The Burning Wire

by Jeffery Deaver

  "That son of a bitch. And he's one of us. Linemen and troublemen stick together. It's like a brotherhood, you know. We have to be. Juice is so dangerous." He was furious at the betrayal.

  Sachs rolled the man's hands, arms and legs for trace and then nodded to the medics. "He can go now." She told Barzan if he thought of anything else to give her a call and handed him a card. A medic radioed his colleague and said that the scene was clear and that they could bring the stretcher down the tunnel to evacuate the worker. Barzan sat back against the tunnel wall and closed his eyes.

  Sachs then contacted Nancy Simpson and told her what had happened. "Get ESU into the Algonquin tunnels for a half mile around. And the subways too."

  "Sure, Amelia. Hold on." Simpson came back on a moment later. "They're on their way."

  "What about our witness from the hotel?"

  "I'm still checking."

  Sachs's eyes were growing more accustomed to the dark. She squinted. "I'll get back to you, Nancy. I see something." She moved through the tunnel in the direction that Barzan indicated Galt probably had fled.

  About thirty feet away, sandwiched behind a grating in a small recess, she found a set of Algonquin dark blue overalls, hard hat and gear bag. She'd seen a flash of yellow from the safety hat. Of course, Galt would now know that everybody was looking for him, so he'd stripped off the outfit and hidden it here with the tool bag.

  She called back Simpson and asked her to contact Bo Haumann and ESU and let them know that Galt would be in different clothes. Then she donned latex gloves and reached forward to pull the evidence out from behind the metal.

  But then she stopped fast.

  Now, you have to remember that even if you think you're avoiding it, you could still be in danger.

  Sommers's words resounded in her head. She took the current detector and swept it over the tools.

  The needle jumped: 603 volts.

  Gasping, Sachs closed her eyes and felt the strength drain from her legs. She looked more carefully and saw a wire. It ran from the grating underground to the conduit behind which the evidence was stashed. She'd have to touch the pipe to pull the items out. The power was technically off in the tunnel but maybe this was a case of islanding or backfeed, if she remembered what Sommers had told her.

  How much amperage does it take to kill you?

  One tenth of one amp.

  She returned to Barzan, who gazed at her blearily, his bandaged head still resting against the tunnel wall.

  "I need some help. I need to collect some evidence, but there's still power in one of the lines."

  "What line?"

  "Up there. Six hundred volts. He's wired it to some conduit."

  "Six hundred? It's DC, backfeed from the third rail supply on the subway. Look, you can use my hot stick. See it there?" He pointed. "And my gloves. The best thing is to run another wire to a ground from the conduit. You know how to do that?"

  "No."

  "I'm in no shape to help you. Sorry."

  "That's okay. Tell me how to use the stick." She pulled on Barzan's gloves over the latex ones and took the tool, which ended with a clawlike attachment on the end, covered in rubber. It gave her some, but not a lot of, confidence.

  "Stand on the rubber mat and pull whatever you saw out one by one. You'll be fine. . . . To be safe do it one-handed. Your right hand."

  Farthest from the heart . . .

  Which thudded furiously as she walked up to the recess, lay the Teflon sheets down and began slowly to collect the evidence.

  Pictured yet again young Luis Martin's torn body, the shivering creatures dying in the hotel lobby.

  Hated being distracted.

  Hated being up against an enemy she couldn't see.

  Holding her breath--though she didn't know why--she pulled out the overalls and hard hat. Then the gear bag. R. Galt was written in sloppy marker on the red canvas.

  Exhaling long.

  After she'd finished bagging the evidence, she called Rhyme and gave him an update.

  "Get back here as soon as you can, Sachs. We need that evidence."

  "What'd Ron find?"

  "According to Lon, nothing spectacular. Hm. Wonder what's going on. He should be here by now." His impatience was obvious.

  "It'll just be a few minutes. I want to find that witness. Somebody having lunch apparently got a good look at Galt. I'm hoping he can tell us something specific."

  They disconnected and Sachs returned to the surface and found Nancy Simpson. The detective was in the hotel lobby, which was now largely empty. Sachs started for one of the revolving doors not sealed off with police tape but stopped. She turned and climbed through the shattered window.

