How do you respond to a lunatic? Desperately, Gideon tried recalling the advice Fordyce had given him. Engage the hostage taker, stimulate his humanity.

“Reed, look into the boy’s face. You’ll see how truly innocent he is—”

“My skin’s on fire!” Chalker cried. “I was counting! Where was I? Six, eight—” He suddenly grimaced, his face contorted with pain. “They’re doing it again! The burning, burning!” Once again he pushed the gun into the child’s neck. Now the boy began to scream—a high, thin sound, otherworldly.

“Wait!” Gideon yelled. “No, don’t!” He began walking more quickly toward Chalker with his hands up. Forty yards, thirty—a distance he could cover in a few seconds…

“Nine, TEN! TEN! Ahhhhhh!—”

Gideon saw the finger tighten on the trigger and he sprinted straight at him. At the same time, with an inarticulate roar, the male hostage suddenly appeared in the hallway and fell upon Chalker from behind.

Chalker wheeled backward, the gun firing harmlessly.

“Run!” Gideon screamed at the boy as he dashed toward the house.

But the boy did not run. Chalker struggled with the hostage, who was clinging to his back. They spun around together and Chalker slammed him into the wall of the entryway and wrenched free. The man rebounded with a fierce cry and swung at Chalker, but he was a flabby man in his fifties and Chalker deftly sidestepped the blow and punched him to the floor, knocking him senseless.

“Run!” Gideon yelled at the boy again as he jumped the curb.

As Chalker swung the gun around toward the father, the boy leapt onto the scientist’s back, pounding him with his small fists.

“Dad! Get away!”

Gideon tore up the walkway toward the front steps.

“Don’t shoot my dad!” the boy shrieked, flailing.

“Turn them off!” Chalker screamed, whirling around, distracted by the child, swinging the handgun back and forth as if seeking a target.

Gideon took a flying leap at Chalker, but the gun went off before he made contact. He slammed the scientist to the ground, seized his forearm, and broke it against the banister like a stick of firewood, the weapon tumbling from his grip. Chalker shrieked in agony. Behind him, the boy’s heartbreaking cries shrilled out as he hunched over his father, who was lying prone on the floor, the side of his head gone.

Pinned, Chalker writhed underneath Gideon like a snake, roaring insanely, spittle flying…

…And then the SWAT team came bursting through the door and thrust Gideon violently aside; Gideon felt hot blood and body matter spray across one side of his face as a fusillade of shots cut off Chalker’s ravings.

The sudden, awful silence that followed lasted only a moment. And then, from somewhere inside the house, a little girl began to cry. “Mommy’s bleeding! Mommy’s bleeding!”

Gideon rolled to his knees and puked.

5

The charge of SWAT team responders, CSI coordinators, and emergency medical personnel rolled in like a wave, the area immediately filling with people. Gideon sat on the floor, absently wiping the blood from his face. He felt shattered. No one took any notice of him. The scene had abruptly changed from a tense standoff to controlled action: everyone had a role to play; everyone had a job to do. The two screaming children were whisked away; medical personnel knelt over the three people who had been shot; the SWAT teams did a rapid search of the house; the cops began stringing tape and securing the scene.

Gideon staggered up and leaned against the wall, hardly able to stand, still heaving. One of the medics approached him. “Where’s the injury—?”

“Not my blood.”

The medic examined him anyway, probing the area where Chalker’s blood had splattered across his face. “Okay,” he said. “But let me clean you up a bit.”

Gideon tried to focus on what the medic was saying, almost drowning from the feeling of revulsion and guilt that overwhelmed him.

Again. Oh my God, it’s happened again. The presence of the past, the horribly cinematic and vivid memory of his own father’s death, was so strong that he felt a kind of mental paralysis, an inability to work his mind beyond the hysterical repetition of the word again.

“We’re going to need this area vacated,” said a cop, moving them toward the door. As they spoke, the CSI team laid down a tarp and began setting down their small sports bags on it, organizing their equipment.

The medic took Gideon’s arm. “Let’s go.”

Gideon allowed himself to be led away. The CSI team unzipped their bags and began removing tools, flags, tape, test tubes, and evidence Baggies, snapping on latex gloves, putting on hairnets and plastic booties. All around him, there was a sense of winding down: the tenseness, the hysteria, was dissipating, replaced by a banal professionalism: what had been a drama of life and death was now just a series of checklists to be completed.

Fordyce appeared out of nowhere. “Don’t go far,” he said in a low voice, taking his arm. “You need to be debriefed.”

Hearing this, Gideon looked at him, his mind gradually clearing. “You saw the whole thing—what’s to debrief?” He just wanted to get the hell away, get back to New Mexico, put this horror show behind him.

Fordyce shrugged. “The way it is.”

Gideon wondered if they’d blame him for the death of the hostage. Probably. And rightfully so. He’d fucked up. He felt sick all over again. If he’d only said something different, the right thing, or maybe left the earpiece in, maybe they would have seen it coming, given him something to say… He’d been too close to the situation, unable to separate it from the shooting of his own father. He should never have let Glinn talk him into it. He realized to his dismay that his eyes were threatening to mist over.

“Hey,” said Fordyce. “Don’t sweat it. You saved the two kids. And the wife’s going to make it—just a flesh wound.” Gideon felt the man’s grip tighten on his arm. “We’ve got to go now, they’re securing the scene.”

Gideon drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “Okay.”

As they began to move toward the door, there was a strange ripple in the atmosphere, as if a chill wind had just blown through the house. Through his peripheral vision, Gideon noticed one of the CSI women freeze in place. At the same time he heard a low clicking noise, strangely familiar, but in his fog of guilt and nausea he couldn’t quite place it. He paused as the crime scene investigator stepped over to her bag and rooted around in it, pulling out a yellow box with a gauge and a handheld tube on a long coiled wire. Gideon recognized it immediately.

A Geiger counter.

The machine was clicking quietly but regularly, the needle jumping with each beat. The woman looked at her partner. The entire room had fallen silent. Gideon watched, his mouth going dry.

In the suddenly quiet house the faint clicks were oddly magnified. The woman rose and held the Geiger counter out, slowly panning the room with it. The machine hissed, the clicks abruptly spiking. She jumped at the noise. Then, steadying, she took a step forward, and—almost reluctantly—began rotating it toward Chalker’s dead body.

As the tube came closer to the body, the clicks climbed quickly in volume and frequency, an infernal glissando that morphed from hiss, to roar, and then finally to a shriek as the instrument’s needle pinned all the way into the red.

“Oh my God,” murmured the woman, backing away as she stared at the gauge, her eyes widening in disbelief. Suddenly she dropped the unit, turned, and ran out of the house. The instrument crashed to the floor, the roar from its counter filling the air, rising and falling as the tube rolled back and forth.

And then the entire room was in panicked motion, scrambling back, pushing, shoving, trying to get out. The CSI team broke into a run, followed by the photographers, cops, and SWAT members; in a matter of moments everyone was fleeing willy-nilly, clawing and shoving their way out the door, all sense of procedure vanishing. Gideon and Fordyce were carried along on the human wave. A moment later Gideon found himself out on the street before the house.