Zimmerman's Algorithm

1.06 Tue. Mar. 3

A T eight in the morning, Kareem Rashad Williams, aka Lionel, walked down Twelfth Street in Brookland. He walked with an exaggerated swagger, staring at each passerby, as if daring anyone to make something of him. He looked at everyone as if he wanted them to start trouble, trouble he'd enjoy finishing. It was Lionel's crazy look, and he always used it when he was scared shitless.

He hadn't slept more than six hours in the past week. He hadn't gone home—hadn't even gone back to The Zodiac. He'd been walking the streets of Washington since he'd found Davy.

Now Davy's cash was almost gone. What the fuck was he going to do?

It was one thing knowing that he'd tipped a cop—a cop and a Fed—into a world of shit. He could care less about what happened to Detective Gideon Malcolm and his brother, that was the cop's own lookout.

But Davy, that was too fucking close to home.

Davy had been a little guy who'd boosted cars for a living. He and Lionel had been buddies since they'd shared a six-month stretch together. They'd been released the same day with fifty other small-timers that the District couldn't afford to house. The two of them had been tight since then.

Davy had been the ambitious one. While Lionel had been nickel and diming as a street-level dealer, turning to the cops for extra scratch, Davy had been moving up and out. He'd gone from boosting cars and chopping them, to boosting heavy equipment and truck hijacking. Davy had been talking lately about becoming a regular wiseguy. He had talked about taking down loads of everything from cigarettes to VCRs. He had talked about the special job that was going to land him a hundred grand all for himself.

Lionel thought Davy just talked too damn much.

But Lionel was beginning to think that God was getting him back for ratting on Davy. Christ, why did Davy have to tell him about that one job? Why'd he have to keep repeating the fact that he was going to make a hundred grand just for delivering a refrigerated truck—

Lionel had felt all too justified in giving the whole deal over to Detective Malcolm. Davy hadn't needed to rub his face in the hundred grand, more money than Lionel was going to see in his entire street-peddling life. The one concession that Lionel had made for friendship's sake was he'd held out for an extra fifty bucks before he gave over the address.

Then things had gone to shit.

First, Davy had come over the night before the job and gotten drunk on Lionel's couch telling him how the Doctor with the hundred grand had pulled out of the deal thinking there was some sort of setup. Lionel had spent the entire evening in a panic thinking that he'd blown the job and not only was Davy going to find out—and maybe have his mob friends put a hit out on his good friend Lionel—but Detective Malcolm was going to show up for his fifty bucks because nothing'd been going on at the address Lionel had sold him.

Then the next day, he'd heard about the mother of all setups. He had heard about the whole damn thing on the news, Davy there with him hungover and staring at the TV screen. For fifteen minutes, all Davy could do was shake his head. Lionel had gotten the gut feeling that Davy had known, that he was going to draw down on him right there while Lionel's gun was on his bed under a pile of underwear. But all Davy had said was, "Guess it was a good thing they canceled the job, huh?" Then he had turned to Lionel and grinned at him. It was such a fucking irritating grin that Lionel'd wanted to cap him right there.

But he hadn't.

It wasn't long before Lionel's little tip-off began haunting him. For a while he was crashing at friends and at The Zodiac trying to keep a step ahead of them. It lasted a while. Then his money dried up, and with it, most of his friends. It was in desperation that he tried to lean on Davy for some cash, maybe enough to get out from under this heat he was feeling.

When he'd gone to Davy's to see him about the money, he'd almost turned around and left before he entered the building. There was something about the whole setup he didn't like. The more he had thought about it, the more he didn't like the way Davy had sounded on the phone. He'd stood out on the street, paranoia gripping him for the better part of an hour.

Lionel knew then that Davy knew. He could feel it in his gut that Davy had seen through him and was waiting up there with his chromed Magnum to blow his old friend Lionel away.

For half that hour, Lionel was going to leave, find a way to split town broke. The second half, the hard ass in him took over and he decided he wasn't going to let any assholes, Davy and cops included, put the fear on him.

When the street had cleared of the last occupied car, an idling Dodge pickup, Lionel raced into Davy's building, his hand on the butt of his nine millimeter.

Lionel had decided that Davy was not going to get the drop on him.

Davy hadn't.

Lionel had his gun out before he'd reached Davy's floor. He took the steps slow, expecting an ambush at every landing. He made it fine to Davy's door . . .

