Gideon's Corpse by Douglas Preston Read Free Book Online

would retreat to his cabin in the Jemez Mountains and let these assholes fend for themselves…
    But as this thought ran through his mind, he faltered. Who was he to judge? The world was made up of all kinds of people. If he fled to his cabin and New York was taken out by a nuke, where would that leave him? Was it his responsibility? No. But by running away, he would have still put himself lower than that tuxedoed scumbag by orders of magnitude.
    Whether he had eleven months or fifty years, it would be a long and lonely space of time in which he would never, ever forgive himself.
    For a long, furious moment he hesitated. And then, boiling with rage and frustration, he turned and retraced his steps down Little West 12th Street to the anonymous door of Effective Engineering Solutions, Inc. It opened as he approached, as if Glinn were expecting him.

11
     
    C HALKER’S BODY LAY on a porcelain gurney encased in a large glass cube, like an offering to some high-tech god. The corpse had been autopsied and was splayed open, a riot of red among gray steel, glass, and chrome, various organs arrayed around it—the heart, liver, stomach, and other body parts Gideon did not recognize and didn’t want to recognize. There was something uniquely unsettling about seeing the guts of someone you’d known personally—it wasn’t just another image on the evening news.
    Chalker’s personal effects were arranged on a table next to the body: his clothes, wallet, keys, belt, credit cards, papers, change, ticket stubs, Kleenex, and various other items—all tagged. All, evidently, radioactive.
    At a console, medical personnel and technicians were operating a set of eight robotic arms inside the glass cube, each one of which terminated in a different set of grisly-looking dissecting instruments—bone chisels, shears, mallets, forceps, knives, skullbreakers, spreaders, and other tools of cadaveritude. Despite the highly dissected condition of the body, the work was still progressing.
    “Lucky thing,” said Fordyce, removing his notebook. “We didn’t miss the autopsy completely.”
    “Funny, I was thinking just the opposite,” said Gideon.
    Fordyce glanced at him and rolled his eyes.
    Gideon heard a whirring sound. One of the robotic arms, which terminated in a circular saw, began to move, the blade spinning up to a high-pitched whine. As the technicians murmured into headsets, the blade lowered toward Chalker’s skull. “Torquemada would have loved this stuff,” Gideon said.
    “Looks like we’re just in time for the removal of the brain,” Fordyce said, licking his finger and turning the pages of his notebook to find a blank one.
    The whine became muffled as the saw sank into Chalker’s forehead. A dark liquid began running into the drain along the edge of the gurney. Gideon turned away, pretending to examine some papers in his briefcase. At least, he thought, there was no smell.
    “Agent Fordyce? Dr. Crew?”
    Gideon glanced over to see a technician with big glasses, a ponytail, and a clipboard, standing beside them expectantly.
    “Dr. Dart will see you in his office now.”
    With a feeling of relief, Gideon followed the technician toward a cubicle at the far end of the high-tech area. Fordyce went along, grumbling about being taken away from the autopsy. They entered a spartan space no more than nine by twelve feet. Dart himself was sitting behind a small desk covered with heavy, squared stacks of folders. He rose and offered his hand, first to Fordyce, then to Gideon.
    “Please sit down.”
    They took seats in folding chairs set up in front of the desk. Dart spent a moment organizing some already-organized papers. He had a face that did little to conceal the bones of the skull underneath; his eyes, full of vitality, were so deeply set that they gleamed out of two pools of darkness. At Los Alamos he had been a bit of a legend, a rather humorless geek physicist with a doctorate from CalTech who was unexpectedly a decorated