Douglas Preston - Gideon’s Sword

He shook his head with something almost like regret. There would be no challenge here at the police warehouse — none at all.

Three o’clock in the morning. Gideon Crew sauntered down Brown Place and crossed 132nd Street, weaving slightly, muttering to himself. He was wearing baggy jeans and a thin hoodie sporting a Cab Calloway silkscreen—​a nice touch, he thought—​which flopped over his face. The fake gut he had purchased at a theatrical supply store hung hot and heavy on his midriff, and it pressed heavily on the Colt Python snugged into his waistband against his skin.

He crossed the street, stumbled on the opposite curb, and continued down 132nd toward Pulaski Park, alongside the chain-link fence surrounding the police warehouse. The sodium lamps cast a bright urine glow everywhere, and the separate security floods around the warehouse added their own brilliant white to the mix. The gatehouse was empty, the gate shut and locked, the rolls of concertina wire at the top of the fence gleaming in the light.

Reaching the point where the fence made a turn toward an old set of railroad tracks across an overgrown and abandoned parking lot, now used for storage of old tractor-trailers, he staggered around the corner, searching here and there as if looking for a place to piss. There was no one in the area he could see, and he doubted anyone was watching, but he felt certain the surveillance cameras were recording his every move; they probably weren’t monitored in real time, but they surely would be scrutinized later.

Staggering alongside the fence, he unzipped his fly, took a steaming leak, then continued to the tracks. Turning again, now out of sight from the street, he suddenly crouched, reached into his pocket, and pulled a stocking down over his face. The bottom of the chain-link fence was anchored into a cement apron with bent pieces of rebar and could not be pulled up. Reaching under his baggy sweatshirt, he pulled out a pair of bolt cutters and cut the links along the bottom, then up one side beside a pole. Grasping the cut section of links, he bent them inward. In another moment he was inside. He pushed the flap of chain link back into place and looked around.

The warehouse had two huge doors in the front and back, into which had been set smaller doors. He scooted up to the back door and found, as expected, a numerical keypad with a small LED screen to set or turn off the alarm. No peephole or window — the door was blank metal.

Naturally, he didn’t know the code to turn off the alarm. But there was someone who did, inside; all he needed to do was summon him.

He knocked on the door and waited.

Silence.

He knocked again, louder. “Yo!” he called.

And now he could hear, inside, the sound of the guard moving toward the door.

“Who is it?” came the disembodied voice.

“Officers Halsey and Medina,” Gideon barked out in a loud, officious voice. “You okay? We got a silent alarm going at the precinct house.”

“Silent alarm? I don’t know anything about it.” Gideon waited as the guard pressed the password into the keypad on the other side. The numbers came up only as asterisks on the external LED screen.

As the door began to open, Gideon ducked back around the corner, then fled to the outdoor wrecking yard he’d previously picked out as a hiding place. He climbed a stack of pancaked cars and lay down on top, watching and waiting.

“Hey!” shouted the guard at the threshold of the open door, looking about in a panic but not daring to venture outside. “Who’s there?” There was real alarm in his voice.

Gideon waited.

An alarm began to whoop — the guard had pulled it, right on cue — and within five minutes the cop cars arrived, three of them screeching up at the curb, the occupants leaping out. Six cops.

Gideon smiled. The more the merrier.

They began a search of the place, three taking the inside of the warehouse, and three searching the wrecking yard. Naturally, most of them being out of shape, they did not attempt to climb the stacks of crushed cars. Gideon watched them poking and shining their lights all over for about thirty minutes, amusing himself by reconstructing the complex bass line of the Cecil Taylor number he’d listened to the previous afternoon. They then inspected the perimeter fence but, as he’d figured, missed the carefully concealed gap he’d created.

Meanwhile, just as he’d hoped, the other three cops and the guard were coming and going from the warehouse without bothering to shut, lock, or alarm the door in their haste. Finally, search completed, the six cops gathered in the parking lot with the guard beside their cars, where they radioed back to the precinct.

Gideon climbed down the heap of flattened cars, ran out of the junkyard, flitted across the parking lot, and flattened himself against the warehouse wall. He crept up to the door, which was still halfway open, and slipped inside.

Keeping to the shadows, he found a new hiding place inside the warehouse, in a far corner behind two deep rows of chain-link cages, each protecting a car. It was stifling in the building, the muggy dead air redolent of gasoline, oil, and burned rubber.

Another fifteen minutes passed and the guard came back in, shutting and locking the door behind him and resetting the alarm. Gideon watched as the man walked the length of the warehouse and settled into a lighted area at the far end, replete with a chair and desk, a huge bank of CCTV monitors — and a television set.

And sure enough, the guard turned on the set, swung his feet up, and began to watch. It was some old show, and every few moments there was a laugh track. He listened. Was that really the penetrating voice of Lucille Ball and the answering bark of Ricky Ricardo? God bless the unions, Gideon thought, that had fought so hard for the right of municipal employees on night duty to have access to a TV set.

On his hands and knees, Gideon crawled along the row of cages, peering inside, until at last he found the wrecked Ford Escape. He removed the bolt cutters and a thick cotton rag. Winding the rag around the first chain link, he waited for the laugh track; made the cut; rewound the rag around the next link; waited for the laugh track; cut again.

He finished as the show ended with the usual burst of pseudo-Copacabana music. Opening the flap he’d created, he crawled inside.

The car was an absolute mess. It had been pried apart and cut into several pieces that were so mangled they were only vaguely recognizable as belonging to a vehicle. It was still drenched in blood and gore and smelled like a butcher shop on a hot summer’s day. Crawling around it, Gideon located the rear passenger area where Wu had been sitting and wormed his way inside. The seat was sticky with blood.

Trying his best to tune this out, he forced his hands into the space behind and groped around. Almost immediately he felt something hard and small. He grasped it, slipped it into a ziplock bag he pulled from his pocket, and sealed the bag with a feeling of triumph.

A cell phone.

In Roland Blocker’s four years of working the night shift at the warehouse, nothing had ever happened. Absolutely nothing. Night after night it was the same routine, the same rounds, the same comforting parade of late-night, black-and-white television sitcoms. Blocker loved the peace and quiet of the vast space. He had always felt safe, cocooned in the warehouse with its heavy metal doors and alarms and ceaselessly vigilant cameras, all safely enclosed within a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped by concertina wire. He’d never been bothered, no burglary attempts, nothing. After all, there was nothing to steal either inside or out — except wrecked cars, cars hauled out of the rivers with dead bodies in them, cars found with bodies locked in their trunks, burned-out cars, drug-smuggling cars, shot-up cars. What was there to steal?