The computer surveillance center down at One Police Plaza.
He held up his phone. “And look who got videoed slipping into and out of Claire Porter’s building last week. The basement.”
It was a screenshot of a man in dark clothing and a stocking cap, carrying an orange vest and yellow hard hat. A bag was slung over his shoulder. It appeared heavy.
Identical to the image of Unsub 47 as he’d left the geothermal site later that same day, heading for the subway—minus the bag.
Sellitto said, “I had RTCC pull all the videos from her apartment to the drilling site. He walks right to the construction site, puts on his hat and vest and vanishes inside. It was an hour before he left and walked to the subway. And then I ordered videos near the sites of all the other gas fires. Within the space of two hours, Unsub Forty-Seven broke into every single one of them.”
Jesus. The unsub planted gas line bombs meant to mimic fires after the quakes? What was this about? Rhyme said, “I want to see the device. Get it here fast.”
“Already ordered. I thought you would. It’ll be here any minute.”
“And have an ECT crew walk the grid around where it was found in Ms. Porter’s building. Probably contaminated as hell but we’ll give it a shot.”
“K. Will do. Thanks. I gotta go. Mayor wants a briefing. You’ll copy me on all your brilliant insights, right?”
Rhyme grunted.
Sellitto pulled his jacket off the hook and left. Just as he stepped through the door, Ron Pulaski arrived, nodded to the lieutenant and continued into the hallway. Rhyme wheeled into the hallway to greet him.
The young officer sniffed the air and said, “I smell gas.”
Rhyme realized he did too, very faint. “It was Lon.” He explained about the IED that ate through the line at Claire Porter’s apartment. “Disarmed before it ignited. But anybody nearby would’ve picked up some odorant.” Since explosive—and suffocating—natural gas was odorless, sulfur-based chemicals, reeking of rotten eggs, were added to warn of leaks.
He explained they’d learned that the fires after the earthquakes were actually arson.
The young officer frowned at this. “Who set them?”
“It appears…and note that word. It appears to be Unsub Forty-Seven.”
“No way,” Pulaski muttered.
“We’ll see.” Rhyme nodded toward the box of files that Carreras-López’s driver had delivered. “Those’re the files in the El Halcón. Can you run the analysis tonight?”
Not really a question.
“Sure.”
“And I’m going to need you to walk the grid at the scene.”
“What scene?”
“Long Island. The warehouse where the El Halcón shoot-out took place. It’ll all be in the file. And remember—”
The Rookie whispered, “Not a word to anyone.”
Rhyme winked. Pulaski blinked at the alien expression,
The young officer collected the box for his furtive assignment and left.
Back to the parlor—where nobody seemed to have noticed Pulaski’s arrival, sans box, or his departure with it.
The buzzer rang yet again and Rhyme recognized the caller. He instructed the security system to open the door.
Into the parlor walked an officer from the Bomb Squad, based out of the 6th Precinct in Greenwich Village.
“Brad.”
“Lincoln.” Lieutenant Bradley Geffen, a compact, gray-haired man, walked forward and had no hesitation shaking Rhyme’s somewhat functioning right hand. Often people were intimidated by the disability but this was a man who would lie on his belly with tweezers and screwdriver and dismantle IEDs that could turn him into red vapor. Not much fazed him. If he resembled anyone, it would be a drill sergeant, with his sinewy, etched face, crew cut, piercing eyes.
He nodded a greeting to the others and stepped to an examination table in the parlor.
“What do we have?” Rhyme asked.
“Our boys and gals went over it.” He extracted an evidence bag from the attaché case he carried. “Never seen anything like it. But it’s pretty damn smart.”
He held it out for Rhyme to look at. Inside the bag was what appeared to be a typical white plastic thermostat housing along with some other metallic and plastic parts, none of which he recognized.
Turning it over, Geffen said, “There. See that hole? A timer opened a little spigot. Acid dripped out and melted the gas line. About ten minutes later, this part…” He touched a small gray box with two electrodes on it. “It would strike a spark. That would ignite both the gas and the solvent—it’s very flammable. Now, the delay was smart. It let the room build up with gas but not force all the air out.”
