The aide had gotten him up early today, as Rhyme had instructed, dressed and deposited him into the wheelchair. The criminalist had then said, "I'm meeting somebody for breakfast."
"Where are we going?" Thom had asked.
" 'I' is singular first person, Thom. 'We' is plural. Also first person and a pronoun, but other than that they have very little in common. You're not invited and it's for your own sake. You'd be bored."
"It's never boring around you, Lincoln."
"Ha. I'll be back soon."
The criminalist had been in such a good mood that Thom had agreed.
But then Rhyme simply hadn't returned.
Another hour had gone by after Sachs had arrived. And curiosity became concern. But at that very instant they'd both received an email, dinging on computers and BlackBerrys. It was as clipped and functional as one would expect from Lincoln Rhyme.
Thom, Sachs--
After a great deal of deliberation I've concluded that I don't want to continue to live in my current condition.
"No," Thom had gasped.
"Keep reading."
Recent events have made clear that certain inabilities are no longer acceptable to me. I've been motivated to act by two things. The visit by Kopeski, which told me that while I would never kill myself, nonetheless there are times when the risk of death should not deter one from making a decision.
The second was meeting Susan Stringer. She said there were no coincidences and that she felt she was fated to tell me about Pembroke Spinal Cord Center. (You know how much I believe in THAT--and if this is the point where I'm supposed to type LOL, it's not going to happen.)
I've been in regular discussions with the center and have made four appointments for various procedures over the next eight months. The first of these is about to begin.
Of course, there's the possibility that I might not make the other three appointments, but one can only wait and see. If things turn out as I hope I'll be giving you all the gory details of the surgery in a day or two. If not, Thom, you know where all the paperwork is kept. Oh, and one thing I forgot to put into the will, give all my scotch to my cousin Arthur. He'll appreciate it.
Sachs, there's another letter for you. Thom will hand it over.
Sorry I handled it this way, but you both have better things to do on this fine day than shepherd a bad patient like me to a hospital and waste time. Besides, you know me. Some things I'd just rather do on my own. Haven't had much of a chance to do that in the past few years.
Somebody will call with information late this afternoon or early evening.
As for our last case, Sachs, I expect to testify at the Watchmaker's trial in person. But if things don't go quite right, I've filed my depositions with the attorney general. You and Mel and Ron can take up the slack. Make sure Mr. Logan spends the rest of his life in jail.
This thought, from someone I've been close to, describes what I'm feeling perfectly: "Times change. We have to change too. Whatever the risks. Whatever we have to leave behind."
--LR
And now, in the abhorrent hospital, they waited.
Finally, an official. A tall man in green scrubs, with graying hair, slim, walked into the room.
"You're Amelia Sachs."
"That's right."
"And Thom?"
A nod.
The man turned out to be the chief surgeon of the Pembroke Spinal Cord Center. He said, "He's come through the surgery, but he's still unconscious."
He continued, explaining technical things to them. Sachs nodded, taking in the details. Some seemed good, some seemed less so. But mostly she noted that he wasn't answering the one question that mattered--not about the success of the surgery in technical terms, but when, or if, Lincoln Rhyme would swim back to consciousness.
When she bluntly posed that question, the best the doctor could say was: "We just don't know. We'll have to wait."
Chapter 87
THE 3D SWIRLS of fingerprints evolved not to help forensic scientists identify and convict criminals but simply to give our digits sure purchase, so that whatever we were holding that was precious or necessary or unrecognized wouldn't slip from our frail human grasp.
We are, after all, bereft of claws, and our muscle tone--sorry, ardent health club devotees--is truly pathetic compared with that of any wild animal of comparable weight.
The official title of the patterns on the fingers (feet too) is, in fact, friction ridge, revealing their true purpose.
Lincoln Rhyme glanced briefly at Amelia Sachs, who was ten feet away, curled up, sleeping in a chair, in an oddly content and demure pose. Her red hair fell straight and thick, bisecting her face.
