Gideon's Sword (28 page)

“Wires conduct electricity,” Gideon said.

“Exactly.”

“So?”

“So this is a special kind of wire. It conducts electricity—but in a different sort of way.”

“You’ve completely lost me,” O’Brien said.

“What we’re dealing with here,” she said, triumphantly, “is a room-temperature superconductor.”

A silence.

“Is that all?” O’Brien asked.

“Is that all?” She rounded on him incredulously. “It’s only the Holy Grail of energy technology!”

“I was expecting something that would…change the world,” O’Brien said lamely.

“This
would
transform the world, you dolt! Look. Ninety-nine percent of all electricity generated in the world is lost to resistance as it flows from source to use.
Ninety-nine percent!
But electricity flows through a superconducting wire without
any
resistance. Without
any
loss of energy. If you replaced all the transmission lines in America with wires made out of this stuff, you’d reduce electrical energy usage by ninety-nine percent.”

“Oh my God,” mumbled O’Brien as the impact sank in.

“Yeah. You could supply all US energy needs with just one percent of what it takes now. And that one percent could easily be supplied by existing solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear installations. No more coal and oil generating plants. Transportation and manufacturing costs would drop enormously. Electricity would be virtually free. Cars that ran on electricity would cost almost nothing to operate—they’d sweep away the gas-powered vehicle industry. The oil and coal industries would fold. We’re essentially talking the end of fossil fuels. No more greenhouse emissions, no more OPEC holding the world by the short hairs.”

“In other words,” Gideon said, “the country that controls this discovery would blow everyone else out of the water economically.”

Epstein laughed harshly. “Worse than that. The country that controls this material would
control
the world’s economy. It would rule the world.”

“And everyone else would be fucked,” O’Brien said.

She looked at him. “That is the technical term for it, yes.”

54

LET CONVERSATION CEASE, LET LAUGHTER FLEE. THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS IN HELPING THE LIVING.

I
t was two o’clock in the morning and Gideon Crew was getting tired of reading that same motto above the door into the morgue, over and over again. It irritated him; it managed to be macabre and smug at the same time. As far as he could see, there wasn’t anything delightful about this grim and noisome place—or about death, for that matter.

He’d been waiting for forty-five minutes, and his impatience had almost reached its limit. The receptionist seemed to be moving as if underwater, shifting a piece of paper here, another there, taking a call, murmuring in a low voice, her long red fingernails clicking and clacking as she shuffled her paperwork.

This was ridiculous. He stood up, walked over. “Excuse me? I’ve been waiting almost an hour.”

She looked up. The nails ceased clacking. Black roots showed through the bleached-blond tease. She was a hard New Yorker of the old school. “We had a homicide come in. Tied up our personnel.”

“Homicide? Wow, that must be a rarity in New York City.” Gideon wondered, through the fog of irritation, if that was the one he’d seen at Saint Bart’s earlier. “Look, my…
partner
is in some cold drawer in there, and I just want a few minutes alone with him.” He put an aggrieved whine into his voice. “Just a few minutes.”

“Mr. Crew,” she said, unfazed, “you realize, don’t you, that the remains of your partner have been sitting here for five days, awaiting your instructions? You could have come in at any time. The file here says we’ve tried to contact you at least—” She checked her computer. “—half a dozen times.”

“I lost my cell phone,” he said. “And I’ve been traveling.”

“Okay. But you can’t expect to drop in at one in the morning and have everything ready and waiting, now, can you?” She gave him an uncompromising look.

Gideon felt sheepish and defeated. She was right, of course. But the box cutter was burning a hole in his pocket; the X-rays were doing the same in his shopping bag; and he couldn’t stop thinking of Nodding Crane and what he might be doing right now, whether he was around, whether he had staked out the morgue. The longer he had to wait, the more time he was giving Nodding Crane.

“How much longer?” Gideon asked.

The red nails went back to clacking and moving paper. “I’ll let you know when someone’s free.”

He sat back down and stared moodily at the motto again. He could hear faint sounds coming from behind the stainless-steel double doors, well dented by the incessant pounding of stretchers. Something was going on in there—the homicide, no doubt. Now he felt sure it was the one at Saint Bart’s. That would be big: someone murdered in one of the oldest and most venerable churches in New York, with one of the wealthiest congregations, to boot.

“What’s through those doors?” Gideon asked.

The woman looked up again. “Autopsy, coolers, offices.”

There was more noise from beyond the double doors, a vague murmur of excitement and activity. He glanced at the clock. Almost two thirty now.

The intercom on the receptionist’s desk squawked. She answered it in a hushed voice, then looked over at him. “Someone’s coming to help you now.”

“
Thank
you.”

A man, dressed in none-too-clean whites, bumped out through the doors. He was badly shaven, little dots and pimples of blood on his neck. He raised a clipboard, read from it. “George Crew?”

“That’s Gideon. Gideon Crew.”

Without another word he turned, and Gideon followed him through the doors. “I’d like to have a moment with him—alone,” he said to the man’s back.

No reply.

They walked down a long, bright, linoleum corridor that ended in another set of doors leading, it seemed, into the autopsy room itself. Through the door windows he had a glimpse of a row of stainless-steel and porcelain tables, several orange medical-waste bins, stacks of Tupperware containers. He could see a group around one of the tables, including detectives and cops. Must be the murder victim.

“This way, please.”

Gideon turned to follow the man through another door, down another corridor, and finally into a long room, lined on either side with metal drawers. A company logo identified them as
SO-LOW, INC.
equipment. The “coolers.”

The aide consulted his clipboard, his lips moving silently, and then, lips still moving, looked down the rows of drawers until he found the right one. He unlocked it with a key on a spiral cord held around his waist and slid the drawer out. A gray plastic body bag appeared, zipped up tight. The bitter-cherry smell of formaldehyde bit into Gideon’s nostrils, not even coming close to covering the smell of dead human meat.

