now personally entered the House of Islam. Now the real struggle begins—with the House of War you left behind.
Gideon stared in disbelief. He’d never written that. It didn’t just make him look like a co-conspirator with Chalker; it made him look like his
My friend Reed, Salaam:
Jihad is not just an internal struggle, but it’s also external. There can be no peace for you as a good Muslim, no cessation of struggle, until all the world becomes Dar al-Islam.
He began paging forward through the emails. This was clearly a complex, highly sophisticated and exhaustive fraud. No wonder Fordyce had been taken in. He noticed a more recent email, opened it.
The time is now. Do not hesitate. If someone receives the message of Islam and dies rejecting it, they are forever destined to Hellfire. Anyone who truly believes in the message, their previous sins are forgiven and they will spend eternity in Paradise. If you have belief, act on it. Do not worry what anyone else thinks. Your eternal life is at stake.
It continued in a similar vein, persuading Chalker to convert. Gideon read on with mounting outrage. Not only had he been framed, but he had been framed in a most sophisticated fashion—
39
Warren Chu gazed at the emailed messages with growing horror and disbelief. These were not planted. How could they be? Nobody but a chief security administrator could do that.
He slowly turned and looked at Gideon, staring at him, as if seeing him for the first time. A thought went through his mind: you just never could see inside another person. He never would have guessed.
“I can’t believe you wrote this,” he burst out, almost without thinking.
“Damn it, Warren, I didn’t,” Gideon told him forcefully. “Those emails were planted!”
Chu was taken aback by his vehemence. Again, he wondered how such a thing could be done. It seemed highly unlikely. Not only that, but that business about himself being targeted as well? It was starting to smell phony.
He cleared his throat, tried to sound normal. “Right. Okay. Let me work on this for a while. See if I can figure out who did this, and how.”
“You’re a real pal, Warren.” Gideon crammed the rest of the cheesecake donut into his mouth.
A beat. “Gideon, um, would you mind? I can’t work with someone staring over my shoulder.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Gideon retreated to the other side of the office, at the same time—Chu noted with irritation—helping himself to yet another donut. The guy acted as if he hadn’t eaten in days.
Chu opened another email, then another. This was scary stuff. The secure network ran as a Type II Virtual Machine environment: was it possible somebody had leveraged the VM monitor, maybe gained root access or swapped out the guest OS, then planted a keylogger or compromised the secure login feature somehow? It was theoretically possible—but it would take more skill than Chu himself had.
The more he thought about the robustness of the VM architecture, the isolated address spaces, and the virtual memory abstraction, the more difficult the hack seemed. And he had always thought Gideon just a little too independent…sketchy, even. But that meant—if these emails hadn’t been planted—that Gideon was a terrorist, a traitor to his country, a potential mass murderer… Chu, overwhelmed by the thought, felt his bowels loosening.
What in God’s name should he do?
Suddenly he realized that the woman who had come in with Gideon, the new employee, had come up behind him. He jumped as she laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, hard enough to send a message. He glanced up, looked around. Gideon was at the door now, looking out, left and right, down the halls, keeping a lookout. For the first time, Chu noticed a handgun stuffed into the waistband of his pants.
She leaned over him and whispered. “If you’ve got an alarm, activate it. Now.”
“What?” Chu didn’t quite understand.
“Gideon’s with them. The terrorists.”
Chu swallowed. Confirmation.
“Just do it and keep cool.”
Chu felt unreality take hold. His heart surged in his chest and he felt the sweat glands on his face prickle. First Chalker, now Gideon. Unbelievable. But there were the emails, staring him right in the face—practically a smoking gun.
Casually, he reached beneath the desk, found the button, pressed it. He’d never done this before and wasn’t sure what would happen.
A low siren went off. In the hallway, red lights began to flash.
“What the
“Sorry, pal,” said the woman, turning toward Gideon and crossing her arms in front of her. “You’re busted.”
40
Gideon stared at her in disbelief. Surely he must have misheard or misunderstood something. “Alida, what are you doing?”
She turned to him, poised and collected. “I’ve been waiting for my opportunity. I told you I couldn’t wait to turn you in. Remember?”
For the moment he was too shocked to feel any anger.
“You almost had me believing you back there,” she said. “But when I saw those emails—”
“They were
“Yeah. And all those FBI agents, all those choppers, everyone shooting at you—I suppose that’s all just a mistake, too. It’s just too much to believe, Gideon. I’m not that gullible.”
Gideon heard footsteps pounding down the corridor. He quickly drew the six-gun, fired it once into the air. Then he grabbed Chu’s arm, turned his arm behind his back, and put the gun to his head. “Out,” he barked. “Into the hall.”
With a gasp of fear Chu scrambled to obey.
“The gun’s a fake!” Alida cried, chasing after them.
“Trust me, it’s real!” Gideon said. “Don’t make me kill him!”
Gideon pushed Chu ahead of him, at a jog. The high-security checkpoint to the inner labs was just down the hall. They rounded the corner and came to the checkpoint, with two metal detectors and several guards—all of whom had their own weapons drawn.
“He’s a dead man if you stop me!” Gideon shouted, shoving Chu through the metal detector, which went off with a shrill alarm.
“It’s a stage gun, you idiots!” Alida yelled.
“You want me to prove it’s real? If you follow, I shoot!” He continued on, thrusting Chu down the hall to the emergency stairs. He slammed open the door with his shoulder and dragged Chu down the stairs with him. The only person to follow was Alida.
“Bitch!” Gideon said as Alida threw herself on his back and tried to grab his gun. He knocked her aside but she came back at him again, punching him, again trying to rip the gun out of his hand.
“Stop it!” yelled Chu.
Gideon twisted away, pushing Chu through the doors at the bottom of the stairs and into the particle accelerator control room. Two operators stood there, at the large semicircle of monitors and instrumentation,
