The Burning Wire

Chapter 25

EIGHT A.M.

Low morning light poured into the townhouse. Lincoln Rhyme blinked and maneuvered out of the blinding stream as he steered his Storm Arrow wheelchair out of the small elevator that connected his bedroom with the lab below.

Sachs, Mel Cooper and Lon Sellitto had assembled an hour earlier.

Sellitto was on the phone and said, “Okay, got it.” He crossed through another name. He hung up. Rhyme couldn’t tell if he’d changed clothes. Maybe he’d slept in the den or downstairs bedroom. Cooper had been home, at least for a time. And Sachs had slept beside Rhyme-for a portion of the night. She was up at five-thirty to keep reviewing employee files and narrowing the list of suspects.

“Where are we?” Rhyme now asked.

Sellitto muttered, “Just talked to McDaniel. They’ve got six and we’ve got six.”

“You mean we’re down to twelve suspects? Let’s-”

“Uhm, no, Linc. We’ve eliminated twelve.”

Sachs said, “The problem is that a lot of the employees on the list are senior. They didn’t put their early careers on their résumés or all of the continuing education computer courses. We have to do a lot of digging to find out if they had the skill to manipulate the grid and rig the device.”

“Where the hell’s the DNA?” Rhyme snapped.

“Shouldn’t be long,” Cooper said. “They’re expediting it.”

“Expediting,” was Rhyme’s sour, muttered response. The new tests generally could be done in a day or two, unlike the old RFPL tests, which could take a week. He didn’t understand why the results weren’t back already.

“And nothing more about Justice For?”

Sellitto said, “Our people’ve been through all their files. McDaniel’s too. And Homeland Security and ATF and Interpol. Nothing on them or Rahman. Zip. Fucking creepy, that cloud zone thing. Sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel.”

Rhyme started to call the lab running the DNA analysis but just as he flicked a finger to the touchpad to make a call, the phone buzzed. He lifted an eyebrow and instantly hit ANSWER CALL.

“Kathryn. Morning. You’re up early.” It was 5 a.m. in California.

“A bit.”

“Anything more?”

“Logan was spotted again-near where he’d been seen before. Now, I just talked to Arturo Diaz.”

The law enforcer was up early too. A good sign.

“His boss is on the case now. The one I mentioned. Rodolfo Luna.”

Luna was, it turned out, very senior indeed: the second in command of the Mexican Ministerial Federal Police, the equivalent of the FBI. Though burdened with the overwhelming task of running drug enforcement operations-and rooting out corruption in government agencies themselves-Luna had eagerly taken over the chance to apprehend the Watchmaker, Dance explained. A threat of another killing in Mexico wasn’t much news, and hardly required someone as high up as Luna, but he was ambitious and he’d be thinking that his cooperation with the NYPD would pay dividends with Mexico’s tenuous allies to the north.

“He’s larger than life. Drives around in his own Lexus SUV, carries two guns… a real cowboy sort.”

“But is he honest?”

“Arturo was telling me that he plays the system but, yes, he’s honest enough. And he’s good. He’s a twenty-year veteran and sometimes goes into the field himself to work a case. He even collects evidence on his own.”

Rhyme was impressed. He’d done the same when he was an active captain on the force and working as head of Investigation Resources. He remembered many times when a young technician was startled to turn around at the sound of a voice and see his boss’s boss’s boss holding a pair of tweezers in gloved hands as he examined a fiber or hair.

“He’s made a name for himself cracking down on economic crimes and human trafficking and terrorism. Put some big people behind bars.”

“And he’s still alive,” Rhyme said. He wasn’t being flippant. The head of the Mexico City police force had been assassinated not long ago.

“He does have a huge security detail,” Dance explained. Then added, “He’d like to talk to you.”

“Give me the number.”

Dance did. Slowly. She’d met Rhyme and knew about his disability. He moved his right index finger over the special touchpad and typed the numbers. They appeared on the flat screen in front of him.

She then said that the DEA was continuing its interview with the man who’d delivered a package to Logan. “He’s lying when he says he doesn’t know what was inside. I watched the video and gave the agents some advice on how to handle the interrogation. The worker would’ve thought drugs or cash and taken a fast look. The fact he didn’t steal it means that it wasn’t those two things. They’re about to start with him again.”

Rhyme thanked her.

“Oh, one thing?”

“Yes?”

Dance gave him a URL of a website. This too Rhyme slowly typed into his browser.

“Go to that site. I thought you’d like to see Rodolfo. I think it’s easier to understand someone when you can picture them.”

Rhyme didn’t know if that was the case or not. In his line of work, he tended not to see many people at all. The victims were usually dead and the ones who’d killed them were long gone by the time he got involved. Given his druthers he’d rather not see anyone.

After disconnecting, though, he called the site up. It was a Mexican newspaper story in Spanish about a huge drug bust, Rhyme deduced. The officer in charge was Rodolfo Luna. The photo accompanying the story showed a large man surrounded by fellow federal policemen. Some wore black ski masks to hide their identities, others had the grim, vigilant look of people whose jobs turned them into marked men.

Luna was a broad-faced, dark-complexioned man. He wore a military cap but it seemed that he had a shaved head underneath. His olive drab uniform was more military than police and he was decked out with plenty of shiny gingerbread on the chest. He had a bushy black mustache, surrounded by jowl lines. Frowning with an intimidating visage, he was holding a cigarette and pointing toward something to the left of the scene.

Rhyme placed the call to Mexico City, again using the touchpad. He could have used the voice recognition system, but since he’d regained some motion in his right hand he tended to prefer to use the mechanical means.

Placing the call took only a country code’s extra effort and soon he was talking to Luna, who had a surprisingly delicate voice with only a slight and completely unrecognizable accent. He would be Mexican, of course, but his vowels seemed tinged with French.

“Ah, ah, Lincoln Rhyme. This is very much a pleasure. I’ve read about you. And, of course, I have your books. I made sure they were in the course curriculum for my investigators.” A moment’s pause. He asked, “Forgive me. But are you going to update the DNA section?”

Rhyme had to laugh. He’d been considering doing exactly that just a few days ago. “I’m going to. As soon as this case is finished. Inspector… are you an inspector?”

“Inspector? I’m sorry,” said the good-natured voice, “but why does everybody think that officers in other countries than the United States are inspectors?”

“The definitive source for law enforcement training and procedures,” Rhyme said. “Movies and TV.”

A chuckle. “What would we poor police do without cable? But no. I’m a commander. In my country the army and the police, we’re often interchangeable. And you are a captain RET, I see from your book. Does that mean resident expert technician? I was wondering.”

Rhyme laughed aloud. “No, it means I’m retired.”

“Really? And yet here you are working.”

“Indeed. I appreciate your help with this case. This is a very dangerous man.”

“I’m pleased to be of assistance. Your colleague, Mrs. Dance, she’s been very helpful in getting some of our felons extradited back to our own country, when there was considerable pressure not to.”

“Yes, she’s good.” He got to the meat of his question: “I understand you’ve seen Logan.”

“My assistant, Arturo Diaz, and his team have spotted him twice. Once yesterday in a hotel. And then not long ago nearby-among office buildings on Avenue Bosque de Reforma in the business district. He was taking pictures of the buildings. That aroused suspicion-they are hardly architectural marvels-and a traffic officer recognized Logan’s picture. Arturo’s men got there quickly. But your Mr. Watchmaker vanished before backup arrived. He’s very elusive.”

“That describes him pretty well. Who are the tenants in the offices he was taking pictures of?”

“Dozens of companies. And some small government ministries. Satellite offices. Transport and commerce operations. A bank on the ground floor of one. Would that be significant?”

“He’s not in Mexico for a robbery. Our intelligence is that this is a murder he’s planning.”

“We’re looking into the personnel and the purposes of all the offices right now to see if there might be a likely victim.”

Rhyme knew the delicate game of politics but he had no time for finesse, and he had a feeling Luna didn’t either. “You have to keep your teams out of sight, Commander. You must be much more careful than usual.”

“Yes, of course. This man has the eye, does he?”

“The eye?”

“Like second sight. Kathryn Dance was telling me he’s like a cat. He knows when he’s in danger.”

No, Rhyme thought; he’s just very smart and can anticipate exactly what his opponents are likely to do. Like a master chess player. But he said, “That’s it exactly, Commander.”

Rhyme stared at the picture of Luna on his computer. Dance was right: Conversations seemed to have more to them when you could visualize the person you were speaking with.

“We have a few of those down here too.” Another chuckle. “In fact, I’m one of them. It’s why I’m still alive when so many of my colleagues are not. We will continue the surveillance-subtly. When we capture him, Captain, perhaps you would like to come for the extradition.”

“I don’t get out much.”

Another pause. Then a somber, “Ah, forgive me. I forgot about your injury.”

The one thing, Rhyme reflected, with equal sobriety, that he himself never could. He said, “No apologies are necessary.”

Luna added, “Well, we are very-what do you say?-accessible here in Mexico City. You would be welcome to come, and very comfortable. You could stay at my house and my wife will cook for you. I have no stairs to trouble you.”

“Perhaps.”

“We have very good food, and I am a collector of mescal and tequilas.”

“In that case a celebration dinner might be in order,” Rhyme said to placate him.

“I will earn your presence by capturing this man… and perhaps you could lecture to my officers.”

Now Rhyme laughed to himself. He hadn’t realized they’d been negotiating. Rhyme’s appearance in Mexico would be a feather in this man’s cap; it was one of the reasons he’d been so cooperative. This was probably the way all business-whether it was law enforcement or commerce-worked in Latin America.

“It would be a pleasure.” Rhyme glanced up and saw Thom gesturing to him and pointing to the hallway.

“Commander, I have to go now.”

“I’m grateful you contacted me, Captain. I will be in touch as soon as I learn anything. Even if it seems insignificant, I will absolutely call you.”

Chapter 26

THOM LED TRIM, energetic Assistant Special Agent in Charge Tucker McDaniel into the lab again. He was accompanied by an associate, spiffy and young and compensating, whose name Rhyme immediately forgot. He was easier to think of as the Kid, capital K, anyway. He blinked once at the quadriplegic and looked away.

The ASAC announced, “We’ve eliminated a few more names from the list. But there’s something else. We’ve got a demand letter.”

“Who from?” Lon Sellitto asked from an examination table, where he sat wrinkled as a deflated ball. “Terrorists?”

“Anonymous and unspecified,” McDaniel said, pronouncing every syllable primly. Rhyme wondered if he disliked the man as much as he thought he did. Partly it was how he’d treated Fred Dellray. Partly it was just his style. And sometimes, of course, you just didn’t need a reason.

Cloud zone…

The agent continued, “Sounds mostly like a crank, eco issues, but who knows what it’s a front for.”

Sellitto continued, “We sure it’s him?”

After an apparently motiveless attack, it wasn’t unusual for a number of people to take credit for it. And threaten to repeat the incident if some demands weren’t met, even though they themselves had nothing to do with it.

McDaniel said in a stiff voice, “He confirmed details of the bus attack. Of course we checked that.”

The condescension explained some of Rhyme’s distaste.

“Who received it and how?” Rhyme asked.

“Andi Jessen. I’ll let her give you the details. I wanted to get it to you as fast as possible.”

At least the fed wasn’t fighting a turf war. The dislike eased a bit.

“I’ve told the mayor, Washington and Homeland Security. We conferenced about it on the way over.”

Though without our presence, Rhyme noted.

The fed opened his briefcase and took out a sheet of paper in a clear plastic envelope. Rhyme nodded to Mel Cooper, who, in gloved hands, removed the sheet and placed it on an examining table. First, he photographed it and an instant later the handwritten text appeared on the computer screens around the room:

To Andi Jessen, CEO, and Algonquin Consolidated Power:

At around 11:30 a.m. yesterday morning there was an arc flash incident at the MH-10 substation on W 57 Street in Manhattan, this happened by securing a Bennington cable and bus bar to a post-breaker line with two split bolts. By shutting down four substations and raising the breaker limit at MH-10 an overload of close to two hundred thousand volts caused the flash.

This incident was entirely your fault and due to your greed and selfishness. This is typical of the industry and it is reprehensable. Enron destroyed the financial lives of people, your company destroys our physical lives and the life of the earth. By exploiting electricity without regard for it’s consequences you are destroying our world, you insideously work your way into our lives like a virus, until we are dependent on what is killing us.

People must learn they do not need as much electricity as you tell them they do. You have to show them the way. You are to execute a rolling brownout across the New York City service grid today-reduce levels to fifty per cent of offpeak load for a half hour, starting at 12:30. If you don’t do this, at 1 p.m. more people will die.

Rhyme nodded toward the phone and said to Sachs, “Call Andi Jessen.”

She did and a moment later the woman’s voice came through the speaker. “Detective Sachs? Have you heard?”

“Yes, I’m here with Lincoln Rhyme and some people from the FBI and the NYPD. They’ve brought the letter.”

Rhyme heard exasperation and anger as the woman said, “Who’s behind it?”

“We don’t know,” Sachs said.

“You have to have some idea.”

McDaniel identified himself and said, “The investigation’s moving along, but we don’t have a suspect yet.”

“The man in the uniform at the coffee shop yesterday morning, by the bus stop?”

“We don’t have his identity. We’re going through the list you gave us. But nobody’s a clear suspect yet.”

“Ms. Jessen, this is Detective Sellitto, NYPD. Can you do it?”

“Do what?”

“What he’s asking for. You know, reduce the power.”

Rhyme didn’t see any problem playing games with the bad guys, if a little negotiation gave extra time to analyze the evidence or run surveillance on a terrorist. But it wasn’t his call.

“This is Tucker again, Ms. Jessen. We strongly recommend against negotiating. In the long run, that just encourages them to up their demands.” His eyes were on the large detective, who stared right back.

Sellitto persisted, “It could buy us some breathing room.”

The ASAC was hesitating, perhaps debating the wisdom of not presenting a united front. Still he said, “I would firmly recommend against it.”

Andi Jessen said, “It’s not even an issue. A citywide fifty percent decrease below off-peak load? It’s not like turning a dimmer switch. It would throw off the load patterns throughout the Northeast Interconnection. We’d have dropouts and blackouts in dozens of places. And we’ve got millions of customers with on-off systems that’d shut down cold with that drop in power. There’d be data dumps and resets’d go to default. You can’t just turn them back on again; it would take days of reprogramming, and a lot of data would be lost altogether.

“But worse, some of the life-critical infrastructure has battery or generator backup, but not all of it. Hospitals have only so much and some of those systems never work right. People will die as a result of it.”

Well, thought Rhyme, the writer of the letter had one point right: Electricity, and Algonquin and the power companies, have indeed worked their way into our lives. We’re dependent on juice.

“There you have it,” said McDaniel. “It can’t be done.”

Sellitto grimaced. Rhyme looked toward Sachs. “Parker?”

She nodded, and scrolled through her BlackBerry to find the number and email of Parker Kincaid in Washington, D.C. He was a former FBI agent and now a private consultant, the best document examiner in the country, in Rhyme’s opinion.

“I’ll send it now.” She dropped into a chair in front of one of the workstations, wrote an email, scanned the letter then sent them on their way.

Sellitto snapped open his phone and contacted NYPD Anti-Terror, along with the Emergency Service Unit-the city’s version of SWAT-and told them that another attack was planned for around 1 p.m.

Rhyme turned to the phone. “Ms. Jessen, Lincoln again. That list you gave Detective Sachs yesterday? The employees?”

“Yes?”

“Can you get us samples of their handwriting?”

“Everybody?”

“As many as you can. As soon as you can.”

“I suppose. We have signed confidentiality statements from just about everybody. Probably health forms, requests, expense accounts.”

Rhyme was somewhat skeptical of signatures as representative of handwriting. Though he was no document examiner, you can’t be the head of a forensics unit without developing some knowledge of the subject. He knew that people tended to scrawl their names carelessly (very bad practice, he’d also learned, since a sloppy signature was easier to forge than a precise one). But people wrote memos and took notes in a more legible way, which was more indicative of how they wrote in general. He told this to Jessen, and she responded that she’d put several assistants on the job of finding as many nonsignature examples of handwriting as she could. She wasn’t happy but seemed to be softening her position that an Algonquin employee couldn’t be involved.

Rhyme turned away from the phone and called, “Sachs! Is he there? Is Parker there? What’s going on?”

She nodded. “He’s at some function or something. I’m getting patched through.”

Kincaid was a single father of two children, Robby and Stephanie, and he carefully balanced his personal and professional lives-his commitment to his kids was why he’d quit the FBI to become, like Rhyme, a consultant. But Rhyme knew too that for a case like this, Kincaid would get on board instantly and do what he could to help.

The criminalist turned back to the phone. “Ms. Jessen, could you scan them and send them to…” An eyebrow raised toward Sachs, who called out Parker Kincaid’s email address.

“I’ve got it,” Jessen said.

“Those are terms in the business, I assume?” Rhyme asked. “ ‘Rolling brownout,’ ‘shedding load,’ ‘service grid,’ ‘offpeak load.’ ”

“That’s right.”

“Does that give us any details about him?”

“Not really. They’re technical aspects of the business but if he could adjust the computer and rig a flash arc device, then he’d know those too. Anybody in the power industry would know them.”

“How did you get the letter?”

“It was delivered to my apartment building.”

“Is your address public?”

“I’m not listed in the phone book but I suppose it wouldn’t be impossible to find me.”

Rhyme persisted, “How exactly did you receive it?”

“I live in a doorman building, Upper East Side. Somebody rang the back delivery bell in the lobby. The doorman went to go see. When he got back, the letter was at his station. It was marked, Emergency. Delivery immediately to Andi Jessen.”

“Is there video security?” Rhyme asked.

“No.”

“Who handled it?”

“The doorman. Just the envelope, though. I had a messenger from the office pick it up. He would have touched it too. And I did, of course.”

McDaniel was about to say something but Rhyme beat him to it. “The letter was time sensitive, so whoever left it knew you had a doorman. So that it would get to you immediately.”

McDaniel was nodding. Apparently that would have been his comment. The bright-eyed Kid nodded as well, like a bobble-head dog in the back window of a car.

After a moment: “I guess that’s right.” The concern was obvious in her voice. “So that means he knows about me. Maybe knows a lot about me.”

“Do you have a bodyguard?” Sellitto asked.

“Our security director, at work. Bernie Wahl. You met him, Detective Sachs. He’s got four armed guards on staff, each shift. But not at home. I never thought…”

“We’ll get somebody from Patrol stationed outside your apartment,” Sellitto said. As he made the call, McDaniel asked, “What about family in the area? We should have somebody look out for them.”

Momentary silence from the speaker. Then: “Why?”

“He might try to use them as leverage.”

“Oh.” Jessen’s otherwise rugged voice sounded small at the implications, those close to her being hurt. But she explained, “My parents are in Florida.”

Sachs asked, “You have a brother, don’t you? Didn’t I see his picture on your desk?”

“My brother? We don’t stay in touch much. And he doesn’t live here-” Another voice interrupted her. Jessen came back on the line. “Look, I’m sorry, the governor’s calling. He’s just heard the news.”

With a click she disconnected.

“So.” Sellitto lifted his palms. His eyes grazed McDaniel but then settled on Rhyme. “This makes it all pretty fucking easy.”

“Easy?” asked the Kid.

“Yeah.” Sellitto nodded at the digital clock on a nearby flat-screen monitor. “If we can’t negotiate, all we gotta do is find him. In under three hours. Piece of cake.”

Chapter 27

MEL COOPER AND Rhyme were working on the analysis of the letter. Ron Pulaski had arrived too, a few minutes earlier. Lon Sellitto was speeding downtown to coordinate with ESU, in the event they could either ID a suspect or find his possible target.

Tucker McDaniel looked over the demand letter as if it were some type of food he’d never encountered. Rhyme supposed this was because handwriting on a piece of paper didn’t fall into cloud zone law enforcement. It was the antithesis of high-tech communications. His computers and sophisticated tracing systems were useless against paper and ink.

Rhyme glanced at the script. He knew from his own training, as well as from working with Parker Kincaid, that handwriting doesn’t reveal anything about the personality of the writer, whatever the grocery store checkout-stand books and news pundits suggested. Analysis could be illuminating, of course, if you had another, identified sample to compare it with, so you could determine if the writer of the second document was the same as the one who wrote the first. Parker Kincaid would be doing this now, running a preliminary comparison with known handwriting samples of terror suspects and comparing them with the writing of those Algonquin employees who were on the company list.

Handwriting and content could also suggest right- or left-handedness, level of education, national and regional upbringing, mental and physical illnesses and intoxication or drug-impaired states.

But Rhyme’s interest in the note was more basic: the source of the paper, source of the ink, the fingerprints and trace embedded in the fibers.

All of which, after Cooper’s diligent analysis, added up to a big fat nothing.

The sources for both paper stock and ink were generic-they could have come from one of thousands of stores. Andi Jessen’s prints were the only ones on the letter and those on the envelope were from the messenger and the doorman; McDaniel’s agents had taken samples of their prints and forwarded them to Rhyme.

Useless, Rhyme reflected bitterly. The only deduction was that the perp was smart. And had a great sense of survival.

But ten minutes later, they had a breakthrough, of sorts.

Parker Kincaid was on the line from his document examination office in his house in Fairfax, Virginia.

“Lincoln.”

“Parker, what’ve we got?”

Kincaid said, “First, the handwriting comparison. The control samples from Algonquin itself were pretty sparse, so I couldn’t do the complete analysis I would have liked.”

“I understand that.”

“But I’ve narrowed it down to twelve employees.”

“Twelve. Excellent.”

“Here are the names. Ready?”

Rhyme glanced at Cooper, who nodded. The tech jotted them down as Kincaid dictated.

“Now, I can give you a few other things about him. First, he’s right-handed. Then I picked some characteristics from the language and word choice.”

“Go ahead.”

At Rhyme’s nod, Cooper walked to the profile board.

“He’s a product of high school and probably some college. And it was an American education. There are a few spelling, grammatical and punctuation mistakes but mostly with more difficult words or constructions. I put those down to the stress of what he’s doing. He was probably born here. I can’t say for sure that he isn’t of foreign extraction, but English is his first and, I’m almost positive, only language.”

Cooper wrote this down.

Kincaid continued, “He’s also pretty clever. He doesn’t write in the first person and avoids the active voice.”

Rhyme understood. “He never says anything about himself.”

“Exactly.”

“Suggesting there could be others working with him.”

“It’s a possibility. Also, there’s some variation on ascenders and descenders. You get that when a subject is upset, emotional. They’re writing in anger or distress, and broader strokes tend to be emphasized.”

“Good.” Rhyme nodded at Cooper, who jotted this too onto the profile board.

“Thanks, Parker. We’ll get to work.”

They disconnected. “Twelve…” Rhyme sighed. He looked over the evidence and profile chart, then the names of the suspects. “Don’t we have any way to narrow it down faster?” he asked bitterly, watching his clock advance one more minute toward the approaching deadline.

CRIME SCENE: ALGONQUIN SUBSTATION

MANHATTAN-10, WEST 57TH STREET

– Victim (deceased): Luis Martin, assistant manager in music store.

– No friction ridge prints on any surface.

– Shrapnel from molten metal, as a result of the arc flash.

– 0-gauge insulated aluminum strand cable.

– Bennington Electrical Manufacturing, AM-MV-60, rated up to 60,000v.

– Cut by hand with hacksaw, new blade, broken tooth.

– Two “split bolts,” ³ / ₄ -inch holes in them.

– Untraceable.

– Distinctive tool marks on bolts.

– Brass “bus” bar, fixed to cable with two ¹ / ₄ -inch bolts.

– All untraceable.

– Boot prints.

– Albertson-Fenwick Model E-20 for electrical work, size 11.

– Metal grating cut to allow access to substation, distinctive tool marks from bolt cutter.

– Access door and frame from basement.

– DNA obtained. Sent out for testing.

– Greek food, taramasalata.

– Blond hair, 1 inch long, natural, from someone 50 or under, discovered in coffee shop across the street from substation.

– Sent out for tox-chem screening.

– Mineral trace: volcanic ash.

– Not naturally found in New York area.

– Exhibits, museums, geology schools?

– Algonquin Control Center software accessed by internal codes, not outside hackers.

DEMAND NOTE

– Delivered to Andi Jessen at home.

– No witnesses.

– Handwritten.

– Sent to Parker Kincaid for analysis.

– Generic paper and ink.

– Untraceable.

– No friction ridge prints, other than A. Jessen, doorman, messenger.

