The Burning Wire

Chapter 55

“ PLEASE LEAVE a message at the tone.”

Sitting in his Brooklyn townhouse at 7:30 a.m., Fred Dellray stared at his phone, flipped it closed. He didn’t bother to leave another message, though, not after leaving twelve earlier ones on William Brent’s cold phone.

I’m screwed, he thought.

There was the chance the man was dead. Even though McDaniel’s phrasing was fucked-up (symbiosis construct?), his theory might not be. It made sense that Ray Galt was the inside man seduced into helping Rahman and Johnston and their Justice For the Earth group target Algonquin and the grid. If Brent had stumbled into their cell, they’d have killed him in an instant.

Ah, Dellray thought angrily: blind, simpleminded politics-the empty calories of terrorism.

But Dellray’d been in this business a long time and his gut told him that William Brent was very much alive. New York City is smaller than people think, particularly the underside of the Big Apple. Dellray had called up other contacts, a lot of them: other CIs and some of the undercover agents he ran. No word about Brent. Even Jimmy Jeep knew nothing-and he definitely had a motive to track down the man again, to make sure Dellray still backed the upcoming march through Georgia. Yet nobody’d heard about anybody ordering a clip or a cleaner. And no surprised garbagemen had wheeled a Dumpster to their truck and found nestled inside the pungent sarcophagus an unidentified body.

No, Dellray concluded. There was only the obvious answer, and he could ignore it no more: Brent had fucked him over.

He’d checked Homeland Security to see if the snitch, either as Brent or as one of his half dozen undercover identities, had booked a flight anywhere. He hadn’t, though any professional CI knows where to buy airtight identity papers.

“Honey?”

Dellray jumped at the sound and he looked up and saw Serena in the doorway, holding Preston.

“You’re looking thoughtful,” she said. Dellray continued to be struck by the fact she looked like Jada Pinkett Smith, the actress and producer. “You were brooding before you went to bed, you started brooding when you woke up. I suspect you were brooding in your sleep.”

He opened his mouth to spin a tale, but then said, “I think I got my ass fired yesterday.”

“What?” Her face was shocked. “McDaniel fired you?”

“Not in so many words-he thanked me.”

“But-”

“Some thank-you’s mean thank you. Others mean pack up your stuff… Let’s just say I’m being eased out. Same thing.”

“I think you’re reading too much into it.”

“He keeps forgetting to call me with updates on the case.”

“The grid case?”

“Right. Lincoln calls me, Lon Sellitto calls me. Tucker’s assistant calls me.”

Dellray didn’t go into the part about another source of the brooding: the possible indictment for the stolen and missing $100,000.

But more troubling was the fact that he really did believe William Brent had had a solid lead, something that might let them stop these terrible attacks. A lead that had vanished with him.

Serena walked over and sat beside him, handed over Preston, who, grabbing Dellray’s lengthy thumb in enthusiastic fingers, took away some of the brooding. She said to him, “I’m sorry, honey.”

He looked out the window of the townhouse into the complex geometry of buildings and beyond, where he could just see a bit of stonework from the Brooklyn Bridge. A portion of Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” came to mind.

The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious;

My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

These words were true of him as well. The facade of Fred Dellray: hip, ornery, tough, man of the street. Occasionally thinking, more than occasionally thinking, What if I’m getting it wrong?

The beginning lines of the next stanza of Whitman’s poem, though, were the kicker:

It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil;

I am he who knew what it was to be evil…

“What’m I going to do?” he mused.

Justice For the Earth…

He ruefully recalled turning down the chance to go to a high-level conference on satellite and data intelligence gathering and analysis. The memo had read, “The Shape of the Future.”

Slipping into street, Dellray had said aloud, “Here’s the shape of the few-ture.” And rolled the memo into a ball, launching it into a trash bin for a three-pointer.

“So, you’re just… home?” Serena asked, wiping Preston’s mouth. The baby giggled and wanted more. She obliged and tickled him too.

“I had one angle on the case. And it vanished. Well, I lost it. I trusted somebody I shouldn’t’ve. I’m outa the loop.”

“A snitch? Walked out on you?”

An inch away from mentioning the one hundred thousand. But he didn’t go there.

“Gone and vanished,” Dellray muttered.

“Gone and vanished? Both?” Serena’s face grew theatrically grave. “Don’t tell me he absconded and disappeared too?”

The agent could resist the smile no longer. “I only use snitches with extra-ordinary talents.” Then the smile faded. “In two years he never missed a debriefing or call.”

Of course, in those two years I never paid him till after he’d delivered.

Serena asked, “So what’re you going to do?”

He answered honestly, “I don’t know.”

“Then you can do me a favor.”

“I suppose. What?”

“You know all that stuff in the basement, that you’ve been meaning to organize?”

Fred Dellray’s first reaction was to say, You’ve got to be kidding. But then he considered the leads he had in the Galt case, which were none, and, hefting the baby on his hip, rose and followed her downstairs.

Chapter 56

RON PULASKI COULD still hear the sound. The thud and then the crack.

Oh, the crack. He hated that.

Thinking back to his first time working for Lincoln and Amelia: how he’d gotten careless and had been smacked in the head with a bat or club. He knew about the incident though he couldn’t remember a single thing about it. Careless. He’d turned the corner without checking on the whereabouts of the suspect and the man had clocked him good.

The injury had made him scared, made him confused, made him disoriented. He did the best he could-oh, he tried hard-though the trauma kept coming back. And even worse: It was one thing to get lazy and walk around a corner when he should’ve been careful, but it was something very different to make a mistake and hurt somebody else.

Pulaski now parked his squad car in front of the hospital-a different vehicle. The other one had been impounded for evidence. If he was asked, he was going to say he was here to take a statement from somebody who’d been in the neighborhood of the man committing the terrorist attacks on the grid.

I’m trying to ascertain the perpetrator’s whereabouts…

That was the sort of thing he and his twin brother, also a cop, would say to each other and they’d laugh their asses off. Only it wasn’t funny now. Because he knew the guy he’d run over, whose body had thudded and whose head had cracked, was just some poor passerby.

As he walked inside the chaotic hospital, a wave of panic hit him.

What if he had killed the guy?

Vehicular manslaughter, he supposed the charge could be. Or criminally negligent homicide.

This could be the end of his career.

And even if he didn’t get indicted, even if the attorney general didn’t go anywhere with the case, he could still be sued by the guy’s family. What if the man ended up like Lincoln Rhyme, paralyzed? Did the police department have insurance for this sort of thing? His own coverage sure wouldn’t pay for anything like lifelong care. Could the vic sue Pulaski and take away everything? He and Jenny’d be working for the rest of their lives just to pay off the judgment. The kids might never go to college; the tiny fund they’d already started would disappear like smoke.

“I’m here to see Stanley Palmer,” he told the attendant sitting behind a desk. “Auto accident yesterday.”

“Sure, Officer. He’s in four oh two.”

Being in uniform, he walked freely through several doors until he found the room. He paused outside to gather his courage. What if Palmer’s entire family was there? Wife and children? He tried to think of something to say.

But all he heard was thud. Then crack.

Ron Pulaski took a deep breath and stepped into the room. Palmer was alone. He lay unconscious, hooked to all sorts of intimidating wires and tubes, electronic equipment as complicated as the things in Lincoln Rhyme’s lab.

Rhyme…

How he’d let down his boss! The man who’d inspired him to remain a cop because Rhyme had done the same after his own injury. And the man who kept giving him more and more responsibility. Lincoln Rhyme believed in him.

And look what I’ve done now.

Pulaski stared at Palmer, lying absolutely still-even stiller than Rhyme, because nothing on the patient’s body was moving, except his lungs, though even the lines on the monitor weren’t doing much. A nurse passed by and Pulaski called her in. “How is he?”

“I don’t know,” she replied in a thick accent he couldn’t identify. “You have to talk to, you know, the doctor.”

After staring at Palmer’s still form for some time, Pulaski looked up to see a middle-aged man of indeterminate race in blue scrubs. M.D. was embroidered after his name. Again because of Pulaski’s own uniform, it seemed, the medico gave him information he might not otherwise have doled out to a stranger. Palmer had undergone surgery for severe internal injuries. He was in a coma and they weren’t able to give a prognosis at this point.

He didn’t have any family in the area, it seemed. He was single. He had a brother and parents in Oregon and they’d been contacted.

“Brother,” Pulaski whispered, thinking of his own twin.

“That’s right.” Then the doctor lowered the chart and cast a look at the cop. After a moment he said, with a knowing gaze, “You’re not here to take his statement. This has nothing to do with the investigation. Come on.”

“What?” Alarmed, Pulaski could only stare.

Then a kind smile blossomed in the doctor’s face. “It happens. Don’t worry about it.”

“Happens?”

“I’ve been an ER doctor in the city for a long time. You never see veteran cops come in person to pay respects to victims, only the young ones.”

“No, really. I was just checking to see if I could take a statement.”

“Sure… but you could’ve called to see if he was conscious. Don’t play all hardass, Officer. You got a good heart.”

Which was pounding all the harder now.

The doctor’s eyes went to Palmer’s motionless form. “Was it a hit-and-run?”

“No. We know the driver.”

“Good. You nailed the prick. I hope the jury throws the book at him.” Then the man, in his stained outfit, was walking away.

Pulaski stopped at the nurses’ station and, once more under the aura of his uniform, got Palmer’s address and social security number. He’d find out what he could about him, his family, dependents. Even though he was single, Palmer was middle-aged so he might have kids. He’d call them, see if he could help in some way. Pulaski didn’t have much money, but he’d give whatever moral support he could.

Mostly the young officer just wanted to unburden his soul for the pain he’d caused.

The nurse excused herself and turned away, answering an incoming call.

Pulaski turned too, even more quickly, and before he left the nurses’ station, he pulled on sunglasses so nobody could see the tears.

Chapter 57

AT A LITTLE after 9 a.m. Rhyme asked Mel Cooper to click on the TV in the lab, though he kept the sound down.

Since the feds had seemed slow to share up-to-the-minute information with the NYPD, at least with Rhyme, he wanted to make certain he learned the latest developments.

What better source than CNN?

The case was front and center, of course. Galt’s picture was flashed about a million times and there were nearly as many references to the mysterious Justice for the Earth ecoterror group. And sound bites from anti-green Andi Jessen.

But most of the coverage of the Galt attacks involved windstorms of speculation. And many anchors, of course, wondered if there was a connection to Earth Day.

Which was also the subject of much reportage. There were a number of celebrations in the city: a parade, schoolchildren planting trees, protests, the New Energy Expo at the convention center and the big rally in Central Park, at which two of the President’s key allies on the environment would be speaking, up-and-coming senators from out west. Following that would be a concert by a half dozen famous rock groups. Attendance would be close to a half million people. Several stories dealt with the increased security at all the events because of the recent attacks.

Gary Noble and Tucker McDaniel had told Rhyme that not only were two hundred extra agents and NYPD officers assigned to security, the FBI’s technical support people had been working with Algonquin to make sure that all the electrical lines in and around the park were protected from sabotage.

Rhyme now looked up as Ron Pulaski walked into the room.

“Where’ve you been, Rookie?”

“Uhm…” He held up a white envelope. “The DNA.”

He’d been someplace else-Rhyme believed he knew where. The criminalist didn’t press it but he said, “That wasn’t a priority. We know who the perp is. We’ll need it for the trial. But we’ve got to catch him first.”

“Sure.”

“You find anything else yesterday at Galt’s?”

“Went over it again top to bottom, Lincoln. But nothing, sorry.”

Sellitto too arrived, looking more disheveled than usual. The outfit seemed the same-light blue shirt and navy suit. Rhyme wondered if he’d slept in his own office last night. The detective gave them a synopsis of how things were unfolding downtown-the case had bled over into the public relations world. Political careers could be at stake and while local, state and federal officials were putting bodies on the street and bringing “resources to bear,” each was also carefully suggesting that it was doing more than the others.

Settling into a noisy wicker chair, he loudly slurped coffee and muttered, “But the bottom line is nobody knows how to run this thing. We’ve got portables and feebies and National Guard at the airports, subways, train stations. All the refineries and docks. Special harbor patrols around the tankers-though I don’t know how the fuck he’d attack a ship with an arc flash or whatever. And they’ve got people on all the Algonquin substations.”

“He’s not going after the substations anymore,” Rhyme complained.

“I know that. And so does everybody, but nobody knows where exactly to expect him. It’s everywhere.”

“What is?”

“This fucking juice. Electricity.” He waved his hand, apparently indicating the entire city. “Everybody’s goddamn house.” He eyed the outlets in Rhyme’s wall. Then said, “At least we haven’t got any more demands. Christ, two yesterday, within a few hours. I was thinking he just got pissed off and decided to kill those guys in an elevator, no matter what.” The big man sighed. “I’ll be taking the stairs for a while, I’ll tell you. Good for the weight, at least.”

Eyes sweeping across the evidence boards, Rhyme was in agreement about the rudderless nature of the case. Galt was smart but he wasn’t brilliant, and he was leaving ample trace behind. It just wasn’t leading them anywhere, other than offering general ideas of his targets.

An airport?

An oil depot?

Though Lincoln Rhyme was also thinking something else: Are the paths there and am I just missing them?

And felt again the tickle of sweat, the faint recurring headache that had plagued him recently. He’d successfully ignored it for a time but the throbbing had returned. Yes, he was feeling worse, there was no doubt about it. Was that affecting his mental skills? He would admit to no one, not even Sachs, that this was perhaps the most terrifying thing in the world to him. As he’d told Susan Stringer last night, his mind was all he had.

He found his eyes drawn to the den across the hall. The table where Dr. Arlen Kopeski’s Die with Dignity brochure rested.

Choices…

He then tipped the thought away.

Just then Sellitto took a call, sitting up as he listened and setting down his coffee quickly. “Yeah? Where?” He jotted in his limp notebook.

Everyone in the room was watching him intently. Rhyme was thinking: a new demand?

The phone clicked closed. He looked up from his notes. “Okay, may have something. A portable downtown, near Chinatown, calls in. Woman’d come up to him and says she thinks she saw our boy.”

“Galt?” Pulaski asked.

Sourly: “What other boy we interested in, Officer?”

“Sorry.”

“She thinks she recognized the picture.”

“Where?” Rhyme snapped.

“There’s an abandoned school, near Chinatown.” Sellitto gave them the address. Sachs was writing.

“The portable checked it out. Nobody there now.”

“But if he was there, he’d’ve left something behind,” Rhyme said.

At his nod, Sachs stood. “Okay, Ron, let’s go.”

“You better take a team.” Sellitto added wryly, “We’ve probably got a few cops left who aren’t guarding fuse boxes or wires around town.”

“Let’s get ESU in the area,” she said. “Stage nearby but keep ’em out of sight. Ron and I’ll go in first. If he’s there after all and we need a takedown, I’ll call. But we don’t want a team running through the place, screwing up the evidence, if it’s empty.”

The two of them headed out the door.

Sellitto called Bo Haumann of Emergency Service and briefed him. The ESU head would get officers into the area and coordinate with Sachs. The detective disconnected and looked around the room, presumably for something to accompany the coffee. He found a plate of pastry, courtesy of Thom, and grabbed a bear claw pastry. Dunked it and ate. Then he frowned.

Rhyme asked, “What?”

“Just realized I forgot to call McDaniel and the feds and tell ’em about the operation in Chinatown-at the school.” Then he grimaced and held up his phone theatrically. “Aw, shit. I can’t. I didn’t pay for a cloud zone SIM chip. Guess I’ll have to tell him later.”

Rhyme laughed and ignored the searing ache that spiked momentarily in his head. Just then his phone rang and both humor and headaches vanished.

Kathryn Dance was calling.

His finger struggled to hit the keypad. “Yes, Kathryn? What’s going on?”

She said, “I’m on the phone with Rodolfo. They’ve found the Watchmaker’s target.”

Excellent, he reflected, though part of him was also thinking: Why now? But then he decided: The Watchmaker’s the priority, at least for the moment. You’ve got Sachs and Pulaski and a dozen ESU troops after Galt. And the last time you had a chance at the Watchmaker, you turned away from the search to focus on something else, and he killed his victim and got away.

Not this time. Richard Logan isn’t escaping this time.

“Go ahead,” he told the CBI agent, forcing himself to turn away from the evidence boards.

There was a click.

“Rodolfo,” Dance said. “Lincoln’s on the line. I’ll leave you two to talk. I’ve got to see TJ.”

They said good-bye to her.

“Hello, Captain.”

“Commander. What do you have?”

“Arturo Diaz has four undercover officers in the office complex I was telling you about. About ten minutes ago Mr. Watchmaker, dressed as a businessman, entered the building. From the lobby he used a pay phone to call a company on the sixth floor-on the opposite side of where the fire alarm was yesterday. Just like you thought. He spent about ten minutes inside and then left.”

“He vanished?” Rhyme asked, alarmed.

“No. He’s now outside in a small park between the two main buildings in the complex.”

“Just sitting there?”

“So it seems. He’s made several mobile calls. But the frequency is unusual or they’re scrambled, Arturo tells me. So we can’t intercept.”

Rhyme supposed rules about eavesdropping in Mexico might be somewhat less strict than in the U.S.

“They’re sure it’s the Watchmaker?”

“Yes. Arturo’s men said they had a clear view. He has a satchel with him. He still is carrying it.”

“He is?”

“Yes. We still can’t be sure what it is. A bomb, perhaps. With the circuit board detonator. Our teams are surrounding the facility. All plainclothed but we have a full complement of soldiers nearby. And the bomb squad.”

“Where are you, Commander?”

A laugh. “It was very considerate of your Watchmaker to pick this place. The Jamaican consulate is here. They have bomb barriers up and we’re behind those. Logan can’t see us.”

Rhyme hoped that was true.

“When will you move in?”

“As soon as Arturo’s men say it’s clear. The park is crowded with innocents. A number of children. But he won’t get away. We have most of the roads sealed off.”

A trickle of sweat slipped down Rhyme’s temple. He grimaced and twisted his head to the side to wipe it on the headrest.

The Watchmaker…

So close.

Please. Let this work out. Please…

And again squelched the frustration that he felt from working on such an important case at a distance.

“We’ll let you know soon, Captain.”

They disconnected the call and Rhyme forced himself to focus on Raymond Galt once again. Was the lead to his whereabouts solid? He looked like an everyman, approaching middle age, not too heavy, not too slim. Average height. And in the paranoid climate he’d created, people were undoubtedly primed to see things that weren’t there. Electrical traps, arc flash risks… and the killer himself.

Then he started, as Sachs’s voice snapped through the radio. “Rhyme, you there, K?”

She’d ended her transmission with the traditional conclusion of a comment or question in the police radio parlance, K, to let the recipient know it was okay to transmit. He and she usually disposed of this formality, and for some reason Rhyme found it troubling that she’d used the shorthand.

“Sachs, go ahead. What do you have?”

“We just got here. We’re about to go in. I’ll let you know.”

Chapter 58

A MAROON TORINO Cobra made for a bad undercover car, so Sachs had glided it to a stop about two blocks away from the school where Galt had been sighted.

The school had closed years ago and, according to the signage, was soon to be demolished and condominiums built on the grounds.

“Good hidey-hole,” she said to Pulaski as they jogged close, noting the seven-foot-high wooden fence around the grounds, covered with graffiti and posters of alternative theater, performance pieces and music groups plummeting to obscurity. The Seventh Seal. The Right Hands. Bolo.

Pulaski, who seemed to be forcing himself to concentrate, nodded. She’d have to keep an eye on him. He’d done well at the elevator crime scene in Midtown but it seemed that the accident at Galt’s apartment-hitting that man-was bothering him again.

They paused in front of the fence. The demolition hadn’t started yet; the gate-two hinged pieces of plywood chained together and padlocked-had enough play so they could have squeezed through, which is probably how Galt had gotten in, if in fact he had. Sachs stood to the side of the gap and peered in. The school was largely intact, though it seemed that a portion of the roof had fallen in. Most of the glass had been stoned out of the windows but you could see virtually nothing inside.

Yep, it was a good hidey-hole. And a nightmare to assault. There’d be a hundred good defensive positions.

Call in the troops? Not yet, Sachs thought. Every minute they delayed was a minute Galt could be finishing the last touches on his new weapon. And every ESU officer’s footfall might destroy trace evidence.

“He could have it booby-trapped,” Pulaski whispered in an unsteady voice, looking at the metal chain. “Maybe it’s wired.”

“No. He wouldn’t risk somebody just touching it casually and getting a shock; they’d call the police right away.” But, she continued, he could easily have something rigged to tell him of intruders’ presence. So, sighing and with a grimace on her face, she looked up the street. “Can you climb that?”

“What?”

“The fence?”

“I guess I could. If I were chasing or being chased.”

“Well, I can’t, unless you give me a boost. Then you come after.”

“All right.”

They walked to where she could make out, through a crack in the fence, some thick bushes on the other side, which would both break their fall and give them some cover. She recalled that Galt was armed-and with a particularly powerful gun, the.45. She made sure her Glock holster was solidly clipped into her waistband and then nodded. Pulaski crouched down and laced his fingers together.

Mostly to put him at ease, she whispered gravely, “One thing to remember. It’s important.”

“What’s that?” He looked into her eyes uneasily.

“I’ve gained a few pounds,” said the tall policewoman. “Be careful of your back.”

A smile. It didn’t last long. But it was a smile nonetheless.

She winced from the pain in her leg as she stepped onto his hands, and twisted to face the wall.

Just because Galt hadn’t electrified the chain didn’t mean he hadn’t rigged something on the other side. She saw in her mind’s eye once more the holes in Luis Martin’s flesh. Saw too the sooty floor of the elevator car yesterday, the quivering bodies of the hotel guests.

“No backup?” he whispered. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. On three. One… Two… Three.”

And up she went, Pulaski much stronger than she’d expected, launching her nearly six-foot frame straight up. Her palms caught the top and she lodged there, sitting momentarily. A glance at the school. No sign of anyone. Then a look downward, and she saw beneath her only the bush, nothing to burn her flesh with five-thousand-degree arc flashes, no metal wires or panels.

