The Burning Wire

by Jeffery Deaver

  Noble said, "Now, for the press, we're trying to downplay the terror angle at this point. We'll be making it sound like an accident. But the news leaked that it may be more than that. People are freaked out."

  "I'll say they are." McDaniel nodded. "I've got monitors in my office checking Internet traffic. Huge increases in hits in search engines for 'electrocution,' 'arc flash' and 'blackouts.' YouTube viewings of arc flash videos are through the roof. I went online myself. They're scary as hell. One minute there're two guys working on an electric panel, then all of a sudden there's a flash that fills the whole screen and a guy's on his back, with half his body on fire."

  "And," Noble said, "people're real nervous that arc flashes might happen someplace other than a substation. Like their houses and offices."

  Sachs asked, "Can they?"

  McDaniel apparently had not learned all there was to know about arc flashes. He admitted, "I think so, but I'm not sure how big the current has to be." His eyes strayed to a 220v outlet nearby.

  "Well, I think we better get moving," Rhyme said, with a glance at Sachs.

  She headed for the door. "Ron, come with me." Pulaski joined her. A moment later the door closed, and soon he heard the big engine of her car fire up.

  "Now, one thing to keep in mind, one scenario we ran on the computers," McDaniel added, "was that the UNSUB was just testing the waters, checking out the grid as a possible terror target. It was pretty clumsy and only one person died. We fed that into the system and the algorithms are suggesting that they might try something different next. There's even a potential that this was a singularity."

  "A . . . ?" Rhyme asked, exasperated at the language.

  "Singularity--a onetime occurrence. Our threat analysis software assigned a fifty-five percent nonrepeatability factor to the incident. That's not the worst in the world."

  Rhyme said, "But isn't that just another way of saying there's a forty-five percent chance that somebody else somewhere in New York City's going to get electrocuted? . . . And it could be happening right now."

  Chapter 5

  ALGONQUIN CONSOLIDATED POWER substation MH-10 was a miniature medieval castle in a quiet area south of Lincoln Center. It was made of unevenly cut limestone, dingy and pitted from decades of New York City pollution and grime. The cornerstone was worn but you could easily read, 1928.

  It was just before 2 p.m. when Amelia Sachs skidded her maroon Ford Torino Cobra up to the curb in front of the place, behind the ruined bus. The car and its bubbling exhaust drew glances of curiosity or admiration from bystanders, cops and firemen. She climbed out of the driver's seat, tossed an NYPD placard on the dash and stood with hands on hips, surveying the scene. Ron Pulaski exited from the passenger door and slammed it with a solid clunk.

  Sachs regarded the incongruity of the setting. Modern buildings, at least twenty or so stories high, bracketed the substation, which for some reason had been designed with turrets. The stone was streaked with white, thanks to the resident pigeons, a number of which had returned after the excitement. The windows were of jaundiced glass and covered with bars painted black.

  The thick metal door was open and the room inside was dark.

  With a bleat of an electronic siren a rapid response vehicle from the NYPD Crime Scene Unit eased into the area. The RRV parked, and three technicians from the main operation in Queens climbed out. Sachs had worked with them on a number of occasions and she nodded to the Latino man and the Asian woman under the direction of a senior officer, Detective Gretchen Sahloff. Sachs nodded to the detective, who waved a greeting and with a somber look at the front of the substation walked to the rear of the large van, where the newly arrived officers began to unload equipment.

  Sachs's attention then moved to the sidewalk and street, cordoned off with yellow tape, beyond which a crowd of fifty or so watched the action. The bus that had been the object of the attack sat in front of the substation, empty, lopsided; the right tires were deflated. Near the front the paint was scorched. Half the windows were gray and opaque.

  An EMS medic approached, a stocky African-American woman, and nodded. Sachs said, "Hi."

  The woman gave a tentative nod of greeting. Med techs had witnessed just about all the carnage you could see but she was shaken. "Detective, you better take a look."

  Sachs followed her to the ambulance, where a body lay on a gurney, waiting transport to the morgue. It was covered with a dark green waxy tarp.