– No discernible trace discovered in paper.

UNSUB PROFILE

– Male.

– 40’s.

– Probably white.

– Possibly glasses and cap.

– Possibly with short, blond hair.

– Dark blue overalls, similar to those worn by Algonquin workers.

– Knows electrical systems very well.

– Boot print suggests no physical condition affecting posture or gait.

– Possibly same person who stole 75 feet of similar Bennington cable and 12 split bolts. More attacks in mind? Access to the warehouse where theft occurred with key.

– Likely he is Algonquin employee or has contact with one.

– Terrorist connection? Relation to Justice For [unknown]? Terror group? Individual named Rahman involved? Coded references to monetary disbursements, personnel movements and something “big.”

– Algonquin security breach in Philadelphia might be related.

– SIGINT hits: code word reference to weapons, “paper and supplies” (guns, explosives?).

– Personnel include man and woman.

– Would have studied SCADA-Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition program. And EMP-energy management programs. Algonquin’s is Enertrol. Both Unix-based.

– To create arc flash would probably have been or currently is lineman, troubleman, licensed tradesman, generator construction, master electrician, military.

– Profile from Parker Kincaid, Re: handwriting:

– Right-handed.

– High school education at least, probably college.

– American educated.

– English first and probably only language.

– Writes with passive voice, to keep from giving away accomplices?

– Could match one of 12 Algonquin employees.

– Emotional, angry, distressed writing the letter.

Chapter 28

MEL COOPER, IN front of his computer, sat up quickly. “I think I’ve got one.”

“One what?” Rhyme asked acerbically.

“A way to narrow down the list.” Cooper sat up straighter yet and shoved his glasses higher onto the bridge of his nose as he read an email. “The hair. That we got from the coffee shop across from the substation?”

“No bulb so there’s no DNA,” Rhyme pointed out abruptly. He was still irritated that the analysis wasn’t ready yet.

“I don’t mean that, Lincoln. I’ve just got the tox-chem screening from the hair itself. Vinblastine and prednisone in significant quantities, and traces of etoposide.”

“Cancer patient,” Rhyme said, leaning his head forward-his version of Cooper’s own posture adjustment. “He’s on a chemotherapy regimen.”

“Has to be.”

The young FBI protégé of McDaniel’s barked a laugh. “How do you know that?” Then to his boss: “That’s pretty good.”

“You’d be surprised,” Ron Pulaski said.

Rhyme ignored them both. “Call Algonquin and see if any of the twelve on the list made health claims for cancer treatment in the past five or six months.”

Sachs called Algonquin. Andi Jessen was on the phone-probably with the governor or mayor-and Sachs was transferred to the company’s security chief, Bernard Wahl. Through speakerphone, the deep, African-American-inflected voice reassured them that he’d look into it immediately.

It wasn’t quite immediate but it was good enough for Rhyme. Three minutes later Wahl came back on the line.

“There’re six cancer patients on the original list-of the forty-two. But only two on the list of the twelve, the ones whose handwriting could match the demand letter. One of those is a manager in the energy brokerage department. He was supposedly flying into town from a business trip at the time of the attack.” Wahl gave the relevant information. Mel Cooper took it down and, at a nod from Rhyme, called the airline to check. Transportation Security had become an unwitting partner in general law enforcement because identification requirements were now so stringent that the whereabouts of people flying could be verified easily.

“He checks out.”

“What about the other one?”

“Yessir, well, he’s a possibility. Raymond Galt, forty. He’s made health claims for leukemia treatment over the past year.”

Rhyme shot a glance to Sachs, who knew instinctively what the look meant. They communicated this way often. She dropped into a chair and began keyboarding.

“His history?” Rhyme said.

Wahl answered, “Started with a competitor in the Midwest and then joined Algonquin.”

“Competitor?”

He paused. “Well, not really competitor, like carmakers are. That’s just how we refer to other power companies.”

“What does Galt do for you now?”

“He’s a troubleman,” Wahl said.

Rhyme was staring at the profile on his computer screen. A troubleman would have enough experience to put together an arc flash weapon like the sort at the substation, according to Charlie Sommers. He asked, “Mel, take a look at Galt’s file. Would he know SCADA and the energy management program?”

Cooper opened the man’s personnel file. “Doesn’t say specifically. Just that he’s taken a lot of continuing education courses.”

“Mr. Wahl, is Galt married, single?” Rhyme asked the security chief.

“Single. Lives in Manhattan. You want his address, sir?”

“Yes.”

Wahl gave it to them.

“This is Tucker McDaniel. What about whereabouts, Mr. Wahl?” McDaniel asked urgently.

“That’s the thing. He called in sick two days ago. Nobody knows where he is.”

“Any chance he’s done some traveling lately? Maybe to Hawaii or Oregon? Someplace where there’s a volcano?”

“Volcano? Why?”

Struggling to be patient, Rhyme asked, “Just, has he traveled?”

“According to his time sheets, no. He’s taken a few days’ medical-I guess for the cancer treatment-but he hasn’t been on a vacation since last year.”

“Could you check with his fellow employees and see if they know about places he goes, friends outside of the company, any groups he’s in?”

“Yessir.”

Thinking of the Greek food connection, Rhyme asked, “And anybody he goes to lunch with regularly.”

“Yessir.”

“Mr. Wahl, what about Galt’s next of kin?” McDaniel asked.

Wahl reported that Galt’s father was dead but his mother and a sister lived in Missouri. He recited the names, addresses and phone numbers.

Rhyme-and McDaniel too-could think of nothing else to ask the security chief. The criminalist thanked him and they disconnected.

McDaniel instructed his underling to contact the FBI’s resident agency in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and have them start surveillance.

“Probable cause to get a tap?” the Kid asked.

“Doubt it. But push for one. Get a pen register, at least.”

“I’m on it.”

“Rhyme,” Sachs called.

He looked up at the screen, which revealed the fruits of Sachs’s frantic keyboarding. The DMV picture showed a pale man, gazing unsmiling at the camera. He was blond, hair trimmed short. About an inch long.

“So,” McDaniel said, “we’ve got a suspect. Good job, Lincoln.”

“We’ll congratulate ourselves when he’s in custody.”

He then squinted at the DMV information, which confirmed the address. “His place is on the Lower East Side?… Not many colleges or museums there. I think the volcanic ash must’ve come from the place he’s going to attack. Maybe the next target. And he’d want a public location, lots of people.”

Lots of victims…

A glance at the clock. It was ten-thirty.

“Mel, check again with your geology person at HQ. We need to move!”

“I’m on it.”

McDaniel said, “I’ll call a magistrate for a warrant and get a tac team ready to hit Galt’s place.”

Rhyme nodded and called Sellitto, still en route to city hall.

The detective’s voice rattled from the speaker, “I’ve just blown through about five hundred traffic lights, Linc. I’m thinking if this asshole shuts down the grid and the lights go, we’re fucked. No way to-”

Rhyme cut him off. “Lon, listen, we’ve got a name. Raymond Galt. He’s a troubleman at Algonquin. Not absolute but it looks likely. Mel’s going to email you the particulars.”

Cooper, juggling the phone call about the lava search, began typing the relevant information about the suspect into a text.

“I’ll get ESU down there now,” Sellitto called.

“We’re sending our tac team,” McDaniel said quickly.

Like schoolkids, Rhyme thought. “Whoever it is, I don’t think matters. But the point is now.”

Via speaker conference, the detective and the agent agreed to task-force the raid and each arranged to assemble and deploy teams.

Rhyme then warned, “We’re getting close to the deadline, so he probably won’t be there. If not, then I want only my person running the scene at Galt’s apartment.”

“No problem,” McDaniel said.

“Me?” Sachs lifted an eyebrow.

“No. If we get any leads to the next attack, I want you there.” He glanced at Pulaski.

“Me?” Same pronoun, different tone.

“Get going, Rookie. And remember-”

“I know,” Pulaski said. “Those arc things’re five thousand degrees Fahrenheit. I’ll be careful.”

Rhyme grunted a laugh. “What I was going to say was: Don’t fuck up… Now, move!”

Chapter 29

PLENTY OF METAL. Metal everywhere.

Ron Pulaski glanced at his watch: eleven a.m. Two hours until another attack.

Metal… wonderfully conductive, and possibly connected to wires that ran to one of the invisible sources of juice in the bowels of the lousy apartment building he was standing in.

Armed with a warrant, the FBI and ESU teams had found-to everyone’s disappointment but no one’s surprise-that Galt wasn’t there. Pulaski then shooed the officers out. And was now surveying the dim apartment, the basement unit in an old decrepit brownstone on the Lower East Side. He and three tactical officers had cleared the place-only the four of them, as Rhyme had ordered, to minimize contamination of the scene.

The team was now outside and Pulaski was examining the small place by himself. And seeing a lot of metal that could be rigged, the way the battery was rigged in the substation-the trap that had nearly killed Amelia.

Also picturing the metal disks on the sidewalk, seeing the scars in the concrete and in the body of poor young Luis Martin. And he recalled something else too, something even more troubling: Amelia Sachs’s eyes looking spooked. Which they never did. If this electricity crap could scare her…

Last night, after his wife, Jenny, had gone to bed, Ron Pulaski went online to learn what he could about electricity. If you understand something, Lincoln Rhyme had told him, you fear it less. Knowledge is control. Except with electricity, with power, with juice, that wasn’t quite the case. The more he learned, the more uneasy he grew. He could grasp the basic concept but he kept coming back to the fact it was so damn invisible. You never knew exactly where it was. Like a poisonous snake in a dark room.

He then shook himself out of these thoughts. Lincoln Rhyme had entrusted the scene to him. So get to work. On the drive here, he’d called in and asked if Rhyme wanted him to hook up via radio and video and walk him through the scene like he sometimes did with Amelia.

Rhyme had said, “I’m busy, Rookie. If you can’t run a scene by now there’s no damn hope for you.”

Click.

Which to most people would’ve been an insult, but it put a big grin on Pulaski’s face and he wanted to call his twin brother, a uniform down in the Sixth Precinct, and tell him what had happened. He didn’t, of course; he’d save that for when they went out for beers this weekend.

And so, solo, he started the search, pulling on the latex gloves.

Galt’s apartment was a cheesy, depressing place, clearly the home of a bachelor who cared zero about his environment. Dark, small, musty. Food half fresh and half old, some of it way old. Clothes piled up. The immediate search, as Rhyme had impressed on him, was not to gather evidence for trial-though he “better not fuck up the chain of custody cards”-but to find out where Galt might be going to attack again and what, if any, connection he had with Rahman and Justice For…

Presently he was searching fast through the unsteady, scabby desk and the battered filing cabinets and boxes for references to motels or hotels, other apartments, friends, vacation houses.

A map with a big red X and a note: Attack here!

But of course there wasn’t anything that obvious. In fact, there was very little helpful at all. No address books, notes, letters. The call log, in and out, on the phone had been wiped and, hitting REDIAL, he heard the electronic voice ask what city and state he needed a number for. Galt had taken his laptop with him and there was no other computer here.

Pulaski found sheets of paper and envelopes similar to what had been used for the demand note. A dozen pens too. He collected these and bagged them.

When he found nothing else helpful he began walking the grid, laying the numbers, photographing. And collecting samples of trace.

He moved as quickly as he could, though, as often, wrestling with the fear, which was always with him. Afraid that he’d get hurt again, which made him timid and want to pull back. But that in turn led to another fear: that if he didn’t do 100 percent, he wouldn’t live up to expectations. He’d disappoint his wife, his brother, Amelia Sachs.

Disappoint Lincoln Rhyme.

But it was so hard to shake the fear.

His hands started to quiver, breath came fast, and he jumped at the sound of a creak.

Calming, remembering his wife’s comforting voice whispering, “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay…”

He started again. He located a back closet and was about to open it. But he noted the metal handle. He was on linoleum but he didn’t know if that was safe enough. He was too spooked to open the door even with the CS latex gloves. He picked up a rubber dish mat and used that to grip the knob. He opened the door.

And inside was proof positive that Ray Galt was the perp: a hacksaw with a broken blade. The bolt cutter too. He knew his job here was only to walk the grid and collect evidence but he couldn’t help pulling a small magnifier from his pocket and looking over the tool, noting that it had a notch on the blade that could have left the distinctive mark on the grating bar he’d collected at the substation scene near the bus stop. He bagged and tagged them. In another small cabinet he discovered a pair of Albertson-Fenwick boots, size 11.

His phone trilled, startling him. It was Lincoln Rhyme on caller ID. Pulaski answered at once. “ Lincoln, I-”

“You find anything about hidey-holes, Rookie? Vehicles he might’ve rented? Friends he might be staying with? Anything at all about target locations?”

“No, he’s kind of sanitized the place. I found the tools and boots, though. It’s definitely him.”

“I want locations. Addresses.”

“Yessir, I-”

Click.

Pulaski snapped the phone shut and carefully bagged the evidence he’d collected so far. Then he went through the entire apartment twice, including the refrigerator, the freezer, all the closets. Even food cartons large enough to hide something.

Nothing…

Now the fear was replaced by frustration. He’d found evidence that Galt was the attacker but nothing else about him. Where he might be, what his target was. Then his eyes settled on the desk again. He was looking at a cheap computer printer. On the top a yellow light was blinking. He approached it. The message was: Clear jam.

What had Galt been printing?

The cop carefully opened the lid and peered into the guts of the machine. He could see the tangle of paper.

He could also see a sign that warned, Danger! Electric Shock Risk! Unplug before clearing jam or servicing!

Presumably there might be other pages in the queue, something that could be helpful. Maybe even key. But if he unplugged the unit, the memory would dump the remaining pages of the job.

He started to reach in carefully. Then he pictured the molten bits of metal again.

Five thousand degrees…

A glance at his watch.

Shit. Amelia had told him not to go near electricity with anything metallic on. He’d forgotten about it. Goddamn head injury! Why couldn’t he think straighter? He pulled the watch off. Put it in his pocket. Jesus our Lord, what good is that going to do? He put the Seiko on the desk, far away from the printer.

One more attempt, but the fear got to him again. He was furious with himself for hesitating.

“Shit,” he muttered, and returned to the kitchen. He found some bulky pink Playtex gloves. He pulled them on and, looking around to make sure no FBI agents or ESU cops were peering in at the ridiculous sight, walked back to the printer.

He opened the evidence collection kit and selected the best tool to clear the jam and get the printer working again: tweezers. They were, of course, metal ones, just the ticket to make a nice, solid connection to any exposed electric wires Galt had rigged inside the printer.

He glanced at his watch, six feet away. Less than an hour and a half until the next attack.

Ron Pulaski leaned forward and eased the tweezers between two very thick wires.

Chapter 30

NEWS STATIONS WERE broadcasting Galt’s picture, former girlfriends were being interviewed, as was his bowling team and his oncologist. But there were no leads. He’d gone underground.

Mel Cooper’s geology expert at Queens CS had found twenty-one exhibits in the New York metropolitan area that might involve volcanic ash, including an artist in Queens who was using lava rock to make sculpture.

Cooper muttered, “Twenty thousand dollars for something the size of a watermelon. Which is what it looks like, by the way.”

Rhyme nodded absently and listened to McDaniel, now back at Federal Plaza, explain on speakerphone that Galt’s mother hadn’t heard from him for a few days. But that wasn’t unusual. He’d been upset lately because he’d been sick. Rhyme asked, “You get a Title Three on them?”

The agent explained testily that the magistrate hadn’t been persuaded to issue a wiretap on Galt’s family members.

“But we’ve got a pen.” A pen register phone tap wouldn’t allow agents to listen to the conversation but would reveal the numbers of anyone who called them and of anybody they phoned. Those could then be traced.

Impatient, Rhyme had contacted Pulaski again, who’d responded immediately and with a shaking voice, saying the buzzing phone had scared the “you know what out of me.”

The young officer told Rhyme he was extracting information from Raymond Galt’s computer printer.

“Jesus, Rookie, don’t do that yourself.”

“It’s okay, I’m standing on a rubber mat.”

“I don’t mean that. Only let experts go through a computer. There could be data-wipe programs-”

“No, no, there’s no computer. Just the printer. It’s jammed and I’m-”

“Nothing about addresses, locations of the next attack?”

“No.”

“Call the minute, call the second you find something.”

“I-”

Click.

The joint task force had had little luck in canvassing people on Fifty-seventh Street and in Ray Galt’s neighborhood. The perp-no longer an UNSUB-had gone underground. Galt’s mobile was “dead”: The battery had been removed so it couldn’t be traced, his service provider reported.

Sachs was on her own phone, head down, listening. She thanked the caller and disconnected. “That was Bernie Wahl again. He said he’d talked to people in Galt’s department-New York Emergency Maintenance-and everybody said he was a loner. He didn’t socialize. Nobody regularly had lunch with him. He liked the solitude of working on the lines.”

Rhyme nodded at this information. He then told the FBI agent about the sources for the lava. “We’ve found twenty-one locations. We’re-”

“Twenty-two,” Cooper called, on the phone with the CS woman in Queens. “ Brooklyn art gallery. On Henry Street.”

McDaniel sighed. “That many?”

“Afraid so.” Then Rhyme said, “We should let Fred know.”

McDaniel didn’t respond.

“Fred Dellray.” Your employee, Rhyme added silently. “He should tell his CI about Galt.”

“Right. Hold on. I’ll conference him in.”

There were some clicks and a few heartbeats of silence. Then they heard, “ ’Lo? This’s Dellray.”

“Fred, Tucker here. With Lincoln. On conference. We’ve got a suspect.”

“Who?”

McDaniel glanced at Rhyme, who explained about Ray Galt. “We don’t have a motive, but it’s pointing to him.”

“You found him?”

“No. He’s MIA. We’ve got a team at his apartment.”

“The deadline’s still a go?”

McDaniel said, “We have no reason to think otherwise. You found anything, Fred?”

“My CI’s got some good leads. I’m waiting to hear.”

“Anything you can share?” the ASAC asked pointedly.

“Not at this point. I’m meeting him at three. He tells me he’s got something. I’ll call him and give him Galt’s name. Maybe that’ll speed things up.”

They disconnected. Only a moment later Rhyme’s phone rang again. “Is this Detective Rhyme?” a woman asked.

“Yes. That’s me.”

“It’s Andi Jessen. Algonquin Consolidated.”

McDaniel identified himself, then: “Have you heard anything more from him?”

“No, but there’s a situation I have to tell you about.” Her husky, urgent voice got Rhyme’s full attention.

“Go ahead.”

“Like I told you, we changed the computer codes. So he couldn’t repeat what happened yesterday.”

“I remember.”

“And I ordered security around all the substations. Twenty-four/seven. But about fifteen minutes ago a fire started in one of our Uptown substations. One in Harlem.”

“Arson?” Rhyme asked.

“That’s right. The guards were in front. It looks like somebody threw a firebomb through the back window. Or something. The fire’s been extinguished but it caused a problem. Destroyed the switchgear. That means we can’t manually take that substation offline. It’s a runaway. There’s no way to stop the electricity flowing through the transmission lines without shutting down the entire grid.”

Rhyme sensed she was concerned but he didn’t grasp the implications. He asked her to clarify.

She said, “I think he’s done something that’s pretty crazy-he cut directly into an area transmission line running from the substation that burned. That’s nearly a hundred and fifty thousand volts.”

“How could he do it?” Rhyme asked. “I thought he used the substation yesterday because it was too dangerous to splice into a main line.”

“True, but, I don’t know, maybe he’s developed some kind of remote switchgear to let him rig a splice, then activate it later.”

McDaniel asked, “Any idea where?”

“The line I’m thinking of is about three-quarters of a mile long. It runs under Central and West Harlem to the river.”

“And you absolutely can’t shut it down?”

“Not until the switchgear’s repaired in the burned substation. That’ll take a few hours.”

“And this arc flash could be as bad as yesterday’s?” Rhyme asked.

“At least. Yes.”

“Okay, we’ll check it out.”

“Detective Rhyme? Tucker?” Her voice was less brittle than earlier.

It was the FBI agent who said, “Yes?”

“I’m sorry. I think I was being difficult yesterday. But I honestly didn’t believe that one of my employees would do this.”

“I understand,” McDaniel said. “At least we’ve got the name now. If we’re lucky we’ll stop him before more people get hurt.”

As they disconnected, Rhyme was shouting, “Mel, you get that? Uptown? Morningside Heights, Harlem. Museum, sculptor, whatever. Now, find me a possible target!” Rhyme then called the temporary head of the Crime Scene Unit in Queens -the man with his former job-and asked him to send a team to the substation closed because of the arson. “And have them bring back whatever they find, stat!”

“Got a possibility!” Cooper called, tilting his head away from the phone. “ Columbia University. One of the biggest lava and igneous rock collections in the country.”

Rhyme turned to Sachs. She nodded. “I can be there in ten minutes.”

They were both glancing at the digital clock on Rhyme’s computer screen.

The time was 11:29.

Chapter 31

AMELIA SACHS WAS on the Columbia University campus, Morningside Heights, in northern Manhattan.

She had just left the Earth and Environmental Science Department office, where a helpful receptionist had said, “We don’t have a volcano exhibit, as such, but we have hundreds of samples of volcanic ash, lava and other igneous rock. Whenever some undergrads come back from a field project, there’s dust all over the place.”

“I’m here, Rhyme,” she said into the mike and told him what she’d learned about the volcanic ash.

He was saying, “I’ve been talking to Andi Jessen again. The transmission line goes underground basically all the way from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson. It roughly follows a Hundred and Sixteen Street. But the lava dust means the arc is rigged somewhere near the campus. What’s around there, Sachs?”

“Just classrooms, mostly. Administration.”

“The target could be any of them.”

Sachs was looking from right to left. A clear, cool spring day, students meandering or jogging. Sitting on the grass, the library steps. “I don’t see a lot of likely targets, though, Rhyme. The school’s old, mostly stone and wood, it looks like. No steel or wires or anything like that. I don’t know how he could rig a large trap here to hurt a significant number of people.”

Then Rhyme asked, “Which way is the wind blowing?”

Sachs considered this. “To the east and northeast, it looks like.”

“Logically, what would you think? Dust wouldn’t blow that far. Maybe a few blocks.”

“I’d think. That’d put him in Morningside Park.”

Rhyme told her, “I’ll call Andi Jessen or somebody at Algonquin and find out where the transmission lines are under the park. And, Sachs?”

“What?”

He hesitated. She guessed-no, knew-that he was going to tell her to be careful. But that was an unnecessary comment.

“Nothing,” he said.

And disconnected abruptly.

Amelia Sachs walked out one of the main gates in the direction the wind was blowing. She crossed Amsterdam and headed down a street in Morningside Heights east of the campus, toward dun-shaded apartments and dark row houses, solidly built of granite and brick.

When her phone trilled she glanced at caller ID. “Rhyme. What do you have?”

“I just talked to Andi. She said the transmission line jogs north around a Hundred Seventeenth then runs west under the park.”

“I’m just about there, Rhyme. I don’t see… oh, no.”

“What, Sachs?”

Ahead of her was Morningside Park, filled with people as the hour approached lunchtime. Children, nannies, businesspeople, Columbia students, musicians… hundreds of them, just hanging out, enjoying the beautiful day. People on the sidewalks too. But the number of targets was only part of what dismayed Sachs.

“Rhyme, the whole west side of the park, Morningside Drive?”

“What?”

“They’re doing construction. Replacing water mains. They’re big iron pipes. God, if he’s rigged the line to them…”

Rhyme said, “Then the flash could hit anywhere on the street. Hell, it could even get inside any building, office, dorm, a store nearby… or maybe miles away.”

“I’ve got to find where he connected it, Rhyme.” She slipped her phone into its holster and jogged to the construction site.

Chapter 32

SAM VETTER HAD mixed feelings about being in New York.

The sixty-eight-year-old had never been here before. He’d always wanted to make the trip from Scottsdale, where he’d lived for 100 percent of those years, and Ruth had always wanted to see the place, but their vacations found them in California or Hawaii or on cruises to Alaska.

Now, ironically, his first business trip after her death had brought him to New York, all expenses paid.

Happy to be here.

Sad Ruth couldn’t be.

He was having lunch, sitting in the elegant, muted Battery Park Hotel dining room, chatting with a few of the other men who were here for the construction finance meeting, sipping a beer.

Businessman talk. Wall Street, team sports. Some individual sports talk too, but only golf. Nobody ever talked about tennis, which was Vetter’s game. Sure, Federer, Nadal… but tennis wasn’t a war story sport. The topic of women didn’t much enter into the discussion; these men were all of an age.