Sachs turned her back to the school, gripped the top of the fence and lowered herself as far as she could. Then, when she knew she’d have to let go, she let go.

She hit rolling, and the pain rattled through her knees and thighs. But she knew her malady of arthritis as intimately as Rhyme knew his bodily limitations and she understood this was merely a temporary protest. By the time she’d taken cover behind the thickest stand of shrub, gun drawn and looking for any presenting targets, the pain had diminished.

“Clear,” she whispered through the fence.

There was a thump and a faint grunt and, like some kung-fu movie actor, Pulaski landed deftly and silently beside her. His weapon too appeared in his hand.

There was no way they could approach the front without being seen if Galt happened to look out. They’d go around to the back but Sachs needed to do one thing first. She scanned the grounds and, gesturing Pulaski to follow her, stayed behind the bushes and Dumpsters awaiting filling, heading to the right side of the school.

With Pulaski covering her, she moved fast to where two large rusting metal boxes were fitted to the brick. Both had peeling decals with the name Algonquin Consolidated on the side and a number to call in an emergency. She took from her pocket Sommers’s current detector, turned it on and swept the unit over the boxes. The display showed zero.

Not surprising, since the place had been deserted for years, it seemed. But she was happy to see the confirmation.

“Look,” Pulaski whispered, touching her arm.

Sachs gazed at where he was pointing, through a greasy window. It was dim and hard to make out anything inside clearly, but after a moment she could see the faint movement of a flashlight, she believed, slowly scanning. Possibly-the shadows were deceptive-she was looking at a man poring over a document. A map? A diagram of an electrical system he was going to turn into a deadly trap?

“He is here,” Pulaski whispered excitedly.

She pulled the headset on and called Bo Haumann, the ESU head.

“What do you have, Detective? K.”

“There’s somebody here. I can’t tell if it’s Galt or not. He’s in the middle part of the main building. Ron and I are going to flank him. What’s your ETA? K.”

“Eight, nine minutes. Silent roll-up, K.”

“Good. We’ll be in the back. Call me when you’re ready for the takedown. We’ll come in from behind.”

“Roger, out.”

She then called Rhyme and told him that they might have the perp. They’d go in as soon as ESU was on site.

“Look out for traps,” Rhyme urged.

“There’s no power. It’s safe.”

She disconnected the transmission and glanced at Pulaski. “Ready?”

He nodded.

Crouching, she moved quickly toward the back of the school, gripping her weapon tightly and thinking: Okay, Galt. Haven’t got your juice to protect you here. You’ve got a gun, I’ve got a gun. Now, we’re on my turf.

Chapter 59

AS HE DISCONNECTED from Sachs, Rhyme felt another tickle of sweat. He finally had to resort to calling Thom and asking him to wipe it off. This was perhaps the hardest for Rhyme. Relying on somebody for the big tasks wasn’t so bad: the range-of-motion exercises, bowel and bladder, the sitting-transfer maneuver to get him into the wheelchair or bed. The feeding.

It was the tiny needs that were the most infuriating… and embarrassing. Flicking away an insect, picking fuzz off your slacks.

Wiping away a rivulet of sweat.

The aide appeared and easily took care of the problem without a thought.

“Thank you,” the criminalist said. Thom hesitated at the unexpected show of gratitude.

Rhyme turned back to the evidence boards, but in fact he wasn’t thinking much of Galt. It was possible that Sachs and the ESU team were about to collar the crazed employee at the school in Chinatown.

No, what was occupying his overheated mind exclusively was the Watchmaker in Mexico City. Goddamn it, why wasn’t Luna or Kathryn Dance or somebody calling to give him a blow-by-blow description of the takedown?

Maybe the Watchmaker had already planted the bomb in the office building and was using his own presence as a diversion. The satchel he carried might be filled with bricks. Why exactly was he hanging out in the office park like some goddamn tourist trying to figure out where to get a margarita? And could it be a different office altogether he was targeting?

Then Rhyme said, “Mel, I want to see where the takedown’s happening. Google Earth… or whatever it’s called. Pull it up for me. Mexico City.”

“Sure.”

“Avenue Bosque de Reforma… How often do they update the images?”

“I don’t know. Probably every few months. It’s not real time, though, I don’t imagine.”

“I don’t care about that.”

A few minutes later they were looking at a satellite image of the area: a curving road, Avenue Bosque de Reforma, with the office buildings separated by the park where the Watchmaker was sitting at that moment. Across the street was the Jamaican consulate, protected by a series of concrete barriers-the bomb blast shields-and a gate. Rodolfo Luna and his team would be on the other side of those. Behind them were official vehicles parked in front of the embassy itself.

He gasped as he stared at the barriers. To the left was a blast shield running perpendicular to the road. To the right were six others, parallel to it.

This was the letter I and the blank spaces from the package delivered to the Watchmaker at Mexico City airport.

Gold letters…

Little blue booklet…

The mysterious numbers…

“Mel,” he said sharply. The tech’s head snapped up at the urgency. “Is there any passport that has the letters CC on the cover? Issued in blue?”

A moment later Cooper looked up from the State Department archive. “Yes, as a matter of fact, there is. Navy blue with interlocking C’s at the top. It’s the Caribbean Community passport. There’re about fifteen countries in-”

“Is Jamaica one?”

“Yes.”

He realized too they’d been thinking of the numbers as five hundred seventy and three hundred seventy-nine. In fact, there was another way to refer to them. “Quick. Look up Lexus SUVs. Is there a model with a five seventy or a three seventy-nine in the designation?”

This was even faster than the passport. “Let’s see… Yep, the LX five-seventy. It’s a luxury-”

“Get me Luna on the phone. Now!” He didn’t want to risk his own dialing, which would have taken some time and might have been inaccurate.

He felt the sweat again but ignored it.

“Sí?”

“Rodolfo! It’s Lincoln Rhyme.”

“Ah, Captain-”

“Listen to me! You are the target. The office building’s a diversion! The package delivered to Logan? The rectangular images on the drawing? It was a diagram of the grounds of the Jamaican embassy, where you are right now. The rectangles are the blast barriers. And you drive a Lexus LX five-seventy?”

“Yes… You mean, that was the five hundred seventy?”

“I think so. And the Watchmaker was given a Jamaican passport to get into the compound. Is there a car parked nearby with three seven nine in the license plate?”

“I don’t… Why, yes. It’s a Mercedes with diplomatic plates.”

“Clear the area! Now. That’s where the bomb is! The Mercedes.”

He heard shouting in Spanish, the sound of footfalls, hard breathing.

Then, a stunning explosion.

Rhyme blinked at the startling noise that rattled the speakers of the phone.

“Commander! Are you there?… Rodolfo?”

More shouting, static, screams.

“Rodolfo!”

After a long moment: “Captain Rhyme? Hello?” The man was shouting-probably because he’d been partially deafened by the blast.

“Commander, are you all right?”

“Hello!”

A hissing noise, moans, gasping. Shouts.

Sirens and more shouting.

Cooper asked, “Should we call-”

And then “Qué?… Are you there, Captain?”

“Yes. Are you hurt, Rodolfo?”

“No, no. No bad injuries. Some cuts, stunned, you know.” The voice was gasping. “We climbed over barriers and got down on the other side. I see people cut, bleeding. But no one is dead, I think. It would have killed me and the officers standing beside me. How did you know?”

“I’ll go into that later, Commander. Where is the Watchmaker?”

“Wait a moment… wait… All right. At the explosion he fled. Arturo’s men were distracted by the blast-as he planned, of course. Arturo said a car drove into the park and he got inside. They’re moving south now. We have officers following him… Thank you, Captain Rhyme. I cannot thank you enough. But now I must go. I will call as soon as we learn something.”

Inhaling deeply, ignoring the headache and the sweat. Okay, Logan, Rhyme was thinking, we’ve stopped you. We’ve ruined your plan. But we still don’t have you. Not yet.

Please, Rodolfo. Keep after him.

As he was thinking this, his eyes strayed over the evidence charts in the Galt case. Maybe this would be the conclusion of both of the operations. The Watchmaker would be apprehended in Mexico, and Ray Galt, in an abandoned school near Chinatown.

Then his eyes settled on one bit of evidence in particular: Chinese herbs, ginseng and wolfberry.

And another listing, a substance that had been found in proximity to the herbs: Diesel fuel.

Rhyme originally had though that the fuel was from a possible site of an attack, a refinery perhaps. But it occurred to him now that diesel fuel would also run motors.

Like in an electric generator.

Then another thought occurred to him.

“Mel, the call-”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Rhyme snapped.

“You look flushed.”

Ignoring the comment, he instructed, “Find out the number of the cop who called in about Galt being in the school.”

The tech turned away and made a call. A few minutes later he looked up. “Funny. I got the number from Patrol. But it’s out of service.”

“Give it to me.”

Cooper did, slowly. Rhyme typed it into a mobile phone database at the NYPD.

It was listed as prepaid.

“A cop with a prepaid mobile? And now out of service? No way.”

And the school was in Chinatown; that’s where Galt had picked up the herbs. But it wasn’t a staging area or where he was hiding out. It was a trap! Galt had run wires from a diesel-powered generator to kill whoever was searching for him and then, pretending to be a cop, he called in to report himself. Since the juice was off in the building, Sachs and the others wouldn’t expect the electrocution danger.

There’s no power. It’s safe…

He had to warn them. He started to press “Sachs” on the speed-dial panel on the computer. But just at that moment his nagging headache swelled to a blinding explosion in his head. Lights like electric sparks, a thousand electric sparks, flashed across his vision. Sweat poured from his skin as the dysreflexia attack began in earnest.

Lincoln Rhyme whispered, “Mel, you have to call-”

And then passed out.

Chapter 60

THEY MADE IT to the back of the school without being seen. Sachs and Pulaski were crouching, looking for entrances and exits, when they heard the first whimpers.

Pulaski turned an alarmed face toward the detective. She held up a finger and listened.

A woman’s voice, it seemed. She was in pain, maybe held hostage, being tortured? The woman who’d spotted Galt? Someone else?

The sound faded. Then returned. They listened for a long ten seconds. Amelia Sachs gestured Ron Pulaski closer. They were in the back of the school, smelling urine, rotting plasterboard, mold.

The whimpering grew louder. What the hell was Galt doing? Maybe the victim had information he needed for his next attack. “No, no, no.” Sachs was sure that’s what the voice was saying.

Or maybe Galt had slipped farther from reality. Maybe he’d kidnapped an Algonquin worker and was torturing her, satisfying his lust for revenge. Maybe she was in charge of the long-distance transmission lines. Oh, no, Sachs thought. Could it be Andi Jessen herself? She sensed Pulaski staring at her with wide eyes.

“No… please,” the woman cried.

Sachs hit TRANSMIT and radioed Emergency Service. “Bo… it’s Amelia, K?”

“Go ahead, K.”

“He’s got a hostage here. Where are you?”

“Hostage? Who?”

“Female. Unknown.”

“Roger that. We’ll be five minutes. K.”

“He’s hurting her. I’m not going to wait. Ron and I’re going in.”

“You have logistics?”

“Just what I told you before. Galt’s in the middle of the building. Ground floor. Armed with a forty-five ACP. Nothing’s electrified here. The power’s off.”

“Well, that’s the good news, I guess. Out.”

She disconnected and whispered to Pulaski, pointing, “Now, move! We’ll stage at the back door.”

The young officer said, “Sure. Okay.” An uneasy glance into the shadows of the building, from which another moan floated out on the foul air.

Sachs surveyed their route to the back door and loading dock. The crumbling asphalt was littered with broken bottles and papers and cans. Noisy to traverse, but they didn’t have a choice.

She gestured Pulaski forward. They began to pick their way over the ground, trying to be quiet, though they couldn’t avoid crunching glass beneath their shoes.

But as they approached, they had some luck, which Sachs believed in, even if Lincoln Rhyme did not. Somewhere nearby a noisy diesel engine rattled to life, providing good covering sound.

Sometimes you do catch a break, Sachs thought. Lord knows we could use one now.

Chapter 61

HE WASN’T GOING to lose Rhyme.

Thom Reston had his boss out of the Storm Arrow chair and into a near standing position, pinned against the wall. In autonomic dysreflexia attacks, the patient should be kept upright-the books say sitting, but Rhyme had been in his chair when the vessels tightened en masse and the aide wanted to get him even more elevated, to force the blood back toward the ground.

He’d planned for occurrences like this-even rehearsing when Rhyme wasn’t around, since he knew his boss wouldn’t have the patience for running mock emergencies. Now, without even looking, he grabbed a small vial of vasodilator medication, popped the cap with one thumb and slipped the delicate pill under Rhyme’s tongue.

“Mel, help me here,” Thom said.

The rehearsals didn’t include a real patient; Thom’s unconscious boss was presently 180 pounds of dead weight.

Don’t think about it that way, he thought.

Mel Cooper leapt forward, supporting Rhyme while Thom hit speed-dial button one on the phone he always made sure was charged and that had the best signal of any he’d tested. After two brief rings he was connected, and in five long seconds he was speaking to a doctor in a private hospital. An SCI team was dispatched immediately. The hospital Rhyme went to regularly for specialized therapy and regular checkups had a large spinal cord injury department and two emergency response teams, for situations where it would take too long to get a disabled patient to the hospital.

Rhyme had had a dozen or so attacks over the years, but this was the worst Thom had ever seen. He couldn’t support Rhyme and take his blood pressure simultaneously, but he knew it was dangerously high. His face was flushed, he was sweating. Thom could only imagine the pain of the excruciating headache as the body, tricked by the quadriplegia into believing it needed more blood and quickly, pumped hard and constricted the vessels.

The condition could cause death and, more troubling to Rhyme, a stroke, which could mean even more paralysis. In which case Rhyme might very well dust off his long-laid-to-rest idea of assisted suicide, which that damn Arlen Kopeski had brought up again.

“What can I do?” Cooper whispered, the normally placid face dark with worry, slick with sweat.

“We’ll just keep him upright.”

Thom examined Rhyme’s eyes. Blank.

The aide snagged a second vial and administered another dose of clonidine.

No response.

Thom stood helpless, both he and Cooper silent. He thought of the past years with Rhyme. They’d fought, sometimes bitterly, but Thom had been a caregiver all his working life and knew not to take the anger personally. Knew not to take it at all. He gave as much as he got.

He’d been fired by Rhyme and had quit in nearly equal measure.

But he’d never believed the separation between the two of them would last more than a day. And it never had.

Looking at Rhyme, wondering where the hell the medics were, he was considering: Was this my fault? Dysreflexia is frequently caused by the irritation that comes from a full bladder or bowel. Since Rhyme didn’t know when he needed to relieve himself Thom noted the intake of food and liquid and judged the intervals. Had he gotten it wrong? He didn’t think so, but maybe the stress of running the double case had exacerbated the irritation. He should have checked more often.

I should’ve exercised better judgment. I should’ve been firmer…

To lose Rhyme would be to lose the finest criminalist in the city, if not the world. And to lose countless victims because their killers would go undetected.

To lose Rhyme would be to lose one of his closest friends.

Yet he remained calm. Caregivers learn this early. Hard and fast decisions can’t be made in panic.

Then the color of Rhyme’s face stabilized and they got him into the wheelchair again. They couldn’t have kept him up much longer anyway.

“Lincoln! Can you hear me?”

No response.

Then a moment later, the man’s head lolled. And he whispered something.

“Lincoln. You’re going to be all right. Dr. Metz is sending a team.”

Another whisper.

“It’s all right, Lincoln. You’ll be all right.”

In a faint voice Rhyme said, “You have to tell her…”

“Lincoln, stay still.”

“Sachs.”

Cooper said, “She’s at the scene. The school where you sent her. She’s not back yet.”

“You have to tell Sachs…” The voice faded.

“I will, Lincoln. I’ll tell her. As soon as she calls in,” Thom said.

Cooper added, “You don’t want to disturb her now. She’s moving in on Galt.”

“Tell her…”

Rhyme’s eyes rolled back in his head and he went out again. Thom angrily looked out the window, as if that would speed the arrival of the ambulance. But all he saw were people strolling by on healthy legs, people jogging, people bicycling through the park, none of them with an apparent care in the world.

Chapter 62

RON PULASKI GLANCED at Sachs, who was peeking through a window at the back of the school.

She held up a finger, squinting and jockeying for position to try to get a better look at where Galt was. The whimpering was hard to hear from this vantage point since that diesel truck or engine was close, just on the other side of a fence.

Then came a louder moan.

Sachs turned back and nodded at the door, whispering, “We’re going to get her. I want crossfire coverage. Somebody up, somebody down. You want to go through here or up the fire escape?”

Pulaski glanced to their right, where a rusty metal ladder led up to a platform and an open window. He knew there was no chance they were electrified. Amelia had checked. But he really didn’t want to go that way. Then he thought about his mistake at Galt’s apartment. About Stanley Palmer, the man who might die. Who, even if he lived, might never be the same again.

He said, “I’ll go up.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Remember, we want him alive if at all possible. If he’s set another trap, it might have a timer on it and we’ll need him to tell us where it is and when it’s going to activate.”

Pulaski nodded. Crouching, he made his way over the filthy asphalt strewn with all sorts of garbage.

Concentrate, he told himself. You’ve got a job to do. You’re not going to get spooked again. You’re not going to make a mistake.

As he moved silently, he found he was, in fact, a lot less spooked than before. And then he wasn’t spooked at all.

Ron Pulaski was angry.

Galt had gotten sick. Well, sorry. Well, too goddamn bad. Hell, Pulaski had had his head trauma, and he didn’t blame anybody for it. Just like Lincoln Rhyme didn’t sit around and mope. And Galt might very well be fine, all the new cancer treatments and techniques and everything. But here this whiny little shit was taking out his unhappiness on the innocent. And, Jesus Lord, what was he doing to that woman inside? She must’ve had information Galt needed. Or maybe she was a doctor who’d missed a diagnosis or something and he was getting revenge on her too.

At this thought he moved a little more quickly. He glanced back and saw Sachs waiting beside a half-open door, Glock drawn and pointed down, extended in a combat grip.

The anger growing, Pulaski came to a solid brick wall, where he couldn’t be seen. He sped up further, heading toward the fire escape ladder. It was old and most of the paint had worn off, replaced by rust. He paused at the puddle of standing water surrounding the concrete around the base of the ladder. Water… electricity. But there was no electricity. And, anyway, there was no way to avoid the water. He sloshed through it.

Ten feet away.

Looking up, picking the best window to go through. Hoping the stairs and platform wouldn’t clank. Galt couldn’t be more than forty feet from them.

Still, the sound of the diesel engine would cover up most squeaks.

Five feet.

Pulaski examined his heart and found its beat steady. He was going to make Lincoln Rhyme proud of him again.

Hell, he was going to collar this sick bastard himself.

He reached for the ladder.

And the next thing he knew he heard a snap and every muscle in his body contracted at once. In his mind he was looking at all the light of heaven, before his vision dissolved to yellow then black.

Chapter 63

STANDING TOGETHER BEHIND the school, Amelia Sachs and Lon Sellitto watched the place being swept by ESU.

“A trap,” the lieutenant said.

“Right,” she replied grimly. “Galt hooked up a big generator in a shed behind the school. He started it and then left. It was connected to the metal doors and the fire escape.”

“The fire escape. That’s the way Pulaski was going.”

She nodded. “Poor kid. He-”

An ESU officer, a tall African American, interrupted them. “We’ve finished the sweep, Detective, Lieutenant. It’s clean. The whole place. We didn’t touch anything inside, like you asked.”

“A digital recorder?” she asked. “That’s what I’m betting he used.”

“That’s right, Detective. Sounded like a scene from a TV show or something. And a flashlight hanging by a cord. So it looked like somebody was holding it.”

No hostage. No Galt. Nobody at all.

“I’ll run the scenes in a minute.”

The officer asked, “There was no portable called it in?”

“Right,” Sellitto muttered. “Was Galt. Probably on a prepaid mobile, I’d bet. I’ll check it.”

“And he just did this”-a wave at the school-“to kill some of us.”

“That’s right,” Sachs said somberly.

The ESU officer grimaced and headed off to gather his team. Sachs had immediately called Rhyme to give him the news about the school. And about Ron Pulaski.

But, curiously, the phone went right to voice mail.

Maybe something had heated up in the case, or in the Watchmaker situation in Mexico.

A medic was walking toward her, head down, picking his way through the trash; the yard behind the school looked like a beach after a garbage spill. Sachs walked forward to meet him.

“You free now, Detective?” he asked her.

“Sure.”

She followed him around to the side of the building, where the ambulances waited.

There, sitting on a concrete stoop, was Ron Pulaski, head in his hands. She paused. Took a deep breath and walked up to him.

“I’m sorry, Ron.”

He was massaging his arm, flexing his fingers. “No, ma’am.” He blinked at his own formality. Grinned. “I should say, thank you.”

“If there’d been any other way, I would’ve done it. But I couldn’t shout. I assumed Galt was still inside. And had his weapon.”

“I figured.”

Fifteen minutes earlier, as Sachs had waited at the door, she’d decided to use Sommers’s current detector once more to double check that there was no electricity in the school.

To her horror she saw the metal door she was inches away from contained 220 volts. And the concrete she was standing on was soaking wet. She realized that whether or not Galt was inside, he’d rigged wires to the metal infrastructure of the school. Probably from a diesel-powered generator; that was the racket they’d heard.

If Galt had rigged the door he would have rigged the fire escape as well. She’d leapt to her feet then and charged after Pulaski as he approached the ladder. She didn’t dare call his name, even in a whisper, because if Galt was in the school, he’d hear and start shooting.

So she’d used Taser on Pulaski.

She carried an X26 model, which fired probes that delivered both high- and low-voltage charges. The X26 had a range of about thirty-five feet, and when she saw that she couldn’t tackle the officer in time, she’d hit him with the double probes. The neuromuscular incapacitation dropped him where he stood. He’d fallen hard on his shoulder, but, thank God, hadn’t struck his head again. Sachs dragged him, gasping and quivering, to cover. She’d found and shut the generator off just as the ESU officers arrived, blowing open the chain on the front gate and storming the school.