  "Was the last passenger, looks like. We thought we could save him. But . . . we only got him this far."

  "Electrocuted?"

  "You better see," she whispered. And lifted the covering.

  Sachs froze as the smell of burned skin and hair rose and she gazed at the victim, a Latino in a business suit--or what was left of one. His back and much of the right side of his body was a mix of skin and cloth from the burn. She guessed second and third degree. But that wasn't what unsettled her so much; she'd seen bad burns, accidental and intentional, in her line of work. The most horrifying sight was in his flesh, exposed when the EMS team had cut away the cloth of his suit. She was looking at dozens of smooth puncture wounds, which covered his body. It was as if he'd been hit by a blast from a huge shotgun.

  "Most of them," the medic said, "entrance and exit."

  They went all the way through?

  "What'd cause that?"

  "Don't know. Never seen anything like it, all my years."

  And Sachs realized something else. The wounds were all distinct and clearly visible. "There's no blood."

  "Whatever it was cauterized the wounds. That's why . . ." Her voice went soft. "That's why he stayed conscious for as long as he did."

  Sachs couldn't imagine the pain. "How?" she asked, half to herself.

  And then she got the answer.

  "Amelia," Ron Pulaski called.

  She glanced toward him.

  "The bus sign pole. Take a look. Brother . . ."

  "Jesus," she muttered. And walked closer to the edge of the crime scene tape. About six feet from the ground a hole had been blasted clean through the metal pole, five inches wide. The metal had melted like plastic under a blowtorch. She then focused on the windows of the bus and a delivery truck parked nearby. She'd thought the glass was frosted from the fire. But, no, small bits of shrapnel--the same that had killed the passenger--had hit the vehicles. The sheet-metal skins were also punctured.

  "Look," she whispered, pointing at the sidewalk and the facade of the substation. A hundred tiny craters had been dug into the stone.

  "Was it a bomb?" Pulaski asked. "Maybe the respondings missed it."

  Sachs opened a plastic bag and removed blue latex gloves. Pulling them on, she bent down and collected a small disk of metal shaped like a teardrop at the base of the post. It was so hot it softened the glove.

  When she realized what it was, she shivered.

  "What's that?" Pulaski asked.

  "The arc flash melted the pole." She looked around and saw a hundred or more drops on the ground or sticking to the side of the bus, buildings and nearby cars.

  That's what had killed the young passenger. A shower of molten metal drops flying through the air at a thousand feet a second.

  The young officer exhaled slowly. "Getting hit by something like that . . . burning right through you."

  Sachs shivered again--at the thought of the pain. And at the thought of how devastating the results of the attack might have been. This portion of street was relatively empty. Had the substation been closer to the center of Manhattan, easily ten or fifteen passersby would have died.

  Sachs looked up and found herself staring at the UNSUB's weapon: From one of the windows overlooking Fifty-seventh Street about two feet of thick wire dangled. It was covered in black insulation but the end was stripped away and the bare cable was bolted to a scorched brass plate. It looked industrial and mundane and not at all the sort of thing that could have produced such a terrible explosion.

  Sachs and Pulaski joined
the cluster of two dozen Homeland Security, FBI and NYPD agents and officers at the FBI's command post van. Some were in tactical gear, some in crime scene coveralls. Others, just suits or regulation uniforms. They were dividing up the labor. They'd be canvassing for witnesses and checking for post-incident bombs or other booby traps, a popular terrorist technique.

  A solemn, lean-faced man in his fifties stood with his arms crossed, staring at the substation. He wore an Algonquin Consolidated badge on a chain around his neck. He was the senior company representative here: a field supervisor in charge of this portion of the grid. Sachs asked him to describe what Algonquin had learned about the event in detail, and he gave her an account, which she jotted into her notebook.

  "Security cameras?"

  The skinny man replied, "Sorry, no. We don't bother. The doors are multiple locked. And there's nothing inside to steal, really. Anyways, all that juice, it's sort of like a guard dog. A big one."

