Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

Her jerky, grain-filled image looked around. "Yes."

"Get him on camera."

He heard Sachs call the officer over. A moment later he was seated, staring out of the monitor. "Yessir?"

"You find where he got into the tunnel behind the substation?"

"Yep."

"Yep? You sound like a dog, Rookie. Yip, yip."

"Sorry. Yes, I did."

"Where?"

"There's a manhole in an alley up the street. Algonquin Power. It was for access to steam pipes. It didn't lead to the substation itself. But about twenty feet inside, maybe thirty, I found a grating. Somebody'd cut an opening into it. Big enough to climb through. They'd stuck it back up but I could see it'd been cut."

"Recently?"

"Right."

"Because there was no rust on the cut edges."

"Yeah, I mean yes. It led to this tunnel. It was really old. Might've been for delivering coal or something a long time ago. That's what went to the access door that Amelia got. I was at the end of the tunnel and I saw the light when she took the door off. And I heard the battery blow and her scream. I got to her right away, through the tunnel."

The gruffness fell away. "Thanks, Pulaski."

An awkward moment. Rhyme's compliments were so rare he'd found that people didn't quite know what to do with them.

"I was careful not to contaminate the scene too much, though."

"To save lives, contaminate to your heart's content. Remember that."

"Sure."

The criminalist continued, "You walked the grid at the manhole-and where he cut through the grating? And the tunnel?"

"Yessir."

"Anything jump out?"

"Just footprints. But I've got trace."

"We'll see what it says."

Thom whispered firmly, "Lincoln?"

"Just a minute more. Now, I need you to do something else, Rookie. You see that restaurant or coffee shop across the street from the power station?"

The officer looked to his right. "I've got it… Wait, how'd you know there was one there?"

"Oh, from one of my neighborhood strolls," Rhyme said, chuckling.

"I…" The young man was flustered.

"I know because there has to be one. Our UNSUB wanted to be able to see the substation for the attack. He couldn't watch from a hotel room because he'd have to register, or an office building because it would be too suspicious. He'd be someplace where he could sit at his leisure."

"Oh, I get it. You mean psychologically, he gets off on watching the fireworks."

The time for compliments was over. "Jesus Christ, Rookie, that's profiling. How do I feel about profiling?"

"Uhm. You're not exactly a big fan, Lincoln."

Rhyme caught Sachs, in the background, smiling.

"He needed to see how the device was working. He'd created something unique. His arc flash gun isn't the sort of thing he could test-fire at a rifle range. He had to make adjustments to the voltage and the circuit breakers as he went along. He had to make sure it discharged at the exact moment when the bus was there. He started manipulating the grid computer at eleven-twenty and in ten minutes it was all over. Go talk to the manager at the restaurant-"

"Coffee shop."

"-of the coffee shop and see if anybody was inside, near a window, for a while before the explosion. He would've left right after, before police and fire got there. Oh, and find out if they have broadband and who's the provider."

Thom, now in rubber gloves, was gesturing impatiently.

The piss and shit detail…

Pulaski said, "Sure, Lincoln."

"And then-"

The young officer interrupted, "Seal off the restaurant and walk the grid where he was sitting."

"Exactly right, Rookie. Then both of you, get the hell back here ASAP."

With a flick of one of his working fingers Rhyme ended the call, beating Thom's own digit to the button by a millisecond.

THE CLOUD ZONE, Fred Dellray was thinking.

Recalling when Assistant Special Agent in Charge Tucker McDaniel, newly on board in the FBI's New York office, had gathered the troops and given, in lecture form, a talk similar to what he'd just delivered at Rhyme's a few hours earlier. About the new methods of communication the bad guys were using, about how the acceleration of technology was making it easier for them and harder for us.

The cloud zone…

Dellray understood the concept, of course. You couldn't be in law enforcement now and not be aware of McDaniel's high-tech approach to finding and collaring perps. But that didn't mean he liked it. Not one bit. Largely because of what the phrase stood for; it was an emblem for fundamental, maybe cataclysmic, changes in everyone's life.

Changes in his life too.

Heading downtown on a subway on this clear afternoon, Dellray was thinking about his father, a professor at Marymount Manhattan College, and a writer of several books about African-American philosophers and cultural critics. The man had eased into academia at the age of thirty, and he'd never left. He died at the same desk he'd called home for decades, slumping forward on proofs of the journal he'd founded when Martin Luther King's assassination was still fresh in the world's mind.

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 airbags. 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 townhouse 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.