“You look a little woozy.”

“Was quite a rush,” Pulaski said, breathing deeply.

She said, “Take it easy.”

“I’m okay. I’m helping the scene.” He blinked like a drunk. “I mean helping you search the scene.”

“You’re up for it?”

“Long as I don’t move too fast. But, listen, keep that thing of yours, that box that Charlie Sommers gave you? Keep it handy, okay? I’m not touching anything until you go over it.”

The first thing they did was walk the grid around the generator behind the school. Pulaski collected and bagged the wires that had carried the charge to the door and fire escapes. Sachs herself searched around the generator. It was a big unit several feet high and about three long. A placard on the side reported that its maximum output was 5,000 watts, producing 41 amps.

About four hundred times what was needed to kill you.

Nodding at the unit. “Could you pack it up and get it to Rhyme’s?” she asked the crime scene team from Queens, who’d just joined them. It weighed about two hundred pounds.

“You bet, Amelia. We’ll get it there ASAP.”

She said to Pulaski, “Let’s walk the grid inside.”

They were heading into the school when Sachs’s phone rang. “Rhyme” popped up on caller ID.

“About time,” she said good-naturedly as she answered. “I’ve got some-”

“Amelia.” It was Thom’s voice, but the tone was one she’d never heard before. “You better come back here. You better come now.”

Chapter 64

BREATHING HARD, SACHS hurried up the ramp and pushed open the door to Rhyme’s townhouse.

Jogging across the foyer, boots slapping hard, she ran into the den, to the right, opposite the lab.

Thom looked toward her from where he was standing over Lincoln Rhyme in his wheelchair, eyes closed, face pale and damp. Between them was one of Rhyme’s doctors, a solidly built African American, a former football star in college.

“Dr. Ralston,” she said, breathing hard.

He nodded. “Amelia.”

Finally Rhyme’s eyes opened. “Ah, Sachs.” The voice was weak.

“How are you?”

“No, no, how are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“And the rookie?”

“He nearly had a problem, but it worked out okay.”

Rhyme said in a stiff voice, “It was a generator, right?”

“Yes, how did you know? Did Crime Scene call?”

“No, I figured it out. Diesel fuel and herbs from Chinatown. The fact that there didn’t seem to be any juice in the school. I figured out it was a trap. But had a little problem before I could call.”

“Didn’t matter, Rhyme,” she said. “I figured it out too.”

And didn’t tell him how close Pulaski had come to getting electrocuted.

“Well, good. I… Good.”

She understood that he was thinking how he’d failed. How he’d nearly gotten one or both of them injured or killed. Normally he’d have been furious; a tantrum might have ensued. He’d want a drink, he’d insult people, he’d revel in sarcasm, all of which was directed toward himself, of course, as she and Thom knew very well.

But this was different. There was something about his eyes, something she didn’t like one bit. Oddly, for someone with such a severe disability, there was rarely anything vulnerable about Lincoln Rhyme. Now, with this failure, he radiated weakness.

She found she had to look away and turned to the doctor, who said, “He’s out of danger. Blood pressure’s down.” He then turned to Rhyme; even more than most patients, spinal cord injury victims hate being discussed in the third person. Which happens a lot. “Stay in the chair and out of bed as much as you can, and make sure bladder and bowel are taken care of. Loose clothes and socks.”

Rhyme nodded. “Why did it happen now?”

“Stress probably, combined with pressure somewhere. Internally, shoes, garments. You know how dysreflexia works. Mostly it’s a mystery.”

“How long was I out?”

Thom said, “Forty minutes, off and on.”

He rocked his head back in the chair. “Forty,” he whispered. Sachs understood he’d be replaying his failure. Which had nearly cost her and Pulaski their lives.

Now he was staring toward the lab. “Where’s the evidence?”

“I came here first. Ron’s on his way. We needed some people from Queens to get the generator. It weighs a couple of hundred pounds.”

“Ron’s coming?”

“That’s right,” she confirmed, noting that she’d just told him this and wondering if the episode had made him disoriented. Maybe the doctor had given him a painkiller. Dysreflexia is accompanied by excruciating headaches.

“Good. He’ll be here soon? Ron?”

A hesitant glance at Thom.

“Any minute now,” she said.

Dr. Ralston said, “Lincoln, I’d rather you took it easy for the rest of the day.”

Rhyme was hesitating, looking down. Was he actually going to give in to a request like this?

But he said in a soft voice, “I’m sorry, Doctor. I really can’t. There’s a case… it’s important.”

“The grid thing? The terrorists?”

“Yes. I hope you don’t mind.” His eyes were downcast. “I’m sorry. I really have to work it.”

Sachs and Thom exchanged glances. Rhyme’s apologetic mien was atypical, to put it mildly.

And, again, the vulnerability in his eyes.

“I know it’s important, Lincoln. I can’t force you to do anything. Just remember what I said: Stay upright and avoid any kinds of pressure on your body, inside and out. I guess it won’t do any good to say avoid stress. Not with this madman on the loose.”

“Thank you. And thank you, Thom.”

The aide blinked and nodded uneasily.

Again, though, Rhyme was hesitating, staring down. Not driving into the parlor lab with all the speed the Storm Arrow could muster, which he’d be doing under other circumstances. And even when the front door to the townhouse opened and they could hear Pulaski and the other crime scene technicians hurrying in with the evidence, Rhyme remained where he was, staring down.

“Li-” Sachs found herself saying and braking her words to a halt-their superstition again. “Rhyme? You want to go into the lab?”

“Yes, sure.”

But still staring down. Not moving.

Alarmed, she wondered if he was having another attack.

Then he swallowed and moved the controller of the wheelchair. His face melted with relief and she understood what had been happening: Rhyme was worried-terrified-that the attack had caused yet more damage, that perhaps even the rudimentary mobility he’d achieved in his right hand and fingers had been erased.

That’s what he’d been staring at: his hand. But apparently there’d been no damage.

“Come on, Sachs,” he said, though softly. “We’ve got work to do.”

Chapter 65

THE POOL PARLOR was looking like a crack house, R.C. decided.

He’d talk to his father about it.

The thirty-year-old pressed his pale hands around his beer bottle, watching the games at the pool tables. Snuck a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the exhaust vent. That smoking law was fucking stupid. His father said the socialists in Washington were to blame. They didn’t mind sending kids to get killed in places with names you couldn’t pronounce but they had to say, fuck you, no smoking.

Eyes on the pool tables. The fast one on the end might be trouble-there was serious money on it-but Stipp had the baseball bat behind the bar. And he liked to swing.

Speaking of which. Goddamn Mets. He grabbed the remote.

Boston didn’t make him feel any better.

Then he put on the news about the crazy man screwing around with electricity. R.C.’s brother was handy and did a fair amount of electrical work, but wiring always scared him.

And now people around town were getting fried.

“You hear about that shit?” he asked Stipp.

“Yeah, which shit is that?” He had a cast eye, or one that didn’t look right at you, if that’s what a cast eye was.

“About the electricity thing? Some dude hooking up wires at that hotel? You touched the door handle and, zzzzzzz, you’re dead.”

“Oh, that shit.” Stipp coughed a funky laugh. “Like the electric chair.”

“Like that. Only it could be stairs or a puddle or those metal doors on the sidewalk. Elevators to the basements.”

“You walk on them and get zapped?”

“I guess. Fuck. And you push those metal WALK buttons in the crosswalks. That’s it. You’re fucked.”

“What’s he doing it for?”

“Fuck knows… The electric chair, you piss your pants and your hair catches fire. You know that? That’s what kills you sometimes, the fire. Burns you to death.”

“Most states got injection.” Stipp frowned. “You probably still piss your pants.”

R.C. was eyeing Janie in her tight blouse and trying to remember when his wife was coming by to pick up the grocery money, when the door opened and a couple of people came in. Two guys in delivery company uniforms, maybe early shifters, which was good, because they’d be spending money now that their day was over.

Then right behind them, a homeless guy pushed inside too.

Fuck.

The black guy, in filthy clothes, had abandoned a grocery cart of empties on the sidewalk and more or less run in here. He was now turning his back, staring out the window, scratching his leg. And then his head, under a disgusting cap.

R.C. caught the bartender’s eye and shook his head no.

“Hey, mister,” Stipp called. “Help you?”

“Something weird out there,” the man muttered. He talked to himself for a moment. Then louder: “Something I saw. Something I don’ like.” And he gave a high-pitched laugh that R.C. thought was pretty weird in itself.

“Yeah, well, take it outside, okay?”

“You see that?” the bum asked no one.

“Come on, buddy.”

But the man tottered to the bar, sat down. Spent a moment digging out some damp bills and a ton of change. He counted the coins carefully.

“Sorry, sir. I think you’ve had plenty.”

“I ain’t had no drink. You see that guy? The guy with the wire?”

Wire?

R.C. and Stipp eyed each other.

“Crazy shit going down in this town.” He turned his mad eyes on R.C. “Fucker was right outside. By that, you know, lamppost. He was doing something. Playing with the wires. You hear what’s going down around here? Peoples gettin’ their asses fried.”

R.C. wandered to the window past the guy, who stank so bad he felt like puking. But he looked out and saw the lamppost. Was that a wire attached? He couldn’t tell. Was that terrorist around here? The Lower East Side?

Well, why not?

If he wanted to kill innocent citizens, this was as good a place as any.

R.C. said to the homeless guy, “Listen, man, get outa here.”

“I wanna drink.”

“Well, you’re not getting a drink.” Eyes outside again. R.C. was thinking he did see some cables or wires or shit. What was going on? Was somebody fucking with the bar itself? R.C. was thinking of all the metal in the place. The bar footrest, the sinks, the doorknobs, the register. Hell, the urinal was metal. If you peed, would the current run up the stream to your dick?

“You don’t unnerstand, don’t unnerstand!” the homeless guy was wailing, getting even weirder. “It ain’t safe out there. Look outside. Ain’t safe. That asshole with the wires… I’ma staying in here till it safe.”

R.C., the bartender, Janie, the pool players and the delivery guys were all staring out the window now. The games had been suspended. R.C.’s interest in Janie had shriveled.

“Not safe, man. Gimme a vodka and Coke.”

“Out. I’m not telling you again.”

“You don’t think I can pay you. I got fucking money here. What you call this?”

The man’s odor had wafted throughout the bar. It was repulsive.

Sometimes you burn to death…

“The wire man, the wire man…”

“Get the fuck out. Somebody’s going to steal your fucking grocery cart.”

“I ain’t going out there. You can’t make me go. I ain’t getting burnt up.”

“Out.”

“No!” The disgusting asshole slammed his fist down on the bar. “You ain’t service… you ain’t serving me,” he corrected, “’cause I’m black.”

R.C. saw a flash on the street. He gasped. Then he relaxed. It was just a reflection off the windshield of a passing car. Getting spooked like that made him all the angrier. “We ain’t servicing you ’cause you stink and you’re a prick. Out.”

The man had assembled all his wet bills and sticky coins. He must’ve had twenty dollars. He muttered, “You the prick. You throwing me out and I’ll go out there and get burnt up.”

“Just take your money and get out.” Stipp picked up the bat and displayed it.

The man didn’t care. “You throw me out I’ma tell ever’body what goes on here. I know what goes on here, you think I don’t? I seen you looking at Miss Titty over there. An’, shame on you, you got a wedding ring on. Whatta Mrs. Prick think ’bout-”

R.C. grabbed the guy’s disgusting jacket with both hands.

When the black guy winced in panic and cried, “Don’ hit me! I’m a, you know, a cop! I’m a agent!”

“You’re no fucking law.” R.C. drew back for a head butt.

In a fraction of a second the FBI ID appeared in his face, and the Glock wasn’t far behind.

“Oh, fuck me,” R.C. muttered.

One of the two white guys who’d come in just before him said, “Duly witnessed, Fred. He attempted to cause bodily harm after you identified yourself as a law enforcement officer. We get back to work now?”

“Thanks, gentlemen. I’ll take it from here.”

Chapter 66

IN THE CORNER of the pool parlor, Fred Dellray sat on a wobbly chair, the back turned around, facing the youngster. It was a little less intimidating-the back of the chair in between them-but that was okay because the agent didn’t need R.C. to be so afraid he couldn’t think straight.

Though he needed him to be a little afraid.

“You know what I am, R.C.?”

The sigh shook the skinny kid’s entire body. “No, I mean, I know you’re an FBI agent and you’re undercover. But I don’t know why you’re hassling me.”

Dellray kept right on going, “What I am is a walking lie detector. I been in the business so long I can look at a girl and hear her say, ‘Let’s go home and we can fuck,’ and I know she’s thinking, He’ll be so drunk by the time we get there I can just get some sleep.”

“I was just protecting myself. You were intimidating me.”

“Fuck, yes, I was intimidating you. And you can just close your lips and not say a word and wait for a lawyer to come by and hold your hand. You can even call the federal building and complain about me. But, either which way, word’s going to get to your daddy in Sing-Sing that his kid hassled an FBI agent. And he’s going to think that running this shithole bar, the one thing he left to you to keep an eye on while he’s inside and hoped you didn’t fuck up, you fucked up.”

Dellray watched him squirm. “So, we all together on that?”

“Whatta you want?”

And just to make sure the back of the chair didn’t make R.C. feel too much at ease, Dellray slapped his hand on the kid’s thigh and squeezed hard.

“Ouch. Why’d you do that?”

“You ever been polygraphed, R.C.?”

“No, Dad’s lawyer said never-”

“It’s a rhe-tor-i-cal question,” Dellray said, even though it wasn’t. It was just a way to burst a little intimidation over R.C.’s head like a tear gas grenade at a protest.

The agent gave another squeeze for good measure. He couldn’t help thinking: Hey, McDaniel, can’t do this while you’re eavesdropping in the cloud zone, can you?

Which’s too bad. ’Cause this is a lot more fun.

Fred Dellray was here thanks to one person: Serena. The favor that she’d asked had nothing to do with cleaning the basement. It was about getting off his ass. She’d led him downstairs into the messy storeroom, where he kept his outfits from his days as an undercover agent. She found one in particular, sealed up in the same kind of plastic bag that you used for wedding dresses. It was the Homeless Drunk costume, suitably perfumed with mold and sufficient human odor-and a little cat pee-to get a confession just by sitting down next to a suspect.

Serena had said, “You lost your snitch. Quit feeling sorry for yourself and go pick up his trail. If you can’t find him, then find out what he found.”

Dellray had smiled, hugged her and gone to change. As he left, Serena said, “Whoa, you smell bad, son.” And gave him a playful swat on the butt. A gesture very, very few people had ever bestowed on Fred Dellray.

And he hit the street.

William Brent was good at hiding tracks, but Dellray was good at finding them. One thing he’d learned, encouragingly, was that maybe Brent had been on the job after all. Dellray found by tracing his movements that the CI had come up with a lead to Galt or to Justice For the Earth or something relevant to the attacks. The man had been working hard, tracking deep undercover. Finally he’d learned Brent had come here, to this dark pool parlor, where apparently the CI had sought, and ideally gotten, important information from the young man whose knee Dellray had just vise-gripped.

Dellray now said, “So. My cards. On the table. Are we havin’ fun yet?”

“Jesus.” A fierce grimace that might’ve sent R.C.’s cheeks into a cramp. “Just tell me what you want.”

“That’s the spirit, son.” A picture of William Brent appeared.

Dellray watched his face closely and a flash of recognition popped into R.C.’s eyes before it dissolved. He asked the kid instantly, “What’d he pay you?”

The blink of a pause told Dellray both that Brent had paid him and that the amount he was about to say would be considerably less than what really changed hands.

“One large.”

Damn. Brent was being pretty fucking generous with Dellray’s money.

R.C. said, with a bit of whine, “It wasn’t drugs, man. I’m not into that.”

“Course you are. But I don’t care. He was here about information. And now… now… now. I need to know what he asked and what you told him.” Dellray limbered up his lengthy fingers again.

“Okay, I’ll tell you. Bill-he said his name was Bill.” R.C. pointed at the picture.

“Bill is as good as any. Keep going, friend.”

“He heard somebody was staying here in the ’hood. Some guy who’d come to town recent, was driving a white van, carrying a piece. A big fucking forty-five. He clipped somebody.”

Dellray gave nothing away. “Who’d he kill? And why?”

“He didn’t know.”

“Name?”

“Didn’t have one.”

The agent didn’t need a polygraph. R.C. was doing just fine with the dharmic quality of honesty.

“Come on, R.C., my friend, what else about him? White van, just came to town, big forty-five. Clipped somebody for reasons unknown.”

“Maybe kidnapped ’em before he killed ’em… Was somebody you didn’t fuck with.”

That kind of went without saying.

R.C. continued, “So this Bill or whoever heard I was connected, you know. Hooked into the wire, you know.”

“The wire.”

“Yeah. Not what that asshole’s using to kill people. I mean the word on the street.”

“Oh, that’s what you mean,” Dellray said but R.C. floated below irony.

“And you are connected, aren’t you, son? You know all ’bout the hood, right? You’re the Ethel Mertz of the Lower East Side.”

“Who?”

“Keep going.”

“Okay, well, like, I had heard something. I like to know who’s around, what kind of shit could be going down. Anyway, I’d heard about this guy, was just like Bill said. And I sent him over to where he’s staying. That’s it. That’s all.”

Dellray believed him. “Gimme the address.”

He did, a decrepit street not far away. “It’s the basement apartment.”

“Okay, s’all I need for now.”

“You…”

“I won’t tell Daddy anything. Don’tcha worry. ’Less you’re fucking with me.”

“I’m not, no, Fred, really.”

When Dellray was at the door, R.C. called, “It wasn’t what you think.”

The agent turned.

“It really was ’cause you smelt bad. That’s why we weren’t going to serve you. Not because you’re black.”

Five minutes later Dellray was approaching the block R.C. had told him about. He’d debated calling in backup, but decided not to quite yet. Working street required finesse, not sirens and takedown teams. Or Tucker McDaniel. Dellray loped through the streets, dodging the dense crowds. Thinking, as he often did, It’s the middle of the day. What the hell do these people do for work? Then he turned two corners and eased into an alley, so he could approach the apartment in question from the back.

He looked quickly up the dim, rot-smelling canyon.

Not far away was a white guy in a cap and baggy shirt, sweeping cobblestones. Dellray counted addresses; he was directly behind the place where R.C. had sent William Brent.

Okay, this’s weird, the agent thought. He started forward through the alley. The sweeper turned his mirrored sunglasses his way and then went back to sweeping. Dellray stopped near him, frowning and looking around. Trying to make sense of this.

Finally the sweeper asked, “The fuck’re you doing?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Dellray offered. “One thing I’m doing is looking at an NYPD undercover cop who, for some fucked-up reason, is trying to blend by sweeping cobblestones in a ’hood where they stopped sweeping cobblestones, oh, about a hundred and thirty years ago.” Dellray displayed his ID.

“Dellray? I heard of you.” Then defensively the cop said, “I’m just doing what they told me. It’s a stakeout.”

“Stakeout? Why? What is this place?”

“You don’t know?”

Dellray rolled his eyes.

When the cop told him, Dellray froze. But only momentarily. A few seconds later he was ripping away his smelly undercover costume and dumping it in a waste bin. As he started sprinting for the subway, he noted the cop’s startled reaction, and supposed it could have come from one of two things: the striptease act itself, or the fact that underneath the disgusting outfit he was wearing a kelly green velour tracksuit. He supposed it was a little of both.

Chapter 67

“RODOLFO, TELL ME.”

“We may have good news soon, Lincoln. Arturo Diaz’s men have followed Mr. Watchmaker into Gustavo Madero. It’s a delegación in the north of the city-you would say borough, like your Bronx. Much of it is not so nice and Arturo believes that’s where the associates helping him are.”

“But do you know where he is?”

“They think so. They’ve found the car he escaped in-they were no more than three or four minutes behind but could not get through the traffic to stop his car. He’s been spotted in a large apartment building near the center of the delegación. It’s being sealed off. We will do a complete search. I will call back with more information soon.”

Rhyme disconnected the call, and struggled to keep his impatience and concern at bay. He would believe that the Watchmaker had actually been arrested when he saw the man arraigned in a New York court.

He wasn’t encouraged when he called Kathryn Dance to tell her the latest and she replied, “Gustavo Madero? It’s a lousy neighborhood, Lincoln,” she said. “I was down in Mexico City for an extradition. We drove through the area. I was really glad the car didn’t break down, even with two armed federal officers next to me. It’s a rabbit warren. Easy to hide in. But the good news is that the residents absolutely won’t want the police there. If Luna moves a busload of riot cops in, the locals’ll give up an American pretty fast.”

He said he’d keep her posted and disconnected. The fatigue and fogginess from the dysreflexia attack ebbed in once more and he rested his head on the back of the Storm Arrow.

Come on, stay sharp! he commanded, refusing to accept anything less than 110 percent from himself, just as he did from everybody else. But he wasn’t feeling that measure, not at all.

Then he glanced up to see Ron Pulaski at the evidence table and thoughts of the Watchmaker faded. The young officer was moving pretty slowly. Rhyme regarded him with concern. The jolt of the Taser had been pretty powerful, apparently.

But that concern was accompanied by another emotion, one he’d been feeling for the past hour: guilt. It had been exclusively Rhyme’s fault that Pulaski-and Sachs too-had come as close as they had to being electrocuted by Galt’s trap at the school. Sachs had downplayed the incident. Pulaski too. Laughing, he’d said, “She Tased me, bro,” which apparently was some kind of joke, drawing a smile from Mel Cooper, but Rhyme didn’t get it. Nor was he in a mood that was at all humorous. He was confused and disoriented… and not just from the medical emergency. He was having trouble shaking his sense of failure from letting down Sachs and the rookie.

He forced himself to focus on the evidence that’d been collected from the school. Some bags of trace, some electronics. And most important, the generator. Lincoln Rhyme loved big, bulky pieces of equipment. To move them took a lot of physical contact and that meant such objects picked up significant prints, fibers, hair, sweat and skin cells, as well as other trace. The generator was attached to a wheeled cart, but it would still have taken some grappling to get it into place.

