"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.
1.11 Sun. Mar 8
The Zodiac was a dark strip club north of New York Avenue, in one of the dozens of depressed areas in the District. It would have been in sight of the capital if it was above ground. Its decor resembled a condemned building. The walls were spray-painted fluorescent colors, and if Gideon stared up through the gloom, he could see pipes hugging the rafters above. It was one of those places that made him feel sick and alone.
The strippers matched the environment, dancing to old Deborah Harry with a passionless fatigue.
The mood of this place, and lack of sleep, made it a little too easy for him to imagine his own future. Old, alone, no family— The fears caught him in the same ache that had been inside him since Raphael was shot.
He had just stepped inside, leaning on his crutches. A minute later, Morris Kendal walked into The Zodiac.
Kendal was bigger than either of the bouncers. He snorted at the place, turning so that every part of it got a good look at his sneer. Gideon might have passed for a regular at this kind of place, but Kendal was dressed at least a grand better than The Zodiac rated.