“Um. You sure this is Mark Wu?” Gideon found himself unaccountably nervous.

“What it says here.” The man compared his clipboard with a number on a tag clipped to the bag.

Gideon could feel the hard plastic handle of the box cutter in his pocket. Despite the chill air of the morgue, the handle was slick from his sweaty hand. This was going to be an ordeal. He swallowed, tried to steel himself for it.

“I want a moment alone with him,” Gideon said, ending the request with a quick little fake sob. It didn’t come off well, sounding more like a hiccup.

This time, a nod. It seemed the aide was no more eager to stay in here than Gideon was. “Five minutes?”

“Um, how about ten?” Another sob, this one better.

A grunt of approval. “I’ll wait in the hall.”

“Thank you.”

The man went out and the door swung shut behind him. The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly; the forced-air system hissed; the smell in the room was so strong, Gideon felt like it was coating him.

Ten minutes. He’d better get his ass moving. Pulling out the X-rays, he rechecked the location of the wire. It was on the inside of the left thigh, where Wu could have gotten to it readily. For the same reason, it wouldn’t be deep. With luck, the mark or scab of its insertion would still show—assuming the skin hadn’t deteriorated that badly over the last five days. He took a deep breath, then reached over and grabbed the zipper. It felt like a little cold worm between his thumb and finger. He hesitated, took another breath. And then he drew down the zipper, exposing the face, the naked hairless chest, its Y-incision crudely sewn back together after the autopsy. The body had been sponged off badly, leaving behind streaks and bits of clotted blood, various strings of one thing or another. There were numerous cuts and lacerations that had been sewn up more carefully, obviously during the time Wu was still alive.

The smell was overpowering.

With his left hand he pulled the box cutter from his pocket, wiped it dry, thumbed open the blade. It was time. With a final jerk he pulled the zipper all the way down—and stared. Shocked. Speechless.

“The legs!” he cried. “What the hell?
What happened to the legs?
”

55

A
few blocks north of the Port Authority Bus Terminal and hard by the Hudson River stood a massive, nearly windowless ten-story structure of brown limestone, covering an entire city block. It had originally been the mill and headquarters of the New Amsterdam Blanket and Woolen Goods Corporation. Later, when the company went out of business, an enterprising firm purchased the building and retrofitted it into self-storage facilities. When this failed and was seized for nonpayment of taxes, the city converted the storage units, with few modifications, into “temporary” shelters for homeless persons. Known officially as the Abram S. Hewitt Transitional Housing Facility, unofficially as the Ant Farm, it was a vast cliff dwelling for thousands of the disillusioned and disenfranchised.

Nodding Crane’s own storage-unit-
cum
-studio was on the seventh floor of the Ant Farm. It suited him perfectly. In his grimy coat and hat, head hanging low, he was almost indistinguishable from the other inmates, the battered guitar case being the only thing that gave him a certain distinction in this shabby and miserable environment.

At two forty-five
AM
, he walked along the narrow corridor of the seventh floor, past unit after unit, each just a closed roll-down door with a stenciled number, his guitar case knocking gently against his legs. From behind the metal doors, he could hear coughing; snores; other, less identifiable noises. Reaching his own at last, he opened its padlock with a key, raised the curtain wall, ducked in, lowered it again, and barred it shut with a police brace. He reached up, pulled the cord to turn on the bare bulb, then glanced around. The slit of a window peeped into the blackness of an airshaft.

He knew the tiny room had not been burgled: he had replaced the supplied padlock with a much better one he’d purchased, with a five-pin tumbler and a stainless-steel shackle, and it had not been disturbed. And yet with him such an examination was as instinctive as breathing. There was little to take in: a futon, neatly made; a battered leather suitcase; a rice-paper mat; a case of liter-size bottles of springwater; a few rolls of paper towels. In one corner was a portable music player and a stack of well-used Blues CDs; in another, a small neat row of popular paperback books. Nodding Crane favored Hemingway, Twain, and the martial arts literature of the Tang dynasty:
Fengshen Yanyi
;
Outlaws of the Marsh
.

There was only one item in the little space that could be considered decorative: a photograph, badly creased and faded, of a brown and desolate-looking mountain range—the Pamir Plateau in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Putting his guitar carefully aside and hanging his coat and hat on a metal hook, Nodding Crane sat on the rice-paper mat and gazed at the photograph with an intense concentration, for five minutes exactly.

He had been born on that plateau, in the shadow of those mountains, far from any village. His father had been a poor herder and smallhold farmer who died when Nodding Crane was less than a year old. His mother had tried to carry on with the farm. One day, when Nodding Crane was six, a man stopped by. He looked very different from any man Nodding Crane had ever seen, and he spoke Mongolian haltingly, with a strange accent. The man said he was from America—Nodding Crane had vaguely heard of that place. He said he was a missionary, traveling from village to village, but to Nodding Crane he looked more like a beggar than a holy man. In exchange for a meal, he would pray with them and teach the word of God.

His mother invited the man in to share their supper. The man accepted. While they ate, he talked of faraway places, of his strange religion. He was a little clumsy with chopsticks and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and he kept taking quick drinks from a flask. Nodding Crane did not like the way he kept staring at his mother with wet eyes. Now and again he broke into song: a dolorous, mournful kind of music that was new to Nodding Crane. After dinner, as they were drinking tea, the man began pawing at Nodding Crane’s mother. When she pulled away, he knocked her to the floor. Nodding Crane threw himself on the man and was shoved violently away. When the man began to rape his mother, again he tried to defend her. But the man was powerful and beat him senseless with a brick. When he woke, he found his mother strangled.