Ron Pulaski got a phone call. He glanced at Rhyme and then headed into the corner of the room to take it. Despite his groggy demeanor, his face began to brighten. He disconnected and stood for a moment, looking out the window. Though he didn’t know the substance of the conversation, Rhyme wasn’t surprised to see the young man walk toward him with a confessional cast to his eyes.

“I have to tell you something, Lincoln.” His glance took in Lon Sellitto too.

“Yeah?” Rhyme asked distractedly, offering a word that would have earned the young officer a glare, if he’d used it.

“I kind of wasn’t honest with you earlier.”

“Kind of?”

“Okay, I wasn’t.”

“What about?”

Scanning the evidence boards and the profile of Ray Galt, he said, “The DNA results? I know I didn’t need to get them. I used that as an excuse. I went to see Stan Palmer.”

“Who?”

“The man in the hospital, the one I ran into in the alley.”

Rhyme was impatient. The evidence beckoned. But this was important, it seemed; he nodded, then asked, “He’s okay?”

“They still don’t know. But what I’m saying is, first, I’m sorry I didn’t tell the truth. I was going to but it just seemed, I don’t know, unprofessional.”

“It was.”

“But there’s more. See, when I was at the hospital I asked the nurse for his social security number. And personal information. Guess what? He was a con. Did three years in Attica. Got a long sheet.”

“Really?” Sachs asked.

“Yep… I mean, yes. And there’s active paper on him.”

“He’s wanted,” Rhyme mused.

“Warrants for what?” Sellitto asked.

“Assault, receiving stolen, burglary.”

The rumpled cop barked a laugh. “You backed into a collar. Like, literally.” He laughed again and looked at Rhyme, who didn’t join in the fun.

The criminalist said, “So that’s why you’re so chipper?”

“I’m not happy I hurt him. It was still a screw-up.”

“But if you had to run over somebody, it’s better him than a father of four.”

“Well, yeah,” Pulaski said.

Rhyme had more to say on the subject, but this wasn’t the time or place. “The important thing is you’re not distracted anymore, right?”

“No.”

“Good. Now, if we’ve got the soap opera out of the way, maybe we can all get back to work.” He looked at the digital clock: 3 p.m. Rhyme felt the time pressure humming like, well, electricity in a high-tension wire. They had the perp’s identity, they had his address. But they had no solid leads to his whereabouts.

It was then that the doorbell rang.

Thom appeared a moment later with Tucker McDaniel, minus his underling. Rhyme knew immediately what he was going to say. Everybody in the room probably did.

“Another demand?” Rhyme asked.

“Yes. And he’s really upped the ante this time.”

Chapter 68

“WHAT’S THE DEADLINE?” Sellitto asked.

“Six-thirty tonight.”

“Gives us a little over three hours. What’s he want?”

“This demand’s even crazier than the first two. Can I use a computer?”

Rhyme nodded toward it.

The ASAC typed and in a moment the letter appeared on the screen. Rhyme’s vision was blurred. He blinked into clarity and leaned toward the monitor.

To Algonquin Consolidated Power and Light and CEO Andi Jessen:

At about 6 p.m. yesterday, a remote control switch routed current from a spot network distribution system at an office building at 235 W. 54th Street totaling 13,800 volts to the floor of the elevator which had a return line connected through the control panel in the car. When the car stopped before it got to the ground floor a passenger touched the panel to hit the alarm button, the circuit was closed and individuals inside died.

Twice I’ve asked you to show good faith by reducing output of supply. And twice you have refused. If you’d done what I reasonably requested you would never have brought such suffering into the lives of the people you call your customers. You wantonly disregarded my requests and somebody else paid the price for that.

In 1931 when Thomas A. Edison died, his coworkers respectfully requested that all the power in the city be shut off for sixty seconds to mark the passing of the man who had created the grid and brought light to millions. The city declined.

I am now making the same request-not out of respect for the man who CREATED the grid but for the people who are being DESTROYED because of it- those who are made sick from the power lines and from the pollution from burning coal and from radiation, those who lose their houses from the earthquakes caused by geothermal drilling and damming our natural rivers, those cheated by companies like Enron, the list is endless.

Only unlike 1931 I am insisting you shut down the entire Northeastern Interconnection for one day. Beginning at 6:30 p.m. today.

If you do this people will see that they do not need to use as much power as they do. They will see that it is their greed and gluttony that motivates them, which you are happy to play into. Why? For PROFITS of course.

If you ignore me this time, the consequences will be far, far greater than the small incidents of yesterday and the day before, the loss of life far worse.

– R. Galt

McDaniel said, “Absurd. There’ll be civil chaos, riots, looting. The governor and president are adamant. No caving in.”

“Where’s the letter?” Rhyme asked.

“What you’re seeing there. It was an email.”

“Who’d he send it to?”

“Andi Jessen-personally. And the company itself. Their security office email account.”

“Traceable?”

“No. Used a proxy in Europe… He’s going for a mass attack, it seems.” McDaniel looked up. “Washington’s involved now in a big way. Those senators-the ones working with the President on renewable energy-are coming to town early. They’re going to meet with the mayor. The assistant director of the Bureau’s coming in too. Gary Noble’s coordinating everything. We’ve got even more agents and troops out on the streets. And the chief has mobilized a thousand more NYPD officers.” He rubbed his eyes. “Lincoln, we’ve got the manpower and the firepower, but we need to know some idea of where to look for the next attack. What’ve you got? We need something concrete.”

McDaniel was reminding Rhyme he’d let the criminalist take the case with the assurance that his condition wouldn’t slow the investigation.

From entrance to exit…

Rhyme had gotten what he wanted-the investigation. And yet he hadn’t found the man. In fact, the very condition that he’d assured McDaniel wasn’t a problem had nearly gotten Sachs and Pulaski killed, along with a dozen ESU officers.

He gazed back to the agent’s smooth face and predator’s eyes and said evenly, “What I’ve got is more evidence to look at.”

McDaniel hesitated then waved his hand in an ambiguous gesture. “All right. Go ahead.”

Rhyme had already turned away to Cooper with a nod toward the digital recorder on which had been recorded the sounds of the “victim” moaning. “Audio analysis.”

With gloved hands, the tech plugged the unit into his computer and typed. A moment later, reading the sine curves on the screen, he said, “The volume and signal quality suggest it was recorded from a TV program. Cable.”

“Brand of the recorder?”

“Sanoya. Chinese.” He typed some commands and then studied a new database. “Sold in about ten thousand stores in the country. No serial number.”

“Anything more?”

“No prints on it or other trace, except more taramasalata.”

“The generator?”

Cooper and Sachs went over it carefully, while Tucker McDaniel made phone calls and fidgeted in the corner. The generator turned out to be a Power Plus model, made by the Williams-Jonas Manufacturing Company, in New Jersey.

“Where’d this one come from?” Rhyme asked.

“Let’s find out,” Sachs said.

Two phone calls later-to the local sales office of the manufacturer and the general contractor that the company referred them to-revealed that it had been stolen from a job site in Manhattan. There were no leads in the theft, according to the local precinct. The construction project had no security cameras.

“Got some trace that’s curious,” Cooper announced. He ran it through the GC/MS. The machine hummed away.

“Getting something…” Cooper was bending forward over the screen. “Hmm.”

This would normally have drawn an acerbic “What does that mean?” glance from Rhyme. But he still felt tired and shaken from the attack. He waited patiently for the tech to explain.

Finally: “Don’t think I’ve seen it before. A significant amount of quartz and some ammonium chloride. Ratio’s about ten to one.”

Rhyme knew the answer instantly. “Copper cleaner.”

“Copper wires?” Pulaski suggested. “Galt is cleaning them?”

“Good idea, Rookie. But I’m not sure.” He didn’t think electricians cleaned wires. Besides, he explained, “Mostly it’s used for cleaning copper on buildings. What else, Mel?”

“Some stone dust you don’t usually see in Manhattan. Architectural terra-cotta.” Cooper was now looking into the eyepieces of a microscope. He added, “And some granules that look like white marble.”

Rhyme blurted, “The police riots of fifty-seven. That’s eighteen fifty-seven.”

“What?” McDaniel asked.

“A few years ago. The Delgado case?”

“Oh, sure,” Sachs said.

Sellitto asked, “Did we work it?”

Rhyme’s grimace conveyed his message: It didn’t matter who worked a case. Or when. Crime scene officers-hell, every officer on the force-had to be aware of all major cases in the city, present and past. The more you put into the brain, the more likely you were to make connections that solved your crime.

Homework…

He explained: A few years ago Steven Delgado, a paranoid schizophrenic, planned a series of murders to mimic deaths that occurred during the infamous New York City Police Riots of 1857. The madman picked the same locale as the carnage 150 years earlier: City Hall Park. He was captured after his first kill because Rhyme had traced him to an apartment on the Upper West Side, where he’d left trace that included copper cleaner, terra-cotta residue from the Woolworth building and white marble dust from the city courthouse, which was undergoing renovations, then as now.

“You think he’s going to hit City Hall?” McDaniel asked urgently, the phone in his hand drooping.

“I think there’s a connection. That’s all I can say. Put it on the board and we’ll think about it. What else do you have from the generator?”

“More hair,” Cooper announced, holding up a pair of tweezers. “Blond, about nine inches long.” He slipped it under the microscope and slid the specimen tray up and down slowly. “Not dyed. Natural blond. No color degradation and not desiccated. I’d say it’s from somebody younger than fifty. Also refraction variation on one end. I could run it through the chromatograph, but I’m ninety percent sure it’s-”

“Hair spray.”

“Right.”

“Woman probably. Anything else?”

“Another hair. Brown. Shorter. Crew cut. Also under fifty.”

“So,” Rhyme said, “not Galt’s. Maybe we’ve got our Justice For the Earth connection. Or maybe some other players. Keep going.”

The other news wasn’t so encouraging. “The flashlight he could’ve bought in a thousand places. No trace or prints. The string was generic too. The cable he used to wire the doors at the school? Bennington, the same he’s been using all along. Bolts are generic but similar to the others.”

Eye on the generator, Rhyme was aware his thoughts were spinning dizzily. Part of this was the attack he’d experienced a short time ago. But some of it had to do with the case itself. Something was wrong. Pieces of the puzzle were missing.

The answer had to be in the evidence. And just as important: what wasn’t in the evidence. Rhyme now scanned the whiteboards, trying to stay calm. This wasn’t to stave off another episode of dysreflexia, per doctor’s orders; it was because nothing made you blind faster than desperation.

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.

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,” ¾-inch holes in them.

– Untraceable.

– Distinctive tool marks on bolts.

– Brass “bus” bar, fixed to cable with two ¼-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.

CRIME SCENE: BATTERY PARK HOTEL

AND SURROUNDINGS

– Victims (deceased):

– Linda Kepler, Oklahoma City, tourist.

– Morris Kepler, Oklahoma City, tourist.

– Samuel Vetter, Scottsdale, businessman.

– Ali Mamoud, 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, hard hat 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.

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?

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 aviation jet fuel.

– Dark brown cotton heavy-duty clothing fiber.

– Containing trace of diesel fuel.

– Containing additional Chinese herbs.

CRIME SCENE: ABANDONED SCHOOL, CHINATOWN

– Bennington cable, identical to that at other scenes.

– Generator, Power Plus by Williams-Jonas Manufacturing, stolen from job site in Manhattan.

– Digital voice recorder, Sanoya brand, on which was recorded segment from TV show or film. Cable TV.

– Additional traces of taramasalata.

– Brite-Beam Flashlight.

– Untraceable.

– Six-foot string holding flashlight.

– Untraceable.

– Trace evidence, associated with the area around City Hall:

– Quartz and ammonium chloride copper cleaner.

– Terra-cotta dust, similar to building facades in area.

– White marble stone dust.

– Hair, 9 inches long, blond, sprayed, person under 50, probably woman’s.

– Hair, ³ / ₈ inches long, brown, person under 50.

THIRD DEMAND

– Sent via email.

– Untraceable; used a proxy in Europe.

But it turned out that Rhyme was wrong.

It was true that, as he’d felt all along, the evidence-as much else in this case-just didn’t add up. But he was wrong in that the key to unraveling the mystery wasn’t to be found on the charts surrounding him. Rather, it came blustering into the lab just now, accompanied by Thom, in the form of a tall, lanky sweating man, skin black, clothing bright green.

Catching his breath, Fred Dellray nodded fast to everybody in the room, then proceeded to ignore them as he strode up to Rhyme. “I need to throw something out, Lincoln. And you gotta tell me if it works or not.”

“Fred,” McDaniel began. “What the hell-”

“Lincoln?” Dellray persisted.

“Sure, Fred. Go ahead.”

“What do you think of the theory that Ray Galt’s a fall guy. He’s dead, been dead for a couple of days, I think. It’s somebody else who’s put this whole thing together. From the beginning.”

Rhyme paused for a moment-the disorientation from the attack was slowing his analysis of Dellray’s idea. But finally he offered a faint smile and said, “What do I think? It’s brilliant. That’s what.”

Chapter 69

TUCKER MCDANIEL’S RESPONSE, however, was, “Ridiculous. The whole investigation’s based on Galt.”

Sellitto ignored him. “What’s your theory, Fred? I want to hear it.”

“My CI, a guy named William Brent. He was following up on a lead. He was on to somebody who was connected with-maybe behind-the grid attacks. But then he vanished. I found out that Brent was interested in somebody who’d just come to town, was armed with a forty-five and was driving a white van. He’d recently kidnapped and killed somebody. He’d been staying at an address on the Lower East Side for the past couple of days. I found out where. It turned out to be a crime scene.”

“Crime scene?” Rhyme asked.

“You betcha. It was Ray Galt’s apartment.”

Sachs said, “But Galt didn’t just come to town. He’s lived here all his adult life.”

“Ex-actly.”

“So what’s this Brent have to say?” McDaniel asked skeptically.

“Oh, he ain’t tellin’ anybody anything. ’Cause yesterday he was in the alley behind Galt’s and got himself run over by an NYPD patrolman. He’s in the hospital, still unconscious.”

“Oh my God,” Ron Pulaski whispered. “St. Vincent’s?”

“Right.”

Pulaski said in a weak voice, “That was me who hit him.”

“You?” Dellray asked, voice rising.

The officer said, “But, no, it can’t be. The guy I hit? His name’s Stanley Palmer.”

“Yep, yep… That’s him. ‘Palmer’ was one of Brent’s covers.”

“You mean, he didn’t have warrants on him? He didn’t do time for attempted murder, aggravated assault?”

Dellray shook his head. “The rap sheet was fake, Ron. We put it into the system so anybody who checked’d find out he had a record. The worst we got him for was conspiracy and then I turned him. Brent’s a stand-up guy. He snitched for the money mostly. One of the best in the business.”

“But what was he doing with groceries? In the alley?”

“Undercover technique a lot of us use. You cart around groceries or shopping bags, you look less suspicious. Baby carriage is the best. With a doll in it, course.”

“Oh,” Pulaski muttered. “I… Oh.”

But Rhyme couldn’t be concerned about his officer’s psyche. Dellray had raised a credible theory that explained the inconsistencies that Rhyme had been sensing in the case all along.

He’d been looking for a wolf, when he should have been hunting a fox.

But could it be? Was somebody else behind the attacks and Galt just a fall guy?

McDaniel looked doubtful. “But there’ve been witnesses…”

His brown eyes locked on his boss’s blue ones, Dellray said, “Are they reliable?”

“What do you mean, Fred?” An edge now in the slick ASAC’s voice.

“Or were they people who believed it was Galt because we told the media that’s who it was? And the media told the world?”

Rhyme added, “You wear safety goggles, you wear a hard hat and a company uniform… If you’re the same race and same build, and you’ve got a fake name badge with your own picture on it and Galt’s name… sure, it could work.”

Sachs too was considering the evidence. “The lineman in the tunnel, Joey Barzan, said he identified him because of the name badge. He’d never met Galt. And it was real dark down there.”

“And the security chief, Bernie Wahl,” Rhyme added, “never saw him when he delivered the second demand note. The perp got him from behind.”

Rhyme said, “And Galt was the one he kidnapped and killed. Like your CI found out.”

“That’s right,” Dellray said.

“But the evidence?” McDaniel persisted.

Rhyme stared at the board, shaking his head. “Shit. How could I’ve missed it?”

“What, Rhyme?”

“The boots in Galt’s apartment? A pair of Albertson-Fenwicks.”

“But they matched,” Pulaski said.

“Of course they matched. But that’s not the point, Rookie. The boots were in Galt’s apartment. If they were his, they wouldn’t’ve been there; he’d be wearing them! Workers wouldn’t have two pairs of new boots. They’re expensive and employees usually have to buy their own… No, the real perp found out what kind Galt wore and bought another pair. Same with the bolt cutter and hacksaw. The real perp left them in Galt’s apartment to find. The rest of the evidence implicating Galt, like the hair in the coffee shop across from the substation on Fifty-seventh Street? That was planted too.

“Look at the blog posting,” Rhyme continued, nodding at the documents Pulaski had wrested from Galt’s printer.

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

“Now look at the first couple of paragraphs of the first demand letter.”

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.

“What’s distinctive?” Rhyme asked.

Sachs shrugged.

Pulaski pointed out, “No misspellings in the blog.”

“True, Rookie, but that’s not my point; the computer’s spell checker would have picked up any mistakes in the blog and corrected them. I’m talking about word choice.”

Sachs nodded vigorously. “Sure. The blog language is a lot simpler.”

“Exactly. The blog was written by Galt himself. The letters were transcribed by him-it was his handwriting-but they were dictated by the real perp, the man who kidnapped Galt and forced him to write what he was saying. The perp used his own language, which Galt wasn’t familiar with so he misspelled the big words. In the blog he never used any words like ‘reprehensible.’… And in the other letters there’re similar misspellings. In the last letter-no misspellings because the perp wrote that himself in an email.”

Sellitto paced; the floor creaked. “Remember what Parker Kincaid said? Our handwriting guy? That the letter was written by somebody who was emotional, upset-because he was being threatened to take the dictation. That’d make anybody upset. And he also forced Galt to handle the switches and hard hat so they’d have his prints on them.”

Rhyme nodded. “In fact, I’ll bet the blog postings were real. Hell, they were probably how the perp picked Galt in the first place. He’d read how angry Galt was about the power industry.”

A moment later his eyes took in the physical evidence itself: the cables, the nuts and bolts.

And the generator. He gazed at it for a moment.

Then he called up word processing software on his computer and began to type. His neck and temple throbbed-this time, though, not as a prelude to an attack, but a sign that his heart was pounding hard with excitement.

Hunt lust.

Foxes, not wolves…

“Well,” McDaniel muttered, ignoring an incoming phone call. “If that’s right, I don’t think it is, but if it’s right, who the hell’s behind it?”

Typing slowly, the criminalist continued, “Let’s think about the facts. We’ll discount all the evidence specifically implicating Galt; for the moment let’s assume it’s been planted. So, the short blond hair is out, the tools are out, the boots are out, his uniform, gear bag, hard hat, friction ridges. All of those are out.

“Okay, so what else do we have? We’ve got a Queens connection-the taramasalata. He tried to destroy the access door we found it on so we know that evidence is real. We’ve got the handgun. So the real perp has access to weapons. We’ve got a geographic connection to the City Hall area-the trace we found in the generator. We’ve got hair-long blond and short brown. That suggests two perps. One definitely male, rigging the attacks. The other unknown, but probably a woman. What else do we know?”

“He’s from out of town,” Dellray pointed out.

Pulaski said, “Knowledge of arc flashes and how to create the booby traps.”

“Good,” Rhyme said.

Sellitto said, “One of them has access to Algonquin facilities.”

“Possibly, though they could have used Galt for that.”

Hums and clicks from the forensic instruments filled the parlor, coins jingled in somebody’s pocket.

“A man and a woman,” McDaniel said. “Just what we learned from T and C. Justice For the Earth.”

Rhyme exhaled a sigh. “Tucker, I could buy that if we had any evidence about the group. But we don’t. Not a single fiber, print, bit of trace.”

“It’s all cloud zone.”

“But,” the criminalist snapped, “if they exist they have a physical presence. Somewhere. I don’t have any proof of that.”

“Well, then what do you think’s going on?”

Rhyme smiled.

Almost simultaneously Amelia Sachs was shaking her head. “Rhyme, you don’t think it could be, do you?”

“You know what I say: When you’ve eliminated all the other possibilities, the remaining one, however outlandish it seems, has to be the answer.”

“I don’t get it, Lincoln,” Pulaski said. McDaniel’s expression echoed the same. “What do you mean?”

“Well, Rookie, you might want to ask yourself a few questions: One, does Andi Jessen have blond hair about the length of what you found? Two, does she have a brother who’s a former soldier who lives out of town and who might have access to weapons like a nineteen eleven Colt army forty-five? And, three, has Andi spent any time in City Hall in the last couple of days, oh, say, giving press conferences?”

Chapter 70

“ANDI JESSEN?”

As he continued to type, Rhyme replied to McDaniel, “And her brother’s doing the legwork. Randall. He’s the one who’s actually staged the attacks. But they coordinated them together. That’s why the transfer of evidence. She helped him move the generator out of the white van to the back of the school in Chinatown.”

Sachs crossed her arms as she considered this. “Remember: Charlie Sommers said that the army teaches soldiers about arc flashes. Randall could’ve learned what he needed to know there.”

Cooper said, “The fibers we found in Susan’s wheelchair? The database said they might’ve come from a military uniform.”

Rhyme nodded at the evidence board. “There was that report of an intrusion at a company substation in Philadelphia. We heard on TV that Randall Jessen lives in Pennsylvania.”

“That’s right,” Sachs confirmed.

“He’s got dark hair?” Pulaski asked.

“Yes, he does. Well, he did when he was a kid-from the pictures on Andi’s desk. And Andi went out of her way to say he didn’t live here. And there’s something else. She told me she didn’t come out of the technical side of the business. She said she got her father’s talent-the business side of the energy industry. But remember that news story about her? Before the press conference?”

Cooper nodded. “She was a lineman for a while before she moved into management and succeeded her father.” He pointed to the perp profile on the whiteboard. “She was lying.”

