Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

"No, Tucker. Nothing yet. It's like an investment."

Finally the ASAC said, "I could do six, eight thousand probably."

"That's all?"

"How the hell much does he want?"

"We're negotiating."

"Fact is, we've had to adjust bottom lines for this one, Fred. Took us by surprise. You know."

McDaniel's reluctance to spend was suddenly clear. He'd moved all the money in the Bureau operating accounts to the SIGINT and T and C teams. Naturally one of the first places he'd raided was the snitch fund.

"Start with six. See the merchandise. If it's meaty, maybe I could go nine or ten. Even that's pushing it."

"I think he could be on to something, Tucker."

"Well, let's see some proof… Hold on… Okay, Fred, it's T and C on the other line. I better go."

Click.

Dellray snapped the phone shut and stood for a moment, staring at the tree. He heard: "She was hot, you know, but there was this one thing didn't seem right… no, it's the Mayan calendar, I mean, maybe Nostradamus… that's totally fucked up… yo, where you been, dog?…"

But what he was really hearing was his partner in the FBI some years ago saying, No problem, Fred. I'll take it. And going on a trip that Dellray had been scheduled to handle.

And then hearing the voice of his special agent in charge of the New York office two days later, that voice choking, telling Dellray that the partner had been one of the people killed in a terrorist bombing in the Oklahoma City federal building. The man had been in the conference room that Dellray should have been occupying.

At that moment, Fred Dellray, in a comfortable air-conditioned conference room of his own many miles from the smoking crater, had decided that a priority in his law enforcement career from then on would be to pursue terrorists and anyone else who killed the innocent in the name of ideas, whether political or religious or social.

Yes, he was being marginalized by the ASAC. He wasn't even being taken seriously. But what Dellray was about to do had very little to do with vindicating himself, or striking a blow for the old ways.

It was about stopping what he thought was the worst of evils: killing innocents.

He returned to William Brent, sat down. He said, "Okay. One hundred thousand." They exchanged numbers-both cold phones, prepaid mobiles that would be discarded after a day or so. Dellray looked at his watch. He said, "Tonight. Washington Square. Near the law school, by the chess boards."

"Nine?" Brent asked.

"Make it nine-thirty." Dellray rose and, according to the tradecraft of the CI world, left the park alone, with William Brent remaining behind to pretend to read the paper or contemplate the Krishna elm.

Or figure out how to spend his money.

But the CI was soon lost to thought, and Fred Dellray was considering how best to plan the set, what part the chameleon should now play, how to cast his eyes, how to convince and wheedle and call in favors. He was pretty sure he could pull it off; these were skills he'd honed for years.

He'd just never thought he'd ever be using his talents to rob his employer-the American government and the American people-of $100,000.

AS AMELIA SACHS followed Charlie Sommers to his office on the other side of the Burn in Algonquin Consolidated, she was aware that the heat was rising along the complicated route he was taking. And the rumble filling the halls was getting louder with every step.

She was totally lost. Up stairways, down stairways. As she followed him she sent and received several text messages on her BlackBerry but as they moved lower and lower she had to concentrate on where she was walking; the hallways became increasingly visitor-hostile. Cell reception finally turned to dust and she put her phone away.

The temperature rose higher.

Sommers stopped at a thick door, beside which were a rack of hard hats.

"You worried about your hair?" he asked, his voice rising, since the rumbling from the other side of the door was very loud now.

"I don't want to lose it," she called back. "But otherwise, no."

"Just getting mussed a bit. This is the shortest way to my office."

"Shorter's better. I'm in a hurry." She grabbed a hat and squashed it onto her head.

"Ready?"

"I guess. What's through there exactly?"

Sommers thought for a moment and said, "Hell." And nodded her forward.

She recalled the seared polka-dot wounds that covered Luis Martin. Her breath was coming fast and she realized that her hand, moving toward the door handle, had slowed. She gripped and pulled the heavy steel portal open.

Yep, hell. Fire, sulfur, the whole scene.

The temperature in the room was overwhelming. Well over a hundred degrees and Sachs felt not only a painful prickle on her skin but a curious lessening of the pain in her joints as the heat deadened her arthritis.

The hour was late-it was close to eight p.m.-but there was a full staff at work in the Burn. The hunger for electricity might ebb and flow throughout the day but never ceased completely.

The dim space, easily two hundred feet high, was filled with scaffolding and hundreds of pieces of equipment. The centerpiece was a series of massive light green machines. The largest of them was long with a rounded top, like a huge Quonset hut, from which many pipes and ducts and wires sprouted.

"That's MOM," Sommers called, pointing to it. "M-O-M. Midwest Operating Machinery, Gary, Indiana. They built her in the 1960s." This was all shouted with some reverence. Sommers added that she was the biggest of the five electrical generators here in the Queens complex. He continued, explaining that when first installed, MOM was the biggest electrical generator in the country. In addition to the other electrical generators-they were only numbered, without names-were four units that provided superheated steam to the New York City area.

Amelia Sachs was indeed captivated by the massive machinery. She found her step slowing as she gazed at the huge components and tried to figure out the parts. Fascinating what the human mind could put together, what human hands could build.

"Those're the boilers." He pointed to what seemed to Sachs to be a separate building within a building. They must've been ten or twelve stories tall. "They produce steam, over three thousand pounds per square inch." He drew a breath. "It goes into two turbines, a high-pressure and a low-pressure one." He pointed to part of MOM. "Then into the generator. She's got a continuous output-thirty-four thousand amps, eighteen thousand volts, but it's stepped up once it gets outside for transport to over three hundred thousand."

Despite the squashing heat, she felt a shiver, hearing those figures and flashing on the memory of Luis Martin, his skin punctured by hot metal raindrops.

Sommers added with some pride, it seemed to Sachs, that the output of the entire Queens facility-MOM plus several other turbines-was close to 2,500 megawatts. About 25 percent of the city's entire usage.

He pointed to a series of other tanks. "That's where the steam is condensed to water and pumped back to the boilers. Starts all over again." Proudly he continued, shouting, "She's got three hundred and sixty miles of tubes and pipes, a million feet of cable."

But then, despite her fascination and the massive scale, Sachs found herself gigged in the belly by her claustrophobia. The noise was relentless, the heat.

Sommers seemed to understand. "Come on." He gestured her to follow and in five minutes they were out the other door and hanging up their hats. Sachs was breathing deeply. The corridor, while still warm, was blessedly cool after her minutes in hell.

"It gets to you, doesn't it?"

"Does."

"You all right?"

She diverted a tickling stream of sweat and nodded. He offered her a paper towel from a roll kept there for mopping faces and necks, it seemed, and she dried off.