  Simpson's hollow face revealed that she was still shaken. "Just talked to Bo. No idea where Galt got out of the system. With the power off he might've just walked down the subway tracks to Canal Street, got lost in Chinatown. Nobody knows."

  Sachs looked at where blood and scorch marks stained the marble floors, outlining where the victims had been.

  "Final count?"

  "Five dead, looks like eleven injured, all seriously. Burns are mostly third degree."

  "You canvass?"

  "Yep. But nobody saw anything. Most of the guests who were here just vanished. They weren't even checking out." Simpson added that they had fled, with spouses, children, associates and suitcases in tow. The hotel staff had done nothing to stop them. Half the employees had left too, it seemed.

  "What about our witness?"

  "I'm trying to track him down. I found some people he was having lunch with. They said he saw Galt. That's why I'd really love to find him."

  "Who is he?"

  "His name's Sam Vetter. Was here from Scottsdale on business. His first trip to the city."

  A patrolman walked past. "Excuse me, I heard you mention the name Vetter?"

  "Right. Sam Vetter."

  "He came up to me in the lobby. Said he had some information about Galt."

  "Where is he?"

  "Oh, you didn't know?" the officer said. "He was one of the victims. Was in the revolving door. He's dead."

  Chapter 41

  AMELIA SACHS RETURNED with the evidence.

  Rhyme's eyes narrowed as she walked quickly into the town house. In her wake was a repulsive odor. Burned hair, burned rubber, burned flesh. Some crips believed they had an increased sense of smell because of their disability; Rhyme wasn't sure if this was true but in any case he had no problem detecting the stench.

  He looked over the evidence Sachs and a crime scene tech from Queens had carted in. The hungry itch to tackle the mysteries the clues might reveal filled him. As Sachs and Cooper laid it out, Rhyme asked, "ESU find where Galt got out of the tunnel?"

  "No sign of him. None at all." She looked around. "Where's Ron?"

  Rhyme said that the rookie still wasn't back. "I called, left a message. I haven't heard from him. The last he said he'd found Galt's motive but didn't go into it. . . . What, Sachs?"

  He'd caught her gazing out the window, her face still.

  "I got it wrong, Rhyme. I wasted time evacuating the construction site and missed the real target completely."

  She explained that it had been Bob Cavanaugh who figured out that the target was the hotel. She was sighing. "If I'd thought it out better, I might've saved them." She walked to a whiteboard and with a firm hand wrote, "Battery Park Hotel," at the top and just below that the names of the deceased victims, apparently a husband and wife, a businessman from Scottsdale, Arizona, a waiter and an advertising executive from Germany.

  "It could've been a lot more. I heard you took out the windows and got people out that way."

  Her response was a shrug.

  Rhyme felt that "what if" had no part in the policing business. You did the best you could, you played the odds.

  Though he too was feeling what Sachs was, angry that, despite their race against the clock and their correct deduction about the general locale where the attack would be, n
ot only had they failed to save victims but they'd missed their chance to collar Galt.

  But he wasn't as upset as she was. However many people were at fault and whatever their degree of blame, Sachs was always hardest on herself. He could have told her that undoubtedly more people would have died if she hadn't been there, and that Galt now knew that he'd been identified and nearly outthought. He might very well stop the attacks altogether and give up. But saying this to her would smack of condescension and, had it been directed at Rhyme himself, he wouldn't even have listened.

  Besides, the stark truth was, yes, the perp got away because they'd got it wrong.

  Sachs returned to assembling the evidence on the examining table.

  Her face was paler than normal; she was a minimalist when it came to makeup. And Rhyme could see that this crime scene too had affected her. The bus incident had spooked her--and some of that was still in her eyes, a patina of ill ease. But this was a different horror, the residue of the image of the people in the hotel dying in such terrible ways. "They were . . . it was like they were dancing while they died, Rhyme," she'd described it to him.

