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.
After the third day of questioning, it seemed as if he'd barely laid his head down when the door to his room opened and a series of Marines surrounded his cot.
'Come with us, sir.'
Gideon pushed himself upright and picked up his watch. He felt as if he had barely gotten to sleep. He hadn't. His watch read 1:05. He looked up at the trio of Marines and said, 'Do you know what time it is?'
'Yes, sir. Now would you please come with us.'
Gideon pushed off the thin excuse for a blanket and started getting dressed. He pulled on one of the shirts and a pair of pants that they'd provided him, got up, and took a step to the bathroom.
A Marine seized his arm, the bad one, and Gideon could feel the strain on his barely-healed injury. 'I'm afraid you have to come with us now, sir.'
The problem with these guys was there was no room to negotiate. Gideon was really in no mood to test them. He yawned and nodded his head. He let them lead him back out, toward the Colonel's office.
That wasn't where they were taking him.
Gideon felt something sick in the pit of his stomach. He didn't exactly trust the Colonel; he didn't even know the guy's name. Any change in the routine they'd established set off warning signals.
The Marines were leading him back toward the elevators that had brought him here. They were moving him. The fact that they were doing it without any warning made Gideon extremely nervous. When they reached the bank of elevators, another trio of Marines were standing there already, escorting Ruth Zimmerman. She looked as tired and confused as he felt.
She blinked at him, as if her eyes were still adjusting to the stark florescent lighting. 'Gideon? What's happening? Where are they taking us?'
Gideon shook his head. 'I don't know.' They were standing in front of the elevator, and at first Gideon thought that was what they were waiting for. After a while it began to dawn on him that they were waiting for something else, another member of the exodus. At first he thought it was the Colonel they were waiting for. Then he heard the Colonel's voice from down the hallway. The man did not sound happy.
'What do you think you're doing? You can't come into a live operation like this—'
Gideon heard another, calmer voice respond. 'Don't engage me in a jurisdictional argument. You may have some tactical authority, but I have an executive order from the President of the United States. This is my operation. Not yours, not Fitzsimmons', not the General's . . .'
