Gideon’s Sword

Yveline pressed the emergency intercom, summoning the triage head nurse. The crowd stared at the man on the floor, but his collapse had been more emotional than medical and she saw he was already reviving. He rose to his knees, hyperventilating, and some members of the crowd rushed over to help him up.

“Help him to a seat,” said Yveline. “The nurse is on her way.” More people in the group responded, helping the man to a seat against the wall. He fell heavily into it, covering his face and sobbing loudly.

“Come on, lady,” said a woman. “What’s the harm in telling him how his friend is?”

A murmur of agreement rose from the crowd. Gideon Crew rocked in the chair, his face in his hands.

“He’s dead,” he said. “I know it. He’s dead.”

Yveline ignored the people and went back to her clipboard. It was a damn shame the rules forced her to be this way. But she was determined not to show vacillation or weakness.

“Why don’t you just tell him how his friend is?” persisted the woman.

“Ma’am,” said Yveline, “I don’t make the rules. Medical information is private.”

A harried nurse arrived. “Where’s the patient?”

“He’s upset — collapsed.” Yveline indicated the man.

The nurse went over, suddenly putting on a smooth voice. “Hello, my name’s Rose. What’s the problem?”

The man choked up. “He’s dead and they won’t tell me.”

“Who?”

“My life partner. In the ER. But they won’t tell me anything because I don’t have a piece of paper.”

“You’re in a long-term domestic partnership?”

A nod. “Five years. He’s everything to me. He doesn’t have any family here.” He looked up suddenly, beseechingly. “Please don’t let him die alone!”

“May I?” The nurse took the man’s pulse, slapped a cuff on him and took his blood pressure. “You’re okay. Just upset. Just slow down your breathing and let me talk to the admitting staff.”

The man nodded, struggling to get his gasping under control.

The nurse stepped over to Yveline. “Look, let’s just authorize him as a domestic partner. Okay? I’ll take full responsibility.”

“Thank you.” The nurse left while Yveline called up the electronic file, read the latest update. “Mr. Crew?”

He leapt up and came over.

“Your friend is critically injured but alive and is stabilizing,” she said in a low voice. “Now if you’ll come up and sign this form, I’ll authorize you as his domestic partner.”

“Thank God!” he cried. “He’s alive, thanks be to God!”

The waiting room broke into applause.

18

Gideon Crew looked around at the room he had booked at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge on Eighth Avenue. It was surprisingly decent, well appointed, not a trace of blue and orange to be seen. Best of all, it had an iPod dock. He slipped out his iPod, pondered the problem at hand, dialed in Bill Evans’s Blue in Green, and docked it. The bittersweet chords of “The Two Lonely People” filled the room. He gulped the last of his quintuple espresso and tossed the cup into the trash.

For several minutes, he sat motionless in the chair by the small desk, allowing the moody, introspective music to wash over him, willing himself to relax muscle by muscle, letting the events of the day sort themselves out in his mind. Just fifteen hours earlier, he’d been fishing for trout in Chihuahueños Creek. Now here he was, sitting in a Manhattan hotel room, with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket, a death sentence on his head, and a strange man’s blood on his hands.

He stood up, shrugged out of his shirt, and walked into the bathroom to wash his hands and arms. Then he stepped out and put on a fresh shirt. Covering the bed with plastic garbage bags, he carefully spread out Wu’s clothes, which had been cut off in the emergency room and already gone into the medical-waste stream. He’d had a devil of a time retrieving them. A heartwarming Christmas story about a broken promise, a Hong Kong tailor, and a lost puppy had finally done the trick — but just barely.

After the clothes were carefully arranged, Gideon laid out the contents of Wu’s wallet, the spare change from his pockets, passport, rollerball, and an old-fashioned safety razor in a plastic case, no blade, which he had found in Wu’s suit coat pocket. That was all. No cell phone, no BlackBerry, no calculator, no flash drive.

As he worked, dawn broke over the city, the hotel windows shifting from gray to yellow, the city waking up with car horns and traffic.

When everything was laid out in geometric precision, he looked it over, finger pensively placed on his lower lip. If the man was carrying the plans for a new kind of weapon, it was not at all obvious where they were—​​if he had even been carrying them on his person. Clearly, the list of numbers Wu had gasped out to him at the accident scene couldn’t be the complete set of plans—​such plans, even in highly compressed form, would take up a significant amount of data. They would have to be stored digitally, which meant he was looking for a microchip; a magnetic or bubble memory device; a holographic image stored on some medium; or perhaps a laser-read storage device such as a CD or DVD.

It seemed logical that the man would have kept the plans on his person — or, more exotically, perhaps embedded within his body. Shuddering slightly, Gideon decided he would deal with the “inside” question later — first he would carefully search all of Wu’s few possessions.

From a group of shopping bags dumped by the door, he removed an electronic device he had just purchased—​amazing how in Manhattan you could get anything at any time of the night or day, from bombs to blow jobs—​opened the box, and began setting it up. Called the MAG 55W05 Advanced Countermeasures Sweep Kit, it was a device used by private investigators, CEOs, and other paranoid people to sweep areas for bugs. Completing the assembly, he perused the manual quickly, then fired it up.

With painstaking slowness, he moved the device’s sweeping wand over the clothing spread out on the bed. No hits. The wallet and its contents—​money, business cards, family photos—​were also negative, except for the magnetic stripe on the single credit card Wu carried. When the sweeping wand went over the magnetic stripe, the MAG 55 bleeped and blinked and bars went flickering up and down the LED screen. It seemed there was data on the stripe, but exactly how much he couldn’t be sure: all the MAG 55 told him was that it was less than 64K. He’d have to find some way of downloading and examining it.

Wu’s Chinese passport also contained an embedded magnetic stripe along the outer edge of the front cover, just as US passports did. Using the integrated reader of the device, he was able to determine that this stripe held data, and that it, too, was less than 64K. He scratched his head thoughtfully. That seemed too small to credibly detail the workings of a secret weapon. Advanced technology could compress data a great deal, but he wasn’t sure just how much.

The passport and credit card would have to be further analyzed.

He threw himself in a wing chair, closing his eyes. He hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. He listened to the rich chord progressions of “Very Early,” letting his mind wander through the swirling colors and rhythms. His father had been a jazz aficionado and he remembered him every evening in his easy chair, head bent over the hi-fi, listening to Charlie Parker and Fats Waller, his foot tapping to the music, his bald head nodding. It was the only music Gideon listened to, and he knew it well, very well…

The next thing he knew, he was waking up, the closing bars of “If You Could See Me Now” fading on the player.

He got up, went into the bathroom, stuck his head under the faucet, and turned on the cold water. Toweling his head dry, he emerged with a new spring in his step. Gideon had an ability to get by on very little sleep, and to wake from catnaps feeling completely refreshed. It was now almost nine AM, and he could hear the maids talking in the hall.