  She'd collected Galt's Algonquin overalls and hard hat, the gear bag containing tools and supplies, another of the heavy-duty cables, identical to the one Galt had used for the arc flash yesterday morning. There were also several bags of trace. Another item, too, in a thick plastic bag: connecting the cable to the main line involved something different from what Galt had used at the Algonquin substation on Fifty-seventh Street, she explained. He'd used split bolts but between the two wires was a plastic box, about the size of a hard-cover book.

  Cooper scanned it for explosives and then opened it up. "Looks homemade but I have no idea what it is."

  Sachs said, "Let's talk to Charlie Sommers."

  In five minutes they were on a conference call with the inventor from Algonquin. Sachs described the attack at the hotel.

  "I didn't know it was that bad," he said in a soft voice.

  Rhyme said, "Appreciate your advice earlier--how he'd be rigging the current like he did, instead of the arc."

  "Didn't help much, though," the man muttered.

  "Can you look over this box we recovered?" Sachs asked. "It was connecting the Algonquin line to the one he ran to the hotel."

  "Of course."

  Cooper gave Sommers a URL for a secure streaming video and then turned the high-def camera over the guts of the box.

  "Got it. Let me take a look. . . . Go back to the other side. . . . Interesting. Not commercial. Made by hand."

  "That's what it looks like to us," Rhyme said.

  "I've never seen anything like it. Not this compact. It's switchgear. That's our term for the switches in substations and on transmission systems."

  "Just shuts a circuit on and off?"

  "Yep. Like a wall switch, except I'd say it could handle a hundred thousand volts easy. A built-in fan, a solenoid and a receiver. Remote control."

  "So he hooked the wires together without transferring any current, then when he was safely away he hit the switch. Andi Jessen said he might try something like that."

  "Did she? Hm. Interesting." Then Sommers added, "But I don't think the issue is safety. Any troubleman knows how to splice wires safely. He did this for another reason."

  Rhyme understood. "To time the attack--he'd turn on the juice the moment when most victims were exposed."

  "I think that's it, yes."

  Sachs added, "One of the workers who saw him said he was watching the scene on his laptop--it was probably hooked into a nearby security camera. I couldn't find where he cut in, though."

  "Maybe that's why he hit the switch a few minutes early," Rhyme said. "He had the chance to get the most victims, and he knew Algonquin wasn't going to give in to his demand at that point anyway."

  Sommers sounded impressed when he said, "He's talented. That's a clever piece of work. The switch seems simple but it was a lot harder to make than you'd think. There's a lot of electromagnetic power in voltage lines that big and he'd have to shield the electronics. He's smart. Which, I guess, is bad news."

  "Where could he get the parts, the solenoid, the receiver, the fan?"

  "In any one of a hundred electrical supply stores in the area. Two hundred . . . Any serial numbers?"

  Cooper examined them carefully. "No. Model numbers, that's all."

  "Then you're out of luck."

  Rhyme and Sachs thanked Sommers and they hung up.

  Sachs and Cooper examined Galt's gear kit and the Algonquin overalls and hard hat. No notes or maps, nothing to indicate where he might be hiding out or what his next target might be. That didn't surprise them, since Galt had intentionally ditched the items and would know they'd been discovered.

  Detective Gretchen Sahloff, from Crime Scene HQ, had collected samplars of Galt's fingerprints from his office and a thumbprint on file from Algonquin Human Resources. Cooper now examined all of the items collected, against these prints. He found only Galt's on the collected evidence. Rhyme was frustrated at this. Had they found others, that could have led them to a friend of Galt's or an accomplice or someone in the Justice For cell, if it was involved in the attacks.

  Also Rhyme noted that the hacksaw and bolt cutter weren't in the bag, but this didn't surprise him. The kit was for smaller hand tools.

  The wrench, however, was, and it had tool marks that were identical to those on the bolts at the substation on Fifty-seventh Street.

  The crime scene team from the arson incident at the substation in Harlem arrived. They had very little. Galt had used a simple Molotov cocktail--a glass bottle filled with gasoline and a cloth rag stuck into the top. It had been thrown against the barred but open window and the burning gas had flowed inside, igniting rubber and plastic insulation. The bottle was for wine--there were no threads for a screw-top cap--and was manufactured by a glassworks that sold to dozens of wineries, which in turn sold to thousands of retail outlets. The label had been soaked off. Untraceable.

