The Burning Wire

by Jeffery Deaver

  The politics had changed drastically during his father's lifetime--the death of communism, the wounding of racial segregation, the birth of nonstate enemies. Computers replaced typewriters and the library. Cars had air bags. TV channels propagated from four--plus UHF--to hundreds. But very little about the man's lifestyle had altered in a core way. The elder Dellray thrived in his enclosed world of academia, specifically philosophy, and oh, how he had wanted his son to settle there too, examining the nature of existence and the human condition. He'd tried to fill his son with a love of the same.

  To some extent he was successful. Questioning, brilliant, discerning young Fred did indeed develop a fascination with humankind in all its incarnations: metaphysics, psychology, theology, epistemology, ethics, and politics. He loved it all. But it took only one month as a graduate assistant to realize he'd go mad if he didn't put his talents to practical use.

  And never one to pull back, he sought out the rawest and most intense practical application of philosophy he could think of.

  He joined the FBI.

  Change . . .

  His father reconciled himself to his son's apostasy and they enjoyed coffee and long walks in Prospect Park, during which they came to understand that, although their laboratories and techniques were different, their outlooks and insights were not.

  The human condition . . . observed and written about by the father and experienced firsthand by the son.

  In the unlikely form of undercover work. Fred's intense curiosity about and insights into the nature of life made him a natural Everyman. Unlike most undercover cops, with their limited acting skills and repertoires, Dellray could truly become the people he played.

  Once, when Dellray was in disguise as a homeless man on the streets of New York, not far from the Federal Building, the then assistant special agent in charge of the Manhattan office of the FBI--Dellray's boss, in effect--walked right past and dropped a quarter into his cup, never recognizing him.

  One of the best compliments Dellray ever received.

  A chameleon. One week, a scorched-brain tweaker desperate for meth. The next a South African envoy with nuclear secrets to sell. Then a Somalian imam's lieutenant, lugging around a hatred of America and a hundred quotations from the Koran.

  He owned dozens of outfits, purchased or hacked together by himself, which now clogged the basement of the town house he and Serena had bought a few years ago in BK--Brooklyn. He'd advanced in his career, which was inevitable for someone with his drive, skill and absolute lack of desire to stab fellow workers in the back. Now Dellray primarily ran other undercover FBI agents and civilian confidential informants--AKA snitches--though he still got into the field occasionally. And loved it just as much as he ever had.

  But then came the change.

  Cloud zone . . .

  Dellray didn't deny that both the good guys and the bad guys were getting smarter and more tech-savvy. The shift was obvious: HUMINT--the fruits of intelligence gathering from human-to-human contact--was giving way to SIGINT.

  But it was a phenomenon that Dellray simply wasn't comfortable with. In her youth Serena had tried to be a torch singer. She was a natural at all forms of dance, from ballet to jazz to modern, but she just didn't have the skill to sing. Dellray was the same with the new law enforcement of data, numbers, technology.

  He kept running his snitches and he kept going undercover himself, and getting results. But with McDaniel and his T and A team--oh, 'scuse me, Tucker--his Tech and Com team, old-school Dellray was feeling, well, old. The ASAC was sharp, a hard worker--putting in sixty-hour work weeks--and an infighter; he'd stand up for his agents against the President if he needed to. And his techniques had worked; last month McDaniel's people had picked up sufficient details from encrypted satellite phone calls to pinpoint a fundamentalist cell outside Milwaukee.

  The message to Dellray and the older agents was clear: Your time's passing.

  He still stung from the dig, possibly inadvertent, delivered at the meeting in Rhyme's lab:

  Well, keep at it, Fred. You're doing a good job. . . .

  Meaning, I didn't even expect you to come up with any leads to Justice For and Rahman.

  Maybe McDaniel was right to criticize. After all, Dellray had as good a network of CIs in place as you could hope for to track terrorist activities. He met with them regularly. He worked them all hard, doling out protection to the fearful, Kleenex to the wet-eyed guilty, cash to the ones who informed as a livelihood and painful squeezes to the shoulders and psyches of those who'd gotten, as Dellray's grandmother said, too big for their britches.

