Zimmerman's Algorithm Read online

  Volynskji turned off the television.

  1.03 Mon. Feb. 23

  THE days Gideon spent at the hospital blended into a single, painful blur. Long stretches of second-guessing his walk into the Secret Service's trap, broken only by the physical discomfort of the nurses changing dressings on his leg, and draining the wound in his shoulder. Antibiotics and painkillers kept him semiconscious.

  After the first few days they moved him into a room with a television, but most of the time he was too groggy to follow what was happening on it.

  His memory of the news was a disjointed series of reports on his progress. Watching reporters talk about him was an alien sensation, like thinking of himself in the third person.

  On the news, Gideon graduated from critical to guarded to stable. Though he, himself, couldn't identify any changes.

  The one image that penetrated the haze of antibiotics was his brother's televised funeral. The broadcast caught him completely unaware. He was too out of it to realize what day it was, and it was several minutes in before he realized what he was watching.

  On the TV he saw the flag-draped casket; officers in dress blues; Chief Conroy and Mayor Harris alongside the Director of the FBI; a series of speakers talking about heroic sacrifices. . .

  No one said the words "screw up."

  The first time he saw the funeral, televised live on CNN, all he could think of was that no one had bothered to tell him that they were burying his brother, and that he wasn't there. Halfway in, the nurses realized what was on TV and came in and shut it off. He protested, yelling until he was sedated. . .

  However, the following week gave him ample opportunity to see the images of the funeral again and again. By the day of his release he had seen his sister-in-law take the flag from Raphael's coffin about twenty-five times on seven different networks.

  The last day, he watched it again, as part of a special on the whole Daedalus disaster. The tube was out of his nose, he had a fresh cast on his arm, and he was more lucid than he had been through most of his stay. Which meant that there was little reprieve from the numb sense of loss he felt, staring at the screen, at a funeral they didn't let him attend.

  He watched the camera pan across the first row of the mourners. Next to Monica, Raphael's widow, stood Alexander Lloyd, the Attorney General of the United States. He was one of a half-dozen white faces in the crowd other than Conroy, and he looked very uncomfortable. Gideon thought he should look uncomfortable. He was probably there to offer some gesture of apology, but Gideon thought his presence there was in horrid taste. It gave the appearance of being some cynical attempt to reclaim the political capital Lloyd had lost when his agents shot up Rafe.

  Gideon was glad that Lloyd never got up to speak. He could tell Lloyd's presence was a strain on most of the attendees. Gideon noticed that the Director of the Bureau, stood far away from Lloyd, and carefully avoided referring to him, or the Secret Service, during his short eulogy.

  "Damn." Gideon whispered.

  As he watched the funeral, the door to his room opened.

  Gideon turned, expecting to see an orderly with a wheelchair ready to take him down to a waiting taxi.

  Instead, he saw Monica, his sister-in-law. He felt his breath catch and his hand shook the remote as he tried to shut off the TV. The remote tumbled out of his hand and clattered to the wall, dangling on its cord.

  Monica stood there looking at him, her expression set into a hard mask as the TV continued with Mayor Harris' speech, "—a man who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the service of his fellow man—"

  "Oh, God," Gideon said after a moment, trying to gather his wits about him. "I'm sorry." The words sounded so weak and lame as they fell out of his mouth. He wanted to say that he felt the loss, too, that he mourned for his brother as she did for her husband, but he couldn't bring himself to say it—

  "You're sorry?" she said. She almost spit the words. "Is that it, Gideon? You're sorry?"

  Gideon was at a loss. He felt himself tied up in a knot of guilt and grief that kept his voice from working right. "I wish I could do something."

  "Like what?" Monica asked softly. She looked around the room. Her face was angry, ready to tear into him, but her eyes were shiny with grief. She walked to a pile of cards and flowers that the staff had been piling on a dresser opposite the door.

  Gideon watched her, and felt a need to justify himself. "From people on the force, the rest is just from people who saw me on the news."

