staring at other passengers, wondering which ones were planning to attack them.
The rest of the time he thought about what was happening. Why was he here, next to Dr.
Zimmerman's sister, on the New York subway system?
'Julia, who are you?' he asked a mental image of the Doctor. 'What are you doing?'
His only response was an enigmatic stare from those depthless gray eyes. What made her turn away? From her parents, from her sister, from her colleagues . . . ?
Christ, tell me why I turned away?
He must have been too tired, because that kind of question bore on things that he never wanted to think about.
Ruth must have felt him tense up because she sat up next to him and looked at him. 'Are you all right?'
'I'm fine.' The words were a whisper through clenched teeth.
'You're crying.'
Gideon shook his head, but he raised his hand to his cheek and found wetness there. 'It's just the smoke.'
'It's all right,' Ruth whispered. 'You've been through a lot.'
'It's not all right. It's never been all right.' Gideon rubbed his forehead as if he could push the thoughts away, distract himself with what was going on around them now. 'I'm a fraud,' he whispered.
Ruth rubbed his shoulder.
'I couldn't hack it as a Fed,' Gideon said. 'I shouldn't be a cop either. I'll deserve it when IA pulls my badge.'
'You aren't responsible—'
'My brother, my ex-partner . . . I got them both killed. Just because I wanted, someday, to be Rafe.'
Ruth was silent for a long time before she said, 'Rafe was your brother?'
Gideon nodded.
'I know what it is like to live in someone's shadow.'
They were on the return trip from Jackson Heights, and morning light was streaming into the car as they rode over northern Queens. Ruth looked around as if she was looking for some reason to change the subject. 'Where are we?' she finally asked.
'Queens,' Gideon said, relieved to be talking about something else. 'Going back to Manhattan.'
She looked at the rest of the car. It was packed with people making the morning commute. Standing room only. She shook her head and whispered, 'Is that safe?'
'I think we're all right now. The Israelis did us the favor of separating me from all the tracking devices—' Gideon felt the Micro-Uzi in his pocket. He'd had to strip off the silencer to allow it to fit.
'We should go to the FBI,' Ruth whispered.
That was the easy answer, wasn't it? Gideon had been thinking the exact same thing for most of the night. There was one problem with it, though. 'I can't.'
'What do you mean, you can’t?'
'I can take you to them,' Gideon said. 'I can't stop.'
Ruth's voice lowered even further. 'Don't you realize that people are shooting at you?'
Gideon rubbed his healing leg and said, 'I know.' Not just at me. His voice was slow, halting, as he tried to explain why he needed to continue. Why he couldn't ask anyone for help. 'I still have to find out
what's happening. Why.' He closed his eyes and wondered how much of what he was saying was rationalization. 'I can't back off now. I go to the Feds now, and the best that will happen is they'll hand me over to IA while they try and bury all their embarrassing mistakes.' And I have to prove to myself that I can do this. Every time I've hit a snag, I've turned to someone to bail me out. Dad, Rafe, Kendal—
Ruth leaned back and sighed. Even with the motorcycle jacket, perhaps because of it, she looked very small and vulnerable. 'You think I don't want to find Julie? She's my sister.'
Gideon nodded. The train shot into a tunnel under the East River, briefly exchanging day for night. Gideon's hand drifted back toward the pocket with the gun. I'm doing this for Rafe. What he did for me has got to mean something.
Later on, as they rode under Manhattan, Gideon asked, 'Do you think Julia could be working with the IUF?'
'Are you kidding? Why would she do that? It'd be pointless.'
'She planned her disappearance,' Gideon said. 'Just like MIT. She even wiped her own home computer. Wherever she went, she planned to go there.'
Ruth laughed. The sound was half derisive and half nervous. 'You can't be suggesting that after all these years that Julie suddenly became political—not to mention political for these guys.'
The train slowed for a stop, and the packed cars began to gradually empty out.
'What could they offer her?'
'To get her to jump ship at the NSA?' She shook her head. 'You don't understand. All she really cares about is her work, it's almost a divine mission for her. From what I heard, the NSA gave her the best environment to conduct her work that she could possibly have.'
Gideon thought back to their conversation in the restaurant. 'Something she'd need a Daedalus for,' he muttered.
'What?'
'What if they were watching us, had a man near us? What if something we did or said triggered the attack? What if we stumbled on something the IUF didn't want anyone to know?'
'Like what? We just talked about Julie's life, nothing secret—' Ruth shivered a little bit. 'We didn't talk about anything worth shooting at us for.'
Gideon stared out at a platform as the train pulled out. The lighted platform slid away and replaced itself with the depthless black of the tunnels. The clearest image was his own reflection in the window.
'She was working on something on her own. Something private. Everyone looking for Julia Zimmerman is afraid of what she was known to be working on for the NSA. What if the IUF offered her the opportunity to work on something she couldn't work on at the NSA?'
Ruth shook her head. 'I know where you're going with that. I know it looks a lot like when she left MIT. But Julie isn't stupid. She'd consider the consequences of her actions. She knew that she could screw MIT, because she knew who would be backing her if things came to a head. She knew that she'd beat them.' She turned her head and looked at Gideon. 'This isn't the same. I can't see her making that decision. This is a no-win situation.'
The train pulled to a stop again, and Gideon stood up. 'Come on.'
'What? Where are we going?'
'I want to make a stop at the library.'
When Gideon sat behind one of the public terminals at the New York Public Library, Ruth asked him, 'And what exactly do you expect to find here?'
Gideon cued up a search engine and said, 'I want to look into what your sister might have been working
on.'
'How the hell do you intend to do that?' Ruth pulled up a chair and sat next to him. 'Are you some sort of police mathematician?'
'No,' Gideon shook his head. 'But I think the answer is somewhere in what we already know.'
There was a pile of scratch paper and a small pencil box next to the computer. He took a sheet and a pencil and started scribbling a list of words;
'Information Warfare. Virus. Cryptography. Riemann. Number Theory. Aleph-Null. Evolutionary Algorithm. Zeta Function.'
Gideon looked at the list of words. 'That should be enough of a start.'
Ruth watched as he scanned papers, articles, as well as the other detritus accumulated on the Internet. Those sites that weren't mathematical tended to be about private-sector information security. After about fifteen minutes, Gideon found a page that made him realize one of the fundamental reasons why the government was scared of losing Zimmerman. On the screen was a layman's description of public key cryptography, the de facto standard for secure personal communications on the Internet.
'No wonder they're frightened of her,' Gideon whispered.