  But of all the information he'd gathered about terrorist plots, even embryonic ones, there'd been nothing about Rahman's Justice For or about a big fucking spark.

  And here McDaniel's people had made an ID and defined a real threat by sitting on their asses.

  Like the drones in the Middle East and Afghanistan? You know the pilots are next to a strip mall in Colorado Springs or Omaha. . . .

  Dellray had another concern too, one that had arisen around the same time as youthful McDaniel appeared: Maybe he just wasn't as good as he used to be.

  Rahman might've been right under his nose. Cell members in Justice For might've been studying electrical engineering in BK or New Jersey the same way the Nine-Eleven hijackers had studied flying.

  Then something else: He had to admit he'd been distracted lately. Something from his Other Life, he called it, his life with Serena, which he kept as separate from the street as you'd keep flame from gasoline. And that something was pretty significant: Fred Dellray was now a father. Serena had had a baby boy a year ago. They'd talked about it beforehand, and she'd insisted that even after their child was born Dellray wouldn't change his job one bit. Even if it involved running dangerous undercover sets. She understood that his work defined him the way dancing defined her; it would be more dangerous to him, ultimately, to move behind a desk.

  But was being a father altering him as an agent? Dellray looked forward to taking Preston to the park or a store with him, feeding the boy, reading to him. (Serena had come by the nursery, laughed and gently taken Kierkegaard's existentialist manifesto Fear and Trembling from Dellray's lengthy hand and replaced it with Goodnight Moon. Dellray hadn't realized that even at that young age, words count.)

  The subway now stopped in the Village, and passengers rustled aboard.

  Instinctively the undercover operative within him immediately spotted four people of note: two almost-guaranteed-to-be pickpockets, one kid who was carrying a knife or box cutter and a young, sweaty businessman pressing a protective hand against a pocket so hard that he'd split open the bag of coke if he wasn't careful.

  The street . . . how Fred Dellray loved the street.

  But these four had nothing to do with his mission and he let them fade from his consciousness, as he told himself: Okay, you fucked up. You missed Rahman, and you missed Justice For. But the casualties and damage were minimal. McDaniel was condescending but hasn't made you a scapegoat, not yet. Which somebody else might've done in a heartbeat.

  Dellray could still find a lead to their UNSUB and stop him before another of those terrible attacks happened. Dellray could still redeem himself.

  At the next subway stop, he climbed out and began his trek east. Eventually he came to bodegas and tenements and old, dark social clubs, rancid-smelling diners, radio taxi operations whose signs were in Spanish or Arabic or Farsi. No fast-moving professionals like in the West Village; here people weren't moving around much at all, but merely sitting--men mostly--on rickety chairs or on doorsteps, the young ones slim, the old round. They all watched with cautious eyes.

  This was where the serious work of the street got done. This was Fred Dellray's office.

  He strode up to a coffee shop window and looked inside--with some difficulty since the glass hadn't been cleaned for months.

  Ah, yeah, there. He spotted what would either be his salvation or his downfall.

  His last
chance.

  Tapping one ankle against the other just to make sure the pistol strapped there hadn't shifted, he opened the door and stepped inside.

  Chapter 11

  "HOW ARE YOU feeling?" Sachs asked, walking into the lab.

  Rhyme said stiffly, "I'm fine. Where's the evidence?" Sentences spoken without discernible punctuation.

  "The techs and Ron are bringing it. I took the Cobra by myself."

  Meaning, he supposed, she'd driven home like a crazy woman.

  "And how are you?" Thom asked.

  "Wet."

  Which went without saying. Her hair was drying but the clothes were still drenched. Her condition wasn't an issue. They knew she was fine. They'd established that earlier. Rhyme had been shaken at the time but now she was all right and he wanted to get on with the evidence.

  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.

  "Well, where are--?"

  "What happened?" she asked Thom, a glance toward Rhyme.

  "I said I was fine."

  "I'm asking him." Sachs's own temper flared a bit.

  "Blood pressure was high. Spiking."