A room filled with gas only will sometimes not blow up. As with all fires, both air and fuel are required.
“We’ll take over, Bradley. Thanks.”
Geffen nodded and stepped out of the room. He moved stiffly, the result of an IED that detonated at a woman’s health clinic during the render-safe operation. (There was grim irony in the fanatics’ tactic: They’d planted the bomb between two buildings—the clinic and what they hadn’t realized was a church’s daycare center. If the structures hadn’t been evacuated, the daycare center would have sustained far more damage and injuries than the clinic.)
Cooper filled out the chain-of-custody card and began his analysis. He found no prints, and sent swabs out for DNA testing. He took a sample of the acid and ran it through the gas chromatograph. It would take some minutes for the results.
“Detonates by digital timer,” Cooper said as he examined the components with tweezers and a probe. “Battery life about two months.”
“It doesn’t look handmade,” Rhyme observed.
“No. Professionally assembled. Sold on the arms market, I’d imagine.”
“Any idea where it would’ve come from?”
“Nope. Nothing I’ve ever come across.” Cooper looked over the chromatograph/spectrometer. “Got the acid used to melt the line. Well, it’s not acid. It’s trichlorobenzene. Gas pipes are usually polyethylene and impervious to most acids. But benzene derivatives will melt them. And—”
“No. Can’t be.” Rhyme was staring at the evidence charts.
“What, Lincoln?”
What he was thinking seemed impossible. Or would have, if he hadn’t just learned about Unsub 47’s likely planting of the gas line IEDs.
“Get Lon back here. And do you have Edward Ackroyd’s number?”
“Somewhere.”
“Find it. I want him here. Now.”
“Sure.”
“Dial Sachs,” he commanded his phone.
She answered a minute later. “Rhyme.”
“I need you to run another scene, Sachs. Well, to be accurate, to run a scene you’ve run before but to look for something else.”
“Where?”
“It’s the geothermal site. The drilling shafts again.”
Where, he deduced, though she hadn’t mentioned it, she’d nearly been buried alive.
Sachs was silent.
There were plenty of competent evidence collection techs who could walk the grid and could probably find what he needed. But no one was better than Amelia Sachs. He wanted her, and only her.
“Sachs?”
“I’ll run it,” she said in a flat voice. “Tell me what I’m looking for.”
Chapter 40
Forty minutes later Sellitto and Ackroyd were in the parlor, along with Mel Cooper. Amelia Sachs was joining them, walking through the elegant archway that separated the hallway from the parlor.
Rhyme noted that she didn’t seem troubled to have revisited her near-burial ground. The hollow look on her face was gone completely and she wore the keen expression of a hunter. He noticed mud speckling her jeans.
Sellitto asked, “What’s this all about, Linc?”
“Let me try this out on you. Theory only. But let’s see. Whatever our unsub’s interest in diamonds is, he’s got another mission. He’s behind the eart
hquakes.”
Edward Ackroyd gave a brief laugh. “Behind the earthquakes? You mean…somehow he’s caused them?”
“Exactly.”
Sellitto said, “Better keep going on this one, Linc. Fill in the gaps. I see a lot of ’em.”
Rhyme was staring at the ceiling. His face knotted. “We…I should’ve thought better. Why would Forty-Seven go to the trouble to get a hard hat and go into the jobsite to buy a weapon from somebody? They’d meet in a bar or on the street somewhere. No, he needed access to the site itself.”
“Why?” the detective asked.
Rhyme looked at Sachs, who said, “I was just down to the site again. I found traces of RDX near several of the shafts.”
The main ingredient in C4 plastic explosive.
“At a construction site?” Sellitto asked. “C4’s never used commercially.”
It was a military explosive.
“And the site manager told me that one of his workers has gone missing. It was right after Unsub Forty-Seven was in the site. And there was a half ton of grout missing from the pallets in Area Seven.”
“Grout?” Cooper asked.