Sachs said, “And the Greek food-could have come from Andi herself. Or maybe she met her brother at a restaurant near the company.”

Eyes on what he was typing, Rhyme’s brow furrowed as he considered something else. “And why is Bernie Wahl still alive?”

“The security chief at Algonquin?” Sellitto mused. “Fuck, I never thought about it. Sure, it would have made sense for Galt-well, the perp-to kill him.”

“Randall could’ve delivered the second demand letter a dozen different ways. The point was to make Wahl believe it was Galt. He never saw the perp’s face.”

Dellray chimed in, “No wonder nobody spotted the real Galt, even after all the pictures on TV and the Internet. It was a different goddamn perp altogether.”

McDaniel now looked less skeptical. “So where’s Randall Jessen now?”

“All we know is he’s planning something big for six-thirty tonight.”

Eyeing the recent evidence, Rhyme was lost in thought for a moment, then continued to type-it was a list of instructions on how to proceed from here, one slow letter at a time.

Then the assistant special agent in charge’s skeptical gaze returned. “I’m sorry, time-out here. I can see what you’re saying, but what’s her motive? She’s screwing up her own company. She’s committing murder. That makes no sense.”

Rhyme corrected a typo and kept going.

Click, click…

Then he looked up and said softly, “The victims.”

“What?”

Rhyme explained, “If the perp was just making a statement, like it seemed, he could have rigged a timed device-and not risked being nearby. We know he could have done that; we found the timer spring at one of the crime scenes. But he didn’t. He was using a remote control and he was nearby when the victims died. Why?”

Sellitto barked a laugh. “Goddamn, Linc. Andi and her brother were after somebody in particular. She was just making it look, you know, random. That’s why the attacks happened before the deadlines.”

“Exactly!… Rookie, bring the whiteboards over here. Now!”

He did.

“The vics. Look at the vics.”

Luis Martin, assistant store manager.

Linda Kepler, Oklahoma City, tourist.

Morris Kepler, Oklahoma City, tourist.

Samuel Vetter, Scottsdale, businessman.

Ali Mamoud, New York City, waiter.

Gerhart Schiller, Frankfurt, Germany, advertising executive.

Larry Fishbein, New York City, accountant.

Robert Bodine, New York City, attorney.

Franklin Tucker, Paramus, New Jersey, salesman.

“Do we know anything about the injured?”

Sachs said she didn’t.

“Well, one of them might’ve been the intended victim too. We should find out. But what do we know about them, at least, the deceased?” Rhyme asked, staring at the names. “Is there any reason Andi would want any of them dead?”

“The Keplers were tourists in town on a package tour,” Sachs said. “Retired ten years ago. Vetter was the witness. Maybe that’s why they killed him.”

“No, this was planned a month ago. What was the business?”

Sachs flipped through her notebook. “President of Southwest Concrete.”

“Look ’em up, Mel.”

In a minute Cooper was saying, “Well, listen to this. Based in Scottsdale. General construction, with a specialty in infrastructure projects. On the website it says that Vetter was attending an alternative energy financing seminar at the Battery Park Hotel.” He looked up. “Recently they’ve been involved in constructing the foundations for photovoltaic arrays.”

“Solar power.” Rhyme’s eyes continued to take in the evidence. He said, “And the victims in the office building? Sachs, call Susan Stringer and see if she knows anything about them.”

Sachs pulled out her phone and had a conversation with the woman. When she hung up she said, “Okay, she doesn’t know the lawyer or the man who got on at the sixth floor. But Larry Fishbein was an accountant she knew a little. She overheard him complaining that there was something odd about the books of a company where he’d just done an audit. Some money was disappearing. And wherever it was, the place was really hot. Too hot to golf.”

“Maybe Arizona. Call and find out.”

Sellitto got the number of the man’s firm from Sachs and called. He spoke for a few minutes and then disconnected. “Bingo. Fishbein was in Scottsdale. He got back Tuesday.”

“Ah, Scottsdale… Where Vetter had his company.”

McDaniel said, “What is this, Lincoln? I still don’t see the motive.”

After a moment Rhyme said, “Andi Jessen’s opposed to renewable energy, right?”

Sachs said, “That’s a little strong. But she’s definitely not a fan.”

“What if she was bribing alternative energy companies to limit production or doing something else to sabotage them?”

“To keep demand for Algonquin’s power high?” McDaniel asked. A motive in his pocket, he seemed more on board now.

“That’s right. Vetter and Fishbein might’ve had information that would’ve sunk her. If they’d been murdered in separate incidents, just the two of them, the investigators might’ve wondered if there was a connection. But Andi arranged this whole thing to make it look like they were random victims so nobody’d put the pieces together. That’s why the demands were impossible to comply with. She didn’t want to comply with them. She needed the attacks to take place.”

Rhyme said to Sachs, “And get the names of the injured and check out their histories. Maybe one of them was a target too.”

“Sure, Rhyme.”

“But,” Sellitto said with unusual urgency in his voice, “there’s the third demand letter, the email. That means she still needs to kill somebody else. Who’s the next victim?”

Rhyme continued to type as quickly as he could on his keyboard. His eyes rose momentarily to the digital clock on the wall nearby. “I don’t know. And we’ve got less than two hours to figure it out.”

Chapter 71

DESPITE THE HORROR of Ray Galt’s attacks, Charlie Sommers couldn’t deny the exhilaration that now, well, electrified him.

He’d taken a coffee break, during which he’d spent the time jotting diagrams for a possible invention (on a napkin, of course): a way to deliver hydrogen gas to homes for fuel cells. He was now returning to the main floor of the New Energy Expo in the Manhattan Convention Center on the West Side, near the Hudson River. It was filled with thousands of the most innovative people in the world, inventors, scientists, professors, the all-important investors too, each devoted to one thing: alternative energy. Creating it, delivering it, storing it, using it. This was the biggest conference of its sort in the world, timed to coincide with Earth Day. It brought together those who knew the importance of energy but knew too the importance of making and using it in very different ways from what we’d been used to.

As Sommers made his way through the halls of the futuristic convention center-finished just a month or so ago-his heart was pounding like that of a schoolboy at his first science fair. He felt dizzy, head swiveling back and forth as he took in the booths: those of companies operating wind farms, nonprofits seeking backers to create microgrids in remote parts of Third World countries, solar power companies, geothermal exploration operations and smaller outfits that made or installed photovoltaic arrays, flywheel and liquid sodium storage systems, batteries, superconductive transport systems, smart grids… the list was endless.

And utterly enthralling.

He arrived at his company’s ten-foot-wide booth at the back end of the hall.

ALGONQUIN CONSOLIDATED POWER

SPECIAL PROJECTS DIVISION

THE SMARTER ALTERNATIVE ^TM

Although Algonquin was probably bigger than the five largest exhibitors here put together, his company had bought only the smallest booth available for the new-energy show, and he was the only one manning it.

Which was a pretty clear indication of how CEO Andi Jessen felt about renewables.

Still, Sommers didn’t care. Sure, he was here as a company representative, but he’d also come here to meet people and make contacts on his own. Someday-soon, he hoped-he’d leave Algonquin and spend all his time on his own company. He was very up front with his supervisors about his private work. Nobody at Algonquin had ever had a problem with what he did on his own time. They wouldn’t be interested in the inventions he created at home anyway, things like the Sink-Rynicity water-saving system for kitchens, or the Volt-Collector, a portable box that used the motion of vehicles to create power and store it in a battery you could plug into a fixture in your house or office, thus reducing demand from your local company.

The king of negawatts…

Already incorporated, Sommers Illuminating Innovations, Inc., was his company’s name and it consisted of himself, his wife and her brother. The name was a play on Thomas Edison’s corporation, Edison Illuminating Company, the first investor-owned utility and the operator of the first grid.

While he may have had a bit-a tiny bit-of Edison’s genius, Sommers was no businessman. He was oblivious when it came to money. When he’d come up with the idea of creating regional grids so that smaller producers could sell excess electricity to Algonquin and other large power companies, a friend in the industry had laughed. “And why would Algonquin want to buy electricity when they’re in the business of selling it?”

“Well,” Sommers replied, blinking in surprise at his friend’s naivete, “because it’s more efficient. It’ll be cheaper to customers and reduce the risk of outages.” This was obvious.

The laugh in response suggested that perhaps Sommers was the naive one.

Sitting down at the booth, he flicked on light switches and removed the BE BACK SOON sign. He poured more candy into a bowl. (Algonquin had vetoed hiring a model in a low-cut dress to stand in front of the booth and smile, like some of the exhibitors had.)

No, the smiling was up to him and he grinned with a vengeance as he gestured people over and talked about power.

During a lull, he sat back and gazed around him, wondering what Thomas Edison would have thought walking through these halls. Sommers had a feeling that the man would have been fascinated and delighted, but not amazed. After all, electrical generation and the grid hadn’t changed significantly for 125 years. The scale was bigger, the efficiency better, but every major system in use nowadays had been around then.

Edison would probably have gazed enviously at the halogen bulbs, knowing how hard it had been to find a filament that worked in his. And laughed to see the displays on micro-nuclear reactors, which could travel on barges to where they were needed (Edison had predicted in the 1800s that we would one day be using nuclear energy to power generators). He would also undoubtedly have been awed by the convention center building itself. The architect had made no attempt to hide the infrastructure; the beams, the walls, the ducts, even portions of the floor were gleaming copper and stainless steel.

It was, Sommers considered, like being inside a huge switchgear array.

The special project manager kept his guard up, though. There’s a seamy side to invention. The creation of the lightbulb had been a fierce battle-not only technologically but legally. Dozens of people were involved in knock-down, drag-out battles for credit for-and the profit from-the lightbulb. Thomas Edison and England’s Joseph Wilson Swan emerged as the victors but from a field littered with lawsuits, anger, espionage and sabotage. And destroyed careers.

Sommers was thinking of this now because he’d seen a man in glasses and a cap not far from the Algonquin booth. He was suspicious because the guy had been lingering at two different booths nearby. One company made equipment for geothermal exploration, devices that would locate hot spots deep in the earth. The other built hybrid motors for small vehicles. But Sommers knew that someone interested in geothermal would likely have no interest in hybrids.

True, the man was paying little attention to Sommers or Algonquin, but he could easily have been taking pictures of some of the inventions and mockups on display at the booth. Spy cameras nowadays were extremely sophisticated.

Sommers turned away to answer a woman’s question. When he looked back, the man-spy or businessman or just curious attendee-was gone.

Ten minutes later, another lull in visitors. He decided to use the restroom. He asked the man in the booth next to his to keep an eye on things and then headed down a nearly deserted corridor to the men’s room. One advantage of being in the cheaper, small-booth area was that you had the toilets largely to yourself. He stepped into a corridor whose stylish steel floor was embossed with bumps, presumably to simulate the flooring of a space station or rocket.

When he was twenty feet away his cell phone started to ring.

He didn’t recognize the number-from a local area code. He thought for a moment then hit the IGNORE button.

Sommers continued toward the toilet, noticing the shiny copper handle on the door and thinking, They sure didn’t spare any expense here. No wonder it’s costing us so damn much for the booth.

Chapter 72

“PLEASE,” SACHS MUTTERED out loud, hovering over the speakerphone. “Charlie, pick up! Please!”

She’d called Sommers just a moment before but the phone rang only once and then went to voice mail.

She was trying again.

“Come on!” Rhyme too said.

Two rings… three…

And finally, in the speaker, a click. “Hello?”

“Charlie, it’s Amelia Sachs.”

“Oh, did you call a minute ago? I was on my way-”

“Charlie,” she broke in, “you’re in danger.”

“What?”

“Where are you?”

“In the convention center, about to… What do you mean, danger?”

“Are you near anything metal, anything that could produce an arc flash or something that could be rigged with a hot line?”

He gave an abrupt laugh. “I’m standing on a metal floor. And I was just about to open a bathroom door with a metal handle.” Then the humor faded from his voice. “Are you saying they might be booby-trapped?”

“It’s possible. Get off the metal floor now.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s been another demand and a deadline. Six-thirty. But we think the attacks-the hotel, the elevator-don’t have anything to do with the threats or demands. They’re cover-ups to target certain people. And you might be one of them.”

“Me? Why?”

“First of all, get someplace safe.”

“I’ll go back to the main floor. It’s concrete. Hold on.” A moment later he said, “Okay. You know, I saw somebody here, watching me. But I don’t think it was Galt.”

Rhyme said, “Charlie, it’s Lincoln. We think Ray Galt was set up. He’s probably dead.”

“Somebody else is behind the attacks?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Andi Jessen. The man you saw might’ve been her brother, Randall. The evidence shows that they’re working together.”

“What? That’s crazy. And why’m I in danger?”

Sachs continued, “Some of the people killed in the other attacks were involved in alternative energy production. Like you. We think that she may have been bribing renewable power companies to cut back generation, to keep up demand for Algonquin’s electricity.”

There was a pause. “Well, it’s true, one of my projects’s been to consolidate regional grids so that they could be more self-sufficient-and start supplying juice to the big interconnections, like Algonquin. I guess that could be a problem for her.”

“Have you been to Scottsdale recently?”

“I’m working on some solar farm projects near there, yes, among other places. California, it’s wind farms and geothermal. Arizona is mostly solar farms.”

Sachs said, “I was thinking back to something you said when I met you at Algonquin. Why did she ask you to help me with the investigation?”

He paused. “You’re right. She could’ve asked a dozen people.”

“I think she was setting you up.”

Then he gasped and said, “Oh, Jesus.”

“What?” Rhyme asked.

“Maybe it’s not just me who’s at risk. Think about it: Everybody here at the convention’s a threat to Algonquin. The whole event’s about alternative energy, microgrids, decentralization… Andi could see every exhibitor here as a threat, if she’s that obsessed with Algonquin being the number-one energy provider in North America.”

“Is there somebody at Algonquin we can trust? Somebody to shut off power there? And not let Andi know?”

“Algonquin doesn’t run service here. Like some of the subway lines, the convention center makes its own juice. The plant’s next to the building here. Should we evacuate the place?”

“Would people have to go over a metal floor to get outside?”

“Yes, most of them would. The front lobby and the loading docks are all steel. Not painted. Pure steel. And do you know how much electricity there is feeding in here? The load on a day like this is close to twenty million watts. Look, I can go downstairs, find the supply. Maybe I can pull the breakers. I could-”

“No, we need to find out exactly what they’re doing. And how they’re doing it. We’ll call as soon as we know more. Stay put!”

Chapter 73

SWEATING, FRANTIC, CHARLIE Sommers looked around him at the tens of thousands of visitors at the New Energy Expo, some hoping to make a fortune, some hoping to help, if not save, the planet, some here because it seemed like a fun idea to stop in for a while.

Some were young, teenagers who, like him years ago, would be inspired to take different courses in high school after seeing these exhibits. More science, less foreign language and history. And become the Edisons of their generations.

They were all at risk.

Stay put, the police had told him.

Crowds jostled, carting colorful bags-the exhibitors’ giveaways, with the company logos printed boldly: Volt Storage Technologies, Next Generation Batteries, Geothermal Innovations.

Stay put…

Except his mind was in a place his wife called “Charlie-think.” It was spinning on its own, like a dynamo, like an electricity storage flywheel. Ten thousand RPM. Thinking of the electricity usage here in the convention center. Twenty megawatts.

Twenty million watts.

Watts equals volts times amps…

Enough electricity, if channeled through this conductive superstructure, to electrocute thousands. Arc flashes, or just ground faults, the massive current surging through bodies, taking lives and leaving smoldering piles of flesh and clothing and hair.

Stay put…

Well, he couldn’t.

And, like any inventor, Sommers considered the practical details. Randall Jessen and Andi would have somehow secured the power plant. They couldn’t risk that the police would call the maintenance staff and simply cut the supply. But there’d be a main line coming into this building. Probably like an area transmission line it would be carrying 138,000v. They would have cut into the line to electrify floors or stairways or doorknobs. The elevators again maybe.

Sommers reflected:

The attendees here couldn’t avoid the juice.

They couldn’t protect themselves against it.

So he’d have to cut its head off.

There was no staying put.

If he could find the incoming line before Randall Jessen ran the splice, Sommers could short it out. He’d run a cable from the hot line directly to a return. The resulting short circuit, accompanied by an arc flash as powerful as the one at the bus station the other morning, would pop breakers in the convention center power plant, eliminating the danger. The emergency lighting system would kick on but that was low voltage-probably from twelve-volt lead-calcium batteries. There’d be no risk of electrocution with that small supply. A few people would be stuck in the elevators, maybe there’d be some panic. But injuries would be minimal.

But then reality came home to him. The only way to short out the system was to do the most dangerous procedure in the utility business: bare hand work on an energized line carrying 138,000 volts. Only the top linemen ever attempted this. Working from insulated buckets or helicopters to avoid any risk of ground contact and wearing faraday suits-actual metal clothing-the linemen connected themselves directly to the high-voltage wire itself. In effect, they became part of it, and hundreds of thousands of volts streamed over their bodies.

Charlie Sommers had never tried bare hand work with high voltage, but he knew how to perform it-in theory.

Like a bird on a wire…

At the Algonquin booth he now grabbed his pathetically sparse tool kit and borrowed a length of lightweight high-tension wire from a nearby exhibitor. He ran into the dim hallway to find a service door. He glanced at the copper doorknob, hesitated only a moment then yanked it open and plunged into the dimness of the center’s several basements.

Stay put?

I don’t think so.

Chapter 74

HE SAT IN the front seat of his white van, hot because the air conditioner was off. He didn’t want to run the engine and draw attention to himself. A parked vehicle is one thing. A parked vehicle with an engine running exponentially increased suspicion.

Sweat tickled the side of his cheek. He hardly noticed it. He pressed the headset more firmly against his ear. Still nothing. He turned the volume higher. Static. A clunk or two. A snap.

He was thinking of the words he’d sent via email earlier today: If you ignore me this time, the consequences will be far, far greater than the small incidents of yesterday and the day before, the loss of life far worse…

Yes and no.

He tilted his head, listening for more words to flow through the microphone he’d hidden in the generator he’d planted at the school near Chinatown. A Trojan horse, one that the Crime Scene Unit had courteously carted right into Lincoln Rhyme’s townhouse. He’d already gotten the lowdown on the cast of characters helping Rhyme and their whereabouts. Lon Sellitto, the NYPD detective, and Tucker McDaniel, ASAC of the FBI, were gone, headed downtown to City Hall, where they would coordinate the defense of the convention center.

Amelia Sachs and Ron Pulaski were speeding to the center right now, to see if they could shut the power off.

Waste of time, he reflected.

Then he stiffened, hearing the voice of Lincoln Rhyme.

“Okay, Mel, I need you to get that cable to the lab in Queens.”

“The-?”

“The cable!”

“Which one?”

“How the hell many cables are there?”

“About four.”

“Well, the one Sachs and Pulaski found at the school in Chinatown. I want the trace between the insulation and the wire itself dug out and run through their SEM.”

Then came the sound of plastic and paper. A moment later, footsteps. “I’ll be back in forty minutes, an hour.”

“I don’t care when you get back. I care when you call me with the results.”

Footsteps, thudding.

The microphone was very sensitive.

A door slammed. Silence. The tapping of computer keys, nothing else.

Then Rhyme, shouting: “Goddamn it, Thom!… Thom!”

“What, Lincoln? Are you-”

“Is Mel gone?”

“Hold on.”

After a moment the voice called, “Yes, his car just left. You want me to call him?”

“No, don’t bother. Look, I need a piece of wire. I want to see if I can duplicate something Randall did… A long piece of wire. Do we have anything like that here?”

“Extension cord?”

“No, bigger. Twenty, thirty feet.”

“Why would I have any wire that long here?”

“I just thought maybe you would. Well, go find some. Now.”

“Where am I supposed to find wire?”

“A fucking wire store. I don’t know. A hardware store. There’s that one on Broadway, right? There used to be.”

“It’s still there. So you need thirty feet?”

“That should do it… What?”

“It’s just, you’re not looking well, Lincoln. I’m not sure I should leave you.”

“Yes, you should. You should do what I’m asking. The sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll be back and you can mother-hen me to your heart’s content. But for now: Go!”

There was no sound for a moment.

“All right. But I’m checking your blood pressure first.”

Another pause.

“Go ahead.”

Muffled sounds, a faint hiss, the rasp of Velcro. “It’s not bad. But I want to make sure it stays that way… How are you feeling?”

“I’m just tired.”

“I’ll be back in a half hour.”

Faint steps sounded on the floor. The door opened again then closed.

He listened for a moment more and then rose. He pulled on a cable TV repairman’s uniform. He slipped the 1911 Colt into a gear bag, which he slung over his shoulder.

He checked the front windows and mirrors of the van and, noting that the alley was empty, climbed out. He verified there were no security cameras and walked to the back door of Lincoln Rhyme’s townhouse. In three minutes he’d made sure the alarm was off and had picked the lock, slipping into the basement.

He found the electrical service panel and silently went to work, rigging another of his remote control switchgear units to the incoming service line, 400 amps, which was double that of most other residences in the area.

This was interesting to note but not particularly significant, of course, since he knew that all he needed to cause virtually instant death was a tiny portion of that.

One tenth of one amp…

Chapter 75

RHYME WAS LOOKING over the evidence boards when the electricity went off in his townhouse.

The computer screen turned black, machinery sighed to silence. The red, green and yellow eyes of the LEDs on the equipment surrounding him vanished.

He swiveled his head from side to side.

From the basement, the creak of a door. Then he heard footsteps. Not the footfalls themselves, but the faint protest of human weight on old, dry wood.

“Hello?” he shouted. “Thom? Is that you? The power. There’s something wrong with the power.”

The creaking grew closer. Then it vanished. Rhyme turned his chair in a circle. He scanned the room, eyes darting the way they used to dart at crime scenes upon first arrival, taking in all the relevant evidence, getting the impression of the scene. Looking for the dangers too: the places where the perp might still be hiding, maybe injured, maybe panicked, maybe coolly waiting for a chance to kill a police officer.

Another creak.