  Monica stood with her back to him. Her shoulders started shaking.

  "Are you all right?" Gideon asked her.

  "How dare you," Monica whispered.

  Gideon sat up, but couldn't move any closer because of the cast on his leg.

  "How dare you survive." She spoke so low that Gideon didn't know if he was meant to hear the words. Even so, he could feel them rip a hole inside him. What could he do? She was right. It was his fault. He was the one who should have died.

  Monica turned around, and the hardness was back in her face, and her eyes were drier. "I came here because I knew Rafe loved you, and I know he would want—more than anything in the world—for me to forgive you—"

  "You don't have to—"

  "Let me get through this," she spoke through clenched teeth, harshly enough that Gideon winced. "I came here because it's what Rafe would want. It was a mistake. I'm not that strong." Her hands balled up into fists, and she pounded them at her sides as she paced in front of the bed.

  "I look at you, and I don't see Rafe's little brother. I see the man who took my husband away."

  Gideon looked down. He could feel the pulse in his neck, and acid burned in his stomach.

  "Rafe would have hated this—that I can't forgive you—but I can't help but see that as your fault too."

  "Maybe we should talk about—"

  "Talk? Talk about what? How you lured Rafe here from a safe desk job, and led him in front of a firing squad?" Monica shook her head. "If you want to talk, talk to the vultures outside. It was a mistake for me to come here."

  She forced her way past a cop pushing an empty wheelchair into the room. The guy looked over his shoulder at Monica leaving, then rolled the chair into the room. "Your ride home's here, Detective Malcolm."

  Vultures? Gideon thought.

  They wheeled him out to a waiting patrol car. He was wearing sweats the hospital provided, and he had a pair of crutches propped between his knees.

  They had barely gotten him out of the door, when he was confronted with a sea of faces. Microphones and lenses aimed at Gideon as an officer forced a path through the throng. An orderly pushed his wheelchair after the cop, toward the patrol car.

  The journey between the doors and the waiting car was only a matter of yards, but with the reporters in their way,. the passage seemed interminable. All of them shouted questions, talking over each other, not even leaving space for breath between them, much less an answer.

  "Can you confirm that there's a wrongful death suit being filed against the Treasury Department?"

  "Are you going to testify that the Secret Service fired first?"

  "The President has promised 'a full investigation,' do you have any comments?"

  "Do you intend to continue working for the D.C. Police Department?"

  "Do you think there should be a criminal investigation of the agents involved?"

  It was worse when they actually reached the car, and Gideon had to maneuver out of the chair and into the passenger seat. He felt vulnerable and under attack. He held his head down and tried not to listen. He stared at the progress of his feet across the asphalt. He pushed himself along with the crutches, the reporters just barely staying out of his way.

  "How do you feel about your brother's death?"

  Did someone actually ask that?

  He managed to get both legs inside, and the orderly slammed the door shut. Gideon watched out the window and saw the orderly disappear in the onrush of people.

  Microphones knocked on
the windows as the driver tried to pull away. He was forced to use his siren and rev the engine threateningly to move reporters out of the way. Even so, he had to drive out of the parking lot at a crawl to avoid bowling over the press.

  Gideon looked out the window and stared at the reporters as they passed. Some were still shouting

  questions, as if they, somehow expected an answer. Gideon felt a pit inside himself and whispered, "I didn't know it was this bad." He wasn't referring to just the reporters. The driver shrugged and blew the siren again.

  The police car went to Dupont Circle and took P Street northwest, toward the fringes of Georgetown. To his father's house. The place Gideon lived was better than most detectives—especially D.C. detectives. When his father had died, he had left Gideon and Raphael the house and some money. He and Rafe had come to an agreement; Gideon had bought Rafe's share of the house with Gideon's share of the money.

  As the police car rolled up to his house, Gideon realized that he felt guilty about that.

  The scene outside his father's brownstone was no better than the one outside the hospital. He didn't know if the reporters from the hospital had beat them here, or if there had been a press encampment lying in wait for him to come home.

