"Uh-huh." Gideon folded the newsletter and asked, "Can I keep this?"
Cho nodded. "It's yours." He took Gideon's hand. "I hope you find what you need.
1.13 Mon. Mar 9
M ORRIS Kendal leaned back in his office chair watching a video that C-Span had sent him. He watched a half-dozen men brought before a federal judge and arraigned for the hijacking of a Daedalus supercomputer. The tape dated from about forty-eight hours after the Secret Service fiasco. Up until then, the men had been held without bond or access to a lawyer.
There were rumors that Congress might offer some of them—the ones not directly involved in the shooting of a state trooper—immunity for their testimony in their closed-session investigation of the Secret Service screw-up. Kendal hoped the rumors were unfounded.
Even if they were, Gideon was right. Something wasn't kosher here.
The tape didn't show anything that wasn't public record. The various news agencies, from CNN to Hard Copy had already done the expose of these men. They were a group of "security consultants." Despite the title, they had little in common with Kendal. These men were all Nicaraguan and Salvadoran ex-military. Applied to them, "security consultant" was a euphemism for hired thug.
Anyone familiar with the death squads of the eighties would have recognized the name of Colonel Luiz Ramon before this incident; now everyone who followed the news would know that since then he'd been implicated in things ranging from drug smuggling to assassination.
"Who hired you boys?" Kendal asked the screen.
Kendal had sources, and knew slightly more than the news agencies did. He had the Colonel's statement to the Justice Department—which he had received in a manila envelope passed to him in the Capitol Rotunda by a very nervous secretary who had owed him a favor. It wasn't very enlightening. The Colonel wasn't saying anything.
It also seemed as if the main defense would be the violation of Luiz Ramon's rights during his capture and the two weeks after. The Justice statement had been given, pointedly, after the period of black captivity before the whole episode blew up in the news. If the Colonel had said anything before that point, Justice didn't have a record of it.
Justice didn't even have a record of where the Colonel had been held before Gideon was shot.
Justice did have a record of a Costa Rican bank that received a wire transfer from a District bank shortly before the hijacking. Two million dollars, paid for with a cashier's check.
For that much, Colonel Ramon should've run the operation a little less as if he was still goose-stepping in some third-world banana republic. He wondered if the Colonel still did the odd job for the CIA, like he had when he was giving communist rebels roadside executions.
Rebels and the occasional nun.
Kendal paused and rewound the tape so he could watch the men again. "CIA, Ramon?" he asked the screen. It wasn't a terribly original thought. There was even speculation on Hard Copy about Ramon's connection with the Agency. The problem was the idea made no sense. If the CIA was involved with anything, it was with the failed "Secret Service" sting. From Gideon's eyeball account, and with the fear of God running rampant among his usual sources, Kendal was almost certain that the whole ambush was a black op that was never meant to see the light of day.
That implied, pretty strongly, that the Agency didn't hire the Colonel for this job.
Kendal hit pause again.
Why did their lawyer look familiar?
Once Gideon had the newsletter from Cho, he visited the campus library. He was looking for campus papers, yearbooks, and most important, publications from the Evolutionary Theorems Research Lab.
With a few of those papers, and their tables of authors, he had a good list of people associated with the lab. A list of suspects . . .
After some digging, and about five dollars in change through a copy machine, Gideon had documentation of at least two Mikes associated with Dr. Zimmerman's lab. One was a Dr. Michael Nolan, one of the faculty running the lab. The other was a Michael Gribaldi—one of the doctoral students who'd worked in the lab.
Gideon couldn't make heads or tails of the papers the lab published. They had titles like, "A General Computational Approach Toward a Spectral Interpretation of the Zeros of the Zeta Function," and "Deriving the Riemann Hypothesis Using a Genetic Algorithm."
With a little more digging, Gideon unearthed a campus newspaper with a picture of the members from the last year of the lab. The caption of the picture was, "Assault on Mt. Riemann; Drs. Nolan and Zimmerman stand with their New Pythagorean Order—members of the ET Lab—show a printout of a fraction of their proof."
The photo, color faded on the newsprint, showed twelve people. Six stood in back, the other six sat in front. The people standing were holding up a long piece of paper between them. The paper snaked around so that the people sitting in front were also holding up portions of the paper. The paper continued past them and piled itself on the ground, making a mound that was almost a seventh person sitting in the foreground.
The short article—mostly just an extended caption— said that the ET Lab had possibly just proved the Riemann Hypothesis. The article didn't explain what the hypothesis was, except that it was a question in mathematics that had been unanswered for over a hundred years. The paper being held in the picture was supposedly a proof—or at least part of a proof—of the Riemann Hypothesis, generated by a computer. The excerpt of the proof in the photo was over fifteen thousand pages long.
At the moment it wasn't the proof that interested Gideon. It was the people holding the proof up for the camera.
On the far right of the people standing, holding up the paper, was Dr. Julia Zimmerman. For some reason, she didn't look anything like Gideon had expected. When he heard about a woman running a research lab at MIT, for some reason he expected a Short frumpy librarian type in a white coat.
She wasn't short and frumpy. She was at least as tall as the tallest man in the back row, and had an a athletic build. She had black hair that was tied back, so it was hard to tell how long it was. She resembled an Olympic cyclist more than a librarian.
Her face was pale, and wore an expression whose depth was hard to fathom. There was something in her gray eyes, in her half-smile, which seemed out of place. The kind of look he'd expect to see in the eyes of a prophet—or a serial killer.
On the opposite end of the back row, stood Michael Gribaldi. He was young-looking, wore a crewcut, and otherwise seemed to match the description given by the bartender at The Zodiac.
Gideon felt he was on the right track.
With a copy of the article in hand, he used one of the computers in the library to call up a campus directory. He put each name he had through the directory. Almost all of the names bombed out. No one from the Evolutionary Theorems Research Lab seemed to still be at MIT.
There was one exception.
Dr. Michael Nolan was still part of the Computer Science faculty. He was the only survivor of the ET Lab.
Gideon found that disturbing. What happened to all these people? Over the course of the existence of the ET Lab, there had been about thirty people involved in it. And none seemed to have retained any connection at MIT.
Gideon began thinking of what Cho had said, "Talk to someone in the Comp-Sci Department. Someone with tenure."
Nolan wasn't on campus, so Gideon had to resort to a Cambridge phone directory. He found Nolan in a little brownstone on a street of crowded brownstones that reminded Gideon of Georgetown.
With the newsletter and a copy of the article in his pocket, he mounted the steps and knocked on the door. After a long time, a man opened the door a crack and looked out. For a few moments Gideon thought
he had gotten the wrong house. Since the picture, taken five years ago, Dr. Nolan had aged drastically. His hair was shot with white, and lines grooved his face. He walked with a stoop that made him seem shorter than he was.