Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

"Come on this way."

He led her down more corridors and into another building. More stairs and finally they arrived at his office. She stifled a laugh at the clutter. The place was filled with computers and instruments she couldn't recognize, hundreds of bits of equipment and tools, wires, electronic components, keyboards, metal and plastic and wood items in every shape and color.

And junk food. Tons of junk food. Chips and pretzels and soda, Ding Dongs and Twinkies. And Hostess powdered sugar doughnuts, which explained the dandruff on his clothes.

"Sorry. It's the way we work in Special Projects," he said, shoveling aside computer printouts from an office chair for her to sit in. "Well, the way I work, at least."

"What exactly do you do?"

He explained, somewhat abashedly, that he was an inventor. "I know, sounds either very nineteenth century or very infomercial. But that's what I do. And I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I do for a living exactly what I wanted to when I was a kid and building dynamos, motors, lightbulbs-"

"You made your own lightbulbs?"

"Only set fire to my bedroom twice. Well, three times, but we only had to call the fire department twice."

She looked at a picture of Edison on the wall.

"My hero," Sommers said. "Fascinating man."

"Andi Jessen had something about him on her wall too. A photo of the grid."

"It's Thomas Alva's original signature… But Jessen's more Samuel Insull, I'd say."

"Who?"

"Edison was the scientist. Insull was a businessman. He headed Consolidated Edison and created the first big monopolistic power utility. Electrified the Chicago trolley system, practically gave away the first electrical appliances-like irons-to get people addicted to electricity. He was a genius. But he ended up disgraced. This sound familiar? He was way overleveraged and when the Depression came, the company went under and hundreds of thousands of shareholders lost everything. Little like Enron. You want to know some trivia: The accounting firm Arthur Andersen was involved with both Insull and Enron.

"But me? I leave the business to other people. I just make things. Ninety-nine percent amounts to nothing. But… well, I've got twenty-eight patents in my name and I've created nearly ninety processes or products in Algonquin's. Some people sit in front of the TV or play video games for fun. I… well, invent things." He pointed to a large cardboard box, brimming with squares and rectangles of paper. "That's the Napkin File."

"The what?"

"I'm out at Starbucks or a deli and I get an idea. I jot it down on a napkin and come back here to draw it up properly. But I save the original, toss it in there."

"So if there's ever a museum about you there'll be a Napkin Room."

"It has occurred to me." Sommers was blushing, from forehead to ample chin.

"What exactly do you invent?"

"I guess my expertise is the opposite of what Edison did. He wanted people to use electricity. I want people not to."

"Does your boss know that's your goal?"

He laughed. "Maybe I should say I want people to use it more efficiently. I'm Algonquin's negawatt maven. That's 'nega' with an n."

"Never heard about that."

"A lot of people haven't, which is too bad. It came from a brilliant scientist and environmentalist, Amory Lovins. The theory is to create incentives to reduce demand and use electricity more efficiently, rather than trying to build new power plants to increase supply. Your typical power station wastes nearly half of the heat generated-right up the smokestack. Half! Think about that. But we've got a series of thermal collectors on the stacks and cooling towers here. At Algonquin we lose only twenty-seven percent.

"I've been coming up with ideas for portable nuclear generators-on barges, so they can be moved around from region to region." He leaned forward, eyes sparkling again. "And the big new challenge: storing electricity. It's not like food. You can't make it and put it on the shelf for a month. You use it or lose it-instantly. I'm creating new ways to store it. Flywheels, air pressure systems, new battery technology…

"Oh, and lately I've been spending half my time traveling around the country linking up small alternative and renewable companies, so they can get onto the major grids like the Northeastern Interconnection-that's ours-and sell juice to us, rather than us selling to small communities."

"I thought Andi Jessen wasn't very supportive of renewables and alternative energy."

"No, but she's not crazy either. It's the wave of the future. I think we just disagree about when that future's going to arrive. I think sooner." A whimsical smile. "Of course, you did notice that her office is the size of my entire department, and it's on the ninth floor with a view of Manhattan… I'm in the basement." His face grew solemn. "Now, what can I do to help?"

Sachs said, "I have a list of people at Algonquin who might've been behind the attack this morning."

"Somebody here?" He appeared dismayed.

"It's looking that way. Or at least they were working with the perp. Now, he's probably a man, though he could be working with a woman. He or she had access to the computer codes that let them get into grid control software. He kept shutting down substations so that the electricity was rerouted into the substation on Fifty-Seventh Street. And he reset the circuit breakers higher than they should have been."

"So that's how it happened." His face was troubled. "The computers. I wondered. I didn't know the details."

"Some of them will have alibis-we'll take care of checking that out. But I need you to give me some idea of who'd have the ability to reroute the electricity and rig the arc flash."

Sommers seemed amused. "I'm flattered. I didn't know Andi even knew much about what happens down here." Then the cherubic look was gone, replaced by a wry smile. "Am I a suspect?"

She'd spotted his name when Jessen had first mentioned him. She held his eye. "You're on the list."

"Hm. You're sure you want to trust me?"

"You were on conference call from ten-thirty until nearly noon today, when the attack happened, and you were out of town during the window when the perp could have gotten the computer codes. The key data shows you didn't log into the safe file room at any other time."

Sommers was lifting an eyebrow.

She tapped her BlackBerry. "That's what I was texting about on the way here. I had somebody in the NYPD check you out. So you're clean."

She supposed she sounded apologetic for not trusting him. But Sommers said, his eyes sparkling, "Thomas Edison would have approved."

"What do you mean?"

"He said a genius is just a talented person who does his homework."

AMELIA SACHS DIDN'T want to show Sommers the list itself; he might know some of the employees and be inclined to dismiss the possibility of their being suspects, or, on the other hand, he might call her attention to somebody simply because he thought they were otherwise suspicious.

She didn't explain her reluctance but said simply she just wanted a profile of somebody who could have arranged the attack and used the computer.

He opened a bag of Doritos, offered Sachs some. She declined and he chomped down a handful. Sommers didn't seem like an inventor. He seemed more like a middle-aged advertising copywriter, with his tousled hair and slightly untucked blue-and-white-striped shirt. Bit of a belly. His glasses were stylish, though Sachs suspected that on the frames were the words "Made in" preceding some Asian Rim country. Only up close could you see the wrinkles near his eyes and mouth.

He washed the food down with soda and said, "First, rerouting the juice to get it to the substation on Fifty-seventh Street? That'll narrow things down. Not everybody who works here could do it. Not many people could at all, in fact. They'd need to know SCADA. That's our Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition program. It runs on Unix computers. He'd also probably have to know EMP-energy management programs. Ours is Enertrol. It's Unix-based too. Unix is a pretty complicated operating system. It's used in the big Internet routers. It's not like Windows or Apple. You couldn't just look up online how to do it. You'd need somebody who'd studied SCADA and EMP, taken courses in it or, at the very least, apprenticed in a control room for six months, a year."