Zimmerman's Algorithm

1.10 Sat. Mar. 7

GIDEON drove his Nissan through Brookland. He hoped he was driving toward one of the men responsible for his brother's death.

After calling on Kendal for help, he had spent all night nonstop on the computer, paging through the department's computer records. Somehow, there was some concrete connection between Lionel and the Daedalus. Gideon was obsessed with finding that connection.

How did he know that the Daedalus was there? And what was it that he wanted to sell to Gideon for three hundred dollars?

Gideon had spent most of the night pulling the sheets for Lionel's known associates. He felt that Lionel must have gotten his information from one of the creeps he hung out with.

On the seat next to him a printout from his computer was weighted down by his crutch. It was the results of that search. He had found one possibility that made sense—Franklin Alexander "Davy" Jones.

The man had started out in assault and car theft and had graduated all the way to truck hijacking. He had spent a stretch of time in the same prison as Lionel, and they had been released together. Of all the names Gideon looked into, Davy seemed the most likely candidate for involvement in the Daedalus theft and Gideon could see him as the driver of the truck that never showed.

And one of the last things that Lionel had ever said was the guy's name.

Gideon pulled to a shuddering stop on the street in front of Davy's apartment building. The lurching stop was due to his bad leg and arm. He probably shouldn't have been driving. The only thing that made it possible was the fact he drove an automatic. A manual would be near impossible with his cast.

As the Nissan's engine ticked into dormancy, Gideon looked up at Davy's building. It wasn't the most inviting of places, a pile of sooty brick with a dozen plywood-covered windows. An old man sat on the stoop eyeing him suspiciously.

He spent about five minutes maneuvering out of the car and getting himself positioned on his crutch. Outside, in the cold air, he could smell the rubber of his own car, and the fainter smell of an old fire hanging in the air.

Gideon psyched himself for the ascent. The bastard lived on the third floor.

For a few moments, he forgot Raphael and considered leaving the whole thing alone. Let the rest of the department deal with it. He was supposed to be on leave. He was too caught up in this, and he probably wasn't thinking clearly.

But if he didn't go, who was going to keep the whole thing from being buried?

He had drawn his brother into this, and he was the only person who cared enough to make certain that the people responsible were held accountable.

Gideon looked up the steps and remembered an event from years ago, something he hadn't thought about, or even remembered, in nearly twenty years. It had happened back in grade school. He had come home from school—run home was more like it—with a black eye and a busted lip. He didn't remember now who had beat him up, or why, but he did remember his older brother, Rafe, carefully explaining how he couldn't run, or forget about it, because if he let them get away with it, they would do it again. He could fight back or call the cops, but he couldn't run away or ignore it. Eventually, Gideon had fought back. He felt as if Rafe was talking to him here now. "You can fight back, or call the cops, but you can’t run away or ignore it. . ."

If he left this alone, there wasn't going to be a prosecution, or any public hearings. Right now, there was only him and Kendal. And Kendal doubted that there was anything more to what happened than what the papers said.

Even if there wasn't a conspiracy to bury the investigation, why would his department deal with it?

They were understaffed, and already had the shooters. The computer's theft wasn't their jurisdiction, and any new information would be making a tied-up case more complicated— A case the Administration wanted to turn into a political asset.

If he passed the buck on it, he doubted anyone would even follow up on Davy.

"You can’t run away or ignore it. . ."

And, damn it, he was the cops.

Gideon sighed and made his way up to the apartment. As he levered himself across the stoop, one step at a time, the old guy looked up at him and said, "I know you, Chief."

Gideon shook his head and said, "I don't think so." He didn't look down at the man. It took all his concentration to pull himself up the steps. At one point the crutch landed on a plastic bag and nearly slipped out from under him, but he managed to recover and reach the front door.

"Yeah, Chief. You that cop they shot up."

Gideon had no choice but to nod. He looked at the intercom. It was painted over and looked as if it hadn't worked in ages.

The old man kept talking at him. "You should get another job, Chief. Cop in this town ain't no job for nobody. No folks deserve that kind of shit."

"When you're right, you're right," Gideon muttered. He tried the door to the stairs. It was unlocked. It didn't even have a doorknob. He had to grab hold of the hole where the knob should be and pull the door open. The smell of piss and mildew slapped him in the face like a wet, moldy towel.

He started up the steps.

It seemed to take an hour to climb all the way up to Davy's apartment, though it probably wasn't more than ten minutes. He had to stop next to Davy's door for nearly as long just to catch his breath.

