Free Gideon's Corpse by Douglas Preston

it.”
    Fordyce shook his head. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself, Gideon.”
    “These people don’t think so.”
    “Jesus,” said Fordyce. “We must’ve spent four hours with those damn people. And only nine days until N-Day.” He used the insider term for the presumed day of the nuke detonation.
    They drove for a moment in silence.
    “I hate that bureaucratic shit,” Fordyce finally said. “I’ve got to clear my head.” He fumbled in his briefcase, pulled out an iPod, stuck it into the car dock, and dialed in a song.
    “Lawrence Welk, here we come,” muttered Gideon.
    Instead, “Epistrophy” came blasting out of the speakers.
    “Whoa,” said Gideon, amazed. “An FBI agent who listens to Monk? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
    “What did you think I listened to—motivational lectures? You a Monk fan?”
    “Greatest jazz pianist of all time.”
    “What about Art Tatum?”
    “Too many notes, not enough music, if you know what I mean.”
    Fordyce had a heavy foot. As the speedometer crept up to a hundred miles an hour, the agent took the portable flasher out of the glove compartment and slapped it onto the roof, turning on the grille flashers as he did so. The rush of air and humming of the tires sounded an ostinato to Monk’s crashing chords and rippling arpeggios.
    They listened to the music in silence for a while, then Fordyce spoke. “You knew Chalker. Tell me about him. What made the guy tick?”
    Gideon felt a swell of irritation at the implication that somehow he and Chalker were buddies. “I don’t know what made the guy ‘tick.’”
    “What did you two do up at Los Alamos, anyway?”
    Gideon sat back, trying to relax. The car approached a line of slower vehicles and a semi; Fordyce swung out into the fast lane at the last moment, the wind buffeting them as they blew past.
    “Well,” said Gideon, “like I said, we both worked in the Stockpile Stewardship program.”
    “What exactly is that?”
    “It’s classified. Nukes get old like everything else. The problem is, we can’t test-fire a nuke these days because of the moratorium. So our job is to make for damn sure they’re in working order.”
    “Nice. So what did Chalker do, in particular?”
    “He used the lab’s supercomputer to model nuclear explosions, identify how the radioactive decay of various nuke components would affect yield.”
    “Also classified work?”
    “Extremely.”
    Fordyce rubbed his chin. “Where’d he grow up?”
    “California, I think. He didn’t talk about his past much.”
    “What about him as a person? Job, marriage?”
    “He started at Los Alamos about six years ago. Had a doctorate from Chicago. Recently married, brought his young wife with him. She became a problem. She was sort of an ex-hippie, New Age type, from the South, hated Los Alamos.”
    “Meaning?”
    “She didn’t hide the fact that she was against nuclear weapons—she didn’t approve of her husband’s work. She was a drinker. I remember one office party where she got drunk and started shouting about the military-industrial complex and calling people murderers and throwing things. She totaled their car and racked up a couple of DUIs before they took away her license. I heard that Chalker did everything he could to keep the marriage going, but eventually she left, went to Taos with some other guy. Joined a New Age commune.”
    “What sort of commune?”
    “Radical, anti-government, I heard. Self-sufficient, off the grid, grow their own tomatoes and pot. Left wing, but the weird kind. You know, the ones who carry guns and read Ayn Rand.”
    “Is there such a thing?”
    “Out west—out here —there is. There were rumors she’d taken his credit cards, emptied their bank account, and was running through the money to support the commune. About two or three years ago Chalker lost his house, declared bankruptcy. That was a real problem with his work, because of the high-level security clearance. You’re supposed to