The Pharaoh Key by Douglas Preston (2)

THE CHILL MARCH sun, streaming down 50th Street, struck Gideon full in the face as he stepped out of the building and into the afternoon rush of Midtown, blaring horns and exhaust mingling with the smell of a street vendor’s roasting kebabs. He felt stunned, hardly able to walk. Two months. Despite knowing better, he realized he’d held out a crazy hope that his AVM had been cured—or at least arrested.

A feeling of self-pity swept over him as he turned the corner onto Madison Avenue. Glinn had vanished. He was, it seemed, without a friend in the world. While he had more than enough money to last a couple of months, what good would it ultimately do him? Was he really going to go back to New Mexico and live in an isolated cabin all by himself, fishing and running out the clock?

His cell phone dinged and he glanced at it: a text from Manuel Garza, second in command at EES. It read: Come to the office right away.

Garza. He had long had a difficult relationship with the man, a brilliant engineer who could be both prickly and cold-blooded. But the two had developed a rapport of sorts on their most recent assignment; he’d found that Garza wasn’t quite the ruthless human being he’d assumed. Underneath that brushed-steel veneer, he did in fact have a heart.

Right away. Gideon decided to walk down the sunny side of the avenue, hoping a brisk, two-mile hike would help clear away the shock of what he had just learned. Two months. Jesus.

Half an hour later, he arrived at the ugly loading dock entrance to EES’s corporate headquarters on Little West 12th Street. He hadn’t been there since they stopped his salary two weeks before, but he found that his card and key code still worked. As he entered the vast, cavernous space of the company’s main working area, he was surprised by what he saw. The huge space, once filled with models of various engineering projects, whiteboards covered with scribbled equations, and people in lab coats scurrying about, was now almost empty. The floor was strewn with papers and other detritus: evidence of a hasty breakdown and removal. The worktables and desks were empty, with dead computer monitors, some draped in plastic, and snakes of cabling leading nowhere.

A dark, muscular figure came out of the gloom, lumpy computer bag slung over his shoulder, and Gideon recognized Garza. The man looked furious.

“It’s about time. What did you do, walk?” he said loudly, even before he had reached Gideon. “Can you believe this shit?”

“What shit?”

He swept his hand around. “This!”

“Looks like they’re shutting the place down.”

“Did they cut you off, too? Last week I didn’t get my salary deposit. No note, no explanation, no dismissal notice. Nada.”

“Same here.”

“And now this. After all those dangerous ops, after risking our lives half a dozen times, after all those years of hard work, this is the thanks I get? What do I have to show for it? Nothing but this.” And he raised his wristwatch to Gideon—a black-faced Rolex with a gold band—and shook it in his face. “I don’t know about you, but I am pissed.”

“Pissed” seemed like an understatement. As for Gideon, he felt more stunned than anything else. What did it really matter, when he had only two months to live? “He did pay us well.”

“For all that I did for him, I should be worth seven figures. As it is, I’ve hardly saved up anything. Life is expensive, especially here in New York City, and I’d planned on a steady revenue stream for years to come. But it’s not just the money—it’s the way he did it. I haven’t been able to reach him in almost six weeks. No response to emails, cell phone messages, nothing. I don’t even know where the son of a bitch is. And now we’ve got until five o’clock to clear out our stuff. That’s in ten minutes, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Um, I hadn’t noticed.”

At this point Garza paused and looked closely at him. “Hey—are you all right?”

Gideon tried to answer, but something seemed to be stopping up his throat, preventing him from talking.

Garza took a step closer, comprehension dawning on his face. He already knew of Gideon’s earlier diagnosis, and now he seemed to be putting it together. “You hear some bad news?”

Gideon nodded.

There was a long silence before Gideon finally found his voice. “Two months.”

It was Garza’s turn to look stunned. “Aw, shit. Shit. I’m so sorry. There’s no possibility, experimental treatment, something?”

Gideon waved his hand. “Nothing.”