When he had collected himself, he pounded on Davy's door with his cast.

"Mr. Jones," Gideon called. "Police. I need to talk to you."

There was no response.

Gideon pounded a few more times. As he did, the copper taste of his exertion left his mouth, and he became aware of a smell.

There's nothing quite like the odor of a dead human body that's been allowed to sit a few days. A slightly wet, greasy smell—something close to rancid bacon fat. It hadn't reached full flower, and the neighbors might not have noticed it yet, but standing this close to the door, the hint of death was unmistakable.

"Fuck," Gideon said as he instinctively raised his good hand to his mouth.

Well if that ain’t probable cause, I don’t know what is.

Gideon tried the door, and found it locked. He turned and pushed his good shoulder into the door. He felt it give a little even with his weak attempt. The deadbolt wasn't set. Gideon tried twice more, resting between each attempt.

On the third try, the door gave. Gideon lost his balance and fell all the way through as the door swung open in front of him.

Here, sprawled facedown in the living room, the smell was just beginning to reach gagging levels. Gideon turned his head and saw an entertainment system, the rectangular TV screen casting a blind blue glow over everything.

He turned the other way and saw Davy, eyes rolled, kit laid out on the coffee table in front of him.

Gideon grabbed his crutch and made it to his feet. The fall, combined with the exertion of climbing the stairs, had ignited a throbbing ache in his injured leg. He tried to ignore it as he looked at Davy.

It was an obvious OD. Though Gideon had trouble believing in the coincidence. Finding Davy dead only convinced Gideon that he had found the right guy.

He walked over to where a phone sat on a table, pulled a tissue from his pocket, and picked up the receiver. There wasn't any way he could avoid calling this in. And the way his leg felt, Davy might not be the only one who needed to be carried out of this apartment.

Before he called it in, he had an idea. He looked at the receiver on the wireless phone, pulled out a pen, and used the dull end to press redial.

After a short series of beeps—a local number—someone picked up.

"The Zodiac, Renny speaking." Behind the voice were the sounds of people talking and dishes clattering.

"I'm calling for Davy."

"Davy ain't here, hasn't been in for near a week."

"How about Lionel?"

"What? Didn't hear about what happened?"

"No."

"Got hisself shot up on the Metro. He ain't taking no calls here no more."

"Okay, thanks."

He hung up with the pen. The Zodiac, a bar, club, or restaurant—somewhere Lionel and Davy both hung out at. It was the last place Davy had called. For Lionel maybe? For the person who had hired him?

Gideon put in the call to the department, wondering exactly how he was going to explain to IA what he was doing here.

In the hour he waited for someone to get there, Gideon went through Davy's apartment looking for anything that might give him a lead on who had hired him to move the Daedalus—or just some concrete evidence that he had found the right guy.

In Davy's bedroom he found something. Davy's wallet rested on the nightstand next to an unmade bed. He didn't need to go through it. Someone had already pulled it open and had spilled its contents all over the bed.

No cash. But there was a business card.

It was just a blank white rectangle bearing a symbol Gideon recognized.

" N," the same mark he had seen on the side of the warehouse.

What the fuck is this?

This was it, the connection. The pulse throbbed in Gideon's neck, and he felt a copper taste in his mouth. He could leave the thing here, have it bagged in the department, and watch as the case sank.

Gideon knew that Davy was murdered, he knew it. He also knew that the path of least resistance would have the corpse tagged as an OD with nothing to do with Raphael's death.

Gideon knew that the card was important.

Gideon wrapped the card in a tissue and put it in his own wallet. He could feel the line he crossed as he did so, but he kept telling himself. . .

"You can’t run away, and you can’t ignore it. . ."

It took another three hours to get away, between waiting for them to come and haul away Davy's body, and explaining how the hell he came upon the corpse to the uniformed officers who showed up. A pale imitation of what would happen when that IA guy, Magness, caught wind of this.

He would have to worry about that later. If he was lucky, it would be a while before news of this filtered through the department. At the moment, he had more pressing concerns.

"You know what you're asking me to do?" Dominic Mallory was looking at the business card that Gideon had taken from Davy's wallet. Gideon had since moved it into a small plastic evidence bag.

Mallory was an employee of the District forensic lab. One of the fingerprint crew that went over the crime scenes that seemed to merit the attention. Davy, as an OD, didn't merit that kind of attention.

Gideon had come down to Mallory's workplace to ask him a favor. He leaned over the black laminated counter and said, "I'm asking you to do your job."