He spun the wheelchair around again, three-sixty, but saw nothing. Then he spotted, on one of the examination tables at the far end of the room, a cell phone. Although the power was off in the rest of the townhouse, of course, the mobile would be working.

Batteries…

Rhyme pushed the controller touchpad forward and the chair responded quickly. He sped to the table and stopped, his back to the doorway, and stared down at the phone. It was no more than eighteen inches from his face.

Its LCD indicator glowed green. Plenty of juice, ready to take or send a call.

“Thom?” he called again.

Nothing.

Rhyme felt the pounding of his heart through the telegraph of his temples and the throbbing veins in his neck.

Alone in the room, virtually immobile. Less than two feet away from the phone, staring. Rhyme turned the chair slightly sideways and then back, quickly, knocking into the table, rocking the phone. But it remained exactly where it was.

Then he was aware of a change in the acoustics of the room, and he knew the intruder had entered. He banged into the table once again. But before the phone skidded closer to him, he heard footsteps pound across the floor behind him. A gloved hand reached over his shoulder and seized the phone.

“Is that you?” Rhyme demanded of the person behind him. “Randall? Randall Jessen?”

No answer.

Only faint sounds behind him, clicks. Then jostling, which he felt in his shoulders. The wheelchair’s battery indicator light on the touchpad went black. The intruder disengaged the brake manually and wheeled the chair to an area illuminated by a band of pale sunlight falling through the window.

The man then slowly turned the chair around.

Rhyme opened his mouth to speak but then his eyes narrowed as he studied the face before him carefully. He said nothing for a moment. Then, in a whisper: “It can’t be.”

The cosmetic surgery had been very good. Still, there were familiar landmarks in the man’s face. Besides, how could Rhyme possibly fail to recognize Richard Logan, the Watchmaker, the man who was supposedly hiding out at that very moment in an unsavory part of Mexico City?

Chapter 76

LOGAN SHUT OFF the cell phone that Lincoln Rhyme had apparently been trying in his desperation to knock into service.

“I don’t understand,” the criminalist said.

Logan sloughed a gear bag off his shoulder and set it on the floor, crouching and opening it. His quick fingers dug into the bag and he extracted a laptop computer and two wireless video cameras. One he took into the kitchen and pointed into the alley. The other he set in a front window. He booted up the computer and placed it on a nearby table. He typed in some commands. Immediately images of the alley and sidewalk approaches to Rhyme’s townhouse came on the screen. It was the same system he’d used at the Battery Park Hotel to spy on Vetter and determine the exact moment to hit the switch: when flesh met metal.

Then Logan looked up and gave a faint laugh. He walked to the dark oak mantelpiece where a pocketwatch sat on a stand.

“You still have my present,” he whispered. “You have it… have it out, on display.” He was shocked. He’d assumed the ancient Breguet had been dismantled and every piece examined to determine where Logan lived.

Though they were enemies, and Logan would soon kill him, he admired Rhyme a great deal and was oddly pleased that the man had kept the timepiece intact.

When he thought about it, however, he decided that, of course, the criminalist had indeed ordered it taken apart, down to the last hairspring and jewel, for the forensics team but then had it reassembled perfectly.

Making Rhyme a bit of a watchmaker too.

Next to the pocketwatch was the note that had accompanied the timepiece. It was both an appreciation of Rhyme, and an ominous promise that they’d meet again.

A promise now fulfilled.

The criminalist was recovering from his shock. He said, “People’ll be back here any minute.”

“No, Lincoln. They won’t.” Logan recited the whereabouts of everyone who’d been in the room fifteen minutes ago.

Rhyme frowned, “How did you…? Oh, no. Of course, the generator. You have a bug in it.” He closed his eyes in disgust.

“That’s right. And I know how much time I have.”

Richard Logan reflected that whatever else occurred in his life, he always knew exactly how much time he had.

The dismay on Rhyme’s face then faded into confusion. “So it wasn’t Randall Jessen masquerading as Ray Galt. It was you.”

Logan fondly studied the Breguet. Compared the time to a watch on his own wrist. “You keep it wound.” Then he replaced it. “That’s right. I’ve been Raymond Galt, master electrician and troubleman, for the past week.”

“But I saw you in the airport security video… You were hired to kill Rodolfo Luna in Mexico.”

“Not exactly. His colleague Arturo Diaz was on the payroll of one of the big drug cartels out of Puerto Vallarta. Luna is one of the few honest cops left in Mexico. Diaz wanted to hire me to kill him. But I was too busy. For a fee, though, I did agree to pretend I was behind it, to keep suspicion off him. It served my purposes too. I needed everyone-especially you-to believe I was someplace other than New York City.”

“But at the airport…” Rhyme’s voice fell to a confused whisper. “You were on the plane. The security tape. We saw you get in that truck, hide under the tarp. And you were spotted in Mexico City and on the road there from the airport. You were seen in Gustavo Madero an hour ago. Your fingerprints and…” The words dissolved. The criminalist shook his head and gave a resigned smile. “My God. You never left the airport at all.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You picked up that package and got onto the truck in front of the camera, on purpose, but it just drove out of view. You handed the package off to somebody else and got a flight headed to the East Coast. Diaz’s men kept reporting you in Mexico City-to make everybody think you were there. How many of Diaz’s people were on the take?”

“About two dozen.”

“There was no car fleeing to Gustavo Madero?”

“No.” Pity was an emotion that to Logan was inefficient and therefore pointless. Still, he could recognize, without being moved personally, that there was something pitiable about Lincoln Rhyme at the moment. He also looked smaller than when last they met. Nearly frail. Perhaps he’d been sick. Which was good, Logan decided; the electricity coursing through his body would take its toll more quickly. He certainly didn’t want Rhyme to suffer.

He added, as if in consolation, “You anticipated the attack on Luna. You stopped Diaz from killing him. I never thought you’d figure it out in time. But, on reflection, I shouldn’t have been surprised.”

“But I didn’t stop you.”

Logan had killed a number of people in his lengthy career as a professional. Most of them, if they were aware they were about to die, grew calm, as they understood the inevitability of what was about to happen. But Rhyme went even further. The criminalist now almost looked relieved. Perhaps that was what Logan saw in Rhyme’s face: the symptoms of a terminal illness. Or maybe he’d just lost the will to live, given his condition. A fast death would be a blessing.

“Where’s Galt’s body?”

“The Burn-the boiler furnace at Algonquin Power. There’s nothing left.” Logan glanced at the laptop. Still all clear. He took out a length of Bennington medium-voltage cable and attached one end to the hot line in a nearby 220-volt outlet. He’d spent months learning all about juice. He felt as comfortable with it now as with the fine gears and springs of clocks and watches.

Logan felt in his pocket the weight of the remote control that would turn the power back on and send sufficient amperage into the criminalist to kill him instantly.

As he wound part of the cable around Rhyme’s arm, the man said, “But if you bugged the generator you must’ve heard what we were saying before. We know Raymond Galt isn’t the real perp, that he was set up. And we know that Andi Jessen wanted to kill Sam Vetter and Larry Fishbein. Whether or not it was her brother who rigged the traps or you, she’ll still get collared and…”

Logan did no more than glance at Rhyme, on whose face appeared a look of both understanding and complete resignation. “But that’s not what this is about, is it? That’s not what this is about at all.”

“No, Lincoln. It’s not.”

Chapter 77

A BIRD NOT on, but above, a wire.

Dangling in the air in the deepest subbasement of the convention center, Charlie Sommers was in an improvised sling exactly two feet away from a line carrying 138,000 volts, swathed in red insulation.

If electricity were water, the pressure in the cable in front of him would be like that at the bottom of the sea, millions of pounds per square inch, just waiting for any excuse to crush the submarine into a flat, bloody strip of metal.

The main line, suspended on insulated glass supports, was ten feet off the ground running from the wall across the basement to the convention center’s own substation, at the far end of the dim space.

Because he couldn’t touch both the bare wire and anything connected to the ground at the same time, he’d improvised a sling from fire hose, which he’d tied to a catwalk above the high-voltage cable. Using all his strength, he’d shimmied down the hose and had managed to slide into the crux of the sling. He fervently hoped that fire hoses were made exclusively of rubber and canvas; if the hose was, for some reason, reinforced with metal strands, then in a few minutes he would become a major player in a phase-to-ground fault and would turn into vapor.

Around his neck was a length of 1/0-gauge cable-what he’d borrowed from the booth next to Algonquin’s. With his Swiss army knife Sommers was slowly stripping away the dark red insulation on it. When he was finished he would similarly strip away the protective coating from the high-voltage line, exposing the aluminum strands. And, with his unprotected hands, he’d join the two wires.

Then one of two things would happen. Either:

Nothing.

Or, a phase-to-ground fault… and vapor.

If the case of the former, he would then carefully extend the exposed end of the wire and touch it to a nearby return source-some iron girders connected to the convention center’s foundation. The result would be a spectacular short that would blow the breakers in the center’s power plant.

As for him, well, Charlie Sommers himself wouldn’t be grounded, but voltage that high would produce a huge arc flash, which could easily burn him to death.

Knowing now that the deadline was meaningless and that Randall and Andi Jessen might trip the switchgear at any moment, he worked feverishly, slicing the bloodred insulation off the cable. The curled strips of dielectric fell to the floor beneath him and Sommers couldn’t help but think they were like petals falling from dying roses in a funeral home after the mourners had returned home.

Chapter 78

RICHARD LOGAN WATCHED Lincoln Rhyme gazing out one of the large windows of the townhouse-in the direction of the East River. Somewhere out there the gray and red towers of Algonquin Consolidated Power presided over the grim riverfront. The smokestacks weren’t visible from here but Logan supposed that on a cold day Rhyme could see the billowing exhaust rising over the skyline.

Shaking his head, the criminalist whispered, “Andi Jessen didn’t hire you at all.”

“No.”

“She’s the target, isn’t she? You’re setting her up.”

“That’s right.”

Rhyme nodded at the gear bag at Logan’s feet. “There’s evidence in there implicating her and her brother. You’re going to plant it here, as if Andi and Randall had killed me too. Just like you’ve been planting evidence all along. The trace from City Hall, the blond hair, the Greek food. You were hired by somebody to make it look like Andi was using Ray Galt to kill Sam Vetter and Larry Fishbein… Why them?”

“It wasn’t them particularly. The victims could have been anybody from the alternative energy conference at the Battery Park Hotel or from Fishbein’s accounting firm. Anybody there might have information about some scam or another Andi Jessen wanted to cover up.”

“Even though they didn’t have any information.”

“No. Nothing to do with Algonquin or Andi at all.”

“Who’s behind it?” Rhyme’s brow was furrowed, the eyes now darting over the evidence boards, as if he needed to know the answer to the puzzle before he died. “I can’t figure that out.”

Logan looked down at the man’s gaunt face.

Pity…

He extracted a second wire and rigged it too to Rhyme. He’d connect this to the closest ground, the radiator.

Richard Logan never cared, on a moral level, why his clients wanted the victims dead, but he made a point of learning the motive because it helped him to plan his job and to get away afterward. So he’d listened with interest when it was explained to him why Andi Jessen had to be discredited and go to jail for a long, long time. He now said, “Andi is a threat to the new order. Her view-her very vocal view, apparently-is that oil and gas and coal and nuke are the only significant sources for energy and will be for the next hundred years. Renewables are a kid’s toy.”

“She’s pointing out the emperor’s new clothes.”

“Exactly.”

“So some ecoterror group is behind this, then?”

Logan grimaced. “Ecoterrorists? Oh, please. Bearded unwashed idiots who can’t even burn down a ski resort construction site without getting caught in the act?” Logan laughed. “No, Lincoln. It’s about money.”

Rhyme seemed to understand. “Ah, sure… It doesn’t matter that clean energy and renewables don’t add up to much in the great scheme of things yet; there’s still lots of profit to be made building wind and solar farms and regional grids and the transmission equipment.”

“Exactly. Government subsidies and tax breaks too. Not to mention consumers who’ll pay whatever they’re billed for green power because they think they’re saving the earth.”

Rhyme said, “When we found Galt’s apartment, his emails about the cancer, we were thinking that revenge never sits well as a motive.”

“No, but greed’s perennial.”

The criminalist apparently couldn’t help but laugh. “So a green cartel’s behind this. What a thought.” His eyes took in the whiteboards. “I think I can deduce one of the players… Bob Cavanaugh?”

“Good. Yes. He’s the principal, in fact. How did you know?”

“He gave us information implicating Randall Jessen.” Rhyme squinted. “And he helped us at the hotel in Battery Park. We might’ve saved Vetter… But, sure, it didn’t matter if you actually killed him or Fishbein, or anyone else for that matter.”

“No. What was important was that Andi Jessen get arrested for the attacks. Discredited and sent to jail. And there was another motive: Cavanaugh was an associate of Andi’s father, and never very happy he’d been passed over for the president and CEO spot by daddy’s little girl.”

“He can’t be the only one.”

“No. The cartel has CEOs from a half dozen alternative-energy equipment suppliers around the world, mostly in the United States, China and Switzerland.”

“A green cartel.” Rhyme shook his head.

“Times change,” Logan said.

“But why not just kill her, Andi?”

“My very question,” Logan said. “But there was an economic component. Cavanaugh and the others needed Andi out but also needed to have Algonquin’s share price drop. The cartel is going to snap up the company.”

“And the attack on the bus?”

“Needed to get everybody’s attention.” Logan felt a ping of regret. And he was comfortable confessing to Rhyme, “I didn’t want anyone to die there. That passenger would have been okay if he’d gotten onto the bus instead of hesitating. But I couldn’t wait anymore.”

“I can see why you’d set up Vetter and Fishbein to make it look like Andi wanted them dead-they were involved in alternative energy projects in Arizona. They’d be logical victims. But why would the cartel want to kill Charlie Sommers? Wasn’t his job developing alternative energy?”

“Sommers?” A nod at the generator. “I heard you mention him. And Bernie Wahl dimed him out when I delivered the second note. Wahl snitched on you too, by the way…”

“Because you threatened to, what? Electrocute his family?”

“Yes.”

“I hardly blame him.”

Logan continued, “But whoever this Sommers is, he’s not part of the plan.”

“But you sent Algonquin a third demand letter. That meant you had to kill somebody else. You don’t have a trap at the convention center?” Rhyme looked confused.

“No.”

Then he nodded with understanding. “Of course… me. I’m the next victim.”

Logan paused, the wire taut in his hands. “That’s right.”

“You took on this whole assignment because of me.”

“I get a lot of calls. But I’ve been waiting for a job that would bring me back to New York.” Logan lowered his head. “You nearly caught me when I was here a few years ago-and you ruined that assignment. It was the first time that anyone’s ever stopped me from fulfilling a contract. I had to return the fee… It wasn’t the cash; it was the embarrassment. Shameful. And then you nearly caught me in England too. Next time… you might get lucky. That’s why I took the job when Cavanaugh called me. I needed to get close to you.”

Logan wondered why he’d chosen those words. He pushed the thought away, finished affixing the ground wire. He rose. “Sorry. But I have to do this,” he apologized. Then poured water onto Rhyme’s chest, soaking his shirt. It was undignified but he didn’t have a choice. “Conductivity.”

“And Justice For the Earth? Nothing to do with you either?”

“No. I never heard of them.”

Rhyme was watching him. “So that remote control switch you’ve made? It’s rigged downstairs in my circuit breaker panel?”

“Yes.”

Rhyme mused, “Electricity… I’ve learned a lot about it in the past few days.”

“I’ve been studying it for months.”

“Galt taught you the Algonquin computer controls?”

“No, that was Cavanaugh. He got me the pass codes to the system.”

“Ah, sure.”

Logan said, “But I also took a course in SCADA and the Algonquin system in particular.”

“Of course, you would have.”

Logan continued, “I was surprised how fascinated I’ve become. I always belittled electricity.”

“Because of your watchmaking?”

“Exactly. A battery and a mass-produced chip can equal the capability of the finest hand-made watches.”

Rhyme nodded with understanding. “Electrical clocks seemed cheap to you. Somehow using battery power lessened the beauty of a watch. Lessened the art.”

Logan felt excitement coursing through him. To engage in a conversation like this was enthralling; there were so few people who were his equal. And the criminalist actually knew what he was feeling! “Yes, yes, exactly. But then, working on this job, my opinion changed. Why is a watch that tells time by an oscillator regulated by a quartz crystal any less astonishing than one run by gears and levers and springs? In the end, it all comes down to physics. As a man of science, you’d appreciate that… Oh, and complications? You know what complications are.”

Rhyme said, “All the bells and whistles they build into watches. The date, the phases of the moon, the equinox, chimes.”

Logan was surprised. Rhyme added, “Oh, I’ve studied watchmaking too.”

Close to you…

“Electronic watches duplicate all of those functions and a hundred more. The Timex Data Link. You know it?”

“No,” Rhyme said.

“They’re classics now-wristwatches that link to your computer. Telling the time is only one of a hundred things they can do. Astronauts have worn them to the moon.”

Another look at the computer screen. No one was approaching the townhouse.

“And all this change, this modernity doesn’t bother you?” Rhyme asked.

“No, it simply proves how integrated in our lives is the subject of time. We forget that the watchmakers were the Silicon Valley innovators of their day. Why, look at this project. What an impressive weapon-electricity. I shut down the entire city for a few days, thanks just to electricity. It’s part of our nature now, part of our being. We couldn’t live without it… Times change. We have to change too. Whatever the risks. Whatever we have to leave behind.”

Rhyme said, “I have a favor.”

“I’ve adjusted the circuit breakers in your service panel. They’ll carry three times the load. It’ll be fast. You won’t feel anything.”

“I never feel very much in any event,” Rhyme said.

“I…” Logan felt as if he had committed a shameful faux pas. “I apologize. I wasn’t thinking.”

A demurring nod. “What I’m asking has to do with Amelia.”

“Sachs?”

“There’s no reason to go after her.”

Logan had considered this and he now told Rhyme his conclusion. “No, I have no intention to. She’ll have the drive to find me. The tenacity. But she’s no match for me. She’ll be safe.”

And now Rhyme’s smile was faint. “Thank you… I was going to say, Richard. You are Richard Logan, right? Or is that fake?”

“That’s my real name.” Logan glanced at the screen again. The sidewalk outside was empty. No police. None of Rhyme’s associates returning. He and the criminalist were completely alone. It was time. “You’re remarkably calm.”

Rhyme replied, “Why shouldn’t I be? I’ve been living on borrowed time for years. Every day it’s a bit of surprise when I wake up.”

Logan dug into his gear bag and tossed another coil of wire, containing Randall Jessen’s fingerprints, onto the floor. He then opened a baggie and upended it, letting some of Randall’s hairs flutter to the ground nearby. He used one of the brother’s shoes to leave an impression in the spilled water. Then he planted more of Andi Jessen’s blond hairs, along with some fibers from one of her suits, which he’d gotten from her closet at work.

He looked up and checked the electrical connections again. Why was he hesitating? Perhaps it was that Rhyme’s death represented for him the end of an era. Killing the criminalist would be a vast relief. But it would also be a loss he’d feel forever. He supposed what he was experiencing now was what one felt making the decision to take a loved one off life support.

Close to you…

He slipped the remote control from his pocket, stood back from the wheelchair.

Lincoln Rhyme was studying him calmly. He sighed and said, “I guess that’s about it, then.”

Logan hesitated and his eyes narrowed, staring at Rhyme. There was something very different about the criminalist’s tone as he’d spoken those words. His facial expression too. And the eyes… the eyes were suddenly a predator’s.

Richard Logan actually shivered as he suddenly understood that that incongruous sentence, delivered so incongruously, was not directed toward him at all.

It was a message. To somebody else.

“What’ve you done?” Logan whispered, heart pounding. He stared at the small computer monitor. There was no sign that anybody was returning to the townhouse.

But… but what if they’d never left in the first place?

Oh, no…

Logan stared at Rhyme and then jammed his finger onto the two buttons of the remote control switch.

Nothing happened.

Rhyme said matter-of-factly, “As soon as you came upstairs one of our officers disconnected it.”

“No,” Logan gasped.

A creak sounded on the floor behind him. He spun around.

“Richard Logan, do not move!” It was that police detective they’d just been talking about, Amelia Sachs. “Keep your hands in view. If you move your hands you will be shot.”

Behind her were two other men. Logan took them to be police too. One was heavy and wearing a wrinkled blue suit. The other, skinnier, was in shirtsleeves, wearing black-framed glasses.

All three officers trained weapons on him.

But Logan’s eyes were on Amelia Sachs, who seemed the most eager to shoot. He realized that Rhyme had asked the question about Sachs to alert them that he was ready to say the magic words and spring the trap.

I guess that’s about it, then…

But the consequence was that she would have heard Logan’s comment about her, her inferior skills.

Still, when she stepped forward to cuff him, it was with utmost professionalism, gently almost. Then she eased him to the floor with minimal discomfort.

The heavy officer stepped forward and reached for the wires coiled around Rhyme.

“Gloves, please,” said the criminalist calmly.

The big cop hesitated. Then pulled on latex gloves and removed the cables. He said into his radio, “It’s clear up here. You can put the power back on.”

A moment later lights filled the room and, surrounded by the clicks of the equipment returning to life and the diodes flickering red, green and white, Richard Logan, the Watchmaker, was read his rights.

Chapter 79

IT WAS TIME for the heroics.

Not generally the bailiwick of inventors.

Charlie Sommers decided he had removed enough insulation from the lightweight cable so that he was ready to try for the short circuit.

In theory this should work.

The risk was that, in its desperation to get to the ground, the instant he moved it closer to the return, the massive voltage in the feeder line would arc to the cable then consume his body in a plasma spark. He was only ten feet above the concrete; Sommers had seen videos of arc flashes that were fifty feet in length.

But he’d waited long enough.

First step. Connect the cable to the main line.

Thinking of his wife, thinking of his children-and his other children: the inventions he’d fathered over the years-he leaned toward the hot wire and with a deep breath touched the lightweight cable to it, using his hands.

Nothing happened. So far, so good. His body and the wires were now at the same potential. In effect, Charlie Sommers was simply a portion of a 138,000v line.