Vetter looked around him, through the panoramic windows, and worked on his impression of New York because his secretary and associates back home would want to know what he thought. So far: really busy, really rich, really loud, really gray-even though the sky was cloudless. Like the sun knew that New Yorkers didn’t have much use for light.

Mixed feelings…

Part of which was a little guilt about enjoying himself. He was going to see Wicked, to see if it stacked up to the Phoenix version, and probably Billy Elliott, to see if it stacked up to the trailers of the movie. He was going to have dinner in Chinatown with two of the bankers he’d met that morning, one based here and one from Santa Fe.

Maybe there was a hint of infidelity about the whole enjoyment thing.

Of course, Ruth wouldn’t’ve minded.

But still.

Vetter also had to admit he was feeling a little out of his element here. His company did general construction, specializing in the basics: foundations, driveways, platforms, walkways, nothing sexy, but necessary and oh-so-profitable. His outfit was good, prompt and ethical… in a business where those qualities were not always fully unfurled. But it was small; the other companies that were part of the joint venture were bigger players. They were more savvy about business and regulatory and legislative matters than he was.

The conversation at the lunch table kept slipping from the Diamondbacks and the Mets to collateral, interest rates and high-tech systems that left Vetter confused. He found himself looking out the windows again at a large construction site next to the hotel, some big office building or apartment going up.

As he watched, one worker in particular caught his eye. The man was in a different outfit-dark blue overalls and yellow hard hat-and was carrying a roll of wire or cable over his shoulder. He emerged from a manhole near the back of the job site and stood, looking around, blinking. He pulled out a mobile phone and placed a call. Then he snapped it closed and wandered through the site and, instead of leaving, walked toward the building next door to the construction. He looked at ease, walking with a bounce in his step. Obviously he was enjoying whatever he was doing.

It was all so normal. That guy in the blue could have been Vetter thirty years ago. He could have been any one of Vetter’s employees now.

The businessman began to relax. The scene made him feel a lot more at home-watching the guy in the blue uniform and the others in their Carhartt jackets and overalls, carrying tools and supplies, joking with one another. He thought of his own company and the people he worked with, who were like family. The older white guys, quiet and skinny and sunburned all of them, looking like they’d been born mixing concrete, and the newer workers, Latino, who chatted up a storm and worked with more precision and pride.

It told Vetter that maybe New York and the people he was doing this deal with were in many ways similar to his world and those who inhabited it.

Relax.

Then his eyes followed the man in the blue overalls and yellow hard hat as he disappeared into a building across from the construction site. It was a school. Sam Vetter noted some signs in the window.

POGO STICK MARATHON FUNDRAISER. MAY 1.

JUMP FOR THE CURE!

CROSS-GENDERED STUDENTS DINNER MAY 3. SIGN UP NOW!

THE EARTH SCIENCES DEPARTMENT PRESENTS

“VOLCANOES: UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL”

APRIL 20-MAY 15. IT’S FREE AND IT’S FIERY!

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Okay, he admitted, with a laugh, maybe New York is a little different from Scottsdale, after all.

Chapter 33

RHYME CONTINUED TO look over the evidence, trying desperately to find, in the seemingly unrelated bits of metal and plastic and dust that had been collected at the scenes, some connection to spark his imagination and help Sachs figure out where exactly Galt had rigged the deadly cable to the water line running through Morningside Heights and Harlem.

If that’s in fact what he’d done.

Spark his imagination… Bad choice of word, he decided.

Sachs continued to search Morningside Park, looking for the spliced wire running from the transmission cable to the pipes. He knew she’d be uneasy-there was no way to find the wire except to get close to it, to find where it had been attached to the water pipes. He recalled the tone of her voice, her hollow eyes as she’d described the shrapnel from the arc flash yesterday, peppering Luis Martin’s body.

There were dozens of uniformed officers from the closest precinct, clearing Morningside Park and the buildings in the vicinity of the water pipe project. But couldn’t the electricity follow a cast-iron pipe anywhere? Couldn’t it produce an arc flash in a kitchen a mile away?

In his own kitchen, where Thom was now standing at the sink?

Rhyme glanced at the clock on his computer screen. If they didn’t find the line in sixty minutes they’d have their answer.

Sachs called back. “Nothing, Rhyme. Maybe I’m wrong. And I was thinking at some point the line has to cross the subway. What if he’s rigged it to hit a car? I’ll have to search there too.”

“We’re still on the horn with Algonquin, trying to narrow it down, Sachs. I’ll call you back.” He shouted to Mel Cooper, “Anything?”

The tech was speaking with a supervisor in the Algonquin control center. Following Andi Jessen’s orders, he and his staff were trying to find if there had been any voltage fluctuation in specific parts of the line. This might be possible to detect, since sensors were spaced every few hundred feet to alert them if there were problems with insulation or degradation in the electric transmission line itself. There was a chance they could pinpoint where Galt had tapped into the line to run his deadly cable to the surface.

But from Cooper: “Nothing. Sorry.”

Rhyme closed his eyes briefly. The headache he’d denied earlier had grown in intensity. He wondered if pain was throbbing elsewhere. There was always that concern with quadriplegia. Without pain, you never know what the rebellious body’s up to. A tree falls in the forest, of course it makes a sound, even if nobody’s there. But does pain exist if you don’t perceive it?

These thoughts left a morbid flavor, Rhyme realized. And he understood too that he’d been having similar ones lately. He wasn’t sure why. But he couldn’t shake them.

And, even stranger, unlike his jousting with Thom yesterday at this same time of day, he didn’t want any scotch. Was nearly repulsed by the idea.

This bothered him more than the headache.

His eyes scanned the evidence charts but they skipped over the words as if they were in a foreign language he’d studied in school and hadn’t used for years. Then they settled on the chart again, tracing the flow of juice from power generation to household. In decreasing voltages.

One hundred and thirty-eight thousand volts…

Rhyme asked Mel Cooper to call Sommers at Algonquin.

“Special Projects.”

“Charlie Sommers?”

“That’s right.”

“This is Lincoln Rhyme. I work with Amelia Sachs.”

“Oh, sure. She mentioned you.” In a soft voice he said, “I heard it was Ray Galt, one of our people. Is that true?”

“Looks that way. Mr. Sommers-”

“Hey, call me Charlie. I feel like I’m an honorary cop.”

“Okay, Charlie. Are you following what’s happening right now?”

“I’ve got the grid on my laptop screen right here. Andi Jessen-our president-asked me to monitor what’s going on.”

“How close are they to fixing the, what’s it called? Switchgear in the substation where they had that fire?”

“Two, three hours. That line’s still a runaway. Nothing we can do to shut it down, except turn off the switch to most of New York City… Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Yes. I need to know more about arc flashes. It looks like Galt’s spliced into a major line, a transmission level line, and hooked his wire to the water main, then-”

“No, no. He wouldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a ground. It’d short out the instant it touched.”

Rhyme thought for a minute. Then another idea occurred to him. “What if he was just hinting at tapping into the transmission line? Maybe he actually rigged a smaller trap, someplace else. How much voltage would you need for an arc?”

“A hundred and thirty thousand is your arc flash of mass destruction but, sure, you can have one with a lot less juice. The key is that the voltage exceeds the capacity of the line or terminal that’s carrying it. The arc jumps from that to another wire-that’s phase to phase. Or to the ground. Phase to ground. With house current, you’ll get a spark but not an arc flash. That’s at most about two hundred volts. When you’re closer to four hundred, yes, a small arc is possible. Over six hundred, it’s a strong possibility. But you’re not going to see any serious length until you get into medium to high voltages.”

“So a thousand volts could do it?”

“If the conditions were right, sure.”

Rhyme was staring at the map of Manhattan, focusing on where Sachs was at the moment. This news exponentially increased the number of places where Galt might have planned his attack.

“But why’re you asking about arcs?” Sommers wondered.

“Because,” Rhyme said absently, “Galt’s going to kill somebody with one in less than an hour.”

“Oh, did Galt’s note say something about an arc?”

Rhyme realized that it didn’t. “No.”

“So you’re just assuming that’s what he’d do.”

Rhyme hated the word “assumption” and all its derivatives. He was furious with himself, wondering if they’d missed something important. “Go on, Charlie.”

“An arc is spectacular but it’s also one of the least efficient ways to use electricity as a weapon. You can’t control it very well, you’re never sure where it’s going to end up. Look at yesterday morning. I mean, Galt had a whole bus for a target and he missed… You want to know how I’d kill somebody with electricity?”

Lincoln Rhyme said quickly, “Yes, I very much would,” and tilted his head to the phone to listen with complete concentration.

Chapter 34

THOMAS EDISON INTRODUCED overhead transmission, those ugly towers, in New Jersey in 1883, but the first grid ran beneath the streets of Lower Manhattan, starting from his generating station on Pearl Street. He had a grand total of fifty-nine customers.

Some linemen hated the underground grid-the dark grid, as it was sometimes called-but Joey Barzan loved it down here. He’d been with Algonquin Power for only a couple of years but had been in the electrical trades for ten years, since he’d started working at eighteen. He’d worked private construction before joining the company, moving his way up from apprentice to journeyman. He was thinking of going on and becoming a master electrician, and he would someday, but for now he liked working for a big company.

And what bigger outfit could he find than Algonquin Consolidated, one of the top companies in the country?

A half hour earlier he and his partner had gotten a call from his troubleman that there’d been a curious fluctuation in power in the supply to a subway system near Wall Street. Some of the MTA lines had their own power plants, miniature versions of Algonquin’s MOM. But this line, the one rumbling nearby right now, was powered purely by Algonquin juice. The company transmitted 27,500 volts from Queens to substations along the line, which stepped it down and converted it to 625 volts, DC, for the third rails.

A gauge in a nearby MTA substation reported that for a fraction of a second there’d been a dropout. Not enough to cause any disruption of subway service but enough to be concerned-considering the incident at the bus station early yesterday.

And, damn, an Algonquin employee was the one behind it. Ray Galt, a senior troubleman in Queens.

Barzan had seen arc flashes-everyone in the business had at one time or another-and the spectacle of the burning lightning, the explosion, the eerie hum was enough to make him promise himself he’d never take a chance with juice. PPE gloves and boots, insulated hot sticks, no metal on the job. A lot of people thought they could outthink juice.

Well, you can’t. And you can’t outrun it either.

Now-his partner up top briefly-Barzan was looking for anything that might’ve caused the current to dip. It was cool here and deserted, but not quiet. Motors hummed and subways shook the ground like earthquakes. Yep, he liked it here, among the cables and the smell of hot insulation, rubber, oil. New York city is a ship, with as much structure under the surface as above. And he knew all the decks as well as he knew his neighborhood in the Bronx.

He couldn’t figure out what had caused the fluctuation. The Algonquin lines all seemed fine. Maybe-

He paused, seeing something that made him curious.

What is that? he wondered. Like all linemen, whether up top or in the dark grid, he knew his territory and at the dim end of the tunnel was something that wasn’t right: A cable was spliced to one of the breaker panels feeding the subway system for no logical reason. And, instead of running down into the ground, to reach the subway, this went up and ran across the ceiling of the tunnel. It was well spliced-you judged a lineman’s skill by how well he joined lines-so it’d been done by a pro. But who? And why?

He stood and started to follow it.

Then gasped in fright. Another Algonquin worker was standing in the tunnel. The man seemed even more surprised to run into somebody. In the dimness Barzan didn’t recognize him.

“Hi, there.” Barzan nodded. Neither shook hands. They were wearing PPE gloves, bulky-thick enough for live-wire work provided the rest of the dielectric was adequate.

The other guy blinked and wiped sweat. “Didn’t expect anybody down here.”

“Me either. You hear about the fluctuation?”

“Yeah.” The man said something else but Barzan wasn’t really listening. He was wondering what the guy was doing exactly, looking at his laptop-all linemen used these, of course, everything on the grid being computerized. But he wasn’t checking voltage levels or switchgear integrity. On the screen was a video image. It looked like the construction site that was pretty much overhead. Like what you’d see from a security camera with good resolution.

And then Barzan glanced at the guy’s Algonquin ID badge.

Oh, shit.

Raymond Galt, Senior Technical Service Operator.

Barzan felt his breath hiss from his lungs, recalling the supervisor that morning calling in all the linemen and explaining about Galt and what he’d done.

He now realized that the spliced cable was rigged to create another arc flash!

Be cool, he told himself. It was pretty dark down here and Galt couldn’t see his face very well; he might’ve missed Barzan’s surprised reaction. And the company and the police had made the announcement only a little while ago. Maybe Galt had been down here for the past couple of hours and didn’t know the cops were looking for him.

“Well, lunchtime. I’m starving.” Barzan started to pat his stomach and then decided that was overacting. “Better get back upstairs. My partner’ll be wondering what I’m doing down here.”

“Hey, take care,” Galt said and turned back to the computer.

Barzan too turned to head toward the closest exit, stifling the urge to flee.

He should have given into it, he quickly realized.

The instant Barzan turned, he was aware of Galt reaching down fast and lifting something from beside him.

Barzan started to run but Galt was even faster and, glancing back, Barzan had only a brief image of a lineman’s heavy fiberglass hot stick, swinging in an arc into his hard hat. The blow stunned him and sent him tumbling to the filthy floor.

He was focused on a line carrying 138,000v, six inches from his face, when the stick slammed into him once more.

Chapter 35

AMELIA SACHS WAS doing what she did best.

Perhaps not best.

But doing what she loved most. What made her feel the most alive.

Driving.

Pushing metal and flesh to its limits, speeding fast along city streets, seemingly impossible routes, considering the dense traffic, human and vehicular. Weaving, skidding. When you drove fast, you didn’t ease the vehicle along the course, you didn’t dance; you pounded the car through its moves, you slammed and jerked and slugged.

These were called muscle cars for a reason.

The 1970 model year 428 Ford Torino Cobra, heir to the Fairlane, pushed out 405 horsepower with a nifty 447 foot pounds of torque. Sachs had the optional four-speed transmission, of course, which she needed for her heavy foot. The shifter was tough and sticky and if you didn’t get it right you’d have adjustments aplenty, which might include flushing gear teeth out of the reservoir. It wasn’t like today’s forgiving six-speed syncromeshes made for midlife-crisis businessmen with Bluetooths stuck into their ear and dinner reservations on their mind.

The Cobra wheezed, growled, whined; it had many voices.

Sachs tensed. She gave a touch of horn but before the sound waves made it to the lazy driver about to change lanes without looking, she was past him.

Sachs admitted that she missed her most recent car, a Chevy Camaro SS, the one she and her father had worked on together. It had been a victim of the perp in a recent case. But her father had reminded her it wasn’t wise to put too much person into your car. It was part of you, but it wasn’t you. And it wasn’t your child or your best friend. The rods, wheels, the cylinders, the drums, the tricky electronics could turn indifferent or lazy and strand you. They could also betray and kill you, and if you thought the conglomeration of steel and plastic and copper and aluminum cared, you were wrong.

Amie, a car has only the soul you put into it. No more and no less. And never forget that.

So, yes, she regretted the loss of her Camaro and always would. But she now drove a fine vehicle that suited her. And that, incongruously, sported as a steering wheel ornament the Camaro’s insignia, a present from Pammy, who’d removed it reverently from the Chevy’s corpse for Sachs to mount on the Ford.

Pound on the brake for the intersection, heel-toe downshift to rev match, check left, check right, clutch out and rip up through the gears. The speedometer hit fifty. Then kissed sixty, seventy. The blue light on the dashboard, which she hardly even saw, flashed as fast as a pounding heart.

Sachs was presently on the West Side Highway, venerable Route 9A, having made the transition from the Henry Hudson several miles behind her. Heading south, she streaked past familiar sights, the helipad, Hudson River Park, the yacht docks and the tangled entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Then with the financial center buildings on her right, she hurried on past the massive construction site where the towers had been, aware even at this frantic time that if ever a void could cast a shadow it was here.

A controlled skid angled the Cobra onto Battery Place, and Sachs flew east into the warren of lower Manhattan.

She had the tip of the ear bud inserted and a crackling sound interrupted her concentration as she deftly skidded around two cabs, noting the shocked expression below the Sikh’s turban.

“Sachs!”

“What, Rhyme?”

“Where are you?”

“Almost there.”

She lost rubber on all four tires as she made a ninety-degree turn and inserted the Ford between curb and car, one needle never below 45, the other never below 5,000.

She was making for Whitehall Street. Near Stone. Rhyme had had a conversation with Charlie Sommers, and it had yielded unexpected results. The Special Projects man had speculated that Galt might try something other than an arc flash; Sommers was betting the man would simply try to electrify a public area with enough voltage to kill passersby. He’d turn them into part of the circuit and run juice through them somehow. It was easier and more efficient, the man had explained, and you didn’t need nearly as much voltage.

Rhyme had concluded that the fire in the uptown substation was really a distraction to keep them focused away from Galt’s attack on the real location: probably downtown. He’d looked over the list of lava and volcano exhibits, and found the one that was the farthest away from Harlem, where everybody was looking: Amsterdam College. It was a community college specializing in office skills and associate degrees in the business professions. But their liberal arts division was having a show on geologic formations, including an exhibit about volcanoes.

“I’m here, Rhyme.” Sachs skidded the Torino to a stop in front of the school, leaving twin tails of black on the gray asphalt. She was out of the car before the tire smoke from the wheel wells had dissipated. The smell ominously reminded her of Algonquin substation MH-10… and though she tried to avoid it, a repeat image of the black-and-red dots in the body of Luis Martin. As she jogged toward the school’s entrance, she was, for once, thankful that a jolt of arthritic pain shot through her knees, partially taking her attention off the harsh memories.

“I’m looking the place over, Rhyme. It’s big. Bigger than I expected.” Sachs wasn’t searching a scene so she’d foregone the video uplink.

“You’ve got eighteen minutes until the deadline.”

She scanned the six-story community college, from which students, professors and staff were leaving, quickly, uneasiness on their faces. Tucker McDaniel and Lon Sellitto had decided to evacuate the place. They hurried outside, clutching purses and computers and books, and moved away from the building. Almost everyone looked up at one point in their exodus.

Always, in a post 9/11 world, looking up.

Another car arrived, and a woman in a dark suit climbed out. It was a fellow detective, Nancy Simpson. She jogged up to Sachs.

“What do we have, Amelia?”

“Galt’s rigged something in the school, we think. We don’t know what yet. I’m going inside and looking around. Could you interview them”-a nod at the evacuees-“and see if anybody spotted Galt? You have his picture?”

“On my PDA.”

Sachs nodded and turned to the front of the school once more, uncertain how to proceed, recalling what Sommers had said. She knew where a bomb might be set, where a sniper would position himself. But the threat from electricity could come from anywhere.

She asked Rhyme, “What exactly did Charlie say Galt might rig?”

“The most efficient way would be to use the victim like a switch. He’d wire door handles or stair railings with the hot source and then the floor with the return. Or the floor might just be a natural ground if it was wet. The circuit’s open until the vic touches the handle or railing. Then the current flows through them. It wouldn’t take much voltage at all to kill somebody. The other way is to just have somebody touch a live source with two hands. That could send enough voltage through your chest to kill you. But it’s not as efficient.”

Efficient… sick word to use under the circumstances.

Sirens chirped and barked behind her. Fire, NYPD Emergency Service Unit and medical personnel had begun to arrive.

She waved a greeting to Bo Haumann, the head of ESU, a lean, grizzled former drill sergeant. He nodded back and began deploying his officers to help get the evacuees to safety and to form into tactical response teams, searching for Raymond Galt and any accomplices.

Hesitating, then pushing on the glass portion of the door rather than the metal handle, she walked into the lobby of the school, against the crowd. She wanted to call out to everyone not to touch any metal but was afraid if she did that, she’d start a panic and people would be injured or killed in a crush. Besides, they still had fifteen minutes until the deadline.

Inside there were plenty of metal railings, knobs, stairs and panels on the floor. But no visual clues about whether or not they were connected to a wire somewhere.

“I don’t know, Rhyme,” she said uncertainly. “There’s metal, sure. But most of the floor’s carpeted or covered with linoleum. That’s gotta be a bad conductor.”

Was he just going to start a fire and burn the place down?

Thirteen minutes.

“Keep looking, Sachs.”

She tried Charlie Sommers’s noncontact current detector and it gave occasional indications of voltage but nothing higher than house current. And the source wasn’t in the places that would be the most likely to kill or injure anyone.

Through the window, a flashing yellow light caught her eye. It was an Algonquin Consolidated truck with a sign on the side, reading Emergency Maintenance. She recognized two of the four occupants, Bernie Wahl, the security chief, and Bob Cavanaugh, the Operations VP. They ran up to a cluster of officers, including Nancy Simpson.

It was as she was looking through the plate glass at the three of them that Sachs noticed for the first time what was next door to the school. A construction site for a large high-rise. The crews were doing the ironwork, bolting and welding the girders into place.

She looked back to the lobby but felt a slam in her gut. She spun back to gaze at the job site.

Metal. The entire structure was pure metal.

“Rhyme,” she said softly, “I don’t think it’s the school at all.”

“What do you mean?”

She explained.

“Steel… Sure, Sachs, it makes sense. Try to get the workers down. I’ll call Lon and have him coordinate with ESU.”

She pushed out the door and ran toward the trailer that was the general contractor’s office for the high-rise construction. She glanced up at the twenty, twenty-five stories of metal that were about to become a live wire, on which easily two hundred workers were perched. And counted only two small elevators to carry them down to safety.

The time was ten minutes until one p.m.

Chapter 36

“WHAT’S GOING ON?” Sam Vetter asked the waiter in the hotel dining room. He and his fellow lunchers were staring out the window at what seemed to be an evacuation of both the school and the construction site between the college and the hotel. Police cars and fire trucks were pulling up.

“It’s safe, isn’t it?” a patron asked. “Here, I mean?”

“Oh, yessir, very safe,” the waiter assured.

Vetter knew the man didn’t have a clue what was safe and what wasn’t. And being in the construction business, Vetter immediately checked out the ratio of emergency exits to occupancy.

One of the businessmen at his table, the man from Santa Fe, asked, “You hear about that thing yesterday? The explosion at the power station? Maybe it’s related to that. They were talking terrorists.”

Vetter had heard a news story or two, but only in passing. “What happened?”

“Some guy doing something to the grid. You know, the electric company.” The man nodded out the window. “Maybe he did the same thing at the school. Or the construction site.”

“But not us,” another patron worried. “Not at the hotel.”

“No, no, not us.” The waiter smiled and vanished. Vetter wondered which exit route he was presently sprinting down.

People were rising and walking to the windows. From here the restaurant offered a good view of the excitement.

Vetter heard: “Naw, it’s not terrorists. It’s some disgruntled worker. Like a lineman for the company. They showed his picture on TV.”

Then Sam Vetter had a thought. He asked one of his fellow businessmen, “You know what he looks like?”

“Just he’s in his forties. And is maybe wearing company overalls and a yellow hard hat. The overalls’re blue.”

“Oh, my God. I think I saw him. Just a little while ago.”

“What?”

“I saw a worker in blue overalls and a yellow hard hat. He had a roll of electrical cable over his shoulder.”

“You better tell the cops.”

Vetter rose. He started away, then paused, reaching into his pocket. He was worried that his new friends might think he was trying to stiff them for the bill. He’d heard that New Yorkers were very suspicious of people and he didn’t want his first step into the world of big-city business to be marred by something like that. He peeled off a ten for his sandwich and beer, then remembered where he was and left twenty.

“Sam, don’t worry about it! Hurry.”

He tried to remember exactly where the man had climbed from the manhole and where he’d stood to make his phone call before walking into the school. If he could recall the time of the call, more or less, maybe the police could trace it. The cell company could tell them who he’d been talking to.

Vetter hurried down the escalator, two steps at a time, and then ran into the lobby. He spotted a police officer, who was standing near the front desk.

“Officer, excuse me. But I just heard… you’re looking for somebody who works for the electric company? That man who was behind that explosion yesterday?”

“That’s right, sir. Do you know anything about it?”

“I think I might’ve seen him. I don’t know for sure. Maybe it’s not him. But I thought I should say something.”

“Hold on.” The man lifted his bulky radio and spoke into it. “This is Portable Seven Eight Seven Three to Command Post. I think I’ve got a witness. Might’ve seen the suspect, K.”

“Roger.” Clattering from the speaker. “Hold on, K… All right, Seven Eight, send him outside. Stone Street. Detective Simpson wants to talk to him, K.”