Rhyme explained, “It’s Forty-Seven’s plan. It’s why he’s here: planting gas line bombs and C4 charges to mimic earthquakes. Last week he placed the gas line IEDs in buildings near the geothermal site. Then he goes to the site, in his hard hat and vest, and meets the now-missing worker, who takes him to Area Seven. He drops C4 charges down some or all of the shafts, and the worker pours grout down them so that when the charges blow, you won’t hear the explosion. Then Forty-Seven ditches the empty shoulder bag and leaves—where we see him on the subway. Later that night, I’m guessing, he kills the worker and disposes of the body.”
“Pretty fucking bizarre, Linc. But can that even happen, explosions causing earthquakes?”
“That’s why I asked our expert here.” He looked at Edward Ackroyd. “You know if there’ve ever been any insurance claims because explosions in mines caused earthquakes?”
The Englishman reminded them of his earlier thoughts, about fracking and geothermal drilling potentially leading to quakes. “But as for explosions? I’ve never heard of that. But I’ll ask my research associate again. Somebody here or in London could have a look, I’m sure.”
“Do that, if you would.”
Ackroyd stepped to the corner and pulled out his phone. After a brief conversation he returned. “Sorry to report, our head researcher’s never heard of an earthquake induced through explosions. She’ll ask at headquarters in London and our other offices when they’re open. My initial thought is that it’s rather unlikely.”
Rhyme noticed Sachs open her purse. She withdrew a business card, read a number and placed a call.
Waiting for the connection, she said to the room, “Don McEllis, the state mining inspector.”
A voice answered, “Hello, Amelia. How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” she said shortly. “Listen, you’re on speaker here with Lincoln Rhyme, an NYPD consultant, and a few other people.”
“Oh. Sure.”
“Dan, this is Lincoln.”
“Don,” Sachs corrected.
“We need to know if somebody can induce an earthquake by explosion.”
There was a pause. “You think these quakes in the past few days aren’t naturally occurring?”
“We aren’t sure. Can explosives cause an earthquake?”
“Well, in theory, yes, but you’d need a nuclear device, in just the right place, just the right megatons. But short of that, no.”
“C4 couldn’t do it? Do you know C4?”
“Plastic explosives, sure. But, no, it’d be impossible. Even a ton or two placed right on a fault line. That’s not how quakes work. But…”
Silence.
“Hello?” Rhyme asked.
They heard fast keyboarding. “Okay, okay. Give me an email address. I want you to see this.”
Cooper did so and a moment later a tone announced the arrival of a message.
McEllis said, “I’ve sent two seismograms.”
Cooper’s astute fingers typed on the keyboard, and the charts—with the familiar waves anyone with a TV and a love of natural disaster blockbusters would recognize—appeared on the screen. “Got them.”
The inspector continued, “The top one is from the most recent tremor here.”
At the far left, the stylus’s black line rose and fell only a little as it moved to the right over the course of several minutes. Then halfway along the chart the line jumped up and down in series of broad, sharp waves. As time passed, they tapered and grew smaller and smaller until the line returned to what it had been before the tremor.
“Now look at the second chart. It’s a record of a real earthquake, one in California. It seems similar but there’s one subtle difference. In the real quake, we can see just a bit of pre-quake ground motion a few seconds before the main disturbance. There’s none of that in the tremors here.”
Rhyme said, “So the explosions weren’t inducing an earthquake; they were mimicking one.”
“Exactly.” A moment later McEllis said, “But then how do you explain the fires…Ah, wait: Unless they were caused by charges too—separate ones, to make it more credible that it was a quake.”
When no one answered, he asked in an uncertain voice, “What exactly is this all about, Amelia?”
“We’re not sure yet, Don. But if you could—please keep it to yourself.”
“Of course. Sure.”
She looked at Rhyme, meaning: Anything else?
He shook his head. She thanked McEllis and they disconnected the call.
Rhyme echoed, “And what is this all about? What’s our unsub up to?”
“Terrorism,” Sachs suggested, then shook her head. “But nobody’s come forward. And why make an attack look like a natural disaster? That’s not the terrorist profile.”