Nearly midnight.
He returned to his contemplation of friction ridges. They occur on digits, which word includes both fingers and toes, and on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. You can be convicted as easily by an incriminating sole print as by a fingerprint, though the circumstances of the crime in which one was involved would surely be a bit unusual.
People have known about the individuality of friction ridges for a long time--they were used to mark official documents eight hundred years ago--but it wasn't until the 1890s that prints became recognized as a way to link criminal and crime. The world's first fingerprint department within a law enforcement agency was in Calcutta, India, formed under the direction of Sir Edward Richard Henry, who gave his name to the classification system of fingerprinting used by police for the next hundred years.
The reason for Rhyme's meditation on fingerprints was that he was presently looking at his own. For the first time in years.
For the first time since the accident in the subway.
His right arm was raised, flexed at the elbow, the wrist and palm twisted so that it was facing him and he was gazing intently at the patterns. He was thoroughly exhilarated, filled with the same sensation as when he'd find the tiny fiber, the bit of trace evidence, the faint impression in the mud that allowed him to make a connection between suspect and crime scene.
The surgery had worked: the implantation of the wires, the computer, controlled by movements of his head and shoulders above the site of his injury. He'd begun tightening muscles in his neck and shoulder to levitate the arm carefully and rotate the wrist. Seeing his own fingerprints had long been a dream of his, and he'd decided that if he could ever regain arm movement, gazing at the whorls and ridges would be the first thing he'd do.
There'd be much therapy ahead of him, of course. And he'd have the other operations too. Nerve rerouting, which would have little effect on mobility but might improve some bodily functions. Then stem cell therapy. And physical rehabilitation too: the treadmill and bicycle and range-of-motion exercises.
There would be limitations too, of course--Thom's job wasn't in any danger. Even if his arms and hands moved, even if his lungs were working better than ever and the business below the waist was approaching that of the nondisabled, he still had no sensation, was still subject to sepsis, would not walk--probably never would, or at least not for many years. But this didn't bother Lincoln Rhyme. He'd learned from his work in forensics that you rarely got 100 percent of what you sought. But usually, with hard work and the alignment of circumstance--never, in Rhyme's view, "luck," of course--what you did achieve was enough . . . for the identification, the arrest, the conviction. Besides, Lincoln Rhyme was a man who needed goals. He lived to fill gaps, to--as Sachs knew well--scratch the itch. His life would be useless without having someplace to go, constantly someplace to go.
Now, carefully, using faint movements of the muscles in his neck, he rotated his palm and lowered it to the bed, with all the coordination of a newborn foal finding its legs.
Then exhaustion and the residue of the drugs were all over him. Rhyme was certainly prepared to sleep, but he chose instead to postpone oblivion for a few minutes, resting his eyes on Amelia Sachs's face, pale and half visible through her hair, like the midpoint of a lunar eclipse.
Acknowledgm
ents
Warm thanks to Crimespree magazine, the Muskego, Wisconsin, library and all those who attended the Murder and Mayhem get-together there last November and won this product placement for their enthusiastic participation at the event, and for their love of reading!
And to Julie, Madelyn, Will, Tina, Ralph, Kay, Adriano and Lisa.
EDGE
JEFFERY DEAVER
Available in hardcover from Simon & Schuster
Turn the page for a preview of Edge. . . .
JUNE 2004
The Rules of Play
THE MAN WHO wanted to kill the young woman sitting beside me was three-quarters of a mile behind us, as we drove through a pastoral setting of tobacco and cotton fields, this humid morning.
A glance in the rearview mirror revealed a sliver of car, moving at a comfortable pace with the traffic, piloted by a man who by all appearances seemed hardly different from any one of a hundred drivers on this recently resurfaced divided highway.
"Officer Fallow?" Alissa began. Then, as I'd been urging her for the past week: "Abe?"
"Yes."
"Is he still there?" She'd seen my gaze.
