It was a double-barreled single-action shotgun. The barrels were sawed off about as far as they could be and still fire. The stock was sawed down to a pistol grip.
"Well, this isn't legal." Gideon broke open the shotgun and dumped out the shells. He put the empty gun on the counter and opened up the refrigerator. There were some bottles of beer, a roll of twenties, a box of shotgun shells, and about six ice trays. Gideon pulled out an ice tray and put in on the counter. It didn't hold ice. Each little compartment held two or three tiny baggies. Each baggie held a crystalline powder.
Gideon pulled himself back upright with the crutch.
"And that really isn't legal."
"Fuck you," the Jamaican said. "You don't have a warrant—"
Gideon shook his head. "You look like a smart guy. Do I really need to explain probable cause to you?"
"You ain't on duty, Cop." He was looking back and forth between Gideon and Kendal.
"Like the Vice boys give two shits. The forfeiture laws are what keep those boys financed. You know that. Even if you walk, with conspiracy to distribute you can kiss this bar gone." Gideon looked around and said, "How understanding is the owner?"
"Fuck," the Jamaican said.
"So what's this?" Gideon picked up a tiny baggie. "Crystal meth? Heroin—"
"Man, you going to arrest me or what?"
"Don't be a pessimist. Talk to me, and the two of us walk out of here like nothing happened."
"What you want to know?"
"You're going to tell me about two regulars. Lionel and Davy."
They took the bartender into the men's room for a private chat. They sat him on the throne while Kendal watched out the front door for more of the horoscope brothers.
The Jamaican had a lot to say. He spoke fast, apparently trying to get Gideon and Kendal out of his dread-locked hair as quickly as possible.
Lionel and Davy both had hung out at The TLodiac a lot. Gideon figured that, since they apparently took calls here. The two were fairly tight, though they didn't seem to work together. Lionel was a small-time dealer and Davy was into much bigger scores hijacking semis and stealing construction equipment. The last time the bartender saw Davy, he was bitching about some score going sour.
About the score the Jamaican claimed to not know any details, beyond the fact that it was a hundred grand for a single truck—an empty truck. Davy began bitching about the score going south about two days before the Daedalus was supposed to have been picked up by a refrigerated truck.
Gideon was certain now that Davy, Franklin Alexander Jones, had to have been the driver who was supposed to move the Daedalus. The hundred grand clinched it. That kind of money would be out of line for just about anything else Davy could've been working on.
The last time the Jamaican saw Lionel, Lionel had just gotten a phone call from Davy—the bartender thought they were going to meet somewhere.
The call was timed right to be the last thing Davy did before he OD'd. As if Gideon needed another reason for Davy's death to look suspicious, he—like Lionel— seemed to have chosen an odd time to go tripping out of his skull, right before he was going to meet with the buddy who had sold him out.
Gideon wondered if Davy had figured that out before he died.
He pressed the point, getting all the details he could out of the Jamaican. The person who hired Davy—all the bartender knew was that Davy called the guy, "the Doctor." This Doctor had never shown in The Zodiac. That didn't surprise Gideon. Folks who'd go around shipping multimillion-dollar computers—stolen or not—probably didn't frequent places like The Zodiac.
However, the Jamaican said there was this one guy Davy had talked to here, a guy who didn't fit. This white guy with a buzz cut—he'd looked like a college student according to the Jamaican—had met with
Davy twice. The first time was right before Davy had started talking about the hundred-grand job. The last time was the day Davy lost the score.
This was what Gideon was looking for, some connection with the people who'd set up the job at the warehouse. Unfortunately, the Jamaican didn't know much of anything about the guy. He thought the guy's name might have been Mike. He'd worn a khaki army jacket over an MIT college sweatshirt.
The last thing Gideon asked him was about the symbol Davy had carried in his wallet. He pulled a wrinkled piece of paper out of his pocket and laid it on the Jamaican's lap. It had a " N " written on it.
"This mean anything to you?"
The Jamaican looked down at the paper and said, "Ho? Xo? You got handwriting problems, man."
Gideon took back the paper and looked up at Kendal. "Let's go."
Back in Kendal's BMW Gideon said, "I owe you for helping me out back there."
"You owe me a lot. I get two hundred an hour for that kind of bodyguard duty." He looked at his watch. "I say you owe me at least fifty bucks."
"What the hell was it you pulled on them."
"Heckler & Koch MP55D—your basic police-slash-antiterrorist weapon."
"Can you legally carry that thing around?"
"Now that's a disingenuous question." Kendal accelerated out down New York Avenue.
"MIT . . ." Gideon said to himself.
"What?" Kendal asked as he jerked to a stop at a red light.
"Someone trying to get their hands on a supercomputer? A lot of tech-heads around that kind of operation."
"Uh-huh," Kendal said. "You're basing this all on a Rastafarian's description of a sweatshirt. You don't know for sure even if this Mike guy ever went to college—"
"It's a lead."
"No talking you out of this, is there?"
"I really don't give a shit if it's D'Arcy or the Pope behind this. Someone's responsible for Rafe's death, and I'm not going to let Magness hang me for it."
Kendal sighed. "Okay, I'll back you up on this thing. You can't do this alone."
"Thanks."
"So what was it you showed the bartender?"
Gideon took the paper out of his pocket. While he was doing it, the light changed and cars started honking. Kendal pulled up, through the intersection.
Kendal glanced over at the paper and the symbol Gideon had copied. "What is it?"
"I don't know. A symbol associated with the people who hired Davy. It was on a card in his wallet."
Kendal kept glancing from the road to the handwritten N.
"It's an aleph," Gideon said. "The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. But I haven't figured out what it means with that circle attached. It isn't a word—it might be some sort of occult symbol, but if so I don't know what it means."
"I don't think it's occult," Kendal said. "I didn't have much science in high school, but I think we're looking at a subscripted constant of some sort."
"Huh?"
"I think what you have here is some sort of mathematical or scientific symbol. You said we're dealing with a bunch of 'tech-heads.' "
"Why you think so? Do you know what it is?"
"I have no clue. But I remember how that kind of techie stuff looked. And putting a little zero at the base of the thing makes it look like some sort of constant that someone would put in an equation somewhere."
"I thought they only used Greek letters for that? You know, like pi."
"They probably ran out of the Greek alphabet a century ago. Talk to a mathematician or an engineer. I bet one of them would know what that means."
Gideon had a gut feeling about what university he would find one at.
1.12 Mon. Mar 9
GIDEON drove to Cambridge. He parked at MIT in the early afternoon, after spending hours on the road. He had to sit in the parking lot for about half an hour just to allow his wounded leg and shoulder to rest. He had driven here in a fog of denial. He had to keep telling himself that he was acting perfectly reasonable.