Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

"Do what?"

"What he's asking for. You know, reduce the power."

Rhyme didn't see any problem playing games with the bad guys, if a little negotiation gave extra time to analyze the evidence or run surveillance on a terrorist. But it wasn't his call.

"This is Tucker again, Ms. Jessen. We strongly recommend against negotiating. In the long run, that just encourages them to up their demands." His eyes were on the large detective, who stared right back.

Sellitto persisted, "It could buy us some breathing room."

The ASAC was hesitating, perhaps debating the wisdom of not presenting a united front. Still he said, "I would firmly recommend against it."

Andi Jessen said, "It's not even an issue. A citywide fifty percent decrease below off-peak load? It's not like turning a dimmer switch. It would throw off the load patterns throughout the Northeast Interconnection. We'd have dropouts and blackouts in dozens of places. And we've got millions of customers with on-off systems that'd shut down cold with that drop in power. There'd be data dumps and resets'd go to default. You can't just turn them back on again; it would take days of reprogramming, and a lot of data would be lost altogether.

"But worse, some of the life-critical infrastructure has battery or generator backup, but not all of it. Hospitals have only so much and some of those systems never work right. People will die as a result of it."

Well, thought Rhyme, the writer of the letter had one point right: Electricity, and Algonquin and the power companies, have indeed worked their way into our lives. We're dependent on juice.

"There you have it," said McDaniel. "It can't be done."

Sellitto grimaced. Rhyme looked toward Sachs. "Parker?"

She nodded, and scrolled through her BlackBerry to find the number and email of Parker Kincaid in Washington, D.C. He was a former FBI agent and now a private consultant, the best document examiner in the country, in Rhyme's opinion.

"I'll send it now." She dropped into a chair in front of one of the workstations, wrote an email, scanned the letter then sent them on their way.

Sellitto snapped open his phone and contacted NYPD Anti-Terror, along with the Emergency Service Unit-the city's version of SWAT-and told them that another attack was planned for around 1 p.m.

Rhyme turned to the phone. "Ms. Jessen, Lincoln again. That list you gave Detective Sachs yesterday? The employees?"

"Yes?"

"Can you get us samples of their handwriting?"

"Everybody?"

"As many as you can. As soon as you can."

"I suppose. We have signed confidentiality statements from just about everybody. Probably health forms, requests, expense accounts."

Rhyme was somewhat skeptical of signatures as representative of handwriting. Though he was no document examiner, you can't be the head of a forensics unit without developing some knowledge of the subject. He knew that people tended to scrawl their names carelessly (very bad practice, he'd also learned, since a sloppy signature was easier to forge than a precise one). But people wrote memos and took notes in a more legible way, which was more indicative of how they wrote in general. He told this to Jessen, and she responded that she'd put several assistants on the job of finding as many nonsignature examples of handwriting as she could. She wasn't happy but seemed to be softening her position that an Algonquin employee couldn't be involved.

Rhyme turned away from the phone and called, "Sachs! Is he there? Is Parker there? What's going on?"

She nodded. "He's at some function or something. I'm getting patched through."

Kincaid was a single father of two children, Robby and Stephanie, and he carefully balanced his personal and professional lives-his commitment to his kids was why he'd quit the FBI to become, like Rhyme, a consultant. But Rhyme knew too that for a case like this, Kincaid would get on board instantly and do what he could to help.

The criminalist turned back to the phone. "Ms. Jessen, could you scan them and send them to…" An eyebrow raised toward Sachs, who called out Parker Kincaid's email address.

"I've got it," Jessen said.

"Those are terms in the business, I assume?" Rhyme asked. " 'Rolling brownout,' 'shedding load,' 'service grid,' 'offpeak load.' "

"That's right."

"Does that give us any details about him?"

"Not really. They're technical aspects of the business but if he could adjust the computer and rig a flash arc device, then he'd know those too. Anybody in the power industry would know them."

"How did you get the letter?"

"It was delivered to my apartment building."

"Is your address public?"

"I'm not listed in the phone book but I suppose it wouldn't be impossible to find me."

Rhyme persisted, "How exactly did you receive it?"

"I live in a doorman building, Upper East Side. Somebody rang the back delivery bell in the lobby. The doorman went to go see. When he got back, the letter was at his station. It was marked, Emergency. Delivery immediately to Andi Jessen."

"Is there video security?" Rhyme asked.

"No."

"Who handled it?"

"The doorman. Just the envelope, though. I had a messenger from the office pick it up. He would have touched it too. And I did, of course."

McDaniel was about to say something but Rhyme beat him to it. "The letter was time sensitive, so whoever left it knew you had a doorman. So that it would get to you immediately."

McDaniel was nodding. Apparently that would have been his comment. The bright-eyed Kid nodded as well, like a bobble-head dog in the back window of a car.

After a moment: "I guess that's right." The concern was obvious in her voice. "So that means he knows about me. Maybe knows a lot about me."

"Do you have a bodyguard?" Sellitto asked.

"Our security director, at work. Bernie Wahl. You met him, Detective Sachs. He's got four armed guards on staff, each shift. But not at home. I never thought…"

"We'll get somebody from Patrol stationed outside your apartment," Sellitto said. As he made the call, McDaniel asked, "What about family in the area? We should have somebody look out for them."

Momentary silence from the speaker. Then: "Why?"

"He might try to use them as leverage."

"Oh." Jessen's otherwise rugged voice sounded small at the implications, those close to her being hurt. But she explained, "My parents are in Florida."

Sachs asked, "You have a brother, don't you? Didn't I see his picture on your desk?"

"My brother? We don't stay in touch much. And he doesn't live here-" Another voice interrupted her. Jessen came back on the line. "Look, I'm sorry, the governor's calling. He's just heard the news."

With a click she disconnected.

"So." Sellitto lifted his palms. His eyes grazed McDaniel but then settled on Rhyme. "This makes it all pretty fucking easy."

"Easy?" asked the Kid.

"Yeah." Sellitto nodded at the digital clock on a nearby flat-screen monitor. "If we can't negotiate, all we gotta do is find him. In under three hours. Piece of cake."

MEL COOPER AND Rhyme were working on the analysis of the letter. Ron Pulaski had arrived too, a few minutes earlier. Lon Sellitto was speeding downtown to coordinate with ESU, in the event they could either ID a suspect or find his possible target.

Tucker McDaniel looked over the demand letter as if it were some type of food he'd never encountered. Rhyme supposed this was because handwriting on a piece of paper didn't fall into cloud zone law enforcement. It was the antithesis of high-tech communications. His computers and sophisticated tracing systems were useless against paper and ink.

Rhyme glanced at the script. He knew from his own training, as well as from working with Parker Kincaid, that handwriting doesn't reveal anything about the personality of the writer, whatever the grocery store checkout-stand books and news pundits suggested. Analysis could be illuminating, of course, if you had another, identified sample to compare it with, so you could determine if the writer of the second document was the same as the one who wrote the first. Parker Kincaid would be doing this now, running a preliminary comparison with known handwriting samples of terror suspects and comparing them with the writing of those Algonquin employees who were on the company list.