Gideon shook his hand violently behind his back, and Ruth quieted. He asked Mike. 'You mind telling me who 'the boys' are?'
'No problem, Gideon.' Mike lowered his voice conspiratorially. 'Though it's probably classified. Since you're here, at ground zero, I can probably tell you.' He leaned forward and whispered. 'They're NSA.'
Gideon was gripped by a sick feeling that he had fallen down the rabbit hole. He had suspicions ever since their too-convenient-for-the-terrorists capture. The whole episode was staged. The reason Volynskji never questioned him about the Colonel's debriefing was because he knew what he and Ruth had told the government. Zimmerman didn't walk into the arms of any terrorists—she had walked into the arms of a covert operation run by her own government.
Shit.
'Let me guess,' Gideon said. 'This is one of Emmit D'Arcy's operations.'
Mike gave him a fraternal push on the shoulder. 'You've been leading me on. You know what's happening.'
He gave Gideon a grin that reminded him of the conspiratorial smirk of two children reading a third's diary.
'Emmit. . .' Ruth asked.
Gideon turned around and faced her. 'He was the guy who escorted us from the Colonel. The guy with the glasses, looks a little like Peter Loire.'
Ruth nodded and said, 'But—'
Gideon was going to motion her to be quiet again, before she started to say that they'd been kidnapped from D'Arcy's little escort. He didn't have to, because Mike interrupted. 'He does look like Loire, doesn't he?'
Ruth looked at Mike, then at Gideon again, and asked, 'Who the hell is Emmit D'Arcy?'
'He's the National Security Advisor for President Rayburn,' Gideon said.
Ruth stared at him for a few long minutes before she said, 'Oh.'
'He had a reputation back in the eighties for engineering covert operations—' Gideon looked at Mike.
'—Like this one.'
'Well, you got something on the ball there, Gideon.' He stepped inside the room and held out his hand. 'And you, I don't think we've been introduced.'
Ruth was having problems. It was clear that she now realized that she and Mike had very different opinions of what was going on, but she still had obvious problems reining in her emotions. Gideon stepped in. 'Michael Gribaldi, let me introduce you to Ruth Zimmerman.' After a pause, Gideon decided to add, 'The good Doctor's sister.'
'I know.' He gave her a polite little bow that seemed utterly out of character. 'I was sent here by Madame El Presidente to fetch you.'
Ruth stood, finally and took Mike's hand. 'She's here?' There was a slight breathless note in her voice. Gideon felt a dark envy, Ruth was going to get her sister back. Rafe wasn't coming back . . .
Mike continued, apparently oblivious to how his comments affected them, 'It's been a real honor to work with your sister again. Especially now that we've gotten back to the real work.'
Gideon nodded, as if he knew what was happening. 'The New Pythagorean Order.'
Mike put a finger to his lips and gave an exaggerated, 'Shhh.' He looked around and said, 'We don't want to let the heathens in on our little secret.' Mike smiled, 'Shall I escort you two to the lab?'
Gideon was now almost certain that he and Ruth were here, and alive, because of Julia Zimmerman's intervention. Mike's presence here all but confirmed it.
'Yes, please,' Ruth said. 'I want to see Julie.'
Mike smiled. 'As the lady wishes.' He turned to Gideon. 'The Doctor wants to talk to you, too. Come on, I'll give you the grand tour.' Mike shook his head. 'You're here at a great time. It's all being prepped for zero hour now.'
Mike gave them a broad wink as if they knew exactly what he was talking about.
Mike led them through the farmhouse, saying, 'Well, you've already seen the dorm. Ain't much, but it's home.' He waved his hand around, taking in the cracked plaster and the boarded-up windows. Gideon kept an eye out for their keepers. Gideon noticed that they were being shadowed by one of the rifle-toting guards. Mike was either pretending not to notice the guy, or just took his presence for granted.
Gideon wondered exactly how many people were here, and how many were guards, and how many were misplaced academics like Mike.
'It's about an hour's drive to the nearest pizza,' Mike was saying. That was something that Gideon had already suspected. They weren't going to get out of here on foot.
As Mike started leading them down the stairs, Gideon decided to press this opportunity for all it was worth, before the guards, the IUF, or the NSA decided to withdraw their implicit approval for Mike's little tour. He asked Mike, 'You've been working on this since MIT, right?'
Mike laughed. 'Since before that, most of us. Some of us were working on little viral programs in the eighties. But, yeah, you're right—the Aleph project has been around since the late, unlamented Evolutionary Theorems Lab.'
Aleph project. . .
They stopped on a landing whose window was intact. Ruth took the opportunity to step between the two of them, to look out. The window overlooked the barn, about two hundred yards away. Mike tapped a finger on the glass. 'There she is, Ground Zero, the lab.'
Gideon looked out over the barn and tried to understand what was going on here. If this was really a government operation, why did Zimmerman have to leave the NSA to run it? 'I can't make sense of it,' Gideon whispered.
Mike nodded, misinterpreting him. 'I know, I sometimes can't get my head around it myself. Awesome, ain't it?'
Gideon shook his head. 'What can she do here that she couldn't do at Fort Meade?'
Mike chuckled. 'And why couldn't we let MIT know what we were doing? Fear. I mean, we all know what we're doing here. We've gone through I don't know how many fail-safes and tests before we let the rabbits out into the field. But what do you think the administrators at MIT would do if they knew about it?' Mike shook his head. 'People would panic—people are panicking. People panic when someone e-mails them about a phony virus. How'd they react about a real one?'
'Is Julie over there?' Ruth asked. Her breath fogged the window.
Mike nodded. 'Overseeing the final stage. It's all just oversight now, monitoring the pipeline to the machine. I'm a programmer, not much for me to do now but watch.'
Gideon did feel a wave of awe. Not at the project, whatever that was, but at finally reaching this point. Here it was, the crux of everything, the why. . .
Julia, Gideon thought, can you give me a reason for Rafe’s death?
Gideon tried not to let his emotions into his voice, he still needed to know what was happening. 'I would think,' he said after a moment, 'that the NSA would have more freedom for this kind of thing than MIT.'
Mike laughed and waved them down another flight of stairs. 'You'd think, wouldn't you? But when it comes down to it, they're free to do what they want when it comes to information warfare, targeting some enemy of the state, but once you get into pure research—especially stuff in the field—the reaction is something like people get when they hear that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was injecting plutonium
into people.'
Ruth sounded surprised, 'You mean that this isn't an official Government project?'
For once, Mike's expression faltered. Gideon could glimpse some of Mike's doubts about what was going on. Gideon wondered if he knew that people had died because of this thing, whatever it was.
Mike spoke slowly now, obviously choosing words with care, 'This is D'Arcy's project. He believes in Aleph, and once we gather the final programs, we'll all be proved right.'
That frightened Gideon because that meant, as far as anyone outside this farm was concerned, this was some international terrorist operation. That meant that it would be too easy for him and Ruth—not to mention Zimmerman and Mike and everyone else here—to just disappear. D'Arcy had a pre-made explanation for anyone who turned up dead.