  "And now it's not high, Thom, is it?" Lincoln Rhyme said testily. "It's nice and normal. That's sort of like saying the Russians sent missiles to Cuba. That was tense for a while. But since Miami isn't a radioactive crater, I guess that problem sorted itself out, now, didn't it? It's. In. The. Past. Call Pulaski, call the techs from Queens. I want the evidence."

  His aide ignored him and said to Sachs, "Didn't need medicine. But I'm keeping an eye on it."

  She gave Rhyme another visual examination. Then said she was going upstairs to change.

  "There a problem?" asked Lon Sellitto, who'd arrived from downtown a few minutes before. "Aren't you feeling good, Linc?"

  "Oh, Jesus Christ," Rhyme spat out. "Is everybody deaf? Is everybody ignoring me? . . ." Then he glanced into the doorway. "Ah, at last. Another country heard from. Goddamn, Pulaski, at least you're being productive. What do we have?"

  The young cop, back in uniform, was carting in milk crates that the crime scene officers usually used for transporting evidence bags.

  A moment later two techs from the Queens Crime Scene HQ brought in a bulky plastic-wrapped object: the wire. The strangest weapon Rhyme had ever seen in a case. And one of the deadliest. They also had the access door from the substation basement, similarly wrapped in plastic.

  "Pulaski? The coffee shop?"

  "You were right. I've got some things here, sir."

  A lifted eyebrow from the criminalist reminded the officer the appellation wasn't necessary. The criminalist was a retired captain of the NYPD. He didn't have any more right to a formal title or "sir" than anybody else on the street. And he'd been trying to break Pulaski of his wispy insecurities--they were due to youth, of course, but there was more to it: He'd sustained a serious head injury on the first case they'd worked together. It had nearly ended his career in law enforcement, but he'd stayed on the force, despite the injury and the resulting bouts of confusion and disorientation that occasionally still plagued him. (His determination to remain a cop had been inspired largely by Rhyme's decision to do the same.)

  In furthering his cause to make Pulaski a top crime scene officer, one of the most important things Rhyme needed to instill was a bulletproof ego. You could have all the skills in the world but they were useless if you didn't have the balls to back them up. Before he died, he wanted to see Pulaski move up high in the ranks of Crime Scene in New York City. He knew it could happen. He had a brief image of a hope of his: Pulaski and Sachs running the unit together. Rhyme's legacy.

  He thanked the CS technicians as they left with respectful nods and expressions that suggested they were memorizing what the lab looked like. Not many people made it over here from headquarters to see Rhyme in person. He occupied a special place in the hierarchy of the NYPD; there had been a recent turnover and the head of forensics had gone to Miami-Dade County. Several senior detectives were now running the operation until a permanent head could be appointed. There was even some talk of hiring Rhyme back to run Crime Scene once more.

  When the deputy commissioner had called about this, Rhyme had pointed out that he might have a few problems with the JST--the NYPD job standard test portion of the requirements. The physical fitness exam required candidates to complete a timed obstacle course: sprint to a six-foot-high barrier and jump over it, restrain a fake bad guy, race up stairs, drag a 176-pound mannequin to safety and pull the trigger of a weapon sixteen times with one's dominant hand, fifteen with the other.

  Rhyme demurred, explaining to the NYPD official who came to see him that he could never pass the test. He could probably clear only a five-foot barrier. But he was flattered by the interest.

  Sachs returned downstairs, wearing jeans and a light blue sweater, tucked in, her hair washed and lightly damp, pulled back into a ponytail once more, bound with a black rubber band.

  At that moment Thom went to answer the doorbell and another figure stepped into the doorway.

  The slim man, whose retiring demeanor suggested he was a middle-aged accountant or shoe salesman, was Mel Cooper, in Rhyme's opinion one of the best forensic lab people in the country. With degrees in math, physics and organic chemistry, and a senior official in both the International Association for Identification and International Association of Blood Pattern Analysis, he was constantly in demand at Crime Scene headquarters. But, since Rhyme was responsible for kidnapping the tech from a job in upstate New York years ago and getting him to the NYPD, it was understood that Cooper would drop what he was doing and head to Manhattan if Rhyme and Sellitto were running a case and they wanted him.