  The gasoline was BP, regular grade, and the cloth was from a T-shirt. None of these items could be traced to a specific location, though a rat-tail file was found in Galt's gear bag with glass dust that could be associated with the bottle--from scoring it, so that it would be certain to break.

  There was no security camera outside or in the substation.

  A knock on the door sounded.

  Thom went to open it and a moment later Ron Pulaski entered, with the evidence he'd gathered at Galt's apartment, several milk crates full of items, the bolt cutter and the hacksaw, along with a pair of boots.

  Well, at last, Rhyme thought, irritated at the delay, though pleased at the arrival of the evidence.

  Unsmiling, Pulaski looked at no one as he stacked up the evidence on the table. Then Rhyme noticed that his hand was shaking.

  "Rookie, you all right?"

  The young man, his back to them all, paused, looking down, hands on the table in front of him. Then he turned. Took a breath. "There was an accident at the scene. I hit somebody with my car. Somebody innocent, just happened to be there. He's in a coma. They think he might die."

  Chapter 42

  THE YOUNG OFFICER told them what had happened.

  "I just wasn't thinking. Or maybe I was thinking too much. I got spooked. I was worried Galt might've gotten to my car and rigged a trap or something."

  "How could he have done that?" Rhyme asked.

  "I don't know," Pulaski said emotionally. "I didn't remember I'd already started the engine. I turned the key again and the noise . . . well, it scared me. I guess my foot slipped off the brake."

  "Who was he?"

  "Just some guy, Palmer's his name. Works nights at a trucking company. He was taking a shortcut back from a grocery store. . . . I hit him pretty hard."

  Rhyme thought about the head injury that Pulaski himself had suffered. He'd be troubled by the fact that his carelessness had now seriously injured someone else.

  "Internal Affairs's going t
o talk to me. They said the city'll probably be sued. They told me to contact the PBA about a lawyer. I . . ." Words failed him. Finally he repeated a bit manically, "My foot slipped off the brake. I didn't even remember putting the car in gear or starting it."

  "Well, Rookie, blame yourself or not, but the point is, this Palmer's not a player in the Galt case, is he?"

  "No."

  "So deal with it after hours," Rhyme said firmly.

  "Yessir, sure. I will. I'm sorry."

  "So, what'd you find?"

  He explained about the sheets he'd managed to tease out of Galt's printer. Rhyme complimented him on that--it was a good save--but the officer didn't even seem to hear. Pulaski continued, explaining about Galt's cancer and the high-tension wires.

  "Revenge," Rhyme mused. "The old standby. An okay motive. Not one of my favorites. Yours?" He glanced at Sachs.

  "No," she replied seriously. "Greed and lust're mine. Revenge's usually an antisocial personality disorder thing. But this could be more than revenge, Rhyme. From the demand note he's on a crusade. Saving the people from the evil energy company. A fanatic. And I still think we may find a terrorist connection."

  Apart from the motive, though, and the evidence tying Galt to the crime scenes, Pulaski had found nothing that suggested his present whereabouts or where he might be going to attack next. This was disappointing but didn't surprise Rhyme; the attacks were obviously well planned and Galt was smart. He'd have known from the start that his identity might be learned and he would have made arrangements for a hideout.

  Rhyme scrolled through numbers and placed a call.

  "Andi Jessen's office," came the weary voice through the speakerphone.

  Rhyme identified himself and a moment later was talking to the CEO of the power company. She said, "I just talked to Gary Noble and Agent McDaniel. There're five people dead, I heard. And more in the hospital."

  "That's right."

  "I'm so sorry. How awful. I've been looking at Ray Galt's employee file. His picture's up in front of me right now. He doesn't look like the kind of person who'd do something like this."

  They never do.

  Rhyme explained, "He's convinced he got cancer from working on the electric lines."

  "Is that why he's doing this?"

  "It seems. He's crusading. He thinks working on high-power lines is a big risk."

  She sighed. "We've got a half dozen suits pending on the issue. High-voltage cables give off EMFs--electromagnetic fields. Insulation and walls shield the electrical field, but not the magnetic. There're arguments that that can cause leukemia."