"You think it isn't?"
"I think Julia's agenda isn't terrorism."
The Colonel leaned forward and shook his head. "What makes you think you know this situation so well?"
"I think I know Julia."
"You've never even met the woman."
Gideon almost objected. He felt as if he had met Julia Zimmerman. He felt as if he had been living with her for weeks . . . Instead, he told the Colonel. "Give me those promises, and I'll cooperate with you."
Slowly, the Colonel nodded. "We can give you that. You're right. We do need Zimmerman alive. Now you tell me what you think is going on."
There it was. For a few long moments, Gideon didn't know what to do. He wanted some sort of guarantee, but he had no way of getting one, and the Colonel here didn't have the means to provide one. He had been prepared to remain silent until his demands were met, but the Colonel's acquiescence made him hesitate.
However, in the end, he really had no choice.
Gideon told him.
Gideon told him of a woman who had replaced God with Number. A woman to whom mathematics wasn't a profession, but a faith. The ET Lab was only part of her work at MIT; another part—a much more private part— was a cult that called itself the New Pythagorean Order, named for the ancient Greeks who worshiped Number as the genesis of all things.
Zimmerman had believed in a perfect numerical world since childhood. At MIT she envisioned the data inside their computers as that world, and she had found people who could share her specific, peculiar faith. People who believed that their studies in artificial life were just that, life. People who believed a computer virus was as "alive" as its biological cousin.
The Colonel asked him what he was getting at.
Gideon told him that Julia's experiments in the ET Lab weren't explorations in mathematics. They were experiments in her religion. They were explorations in a virtual world that she believed was the perfect expression of her faith, at least the most perfect representation of it she could achieve.
"So she worships computers?"
Gideon shook his head.
Not computers. Nothing about Julia's beliefs embraced the physical world. It was the data, the information that the computers arranged and stored. To Julia, it wouldn't matter if a representation of her work was on a Daedalus, on an Apple II, or a spiral notebook. That wasn't the important thing. What the computers did was allow a much more efficient manipulation of the data.
What, exactly, Julia was working toward, Gideon was unsure. But he was positive that it was this work—this expression of faith—that Julia had stolen from the MIT labs, not the relatively mundane work she was doing in the public half of the ET Lab.
"You think that work was mundane?"
"In comparison," Gideon said. "Even though I suspect that it was her work on the Riemann Hypothesis and the implications that meant for factoring large numbers that got her a job in the NSA in the first place. Wasn't it?"
The Colonel was impassive enough that Gideon suspected that he was making an effort not to react to the statement. Enough of an effort that Gideon suspected that he had hit a nerve.
"Shall I extend my theory a little?" Gideon said. "She joined you and started working in cryptanalysis.
She gave you a number of algorithms relating to prime numbers that were useful enough to be very classified—and then she moved, at her own request, to work in information warfare."
The Colonel leaned back, and Gideon could tell that he had scored. Gideon continued, "I'd also venture a guess that she was much more adept at that sort of work, especially in engineering viruses, than her professional credentials would have suggested. You were hiring a pure mathematician who worked with computers, and you received, unexpectedly, a computer scientist."
"Why do you draw these particular conclusions?"
"Because that's what she wanted to do."
Julia had been learning the field, probably since before she started at MIT. While she worked at the ET Lab, her interest wasn't the Riemann Hypothesis, it was the evolutionary algorithm they were using. When she came to the NSA, her interest wasn't cryptography and cryptanalysis, but the virus.
The thing that drove Julia was her faith, her belief in that perfect mathematical world, her exploration of that world. She left the NSA, and that meant there was something she needed to do that she could not do there. If the IUF was involved, Gideon doubted that they knew any more of her full agenda than MIT or the NSA did—although he suspected they thought they did.
"What is her full agenda?"
"That, I don't know," Gideon said. "But the suggestion that she might have had one was enough to have the IUF make an attempt on our lives."
The Colonel nodded. "It's all an interesting theory. Thank you for telling us. However, the purpose of this debriefing is to go over your movements and activities. If we could start going over that. . ."
Gideon did as the Colonel asked, keeping watch on him to see if his revelations about Julia Zimmerman had made any impressions. He couldn't tell.
However, the questions about his movements were much more formal. Like any numbers of questionings he'd been involved in as a cop, it lasted for hours, and involved a lot of repetitive questions. Gideon could understand the frustration of everyone he'd ever interviewed like this. It felt as if the interviewer was constantly trying to catch the interviewee in some sort of contradiction.
Of course, he was.
Even though Gideon understood the process intimately, it was still irritating going over the same territory again and again. It was even more irritating when some fault of memory made him contradict himself on some minor point, and the Colonel would hammer on the single point for what seemed to be hours.
When Gideon got to the gentleman with the Uzis, the Colonel went through it once and called the interview to a stop.
"I'm going to have to bring someone else in to listen to this." He stood up and extended his hand. Gideon stood and took it.
"We'll pick this up tomorrow," the Colonel said. "I think they'll have dinner waiting for you."
Gideon looked at his watch at that. He had been here over eight hours.
3.01 Thur. Mar. 25
THE debriefing lasted for days.
Gideon went through the process with more than a few mixed emotions. It began to feel that he was betraying Julia, and somehow letting Rafe down. Of course thinking he was letting Raphael down was perverse, Rafe had been an FBI agent through and through—if he had been in Gideon's place, there was little question that he would cooperate with the government. Rafe would have been on the Colonel's side.
Somehow, that didn't make things easier.
True to his word, the Colonel brought in a series of people. Not only people to hear about the Israelis, but a series of others, each of whom wanted to hear some specific bit of his story. The eight-hour session that introduced him to the Colonel had seemed long, but the subsequent interviews were much longer. The plain-clothes Marines would bring in food so they didn't have to take any breaks. The sessions were over twelve hours; each time three or four people would participate in questioning him.
The process was exhausting. Each day he was escorted out of his little room first thing in the morning, and each evening they led him back, and all he could do was collapse on the cot they gave him. He wondered if they were keeping Ruth in the same building, but his interviewers were very good at keeping his mind running in the tracks they wanted it to. It was hard for his mind to wander when he was constantly harassed with questions about the minutiae of his movements.
Even when he was alone, sprawled on his cot, his mind still ran over the events since the shooting.