turned a piece of paper over.
“His apartment contained additional religious tracts, DVDs, and documents, as well as a copy of the Qur’an in English, which certain passages marked involving fire, war, and Armageddon.”
Another turn of paper.
“There was a calendar on Chalker’s refrigerator. It was full of appointments he seems to have made. They were all cryptic, just shorthand letters. The key point is this: the appointments abruptly end on the twenty-first of this month. After that, the calendar is blank.”