Mallory snorted. "As if it was that easy. There's not enough resources, time, or money to do the stuff I'm supposed to be doing. I have a month-long backlog . . ." He , picked up the bag and shook it. "I can't be doing work that isn't part of an official case."

"This is an official case."

"What're you talking about? You're on disability leave."

"That card belonged to a DOA overdose named Franklin Alexander Jones, a pal of Kareem Rashad Williams—"

"So?" Mallory looked up from the card.

"The guy who set me up. That card might have the prints of the guy behind that whole fiasco."

"And why isn't this coming down to me through the normal channels?"

"You've seen the news." Gideon shook his head. "The whole disaster has become some sort of political play by the Administration. They don't want an investigation. They want a fiasco. If someone discovered who set us up, it might dilute their play for money out of Congress."

"Gideon, you're thinking too hard."

"Will you do it?"

Mallory shook his head. "Of course I will." He sighed. "This'll take a while. Even with the computerized files, it might take weeks to find a match, assuming we even find a print to compare. I can put it on the list."

"That's all I ask."

Mallory took the baggie and looked at the card inside. "Hebrew?"

Gideon shrugged. "I don't know. Does it mean anything to you?"

Mallory shook his head. "Go on, I'll get hold of you if anything turns up from this."

When Gideon came home, he hobbled up to his computer and connected to the Internet. The symbol " N ," kept running through his head. It had something to do with what was going on, he just didn't know what. It could be the symbol of some terrorist group, or it could be a word in some language he didn't understand.

He was hoping that he would find something out there that might tell him what it meant.

Gideon loaded his own netsearch software into Netscape and told it to fetch him information on the Hebrew alphabet. The symbol was Hebrew, that was about all Gideon knew about it.

The number of pages he found were in the thousands, but the most basic information he needed was in the first two documents. He looked at a page that simply named the characters in the Hebrew alphabet and showed their cursive form. The symbol, at least the first part without the little circle, "K," was called "aleph." The first letter.

The letter had no inherent sound, according to what Gideon read. In transliterating a Hebrew word it would disappear. In trying to find some sort of meaning for the little subscript, he kept hunting. The closest to some sort of meaning he found was the discovery that the original

Hebrew alphabet contained no vowels—the fact that something named "aleph" was not a vowel seemed odd to him—and the only way the written language had of showing vowel pronunciation was as a pattern of dots and dashes above or below the written text.

That kind of text was called "pointed" text, and when he first read about it, he thought that might be what the circle was. But when he saw an example of what pointed Hebrew text actually looked like, he saw that it wasn't anything like what he was searching for.

He discovered that the Hebrew letters doubled as numbers, with the first ten representing the numbers from one to ten, aleph being the number one . . .

Some sort of deeper meaning had to be there. Using the first letter as a trademark meant something. Somehow Gideon felt that it was something beyond an initial.

Gideon's search for meaning in the symbol began to take him further afield than just an alphabet. He found a site that used the Sefer Yetzirah, an ancient Hebrew occult text that explained how The Creator used the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet to create the Universe and all the living things in it. The site assigned Hebrew letters to various amino acids. It was strange, and Gideon didn't quite understand it, but it started him thinking toward the occult.

On the Sefer Yetzirah page he found references to Kabbalah, apparently an old form of Hebrew numerology that used the number-letter equivalence of the Hebrew alphabet extensively. He redid his search for the word "Kabbalah." He read how, to Jewish mystics, every letter was connected to the life force of God and possessed of sacred meaning.

He found a New Age page that ascribed relationships between the Kabbalistic letters and tarot cards. Aleph seemed associated with the tarot card "The Fool."

Gideon searched until he found a picture of "The Fool," and found an image of a young man carrying a pack over his shoulder, a dog nipping at his heels. He seemed caught just before he took his last step over a precipice. Gideon felt as if he were going in the wrong direction, but there was something about the Fool that seemed prophetic.

After a while of finding esoteric things like the "tree of life" that didn't help him in his current questions, he started over again with a search simply for "aleph."

He found that a lot of agencies, corporations, and software companies used the word in their name or in the names of their products. He also found some more New Age mysticism, a meditation on "aleph," which repeated the association with the Fool.

Gideon ended his search on the "Aleph Homepage," which told him that it was the first letter of the first alphabet—Phoenician, Hebrew, or even Protosinaitic—and the origin of the alphabet went back as far as the eighteenth century BC. According to the page, "Aleph" represented the origin of all written material.

It was after midnight when he pushed himself away from his computer, feeling unenlightened.