"Yes. And so's our tail," I added for reassurance. My protege was behind the killer, two or three car lengths. He was not the only person from our organization on the job.
"Okay," Alissa whispered. The woman, in her mid-thirties, was a whistle-blower against a government contractor that did a lot of work for the army. The company was adamant that it had done nothing wrong and claimed it welcomed an investigation. But there'd been an attempt on Alissa's life a week ago and--since I'd been in the army with one of the senior commanders at Bragg--Defense had called me in to guard her. As head of the organization I don't do much fieldwork any longer but I was glad to get out, to tell the truth. My typical day was ten hours at my desk in our Alexandria office. And in the past month, it had been closer to twelve or fourteen, as we coordinated the protection of five high-level organized crime informants, before handing them over to Witness Protection for their face-lifts.
It was good to be back in the saddle, if only for a week or so.
I hit a speed dial button, calling my protege.
"It's Abe," I said into my hands-free. "Where is he now?"
"Make it a half mile. Moving up slowly."
The hitter, whose identity we didn't know, was in a nondescript Hyundai sedan, gray.
I was behind an eighteen-foot truck, CAROLINA POULTRY PROCESSING COMPANY painted on the side. It was empty and being driven by one of our transport people. In front of that was a car identical to the one I was driving.
"We've got two miles till the swap," I said.
Four voices acknowledged this over four very encrypted com devices.
I disconnected.
Without looking at her, I said to Alissa, "It's going to be fine."
"I just . . ." she said in a whisper. "I don't know." She fell silent and stared into the side-view mirror as if the man who wanted to kill her were right behind us.
"It's all going just like we planned."
When innocent people find themselves in situations that require the presence and protection of people like me, their reaction more often than not is as much bewilderment as fear. Mortality is tough to process.
But keeping people safe, keeping people alive, is a business like any other.
I frequently told this to my protege and the others in the office, probably irritating them to no end with both the repetition and the stodgy tone. But I kept on saying it because you can't forget, ever. It's a business, with rigid procedures that we study the way surgeons learn to slice flesh precisely and pilots learn to keep tons of metal safely aloft. These techniques have been honed over the years and they worked.
Business . . .
Of course, it was also true that the hitter who was behind us at the moment, intent on killing the woman next to me, treated his job as a business too. I knew this sure as steel. He was just as serious as I was, had studied procedures as diligently as I had, was smart, IQ-wise and streetwise, and he had advantages over me: His rules were unencumbered by my constraints--the Constitution and the laws promulgated thereunder.
Still, I believe there is an advantage in being in the right. In all my years of doing this work I'd never lost a principal. And I wasn't going to lose Alissa.
A business . . . which meant remaining calm as a surgeon, calm as a pilot.
Alissa was not calm, of course. She was breathing hard, worrying her cuff as she stared at a sprawling magnolia tree we were passing, an outrider of a hickory or chestnut forest, bordering a huge cotton field, the tufts bursting. She was uneasily spinning a thin diamond bracelet--a treat to herself on a recent birthday. She now glanced at the jewelry and then her palms, which were sweating, and placed her hands on her navy blue skirt. Under my care, Alissa had worn dark clothing exclusively. It was camouflage but not because she was the target of a professional killer; it was about her weight, which she'd wrestled with since adolescence. I knew this because we'd shared meals and I'd seen the battle up close. She'd also talked quite a bit about the battle with food. Some principals don't need or want camaraderie. Others, like Alissa, need us to be friends. I don't do well in that role--the stiff part, again--but I try and can generally pull it off.
We passed a sign. The exit was a mile and a half away.
A business requires simple, smart planning. You can't be reactive in this line of work and though I hate the word "proactive" (as opposed to what, antiactive?), the concept is vital to what we do. In this instance, to deliver Alissa safe and sound to the prosecutor for her depositions, I needed to keep the hitter in play. Since my protege had been following him for hours, we knew where he was and could have taken him at any moment. But if we'd done that, whoever had hired him would simply call somebody else to finish the job. I wanted to keep him on the road for the better part of the day--long enough for Alissa to get into the U.S. Attorney's office and give him sufficient information via deposition so that she would no longer be at risk. Once the testimony's down, the hitter has no incentive to eliminate a witness.