“Roger. Seven Eight, out.” Turning to Vetter, the cop said, “Go out the front doors and turn left. There’s a detective there, a woman. Nancy Simpson. You can ask for her.”

Hurrying through the lobby, Vetter thought: Maybe if the man is still around they’ll capture him before he hurts anybody else.

My first trip to New York, and I might just make the newspapers. A hero.

What would Ruth have said?

Chapter 37

“AMELIA!” NANCY SIMPSON shouted from the sidewalk. “I’ve got a witness. Somebody in the hotel next door.” Sachs hurried up to Simpson, who said, “He’s coming out to see us.”

Sachs, via the microphone, relayed this information to Rhyme.

“Where was Galt seen?” the criminalist asked urgently.

“I don’t know yet. We’re going to talk to the wit. In a second.”

Together, she and Simpson hurried to the entrance of the hotel to meet the wit. Sachs looked skyward at the steel superstructure of the building under construction. Workers were leaving fast. Only a few minutes remained until the deadline.

Then she heard: “Officer!” A man’s voice called from behind her. “Detective!”

She turned and saw Algonquin vice president Bob Cavanaugh running toward her. The large man was breathing heavily and sweating as he pulled up. His expression said, Sorry, I forgot your name.

“Amelia Sachs.”

“Bob Cavanaugh.”

She nodded.

“I heard that you’re clearing the construction site?”

“That’s right. We couldn’t find anywhere he’d attack in the school. It’s mostly carpet and-”

“But a job site makes no sense,” Cavanaugh said, gesturing frantically toward it.

“Well, I was thinking… the girders, the metal.”

“Who’s there, Sachs?” Rhyme broke in.

“The operations director of Algonquin. He doesn’t think the attack’s going to be at the job site.” She asked Cavanaugh, “Why not?”

“Look!” he said desperately, pointing to a cluster of workers standing nearby.

“What do you mean?”

“Their boots!”

She whispered, “Personal protective equipment. They’d be insulated.”

If you can’t avoid it, protect yourself against it…

Some were wearing gloves too and thick jackets.

“Galt would know they’re in PPE,” the operations man said. “He’d have to pump so much juice into the superstructure to hurt anybody that the grid’d shut down in this part of town.”

Rhyme said, “Well, if it’s not the school and it’s not the job site, then what’s his target? Or did we get it wrong in the first place? Maybe it’s not there at all. There was another volcano exhibit.”

Then Cavanaugh gripped her arm and gestured behind them. “The hotel!”

“Jesus,” Sachs muttered, staring at the place. It was one of those minimalist, chic places filled with stark stone, marble, fountains… and metal. Lots of metal. Copper doors and steel stairs and flooring.

Nancy Simpson too turned to gaze at the building.

“What?” Rhyme asked urgently in her ear.

“It’s the hotel, Rhyme. That’s what he’s attacking.” She grabbed her radio to call ESU’s chief. She lifted it to her mouth, as she and Simpson sprinted forward. “Bo, it’s Amelia. He’s going after the hotel, I’m sure of it. It’s not the construction site. Get your people there now! Evacuate it!”

“Roger that, Amelia, I’ll-”

But Sachs didn’t hear the rest of his transmission. Or rather, whatever he said was lost completely to her as she stared through the hotel’s massive windows.

Though it was before the deadline, one o’clock, a half dozen people inside the Battery Park Hotel stopped in their tracks. Their animated faces instantly went blank. They became doll faces, they were caricatures, grotesques. Spittle appeared in the corners of lips taut as ropes. Fingers, feet, chins began quivering.

Onlookers gasped and then screamed in panic at the otherworldly sight-humans turned to creatures out of a sick horror film, zombies. Two or three were caught with their hands on the push panels of revolving doors, jerking and kicking in the confined spaces. One man’s rigid leg kicked through the door glass, which severed his femoral artery. Blood sprayed and smoked. Another man, young, student age, was gripping a large brass door to a function room, and bent forward, urinating and shivering. There were two others, their hands on the rails of the low steps to the lobby bar, frozen, shaking, as the life evaporated from their bodies.

And even outside, Sachs could hear an unearthly moan from deep in the smoldering throat of a woman, caught in midstep.

A heavy-set man plunged forward to save a guest-to push him away from the elevator panel the smoking victim’s hand was frozen to. The good Samaritan may have believed he could body-slam the poor guy away from the panel. But he hadn’t reckoned on the speed and the power of juice. The instant he contacted the victim he too became part of the circuit. His face twisted into a mass of wrinkles from the pain. Then the expression melted into that of an eerie doll and he began the terrible quivering too.

Blood ran from mouths as teeth cut into tongues and lips. Eyes rolled back into sockets.

A woman with her fingers around a door handle must have made particularly good contact; her back arched at an impossible angle, her unseeing eyes gazing at the ceiling. Her silver hair burst into flames.

Sachs whispered, “Rhyme… Oh, it’s bad, real bad. I’ll have to call back.” She disconnected without waiting for a response.

Sachs and Simpson turned and began beckoning the ambulances forward. Sachs was horrified by the spectacle of arms and legs convulsing, muscles frozen, muscles quivering, veins rising, spittle and blood evaporating on faces from the blisteringly hot skin.

Cavanaugh called, “We’ve got to stop them from trying to get out. They can’t touch anything!”

Sachs and Simpson ran to the windows and gestured people back from the doors, but everyone was panicked and continued to stream for the exits, stopping only when they saw the terrible scene.

Cut its head off…

She spun to Cavanaugh, crying, “How can we shut the current off here?”

The Operations VP looked around. “We don’t know what he’s rigged it to. Around here we’ve got subway lines, transmission lines, feeders… I’ll call Queens. I’ll cut everything off in the area. It’ll shut down the Stock Exchange but we don’t have any choice.” He pulled out his phone. “But it’ll take a few minutes. Tell people in the hotel to stay put. Not to touch anything!”

Sachs ran close to a large sheet of plate glass and gestured people back frantically. Some understood and nodded. But others were panicking. Sachs watched a young woman break free from her friends and race for the emergency exit door, in front of which lay the smoking body of a man who’d tried to exit a moment before. Sachs pounded on the window. “No!” she cried. The woman looked at Sachs but kept going, arms outstretched.

“No, don’t touch it!”

The woman, sobbing, sped onward.

Ten feet from the door… five feet…

No other way, the detective decided.

“Nancy, the windows! Take ’em out!” Sachs drew her Glock. Checked the backdrop. And firing high, used six bullets to take out three of the massive windows in the lobby.

The woman screamed at the gunshots and dove to the ground just before she grabbed the deadly handle.

Nancy Simpson blew out the windows on the other side of the doors.

Both detectives leapt inside. They ordered people not to touch anything metal and began organizing the exodus through the jagged window frames, as smoke, unbelievably vile, filled the lobby.

Chapter 38

BOB CAVANAUGH CALLED, “Power’s off!”

Sachs nodded and directed emergency workers to the victims, then scanned the crowds outside, looking for Galt.

“Detective!”

Amelia Sachs turned. A man in an Algonquin Consolidated uniform was running in her direction. Seeing the dark blue outfit worn by a white male, she thought immediately that it might be Galt. The witness in the hotel had apparently reported that the suspect was nearby and the police had only a bad DMV picture of the attacker to identify him.

But as the man approached it was clear that he was much younger than Galt.

“Detective,” he said breathlessly, “that officer there said I should talk to you. There’s something I thought you should know.” His face screwed up as he caught a whiff of the smoke from inside the hotel.

“Go on.”

“I’m with the power company. Algonquin. Look, my partner, he’s in one of our tunnels, underneath us?” Nodding toward Amsterdam College. “I’ve been trying to reach him, but he’s not responding. Only, the radios’re working fine.”

Underground. Where the electric service was.

“I was thinking this Raymond Galt guy, maybe he was down there and Joey ran into him. You know. I’m worried about him.”

Sachs called two patrolmen to join her. They and the Algonquin worker hurried to the school. “We have an easement through the basement. It’s the best way to get down to the tunnel.”

So that’s how Galt had picked up the volcanic ash trace, slipping through the exhibit hall of the college. Sachs called Rhyme and explained what had happened. Then added, “I’m going tactical, Rhyme. He might be in the tunnel. I’ll call you when I know something. You found anything else in the evidence that might help?”

“Nothing more, Sachs.”

“I’m going in now.”

She disconnected before he responded and she and the officers followed the worker to the door that led to the basement. The electricity was off in the building, but emergency lights glowed like red and white eyes. The worker started for the door.

“No,” Sachs said. “You wait here.”

“Okay. You go down two flights and you’ll see a red door. It’ll say ‘Algonquin Consolidated’ on it. That’ll lead to stairs going down to the service tunnel. Here’s the key.” He handed it to her.

“What’s your partner’s name?”

“Joey. Joey Barzan.”

“And where was he supposed to be?”

“At the bottom of the access stairs, turn left. He was working about a hundred feet, hundred and fifty, away. It’d sort of be under where the hotel is.”

“What’s visibility down there?”

“Even with the juice off, there’ll be some work lights on battery power.”

Battery. Great.

“But it’s really dark. We always use flashlights.”

“Are there live lines there?”

“Yeah, it’s a transmission tunnel. The feeders here are off now, but others’re live.”

“Are they exposed?”

He gave a surprised blink. “They’ve got a hundred and thirty thousand volts. No, they’re not exposed.”

Unless Galt had exposed them.

Sachs hesitated then swept the voltage detector over the door handle, drawing a glance of curiosity from the Algonquin worker. She didn’t explain about the invention, but merely gestured everybody back and flung the door open, hand on her weapon’s grip. Empty.

Sachs and the two officers started down the murky stairwell-her claustrophobia kicked in immediately but at least here the disgusting smell of burned rubber and skin and hair was less revolting.

Sachs was in the lead, the two patrolmen behind. She was gripping the key firmly but when they got to the red door, giving access to the tunnel, she found it was partially open. They all exchanged glances. She drew her weapon. They did the same and she gestured the patrolmen to move forward slowly behind her, then eased the door open silently with her shoulder.

In the doorway she paused, looked down.

Shit. The stairs leading to the tunnel-about two stories, it seemed-were metal. Unpainted.

Her heart tripping again.

If you can, avoid it.

If you can’t do that, protect yourself against it.

If you can’t do that, cut its head off.

But none of Charlie Sommers’s magic rules applied here.

She was now sweating furiously. She remembered that wet skin was a far better conductor than dry. And hadn’t Sommers said something about salty sweat making it even worse?

“You see something, Detective?” A whisper.

“You want me to go?” the second officer asked.

She didn’t respond to the questions but whispered back, “Don’t touch anything metal.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“A hundred thousand volts. That’s why.”

“Oh. Sure.”

She plunged down the stairs, half expecting to hear a horrific crack and see her vision fill with a blinding burst of spark. Down the first flight of stairs, then down the second one.

The estimate was wrong. The journey was down three very steep flights.

As they approached the bottom, they heard rumbling and hums. Loud. It was also twenty degrees hotter down here than outside and the temperature was rising with every step of the descent.

Another level of hell.

The tunnel was bigger than she expected, about six feet across and seven high, but much dimmer. Many of the emergency lighting bulbs were missing. To the right, she could just make out the end of the tunnel, about fifty feet away. There were no doors Galt could have escaped through, no places to hide. To the left, though, where Joey Barzan was supposed to be, the corridor disappeared in what seemed to be a series of bends.

Sachs motioned the other two to stay behind her as they moved to the first jog in the tunnel. There they stopped. She didn’t believe Galt was still here-he would get as far away as he could-but she was worried about traps.

Still, it was a belief, not a certainty, that he’d fled. So when she looked around the bend she was crouching and had her Glock ready, though not preceding her, where Galt might knock it aside or grab it.

Nothing.

She looked down at the water covering the concrete floor. Water. Naturally. Plenty of conductive water.

She glanced at the wall of the tunnel, on which were mounted thick black cables.

DANGER!!! HIGH VOLTAGE

CALL ALGONQUIN CONSOLIDATED POWER

BEFORE WORKING

She remembered the Algonquin worker’s comment a moment ago about the voltage.

“Clear,” she whispered.

And motioned the officers along behind her, hurrying. She certainly was concerned about the Algonquin worker, Joey Barzan, but more important she hoped to find some clues as to where Galt might’ve gone.

But could they? These tunnels would go on for miles, she guessed. They would have been a perfect route by which to escape. The floors were dirt and concrete, but no footprints were obvious. The walls were sooty. She could collect trace evidence for days and not come up with a single thing that might yield a clue as to where he’d gone. Maybe-

A scraping sound.

She froze. Where had it come from? Were there side passages where he might be hiding?

One of the officers held up a hand. He pointed at his own eyes and then forward. She nodded, though she thought the military signal wasn’t really necessary here.

But whatever makes you comfortable in situations like this…

Though not much was making Sachs comfortable at the moment. Again, the bullets of molten metal zinged, hissing, through her mind’s eye.

Still, she couldn’t pull back.

Another deep breath.

Another look… Again, the stretch of tunnel ahead of them was empty. It was also dimmer than the other. And she saw why: most of the lightbulbs were missing here too, but these had been broken out.

A trap, she sensed.

They had to be directly beneath the hotel, she figured, when they came to a ninety-degree turn to the right.

Again she took a fast look, but this time it was hard to see anything at all because of the greater darkness here.

Then she heard noises again.

One patrolman eased close. “A voice?”

She nodded.

“Keep low,” she whispered.

They eased around the corner and made their way up the tunnel, crouching.

Then she shivered. It wasn’t a voice. It was a moan. A desperate moan. Human.

“Flashlight!” she whispered. As a detective, she wore no utility belt, just weapons and cuffs, and she felt the painful blow as the officer behind her shoved the light into her side.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“Get down,” she told the patrolmen softly. “Prone. Be prepared to fire. But only on my command… unless he takes me out first.”

They eased to the filthy floor, guns pointed down the tunnel.

She aimed in that direction too. Holding the flashlight out to her side at arm’s length so she wouldn’t present a vital-zone target, she clicked it on, the blinding beam filling the grim corridor.

No gunshots, no arc flashes.

But Galt had claimed another victim.

About thirty feet away an Algonquin worker lay on his side, duct tape over his mouth, hands tied behind him. He was bleeding from the temple and behind his ear.

“Let’s go!”

The other officers rose and the three of them hurried down the tunnel to the man she supposed was Joey Barzan. In the beam she could see it wasn’t Galt. The worker was badly injured and bleeding heavily. As one of the patrolmen hurried toward him to stop the hemorrhaging, Barzan began to shake his head frantically and wail beneath the tape.

At first Sachs assumed he was dying and that death tremors were shaking his body. But as she got closer to him she looked at his wide eyes and glanced down, following their path. He was lying not on the bare floor but on a thick piece of what looked like Teflon or plastic.

“Stop!” she shouted to the officer reaching forward to help the man. “It’s a trap!”

The patrolman froze.

She remembered what Sommers had told her about wounds and blood making the body much less resistant to electricity.

Then, without touching the worker, she walked around behind him.

His hands were bound, yes. But not with tape or rope-with bare copper wire. Which had been spliced into one of the lines on the wall. She grabbed Sommers’s voltage detector and aimed it at the wire wrapped around Barzan’s flesh.

The meter jumped off the scale at 10,000v. Had the patrolman touched him, the juice would have streaked through him, through the officer and into the ground, killing them instantly.

Sachs stepped back and turned up the volume on her radio to call Nancy Simpson and have her find Bob Cavanaugh and tell the operations director he needed to cut the head off another snake.

Chapter 39

RON PULASKI HAD managed to nurse Ray Galt’s damaged computer printer back to life. And he was grabbing the hot sheets of paper as they eased into the output tray.

The young officer pored over them desperately, searching for clues as to the man’s whereabouts, accomplices, the location of Justice For… anything that might move them closer to stopping the attacks.

Detective Cooper sent him a text, explaining that they hadn’t successfully stopped Galt at a hotel downtown. They were still searching for the killer in the Wall Street area. Did Pulaski have anything that could help?

“Not yet. Soon, I hope.” He sent the message, turned back to the printouts.

Of the eight remaining pages in the print queue, nothing was immediately relevant to finding and stopping the killer. But Pulaski did learn something that might become helpful: Raymond Galt’s motive.

Some of the pages were printouts of postings that Galt had made on blogs and online newsletters. Others were downloads of medical research, some very detailed and written by doctors with good credentials. Some were written by quacks in the language and tone of conspiracy theorists.

One had been written by Galt himself and posted on a blog about environmental causes of serious disease.

My story is typical of many. I was a lineman and later a troubleman (like a supervisor) for many years working for several power companies in direct contact with lines carrying over one hundred thousand volts. It was the electromagnetic fields created by the transmission lines, that are uninsulated, that led to my leukemia, I am convinced. In addition it has been proven that power lines attract aerosol particles that lead to lung cancer among others, but this is something that the media doesn’t talk about.

We need to make all the power companies but more important the public aware of these dangers. Because the companies won’t do anything voluntarily, why should they? if the people stopped using electricity by even half we could save thousands of lives a year and make them (the companies) more responsible. In turn they would create safer ways to deliver electricity. And stop destroying the earth too.

People, you need to take matters into your own hands!

– Raymond Galt.

So that was it. He was ill, he felt, because of companies like Algonquin. And he was fighting back in the time he had left. Pulaski knew the man was a killer, yet he couldn’t help but feel a bit of sympathy for him. The officer had found liquor bottles, most of them at least half empty, in one of the cupboards. Sleeping pills too. And antidepressants. It was no excuse to kill anybody, but dying alone of a terminal disease and the people responsible for your death not caring? Well, Pulaski could understand where the anger came from.

He continued through the printouts, but found only more of the same: rants and medical research. Not even emails whose addresses they might trace to see if they could find Galt’s friends and clues to his whereabouts.

He looked through them once more, thinking about Assistant Special Agent in Charge Tucker McDaniel’s weird theory about cloud zone communications, looking for code words and secret messages that might be embedded in the text. Then he decided he’d wasted enough time on that and bundled up the printouts. He spent a few minutes bagging the rest of the evidence, collecting the trace and attaching chain-of-custody cards. Then he laid the numbers and photographed the entire site.

When he was finished, Pulaski looked up the dim hallway to the front door and felt the uneasiness return. He started toward the door, noting again that both the knob and the door itself were metal. What’s the problem? he asked himself angrily. You opened it to get inside an hour ago. Leaving on the latex exam gloves, he tentatively reached out and pulled the door open, then, with relief, he stepped outside.

Two NYPD cops and an FBI agent were nearby. Pulaski nodded a greeting.

“You hear?” the agent asked.

Pulaski paused in the doorway of the apartment, then stepped farther away from the steel door. “About the attack? Yeah. I heard he got away. I don’t know any details.”

“He killed five people. Would’ve been more but your partner saved a lot of them.”

“Partner?”

“That woman detective. Amelia Sachs. Bunch were injured. Badly burned.”

Pulaski shook his head. “That’s tough. That same way, the arc flash?”

“I don’t know. He electrocuted them, though. That’s all I heard.”

“Jesus.” Pulaski looked around the street. He’d never noticed how much metal there was on a typical residential block. A creepy feeling was flooding over him, the paranoia. There were metal posts and bars and rods everywhere, it seemed. Fire escapes, vents, pipes going into the ground, those metal sheets covering under-sidewalk elevators. Any one of them could be energized enough to send a charge right through you or to explode in a shower of metal shrapnel.

Killed five people…

Third-degree burns.

“You okay there, Officer?”

Pulaski gave a reflexive laugh. “Yeah.” He wanted to explain his fear, but of course he didn’t. “Any leads to Galt?”

“No. He’s gone.”

“Well, I gotta get this back to Lincoln Rhyme.”

“Find anything?”

“Yeah. Galt’s definitely the one. But I couldn’t find anything about where he is now. Or what he’s got planned next.”

The FBI agent asked, “Who’s going to do surveillance?” He nodded at the apartment. “You want to leave some of your people here?”

The implication being that the feds were perfectly happy to come along for the bust but since Galt wasn’t here and probably wouldn’t return-he must’ve heard on the news that they’d identified him-they didn’t want to bother leaving their people on guard detail.

“That’s not my call,” the young officer said. He radioed Lon Sellitto and told him what he’d found. The lieutenant would arrange for two NYPD officers to remain on site, though hidden, until an official undercover surveillance team could be put together, just in case Galt tried to sneak back.

Pulaski then walked around the corner and into the deserted alleyway behind the building. He popped the trunk and loaded the evidence inside.

He slammed it, and looked around uneasily.

At all the metal, surrounded by metal.

Goddamn it, stop thinking about that! He got into the driver’s seat and started to insert the key into the steering column. Then he hesitated. The car had been parked here, up the alley, out of sight of the apartment in case Galt did come back. If the perp was still free, was there a chance he’d returned and rigged some kind of a trap on Pulaski’s car?

No, too far-fetched.

Pulaski grimaced. He started the car and put it in reverse.

His phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen. It was his wife, Jenny. He debated. No, he’d call her later. He slipped the phone away.

Glancing out the window he saw an electrical service panel on the side of a building, three large wires running from it. Shivering at the sight, Pulaski gripped the key and turned it. The starter gave that huge grinding sound when the engine’s already running. In panic, believing that he was being electrocuted, the young cop grabbed the door handle and yanked it open. His foot slipped off the brake and landed on the accelerator. The Crown Victoria screeched backward, tires skidding. He slammed on the brake.

But not before there was a sickening thud and a scream and he caught a glimpse of a middle-aged man who’d been crossing the alley, carting a load of groceries. The pedestrian flew into the wall and collapsed on the cobblestones, blood streaming from his head.

Chapter 40

AMELIA SACHS WAS taking stock of Joey Barzan.

“How you doing?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

She wasn’t sure what that meant and didn’t think he knew either. She glanced at the EMS medic who was bent over Barzan. They were still in the tunnel beneath the Battery Park Hotel.

“Concussion, lost some blood.” He turned to his patient, who was sitting unsteadily against the wall. “You’ll be all right.”

Bob Cavanaugh had managed to find the source of the juice and shut down the line that Galt had used for the trap. Sachs had confirmed that the electrical supply was dead, using Sommers’s current detector, and quickly-really quickly-undone the wire attached to the feeder line.

“What happened?” she asked Barzan.

“It was Ray Galt. I found him down here. He hit me with a hot stick, knocked me out. When I woke up he’d wired me to the line. Jesus. That was sixty-thousand volts, a subway feeder. If you’d touched me, if I’d rolled a few inches to the side… Jesus.” Then he blinked. “I heard the sirens on the street. The smell. What happened?”

“Galt ran some wires into the hotel next door.”

“God, no. Is anybody hurt?”

“There are casualties. I don’t know the details yet. Where’d Galt go?”

“I don’t know. I was out. If he didn’t leave through the college, he had to go that way, through the tunnel.” He cast his eyes to the side. “There’s plenty of access to the subway tunnels and platforms.”

Sachs asked, “Did he say anything?”

“Not really.”

“Where was he when you saw him?”

“Right there.” He pointed about ten feet away. “You can see where he rigged the line. There’s some kind of box on it. I’ve never seen that before. And he was watching the construction site and the hotel on his computer. Like it was hooked into a security camera.”

Sachs rose and looked over the cable, the same Bennington brand as at the bus stop yesterday. No sign of the computer or hot stick, which she recalled Sommers telling her about-a fiberglass pole for live-wire work.

Then Barzan said in a soft voice, “The only reason I’m alive now is that he wanted to use me to kill people, isn’t that right? He wanted to stop you from chasing him.”

“That’s right.”

“That son of a bitch. And he’s one of us. Linemen and troublemen stick together. It’s like a brotherhood, you know. We have to be. Juice is so dangerous.” He was furious at the betrayal.

Sachs rolled the man’s hands, arms and legs for trace and then nodded to the medics. “He can go now.” She told Barzan if he thought of anything else to give her a call and handed him a card. A medic radioed his colleague and said that the scene was clear and that they could bring the stretcher down the tunnel to evacuate the worker. Barzan sat back against the tunnel wall and closed his eyes.

Sachs then contacted Nancy Simpson and told her what had happened. “Get ESU into the Algonquin tunnels for a half mile around. And the subways too.”

“Sure, Amelia. Hold on.” Simpson came back on a moment later. “They’re on their way.”

“What about our witness from the hotel?”

“I’m still checking.”

Sachs’s eyes were growing more accustomed to the dark. She squinted. “I’ll get back to you, Nancy. I see something.” She moved through the tunnel in the direction that Barzan indicated Galt probably had fled.

