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.
1.07 Tue. Mar. 3
LIONEL sat on the Metro, passing stop after stop, waiting for the shit to hit the fan. He had been on the trains almost constantly since getting on in Brookland. Half the time he had a plan in his head, get the money from the cop, get back on the train, and make for the airport.
The other half of the time he was feeling his gun bite him in the gut where he'd shoved it in his waistband, and watching the people who got on and off the train. He studied each face as if it belonged to someone who might want to kill him. It was nuts, but he felt like he was being watched. He had that feeling every time he got on the Metro. It had to do with the cameras at every stop. Today, it was worse. Every time he looked up, he saw Davy's glassy eyes staring at him from behind the lenses.
He had changed trains a few times, and had gone as far as Arlington, just to avoid someone following him. But those damn cameras were everywhere, making him nervous.
The people on the train made him nervous, too. Fortunately, none of them chose to sit by him. His psycho stare was giving him some space.
When they reached Metro Center, he raced to the door and bumped into a lawyer type—three-piece suit and all. Lionel might never have noticed the guy if it wasn't for something the guy carried—keys, pens, Lionel couldn't tell—stabbing him in the hand.
"Pardon," the man said, without even looking at him. Lionel wanted to tear into the bastard, but the crowd leaving the train had already separated them.
"Fuck out of my face," Lionel yelled at the guy, through the closing doors of the train. Frustration was thick enough to make him sweat. He pushed aside a woman who was just a little too close to him and muttered, "Lucky shit. Don't know how lucky . . ."
The train was pulling away, and the motion ignited a wave of vertigo that sent the inside of his head spinning. The walls were about to close in on him.
Lionel stumbled out onto the platform. Cradling his hand, which was burning like a motherfucker, he looked at it, and all he saw was a red welt where something had scraped across the skin. Just a scratch, but it hurt like the asshole had driven a spike through his hand.