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.'