The first sign that something had happened to Davy—the door hung open, spilling dead-blue light into the hallway.

Lionel pushed the door open with his gun, still worried that Davy might be waiting to whack him.

"Davy?" he called, pointing his gun into the apartment. "You all right in there?"

No answer.

Lionel stepped slowly into Davy's apartment until he could see the whole living room—the TV on, showing a blank digital-blue screen. Across from it—the couch. On the couch—Davy.

Lionel knew what had happened the moment he saw

Davy's rolled eyes and the rubber hose around his right bicep. The smack was rank in the room, the kit strewn across the table in front of Davy.

Davy had shot himself up a bit farther than he'd been ready to go.

Lionel stood in the center of the living room, pointing a gun at Davy as if it was all a trick, as if his old friend was about to jump up and whack him for selling him out.

Davy didn't move, didn't breathe.

The fucker was stone dead.

It took a few minutes to register.

Afterward, after Lionel lowered his gun and took a step or two into the apartment, the real nasty part of it had begun to sink in.

Davy'd never done heroin before. Something Lionel knew. Lionel would've been selling the shit to him otherwise. Just looking at Davy lying there, Lionel could see that there weren't any tracks on the arm with the hose. The kit on the table was brand-fucking new. The spoon didn't even have soot marks.

Two words in Lionel's mind, "Set up."

Someone else shot Davy up. Not Davy's wiseguy friends. Phony ODs were too fucking elaborate for the mob. It began coming down on him. Detective Malcolm shot down, Davy dead with a needle in his arm—

Took no genius to figure who was on the short list to be next. Lionel stayed around only long enough to liberate what cash was immediately obvious, then he got the hell out of there, making sure the door was closed and locked behind him.

Afterward, he'd hit the streets and tried to think.

His thinking had involved at least three liquor stores. Lionel's memory was a little fuzzy on that point right now. He was close to the end of his rope.

What the fuck was he going to do?

The words kept running through his mind. He couldn't get rid of them. He thought of leaving town, but Davy's money was just about gone now. There was a grand or two back in Lionel's apartment, but he knew if he stepped near the place, he'd end up with a needle in his arm like Davy. He thought of going to the cops, but, Christ, the cops might want to whack him for what happened to Malcolm.

He passed a news vending machine. In it was a copy of the Post with the headline, " Wounded Detective Testifies Before Grand Jury." Lionel caught sight of a picture of Detective Malcolm.

He stopped and thought, Maybe this shit's still worth something.

Enough to get out of town.

Gideon was doing one of a set of half-dozen exercises that were supposed to help rehabilitate his injured leg. The flesh had healed into a mass of tissue that left a long concave scar where a large strip of the calf muscle had been chewed by shrapnel.

The muscles in that leg were weak, barely strong enough to support his weight more than a few minutes at a time.

He was lying on the floor, his bad leg angled above him and shaking with fatigue as he counted to ten. On five he was about to give up.

The phone rang.

Gideon let the phone ring as sweat poured down his forehead and stung his eyes. There weren't many people he wanted to talk to. Chances were, it was another reporter. The calls weren't nonstop anymore, but there were still one or two a day.

He didn't move to get it. Even if it wasn't a reporter, there wasn't anyone he wanted to talk to this early in the morning.

When he got to seven, his answering machine got the call. He heard the beep, then a strung out voice. "Yeah, yeah. Malcolm? This you?" Gideon cursed and let his leg drop. With the notoriety of the shoot-out, it was only a matter of time before he started hearing from his share of cranks. The only surprise was that they hadn't joined with the reporters earlier. He needed to change his phone to an unlisted number. "It's Lionel—" the voice continued. Lionel? He suddenly recognized the voice that was hiding under the stressed-out breathlessness. Gideon tried too fast to scramble to his feet. His bad leg gave way, and he fell on his ass.

Lionel kept talking, breathless and sounding as if he was in a daze. "You interested in some info, man? Better deal than last time—"

Gideon pulled himself across the floor, toward the corner table with the phone.

"You want to know something about the fuckup with the goddamn computer, be down at Metro Center, noon. Bring at least tw—three hundred bucks with you."

Gideon grabbed the phone cord and pulled the whole thing off the table. The answering machine fell, springing the tape loose to scuttle across the floor.