  The driver got out first, to help him out of the car. As soon as the door opened, the questions started again.

  He tried to ignore the questions, and the press of people close to him. The cop next to him said something, but he couldn't hear him over the din.

  Gideon concentrated on climbing up the steps on his crutches, one, two. . .

  On the top step he bumped one of the reporters and one of his crutches slipped out from under him. He tumbled forward and his escort managed to catch him by his broken arm. The impact jerked him up short, slamming his teeth shut firmly enough to make his jaw ache—

  "Goddamn." He choked the curse out through clenched teeth.

  He spun around on the reporters. The patrolman started to say something. "Detective Malcolm—" The uncertainty in his voice showed he suspected what was coming.

  Gideon swayed a bit on his remaining crutch. And the patrolman held out a steadying hand. "You bastards won't be satisfied until you have another dead cop on your hands!"

  The reporters didn't seem at all taken aback by the sudden confrontation. One shouted, louder than the rest, "Do you have a statement about what happened?"

  The question was a fist slamming into his stomach, the shamelessness of these people made him gasp, wordless for a few moments as they shouted questions about his brother.

  The patrolman tried to pull him back toward his doorway, away from the confrontation.

  "You want a statement—" Gideon sucked in a breath, "Here's your statement—"

  "Detective," the patrolman whispered into his ear, "we're not supposed to comment about—"

  Gideon wasn't listening. "You're a collection of shameless parasites drooling over my dead brother, and you're going into rating orgasms because it might be someone's fuckup. I don't want anything to do with any of you. I might be on disability leave, but I'm still a cop, and anyone standing on my property after the next five seconds is going to be arrested for trespassing, harassment, and anything else I can think of."

  The bastards didn't seem to miss a beat. Someone even called out, "What problems do you see in the coverage of your brother's death?"

  Gideon turned around, shaking. The cop handed him his fallen crutch and helped him get his keys out of the fanny-pack the hospital had given him to carry his possessions.

  The cop helped him into the house and they slammed the door on the reporters, whose only reaction to Gideon's statement was a slight retreat down the steps to the sidewalk.

  "Was that a good idea?" the cop asked him.

  "I don't really give a shit."

  The cop tried to stay and help him out, but Gideon was in no mood for company. After a few minutes, the patrolman left.

  Once he was alone, Gideon hobbled around the first floor, pulling shades, closing drapes, trying to complete some sense of privacy. The phone rang three times while he was wandering around. After each time proved to be a reporter, he took the phone off the hook.

  He wanted to go upstairs to change, but he didn't feel up to it. He collapsed on a threadbare couch that had been in the same spot since he was six years old and closed his eyes. In ten minutes he had fallen into an exhausted sleep.

  Franklin Alexander Jones, Davy to his friends, sat in his apartment sipping a beer and watching a woman named Amber Waves ride some lucky motherfucker to orgasm on his giant 29-inch television

  screen. This was the tenth day of him feeling sorry for himself. A hundred grand up in smoke. Christ, what a life.

  Davy kept telling himself that it was a damn good thing that the Doctor had called off his end of the job. Otherwise, he might be as dead as that FBI agent. But the whole thing left a bad taste in his mouth.

  Davy thought of that phrase, looked at what Amber Waves was doing on the screen, and started giggling. His beer dropped empty next to seven others on the floor by his end of the couch. He didn't stop laughing until a sour belch gripped him and tore the laugh apart.

  "Oh, fuck." Davy raised his palms to his eyes and rubbed. He felt a wave of vertigo telling him that he was far more drunk than he'd given himself credit for. He shook his head, felt the woozy sensation of blood sloshing from one side of his brain to the other, and decided he needed to get out another six-pack to take the edge off.

  He got up and staggered to the kitchen.