  "Mel, glad you were available."

  "Hm. Available . . . Didn't you call my lieutenant and threaten him with all sorts of terrible things if he didn't release me from the Hanover-Sterns case?"

  "I did it for you, Mel. You were being wasted on insider trading."

  "And I thank you for the reprieve."

  Cooper nodded a greeting to those in the room, knuckled his Harry Potter glasses up on his nose and walked across the lab to the examination table on silent, brown Hush Puppies shoes. Though by appearances the least athletic man Rhyme had ever seen, apart from himself, of course, Mel Cooper nonetheless moved with the grace of a soccer player, and Rhyme was reminded that he was a champion ballroom dancer.

  "Let's hear the details," Rhyme said, turning to Sachs.

  She flipped through her notes and explained what the power company field executive had told her.

  "Algonquin Consolidated Power provides electricity--they call it 'juice'--for most of the area. Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey."

  "That's the smokestacks on the East River?"

  "That's right," she said to Cooper. "Their headquarters is there and they have a steam and electricity generation plant. Now, what the Algonquin supervisor said was that the UNSUB could've broken into the substation at any time in the last thirty-six hours to rig the wire. The substations are generally unmanned. A little after eleven this morning he, or they, got into the Algonquin computers, kept shutting down substations around the area and rerouted all that electricity through the substation on Fifty-seven. When voltage builds up to a certain point, it has to complete a circuit. You can't stop it. It either jumps to another wire or to something that's grounded. Normally the circuit breakers in the substation would pop but the perp had reset them to take ten times the load, so it was sitting in that"--she pointed to the cable--"waiting to burst. Like a dam. The pressure built up and the juice had to go someplace."

  She picked up an evidence bag containing teardrop-shaped bits of metal. "And then it blew," she repeated. "These were all over the place. Like shrapnel."

  "What are they?" Sellitto asked.

  "Molten droplets from the bus sign pole. Blew
them everywhere. Nicked the concrete and went right through the sides of some cars. The vic was burned but that's not what killed him." Her voice grew soft, Rhyme noticed. "It was like a big shotgun blast. Cauterized the wounds." She grimaced. "That kept him conscious for a while. Take a look." A nod at Pulaski.

  The officer plugged the flash cards into a nearby computer and created files for the case. A moment later photos popped up on the high-def monitors nearby. After years and years in the crime scene business, Rhyme was largely inured to even the most horrific images; these, though, troubled him. The young victim's body had been riddled by the dots of metal. There was little blood, thanks to the searing heat of the projectiles. Had the perp known that's what his weapon would do, sealing the punctures? Keeping his victims conscious to feel the pain? Was this part of his MO? Rhyme could understand now why Sachs was so troubled.

  "Christ," the big detective muttered.

  Rhyme shook aside the image and asked, "Who was he?"

  "Name was Luis Martin. Assistant manager in a music store. Twenty-eight. No record."

  "No connection to Algonquin, MTA . . . any reason anybody'd want him dead?"

  "None," Sachs said.

  "Wrong time, wrong place," Sellitto summarized.

  Rhyme said, "Ron. The coffee shop? What'd you find?"

  "A man in dark blue overalls came into the place about ten forty-five. He had a laptop with him. He went online."

  "Blue overalls?" Sellitto asked. "Any logo? ID?"

  "Nobody saw. But the Algonquin workers there, their uniforms were the same dark blue."

  "Get a description?" the rumpled cop persisted.

  "Probably white, probably forties, glasses, dark cap. Couple people said no glasses and no cap. Blond hair, red hair, dark hair."

  "Witnesses," Rhyme muttered disparagingly. You could have a shooter naked to the waist kill somebody in front of ten witnesses and each one would describe him as wearing ten different colored T-shirts. In the past few years his doubt about the value of eyewitnesses had tempered somewhat--because of Sachs's skill in interviewing and because of Kathryn Dance, who'd proved that analyzing body language was scientific enough in most cases to produce repeatable results. Still, he could never completely shake his skepticism.