"Hello, hello?" He was too late, he was talking to a dial tone.

"Fuck!" He slammed the receiver down on the cradle.

Everyone and their brother in the department had been looking for Lionel since the whole fiasco went down. The guy was a minor street-level dealer who occasionally heard shit that was good enough to make a bust out of— which meant the fucker had no ties to anyone and could vanish into the D.C. underbelly like a rat into a garbage dump. No one knew anything about Lionel, what he was doing, where he was—

Now the fucker who had gotten Rafe killed was calling him, trying to cash in on whatever it was he knew. . .

For all that he wanted to cap the bastard himself, Gideon knew that he wanted to know what it was that Lionel was trying to sell. What he might know about the Secret Service sting that had killed his brother.

However much he hated the fucker right now, he knew that the information would be worth three hundred bucks to him.

He looked across at the clock on his VCR. It was nine o'clock.

He pushed himself up onto the couch and called Captain Davis.

"Captain? I think I've got Lionel. No—I have to be there. . . ."

An aide carrying a handful of papers burst into Colonel Gregory Mecham's office shouting, "Sir, Mother has dropped us a flag on a hot target."

Colonel Mecham looked up from his desk. He didn't wear a uniform; in that he wasn't much different than the other twenty percent of the National Security Agency that were on active military duty. The aide bursting in to his office was one of the people monitoring SIGINT, the NSA's primary, and most overt, mission.

Mecham pushed aside the file he was looking at and waved the man in while he fumbled to remember the fellow's name. "What've we got?" The man had to be new, otherwise he would have just forwarded the data to him. As far as the vast majority of the NSA staff was concerned, all the fax and data lines at Fort Meade were ironclad secure. Mecham was one of about half a dozen people who knew that Mother might be compromised. That was such a sensitive bit of information that command had made the explicit decision not to alter any internal procedures for fear that such a change might inadvertently reveal that the systems might have a security breach.

"It came in on a routine keyword search of telephone traffic—"

"Let me see," Mecham said, holding out his hand for the papers. The man—Gerhard, his name was, Mecham finally remembered—handed over the printouts. The paper was slightly greasy, an effect of a coating that prevented copy machines, faxes, or optical scanners from reading anything more than a fuzzy black image from the pages. Even with that security precaution, the printouts were prestamped with the legend, "Destroy after use."

The printout was from a voice recognition program, and it bore the transcript of a call from a pay phone in Brookland to a Georgetown residence at 8:17 this morning. It had taken Mother about twenty minutes to parse the call through its decision tree and flag it for attention.

The message was ranked about as high priority as Mother could assign, "Vital, immediate attention." Mecham studied the papers letting his eyes scan the highlighted keywords. "Malcolm. . . Lionel. . . Computer. . . " Something about those words, combined with the destination of the call—the address in Georgetown was highlighted as well. Then Mecham saw who lived at that address.

"Gideon Malcolm . . ." he.whispered, beginning to see what this intercept was.

"Sir?"

Mecham waved at his visitor. "Thanks for bringing this to my attention."

Gerhard walked out. Mecham didn't explain the significance of the intercept to him. Instead, he reread the transcript two times, committing the words to memory. Then, without the pages leaving his sight, he picked up a phone that was firmly bolted to his desk—one of the few outside lines that he knew was confirmed secure.

The line didn't even ring once as he put the call through.

"Sir?" Mecham asked.

"What is it?" asked Emmit D'Arcy.

"We have a situation with regard to Zimmerman—"

"Yes?" Mecham heard the breathless anticipation in D'Arcy's voice. Mecham knew that D'Arcy was hoping that someone had finally turned up Dr. Zimmerman. Even so, Mecham knew enough about the missing Doctor—and more importantly, the Doctor knew enough about them—to doubt that any lead on Zimmerman's location would ever come from Mother.

"Mother identified someone as associated with Zimmerman. Name's Lionel. We have a transcript of him setting up a meeting with Detective Gideon Malcolm."

"That Detective?"

"Apparently he has some information to sell."

"Where's the meeting?"

Mecham told him.

"Anything more to the transcript?"

"No, sir."

"Do you have any notes about this, any memos, other records?" "No, sir."

"That's good. Keep me apprised of the situation—but take no action yourself."

Mecham nodded and hung up the phone. Then he slowly fed the transcript into his shredder.