Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

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.

"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.