53
GIDEON HAD PULLED the Jeep off the dirt road ten miles from the Paiute Creek Ranch. He had to calm himself down, organize his thoughts. He felt awful about what he’d just done to Willis. He had terrified the man, brutalized him, humiliated him. The man was far from being the nicest person in the world, but no innocent person deserved that kind of treatment. And he was clearly innocent. Could someone else at the cult be behind it? Impossible, not without Willis knowing.
Gideon had made a hideous mistake.
On top of that, it was one o’clock in the morning, the day before N-Day. One day. And he had no more idea who was behind the plot than when he arrived in Santa Fe, eight days ago…
He grasped the wheel, realizing that he was hyperventilating worse than ever. He had to get a grip on himself, clear his head, and think this through.
He turned off the engine, threw the door open, and stumbled out of the vehicle. The night was cool, a slow sigh of air moving through the branches of the pines, the stars twinkling above. He steadied himself, tried to regulate his breathing, and started walking.
The Paiute Creek Ranch had nothing to do with the terrorist plot. That much was clear. So he was back to Joseph Carini and the Al-Dahab Mosque. They had of course been the obvious perpetrators all along, and now it was confirmed. He had been too clever by far. The obvious answer, the simplest answer, was almost always the true answer. It was one of the fundamental principles of scientific inquiry—and criminal investigations.
But was it so obvious? Why would the Muslims frame him as a fellow Muslim, when such a move would only increase suspicion, focus more attention on them? After all, the investigation had already come down on them like a ton of bricks. There were hundreds of investigators crawling all around the mosque, going through their most private documents, questioning their members, digging out all their secrets. He and Fordyce had been two investigators out of hundreds. They hadn’t learned anything of value, anything out of the ordinary, at least that he could see. And yet, whoever had attempted to frame him had taken huge risks, breaking into a highly classified computer system. It was someone who believed he had learned something so incriminating, so dangerous, that extraordinary measures had to be taken—
Suddenly he stopped in his tracks. Frame him. There was something he had been overlooking, blindingly obvious only now, after it had occurred to him. These actions were being taken against him, and him alone. After all, they hadn’t framed Fordyce, too. In fact, Fordyce was hot on his ass.
After the plane wreck, after learning about the sabotage, Gideon had always assumed whoever was doing this was trying to kill them both, to stop their line of inquiry. But the fact was, they were only trying to stop him.
What had he done—what had he investigated, who had he talked to—on his own, without Fordyce?
As quickly as he had posed the question, the answer came.
He stared up at the dark sky, at the hard uncompromising points of starlight. Could it be possible? It seemed so incredibly improbable. But he’d proved it wasn’t Willis, and he felt certain it wasn’t the Muslims. As he turned around and began heading back to the Jeep, he couldn’t help but remember the oft-repeated Sherlock Holmes dictum: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.