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.
'What is it?' He looked Gideon up and down, as if trying to make sense of his appearance here.
'Doctor Michael Nolan?' Gideon asked.
'What do you want from me?' His voice was sharp, and he didn't open the door any further.
'My name's Gideon Malcolm. I'm a detective with the Washington D.C. Police Department—'
'So?'
'—I want to ask you a few questions about your work.'
Nolan shook his head and began closing the door. 'I'm on sabbatical.'
Gideon stuck out his cast, blocking the door. 'I want to know about the Evolutionary Theorems Lab.'
The door stopped closing, and Nolan stared at him. 'Let me see some identification.'
Gideon pulled out his badge and handed it to Nolan. The man pulled out a pair of thick bifocals and stared at it. He kept shaking his head. 'Why does anyone care about that anymore?' He shoved the badge back at Gideon and backed from the door so it opened fully. 'Come in.'
Gideon followed Nolan into the darkened house. The shades were drawn against the afternoon light, and the only lights in the living room were from a pair of low wattage table lamps flanking the couch. They didn't do much to push away the gloom. The room smelled musty, like a book that hadn't been opened in twenty years.
Nolan wore a suit that seemed a size or two too big. When he sat down, he sank into himself. He stared up at Gideon.
Gideon stood for a few moments until he realized that Nolan wasn't going to offer him a seat. Gideon took a seat in an easy chair that more-or-less faced the couch where Nolan sat. The doctor kept staring at him, through him. His face was lined with what might have been pain.
'Are you all right?' Gideon asked.
Nolan laughed. The sound was laced with an almost obnoxious irony. 'Son, I had a prostate ripen way past its due. They took it out, and a rotten kidney. They didn't get it all. The cancer's going to get me within a year. I'm not all right.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Don't give me your damn sympathy. I don't even know you.' Nolan leaned forward and said, 'Now tell me what you want to know and get out of here.'
'The Evolutionary Theorems Lab—'
'That thing destroyed my career.'
'How?'
'The whole Riemann debacle—even after I tried to distance myself from that, no jury would publish my work. And after what Zimmerman did, I was lucky I didn't lose tenure . . .' Nolan coughed, a hacking wet cough that shook his body. 'The bitch should have gone to jail.'
Every instinct Gideon had as a cop told him that he was damn close. This Dr. Zimmerman woman was involved in this. Gideon felt it in the way Nolan talked about her.
