Zimmerman's Algorithm

3.00 Mon. Mar. 22

COLONEL Mecham was glad to get out of Washington. The wrath of Emmit D'Arcy was not something that he wanted to face. He was fortunate in that D'Arcy, at the moment, was embroiled in a feud with the other members of the National Security Council, the ones who'd made the decision to pull the plug on Detective Gideon Malcolm, D'Arcy's loose cannon.

Mecham agreed that the plug needed to be pulled. It was pretty obvious that, due to the IUF's involvement, they'd already lost three people that could have been some source of intelligence. Mecham was certain that they could get more information from Detective Gideon Malcolm by bringing him in than by allowing him to stir things up.

Mecham landed at JFK at six in the morning. He walked off the plane, through the airport, and straight to the lobby where the car was waiting for him. The man waiting for him came to attention. Mecham nodded acknowledgement to the young Marine and said, "At ease, soldier."

"Yes, sir."

The kid looked as if he'd be more comfortable in a uniform. He took Mecham's overnight bag and led him out to a waiting car.

They hadn't taken him to a police station or a federal building. Gideon wasn't exactly sure where this building was. He knew it had to be an office building east of Central Park, but he couldn't be sure which one. The car had turned off the street and had entered an underground garage, and they had taken an elevator up ten stories and led him through a suite of offices that was nearly empty of furniture. Even the windows were covered, making the only light the stark white of the fluorescents.

He tried a few times, in vain, to get them to allow him to call a lawyer. Apparently he had fallen into the same black hole that the original Daedalus thieves had fallen into—a place where the Bill of Rights was conveniently overlooked.

They kept him in a small room that had a cot, a small television, and an adjoining bathroom. Because of the cabinets, Gideon supposed that, at one point, this was supposed to be some sort" of lounge. They locked the door and left him there, occasionally bringing in food from Taco Bell or McDonald's. He only found a change of clothes—two pairs ofjeans and a couple of T-shirts—by accident when he was rummaging around bored. They hadn't even bothered to take the tags off.

Despite lack of a shower, it still felt good to change out of clothes that still smelled faintly of smoke.

For two days, they'd left him in there. The Marines wouldn't talk to him, and—more annoying—they refused to listen to him. He was beginning to wonder if this was it, all there was to everything, just an

anonymous dull captivity. . .

Then, on the morning of day three, he walked out of the bathroom and saw a trio of the plainclothes Marines in his room, waiting for him. The lead one said, "Would you please come with us, sir?"

"As if I have a choice." Gideon rubbed his chin, where four days of stubble itched.

They took him—one on either side, one behind him— down an empty hallway and into an office. The Marines stopped with Gideon standing in front of a closed door. The lead Marine said, "The Colonel is waiting for you."

"I'm sure he is," Gideon said. He really had nowhere to go except through the door. He sighed and pushed his way through. He had barely taken five steps into the office when one of the Marines reached in and closed the door behind him.

The office was mostly empty, like the rest of this place. It was one of the smaller offices, without any windows. There was a battered green metal desk sitting in the center of the room. Sitting on the desk was a small tape recorder attached by a cord to a microphone sitting on the center of the desk. On Gideon's side of the desk was a folding metal chair, and opposite him sat a man in late middle age, with hair that wasn't quite as short as the Marines'.

"Have a seat, Mr. Malcolm." He gestured to the folding chair.

Gideon sat, and as he sat, he looked behind him and saw, in one corner of the room, a camcorder on a tripod, pointed at the desk.

"Where's Ruth?" Gideon asked. "I've been trying to ask, but none of these people will even talk to me. What happened to the Secret Service?" If there ever was any Secret Service.

"Those men have very explicit orders not to communicate with you. I can assure you that Ruth Zimmerman is safe, apparently much safer than she'd be on the streets with you."

"What do you want from me?"

"I want to hear about everything that's happened to you since the incident where your partner was shot."

Gideon shook his head. "I want to talk to a lawyer."

"You aren't in the criminal justice system, Mr. Malcolm. You're involved in a present military threat to the security of this nation. I suggest you cooperate with this debriefing. There's more at stake here than I think you realize."

"Are you sure about that?" Gideon asked.

"Let's start when you left the hospital—"

"I want something."

"You aren't in a position to make deals, Mr. Malcolm."

"You don't have a clue what Zimmerman's up to, do you?"

The room was silent for a long time. The Colonel was looking at him as if he was trying to discern some hidden meaning from his expression. He said, "What do you mean by that?"

"You can't figure out why Zimmerman left, what she's trying to do . . ."

"Do you, Mr. Malcolm?"

"I have an idea."

"What?"

"Like I said, I want something."

There was a long time before the Colonel said, "Let's hear it, then."

"I want you bastards to do right by my brother. We both know it wasn't the Secret Service there. I want the people responsible for that mess to help his widow and his children."

"I think we can manage—"

"That's not all."

"What else?"

"You have to bring Zimmerman in alive."

There was silence, as if it took a long time for the audacity of Gideon's request to sink in for the Colonel.

"That's not much of a promise, Colonel," Gideon said. "You need her alive. Otherwise, you'll never know how compromised you actually are, will you? If she dies, it's just as bad for you as if she never turns up again. You'll have to assume that everything she ever worked on for you is in enemy hands."

"You think it isn't?"

"I think Julia's agenda isn't terrorism."

The Colonel leaned forward and shook his head. "What makes you think you know this situation so well?"

"I think I know Julia."

"You've never even met the woman."

Gideon almost objected. He felt as if he had met Julia Zimmerman. He felt as if he had been living with her for weeks . . . Instead, he told the Colonel. "Give me those promises, and I'll cooperate with you."

Slowly, the Colonel nodded. "We can give you that. You're right. We do need Zimmerman alive. Now you tell me what you think is going on."

There it was. For a few long moments, Gideon didn't know what to do. He wanted some sort of guarantee, but he had no way of getting one, and the Colonel here didn't have the means to provide one. He had been prepared to remain silent until his demands were met, but the Colonel's acquiescence made him hesitate.

However, in the end, he really had no choice.

Gideon told him.

Gideon told him of a woman who had replaced God with Number. A woman to whom mathematics wasn't a profession, but a faith. The ET Lab was only part of her work at MIT; another part—a much more private part— was a cult that called itself the New Pythagorean Order, named for the ancient Greeks who worshiped Number as the genesis of all things.

Zimmerman had believed in a perfect numerical world since childhood. At MIT she envisioned the data inside their computers as that world, and she had found people who could share her specific, peculiar faith. People who believed that their studies in artificial life were just that, life. People who believed a computer virus was as "alive" as its biological cousin.

The Colonel asked him what he was getting at.

Gideon told him that Julia's experiments in the ET Lab weren't explorations in mathematics. They were experiments in her religion. They were explorations in a virtual world that she believed was the perfect expression of her faith, at least the most perfect representation of it she could achieve.

"So she worships computers?"

Gideon shook his head.

Not computers. Nothing about Julia's beliefs embraced the physical world. It was the data, the information that the computers arranged and stored. To Julia, it wouldn't matter if a representation of her work was on a 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.