The plan I'd devised, with my protege's help, was for me to pass the Carolina Poultry truck and pull in front of it. The hitter would speed up to keep us in sight but before he got close the truck and I would exit simultaneously. Because of the curve in the road and the ramp I'd picked, the hitter wouldn't be able to see my car but would spot the decoy. Alissa and I would then take a complicated route to a hotel in Raleigh, where the prosecutor awaited, while the decoy would eventually end up at the courthouse in Charlotte, three hours away. By the time the hitter realized that he'd been following a bogus target, it would be too late. He'd call his primary--his employer--and most likely the hit would be called off. We'd move in, arrest the hitter and try to trace him back to the primary.
About a mile ahead was the turnoff, and the chicken truck was about thirty feet ahead.
I regarded Alissa, now playing with a gold and amethyst necklace. Her mother had given it to her on her seventeenth birthday, more expensive than the family could afford but an unspoken consolation prize for the absence of an invitation to the prom. People tend to share quite a lot with those who are saving their lives.
My phone buzzed. "Yes?" I asked my protege.
"The subject's moved up a bit. About two hundred yards behind the truck."
"We're almost there," I said. "Let's go."
I passed the poultry truck quickly and pulled in behind the decoy--a tight fit. It was driven by a man from our organization; the passenger was an FBI agent who resembled Alissa. There'd been some fun in the office when we picked somebody to play the role of me. I have a round head and ears that protrude a fraction of an inch more than I would like. I've got wiry red hair and I'm not tall. So in the office they apparently spent an hour or two in an impromptu contest to find the most elf-like officer to impersonate me.
"Status?" I asked into the phone.
"He's changed lanes and is accel
erating a little."
He wouldn't like not seeing me, I reflected.
I heard, "Hold on . . . hold on."
I would remember to tell my protege to mind the unnecessary verbal filler; while the words were scrambled by our phones, the fact there'd been a transmission could be detected. He'd learn the lesson fast and retain it.
"I'm coming up on the exit. . . . Okay. Here we go."
Still doing about sixty, I eased into the exit lane and swung around the curve, which was surrounded by thick trees. The chicken truck was right on my bumper.
My protege reported, "Good. Subject didn't even look your way. He's got the decoy in sight and the speed's dropping back to the limit."
I paused at the red light where the ramp fed into Route 18, then turned right. The poultry truck turned left.
"Subject is continuing on the route," came my protege's voice. "Seems to be working fine." His voice was cool. I'm pretty detached about this business but he does me one better. He rarely smiles, never jokes and in truth I don't know much about him, though we've worked together, often closely, for several years. I'd like to change that about him--his somberness--not for the sake of the job, since he really is very, very good, but simply because I wish he took more pleasure in what we do. The endeavor of keeping people safe can be satisfying, even joyous. Especially when it comes to protecting families, which we do with some frequency.
I told him to keep me updated and we disconnected.
"So," Alissa asked, "we're safe?"
"We're safe," I told her, hiking the speed up to fifty in a forty-five zone. In fifteen minutes we were meandering along a route that would take us to the outskirts of Raleigh, where we'd meet the prosecutor for the depositions.
The sky was overcast and the scenery was probably what it had been for dozens of years: bungalow farmhouses, shacks, trailers and motor vehicles in terminal condition but still functioning if the nursing and luck were right. A gas station offering a brand I'd never heard of. Dogs toothing at fleas lazily. Women in stressed jeans, overseeing their broods. Men with beer-lean faces and expanding guts, sitting on porches, waiting for nothing. Most likely wondering at our car--containing the sort of people you don't see much in this neighborhood: a man in a white shirt, dark suit and tie and a woman with a business blond haircut.
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