Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

But not before there was a sickening thud and a scream and he caught a glimpse of a middle-aged man who'd been crossing the alley, carting a load of groceries. The pedestrian flew into the wall and collapsed on the cobblestones, blood streaming from his head.

AMELIA SACHS WAS taking stock of Joey Barzan.

"How you doing?"

"Yeah. I guess."

She wasn't sure what that meant and didn't think he knew either. She glanced at the EMS medic who was bent over Barzan. They were still in the tunnel beneath the Battery Park Hotel.

"Concussion, lost some blood." He turned to his patient, who was sitting unsteadily against the wall. "You'll be all right."

Bob Cavanaugh had managed to find the source of the juice and shut down the line that Galt had used for the trap. Sachs had confirmed that the electrical supply was dead, using Sommers's current detector, and quickly-really quickly-undone the wire attached to the feeder line.

"What happened?" she asked Barzan.

"It was Ray Galt. I found him down here. He hit me with a hot stick, knocked me out. When I woke up he'd wired me to the line. Jesus. That was sixty-thousand volts, a subway feeder. If you'd touched me, if I'd rolled a few inches to the side… Jesus." Then he blinked. "I heard the sirens on the street. The smell. What happened?"

"Galt ran some wires into the hotel next door."

"God, no. Is anybody hurt?"

"There are casualties. I don't know the details yet. Where'd Galt go?"

"I don't know. I was out. If he didn't leave through the college, he had to go that way, through the tunnel." He cast his eyes to the side. "There's plenty of access to the subway tunnels and platforms."

Sachs asked, "Did he say anything?"

"Not really."

"Where was he when you saw him?"

"Right there." He pointed about ten feet away. "You can see where he rigged the line. There's some kind of box on it. I've never seen that before. And he was watching the construction site and the hotel on his computer. Like it was hooked into a security camera."

Sachs rose and looked over the cable, the same Bennington brand as at the bus stop yesterday. No sign of the computer or hot stick, which she recalled Sommers telling her about-a fiberglass pole for live-wire work.

Then Barzan said in a soft voice, "The only reason I'm alive now is that he wanted to use me to kill people, isn't that right? He wanted to stop you from chasing him."

"That's right."

"That son of a bitch. And he's one of us. Linemen and troublemen stick together. It's like a brotherhood, you know. We have to be. Juice is so dangerous." He was furious at the betrayal.

Sachs rolled the man's hands, arms and legs for trace and then nodded to the medics. "He can go now." She told Barzan if he thought of anything else to give her a call and handed him a card. A medic radioed his colleague and said that the scene was clear and that they could bring the stretcher down the tunnel to evacuate the worker. Barzan sat back against the tunnel wall and closed his eyes.

Sachs then contacted Nancy Simpson and told her what had happened. "Get ESU into the Algonquin tunnels for a half mile around. And the subways too."

"Sure, Amelia. Hold on." Simpson came back on a moment later. "They're on their way."

"What about our witness from the hotel?"

"I'm still checking."

Sachs's eyes were growing more accustomed to the dark. She squinted. "I'll get back to you, Nancy. I see something." She moved through the tunnel in the direction that Barzan indicated Galt probably had fled.

About thirty feet away, sandwiched behind a grating in a small recess, she found a set of Algonquin dark blue overalls, hard hat and gear bag. She'd seen a flash of yellow from the safety hat. Of course, Galt would now know that everybody was looking for him, so he'd stripped off the outfit and hidden it here with the tool bag.

She called back Simpson and asked her to contact Bo Haumann and ESU and let them know that Galt would be in different clothes. Then she donned latex gloves and reached forward to pull the evidence out from behind the metal.

But then she stopped fast.

Now, you have to remember that even if you think you're avoiding it, you could still be in danger.

Sommers's words resounded in her head. She took the current detector and swept it over the tools.

The needle jumped: 603 volts.

Gasping, Sachs closed her eyes and felt the strength drain from her legs. She looked more carefully and saw a wire. It ran from the grating underground to the conduit behind which the evidence was stashed. She'd have to touch the pipe to pull the items out. The power was technically off in the tunnel but maybe this was a case of islanding or backfeed, if she remembered what Sommers had told her.

How much amperage does it take to kill you?

One tenth of one amp.

She returned to Barzan, who gazed at her blearily, his bandaged head still resting against the tunnel wall.

"I need some help. I need to collect some evidence, but there's still power in one of the lines."

"What line?"

"Up there. Six hundred volts. He's wired it to some conduit."

"Six hundred? It's DC, backfeed from the third rail supply on the subway. Look, you can use my hot stick. See it there?" He pointed. "And my gloves. The best thing is to run another wire to a ground from the conduit. You know how to do that?"

"No."

"I'm in no shape to help you. Sorry."

"That's okay. Tell me how to use the stick." She pulled on Barzan's gloves over the latex ones and took the tool, which ended with a clawlike attachment on the end, covered in rubber. It gave her some, but not a lot of, confidence.

"Stand on the rubber mat and pull whatever you saw out one by one. You'll be fine… To be safe do it one-handed. Your right hand."

Farthest from the heart…

Which thudded furiously as she walked up to the recess, lay the Teflon sheets down and began slowly to collect the evidence.

Pictured yet again young Luis Martin's torn body, the shivering creatures dying in the hotel lobby.

Hated being distracted.

Hated being up against an enemy she couldn't see.

Holding her breath-though she didn't know why-she pulled out the overalls and hard hat. Then the gear bag. R. Galt was written in sloppy marker on the red canvas.

Exhaling long.

Finally she assembled and bagged the evidence.

A crime scene technician from Queens had arrived with CS equipment suitcases in hand. Even though the scene was now vastly contaminated, Sachs dressed in the blue Tyvek jumpsuit and continued to run the scene like any other. She laid out the numbers, took pictures and walked the grid. Using Sommers's detector, she double-checked the lines and then quickly unbolted the Bennington cable and a square black plastic box that connected it to the main feeder line. Galt's wire ran to the steel girder of the hotel, which would carry the juice to energize the metal fixtures of the door handles, revolving doors and stair rails. She bagged everything she'd found, then took samples from where Galt had stood to mount the cable and where he'd attacked Joey Barzan.

She looked again for the hot stick Galt had hit his fellow worker with but couldn't find it. Nor was there any sign of where he'd cut into any video feeds to use the school's or construction site's security cameras to look over the site of the attack, as Barzan had told her.

After she'd finished bagging the evidence, she called Rhyme and gave him an update.

"Get back here as soon as you can, Sachs. We need that evidence."

"What'd Ron find?"

"According to Lon, nothing spectacular. Hm. Wonder what's going on. He should be here by now." His impatience was obvious.

"It'll just be a few minutes. I want to find that witness. Somebody having lunch apparently got a good look at Galt. I'm hoping he can tell us something specific."