Sellitto said, “One idea: He staged the quakes to cover up the arson. Maybe he’s working for a landlord wants to torch his buildings for insurance.”
Ackroyd said, “With respect, Lieutenant, it’d be the most elaborate insurance scam in history. And, besides, professional arsonists never risk murder or assault charges. They only torch buildings when they’re empty.”
“Granted.”
Rhyme said, “Well, there’s another way to look at it. What McEllis suggested: The fires were cosmetic. Just to give more credibility to the quakes—so that nobody would look too closely at suspicious seismograms. He wants them to seem real…How’s this: He wants to stop the geothermal operation.”
Sellitto offered, “Who’s on that list? Energy industry companies would see geothermal as a threat. Somebody wants the drilling site land. It’s prime real estate.”
“Environmentalists,” Cooper suggested. “That One Earth crowd? Though I don’t think tree huggers use C4 very much…or burn down buildings with people inside.”
Sachs said, “Whatever he’s up to, Forty-Seven seems like a triggerman or mercenary to me. Access to the arms market for the C4 and gas devices. Knows weapons. Doesn’t hesitate to kill. Somebody hired him, I’ll bet.”
Rhyme was inclined to agree. He then said, “One thing: We’ve got a decision to make.”
Sachs was nodding. “To tell or not to tell.”
“Announce the fact they’re fake?” Cooper asked.
“Right. He could have a dozen more IEDs planted in the shafts.”
Sellitto said, “There’ll be some panic. Everybody’ll think terrorism.”
“So, they think terrorism,” Rhyme countered. “I think we have to. And tell people in the general area of the drilling site that there might be a bomb on their gas lines. They should look for them. And announce that if there’s another tremor, they should evacuate or check for gas immediately.”
“It’ll be the commissioner’s and City Hall’s call, but if we do announce, we tip our hand,” Sellitto said. “The perp might book on out of town. Evidence’ll disappear.�
��
As for the last concern, Rhyme was amused: It was very difficult to make evidence disappear from him.
“If I may make an observation?” Ackroyd said.
“Yeah, sure,” Sellitto offered.
“I don’t doubt this fellow is deranged and has some perverse obsession with diamonds. But if he’s basically a mercenary, hired to sabotage the drilling, well, as soon as he finds out we’re onto him, he could sell my client’s rough as soon as he can and leave town. I think I should contact dealers again and explore that possibility.”
Sellitto and Rhyme agreed. Ackroyd pulled on his overcoat and, looking even more like a stolid British detective inspector, left to pursue that lead.
Sellitto too slipped on his jacket. “I’ll go talk to the commissioner and the mayor, recommend we announce the whole thing is probably fake. And I’ll have ESU and Bomb Squad set up a staging area down there. They’ll send a robot down the shafts, see if they can find any more IEDs and render safe.”
For his part, Rhyme had a task too. He placed another call to his spy down in the nation’s capital.
Chapter 41
Trooper J. T. Boyle had had, over the course of his fourteen-year career with the Pennsylvania State Police, some bizarre assignments. Chasing an Amish horse and buggy hijacked by a very non-Amish drunk college kid. The typical cats up trees (“Not our job, ma’am, but I’ll do the best I can”). Birthing babies.
But he’d never pulled over a whole bus before.
This job came as a courtesy to the NYPD, whom Boyle had worked with before and generally liked, though the language of some officers he didn’t approve of. On board the Greyhound he was now trailing was a witness on the run—and, no less, a witness from a case that’d made the news. WKPK, at least. The Promisor—the serial perp murdering young couples who’d just bought their engagement rings. That’d be one sick pup.
A New York detective was sure this witness was on the bus. Their computer department had found his phone and done some kind of high-tech thing so that its GPS kept working, and beaming the location, while incoming and outgoing calls were disabled, so no one could warn him that the police were after him if someone was inclined to do so. The screen showed No Service. He’d get suspicious after a while but after a while didn’t matter; Boyle had him now.
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