He worked the bare section of the cable around the far side of the energized line and caught the end underneath. He twisted it so there was tight contact.

Gripping the insulated part of the lightweight cable, he eased back, in his unsure fire-hose swing, and stared at the place he’d decided to close the connection: a girder that rose to the ceiling but, more important for his purposes, descended deep into the earth.

To which all juice had a primal instinct to return.

The girder was about six feet away.

Charlie Sommers gave a faint laugh.

This was fucking ridiculous. The minute the exposed end of the other wire neared the metal beam, the current would anticipate the contact and lunge outward in a huge explosion of arc flash. Plasma, flame, molten metal drops flying at three thousand feet per second…

But he saw no other choice.

Now!

Cut its head off…

He began to feed the cable to the metal bar.

Six feet, five, four…

“Hey there! Charlie? Charlie Sommers?”

He gasped. The end of the cable swung wildly but he reeled it in fast.

“Who’s there?” Sommers blurted before realizing that it might be Andi Jessen’s brother, who’d come to shoot him.

“It’s Ron Pulaski. I’m that officer works with Detective Sachs.”

“Yes, what?” Sommers gasped. “What’re you doing here?”

“We’ve been trying to call you for a half hour.”

“Get out of here, Officer. It’s dangerous!”

“We couldn’t get through. We called you right after you hung up speaking to Amelia and Lincoln.”

Sommers steadied his voice. “I don’t have my goddamn phone. Look, I’m shutting down the power here, in the whole area. It’s the only way to stop him. There’s going to be a huge-”

“He’s already stopped.”

“What?”

“Yessir, they sent me here to find you. To tell you that what they were saying on the phone was fake. They knew the killer was listening in and they couldn’t tell you what they were really planning. We had to make him think we believed the attack was happening here. As soon as I left Lincoln’s, I tried to call you. But we couldn’t get through. Somebody said they saw you coming down here.”

Jesus Lord in heaven.

Sommers stared at the cable dangling below him. The juice in the feeder cable could decide at any moment that it wanted to take a shortcut to get back home and Sommers would simply disappear.

Pulaski called, “Say, what exactly’re you doing up there?”

Killing myself.

Sommers retracted the cable slowly and then he reached into the enclosure and began undoing the connection with the main line, expecting-no, positive-that at any moment he would hear, very, very briefly, the arc flash hum and bang as he died.

The process of unraveling the beast seemed to take forever.

“Anything I can do, sir?”

Yes, shut the hell up.

“Um, just stay back and give me a minute, Officer.”

“Sure.”

Finally, the cable came away from the feeder line and Sommers dropped it to the floor. Then he eased out of the fire hose sling, hung for a moment, and tumbled to the ground on top of the cable. He collapsed in pain from the fall but stood and tested for broken bones. He sensed there was none.

“What’s that you were saying, sir?” Pulaski asked.

He’d been repeating a frantic mantra: stay put, stay put, stay put…

But he told the cop, “Nothing.” Then he dusted off his slacks and looked around. He asked, “Hey, Officer?”

“Yessir?”

“By any chance you pass a restroom on your way down here?”

Chapter 80

“CHARLIE SOMMERS’S OKAY,” Sachs called, slipping away her cell phone. “Ron just called.”

Rhyme frowned. “I didn’t know he wasn’t okay.”

“Seems he tried to play hero. He was going to shut down the power at the convention center. Ron found him in the basement with a wire and some tools. He was hanging from the ceiling.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know.”

“What part of ‘stay put’ did he have trouble with?”

Sachs shrugged.

“You couldn’t’ve just called him?”

“Didn’t have his phone on him. Something about a hundred thousand volts.”

Andi Jessen’s brother was fine too, though filthy and hungry and furious. He’d been recovered from the back of Logan’s white van parked in the alley behind Rhyme’s townhouse. Logan had shared nothing with him and had kept him in the dark-in both senses. Randall Jessen had assumed he’d been kidnapped in some scheme to extort money from his wealthy CEO sister. Randall’d heard nothing of the attacks, and Logan’s plan was apparently to electrocute him in Rhyme’s basement, as if he’d accidentally touched a hot wire dismantling the switch he’d installed to kill Rhyme. He’d been reunited with his sister, who’d been briefed by Gary Noble about the situation.

Rhyme wondered if she’d respond to the fact that the target of her attacks in the press-the alternative energy world-had been behind the scheme.

Rhyme asked, “And Bob Cavanaugh? The Operations man?”

“McDaniel’s guys got him. He was in his office. No resistance. Tons of business records on start-up alternative energy companies the conspirators planned to do deals with after they’d taken over Algonquin. The Bureau’ll get the other names from his computer and phone records-if he doesn’t cooperate.”

A green cartel…

Rhyme now realized that Richard Logan, sitting cuffed and shackled in a chair between two uniformed patrolmen, was speaking to him. In a cool, eerily analytical voice, the killer repeated, “A setup? All fake. You knew all along.”

“I knew.” Rhyme regarded him carefully. Though he’d confirmed the name Richard Logan, it was impossible to think of him as that. To Rhyme he would always be the Watchmaker. The face was different, yes, after the plastic surgery, but the eyes were those of the same man who’d proved every bit as smart as Rhyme himself. Smarter even, on occasion. And unbridled by the trivia of law and conscience.

The shackles were sturdy and the cuffs tight but Lon Sellitto sat nearby anyway, keeping an eye on the man, as if the cop thought that Logan was using his considerable mental prowess to plan an escape.

But Rhyme believed not. The prisoner’s darting eyes had taken in the room and the other officers and had concluded that there was nothing to be gained by resisting.

“So,” Logan said evenly, “how did you do it?” He seemed genuinely curious.

As Sachs and Cooper logged and bagged the new evidence, Rhyme, with no small ego himself, was pleased to indulge him. “When our FBI agent told me that it was somebody else, not Galt, that jarred me out of my rut. You know the risk of making assumptions… I’d been assuming all along that Galt was the perp. But once that idea got turned upside down, I started thinking about the whole”-Rhyme smiled at the fortuitous word that popped into his mind-“the whole arc of the crimes. Take the trap at the school: What was the point of trying to hurt only two or three officers? And with a noisy generator? It occurred to me that that’d be a good way to get some planted evidence inside the lab-and big enough to hide a microphone.

“I took the chance that the generator was bugged and that you were listening. So I started rambling about new theories involving Andi Jessen and her brother, which is where the evidence was obviously leading us. But at the same time I was typing out instructions for everybody in the lab. They were all reading over my shoulder. I had Mel-my associate-scan the generator for a bug… and there it was. Well, if you wanted the generator to be found, that meant that any evidence in it was planted. So whoever it pointed to was not involved in the crimes: Andi Jessen and her brother were innocent.”

Logan was frowning. “But you never suspected her?”

“I did, yes. We thought Andi’d lied to us. You heard that on the microphone?”

“Yes, though I wasn’t sure what you meant.”

“She told Sachs that she got her skills from her father. As if she was hiding the fact that she’d been a lineman and could rig arc flashes. But if you think about what she said, she wasn’t denying that she’d worked in the field but that she was simply saying her talent was mostly on the business side of the operation… Well, if it wasn’t Andi or her brother, then who? I kept going back over the evidence.” A glance at the charts. “There were some items unaccounted for. The one that stuck in my mind was the spring.”

“Spring? Yes, you mentioned that.”

“We found a tiny hairspring at one of the scenes. Nearly invisible. We thought it could have been from a timer in some switchgear. But I decided if it could come from a timer, it could also be used in watchmaking. That put me in mind of you, of course.”

“A hairspring?” Logan’s face fell. “I always use a roller on my clothes”-he nodded to a rack of pet-hair rollers near an examination table-“to make sure I pick up any trace before I go out on a job. That must’ve fallen into my cuff. And you want to know something funny, Lincoln? It probably got there because I was putting away a lot of my old supplies and tools. What I told you before… I’d become fascinated with the idea of electronic timekeeping. That’s what I was going to try next. I wanted to make the most perfect clock in the world. Even better than the government’s atomic clock. But an electronic one.”

Rhyme continued, “And then all the other pieces fell into place. My conclusion about the letters-that they were written by Galt under threat-worked if you were the one dictating them. The alternative jet fuel? It was being tested mostly in military jets-but that means it was also being tested in some private and commercial flights. I decided it wouldn’t make sense for anybody to plan an attack at an airport or a military base; the security around the electrical systems would be too high. So where did that trace come from? The only aviation scenario that had come up recently didn’t involve this case at all; it involved you-in Mexico. And we found a green fiber at one of the scenes… it was the exact shade of Mexican police uniforms. And it had aviation fuel in it.”

“I left a fiber?” Angry with himself now. Furious.

“I supposed you picked it up from meeting with Arturo Diaz at the airport before you flew back to Philadelphia to kidnap Randall Jessen and drive to New York.”

Logan could only sigh, confirming Rhyme’s theory.

“Well, that was my theory, that you were involved. But it was purely speculation-until I realized I had the answer right in front of me. The definitive answer.”

“What do you mean?”

“The DNA. We had the analysis of the blood we found on the access door near the first substation attack. But I never ran it through CODIS-the DNA database. Why should we? We knew Galt’s identity.”

This was the final check. Not long ago Rhyme had typed instructions to Cooper-he couldn’t tell him orally because of the bug in the generator-to have the DNA lab send a copy of the sample to CODIS. “We had a sample of your DNA from your assignment in New York a few years ago. I was reading the confirmation that they were the same when you showed up. I scrambled to switch screens pretty quickly.”

Logan’s face tightened with anger at himself. “Yes, yes… In the substation, at the access door, I cut my finger on a burr of metal. I wiped the blood off as best I could but I was worried that you’d find it. It’s why I rigged the battery to blow and burn off the DNA.”

“Locard’s principle,” Rhyme said, citing the early-twentieth-century criminologist. He quoted, “ ‘In every crime there is an exchange’-”

Logan finished, “-‘between criminal and victim or criminal and the site of the crime. It may be very difficult to find, but the connection exists. And it is the obligation of every crime scene professional to find that one common bit of evidence that will lead to the perpetrator’s identity, if not his doorstep.’ ”

Rhyme couldn’t help but laugh. That particular quotation was his own, a paraphrase of Locard’s. It had appeared in an article about forensics he’d written only two or three months ago. Richard Logan had apparently been doing his homework too.

Or was it more than research?

That’s why I took the job… I needed to get close to you…

Logan said, “You’re not only a good criminalist, you’re a good actor. You had me fooled.”

“You’ve done some of that yourself now, haven’t you?”

The men’s eyes met and their gaze held steady. Then Sellitto’s phone rang and he answered, had a brief conversation and hung up. “Transport’s here.”

Three officers arrived in the doorway, two uniforms and a brown-haired detective in blue jeans, blue shirt and tan sports coat. He had an easy-going smile, which was tempered by the fact he wore two very large automatic pistols, one on each hip.

“Hey, Roland,” Amelia Sachs said, smiling.

Rhyme offered, “Haven’t seen you for a while.”

“Howdy. Well, you got yourself some catch here.” Roland Bell was a transplant from a sheriff’s office in North Carolina. He’d been a detective on the NYPD for some years but had yet to lose the Southern Mid-Atlantic twang. His specialty was protecting witnesses and making sure suspects didn’t escape. There was nobody better at the job. Rhyme was pleased that he’d be the one shepherding the Watchmaker down to detention. “He’ll be in good hands.”

At a nod from Bell, the patrolmen helped Logan to his feet. Bell checked the shackles and cuffs and then searched the man himself. He nodded and they headed for the door. The Watchmaker turned back, saying coyly, “I’ll see you again, Lincoln.”

“I know you will. I’m looking forward to it.”

The suspect’s smile was replaced by a perplexed look.

Rhyme continued, “I’ll be the expert forensic witness at your trial.”

“Maybe there. Maybe someplace else.” The man glanced at the Breguet. “Don’t forget to keep it wound.”

And with that he was gone.

Chapter 81

“I’M SORRY TO tell you, Rodolfo.”

The boisterous voice was absent completely. “Arturo? No. I can hardly believe it.”

Rhyme continued, explaining about the plot that Diaz had engineered-to kill his boss and make it seem like a by-product of an assassination mission to Mexico City.

In the ensuing silence, Rhyme asked, “He was a friend?”

“Ah, friendship… I would say, when it comes to betrayals, the wife who sleeps with a man and returns home to care for your children and to make you a hot meal is less of a sinner than the friend who betrays you for greed. What do you say to that, Captain Rhyme?”

“Betrayal is a symptom of the truth.”

“Ah, Captain Rhyme, you are a Buddhist? You are a Hindu?”

Rhyme had to laugh. “No.”

“But you wax philosophical… I think the answer is that Arturo Diaz was a Mexican law enforcer and that is reason enough for him to do what he did. Life is impossible down here.”

“Yet you persist. You continue to fight.”

“I do. But I’m a fool. Much like you, my friend. Could you not be making millions by writing security reports for corporations?”

The criminalist replied, “But what’s the fun of that?”

The laugh was genuine and rich. The Mexican asked, “What will happen to him now?”

“Logan? He’ll be convicted of murder for these crimes. And for crimes here several years ago.”

“Will he get the death penalty?”

“He could but he won’t be executed.”

“Why not? Those liberals in America that I hear so much about?”

“It’s more complicated than that. The question is one of momentary politics. Right now, the governor here doesn’t want to execute any prisoners, whatever they’ve done, because it would be awkward.”

“Especially so for the prisoner.”

“His opinion doesn’t much enter into the matter.”

“I suppose not. Well, despite such leniency, Captain, I think I would like America. Perhaps I’ll sneak across the border and become an illegal immigrant. I could work in McDonald’s and solve crimes at night.”

“I’ll sponsor you, Rodolfo.”

“Ha. My traveling there is about as likely as you coming to Mexico City for mole chicken and tequila.”

“Yes, that’s true too. Though I would like the tequila.”

“Now, I’m afraid I must go clean out the rats’ nest that my department has become. I may…”

The voice faded.

“What’s that, Commander?”

“I may have some questions of evidence. I know it’s presumptuous of me, but perhaps I could impose upon you.”

“I’d be delighted to help, however I can.”

“Very good.” Another chuckle. “Perhaps in a few years, if I am lucky, I can add those magic letters to my name too.”

“Magic letters?”

“RET.”

“You? Retire, Commander?”

“I am making a joke, Captain. Retirement is not for people like us. We will die on the job. Let’s pray that it’s a long time from now. Now, my friend, good-bye.”

They disconnected. Rhyme then ordered his phone to call Kathryn Dance in California. He gave her the news about the apprehension of Richard Logan. The conversation was brief. Not because he was feeling antisocial-just the contrary: He was thrilled at his victory.

But the aftermath of the dysreflexia attack was settling on him like cold dew. He let Sachs take over the phone call, girl talk, and Rhyme asked Thom to bring him some Glenmorangie.

“The eighteen year, if you would be so kind. Please and thank you.”

Thom poured a generous slug into the tumbler and propped it in the cup holder near his boss’s mouth. Rhyme sipped through the straw. He savored the smoky scotch and then swallowed it. He felt the warmth, the comfort, though it also accentuated that damn fatigue plaguing him the past week or so. He forced himself not to think about it.

When Sachs disconnected her call, he asked, “You’ll join me, Sachs?”

“You bet I will.”

“I feel like music,” he said.

“Jazz?”

“Sure.”

He picked Dave Brubeck, a recording from a live concert in the sixties. The signature tune, “Take Five,” came on and, with its distinctive five-four beat, the music cantered from speakers, scratchy and infectious.

As Sachs poured the liquor and sat beside him, her eyes strayed to the evidence boards. “There’s one thing we forgot about, Rhyme.”

“What?”

“That supposed terrorist group? Justice For the Earth.”

“That’s McDaniel’s case now. If we’d found any evidence I’d be more concerned. But… nothing.” Rhyme sipped more liquor and felt another wave of the persistent fatigue nestle around him. Still he managed a small joke: “Personally I think it was just a wrong number from the cloud zone.”

Chapter 82

THE EARTH DAY festivities in Central Park were in full swing.

At six-twenty on this pleasant though cool and overcast evening, an FBI agent was on the edge of the Sheep Meadow, scanning the crowd, most of which were protesting something or another. Some picnickers and some tourists. But the crowd of fifty thousand mostly just seemed pissed off about one thing or another: global warming, oil, big business, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases.

And methane.

Special Agent Timothy Conradt blinked as he looked at a group of people protesting bovine flatulence. Methane from livestock apparently burned holes in the ozone layer too.

Cow farts.

What a crazy world.

Conradt was sporting an undercover mustache and wore jeans and a baggy shirt, concealing his radio and weapon. His wife had ironed the wrinkles into his garments that morning, vetoing his idea that he sleep in his clothes to get that “lived-in” look.

He was no fan of knee-jerk liberals and people who’d sell the country out in the name of… well, who knew what? Complacency, Europe, globalism, socialism, cowardice.

But one thing he had in common with these people was the environment. Conradt lived for the outdoors. Hunting, fishing, hiking. So he sympathized.

He was scanning the crowds carefully because even though the perp known as the Watchmaker had been collared, ASAC Tucker McDaniel still was sure that that group Justice For the Earth was going to try something. The SIGINT hits were compelling, even nontech Conradt had to admit. Justice For the Earth. Or, as the agents were referring to it now, per McDaniel’s instruction, JFTE, pronounced “Juf-tee.”

Teams of agents and NYPD cops were deployed throughout the city, covering the convention center near the Hudson River, a parade downtown in Battery Park and this gathering in Central Park.

McDaniel’s theory was that they’d misread the connection among Richard Logan, Algonquin Consolidated Power and JFTE, but it was likely that the group could have formed an alliance with, possibly, an Islamic fundamentalist cell.

A symbiotic construct.

A phrase that would give the agents plenty of ammunition for the next few months when they were out for drinks.

Conradt’s own feeling, from years on the street, was that JFTE may have existed but it was just a bunch of cranks, of no threat to anybody. He strolled around casually, but all the while he was looking for people who fit the profile. Watching where their arms were in relation to their bodies, watching for certain types of backpacks, watching for a gait that might reveal if they were carrying a weapon or an IED. Watching for pale jaws that suggested a newly shaved beard, or a woman’s absent touch to her hair, possibly indicating her ill ease at being in public without a hijab for the first time since she’d reached adolescence.

And always: watching the eyes.

So far Conradt had seen some devout eyes and oblivious eyes and curious eyes.

But none that suggested they were in the head of a man or woman who wanted to murder a large number of people in the name of a deity. Or in the name of whales or trees or spotted owls. He circulated for a while and finally eased up beside his partner, an unsmiling thirty-five-year-old, dressed in a long peasant skirt and a blouse as baggy and concealing as Conradt’s shirt.

“Anything?”

A pointless question because she would have called him-and every other of the multitude of law enforcers here tonight-if she’d spotted “anything.”

A shake of the head.

Pointless questions weren’t worth answering aloud, in Barb’s opinion.

Bar-bar-a, he corrected himself. As she’d corrected him when they first started working together.

“Are they here yet?” Conradt nodded at the stage set up at the south end of the Sheep Meadow, referring to the speakers scheduled to begin at six-thirty: the two senators who’d flown into the city from Washington. They’d been working with the President on environmental issues, sponsoring legislation that made the green libbers happy and half the corporations in America mad enough to wring their necks over.

A concert would follow. He couldn’t decide if most people were here for the music or the speeches. With this crowd, it was probably evenly divided.

“Just got here,” Barbara said.

They both scanned for a while. Then Conradt said, “That acronym’s weird. Juf-tee. They should just call it JFTE.”

“Juf-tee’s not an acronym.”

“What do you mean?”

Barbara explained, “By definition, to be an acronym, the letters themselves have to spell an actual word.”

“In English?”

She gave what he thought was a condescending sigh. “Well, in an English-speaking country. Obviously.”

“So NFL isn’t an acronym?”

“No, that’s initials. ARC-American Resource Council. That’s an acronym.”

Conradt thought: Barbara is a…

“How about BIC?” he asked.

“I suppose. I don’t know about brand names. What does it stand for?”

“I forget.”

Their radios clattered simultaneously and they cocked their heads. “Be advised, the visitors are at the stage. Repeat, the visitors are at the stage.”

The visitors-a euphemism for the senators.

The command post agent ordered Conradt and Barbara to move into position on the west side of the stage. They made their way forward.

“You know, this actually was a sheep meadow,” Conradt told BIC. “The city fathers let them graze here until the thirties. Then they got moved to Prospect Park. Brooklyn. The sheep, I mean.”

Barbara looked at him blankly. Meaning: What does that have to do with anything?

Conradt let her precede him up a narrow path.

There was a burst of applause. And shouts.

Then the two senators were up on the podium. The first one to speak leaned forward into the microphone and began talking in low, resonant tones, his voice echoing across the Sheep Meadow. The crowd was soon hoarse from shouting their mad approval every two minutes or so as the senator fed them platitudes.

Preaching to the converted.

It was then that Conradt saw something off to the side of the stage, moving steadily to the front, where the senators were standing, He stiffened then leapt forward.

“What?” Barbara called, reaching for her weapon.

“Juf-tee,” he whispered. And grabbed his radio.

Chapter 83

AT 7 P.M. Fred Dellray returned to the Manhattan Federal Building from visiting William Brent, aka Stanley Palmer, aka a lot of other names, in the hospital. The man was badly injured but had regained consciousness. He’d be discharged in three or four days.

Brent had already been contacted by the city lawyers about a settlement for the accident. Being hit by an NYPD police officer who fucks up with a squad car was pretty much a no-brainer. The figure being offered was about $50,000, plus medical bills.

So William Brent was having a pretty good couple of days, financially at least, being the recipient of both the settlement, tax-free, as a personal injury award, and the 100 Gs Dellray had paid him-tax-free, too, though solely because the IRS and New York Department of Revenue would never hear a whisper about it.

Dellray was in his office, savoring the news that Richard Logan, the Watchmaker, was in custody, when his assistant, a sharp African-American woman in her twenties, said, “You hear about that Earth Day thing?”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know the details. But that group, Juf-tee-”

“What?”

