"Be great if there was something in there, wouldn't it?"
Gideon looked at Rafe. If there was any sarcasm there, it didn't show. But that wouldn't have been like Rafe anyway. The irritating thing was, Rafe was proud of him. Proud he'd made the force, even prouder when he'd made detective—even if D.C. robbery was not a glamorous assignment.
Never once was Rafe intentionally condescending to him. He was probably genuinely excited about the possibility of Lionel's tip actually panning out. The theft of the Daedalus was big news—the high-tech
robbery of the century. Any cops—and any Feds—involved in its recovery would get an immediate boost to their careers.
Gideon wondered if it might all be wishful thinking on his part. Maybe Rafe was right and he had let himself be conned. The Daedalus theft had gotten enough airtime that Lionel—or the driver he was friends with—probably had seen enough of it to invent the story. Gideon wondered if, right now, Lionel was drinking, smoking, or shooting up the hundred bucks that he'd given him, having a good stoned laugh at his expense.
"Have you ever seen one?" Raphael asked.
"A Daedalus?" .
"Uh-huh."
Gideon shrugged. And kept watching through the binoculars. "Just the pictures in the news, like everyone else. Oversize filing cabinet mated with an air-conditioning unit."
"Can't be disconnected from external power for more than twenty hours, or the chips fry—right?"
"Something like that. Lionel said that the guy was bringing a refrigerated trailer."
"That's how they hijacked it in the first place."
Gideon knew that Rafe was saying that Lionel would have known to add that detail. Everyone with a TV would know that the Daedalus couldn't last long without its massive cooling unit.
Nightline had gone into depth explaining the peculiarities of the Daedalus. The processors in the thing were made from a high-grade ceramic superconductor, as near room temperature as anyone had been able to get them— but they still needed to be kept at an unhumanly low temperature—minus twenty Fahrenheit. The computer itself was about the size of a stack of four briefcases. The rest of the thousand-pound machine consisted of refrigeration units and a backup power supply.
Twenty-five of the things had been built to date. They were the most powerful supercomputers ever created. They made a Sun Worksation or a Cray look like a pocket calculator.
And if anyone let the cooling system go, it would become a fifty-million-dollar paperweight.
"When you got the warrant for this stakeout, did you get one for Con Ed?" Raphael asked.
Obviously, if the computer was here, the thieves had to have it plugged in somewhere. Gideon had known that and had checked it out as soon as he heard from Lionel. "It didn't amount to anything. All they have is the meter reading from about six months ago."
"Six months?"
Gideon nodded. "The building's empty. They cut off the power back in August."
"What's that, then?" Raphael said. Gideon lowered his binoculars and looked at him. Raphael pointed toward the front of the building.
"What's what?" Gideon asked.
"By the front," he said.
Gideon raised his binoculars again, and turned away from the parking area where he had been concentrating most of his attention. The place was an old brick structure, and the window and front doors were boarded over with graffiti-clad plywood. The streetlights washed the stairs to the front, so it was hard to make out the small light that hung in the alcove just above the boarded-up entrance. Knowing where to look, though, Gideon could see a small cage set in the upper part of the doorway's arch. Inside it, a dim yellow light glowed. The bulb was almost lost in the sodium shine of the streetlight, but it was obviously lit.
"Good eyes."
"Power's supposed to be cut?" Raphael asked.
"Supposed to be." Gideon nodded. "Now do you believe we've got something here?"
"Something," Raphael said. "Though your informant probably handed you a meth lab."
Gideon hated to admit it, but his brother was probably right. He usually was about things like this. Irritating, but that was one of the reasons Rafe was the FBI agent and Gideon was just a District cop. The more Gideon looked at this old building, the more he wondered why someone would stash a supercomputer here. But something was going on here.
Gideon set down his binoculars. "Okay, let's forget the truck. It probably isn't coming." He picked up the radio and called in his location, telling the dispatcher that he was going to serve a warrant on an abandoned building.
When he put the microphone down, Raphael asked, "Aren't you going to call in some backup?"
"As everyone points out, this is probably nothing. I haven't seen any sign of activity in there for the past three hours. I call for backup now, I'll get my ass reamed for wasting city resources."
"Uh-huh," Raphael got out and drew his gun.
Gideon got out on his side and looked at Raphael, "Observer, huh?"
He grinned and said, "Haven't been in the field in three years. Nice to get the blood pumping again."
Gideon shook his head and pulled out a Mag-lite from under his seat and drew his own weapon.
They walked slowly up to the building, Gideon watched the dead windows for any sign of movement, but nothing stirred, and no other lights showed inside the structure.
Raphael actually took the lead by a few steps. "I wonder if that light out front is on a different meter."
Gideon shrugged. "Drug dealers hijack power all the time. Someone could have wired a single room in this place, and didn't realize the front light was on the same circuit." "So you do think we've got a meth lab now?"
"I don't know what we have." Gideon grinned at Raphael. "But we do have a warrant."
The building loomed over them as they approached. It was a five-story structure of red brick, the windows set into pointed arches. On the first two stories, the windows were boarded over with plywood. From there on down, the building was almost solid graffiti.
They reached one corner of the building and one spray-paint logo stood out. Gideon noted it in passing. It was a red Hebrew character, " N" Since when do we have Jewish street gangs tagging walls?
"We've been here for hours," Raphael whispered, his breath fogging in the cold air. "Maybe your truck pulled up around back."
Gideon followed Raphael as he ducked into an alley next to the building. The narrow passage was piled with trash and smelled like overripe sewage. They had to step over broken bottles, empty six-packs, used condoms, and someone's old spare tire.
They emerged where the parking lot's weed-shot asphalt wrapped around the building. Gideon noticed that most of the debris was pushed off to the side of the building back here. There wasn't any truck, but there was a crumbling concrete ramp down into the side of the building. It ended in a rolling garage door.
Gideon looked at the garage door, and glanced at Raphael. "Could we have missed a truck?"
Raphael looked down to where the lot curved around the building. "I thought you had the entrance covered?"
Gideon nodded. He had. There was no way they could've missed a truck showing up.
The lot behind the building was bordered on two sides by neighbor buildings. The fourth side, opposite their building, was a vacant lot hiding behind a rusty chain-link fence. A streetlight on a utility pole cast an artificial glow over the whole back lot, making it look like a stage set.
"There's only the one way back here," Gideon said. "Maybe it was already here when we arrived. It's got to be a bitch moving that thing."
"Would it take more than five hours?"
Raphael was right about that point. Reportedly, the thieves who hijacked the Daedalus had taken less than fifteen minutes to move the computer into their truck. Upon reflection, Gideon doubted that the transaction Lionel had told him about would take much longer.