The burning wire lr-9

by Jeffery Deaver

  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 J
essen?"

  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.