About thirty feet away, sandwiched behind a grating in a small recess, she found a set of Algonquin dark blue overalls, hard hat and gear bag. She’d seen a flash of yellow from the safety hat. Of course, Galt would now know that everybody was looking for him, so he’d stripped off the outfit and hidden it here with the tool bag.

She called back Simpson and asked her to contact Bo Haumann and ESU and let them know that Galt would be in different clothes. Then she donned latex gloves and reached forward to pull the evidence out from behind the metal.

But then she stopped fast.

Now, you have to remember that even if you think you’re avoiding it, you could still be in danger.

Sommers’s words resounded in her head. She took the current detector and swept it over the tools.

The needle jumped: 603 volts.

Gasping, Sachs closed her eyes and felt the strength drain from her legs. She looked more carefully and saw a wire. It ran from the grating underground to the conduit behind which the evidence was stashed. She’d have to touch the pipe to pull the items out. The power was technically off in the tunnel but maybe this was a case of islanding or backfeed, if she remembered what Sommers had told her.

How much amperage does it take to kill you?

One tenth of one amp.

She returned to Barzan, who gazed at her blearily, his bandaged head still resting against the tunnel wall.

“I need some help. I need to collect some evidence, but there’s still power in one of the lines.”

“What line?”

“Up there. Six hundred volts. He’s wired it to some conduit.”

“Six hundred? It’s DC, backfeed from the third rail supply on the subway. Look, you can use my hot stick. See it there?” He pointed. “And my gloves. The best thing is to run another wire to a ground from the conduit. You know how to do that?”

“No.”

“I’m in no shape to help you. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. Tell me how to use the stick.” She pulled on Barzan’s gloves over the latex ones and took the tool, which ended with a clawlike attachment on the end, covered in rubber. It gave her some, but not a lot of, confidence.

“Stand on the rubber mat and pull whatever you saw out one by one. You’ll be fine… To be safe do it one-handed. Your right hand.”

Farthest from the heart…

Which thudded furiously as she walked up to the recess, lay the Teflon sheets down and began slowly to collect the evidence.

Pictured yet again young Luis Martin’s torn body, the shivering creatures dying in the hotel lobby.

Hated being distracted.

Hated being up against an enemy she couldn’t see.

Holding her breath-though she didn’t know why-she pulled out the overalls and hard hat. Then the gear bag. R. Galt was written in sloppy marker on the red canvas.

Exhaling long.

Finally she assembled and bagged the evidence.

A crime scene technician from Queens had arrived with CS equipment suitcases in hand. Even though the scene was now vastly contaminated, Sachs dressed in the blue Tyvek jumpsuit and continued to run the scene like any other. She laid out the numbers, took pictures and walked the grid. Using Sommers’s detector, she double-checked the lines and then quickly unbolted the Bennington cable and a square black plastic box that connected it to the main feeder line. Galt’s wire ran to the steel girder of the hotel, which would carry the juice to energize the metal fixtures of the door handles, revolving doors and stair rails. She bagged everything she’d found, then took samples from where Galt had stood to mount the cable and where he’d attacked Joey Barzan.

She looked again for the hot stick Galt had hit his fellow worker with but couldn’t find it. Nor was there any sign of where he’d cut into any video feeds to use the school’s or construction site’s security cameras to look over the site of the attack, as Barzan had told her.

After she’d finished bagging the evidence, she called Rhyme and gave him an update.

“Get back here as soon as you can, Sachs. We need that evidence.”

“What’d Ron find?”

“According to Lon, nothing spectacular. Hm. Wonder what’s going on. He should be here by now.” His impatience was obvious.

“It’ll just be a few minutes. I want to find that witness. Somebody having lunch apparently got a good look at Galt. I’m hoping he can tell us something specific.”

They disconnected and Sachs returned to the surface and found Nancy Simpson. The detective was in the hotel lobby, which was now largely empty. Sachs started for one of the revolving doors not sealed off with police tape but stopped. She turned and climbed through the shattered window.

Simpson’s hollow face revealed that she was still shaken. “Just talked to Bo. No idea where Galt got out of the system. With the power off he might’ve just walked down the subway tracks to Canal Street, got lost in Chinatown. Nobody knows.”

Sachs looked at where blood and scorch marks stained the marble floors, outlining where the victims had been.

“Final count?”

“Five dead, looks like eleven injured, all seriously. Burns are mostly third degree.”

“You canvass?”

“Yep. But nobody saw anything. Most of the guests who were here just vanished. They weren’t even checking out.” Simpson added that they had fled, with spouses, children, associates and suitcases in tow. The hotel staff had done nothing to stop them. Half the employees had left too, it seemed.

“What about our witness?”

“I’m trying to track him down. I found some people he was having lunch with. They said he saw Galt. That’s why I’d really love to find him.”

“Who is he?”

“His name’s Sam Vetter. Was here from Scottsdale on business. His first trip to the city.”

A patrolman walked past. “Excuse me, I heard you mention the name Vetter?”

“Right. Sam Vetter.”

“He came up to me in the lobby. Said he had some information about Galt.”

“Where is he?”

“Oh, you didn’t know?” the officer said. “He was one of the victims. Was in the revolving door. He’s dead.”

Chapter 41

AMELIA SACHS RETURNED with the evidence.

Rhyme’s eyes narrowed as she walked quickly into the townhouse. In her wake was a repulsive odor. Burned hair, burned rubber, burned flesh. Some crips believed they had an increased sense of smell because of their disability; Rhyme wasn’t sure if this was true but in any case he had no problem detecting the stench.

He looked over the evidence Sachs and a crime scene tech from Queens had carted in. The hungry itch to tackle the mysteries the clues might reveal filled him. As Sachs and Cooper laid it out, Rhyme asked, “ESU find where Galt got out of the tunnel?”

“No sign of him. None at all.” She looked around. “Where’s Ron?”

Rhyme said that the rookie still wasn’t back. “I called, left a message. I haven’t heard from him. The last he said he’d found Galt’s motive but didn’t go into it… What, Sachs?”

He’d caught her gazing out the window, her face still.

“I got it wrong, Rhyme. I wasted time evacuating the construction site and missed the real target completely.”

She explained that it had been Bob Cavanaugh who figured out that the target was the hotel. She was sighing. “If I’d thought it out better, I might’ve saved them.” She walked to a whiteboard and with a firm hand wrote, “Battery Park Hotel,” at the top and just below that the names of the deceased victims, apparently a husband and wife, a businessman from Scottsdale, Arizona, a waiter and an advertising executive from Germany.

“It could’ve been a lot more. I heard you took out the windows and got people out that way.”

Her response was a shrug.

Rhyme felt that “what if” had no part in the policing business. You did the best you could, you played the odds.

Though he too was feeling what Sachs was, angry that, despite their race against the clock and their correct deduction about the general locale where the attack would be, not only had they failed to save victims but they’d missed their chance to collar Galt.

But he wasn’t as upset as she was. However many people were at fault and whatever their degree of blame, Sachs was always hardest on herself. He could have told her that undoubtedly more people would have died if she hadn’t been there, and that Galt now knew that he’d been identified and nearly outthought. He might very well stop the attacks altogether and give up. But saying this to her would smack of condescension and, had it been directed at Rhyme himself, he wouldn’t even have listened.

Besides, the stark truth was, yes, the perp got away because they’d got it wrong.

Sachs returned to assembling the evidence on the examining table.

Her face was paler than normal; she was a minimalist when it came to makeup. And Rhyme could see that this crime scene too had affected her. The bus incident had spooked her-and some of that was still in her eyes, a patina of ill ease. But this was a different horror, the residue of the image of the people in the hotel dying in such terrible ways. “They were… it was like they were dancing while they died, Rhyme,” she’d described it to him.

She’d collected Galt’s Algonquin overalls and hard hat, the gear bag containing tools and supplies, another of the heavy-duty cables, identical to the one Galt had used for the arc flash yesterday morning. There were also several bags of trace. Another item, too, in a thick plastic bag: connecting the cable to the main line involved something different from what Galt had used at the Algonquin substation on Fifty-seventh Street, she explained. He’d used split bolts but between the two wires was a plastic box, about the size of a hard-cover book.

Cooper scanned it for explosives and then opened it up. “Looks homemade but I have no idea what it is.”

Sachs said, “Let’s talk to Charlie Sommers.”

In five minutes they were on a conference call with the inventor from Algonquin. Sachs described the attack at the hotel.

“I didn’t know it was that bad,” he said in a soft voice.

Rhyme said, “Appreciate your advice earlier-how he’d be rigging the current like he did, instead of the arc.”

“Didn’t help much, though,” the man muttered.

“Can you look over this box we recovered?” Sachs asked. “It was connecting the Algonquin line to the one he ran to the hotel.”

“Of course.”

Cooper gave Sommers a URL for a secure streaming video and then turned the high-def camera over the guts of the box.

“Got it. Let me take a look… Go back to the other side… Interesting. Not commercial. Made by hand.”

“That’s what it looks like to us,” Rhyme said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. Not this compact. It’s switchgear. That’s our term for the switches in substations and on transmission systems.”

“Just shuts a circuit on and off?”

“Yep. Like a wall switch, except I’d say it could handle a hundred thousand volts easy. A built-in fan, a solenoid and a receiver. Remote control.”

“So he hooked the wires together without transferring any current, then when he was safely away he hit the switch. Andi Jessen said he might try something like that.”

“Did she? Hm. Interesting.” Then Sommers added, “But I don’t think the issue is safety. Any troubleman knows how to splice wires safely. He did this for another reason.”

Rhyme understood. “To time the attack-he’d turn on the juice the moment when most victims were exposed.”

“I think that’s it, yes.”

Sachs added, “One of the workers who saw him said he was watching the scene on his laptop-it was probably hooked into a nearby security camera. I couldn’t find where he cut in, though.”

“Maybe that’s why he hit the switch a few minutes early,” Rhyme said. “He had the chance to get the most victims, and he knew Algonquin wasn’t going to give in to his demand at that point anyway.”

Sommers sounded impressed when he said, “He’s talented. That’s a clever piece of work. The switch seems simple but it was a lot harder to make than you’d think. There’s a lot of electromagnetic power in voltage lines that big and he’d have to shield the electronics. He’s smart. Which, I guess, is bad news.”

“Where could he get the parts, the solenoid, the receiver, the fan?”

“In any one of a hundred electrical supply stores in the area. Two hundred… Any serial numbers?”

Cooper examined them carefully. “No. Model numbers, that’s all.”

“Then you’re out of luck.”

Rhyme and Sachs thanked Sommers and they hung up.

Sachs and Cooper examined Galt’s gear kit and the Algonquin overalls and hard hat. No notes or maps, nothing to indicate where he might be hiding out or what his next target might be. That didn’t surprise them, since Galt had intentionally ditched the items and would know they’d been discovered.

Detective Gretchen Sahloff, from Crime Scene HQ, had collected samplars of Galt’s fingerprints from his office and a thumbprint on file from Algonquin Human Resources. Cooper now examined all of the items collected, against these prints. He found only Galt’s on the collected evidence. Rhyme was frustrated at this. Had they found others, that could have led them to a friend of Galt’s or an accomplice or someone in the Justice For cell, if it was involved in the attacks.

Also Rhyme noted that the hacksaw and bolt cutter weren’t in the bag, but this didn’t surprise him. The kit was for smaller hand tools.

The wrench, however, was, and it had tool marks that were identical to those on the bolts at the substation on Fifty-seventh Street.

The crime scene team from the arson incident at the substation in Harlem arrived. They had very little. Galt had used a simple Molotov cocktail-a glass bottle filled with gasoline and a cloth rag stuck into the top. It had been thrown against the barred but open window and the burning gas had flowed inside, igniting rubber and plastic insulation. The bottle was for wine-there were no threads for a screw-top cap-and was manufactured by a glassworks that sold to dozens of wineries, which in turn sold to thousands of retail outlets. The label had been soaked off. Untraceable.

The gasoline was BP, regular grade, and the cloth was from a T-shirt. None of these items could be traced to a specific location, though a rat-tail file was found in Galt’s gear bag with glass dust that could be associated with the bottle-from scoring it, so that it would be certain to break.

There was no security camera outside or in the substation.

A knock on the door sounded.

Thom went to open it and a moment later Ron Pulaski entered, with the evidence he’d gathered at Galt’s apartment, several milk crates full of items, the bolt cutter and the hacksaw, along with a pair of boots.

Well, at last, Rhyme thought, irritated at the delay, though pleased at the arrival of the evidence.

Unsmiling, Pulaski looked at no one as he stacked up the evidence on the table. Then Rhyme noticed that his hand was shaking.

“Rookie, you all right?”

The young man, his back to them all, paused, looking down, hands on the table in front of him. Then he turned. Took a breath. “There was an accident at the scene. I hit somebody with my car. Somebody innocent, just happened to be there. He’s in a coma. They think he might die.”

Chapter 42

THE YOUNG OFFICER told them what had happened.

“I just wasn’t thinking. Or maybe I was thinking too much. I got spooked. I was worried Galt might’ve gotten to my car and rigged a trap or something.”

“How could he have done that?” Rhyme asked.

“I don’t know,” Pulaski said emotionally. “I didn’t remember I’d already started the engine. I turned the key again and the noise… well, it scared me. I guess my foot slipped off the brake.”

“Who was he?”

“Just some guy, Palmer’s his name. Works nights at a trucking company. He was taking a shortcut back from a grocery store… I hit him pretty hard.”

Rhyme thought about the head injury that Pulaski himself had suffered. He’d be troubled by the fact that his carelessness had now seriously injured someone else.

“Internal Affairs’s going to talk to me. They said the city’ll probably be sued. They told me to contact the PBA about a lawyer. I…” Words failed him. Finally he repeated a bit manically, “My foot slipped off the brake. I didn’t even remember putting the car in gear or starting it.”

“Well, Rookie, blame yourself or not, but the point is, this Palmer’s not a player in the Galt case, is he?”

“No.”

“So deal with it after hours,” Rhyme said firmly.

“Yessir, sure. I will. I’m sorry.”

“So, what’d you find?”

He explained about the sheets he’d managed to tease out of Galt’s printer. Rhyme complimented him on that-it was a good save-but the officer didn’t even seem to hear. Pulaski continued, explaining about Galt’s cancer and the high-tension wires.

“Revenge,” Rhyme mused. “The old standby. An okay motive. Not one of my favorites. Yours?” He glanced at Sachs.

“No,” she replied seriously. “Greed and lust’re mine. Revenge’s usually an antisocial personality disorder thing. But this could be more than revenge, Rhyme. From the demand note he’s on a crusade. Saving the people from the evil energy company. A fanatic. And I still think we may find a terrorist connection.”

Apart from the motive, though, and the evidence tying Galt to the crime scenes, Pulaski had found nothing that suggested his present whereabouts or where he might be going to attack next. This was disappointing but didn’t surprise Rhyme; the attacks were obviously well planned and Galt was smart. He’d have known from the start that his identity might be learned and he would have made arrangements for a hideout.

Rhyme scrolled through numbers and placed a call.

“Andi Jessen’s office,” came the weary voice through the speakerphone.

Rhyme identified himself and a moment later was talking to the CEO of the power company. She said, “I just talked to Gary Noble and Agent McDaniel. There’re five people dead, I heard. And more in the hospital.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m so sorry. How awful. I’ve been looking at Ray Galt’s employee file. His picture’s up in front of me right now. He doesn’t look like the kind of person who’d do something like this.”

They never do.

Rhyme explained, “He’s convinced he got cancer from working on the electric lines.”

“Is that why he’s doing this?”

“It seems. He’s crusading. He thinks working on high-power lines is a big risk.”

She sighed. “We’ve got a half dozen suits pending on the issue. High-voltage cables give off EMFs-electromagnetic fields. Insulation and walls shield the electrical field, but not the magnetic. There’re arguments that that can cause leukemia.”

Reading over the pages from Galt’s printer, now scanned and up on the monitor in front of him, Rhyme said, “He also talks about the lines attracting airborne particles that can cause lung cancer.”

“None of that’s ever been proven. I dispute it. I dispute the leukemia thing too.”

“Well, Galt doesn’t.”

“What does he want us to do?”

“I guess we won’t know that until we get another demand note or he contacts you some other way.”

“I’ll make a statement, ask him to give himself up.”

“It couldn’t hurt.” Though Rhyme was thinking that Galt had come too far simply to make a point and surrender. He had more retribution in mind, they had to assume.

Seventy-five feet of cable and a dozen split bolts. So far he’d used about thirty feet of the stolen wire.

As he disconnected, Rhyme noticed that Pulaski was on the phone, head down. The officer looked up and met his boss’s eyes. He ended his call quickly-and guiltily-and walked over to the evidence table. He started to reach for one of the tools he’d collected and then froze, realizing he didn’t have latex gloves on. He pulled on a pair, cleaned the rubber fingers and palm with the dog-hair roller. Then he picked up the bolt cutter.

A comparison of the tool marks showed that both it and the hacksaw were the same tools used to create the trap at the bus stop, and the boots were the same brand and size too.

But that just confirmed what they already knew: Raymond Galt was the perp.

They took a look at the paper and the pens the young officer had collected from Galt’s apartment. They could determine no source, but the paper and the ink in the Bics were virtually the same as had been used in the demand note.

What they discovered next was much more disturbing.

Cooper was studying the results from the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. He said, “Got some trace here. Found it in two separate locations: the lace of the boots and the handle of the bolt cutter in Galt’s apartment. And then the sleeve of the worker who’d been attacked by Galt in the tunnel downtown, Joey Barzan.”

“And?” Rhyme asked.

“It’s a kerosene derivative, with minute amounts of phenol and dinonylnaphthylsulfonic acid added.”

Rhyme said, “It’s standard jet A fuel. The phenol is an antigumming substance and the acid is an antistatic agent.”

“But there’s more,” Cooper continued. “Something odd, a form of natural gas. Liquefied, but stable across a wide range of temperatures. And… get this, traces of biodiesel.”

“Check the fuel database, Mel.”

A moment later the tech said, “Got it. It’s an alternative aviation fuel that’s being tested now. Mostly in military fighters. It’s cleaner and it cuts down on fossil-fuel use. They say it’ll be the wave of the future.”

“Alternative energy,” Rhyme mused, wondering how this piece of the puzzle fit. But one thing he knew. “Sachs, call Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. FAA too. Tell them our boy may have been checking out fuel depos or air bases.”

An arc flash was bad enough. Combined with jet propellant, Rhyme couldn’t even imagine the devastation.

CRIME SCENE: BATTERY PARK HOTEL

AND SURROUNDINGS

– Victims (deceased):

– Linda Kepler, Oklahoma City, tourist.

– Morris Kepler, Oklahoma City, tourist.

– Samuel Vetter, Scottsdale, businessman.

– Ali Mamrud, New York City, waiter.

– Gerhart Schiller, Frankfurt, Germany, advertising executive.

– Remote control switch for turning on current.

– Components not traceable.

– Bennington cable and split bolts, identical to first attack.

– Galt’s Algonquin uniform, hardhat and gearbag with his friction ridge prints, no others.

– Wrench with tool marks that can be associated with tool marks on bolts at first crime scene.

– Rat-tail file with glass dust that can be associated with glass from bottle found at substation scene in Harlem.

– Probably working alone.

– Trace from Algonquin worker Joey Barzan, assault victim of Galt.

– Alternative jet fuel.

– Attack at military base?

CRIME SCENE: GALT’S APARTMENT,

227 SUFFOLK ST., LOWER EAST SIDE

– Bic SoftFeel fine-point pens, blue ink, associated with ink used in demand letter.

– Generic 8½ × 11 white computer paper, associated with demand letter.

– Generic No. 10 size envelope, associated with envelope containing demand letter.

– Bolt cutter, hacksaw with tool marks matching those at initial scene.

– Computer printouts:

– Articles about medical research on cancer linked to high-power electric lines.

– Blog postings by Galt Re: same.

– Albertson-Fenwick Model E-20 boots for electrical work, size 11, with treads the same as prints at initial scene.

– Additional traces of alternative jet fuel.

– Attack at military base?

– No obvious leads as to where he might be hiding, or location of future attacks.

CRIME SCENE: ALGONQUIN SUBSTATION MH-7,

E. 119TH STREET, HARLEM

– Molotov cocktail: 750-ml wine bottle, no source.

– BP gas used as accelerant.

– Cotton cloth strips, probably white T-shirt, used as fuse, no source determined.

PROFILE

– Identified as Raymond Galt, 40, single, living in Manhattan, 227 Suffolk St.

– Terrorist connection? Relation to Justice For [unknown]? Terror group? Individual named Rahman involved? References to monetary disbursements, personnel movements and something “big.”

– Algonquin security breach in Philadelphia might be related.

– SIGINT hits: code word reference to weapons, “paper and supplies” (guns, explosives?).

– Personnel include man and woman.

– Galt’s involvement unknown.

– Cancer patient; presence of vinblastine and prednisone in significant quantities, traces of etoposide. Leukemia.

Chapter 43

LINCOLN RHYME’S MAIN phone trilled.

The caller ID registered a number he’d been hoping to see, though not at this particular moment. Still he immediately clicked ANSWER.

“Kathryn, what do you have?”

No time for pleasantries at the moment. But Dance would understand. She was the same way when it came to a case.

“The DEA guys in Mexico City got the worker to talk-the man who gave the package to Logan just after he slipped into the country. He did take a look at what was inside, like we thought. I’m not sure it’s helpful but here it is: a dark blue booklet with lettering on it. He didn’t remember the words. Two letter C’s, he thought. A logo of a company maybe. Then a sheet of paper that had a capital letter I followed by five or six lines. Like blanks to be filled in.”

“He have any idea what they were?”

“No… Then a slip of paper containing some numbers. All he remembers is five hundred seventy and three hundred seventy-nine.”

“The Da Vinci Code,” Rhyme said, discouraged.

“Exactly. I like puzzles but not on the job.”

“True.”

I _ _ _ _ _ _

Fill in the blanks.

And: Five hundred seventy and three hundred seventy-nine…

Dance added, “Then he found something else. A circuit board. A small one.”

“For a computer?”

“He didn’t know. He was disappointed. He said he would have stolen it if it’d been something he could sell more easily.”

“And he’d be dead now if he had.”

“I think he’s relieved to be in jail. For that very reason… I’ve had a talk with Rodolfo. He’d like you to call.”

“Of course.”

Rhyme thanked Dance and disconnected. He then called the Commander Rodolfo Luna in Mexico City.

“Ah, Captain RET Rhyme, yes. I just spoke to Agent Dance. The mystery… the numbers.”

“An address?”

“Perhaps it is. But…” His fading voice meant, of course, that in a city of 8 million people, one would need more than a few numbers to find a specific location.

“And maybe related, maybe not.”

“Two separate meanings.”

“Yes,” Rhyme said. “Do they have any significance at all regarding the places he’s been spotted?”

“No.”

“And those buildings? The tenants?”

“Arturo Diaz and his officers are speaking with them now, explaining the situation. The ones there who are legitimate businesspeople are mystified because they cannot believe they are in danger. The ones who are themselves criminals are mystified because they are better armed than my troops and believe no one would dare attack them.”

Five hundred seventy and three hundred seventy-nine…

Phone numbers? Coordinates? Parts of an address?

Luna continued, “We’ve reconstructed the route the truck took from the airport to the capital. They were pulled over once. But you may have heard about our traffic police? A ‘fine’ was paid immediately and no questions were asked. Arturo tells me those officers-who are, by the way, now looking for new jobs-identified your Mr. Watchmaker. There was no one else in the truck other than the driver, and, of course, they didn’t bother to look over his license. And there was, in the back, no equipment or contraband that would lead us in one direction or another. So we are left to focus on the buildings he seems to be focusing on. And hope-”

“-that he isn’t sneaking up behind his real victim, five miles away.”

“Very much what I was going to say.”

“Do you have any thoughts about the circuit board that Logan was given?”

“I’m a soldier, Detective Rhyme, not a hacker. And so naturally I thought it was not a piece of computer hardware but a remote detonator for explosives. The booklet was perhaps an instruction manual.”

“Yes, I was thinking that too.”

“He would not want to travel with such a device. It would make sense to acquire it here. And I understand, from our news, that you have your hands full there. Some terrorist group?”

“We don’t know.”

“I wish I could help you.”

“Appreciated. But keep your attention focused on the Watchmaker, Commander.”

