Gideon's Corpse

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 hell?” Gideon spun away from the doorway.

“Sorry, pal,” said the woman, turning toward Gideon and crossing her arms in front of her. “You’re busted.”