  Sachs asked, "How do you think he got in?"

  "The door was locked when we got here. They're on number-pad locks."

  "Who has the codes?"

  "All the employees. But he didn't get in that way. The locks have a chip that keeps records of when they're opened. These haven't been accessed for two days. And that"--he pointed to the wire dangling from the window--"wasn't there then. He had to break in some other way."

  She turned to Pulaski. "When you're finished out here, check around back, the windows and roof." She asked the Algonquin worker, "Underground access?"

  The field supervisor said, "Not that I know of. The electric lines into and out of this station come through ducts nobody could fit in. But there could be other tunnels I don't know about."

  "Check it out anyway, Ron." Sachs then interviewed the driver of the bus, who'd been treated for glass cuts and a concussion. His vision and hearing had been temporarily damaged but he'd insisted on staying to help the police however he could. Which wasn't very much. The round man described being curious about the wire protruding from the window; he'd never seen it before. Smelling smoke, hearing pops from inside. Then the terrifying spark.

  "So fast," he whispered. "Never seen anything that fast in my life."

  He'd been slammed against the window and woke up ten minutes later. He fell silent, gazing at his destroyed bus, his expression reflecting betrayal and mourning.

  Sachs then turned to the agents and officers present and said she and Pulaski were going to run the scene. She wondered if word really had come down from the FBI's Tucker McDaniel that this was kosher. It wasn't unheard of for senior people in law enforcement to smilingly agree with you and then intentionally forget the conversation had ever taken place. But the federal agents had indeed been told. Some seemed irritated that the NYPD was taking this pivotal role, but others--the FBI's Evidence Response Team mostly--didn't seem to mind and indeed regarded Sachs with admiring curiosity; she was, after all, part of the team headed up by the legendary Lincoln Rhyme.

  Turning toward Pulaski she said, "Let's get to work." Sachs walked toward the RRV, binding her crimson hair into a bun, to suit up.

  Pulaski hesitated and glanced at the hundred dots of cooling metal disks on the sidewalk and lodged against the front of the building, then at the stiff wire hanging from the window. "They did shut the power off in there, didn't they?"

  Sachs just motioned him to follow her.

  Chapter 6

  WEARING DRAB, DARK blue Algonquin Consolidated Power worker overalls, a baseball-style cap without logo and safety glasses, the man busied himself at the service panel in the back of the health club in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.

  As he did his work--mounting equipment and stripping, connecting and snipping wires, he thought about the attack that morning. The news was all over the incident.

  One man was killed and several injured this morning when an overload in a power company substation in Manhattan produced a huge spark that jumped from the station to a bus sign pole, narrowly missing an MTA bus.

  "It was like, you know, a lightning bolt," one witness, a passenger on the bus, reported. "Just filled the whole sidewalk. It blinded me. And that sound. I can't describe it. It was like this loud growl, then it exploded. I'm afraid to go near anything that's got electricity in it. I'm really freaked out. I mean, anybody who saw that thing is freaked out."

  You're not alone, the man thought. People had been conscious of--and awed and frightened by--electricity for more than five thousand years. The word itself came from the Greek for "amber," a reference to the solidified tree resin that the ancients would rub to create static charges. The numbing effects of electricity created by eels and fish in the rivers and off the coasts of Egypt, Greece and Rome were described at length in scientific writings well before the Christian era.

  His thoughts turned to water creatures at the moment since, as he worked, he furtively watched five people swimming slow laps in the club's pool. Three women and two men, all of retirement age.

  One particular fish he'd come to be fascinated with was the torpedo ray, which gave its name to the weapons fired by submarines. The Latin word torpore--to stiffen or paralyze--was the source of the name. The ray had, in effect, two batteries in its body made up of hundreds of thousands of gelatinous plates. These generated electricity, which a complicated array of nerves transported through its body like wires. The current was used for defense but also offensively, for hunting. Rays would lie in wait and then use a charge to numb their next meal or sometimes kill it outright--larger rays could generate up to two hundred volts and deliver more amps than an electric drill.

  Pretty fascinating . . .