“Good advice.” Luna gave a sound between a growl and a laugh. “Cases are so much easier to run when you start with a corpse or two. I hate it when the bodies are still alive and being elusive.”

Rhyme smiled at that. And couldn’t disagree.

Chapter 44

AT 2:40 P.M. Algonquin security chief Bernard Wahl was walking along the sidewalk in Queens, coming back from his investigation. That’s how he liked to think of it. His investigation about his company, the number-one energy provider in the East, maybe in the entire North American grid.

He wanted to help. Especially now, since the horrific attack this afternoon at the Battery Park Hotel.

Ever since he’d heard that woman, Detective Sachs, mention to Ms. Jessen about the Greek food, he’d been devising a strategy.

“Microinvestigation” was how he thought of what he was doing. Wahl had read about it somewhere, or maybe seen it on the Discovery Channel. It was all about looking at the small clues, the small connections. Forget geopolitics and terrorists. Get a single fingerprint or hair and run with it. Until you collared the perp. Or it turned out to be a dead end and you went in a different direction.

So he’d been on a mission of his own-checking out the nearby Greek restaurants in Astoria, Queens. He’d learned Galt enjoyed that cuisine.

And just a half hour ago he’d hit pay dirt.

A waitress, Sonja, more than cute, earned a twenty-dollar tip by reporting that twice in the past week, a man wearing dark slacks and a knit Algonquin Consolidated shirt-the sort worn by middle managers-had been in for lunch. The restaurant was Leni’s, known for its moussaka and grilled octopus… and, more significant, homemade taramasalata, bowls of which were brought to everyone who sat down, lunch and dinner, along with wedges of pita bread and lemon.

Sonja “couldn’t swear to it,” but when shown a picture of Raymond Galt, she said, “Yeah, yeah, that looks like him.”

And the man had been online the entire time-on a Sony VAIO computer. While he’d only picked at the rest of his food he’d eaten all his taramasalata, she’d noted.

Online the whole time…

Which meant to Wahl that there might be some way to trace what Galt had searched for or who he’d emailed. Wahl watched all those crime shows on TV, and did some continuing education in security on his own dime. Maybe the police could get the identification number of Galt’s computer and find out where he was hiding.

Sonja had reported the killer had also made a lot of cell phone calls.

That was interesting. Galt was a loner. He was attacking people because he was pissed off about getting cancer from high-tension wires. So who was he calling? A partner? Why? That was something they could find out too.

Hurrying back to the office now, Wahl considered how best to handle this. Of course he’d have to get word back to the police as fast as he could. His heart was slamming at the thought of being instrumental in catching the killer. Maybe Detective Sachs would be impressed enough to get him a job interview with the NYPD.

But, hold on, don’t be cagey here, he cautioned himself. Just do what’s best and deal with the future in the future. Call everybody-Detective Sachs, Lincoln Rhyme and the others: FBI Agent McDaniel and that police lieutenant, Lon Sellitto.

And, of course, tell Ms. Jessen.

He walked quickly, tense and exhilarated, seeing ahead of him the red and gray smokestacks of Algonquin Consolidated. And in front of the building, those damn protesters. He enjoyed a brief image of turning a water cannon on them. Or, even more fun, a Taser. The company that made them also had a sort of a shotgun Taser, which would fire a number of barbs into a crowd for riot control.

He was smiling at the thought of them dancing around on the ground, when the man got him from behind.

Wahl gasped and barked a cry.

A muzzle of a gun appeared against his right cheek. “Don’t turn around,” was the whisper. The gun now pressed against his back. The voice told him to walk into an alley between a closed car repair shop and a darkened warehouse.

A harsh whisper: “Just do what I say, Bernie, and you won’t get hurt.”

“You know me?”

“It’s Ray,” came the whisper.

“Ray Galt?” Wahl’s heart thudded hard. He wondered if he’d be sick. “Oh, man, look. What’re you-”

“Shhh. Keep going.”

They continued into the alley for another fifty feet or so, and turned a corner into a dim recess.

“Lie down, facefirst. Arms out at your sides.”

Wahl hesitated, thinking for some ridiculous reason about the suit he’d proudly put on that morning, an expensive one. “Always look better than your job title,” his father had told him.

The.45 nudged his back. He dropped like a stone into the greasy dirt.

“I don’t go to Leni’s anymore, Bernie. You think I’m stupid?”

Which told him that Galt had been tailing him for a while.

And I hadn’t even noticed. Oh, some fucking cop I’d be. Jesus.

“And I don’t use their broadband. I use a prepaid cell connection.”

“You killed those people, Ray. You-”

“They’re not dead because of me. They’re dead because Algonquin and Andi Jessen killed them! Why didn’t she listen to me? Why didn’t she do what I asked?”

“They wanted to, man. There just wasn’t enough time to shut the grid down.”

“Bullshit.”

“Ray, listen. Turn yourself in. This is crazy, what you’re doing.”

A bitter laugh. “Crazy? You think I’m crazy?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“I’ll tell you what’s crazy, Bernie: companies that burn gas and oil and fuck up the planet. And that pump juice through wires that kills our children. Just because we like fucking blenders and hair dryers and TVs and microwaves… Don’t you think that’s what’s crazy?”

“No, you’re right, Ray. You’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t know all the shit you’d been through. I feel bad for you.”

“Do you mean it, Bernie? Do you really mean it or are you just trying to save your ass?”

A pause. “Little bit of both, Ray.”

To Bernard Wahl’s surprise, the killer gave a laugh. “That’s an honest answer. Maybe one of the only honest answers that’s ever come out of somebody who works for Algonquin.”

“Look, Ray, I’m just doing my job.”

Which was a cowardly thing to say and he hated himself for saying it. But he was thinking of his wife and three children and his mother, who lived in their home on Long Island.

“I don’t have anything against you personally, Bernie.”

And with that, Wahl suspected that he was a dead man. He struggled not to cry. In a shaky voice he asked, “What do you want?”

“I need you to tell me something.”

The security code for Andi Jessen’s townhouse? What garage she parked her car in? Wahl didn’t know either of those.

But the killer’s request was something very different. “I need to know who’s looking for me.”

Wahl’s voice cracked. “Who’s… Well, the police’re, the FBI. Homeland Security… I mean, everybody. There’s hundreds of them.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Bernie. I’m talking about names. And at Algonquin too. I know employees’re helping them.”

Wahl was going to cry. “I don’t know, Ray.”

“Of course you know. I need names. Give me names.”

“I can’t do that, Ray.”

“They almost figured out about the attack at the hotel. How did they know that? They almost got me there. Who’s behind this?”

“I don’t know. They don’t talk to me, Ray. I’m a security guard.”

“You’re chief of security, Bernie. Of course they talk to you.”

“No, I really-”

He felt his wallet coming out of his pocket.

Oh, not that…

A moment later Galt recited Wahl’s home address, tucked the wallet back.

“What’s the service in your house, Bernie? Two hundred amps?”

“Oh, come on, Ray. My family never did anything to you.”

“I never did anything to anybody and I got sick. You’re part of the system that made me sick, and your family benefited from that system… Two hundred amps? Not enough for an arc. But the shower, the bathtub, the kitchen… I could just play with the ground fault interrupts and your whole house’d become one big electric chair, Bernie… Now, talk to me.”

Chapter 45

FRED DELLRAY WAS walking down a street in the East Village, past a row of gardenias, past a gourmet coffee shop, past a clothing store.

My, my… Was that $325 for a shirt? Without a suit, tie and pair of shoes attached?

He continued past storefronts in which sat complicated espresso machines and overpriced art and the sorts of glittery shoes that a girl would lose at 4 a.m. en route from one hazy downtown club to another.

Thinking how the Village had changed in the years since he’d started being an agent.

Change…

Used to be a carnival, used to be crazy, used to be gaudy and loud, laughter and madness, lovers entwined or shrieking or floating sullenly down the busy sidewalks… all the time, all the time. Twenty-four hours. Now this portion of the East Village had the formula and sound track of a homogenized sitcom.

Man, had this place changed. And it wasn’t just the money, not just the preoccupied eyes of the professionals who lived here now, cardboard coffee cups replacing chipped porcelain…

No, that wasn’t what Dellray kept seeing.

What he saw was everybody on fucking cell phones. Talking, texting… and, Jesus our Savior in heaven, here were two tourists right in front of him using GPS to find a restaurant!

In the East fucking Village.

Cloud zone…

Everywhere, more evidence that the world, even this world-Dellray’s world-was now Tucker McDaniel’s. Back in the day, Dellray would play dress-up here, looking homeless, pimp, dealer. He was good at pimp, loved the colored shirts, purple and green. Not because he worked vice, which wasn’t a federal crime, but because he knew how to fit.

The chameleon.

He fit in places like this. And that meant people talked to him.

But now, hell, there were more people on phones than there weren’t. And every one of those phones-depending on the inclination of the federal magistrate-could be tapped into and give up information that it would have taken Dellray days to get. And even if they weren’t tapped, there apparently were still ways to get that information, or some of it.

Out of the air, out of clouds.

But maybe he was just overly sensitive, he told himself, using a word that had rarely figured in the psyche of Fred Dellray. Ahead of him he saw Carmella’s-the old establishment that may very well have been a whorehouse a long time ago and was presently an island of tradition here. He walked inside and sat down at a rickety table. He ordered a regular coffee, noting that, yes, espresso and cappuccino and latte were on the menu, but of course, they always had been. Long before Starbucks.

God bless Carmella.

And around him, of the ten people here-he counted-only two were on cell phones.

This was the world of Mama behind the cash register, her pretty-boy sons waiting tables and even now, midafternoon, customers twirling pasta, glistening orange not supermarket red. And sipping from small hemispheres of wineglasses. The whole place filled with animated talk, punctuating gestures.

This filled him with comfort. He believed that he was doing this the right way. He believed in William Brent’s reassurance. He was about to receive some value, something for the dubious one hundred thousand dollars. Only a tenuous lead, but it would be enough. That was something else about Street Dellray. He’d been able to weave cloth from the tiny treads his CIs delivered, usually they themselves oblivious to the value of what they’d found.

A single hard fact that would lead to Galt. Or to the site of the next attack. Or to the elusive Justice For.

And he was well aware that fact, that find, that save… they’d vindicate him too, Dellray, the old-school street agent, far, far from the cloud zone.

Dellray sipped the coffee and snuck a glance at his watch. Exactly 3 p.m. He’d had never known William Brent to be late, even by sixty seconds. (“Not efficient,” the CI had said of being either early or tardy.)

Forty-five minutes later, without as much as a phone call from Brent, a grim-faced Fred Dellray checked his messages once more on the cold phone. Nothing. He tried Brent’s for the sixth time. Still straight to the robotic voice telling him to leave a message.

Dellray gave it ten minutes longer, tried once more, then called in a big favor from a buddy of his at one of the mobile providers and learned that the battery had been removed from Brent’s phone. The only reason to do that was to prevent tracing, of course.

A young couple approached and asked if Dellray was using the other chair at his table. The responsive glance must have been pretty intimidating because they retreated instantly and the boyfriend didn’t even try for a moment of chivalric bravado.

Brent’s gone.

I’ve been robbed and he’s gone.

Replaying the man’s confidence, his reassurance.

Guarantee, my ass…

One hundred thousand dollars… He should have known that something was going on when Brent had insisted on that huge sum, considering the shabby suit and threadbare argyle socks.

Dellray wondered whether the man had decided to settle in the Caribbean or South America on his windfall.

Chapter 46

“WE’VE HAD ANOTHER demand.”

Grim Andi Jessen was staring out of Rhyme’s flat-screen monitor, on a video conference call. Her blond hair stiff, oversprayed. Or perhaps she’d spent the night in the office and hadn’t showered that morning.

“Another one?” Rhyme glanced at Lon Sellitto, Cooper and Sachs, all frozen in various places and attitudes around the lab.

The big detective tossed down half the muffin that he’d snagged from a plate Thom had brought in. “We just had an attack, and he’s hitting us again?”

“He wasn’t happy we ignored him, I suppose,” Jessen said brittlely.

“What does he want?” Sachs asked, at the same time as Rhyme said, “I’d like the note here. ASAP.”

Jessen answered Rhyme first. “I gave it to Agent McDaniel. It’s on its way to you now.”

“What’s the deadline?”

“Six p.m.”

“Today?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus,” Sellitto muttered. “Two hours.”

“And the demand?” Sachs repeated.

“He wants us to stop all the DC-the direct current-transmission to the other North American grids for an hour, starting at six. If we don’t he’ll kill more people.”

Rhyme asked, “What does that mean?”

“Our grid is the Northeastern Interconnection, and Algonquin’s the big energy producer in it. If a power company in another grid needs supply, we sell it to them. If they’re more than five hundred miles away, we use DC transmission, not AC. It’s more cost effective. Usually it goes to smaller companies in rural areas.”

“What’s the, you know, significance of the demand?” Sellitto asked.

“I don’t know why he’s asking. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Maybe his point is reducing cancer risk to people near the transmission lines. But I’d guess fewer than a thousand people in North America live near DC lines.”

Rhyme said, “Galt isn’t necessarily behaving rationally.”

“True.”

“Can you do it? Meet his demand?”

“No, we can’t. It’s impossible. It’s just like before, with the grid in New York City, except worse. It would cut out service to thousands of small towns around the country. And there are direct feeds into military bases and research facilities. Homeland Security’s saying to shut it down would be a national security risk. The Defense Department concurs.”

Rhyme added, “And presumably you’d be losing millions of dollars.”

A pause. “Yes. We would. We’d be in breach of hundreds of contracts. It would be a disaster for the company. But, anyway, the argument about complying is moot. We physically couldn’t do this in the time he’s given us. You don’t just flip a wall switch with seven hundred thousand volts.”

“All right,” Rhyme said. “How did you get the note?”

“Galt gave it to one of our employees.”

Rhyme and Sachs exchanged glances.

Jessen continued, explaining that Galt accosted security chief Bernard Wahl as the man was returning from lunch.

“Is Wahl there with you?” Sachs asked.

“Hold on a minute,” Jessen said. “He was being debriefed by the FBI… Let me see.”

Sellitto whispered, “They didn’t fucking bother to even tell us they were talking to him, the feebies? It had to come from her?”

A moment later solid-shouldered Bernard Wahl appeared on the screen and sat down next to Andi Jessen. His round, black scalp glistened.

“Hello,” Sachs said.

The handsome face nodded.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, Detective.”

He wasn’t all right, though, Rhyme could see. His eyes were hollow. They were avoiding the webcam.

“Tell us what happened.”

“I was coming back from lunch. And Galt came up behind me with a gun and took me to an alleyway. Then he shoved the letter into my pocket and said get it to Ms. Jessen right away. Then he was gone.”

“That’s all?”

A hesitation. “Pretty much. Yes, ma’am.”

“Did he say anything that might lead us to where he’s hiding out or where the next target might be?”

“No. Mostly he just rambled about electricity causing cancer and being dangerous and how nobody cares.”

Rhyme was curious about something. “Mr. Wahl? Did you see the weapon? Or was he bluffing?”

Another hesitation. Then the security man said, “I caught a look. A forty-five. Nineteen-eleven. The old army model.”

“Did he grab you? We could get some trace evidence off your clothes.”

“No. Only his gun.”

“Where’d this happen?”

“Somewhere in an alley near B and R Auto Repair. I don’t really remember, sir. I was pretty shaken up.”

Sachs asked, “And that was it? He didn’t ask anything about the investigation?”

“No, ma’am, he didn’t. I think all he cared about was getting the letter to Ms. Jessen right away. He couldn’t think of another way to do it except to stop an employee.”

Rhyme had no more questions for him. He glanced to Sellitto, who shook his head.

They thanked him, and Wahl moved off camera. Jessen looked up, nodding at somebody who’d come into the doorway. Then back to the camera for the video conference. “Gary Noble and I are meeting with the mayor. Then I’m doing a press conference. I’ll make that personal appeal to Galt. Do you think that’ll work?”

No, Rhyme didn’t think it would work. But he said, “Anything you can do-even if it just buys us some time.”

After they disconnected the call, Sellitto asked, “What wasn’t Wahl telling us?”

“He got scared. Galt threatened him. He probably gave up some information. I’m not too worried. He was out of the loop pretty much. But whatever he spilled, frankly, we can’t worry about that now.”

At that moment the doorbell rang. It was Tucker McDaniel and the Kid.

Rhyme was surprised. The FBI agent would have known there was a pending press conference and yet here he was, not leveraging his way onto the podium. He’d yielded to Homeland Security so he could bring evidence to Rhyme in person.

The ASAC’s stock rose slightly once more.

After being briefed about Galt and his motive, the agent asked Pulaski, “And in his apartment you found no reference to Justice For or Rahman? Terrorist cells?”

“No, nothing.”

The agent looked disappointed but said, “Still, that doesn’t contradict a symbiosis construct.”

“Which is?” Rhyme asked.

“A traditional terror operation using a front man, with mutually aligned goals. They may not even like each other but they want the same thing in the end. An important aspect is that the professional terror cell keeps themselves completely isolated from the primary negative actor. And all communications is-”

“Cloud?” Rhyme asked, the agent’s index dipping a bit now.

“Exactly. They have to minimize any contact. Two different agendas. They want societal destruction. He wants revenge.” McDaniel nodded at the profile on the whiteboard. “What Parker Kincaid was saying. Galt didn’t use pronouns-didn’t want to give away any clue that he was working with somebody else.”

“Eco or political/religious?”

“Could be either.”

It was hard to picture al-Qaida or the Taliban in league with an unstable employee bent on revenge because his company had given him cancer. But an ecoterror group made some sense. They’d need somebody to help them get into the system. Rhyme would find it more credible, though, if there was some evidence to support that supposition.

McDaniel added that he’d heard from the warrants people, who’d gotten the okay for T and C teams to go through Galt’s email and social networking accounts. Galt had emailed and posted comments in a number of places about his cancer and its relationship to high-power lines. But nothing in the hundreds of pages he’d written had given them any clues to where he was or what he might have in store.

Rhyme was growing impatient at the speculation. “I’d like to see the note, Tucker.”

“Sure.” The ASAC gestured at the Kid.

Please, be chock-full of trace. Something helpful.

In sixty seconds they were looking at the second demand letter.

To Andi Jessen, CEO and Algonquin Consolidated Power and Light:

You’ve made the decision to ignore my earlier request and that’s not acceptable. You could have responded to that reasonable request for a brownout but you didn’t, YOU have raised the stakes, no one else has. Your callusness and greed lead to the deaths this afternoon. You MUST show the people they do not need the drug that you’ve addicted them to. They can return to a PURER way of life. They don’t think they can but they can be shown the way. You will cease all high voltage DC transmission to the other North American Interconnections for one hour starting at 6 p.m. this evening. This is non-negotiable.

Cooper began his analysis of the letter. Ten minutes later he said, “There’s nothing new, Lincoln. Same paper, same pen. Unsourceable. As far as trace goes, more jet fuel. That’s about it.”

“Shit.” Like opening a beautifully wrapped box on Christmas morning and finding it empty.

Rhyme noticed Pulaski in the corner. His head, with the blond spiky hair, was cast forward as he spoke softly into his mobile. The conversation seemed furtive and Rhyme knew it didn’t have anything to do with the Galt case. He’d be calling the hospital about the man he’d run into. Or maybe he’d gotten the name of the next of kin and was offering condolences.

“You with us, Pulaski?” Rhyme called harshly.

Pulaski snapped his phone shut. “Sure, I-”

“Because I really need you with us.”

“I’m with you, Lincoln.”

“Good. Call FAA and TSA and tell them we’ve had another demand and that we’ve found more jet fuel on the second note. They should step up security at all the airports. And call the Department of Defense too. It could be an attack on a military airfield, especially if Tucker’s terrorist connection pans out. You up for that? Talking to the Pentagon? Impressing the risk on them?”

“Yes, I’ll do it.”

Turning back to the evidence charts, Rhyme sighed. Symbiotic terrorist cells, cumulonimbus communications and an invisible suspect with an invisible weapon.

And as for the other case, the attempt to trap the Watchmaker in Mexico City? Nothing but the mysterious circuit board, its owner’s manual and two meaningless numbers:

Five hundred seventy and three hundred seventy-nine…

Which put him in mind of other digits. Those on the clock nearby, the clock counting down to the next deadline.

SECOND DEMAND NOTE

– Delivered to Bernard Wahl, Algonquin security chief.

– Assaulted by Galt.

– No physical contact; no trace.

– No indication of whereabouts or site of next attack.

– Paper and ink associated with those found in Galt’s apartment.

– Additional traces of alternative jet fuel embedded in paper.

– Attack on military base?

PROFILE

– Identified as Raymond Galt, 40, single, living in Manhattan, 227 Suffolk St.

– Terrorist connection? Relation to Justice For [unknown]? Terror group? Individual named Rahman involved? References to monetary disbursements, personnel movements and something “big.”

– Algonquin security breach in Philadelphia might be related.

– SIGINT hits: code word reference to weapons, “paper and supplies” (guns, explosives?).

– Personnel include man and woman.

– Galt’s relationship unknown.

– Cancer patient; presence of vinblastine and prednisone in significant quantities, traces of etoposide. Leukemia.

– Galt is armed with military 1911 Colt.45.

Chapter 47

THE TV WAS on in Rhyme’s lab.

As a prelude to Andi Jessen’s press conference, which would start in a few minutes, a story about Algonquin Consolidated and Jessen herself was airing. Rhyme was curious about the woman and paid attention to the anchorman as he traced Jessen’s career in the business. How her father had been president and CEO of the company before her. There was no nepotism involved, though; the woman had degrees in engineering and business and had worked her way up, actually starting as a lineman in upstate New York.

A life-long employee of Algonquin, she was quoted as saying how devoted she was to her career and to her goal of building the company into the number-one player in both the generation of electricity and the brokering of it. Rhyme had not known that because of deregulation a few years ago power companies had increasingly taken to brokerage: buying electricity and natural gas from other companies and selling it. Some had even sold off their interest in the generation and transmission of power and were, in effect, commodity dealers, with no assets other than offices, computers and telephones.

And very large banks behind them.

This was, the reporter explained, the thrust of Enron’s business.

Andi Jessen, though, had never slipped over to the dark side-extravagance, arrogance, greed. The compact, intense woman ran Algonquin with an old-fashioned austerity and shunned the splashy life. She was divorced and had no children. Jessen seemed to have no life other than Algonquin. Her only family was a brother, Randall Jessen, who lived in Philadelphia. He was a decorated soldier in Afghanistan and had been discharged after an injury by a roadside bomb.

Andi was one of the country’s most outspoken advocates for the megagrid-one unified power grid that connected all of North America. This was, she felt, a far more efficient way to produce and deliver electricity to consumers. (With Algonquin as the major player, Rhyme supposed.)

Her nickname-though apparently one never used to her face or in her presence-was “the All-Powerful.” Apparently this was a reference to both her take-no-prisoners management style, and to her ambitions for Algonquin.

Her controversial reservations about green power were on blunt display in one interview.

“First of all, I wanted to say that we at Algonquin Consolidated are committed to renewable energy sources. But at the same time I think we all need to be realistic. The earth was here billions of years before we lost our gills and tails and started burning coal and driving internal combustion cars and it’ll be here, doing just fine, long, long after we’re history.

“When people say they want to save the earth, what they really mean is that they want to save their lifestyle. We have to admit we want energy and a lot of it. And that we need it-for civilization to progress, to be fed and educated, to use fancy equipment to keep an eye on the dictators of the world, to help Third World countries join the First World. Oil and coal and natural gas and nuclear power are the best ways to create that power.”

The piece ended and pundits leapt in to criticize or say hurrah. It was more politically correct, and produced better ratings, to eviscerate her, however.

Finally the camera went live to City Hall, four people on the dais: Jessen, the mayor, the police chief and Gary Noble, from Homeland Security.

The mayor made a brief announcement and then turned over the mike. Andi Jessen, looking both harsh and reassuring, told everyone that Algonquin was doing all it could to control the situation. A number of safeguards had been put into place, though she didn’t say what those might be.

Surprising Rhyme, and everyone else in the room, the group had made the decision to go public about the second demand letter. He supposed that the reasoning was if they were unsuccessful in stopping Galt and somebody else died in another attack, the public relations, and perhaps legal, consequences to Algonquin would have been disastrous.

The reporters leapt on this instantly and pelted her with questions. Jessen coolly silenced them and explained that it was impossible to meet the extortionist’s requirements. A reduction in the amount of power he wanted would result in hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. And very likely many more deaths.

