The message flashed off and left the screen with a near-empty desktop. The only object was a small icon centered on the screen. The icon was a tiny grid half-filled with mulitcolored dots.
The icon was titled, "Life."
Gideon took the mouse and slid the cursor over and clicked it.
The drives whirred and suddenly the screen came alive. The whole screen was filled with a grid. In the center of the screen was a small group of dots blinking on and off. As he watched, the pattern of dots grew and mutated, spilling over into the rest of the screen covering the whole grid with a symmetrical, constantly changing pattern of dots.
There was something hypnotic about the pattern. After a few moments of explosive activity, the dot pattern dwindled off and vanished. After displaying a blank grid for a few moments, the program ended, returning Gideon to the bare desktop.
He did what he could to see what else was on the machine, but Julia had left it so bare that even basic parts of the operating system were missing.
The only information he could glean from the system was that the latest any file was modified was at 7:15 AM on December 31. Which seemed to coincide with how long this house had been abandoned. New Year's Eve.
An elaborate message, nothing more. The computer was little more than a digital equivalent of the Aleph spray-painted on the wall.
This means something, even if you don’t know what.
Infinity.
Life.
He returned to the desktop and the enigmatic icon. He clicked it again and watched another pattern of multicolored dots go through their paces. He wondered what it meant. The certainty began to sink in that he had to know this woman in order to discover what was happening.
"What the hell did you do for the NSA?" Gideon asked the computer.
And why does she need a Daedalus?
2.03 Tue. Mar. 17
GIDEON drove across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge as late morning light was picking out the New York skyline. He headed into Brooklyn with almost no sleep, looking for Julia Zimmerman's family.
The Zimmerman family lived on a block of narrow frame houses. Again, he was cautious about pulling up to park, circling twice before he pulled to the curb on the side of the street opposite the Zimmermans' address.
Their house dated from the early 1900s and had made it nearly a century without any vinyl siding. The clapboards were painted a cream color that was almost yellow, and the trim was colored a deep violet. The postage-stamp front lawn, all two feet of it, was spilling over with brown plants that marched back to the porch. Gideon thought it must be quite a garden in the spring. Right now, in mid-March, it seemed long dead.
It made Gideon think of Rafe and Kendal.
He crossed the street without his crutch. He limped, and his leg hurt, but he bore the pain. When he climbed up onto the Zimmermans' porch, he could lean against the doorframe and rest his leg.
Gideon stood there a while, looking at the porch. There was a patio set hiding under vinyl covers. Depressions in the candy-striped vinyl had collected dirty water. In a corner next to the door, a ceramic gnome, about three feet high, stood half-facing the wall, as if trying to hide.
Gideon checked his watch. It was about ten-thirty.
He pressed the doorbell and inside he heard chimes play the first few bars of "It's a Small World."
He stood there a long time, waiting, not knowing exactly what to expect. Given the neighborhood, he wouldn't be surprised if Julia's parents looked out on the porch, saw a black man, and dolled the cops.
The front door swung open behind the screen, and a small, wrinkled, gray-haired woman peered at him through the mesh. She wore a floral print blouse that was at odds with the time of year. "Can I help you?"
From deeper inside the house he heard a male voice ask, "Who is it, Ellie?"
That answered Gideon's primary question. From the records he'd unearthed, he knew that Julia's parents were named Ellice and David Zimmerman. Gideon gave Ellice his most reassuring expression. It was something he did a lot as a cop, and it rarely worked—people were always convinced that he was about to tell them someone had died. Fortunately, since he worked robbery, he didn't have that job much. For all the supposed glamour of the homicide boys, they still told a lot of mothers that their children were dead.
That was all running through his head as he asked, "Are you Ellice Zimmerman?" He was picturing her reaction when he identified himself, and asked about her daughter. Some parents, faced with that, would turn hysterical—
Ellice nodded, "What can I do for you?"
"You're Julia Zimmerman's mother?" Gideon continued.
Ellice smiled, and her eyes lit up. The transformation was eerie, the way all suspicion was wiped from her face. Before she was almost dour, with deep frown lines crossing her jaw. But at the mention of Julia's name, her face took on a youthful cast that seemed to erase decades. Now Gideon could see some of Julia that he'd seen in her pictures. "Yes, dear. Yes, I am."
Gideon smiled back and said, "I'm Detective Gideon Malcolm, from the Washington D.C. Police Department." He braced himself for the inevitable torrent. A cop asking about a child, that always opened an emotional can of worms, and Gideon braced himself for Ellice's reaction. Why are you looking for her? What’s happened to her? Why aren’tyou doing anything about it? She never did anything wrong. ..
Ellice managed to surprise him.
"You must come in," she said as she pushed open the screen door. Gideon began to feel that there was something more deeply wrong about Ellice's expression. "Come on, wipe your feet."
Gideon did as requested, disturbed that she hadn't even asked for his identification.
"Who is it, Ellie?" The male voice repeated. It came from upstairs.
Ellice called up the stairs. "It's one of Julia's friends.
He's from Washington." She held out a hand and said, "Can I take your jacket?"
Gideon looked at her hand, spotted and trembling slightly. He thought of the gun clipped to his belt. "If you don't mind, I'd like to keep it on."
Ellice walked into the house and asked, "Can I get you some coffee, tea—"
Gideon followed into her living room and nodded. "Coffee would be great, thanks." Did she just not hear him say "detective" or "police?"
"Please, sit down," she motioned to a long yellow couch.
Gideon sat and looked around at the house that Julia Zimmerman must have grown up in. The decor was a few decades out of sync. The wallpaper was faded geometric shapes on a mylar backing that was worn to a matte gray. A pair of olive-green enamel table lamps flanked the lemon-yellow couch. A long dead console television sat across the room from an equally ancient Hammond organ whose fake wood-grain lamination was separating from the particleboard beneath it. A fat pink princess phone sat on one of the end tables like a dead salmon.
Unlike Julia's mantel, the mantel here, across from the couch, was covered with pictures. The frames crowded the space and climbed up the wall to either side of the flat mirror mounted above the faux gas fireplace. Most of the pictures seemed to be of Julia or the younger woman— Gideon suspected a younger sister.
Gideon stared at a number of the pictures and had the eerie realization that none of them seemed to be more recent than Julia's high school graduation. He heard someone coming down the stairs, preceded by the odor of pipe smoke.
The man stepped out into the living room. David Zimmerman was a tall man, stockily built. His hair was still brown, but had receded considerably. He wore thick trifocal glasses that fractured his eyes when he looked at Gideon. He was shaking his head, and seemed about to say something when his wife returned with the coffee.