“JFTE. Justice For the Earth. Whatever it is. The ecoterror group?”

Dellray set down his coffee, his heart pounding. “It’s real?”

“Yep.”

“What happened?” he asked urgently.

“All I heard is they got into Central Park, right near those two senators-the ones the President sent down to speak at the rally. The SAC wants you in his office. Now.”

“Anybody hurt, killed?” Dellray whispered in dismay.

“I don’t know.”

Grim-faced, the lanky agent stood. He started down the hallway quickly. His variation of the lope, the way he usually walked. The gait came, of course, from the street.

Which he was now about to say good-bye to. He’d tracked down an important clue to help catch the Watchmaker. But he’d failed in the primary mission: to find the terror group.

And that’s what McDaniel would use to crucify him… in his bright-eyed yet somber, energetic yet subtle way. Apparently he already had if the SAC wanted him.

Well, keep at it, Fred. You’re doing a good job…

As he walked he glanced into offices, to find somebody to ask about the incident. But they were empty. It was after hours but more likely, he guessed, everybody’d sped to Central Park after Justice For the Earth was spotted. That was perhaps the best indicator that his career was over: Nobody had even called to request his presence in the operation.

Of course, there was another possible reason for that too-and for the summons to the SAC’s office: the stolen $100K.

What the hell had he been thinking of? He’d done it for the city he loved, for the citizens he was sworn to protect. But did he actually believe he’d get away with it? Especially with an ASAC who wanted him out and who pored over his agents’ paperwork like a crossword-puzzle addict.

Could he negotiate his way out of jail time?

He wasn’t sure. With the fuckup over Justice For the Earth, his stock was real low.

Down one corridor of the nondescript office building. Down another.

Finally he came to the den of the special agent in charge. His assistant announced Dellray and the agent walked inside the large corner office.

“Fred.”

“Jon.”

The SAC, Jonathan Phelps, mid-fifties, brushed at his gray swept-back hair, pushing it a little further back, and motioned the agent into a chair across from his cluttered desk.

No, Dellray thought, cluttered wasn’t the right word. It was ordered and organized; it was just layered in three inches of files. This was, after all, New York. There was a lot that could go wrong and needed mending by people like the SAC.

Dellray tried to read the man but could find no clues. He too had worked undercover earlier in his career. But that wouldn’t buy Dellray any sympathy, that wisp of common past. That was one thing about the Bureau; federal law and the regulations promulgated thereunder trumped everything. The SAC was the only person in the room, which didn’t surprise Dellray. Tucker McDaniel would be reading rights to terrorists in Central Park.

“So, Fred. I’ll get right to it.”

“Sure.”

“About this Juf-tee thing.”

“Justice For the Earth.”

“Right.” Another sweep through the opulent hair. It was as ordered after the fingers left as when they arrived.

“I just want to understand. You didn’t find anything about the group, right?”

Dellray hadn’t gotten this far by poking at the truth. “No, Jon. I blew it. I hit up all my usual sources and a half dozen new ones. Everybody I’m running now and a dozen I’ve retired. Two dozen. I didn’t come up with squat. I’m sorry.”

“And yet Tucker McDaniel’s surveillance team’s had ten clear hits.”

The cloud zone…

Dellray wasn’t going to trash McDaniel either, not even wing him a bit. “That’s what I understand. His teams came up with a bucketful of good details. The personnel-this Rahman, Johnston. And code words about weapons.” He sighed. “I heard there was an incident, Jon. What happened?”

“Oh, yeah. Juf-tee made a move.”

“Casualties?”

“We’ve got a video. You want to see it?”

Dellray thought, No, sir, you betcha I don’t. The last thing I want to see is people hurt because I screwed up. Or Tucker McDaniel leading in a takedown team to save the day. But he said, “Sure. Roll it.”

The SAC leaned over his laptop and hit some keys, then spun the unit around for Dellray to look at. He expected to see one of the typical Bureau surveillance videos, shot with a wide-angle lens, low contrast to pick up all the details, information at the bottom: location and by-the-second time stamp.

Instead, he was looking at a CNN newscast.

CNN?

A smiling, coiffed woman reporter, holding a sheaf of notes, was talking to a man in his thirties, wearing a mismatched suit jacket and slacks. He was dark-complexioned and his hair was cropped short. He was smiling uneasily, eyes shifting between the reporter and the camera. A young redheaded boy with freckles, about eight years old, stood next to him.

The reporter was saying to the man, “Now, I understand your students have been preparing for Earth Day for the past several months.”

“That’s right,” the man answered, awkward but proud.

“There are a lot of different groups here in Central Park tonight, supporting one issue or another. Do your students have a particular environmental cause?”

“Not really. They have a lot of different interests: renewable energy, risks to the rain forest, global warming and carbon dioxide, protecting the ozone layer, recycling.”

“And who’s your young assistant here?”

“This is a student of mine, Tony Johnston.”

Johnston?

“Hello, Tony. Can you tell our viewers at home the name of your environmental club at school?”

“Uhm, yeah. It’s Just Us Kids for the Earth.”

“And those are quite some posters. Did you and your classmates make them yourself?”

“Uhm, yeah. But, you know, our teacher, Mr. Rahman”-He glanced up at the man beside him-“he helped us some.”

“Well, good for you, Tony. And thanks to you and all your fellow students in Peter Rahman’s third-grade class at Ralph Waldo Emerson elementary school in Queens, who believe you’re never too young to start making a difference when it comes to the environment… This is Kathy Brigham reporting from-”

Under the SAC’s stabbing finger, the screen went blank. He sat back. Dellray couldn’t tell if he was going to laugh or utter some obscenity. “Justice,” he said, enunciating carefully. “Just Us… Kids.” He sighed. “Want to guess how much shit this office is in, Fred?”

Dellray cocked a bushy eyebrow.

“We begged Washington for an extra five million dollars, on top of the expense of mobilizing four hundred agents. Two dozen warrants were ramrodded through magistrates’ offices in New York, Westchester, Philly, Baltimore and Boston. We had absolutely rock solid SIGINT that an ecoterror group, worse than Timothy McVeigh, worse than Bin Laden, was going to bring America to its knees with the attack of all time.

“And they turned out to be a bunch of eight- and nine-year-olds. The code words for the weapons, ‘paper and supplies’? They meant paper and supplies. The communication wasn’t going on in the cloud zone; it went on face-to-face when they woke up from naptime at school. The woman working with Rahman? It was probably little Tony because his goddamn voice hasn’t changed yet… It’s a good thing we didn’t get SIGINT hits about somebody, quote, ‘releasing doves’ in Central Park because we might’ve called in a fucking surface-to-air missile strike.”

There was silence for a moment.

“You’re not gloating, Fred.”

A shrug of the lanky shoulders.

“You want Tucker’s job?”

“And where will he-?”

“Elsewhere. Washington. Does it matter?… So? The ASAC spot? You want it, you can move in tonight.”

Dellray didn’t hesitate. “No, Jon. Thanks, but no.”

“You’re one of the most respected agents in this office. People look up to you. I’ll ask you to reconsider.”

“I want to be on the street. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. It’s important to me.” Sounding as un-street as any human being possibly could.

“You cowboys.” The SAC chuckled. “Now you might wanta get back to your office. McDaniel’s on his way here for a conversation. I’m assuming you don’t want to meet him.”

“Probably not.”

As Dellray was at the door, the SAC said, “Oh, Fred, there’s one other thing.”

The agent stopped in midlope.

“You worked the Gonzalez case, didn’t you?”

Dellray had faced down some of the most dangerous assholes in the city without his pulse speeding up a single beat. He now was sure his neck was throbbing visibly as the blood pumped. “The drug collar, Staten Island. Right.”

“There was a little mix-up somewhere, it seems.”

“Mix-up?”

“Yeah, with the evidence.”

“Really?”

The SAC rubbed his eyes. “At the bust your teams scored thirty ki’s of smack, a couple dozen guns and some big bricks of money.”

“That’s right.”

“The press release said the cash recovered was one point one million. But we were getting the case ready for the grand jury and it looks like there’s only one million even in the evidence locker.”

“Mislogging a hundred K?”

The SAC cocked his head. “Naw, it’s something else. Not mislogging.”

“Uh-huh.” Dellray breathed deeply. Oh, man… This is it.

“I looked over the paperwork and, it was funny, the second zero on the chain-of-custody card, the zero after the one million, was real skinny. You look at it fast, you could think it was a one. Somebody glanced at it and wrote the press release wrong. They wrote, ‘one point one.’ ”

“I see.”

“Just wanted to tell you, if the question comes up: It was a typo. The exact amount the Bureau collected in the Gonzalez bust was one million even. That’s official.”

“Sure. Thanks, Jon.”

A frown. “For what?”

“Clarifying.”

A nod. It was a nod with a message and that message had been delivered. The SAC added, “By the way, you did a good job helping nail Richard Logan. He had that plan a few years ago to take out dozens of soldiers and Pentagon people. Some of our folks too. Glad he’s going away forever.”

Dellray turned and left the office. As he returned to his own, he allowed himself a single nervous laugh.

Third graders?

Then pulled out his mobile to text Serena and to tell her that he’d be home soon.

Chapter 84

LINCOLN RHYME GLANCED up to see Pulaski in the doorway.

“Rookie, what’re you doing here? I thought you were logging in evidence in Queens.”

“I was. Just…” His voice slowed like a car hitting a patch of soupy fog.

“Just?”

It was close to 9 p.m., and they were alone in Rhyme’s parlor. Comforting domestic sounds in the kitchen. Sachs and Thom were getting dinner ready. It was, Rhyme noticed, well past cocktail hour and he was a bit piqued that nobody had filled up his plastic tumbler of scotch again.

A failing he now told Pulaski to remedy, which the young cop did.

“That’s not a double,” Rhyme muttered. But Pulaski seemed not to hear. He’d walked to the window, eyes outside.

Shaping up to be a dramatic scene from a slow-moving Brit drama, Rhyme deduced, and sipped the smoky liquor through the straw.

“I’ve kind of made a decision. I wanted to tell you first.”

“Kind of?” Rhyme chided once again.

“I mean, I have made a decision.”

Rhyme raised his eyebrow. He didn’t want to be too encouraging. What was coming next? he wondered, though he believed he had an idea. Rhyme’s life might have been devoted to science but he’d also been in charge of hundreds of employees and cops. And despite his impatience, his gruffness, his fits of temper, he’d been a reasonable and fair boss.

As long as you didn’t screw up.

“Go on, Rookie.”

“I’m leaving.”

“The area?”

“The force.”

“Ah.”

Rhyme had become aware of body language since he’d known Kathryn Dance. He sensed that Pulaski was now delivering lines he’d rehearsed. Many times.

The cop rubbed his hand through his short blond hair. “William Brent.”

“Dellray’s CI?”

“Right, yessir.”

Rhyme thought once more about reminding the young man that he didn’t need to use such deferential appellations. But he said only, “Go on, Pulaski.”

His face grim, eyes turbulent, Pulaski sat down in the creaking wicker chair near Rhyme’s Storm Arrow. “At Galt’s place, I was spooked. I panicked. I didn’t exercise good judgment. I wasn’t aware enough of procedures.” As if in summary, he added, “I didn’t assess the situation properly and adjust my behavior accordingly.”

Like a schoolboy who wasn’t sure of the test answers and was rattling them off quickly, hoping one would stick.

“He’s out of his coma.”

“But he might’ve died.”

“And that’s why you’re quitting?”

“I made a mistake. It nearly cost somebody his life… I just don’t feel I can keep functioning at full capacity.”

Jesus, where did he get these lines?

“It was an accident, Rookie.”

“And one that shouldn’t’ve happened.”

“Are there any other kinds of accidents?”

“You know what I mean, Lincoln. It’s not like I haven’t thought this through.”

“I can prove that you have to stay, that it’d be wrong for you to quit.”

“What, say that I’m talented, I have a lot to contribute?” The cop’s face was skeptical. He was young but he looked a lot older than when Rhyme had met him. Policing will do that.

So will working with me, Lincoln Rhyme reflected.

“You know why you can’t quit? You’d be a hypocrite.”

Pulaski blinked.

Rhyme continued, an edge to his voice. “You missed your window of opportunity.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Okay, you fucked up and somebody was injured badly. But then when it looked like Brent was a perp with outstanding paper, you thought you’d been given a reprieve, right?”

“Well… I guess.”

“You suddenly didn’t care that you’d hit him. Since he was, what, less than human?”

“No, I just-”

“Let me finish. The minute after you backed into that guy, you had a choice to make: Either you should’ve decided that the risk of collateral damage and accidents isn’t acceptable to you and quit on the spot. Or you should’ve put the whole thing behind you and learned to live with what happened. It doesn’t make any difference if that guy was a serial killer or a deacon at his church. And it’s intellectually dishonest for you to whine about it now.”

The rookie’s eyes narrowed with anger and he was about to offer a defense of some sort, but Rhyme continued, “You made a mistake. You didn’t commit a crime… Well, mistakes happen in this business. The problem is that when they do it’s not like accounting or making shoes. When we fuck up, there’s a chance somebody’s going to get killed. But if we stopped and worried about that, we’d never get anything done. We’d be looking over our shoulders all the time and that would mean more people would die because we weren’t doing our jobs.”

“Easy for you to say,” Pulaski snapped angrily.

Good for him, Rhyme thought, but kept his face solemn.

“Have you ever been in a situation like this?” Pulaski muttered.

Of course he had. Rhyme had made mistakes. Dozens, if not hundreds, of them. It was a mistake years ago, one that indeed resulted in the deaths of innocent people, that led to the case that brought Rhyme and Sachs together for the first time. But he didn’t want a band-of-brothers argument at the moment. “That’s not the point, Pulaski. The point is you’ve already made your decision. Coming back here with the evidence from Galt’s, after you’d run over Brent, you lost the right to quit. So it’s a nonissue.”

“This is eating me up.”

“Well, it’s time to tell it-whatever the hell it is-to stop eating. Part of being a cop is putting that wall up.”

“Lincoln, you’re not listening to me.”

“I did listen. I considered your arguments and I rejected them. They’re invalid.”

“They’re valid to me.”

“No, they’re not. And I’ll tell you why.” Rhyme hesitated. “Because they’re not valid to me… and you and I are a lot alike, Pulaski. I myself hate to goddamn admit it, but it’s true.”

This brought the young man up short.

“Now, forget all this crap you’ve been boring me with. I’m glad you’re here because I need you to do some follow-up work. At the-”

Pulaski stared at the criminalist and gave a cold laugh. “I’m not doing anything. I’m quitting. I’m not listening to you.”

“Well, you’re not going to quit now. You can do it in a few days. I need you. The case-your case as much as mine-isn’t over with yet. We have to make absolutely sure Logan’s convicted. You agree?”

A sigh. “I agree.”

“Before McDaniel got removed from command and sent to the cloud zone, or wherever he went, he had his men search Bob Cavanaugh’s office. He didn’t call us to do it. The Bureau’s Evidence Response Team is good-I helped set it up. But we should’ve walked the grid too. I want you to do that now. Logan was saying there’s a cartel involved and I want to make sure every one of them gets nailed.”

A resigned grimace. “I’ll do it. But that’s my last assignment.” Shaking his head, the young man stormed from the room.

Lincoln Rhyme struggled to keep the smile from his face as he sought the straw sprouting from his tumbler of whisky.

Chapter 85

LINCOLN RHYME WAS now alone.

Ron Pulaski was walking the grid at Algonquin Consolidated. Mel Cooper and Lon Sellitto were back in their respective homes. Roland Bell had reported that Richard Logan was tucked away safely in a special high-security wing of downtown detention.

Amelia Sachs had been downtown too, helping with the paperwork, but was now back in Brooklyn. Rhyme hoped she might be taking a little time to herself, maybe to sneak a drive in her Cobra Torino. She occasionally took Pammy out on the road. The girl reported that the drives were “untotallybelievable,” which he interpreted as meaning “exhilarating.”

He knew, though, that the girl was never in any danger. Unlike when Sachs was by herself, she knew the right moment to pull back when her nature tried to assert itself.

Thom was out too, with his partner, a reporter for The New York Times. He’d wanted to stay at home and keep an eye on his boss, watching for horrific side effects from the dysreflexia attack or for who knew what? But the criminalist had insisted he go out for the night.

“You’ve got a curfew,” he’d snapped. “Midnight.”

“Lincoln, I’ll be back before-”

“No. You’ll be back after midnight. It’s a negative curfew.”

“That’s crazy. I’m not leaving-”

“I’ll fucking fire you if you come back before then.”

The aide examined him carefully and said, “Okay. Thanks.”

Rhyme had no patience for the gratitude and proceeded to ignore the aide as he busied himself on the computer, organizing the lists of evidence that would be turned over to the prosecutor for the trial, at the end of which the Watchmaker would go to jail for an impressive assortment of crimes, including capital murder. He would surely be convicted but New York, unlike California and Texas, treated the death penalty like an embarrassing birthmark in the middle of its forehead. As he’d told Rodolfo Luna, he doubted the man would die.

Other jurisdictions would be vying for him too. But he’d been caught in New York; they’d have to wait in line.

Rhyme secretly was not troubled by a life sentence. Had Logan been killed during the confrontation here-say, going after a gun to hurt Sachs or Sellitto-that would have been a fair end, an honest end. That Rhyme had captured him and that he’d spend the rest of his life in prison was justice enough. Lethal injection seemed cheap. Insulting. And Rhyme wouldn’t want to be part of the case that sent the man on that final stroll to the gurney.

Enjoying the solitude, Rhyme now dictated several pages of crime scene reports. Some forensic officers wrote lyrical ones, dramatic or poetic. This wasn’t Rhyme’s way. The language was lean and hard-cast metal, not carved wood. He reviewed it and was pleased, though irritated at the gaps. He was waiting for some analytical results to come in. Still, he reminded himself that impatience was a sin too, though not one as grave as carelessness, and that the case would not suffer if the final report were delayed for a day or two.

Good, he allowed. More to do-always more to do-but good.

Rhyme looked over the lab, left in pristine shape by Mel Cooper, presently at his mother’s home in Queens, where he lived, or perhaps, after a quick check-in on Mom, with his Scandinavian girlfriend; they might be dancing up a storm by now in some ballroom in Midtown.

Aware of a slight headache, like the one he’d experienced earlier, he glanced at a nearby shelf of his medications. And noticed a bottle of clonidine, the vasodilator, that had possibly saved his life earlier. It occurred to him that if he had an attack at this moment he might very well not survive. The bottle was inches away from his hands. But it might as well have been miles.

Rhyme looked over the familiar evidence boards, filled with Sachs’s and Mel Cooper’s writing. There were smears and cross-outs, erasures of false starts, misspellings and downright errors.

An emblem for the way criminal cases always unfolded.

He then gazed at the equipment: the density gradient device, the forceps and vials, the gloves, the flasks, the collection gear and the battleships of the line: the scanning electron microscope and the chromatograph/mass spectrometer, silent and bulky. He thought back on the many, many hours he’d spent on these machines and their predecessors, recalled the sound of the units, the smell as he sacrificed a sample in the fiery heart of the chromatograph to learn what a mysterious compound really was. Often, the debate: If you destroyed your sole sample to find the identity and whereabouts of the perp, you risked jeopardizing the case at trial because the sample had disappeared.

Lincoln Rhyme always voted to burn.

He recalled the rumble of the machine under his hand when his hand could still feel rumbles.

He now looked too at the snaky wires crisscrossing the parquet floor, remembered feeling-in his jaw and head only, of course-the bumps as the wheelchair thumped over them on the way from one examining table to another or to the computer monitor.

Wires…

He then wheeled into the den, looking at family pictures. Thinking of his cousin Arthur. His uncle Henry. Thinking too of his parents.

And of Amelia Sachs, of course. Always of Amelia.

Then the good memories faded and he couldn’t help thinking about how his failings had nearly cost her her life today. Because his rebellious body had betrayed them all. Rhyme and Sachs and Ron Pulaski. And who knew how many ESU officers who might have been electrocuted storming the rigged school in Chinatown?

From there his thoughts continued to spiral and he realized that the incident was a symbol of their relationship. The love was there, of course, but he couldn’t deny that he was holding her back. That she was only partly the person she could be, if she were with somebody else, or even on her own.

This wasn’t self-pity, and, in fact, Rhyme was feeling oddly exhilarated by where his thoughts were going.

He considered what would happen if she were to go on in life alone. Dispassionately he pictured the scenario. And he concluded that Amelia Sachs would be just fine. Once again he had an image of Ron Pulaski and Sachs running Crime Scene in a few years.

Now, in the quiet den across from the lab, surrounded by pictures of his family, Rhyme glanced down at something that sat on the table nearby. Colorful and glossy. It was the brochure that the assisted-suicide advocate Arlen Kopeski had left.

Choices…

Rhyme was amused to note that the brochure had been designed, cleverly, with the disabled in mind. You didn’t need to pick it up and flip through it. The phone number of the euthanasia organization was printed on the front and in large type-in the event that the condition spurring someone to kill himself involved deteriorating vision.

As he gazed at the brochure, his mind spun. The plan that was formulating itself would take some organizing.

It would take some secrecy.

It would take some conspiracy. And bribery.

But such was the life of a quadriplegic, a life where thinking was free and easy but where acting required complicity.

The plan would take some time too. But nothing that was important in life ever happened quickly. Rhyme was filled with the thrill that comes with making a firm decision.

His big concern was making sure that his testimony against the Watchmaker regarding the evidence could be heard by the jury without Rhyme’s presence. There’s a procedure for this: sworn depositions. Besides, Sachs and Mel Cooper were seasoned witnesses for the prosecution. He believed that Ron Pulaski would be too.

He’d talk to the prosecutor tomorrow, a private conversation, and have a court reporter come to the townhouse and take his testimony. Thom would think nothing of it.

Smiling, Lincoln Rhyme wheeled back into the empty lab with its electronics and software and-ah, yes-the wires that would allow him to make the phone call he’d been thinking of, no, obsessing over, from virtually the moment the Watchmaker was arrested.

Ten days after Earth Day