She added that it would be a national security risk because the demands would hamper military and other governmental operations. “Algonquin is a major player in our nation’s defense and we will not do anything to jeopardize that.”

Slick, thought Rhyme. She’s turning the whole thing around.

Finally, she ended with a personal statement to Galt to turn himself in. He’d be treated fairly. “Don’t let your family or anyone else suffer because of the tragedy that’s happened to you. We’ll do whatever we can to ease your suffering. But please, do the right thing, and turn yourself in.”

She took no questions and was off the dais seconds after she finished speaking, her high heels clattering loudly.

Rhyme noticed that while her sympathy was heartfelt she never once admitted that the company had done anything wrong or that high-voltage lines might in fact have led to Galt’s or anyone else’s cancer.

Then the police chief took over and tried his best to offer concrete reassurance. Police and federal agents were out in force looking for Galt, and National Guard troops were ready to assist if there were more attacks or the grid was compromised.

He ended with a plea to citizens to report anything unusual.

Now that’s helpful, Rhyme thought. If there’s one thing that’s the order of the day in New York City, it’s the unusual.

And he turned back to the paltry evidence.

Chapter 48

SUSAN STRINGER LEFT her office on the eighth floor of an ancient building in Midtown Manhattan at 5:45 p.m.

She said hello to two other men also making their way to the elevator. One of them she knew casually because they’d run into each other occasionally in the building. Larry left at about this same time every day. The difference was that he’d be returning to his office, to work through the night.

Susan, on the other hand, was heading home.

The attractive thirty-five-year-old was an editor for a magazine that had a specialized field: art and antiques restoration, primarily eighteenth and nineteenth century. She also wrote poetry occasionally, and was published. These passions gave her only a modest income but if she ever had any doubts about the wisdom of sticking to her career, all she had to do was listen to a conversation like the one Larry and his friend were having at the moment, and she knew she could never go into that side of business-law, finance, banking, accounting.

The two men wore very expensive suits, nice watches and elegant shoes. But there was a harried quality about them. Edgy. It didn’t seem they liked their jobs much. The friend was complaining about his boss breathing down his neck. Larry was complaining about an audit that was in the “fucking tank.”

Stress, unhappiness.

And that language too.

Susan was pleased she didn’t have to deal with that. Her life was the Rococo and neoclassical designs of craftsmen, from Chippendale to George Hepplewhite to Sheraton.

Practical beauty, she phrased their creations.

“You look wasted,” the friend said to Larry.

He did, Susan agreed.

“I am. Bear of a trip.”

“When’d you get back?”

“Tuesday.”

“You were senior auditor?”

Larry nodded. “The books were a nightmare. Twelve-hour days. The only time I could get out on the golf course was Sunday and the temperature hit a hundred and sixteen.”

“Ouch.”

“I’ve got to go back. Monday. I mean, I just don’t know where the hell the money’s going. Something’s fishy.”

“Weather that hot, maybe it’s evaporating.”

“Funny,” Larry muttered in an unfunny way.

The men continued their banter about financial statements and disappearing money but Susan tuned them out. She saw another man approach, wearing a workman’s brown overalls and a hat, as well as glasses. Eyes down, he carried a tool kit and a large watering can, though he must’ve been working in a different office since there were no decorative plants in the hallway here, and none in her office. Her publisher wouldn’t pay for any flora and he sure wouldn’t pay for a person to water them.

The elevator car came and the two businessmen let her precede them inside, and she reflected that at least some semblance of chivalry remained in the twenty-first century. The workman entered too and hit the button for the floor two down. But, unlike the others, he rudely pushed past her to get to the back of the car.

They started to descend. A moment later Larry glanced down and said, “Hey, mister, watch it. You’re leaking there.”

Susan looked back. The workman had accidentally tilted the can and a stream of water was pouring onto the stainless-steel floor of the car.

“Oh, sorry,” the man mumbled unapologetically. The whole floor was soaked, Susan noted.

The door opened and the worker got out. Another man entered.

Larry’s friend said in a loud voice, “Careful, that guy just spilled some water in here. Didn’t even bother to clean it up.”

But whether the culprit had heard or not, Susan couldn’t say. Even if he had she doubted he cared.

The door closed and they continued their journey downward.

Chapter 49

RHYME WAS STARING at the clock. Ten minutes until the next deadline.

The last hour or so had involved coordinated searches throughout the city by the police and FBI, and, in the townhouse here, a frantic analysis of the evidence once more. Frantic… and futile. They were no closer to finding Galt or his next target location than they’d been just after the first attack. Rhyme’s eyes swung to the evidence charts, which remained an elusive jumble of puzzle pieces.

He was aware of McDaniel’s taking a call. The agent listened, nodding broadly. He shot a look to his protégé. He then thanked the caller and hung up.

“One of my T and C teams had another hit about the terror group. A small one but it’s gold. Another word in the name is ‘Earth.’ ”

“Justice For the Earth,” Sachs said.

“Could be more to it but we know those words for certain. ‘Justice.’ ‘For.’ And ‘Earth.’ ”

“At least we know it’s ecoterror,” Sellitto muttered.

“No hits on any database?” Rhyme wondered aloud.

“No, but remember, this is all cloud zone. And there was another hit. Rahman’s second in command seems to be somebody named Johnston.”

“Anglo.”

But how does this help? Rhyme wondered angrily to himself. How does any of this help us find the site of the attack, which’s going to happen in just a few minutes?

And what the hell kind of weapon has he devised this time? Another arc flash? Another deadly circuit in a public place?

Rhyme’s eyes were riveted on the evidence whiteboards.

McDaniel said to the Kid, “Get me Dellray.”

A moment later the agent’s voice came through the speaker. “Yes, who’s this? Who’s there?”

“Fred. It’s Tucker. I’m here with Lincoln Rhyme and some other people from the NYPD.”

“At Rhyme’s?”

“Yes.”

“How you doing, Lincoln?”

“Been better.”

“Yeah. True about all of us.”

McDaniel said, “Fred, you heard about the new demand and deadline.”

“Your assistant called me. She told me about the motive too. Galt’s cancer.”

“We’ve got a confirmation that it’s probably a terror group. Ecoterror.”

“How does that play with Galt?”

“Symbiosis.”

“What?”

“A symbiotic construct. It was in my memo… They’re working together. The group’s called Justice For the Earth. And Rahman’s second in command is named Johnston.”

Dellray asked, “Sounds like they have different agendas. How’d they hook up? Galt and Rahman?”

“I don’t know, Fred. That’s not the point. Maybe they contacted him, read his postings about the cancer. It was all over the Internet.”

“Oh.”

“Now, the deadline’s coming up at any minute. Has your CI found anything?”

A pause. “No, Tucker. Nothing.”

“The debriefing. You said it was at three.”

Another hesitation. “That’s right. But he doesn’t have anything concrete yet. He’s going a little farther underground.”

“The whole fucking world’s underground,” the FBI agent snapped, surprising Rhyme; he couldn’t imagine an expletive issuing from the man’s smooth lips. “So, call your guy up and get him the information about Justice For the Earth. And the new player, Johnston.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Fred?”

“Yes?”

“He’s the only one has any leads, this CI of yours?”

“That’s right.”

“And he didn’t hear anything, not a name, nothing?”

“Afraid not.”

McDaniel said distractedly, “Well, thanks, Fred. You did what you could.” As if he hadn’t expected to learn anything helpful anyway.

A pause. “Sure.”

They disconnected. Rhyme and Sellitto both were aware of McDaniel’s sour expression.

“Fred’s a good man,” the detective said.

“He is a good man,” the ASAC replied quickly. Too quickly.

But the subject of Fred Dellray and McDaniel’s opinion of him vanished as everyone in the townhouse, except Thom, got a cell call, all within five seconds of each other.

Different sources, but the news was the same.

Although the deadline was still seven minutes away, Ray Galt had struck again, once more killing innocents in Manhattan.

It was Sellitto’s caller who gave them the details. Through speakerphone the NYPD patrolman, sounding young and distracted, started to give an account of the attack-a Midtown office building elevator car in which four passengers were riding. “It was… it was pretty bad.” Then the officer choked, his voice dissolved in coughing-maybe from smoke created by the attack. Or maybe it was simply to cover up his emotion.

The officer excused himself and said he’d call back in a few minutes.

He never did.

Chapter 50

THAT SMELL AGAIN.

Could Amelia Sachs ever escape it?

And even if she scrubbed and scrubbed and threw her clothes out, could she ever forget it? Apparently the sleeve and hair of one of the victims had caught fire in the elevator car. The flames hadn’t been bad but the smoke was thick and the smell was repulsive.

Sachs and Ron Pulaski were suiting up in their overalls. She asked one of the Emergency Service officers, “DCDS?” Gesturing toward the hazy car.

Deceased, confirmed dead at scene.

“That’s right.”

“Where’re the bodies?”

“Up the hall. I know we fucked up the scene in the elevator, Detective, but there was so much smoke, we didn’t know what was going on. We had to clear it.”

She told him that was all right. Checking on the conditions of victims is the first priority. Besides, nothing contaminates a crime scene like fire. A few emergency worker footprints would make little difference.

“How’d it work?” she asked the ESU officer.

“We aren’t sure. The building supervisor said the car stopped just above the ground floor. Then smoke started. And the screams. By the time they got the car down to the main floor and the door opened, it was all over.”

Sachs shivered at the thought. The molten metal disks were bad enough, but, being claustrophobic, she was even more troubled by the thought of those four people in a confined space filled with electricity… and one of them burning.

The ESU officer looked over his notes. “The vics were an editor of an arts magazine, a lawyer and an accountant on the eighth floor. A computer parts salesman from the sixth. If you’re interested.”

Sachs was always interested in anything that made the victims real. Partly this was to keep her heart about her, to make certain she didn’t become callous because of what she encountered on the job. But partly it was because of what Rhyme had instilled in her. For a man who was pure scientist, a rationalist, Rhyme’s talent as a forensic expert was also due to his uncanny ability to step into the mind of the perp.

Years ago, at the very first scene they’d worked, a terrible crime also involving death by a utility system-steam, in that case-Rhyme had whispered to her something that seated itself in her mind every time she walked the grid: “I want you to be him,” he’d told her, speaking of the perp. “Just get into his head. You’ve been thinking the way we think. I want you to think the way he does.”

Rhyme had told her that while he believed forensic science could be taught, this empathy was an innate talent. And Sachs believed the best way to maintain this connection-this wire, she thought now, between your heart and your skill-was never to forget the victims.

“Ready?” she asked Pulaski.

“I guess.”

“We’re going to do the grid, Rhyme,” she said into the microphone.

“Okay, but do it without me, Sachs.”

She was alarmed. Despite his protests to the contrary, Rhyme hadn’t been well. She could tell easily. But it turned out that there was another reason he was signing off. “I want you to walk the grid with that guy from Algonquin.”

“Sommers?”

“Right.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, I like his mind. He thinks broadly. Maybe it’s his inventor’s side. I don’t know. But beyond that, something’s not right, Sachs. I can’t explain it. I feel we’re missing something. Galt had to have planned this out for a month, at least. But now it looks like he’s accelerating the attacks-two in one day. I can’t figure that out.”

“Maybe,” she suggested, “it’s because we’ve gotten on to him faster than he hoped.”

“Could be. I don’t know. But if that’s the case it also means he’d love to take us out too.”

“True.”

“So I want a fresh perspective. I’ve already called Charlie, and he’s willing to help… Does he always eat when he talks on the phone?”

“He likes junk food.”

“Well, when you’re on the grid, make sure he’s got something that doesn’t crunch. Communications will patch you in, whenever you’re ready. Just get back here ASAP with whatever you find. For all we know Galt’s rigging another attack right now.”

They disconnected. She glanced at Ron Pulaski, who was still clearly troubled.

I need you with us, Rookie…

She called him over. “Ron, the major scene’s downstairs, where he probably rigged the wires and that device of his.” She tapped her radio. “I’ll be online with Charlie Sommers. I need you to run the elevator.” Another pause. “And process the bodies too. There probably won’t be much trace. His MO is he doesn’t have any direct contact with the vics. But it needs to be done. Are you okay with that?”

The young officer nodded. “Anything you need, Amelia.” Sounding painfully sincere. He was making amends for the accident at Galt’s apartment, she guessed.

“Let’s get to it. And Vicks.”

“What?”

“In the kit. Vicks VapoRub. Put some underneath your nose. For the smell.”

In five minutes she was online with Charlie Sommers, grateful that he was helping her in running the scene-to give “technical support,” which he defined, in his irreverent way, as helping to “save her ass.”

Sachs clicked on her helmet light and started down the stairs into the basement of the building, describing to Charlie Sommers exactly what she saw in the dank, filthy area at the base of the elevator shaft. She was linked to him only through audio, not video, as she usually was with Rhyme.

The building had been cleared by ESU, but she was very aware of what Rhyme had told her earlier-that Galt could easily have decided to start targeting his pursuers. She looked around for a moment, taking only a few detours to shine the light on shadows that had a vaguely human form.

They turned out to be only shadows that had a vaguely human form.

He asked, “You see anything bolted to the railings the elevator rides on?”

She focused again on her search. “No, nothing on the rails. But… there’s a piece of that Bennington cable bolted to the wall. I’m-”

“Test the voltage first!”

“Was just going to say that.”

“Ah, a born electrician.”

“No way. After this, I’m not even going to change my car batteries.” She swept with the detector. “It’s zero.”

“Good. Where does the line go?”

“On one end, to a bus bar that’s dangling in the shaft. It’s resting against the bottom of the elevator car. It’s scorched where it’s made contact. The other end goes to a thick cable that runs into a beige panel on the wall, like a big medicine cabinet. The Bennington wire is connected to a main line with one of those remote switches like at the last scene.”

“That’s the incoming service line.” He added that an office building like this didn’t receive electricity the way a residence did. It took in a much larger amount, like a street transformer: 13,800 volts, which was then stepped down for distribution to the offices. It was a spot network. “So the car would descend and hit the hot bus bar… But there has to be another switch somewhere, one that controls the power to the elevator. He needed to stop the car just before it got to the lobby. So the victims inside would hit the call button. Then the passenger’s hand on the panel and his feet on the floor completed the circuit and electrocuted him and anybody who touched him or he was brushing up against.”

Sachs looked around and found the other device. She told Sommers this.

He explained exactly how to dismantle the cables and what to look for. Before she removed any evidence, though, Sachs laid the numbers and photographed the scene. Then she thanked Sommers and told him that was all she needed for now. They disconnected and she walked the grid, including the entrance and exit routes-which turned out to be in all likelihood a door nearby that led to the alley. It had a flimsy lock and had recently been jimmied open. She took pictures of this too.

She was about to go upstairs and join Pulaski when she paused.

Four victims here in the elevator.

Sam Vetter and four others dead at the hotel, a number in the hospital. Luis Martin.

And fear throughout the city, fear of this invisible killer.

In her imagination she heard Rhyme say, “You have to become him.”

Sachs rested the evidence by the stairs and returned to the base of the elevator shaft.

I’m him, I’m Raymond Galt…

Sachs had trouble summoning the fanatic, the crusader, since that emotion didn’t jibe, in her mind, with the extreme calculation that the man had shown so far. Anybody else would just have taken a shot at Andi Jessen or firebombed the Queens plant. But Galt was going to these precise, elaborate lengths to use a very complicated weapon to kill.

What did it mean?

I’m him…

I’m Galt.

Then her mind went still and up bubbled the answer: I don’t care about motive. I don’t care why I’m doing this. None of that matters. All that’s important is to focus on technique, like focusing on making the most perfect splice or switch or connection I can to cause the most harm.

That’s the center of my universe.

I’ve become addicted to the process, addicted to the juice…

And with that thought came another: It’s all about angles. He had to get… I have to get the bus bar in just the right position to kiss the floor of the elevator car when it’s near the lobby but not yet there.

Which means I have to watch the elevator in operation from all different perspectives down here to make sure the counterweight, the gears, the motor, the cables of the elevator don’t knock aside the bus bar or otherwise interfere with the wire.

I have to study the shaft from all angles. I have to.

On her hands and knees Sachs made a circuit of the filthy basement all around the base of the shaft-anywhere that Galt could have seen the cable and bar and contacts. She found no footprints, no fingerprints. But she did find places where the ground had been recently disturbed, and it was not unreasonable to think that he’d crouched there to examine his deadly handiwork.

She took samples from ten locations and deposited them into separate evidence bags, marking them according to positions of the compass: “10' away, northwest.” “7' away, south.” She then gathered all the other evidence and climbed painfully on her arthritic legs to the lobby.

Joining Pulaski, Sachs looked into the interior of the elevator. It wasn’t badly damaged. There were some smoke marks-accompanied by that terrible smell. She simply couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to be riding in that car and suddenly have thirteen thousand volts race through your body. At least, she supposed, the vics would have felt nothing after the first few seconds.

She saw that he’d laid the numbers and taken pictures. “You find anything?”

“No. I searched the car too. But the panel hadn’t been opened recently.”

“He rigged everything from downstairs. And the bodies?”

His face was solemn, troubled, and she could tell that it had been a difficult chore. Still, he said evenly, “No trace. But there was something interesting. All three of them had wet soles. All their shoes.”

“The fire department?”

“No, the fire was out by the time they got here.”

Water. That was interesting. To improve the connection. But how did he get their shoes wet? Sachs then asked, “You said three bodies?”

“That’s right.”

“But that ESU guy said there were four vics.”

“There were, but only three of them died. Here.” He handed her a piece of paper.

“What’s this?” On the slip was a name and phone number.

“The survivor. I figured you’d want to talk to her. Her name’s Susan Stringer. She’s at St. Vincent’s. Smoke inhalation, some burns. But she’ll be okay. They’ll be releasing her in an hour or so.”

Sachs was shaking her head. “I don’t see how anybody could’ve survived. There were thirteen thousand volts in here.”

Ron Pulaski replied, “Oh, she’s disabled. In a wheelchair. Rubber tires, you know. Guess that insulated her.”

Chapter 51

“HOW’D HE DO?” Rhyme asked Sachs, who’d just returned to the lab.

“Ron? Little distracted. But he did a good job. Processed the bodies. That was tough. But he found something interesting. Somehow the vics all had wet shoes.”

“How’d Galt manage that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t think Ron’s too shaken up?”

“Not too. But some. But he’s young. Happens.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“No, it’s not. It’s an explanation.”

“They’re both the same to me,” Rhyme muttered. “Where is he?”

The hour was after 8 p.m. “He went back to Galt’s, thought he might’ve missed something.”

Rhyme thought this wasn’t a bad idea, though he was confident that the young officer had searched the scene well the first time. He added, “Just keep an eye on him. I won’t risk anybody’s life because he’s distracted.”

“Agreed.”

The two of them and Cooper were here alone in the lab. McDaniel and the Kid were back at the federal building, meeting with Homeland Security, and Sellitto was down at the Big Building-One Police Plaza. Rhyme wasn’t sure whom he was meeting with but there’d undoubtedly be a long list of people who wanted explanations about why there was no suspect in custody.

Cooper and Sachs were laying out the evidence that Sachs had collected at the office building. The tech then examined the cable and other items that were rigged at the base of the elevator shaft.

“There’s one other thing.” Sachs probably thought her voice was casual; in fact it was tripping with meaning to Rhyme. Tough to be in love with somebody; you can read them so well when they’re up to something.

“What?” He gave her his inquisitor’s gaze.

“There was a witness. She was in the elevator when the other people died.”

“She hurt bad?”

“Apparently not. Smoke inhalation mostly.”

“That would’ve been unpleasant. Burning hair.” His nostrils flared slightly.

Sachs sniffed at her red strands. Her nose wrinkled too. “I’m taking a really long shower tonight.”

“What’d she have to say?”

“I didn’t get a chance to interview her… She’s coming over here as soon as she’s released.”

“Here?” Rhyme asked with surprise. Not only was he skeptical of witnesses in the first place, but there was a security question about letting a stranger into the lab. If a terrorist cell was behind the attacks, they might want to sneak one of their members into the inner sanctum of the investigators.

But Sachs laughed, deducing his thoughts. “I checked her out, Rhyme. She’s clean. No record, no warrants. Longtime editor of some furniture magazine. Besides, I thought it wasn’t a bad idea-I wouldn’t have to spend the time getting to and from the hospital. I can stay here and work the evidence.”

“What else?”

She hesitated. Another smile. “I was explaining too much?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay. She’s disabled.”

“Is she now? That’s still not answering my question.”

“She wants to meet you, Rhyme. You’re a celebrity.”

Rhyme sighed. “Fine.”

Sachs turned to him, eyes narrowed. “You’re not arguing.”

Now he laughed. “Not in the mood. Let her come over. I’ll interview her myself. Show you how it’s done. Short and sweet.”

Sachs gave a cautious look.

Rhyme then asked, “What do you have, Mel?”

Peering through the eyepiece of a microscope, the tech said, “Nothing helpful for sourcing him.”

“ ‘Sourcing.’ Missed that word when I was in verb school,” Rhyme said sourly.

“But I’ve got one thing,” Cooper said, ignoring Rhyme’s remark and reading the results from the chromatograph.”Traces of substances that the database is saying are ginseng and wolfberry.”

“Chinese herbs, maybe tea,” Rhyme announced. A case several years ago had involved a snakehead, a smuggler of illegal aliens, and much of the investigation had centered around Chinatown. A police officer from mainland China, helping in the case, had taught Rhyme about herbalism, thinking it might help his condition. The substances had no effect, of course, but Rhyme had found the subject potentially helpful in investigations. At the moment he noted the find, but agreed with Cooper that it wasn’t much of a lead. There was a time when those substances would have been found only in Asian specialty shops and what Rhyme called “woo-woo stores.” Now products like that were in every Rite Aid pharmacy and Food Emporium throughout the city.

“On the board, if you please, Sachs.”

As she wrote, he looked over a series of small evidence bags lined up in a row, with her handwriting on the chain-of-custody cards. They were labeled with directions from the compass.

“Ten little Indians,” Rhyme said, intrigued. “What do we have there?”

“I got mad, Rhyme. No, I got fucking furious.”

“Good. I find anger liberating. Why?”

“Because we can’t find him. So I took samples of substrate from where he might’ve been. I crawled around in some pretty lousy places, Rhyme.”

“Hence the smudge.” He looked at her forehead.

She caught his eye. “I’ll wash it off later.” A smile. Seductive, he believed.

He lifted an eyebrow. “Well, get searching. Tell me what you find.”

She pulled on gloves and poured the samples into ten examining dishes. Donning magnifying goggles, she began sifting through them, using a sterile probe to search the contents of each bag. Dirt, cigarette butts, the bits of paper, the nuts and bolts, the bits of what seemed to be rodent shit, hairs, scraps of cloth, candy and fast food wrappers, grains of concrete, metal and stone. The epidermis of underground New York.

Rhyme had learned long ago that in searching for evidence at crime scenes, the key was finding patterns. What repeated itself frequently? Objects in that category could be presumptively eliminated. It was the unique items, those that were out of place, that might be relevant. Outliers, statisticians and sociologists called them.

Nearly everything that Sachs had found was repeated in every dish of the samples. But there was only one thing that was in a category of its own: a very tiny band of curved metal, nearly in a circle, about twice the width of a pencil lead. Though there were many other bits of metal-parts of screws and bolts and shavings-nothing resembled this.

It was also clean, suggesting it had been left recently.

“Where was this, Sachs?”

Rising from her hunched-over pose and stretching, she looked at the label on the bag in front of the dish.

“Twenty feet from the shaft, southwest. It’s where he would’ve had a view of all the wiring connections he’d made. It was under a beam.”

So Galt would have been crouching. The metal bit could have fallen from his cuff or clothing. He asked Sachs to hold it up for him to examine closely. She put magnifying goggles on him, adjusted them. Then she took tweezers and picked up the bit, holding it close.

“Ah, bluing,” he said. “Used on iron. Like on guns. Treated with sodium hydroxide and nitrite. For corrosion resistance. And good tensile properties. It’s a spring of some kind. Mel, what’s your mechanical parts database like?”

“Not as updated as when you were chief, but it’s something.”

Rhyme went online, laboriously typing the pass code. He could use voice recognition, but characters like @%$*-which the department had adopted to improve security-were troublesome to interpret vocally.

The NYPD forensic database main screen popped up and Rhyme started in the Miscellaneous Metals-Springs category.

After ten minutes of scrolling through hundreds of samples he announced, “It’s a hairspring, I think.”