  He should have known it was too good to be true. A hundred grand just to move this Daedalus computer thing out of the office building, north. Of course, that meant hijacking a refrigerated semitrailer, but that was Davy's specialty—semis and heavy construction equipment. He'd boosted everything from backhoes to garbage trucks. He had already picked out his transportation when they called off the job.

  If it hadn't been over the phone, he probably would have slit the throat of the guy who told him. He'd like to cap the bastard, even though it was now all over the news that the Daedalus pickup was some goddamn Fed ambush—one he could have ended up in.

  Davy leaned against the side of the refrigerator and opened it.

  The thing was completely empty except for a single Chinese takeout container laying on its side, leaking sauce that had turned black and smelled like a dead rat he'd found once in a prison John. He needed to go on a beer run.

  He opened the freezer door. Inside, sitting on a six-inch-thick layer of ice, were two ice trays and an old frozen orange juice carton. Davy took out the cardboard cylinder, flipped off the metal lid with his thumb, and shook out a roll of bills on the counter in front of him.

  He stared at the wad of twenties for a few minutes, trying to get his eyes to focus. Need to do a job soon. Running out of cash.

  He decided that he probably should go turn his cell phone and his beeper back on. He'd been out of it a little too long. He needed his regular customers to be able to reach him, or he was going to have go back to boosting cars—which didn't pay nearly enough to support him.

  Back in the living room, Amber was moaning to a rhythmic soundtrack as Davy made his way to the end table where he had tossed his phone and his beeper.

  He turned the beeper's sound back on, and looked at it to see what messages he'd missed.

  Fifteen times, someone had left the number for The Zodiac. He knew the number, he'd taken calls there himself. Somehow, he knew it was Lionel calling. The little shit was in some sort of trouble. He couldn't think of anyone else who'd be calling his beeper twice a day from a strip club.

  Oh, fuck, Davy thought. What’s gotten up his ass?

  He fumbled out the cell phone and walked back toward the center of the room. He swayed a little as he waited for someone to pick up. On the television, Amber Waves undulated under a scrolling list of computer-generated credits.

  "Zodiac, Renny speaking—"

  "It's Davy, Lionel there?"

&
nbsp; "Wait a mo, man—" In the background Davy could hear seventies disco music blaring, and people shouting. He heard Renny shouting Lionel's name.

  After a few minutes, he heard Lionel's voice. "Where the fuck you been?"

  "Me? What's gotten into you, my man? You living at The Zodiac now?"

  "Damn close. I need to hit you up for some cash—"

  Davy shook his head and stumbled back toward the couch. He half sat, half fell, back into his seat. "Shit. You think I'm made of money? I ain't your momma, I'm not here to bail you out of every tight spot you get into."

  "Look, the cops are looking for me, I haven't been able to get to my apartment since I saw you last. I've been crashing at—"

  Davy rubbed his head, the blood was sloshing around again. "Don't give me your goddamn life story. Fuck, you know that job fell through on me. I'm strapped myself. If I don't pull a job out of my ass soon, I'm going to be living at The Zodiac myself."

  "I need to get out of town, Davy."

  "Yeah, so's everyone. D.C. sucks."

  "I'm serious. They want me because of the fucking computer."

  Davy sat up. "What you talking about?"

  "The cops are looking for me 'cause of that goddamn shoot-out where you were going to pick up that thing."

  Davy's vertigo was getting worse. "What do you mean they're looking for you? How the fuck do they know you have anything to do with it—fuck you don’t have anything to do with it—"

  "I don't know, man, but I need, like, three hundred dollars to get out of town."

  "Why they looking for you?" Davy had an evil thought. "You didn't tell anyone about my little job, did you?"

  "Fuck no! What kind of scum you think I am? I didn't tell the cops anything."

  Davy's half-drunken mind had already figured out that Lionel was lying.

  At first Davy'd thought maybe Lionel had let what he'd known about the job slip to someone else who was feeding cops information. Davy would like to believe that. After all, Lionel was supposed to be his friend from the joint. Lionel was supposed to be solid, if not very bright.