Garza took a deep breath. “That pisses me off even more. Glinn knew you only had a year to live when he hired you…and look how he’s treated you since! You should be even angrier than I am. We should have had a big score—a really big score—long ago. That’s why I joined EES when we left the military, took all those crazy risks. Eli promised that we’d all have just such a payday. And we did—that’s almost the worst part. Because just when we really, finally struck it rich, he went and funneled every dime back into that white-whale project of his! That was a success, too, of course—thanks to us—but it cost everything and left us high and dry. And now he’s fired us and is shutting down the company!”

It was hard for Gideon to get exercised about Eli Glinn. He mumbled his agreement.

“Well,” Garza said, “I’ve got all my stuff in here—” he raised his computer bag—“so clear out your desk and let’s head over to the Spice Market and get ourselves righteously shitfaced.”

“Now, that’s a good idea. But I don’t really have anything to collect.”

“So much the better. Let’s go.”

Gideon paused to take a moment and look out over the vast, dead, silent space of half-completed projects and dark electronics. Garza paused as well, finally shaking his head.

In that moment Gideon heard, from a distant corner, an electronic chime. A small computer screen woke underneath a clear plastic shroud, creating a glow.

Garza saw it, too. “Looks like somebody forgot to turn off their monitor.” He walked toward the computer and Gideon followed. Taking the corner of the tarp, Garza jerked it away.

A message stood against a white background:

Garza stared at it. “What the hell?”

“Forty-three thousand hours…” Gideon did a quick calculation. “That’s almost five years. You think this computer’s been working on some problem for five years?”

Garza started to laugh, his voice echoing. “It’s just the sort of thing Glinn would do: give a computer some impossible task and let it grind away, day in, day out, just to see if it could come up with a solution. And look here—it finally did! A little late, but what the hell.”

Gideon squinted at the screen. The “solution” following the message was a long listing in hexadecimal. “What’s the Phaistos Project?”

Before Garza could answer, a voice rang out from the far side of the room. “Five o’clock, gentlemen! Sorry, but it’s time to leave. We’re locking the place down.”

Gideon turned to see two security guards at the main door. He glanced back to find Garza bending over the computer, inserting a USB stick into the computer.

“What are you doing?”

“Downloading this data.”

“What for?”

But Garza was busy tapping on the keyboard.

“Gentlemen?” The guards were starting to walk across the room.

“We’ll be there in a sec, just clearing out our stuff!” Garza shouted from a bent position.

“Sorry, but we’re under orders to shut down at five o’clock sharp.”

Garza pulled the USB stick out and slipped it in his sock. “Wish I had time to fuck this machine up,” he muttered. “That would serve old Eli right.”

Now the guards had arrived. “You’re not supposed to be using any of the electronics,” the taller one said.

“Sorry,” said Garza, straightening up. “We’ll go.”

The guards escorted them to the entrance hall and then paused. “Sir,” the taller one said to Garza, “I’m afraid I have to look through your bag.”

“Bullshit,” said Garza, “this is my stuff.”

“We’re under orders,” said the guard. He reached for the bag and, after hesitating, Garza let him take it.

The guard opened it up, and his blunt fingers sorted through everything. There was no laptop in it, but his busy fingers selected a small hard drive. “I have to take this.”

Garza stared at him. “It’s my data.”

“When you leave this company, nothing is yours anymore,” said the guard.

“Bullshit.”

The guard took the hard drive and dropped it into a slot, where there was a sudden grinding noise from an e-waste shredder.

“Hey! What the fuck?”

“Sorry,” the guard said in a tone that was anything but sorry as he stepped forward, one hand coming to rest on the butt of a holstered Glock. “Time to leave.”

Garza stared at him.

“Let’s go,” said Gideon.

They turned and left without a word, the two guards following them out. Once they reached the loading dock, the massive steel door to EES slid shut with a clang and Gideon heard the automatic bolts shooting home.

Garza turned to him. “Time for that drink.”