“What’s that?” Cooper asked.

Rhyme was grimacing. “I’m afraid it’s bad news. If it’s his, it means he might be changing his approach to the attacks.”

“How?” Sachs wondered aloud.

“They’re used in timers… I’d bet he’s worried we’re getting close to him. And he’s going to start using a timed device instead of a remote control. When the next attack happens, he could be in a different borough.”

Rhyme had Sachs bag the spring and mark a chain-of-custody card.

“He’s smart,” Cooper observed. “But he’ll slip up. They always do.”

They often do, Rhyme corrected silently.

The tech then said, “Got a pretty good print from one of the remote’s switches.”

Rhyme hoped it was from somebody else, but, no, it was just one of Galt’s-he didn’t need to be diligent about obscuring his identity now that they’d learned his name.

The phone buzzed and Rhyme blinked to see the country code. He answered at once.

“Commander Luna.”

“Captain Rhyme, we have, perhaps, a development.”

“Go ahead, please.”

“An hour ago there was a false fire alarm in a wing of the building Mr. Watchmaker was observing. On that floor is an office of a company that brokers real estate loans in Latin America. The owner’s a colorful fellow. Been under investigation a few times. It made me suspicious. I looked into the background of this man and he’s had death threats made before.”

“By whom?”

“Clients whose deals turned out to be less lucrative than they would have wanted. He performs some other functions too, which I cannot find out about too easily. And if I cannot find out about them the answer is simple: He’s a crook. Which means he has a very large and efficient security staff.”

“So he’s the sort of target that would require a killer like the Watchmaker.”

“Exactly.”

“But,” Rhyme continued, “I would also keep in mind that the target could be at the exact opposite end of the complex from that office.”

“You think the fire alarm was a feint.”

“Possibly.”

“I’ll have Arturo’s men consider that too. He’s put his best-and most invisible-surveillance people on the case.”

“Have you found anything more about the contents of the package that Logan received? The letter I with the blanks? The circuit board, the booklet, the numbers?”

“Nothing but speculation. And, as I think you would too, Captain, I feel speculation is a waste of time.”

“True, Commander.”

Rhyme thanked the man again and they disconnected. He glanced at the clock. The time was 10 p.m. Thirty-five hours since the attack at the substation. Rhyme was in turmoil. On the one hand, he was aware of the terrible pressure to move forward with a case in which the progress was frustratingly slow. On the other, he was exhausted. More tired than he remembered being in a long time. He needed sleep. But he didn’t want to admit it to anyone, even Sachs. He was staring at the silent box of the phone, considering what the Mexican police commander had just told him, when he was aware of sweat dotting his forehead. This infuriated him. He wanted to wipe it before anyone noticed, but of course that was a luxury not available to him. He jerked his head from side to side. Finally the motion dislodged the drop.

But it also caught Sachs’s attention. He sensed she was about to ask if he was feeling all right. He didn’t want to talk about his condition, since he’d either have to admit that he wasn’t, or lie to her. He wheeled abruptly to an evidence whiteboard and studied the script intently. Without seeing the words at all.

Sachs was starting toward him when the doorbell rang. A moment later there was some motion from the doorway and Thom entered the room with a visitor. Rhyme easily deduced the person’s identity; she was in a wheelchair made by the same company that had produced his.

Chapter 52

SUSAN STRINGER HAD a pretty, heart-shaped face and a singsongy voice. Two adjectives stood out: pleasant and sweet.

Her eyes were quick, though, and lips taut, even when smiling, as befit somebody who had to maneuver her way through the streets of New York using only the power of her arms.

“An accessible townhouse on the Upper West Side. That’s a rarity.”

Rhyme gave her a smile in return-he was reserved. He had work to do, and very little of it involved witnesses; his comments to Sachs earlier about his interviewing Susan Stringer were, of course, facetious.

Still, she’d nearly been killed by Ray Galt-in a particularly horrible way-and might have some helpful information. And if, as Sachs had reported, she wanted to meet him in the process, he could live with that.

She nodded at Thom Reston with a knowing look about the importance of-and burdens upon-caregivers. He asked if there was anything she wanted and she said no. “I can’t stay long. It’s late and I’m not feeling too well.” Her face had a hollow look; she’d undoubtedly be thinking of the terrible moments in the elevator. She wheeled closer to Rhyme. Susan’s arms clearly worked fine; she was a paraplegic and would probably have suffered a thoracic injury, in her mid or upper back.

“No burns?” Rhyme asked.

“No. I didn’t get a shock. The only problem was smoke-from the… from the men in the elevator with me. One caught fire.” The last sentence was a whisper.

“What happened?” Sachs asked.

A stoic look. “We were near the ground floor when the elevator stopped suddenly. The lights went out, except for the emergency light. One of the businessmen behind me reached for the panel to hit the HELP button. As soon as he touched it he just started moaning and dancing around.”

She coughed. Cleared her throat. “It was terrible. He couldn’t let go of the panel. His friend grabbed him or he brushed against him. It was like a chain reaction. They just kept jerking around. And one of them caught fire. His hair… the smoke, the smell.” Susan was whispering now. “Horrible. Just horrible. They were dying, right around me, they were dying. I was screaming. I realized it was some electrical problem and I didn’t want to touch the metal hand rim of the chair or the metal door frame. I just sat there.”

Susan shuddered. Then repeated, “I just sat there. Then the car moved down the last few feet and the door opened. There were dozens of people in the lobby, they pulled me out… I tried to warn them not to touch anything but the electricity was off by then.” She coughed softly for a moment. “Who is this man, Ray Galt?” Susan asked.

Rhyme told her, “He thinks he got sick from power lines. Cancer. He’s out for revenge. But there may be an ecoterror connection. He might’ve been recruited by a group that’s opposed to traditional power companies. We don’t know yet. Not for sure.”

Susan blurted, “And he wants to kill innocent people to make his point? What a hypocrite.”

Sachs said, “He’s a fanatic so he doesn’t even register hypocrisy. Whatever he wants to do is good. Whatever stops him from doing what he wants is bad. Very simple universe.”

Rhyme glanced at Sachs, who caught the cue and asked Susan, “You said there was something that might help us?”

“Yes, I think I saw him.”

Despite his distrust of witnesses, Rhyme said encouragingly, “Go ahead. Please.”

“He got onto the elevator at my floor.”

“You think it was him? Why?”

“Because he spilled some water. Accidentally, it seemed, but now I know he did it on purpose. To improve the connection.”

Sachs said, “The water that Ron found on the soles of their shoes. Sure. We wondered where that came from.”

“He was dressed like a maintenance man with a watering can for the plants. He was wearing brown overalls. Kind of dirty. It seemed odd. And the building doesn’t have plants in the hall and we don’t in our office.”

“There’s still a team there?” Rhyme asked Sachs.

She said that there would be. “Fire, maybe. Not PD.”

“Have them call the building manager, wake him up if they have to. See if they have a plant maintenance service. And check video security.”

A few minutes later they had their answer: no plant waterers for the building or any of the companies on the eighth floor. And security cameras were only in the lobby, with wide-angle lenses uselessly showing “a bunch of people coming, a bunch of people going,” one of the fire marshals reported. “Can’t make out a single face.”

Rhyme called up the DMV picture of Galt on the screen. “Is that him?” he asked Susan.

“Could be. He didn’t look at us and I didn’t look at him really.” A knowing glance toward Rhyme. “His face wasn’t exactly at eye level.”

“Anything else you remember about him?”

“When he was walking toward the car and then when he first got in, he kept looking at his watch.”

“The deadline,” Sachs pointed out. Then added, “He set it off early, though.”

“Only a few minutes,” Rhyme said. “Maybe he was worried that somebody’d recognized him in the building. He wanted to finish up and get out. And he was probably monitoring Algonquin’s electrical transmissions and knew the company wasn’t going to shut down the juice by the deadline.”

Susan continued, “He was wearing gloves. Tan gloves. They were leather… Those were at eye level. And I remember them because I was thinking his hands must be sweating. It was hot in the car.”

“Did the uniform have any writing on it?”

“No.”

“Anything else?”

She shrugged. “Not that it’s helpful, but he was rude.”

“Rude?”

“When he got on the elevator he pushed past me. Didn’t apologize or anything.”

“He actually touched you?”

“Not me.” She nodded down. “The chair. It was kind of a tight squeeze.”

“Mel!”

The tech’s head swiveled toward them.

“Susan,” Rhyme asked. “Do you mind if we examine that spot on your chair?”

“No, not at all.”

Cooper carefully looked over the side of the chair she indicated, using a magnifying glass. Rhyme couldn’t see exactly what he found but the tech lifted away two items from bolts at joints in the upright pieces.

“What?”

“Fibers. One dark green and one brown.” Cooper was examining them through the microscope, then turned to a computer database of similar fiber. “Cotton, heavy duty. Could be military, army surplus.”

“Enough to test?”

“Plenty.” The tech and Sachs ran a portion of each of the samples through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer.

Finally, as Rhyme waited impatiently, she called, “Got the results.” A printout eased from the machine and Cooper looked it over.

“More aviation fuel on the green fiber. But something else. On the brown fiber there’s diesel fuel. And more of those Chinese herbs.”

“Diesel.” Rhyme was considering this. “Maybe it’s not an airport. Maybe it’s a refinery he’s after.”

Cooper said, “That’d be one hell of a target, Lincoln.”

It sure would. “Sachs, call Gary Nobel. Tell him to step up security in the ports. Refineries and tankers especially.”

She grabbed the phone.

“Mel, add everything we’ve got so far to the chart.”

CRIME SCENE: OFFICE BUILDING

AT 235 W. 54TH STREET

– Victims (deceased):

– Larry Fishbein, New York City, accountant.

– Robert Bodine, New York City, attorney.

– Franklin Tucker, Paramus, New Jersey, salesman.

– One friction ridge of Raymond Galt.

– Bennington cable and split bolts, same as at other scenes.

– Two hand-made remote relay switches:

– One to shut off power to elevator.

– One to complete circuit and electrify elevator car.

– Bolts and smaller wires connecting panel to elevator, not traceable.

– Victims had water on shoes.

– Trace:

– Chinese herbs, ginseng and wolfberry.

– Hairspring (planning on using timer, rather than remote for future attacks?).

– Dark green cotton heavy-duty clothing fiber.

– Containing trace of alternative jet fuel.

– Attack on military base?

– Dark brown cotton heavy-duty clothing fiber.

– Containing trace of diesel fuel.

– Containing additional Chinese herbs.

PROFILE

– Identified as Raymond Galt, 40, single, living in Manhattan, 227 Suffolk St.

– Terrorist connection? Relation to Justice For the Earth? Suspected ecoterror group. No profile in any U.S. or international database. New? Underground? Individual named Rahman involved. Also Johnston. References to monetary disbursements, personnel movements and something “big.”

– Algonquin security breach in Philadelphia might be related.

– SIGINT hits: code word reference to weapons, “paper and supplies” (guns, explosives?).

– Personnel include man and woman.

– Galt’s relationship unknown.

– Cancer patient; presence of vinblastine and prednisone in significant quantities, traces of etoposide. Leukemia.

– Galt is armed with military 1911 Colt.45.

– Masquerading as maintenance man in dark brown overalls. Dark green, as well?

– Wearing tan leather gloves.

Cooper organized the evidence, and marked chain of custody cards, while Sachs was on the phone with Homeland Security about the risk to the ports in New York and New Jersey.

Rhyme and Susan Stringer found themselves alone. As he stared at the chart he was aware that the woman was looking him over closely. Uneasy, he turned toward her, trying to figure out how to get her to leave. She’d come, she’d helped, she’d met the celebrity crip. Time to get on with things.

She asked, “You’re C4, right?”

This meant his injury was at the fourth cervical vertebra, four bones down in his spine from the base of the skull.

“Yes, though I’ve got a little motion in my hands. No sensation.”

Technically his was a “complete” injury, meaning that he’d lost all sensory function below the site of the injury (“incomplete” patients can have considerable movement). But the human body is quirky, and a few electric impulses escaped over the barricade. The wiring was faulty but not wholly severed.

“You’re in good shape,” she said. “Musclewise.”

Eyes back on the whiteboards, he said absently, “I do range-of-motion exercises every day and functional electric stimulation to keep the tone up.”

Rhyme had to admit that he enjoyed the exercise. He explained that he worked out on a treadmill and stationary bike. The equipment moved him, not the other way around, but it still built up muscles and seemed to have been responsible for the recent movement he’d regained in his right hand, whereas after the accident only his left ring finger worked.

He was in better shape now than before the injury.

He told her this and he could see from her face that she understood; she flexed. “I’d ask you to arm wrestle, but…”

A genuine laugh from Rhyme’s throat.

Then her face grew solemn and she glanced around to see if anyone else could hear. When it was clear none could she turned back, held his eyes and said, “Lincoln, do you believe in fate?”

Chapter 53

THERE IS A certain camaraderie in the disabled world.

Some patients have the band of brothers attitude-It’s us against them. Don’t mess with us. Others take a more huggy approach: Hey, you ever need to cry on somebody’s shoulder, I’m here for you. We’re all in this together, friend.

But Lincoln Rhyme didn’t have time for either. He was a criminalist who happened to have a body that didn’t operate the way he would have liked. Like Amelia Sachs was a cop with arthritis and a love of fast cars and guns.

Rhyme didn’t define himself by his disability. It was an afterthought. There were pleasant crips and witty ones and those who were insufferable pricks. Rhyme judged them one by one, as he did everybody else.

He thought Susan Stringer was a perfectly pleasant woman and respected her courage in coming here when she could have stayed home and nursed her wounds and exploited her trauma. But they had nothing in common other than a spinal cord injury, and Rhyme’s mind was already back to the Galt case; he suspected Susan was soon to be disappointed that the famous gimp criminalist she’d come to see had little time for her.

And he sure as hell wasn’t anybody to talk to about fate.

“No,” he answered her, “probably not in the sense you mean.”

“I’m referring to what seems to be coincidence actually could be events that were meant to happen.”

He confirmed, “Then, no.”

“I didn’t think so.” She was smiling. “But the good news for people like you is that there are people like me who do believe in fate. I think there’s a reason I was in that elevator and I’m here now.” The smile turned into a laugh. “Don’t worry. I’m not a stalker.” A whisper. “I’m not after a donation… or after your body. I’m happily married and I can see that you and Detective Sachs are together. It’s not about that. It’s solely about you.”

He was about to… well, he wasn’t sure what he was about to do. He simply wanted her to leave but didn’t quite know how to engineer it. So he lifted a curious, and cautious, eyebrow.

She asked, “Have you heard about the Pembroke Spinal Cord Center, over on Lexington?”

“I think so. I’m not sure.” He was forever getting information about spinal cord injury rehab and products and medical updates. He’d stopped paying much attention to the flood of material; his obsession with the cases he was running for the Bureau and the NYPD greatly limited his time for extracurricular reading, much less chasing around the country in search of new treatments.

Susan said, “I’ve been in several programs there. Some people in my SCI support group have too.”

SCI support group. His heart sank. He saw what was coming.

But again, she was a step ahead. “I’m not asking you to join us, don’t worry. You don’t look like you’d be a good member.” The eyes sparkled humorously in her heart-shaped face. “Of anything.”

“No.”

“All I’m asking tonight is that you hear me out.”

“I can do that.”

“Now, Pembroke is the D-day of spinal cord treatment. They do everything.”

There were many promising techniques to help people with severe disabilities. But the problem was funding. Even though the injuries were severe, and the consequences lifelong, the reality was that when compared with other maladies, serious spinal cord problems were relatively rare. Which meant that government and corporate research money went elsewhere, to procedures and medicines that would help more people. So most of the procedures that promised significant improvements in patients’ conditions remained experimental and unapproved in America.

And some of the results were remarkable. In research labs, rats with severed spinal cords had actually learned to walk again.

“They have a critical response unit, but that won’t do us any good, of course.”

The key to minimizing spinal cord damage is to treat the affected area immediately after the accident with medications that prevent swelling and future killing of the nerves at the site of the injury. But there’s a very small window of opportunity to do that, usually hours or at the most days after the injury.

As veteran patients, Rhyme and Susan Stringer could take advantage only of techniques to repair the damage. But that always ran up against the intractable problem: Central nervous system cells-those in the brain and spinal cord-don’t regenerate the way the skin on your finger does after a cut.

This was the battle that SCI doctors and researchers fought daily, and Pembroke was in the vanguard. Susan described an impressive array of techniques that the center offered. They were working with stem cells, doing nerve rerouting-using peripheral nerves (any nerve outside the spinal cord, which can regenerate)-and treating the injured areas with drugs and other substances to promote regeneration. They were even building noncellular “bridges” around the location of the injury to carry nerve impulses between the brain and the muscles.

The center also had an extensive prosthetics department.

“It was amazing,” she told him. “I saw a video of this paraplegic who’d been implanted with a computer controller and a number of wires. She could walk almost normally.”

Rhyme was staring at the length of the Bennington cable that Galt had used in the first attack.

Wires…

She described something called the Freehand system, and others like it, that involved implanting stimulators and electrodes in the arms. By shrugging your shoulders or moving your neck in a certain way, you could trigger coordinated movements of the arm and hands. Some quads, she explained, could even feed themselves.

“None of that bullshit quackery you see, doctors preying on the desperate.” Susan angrily mentioned a doctor in China who’d pocket $20,000 to drill holes in patients’ heads and spines to implant tissue from embryos. With, of course, no discernible effect-other than exposing the patient to risk of death, further injury and bankruptcy.

The people on the staff at Pembroke, she explained, were all from the top medical schools from around the world.

And the claims were realistic-that is, modest. A quad like Rhyme wouldn’t be able to walk, but he could improve his lung functioning, perhaps get other digits to work and, most important, get back control of bowel and bladder. This would greatly help in reducing the risk of dysreflexia attacks-that skyrocketing of the blood pressure that could lead to stroke that could render him even more disabled than he was. Or kill him.

“It’s helped me a lot. I think in a few years I’ll be able to walk again.”

Rhyme was nodding. He could think of nothing to say.

“I don’t work for them. I’m not a disability rights advocate. I’m an editor who happens to be a paraplegic.” This echo made Rhyme offer a faint smile. She continued, “But when Detective Sachs said she was working with you, I thought, Fate. I was meant to come tell you about Pembroke. They can help you.”

“I… appreciate it.”

“I’ve read about you, of course. You’ve done a lot of good for the city. Maybe it’s time you did some good for yourself.”

“Well, it’s complicated.” He had no idea what that meant, much less why he’d said it.

“I know, you’re worried about the risk. And you should be.”

True, surgery would be riskier for him, as a C4, than for her. He was prone to blood pressure, respiratory and infection complications. The question was balance. Was the surgery worth it? He’d nearly undergone an operation a few years ago but a case had derailed the procedure. He’d postponed any medical treatment of that sort indefinitely.

But now? He considered: Was his life the way he wished it to be? Of course not. But he was content. He loved Sachs, and she him. He lived for his job. He wasn’t eager to throw all that away chasing an unrealistic dream.

Normally buttoned tight about his personal feelings, he nonetheless told Susan Stringer this, and she understood.

Then he surprised himself further by adding something he hadn’t told many people at all. “I feel that I’m mostly my mind. That’s where I live. And I sometimes think that’s one of the reasons I’m the criminalist that I am. No distractions. My power comes from my disability. If I were to change, if I were to become, quote, normal, would that affect me as a forensic scientist? I don’t know. But I don’t want to take that chance.”

Susan was considering this. “It’s an interesting thought. But I wonder if that’s a crutch, an excuse not to take the risk.”

Rhyme appreciated that. He liked blunt talk. He nodded at his chair. “A crutch is a step up in my case.”

She laughed.

“Thanks for your thoughts,” he added, because he felt he ought to, and she fixed him with another of those knowing looks. The expression was less irritating now, though it remained disconcerting.

She backed away in the chair and said, “Mission accomplished.”

His brow furrowed.

Susan said, “I found you two fibers you might not otherwise have.” She smiled. “Wish it were more.” Eyes back on Rhyme. “But sometimes it’s the little things that make all the difference. Now, I should go.”

Sachs thanked her and Thom saw her out.

After she’d left, Rhyme said, “This was a setup, right?”

Sachs replied, “It was sort of a setup, Rhyme. We needed to interview her anyway. When I called about arranging it, we got to talking. When she heard I worked with you she wanted to make her sales pitch. I told her I’d get her in to see the chairman.”

Rhyme gave a brief smile.

Then it faded as Sachs crouched and said in a voice that Mel Cooper couldn’t hear, “I don’t want you any different than you are, Rhyme. But I want to make sure you’re healthy. For me, that’s all I care about. Whatever you choose is fine.”

For a moment Rhyme recalled the title of the pamphlet left by Dr. Kopeski, with Die with Dignity.

Choices.

She leaned forward and kissed him. He felt her hand touching the side of his head with a bit more palm than made sense for a gesture of affection.

“I have a temperature?” he asked, smiling at catching her.

She laughed. “We all have temperatures, Rhyme. Whether you have a fever or not, I can’t tell.” She kissed him again. “Now get some sleep. Mel and I’ll keep going here for a while. I’ll be up to bed soon.” She returned to the evidence she’d found.

Rhyme hesitated but then decided that he was tired, too tired to be much help at the moment. He wheeled toward the elevator, where Thom joined him and they began their journey upward in the tiny car. Sweat continued to dot his forehead and it seemed to him that his cheeks were flushed. These were symptoms of dysreflexia. But he didn’t have a headache and he didn’t feel the onset of the sensation that preceded an attack. Thom got him ready for bed and handled the evening detail. The blood pressure cuff and thermometer were handy. “Little high,” he said of the former. As to the latter, Rhyme didn’t, in fact, have a fever.

Thom executed a smooth transfer to get him into bed, and Rhyme heard in his memory Sachs’s comment from a few minutes earlier.

We all have a temperature, Rhyme.

He couldn’t help reflecting that clinically this was true. We all did. Even the dead.

Chapter 54

HE AWOKE FAST, from a dream.

He tried to recall it. He couldn’t remember enough to know whether it had been bad or simply odd. It was certainly intense, though. The likelihood, however, was that it was bad, since he was sweating furiously, as if he were walking through the turbine room at Algonquin Consolidated.

The time was just before midnight, the faint light of the clock/alarm reported. He’d been asleep for a short time and he was groggy; it took a moment to orient himself.

He’d ditched the uniform and hard hat and gear bag after the attack at the hotel, but he’d kept one of his accoutrements, which was now dangling from a chair nearby: the ID badge. In the dim, reflected light he stared at it now: His sullen picture, the impersonal typeface of “R. Galt” and, above that, in somewhat more friendly lettering:

ALGONQUIN CONSOLIDATED POWER

ENERGIZING YOUR LIFE ^TM

Considering what he’d been up to for the past several days, he appreciated the irony of that slogan.

He lay back and stared at the shabby ceiling in the East Village weekly rental, which he’d taken a month ago under a pseudonym, knowing the police would find the apartment sooner or later.

Sooner, as it turned out.

He kicked the sheets off. His flesh was damp with sweat.

Thinking about the conductivity of the human body. The resistance of our slippery internal organs can be as low as 85 ohms, making them extremely susceptible to current. Wet skin, 1,000 or less. But dry skin has a resistance of 100,000 ohms or more. That’s so high that significant amounts of voltage are needed to push that current through the body, usually 2,000 volts.

Sweat makes the job a lot easier.

His skin cooled as it dried, and his resistance climbed.

His mind leapt from thought to thought: the plans for tomorrow, what voltages to use, how to rig the lines. He thought about the people he was working with. And he thought about the people pursuing him. That woman detective, Sachs. The younger one, Pulaski. And, of course, Lincoln Rhyme.

Then he was meditating on something else entirely: two men in the 1950s, the chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago. They devised a very interesting experiment. In their lab they created their version of the primordial soup and atmosphere that had covered the earth billions of years ago. Into this mix of hydrogen, ammonia and methane, they fired sparks mimicking the lightning that blanketed the earth back then.

And what happened?

A few days later they found something thrilling: In the test tubes were traces of amino acids, the so-called building blocks of life.

They had discovered evidence suggesting that life had begun on earth all because of a spark of electricity.

As the clock approached midnight, he composed his next demand letter to Algonquin and the City of New York. Then with sleep enfolding him he thought again about juice. And the irony that what had, in a millisecond burst of lightning, created life so many, many years ago would, tomorrow, take it away, just as fast.

Earth Day