  He finished rigging the panel and regarded his job. Like linemen and master electricians all over the world, he felt a certain pride at the neatness. He'd come to feel that working with electricity was more than a trade; it was a science and an art. Closing the door, he walked to the far side of the club--near the men's locker room. And, out of sight, he waited.

  Like a torpedo ray.

  This neighborhood--the far West Side--was residential; no workers were getting their jogs or swims or squash games in now, early afternoon, though the place would fill up after working hours with hundreds of locals, eager to sweat away the tensions of the day.

  But he didn't need a large crowd. Not at the moment. That would come later.

  So people would think he was simply another worker and ignore him, he turned his attention to a fire control panel and took the cover off, examining the guts without much interest. Thinking again about electric rays. Those that lived in salt water were wired in parallel circuits and produced lower voltage because seawater was a better conductor than fresh and the jolt didn't need to be so powerful to kill their prey. Electric rays that inhabited rivers and lakes, on the other hand, were wired in series and produced higher voltage to compensate for the lower conductivity of freshwater.

  This, to him, was not only fascinating but was relevant at the moment--for this test about the conductivity of water. He wondered if he'd made the calculations right.

  He had to wait for only ten minutes before he heard footsteps and saw one of the lap swimmers, a balding man in his sixties, padding by on slippers. He entered the showers.

  The man in the overalls snuck a peek at the swimmer, turning the faucet on and stepping under the stream of steaming water, unaware that he was being studied.

  Three minutes, five. Lathering, washing . . .

  Growing impatient, because of the risk of detection, gripping the remote control--similar to a large car-key fob--the man in the overalls felt his shoulder muscles stiffening.

  Torpore. He laughed silently. And relaxed.

  Finally the club member stepped out of the shower and toweled off. He pulled his robe on and then stepped back into the slippers. He walked to the door leading to the locker room and took the handle.

  The overalls man pressed two buttons on the remote simultaneously.

  The elderly man gave a gasp and froze.

/>   Then stepped back, staring at the handle. Looking at his fingers and quickly touching the handle once more.

  Foolish, of course. You're never faster than electricity.

  But there was no shock this time and the man was left to consider if maybe it was a burr of sharp metal or maybe even a painful jolt of arthritis in his fingers that he'd felt.

  In fact, the trap had contained only a few milliamps of juice. He wasn't here to kill anyone. This was simply an experiment to tell two things: First, would the remote control switchgear he'd created work at this distance, through concrete and steel? It had, fine. And, second, what exactly was the effect of water on conductivity? This was the sort of thing that safety engineers talked and wrote about all the time but that no one had ever quantified in any practical sense--practical, meaning how little juice did one need to stun somebody wearing damp leather footgear into fibrillation and death.

  The answer was pretty damn little.

  Good.

  Freaked me out . . .

  The man in the overalls headed down the stairwell and out the back door.

  He thought again about fish and electricity. This time, though, not the creation of juice but the detection of it. Sharks, in particular. They had, literally, a sixth sense: the astonishing ability to perceive the bioelectrical activity within the body of prey miles away, long before they could see it.

  He glanced at his watch and supposed the investigation at the substation was well under way. It was unfortunate for whoever was looking into the incident there that human beings didn't have a shark's sixth sense.

  Just as it would soon be unfortunate for many other people in the poor city of New York.

  Chapter 7

  SACHS AND PULASKI dressed in hooded baby blue Tyvek jumpsuits, masks, booties and safety glasses. As Rhyme had always instructed, they each wrapped a rubber band around the feet, to make differentiating their footprints from the others easier. Then, encircling her waist with a belt, to which were attached her radio/video transmitter and weapon, Sachs stepped over the yellow tape, the maneuver sending some jolts of pain through her arthritic joints. On humid days or after a bout of running a tough scene or a foot pursuit, the knees or hips screaming, she harbored secret envy of Lincoln Rhyme's numbness. She'd never utter the thought aloud, of course, never even gave the crazy idea more than a second or two in her mind, but there it was. Advantages in all conditions.