Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

They had discovered evidence suggesting that life had begun on earth all because of a spark of electricity.

As the clock approached midnight, he composed his next demand letter to Algonquin and the City of New York. Then with sleep enfolding him he thought again about juice. And the irony that what had, in a millisecond burst of lightning, created life so many, many years ago would, tomorrow, take it away, just as fast. Earth Day

"I haven't failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that won't work." -THOMAS ALVA EDISON

" PLEASE LEAVE a message at the tone."

Sitting in his Brooklyn townhouse at 7:30 a.m., Fred Dellray stared at his phone, flipped it closed. He didn't bother to leave another message, though, not after leaving twelve earlier ones on William Brent's cold phone.

I'm screwed, he thought.

There was the chance the man was dead. Even though McDaniel's phrasing was fucked-up (symbiosis construct?), his theory might not be. It made sense that Ray Galt was the inside man seduced into helping Rahman and Johnston and their Justice For the Earth group target Algonquin and the grid. If Brent had stumbled into their cell, they'd have killed him in an instant.

Ah, Dellray thought angrily: blind, simpleminded politics-the empty calories of terrorism.

But Dellray'd been in this business a long time and his gut told him that William Brent was very much alive. New York City is smaller than people think, particularly the underside of the Big Apple. Dellray had called up other contacts, a lot of them: other CIs and some of the undercover agents he ran. No word about Brent. Even Jimmy Jeep knew nothing-and he definitely had a motive to track down the man again, to make sure Dellray still backed the upcoming march through Georgia. Yet nobody'd heard about anybody ordering a clip or a cleaner. And no surprised garbagemen had wheeled a Dumpster to their truck and found nestled inside the pungent sarcophagus an unidentified body.

No, Dellray concluded. There was only the obvious answer, and he could ignore it no more: Brent had fucked him over.

He'd checked Homeland Security to see if the snitch, either as Brent or as one of his half dozen undercover identities, had booked a flight anywhere. He hadn't, though any professional CI knows where to buy airtight identity papers.

"Honey?"

Dellray jumped at the sound and he looked up and saw Serena in the doorway, holding Preston.

"You're looking thoughtful," she said. Dellray continued to be struck by the fact she looked like Jada Pinkett Smith, the actress and producer. "You were brooding before you went to bed, you started brooding when you woke up. I suspect you were brooding in your sleep."

He opened his mouth to spin a tale, but then said, "I think I got my ass fired yesterday."

"What?" Her face was shocked. "McDaniel fired you?"

"Not in so many words-he thanked me."

"But-"

"Some thank-you's mean thank you. Others mean pack up your stuff… Let's just say I'm being eased out. Same thing."

"I think you're reading too much into it."

"He keeps forgetting to call me with updates on the case."

"The grid case?"

"Right. Lincoln calls me, Lon Sellitto calls me. Tucker's assistant calls me."

Dellray didn't go into the part about another source of the brooding: the possible indictment for the stolen and missing $100,000.

But more troubling was the fact that he really did believe William Brent had had a solid lead, something that might let them stop these terrible attacks. A lead that had vanished with him.

Serena walked over and sat beside him, handed over Preston, who, grabbing Dellray's lengthy thumb in enthusiastic fingers, took away some of the brooding. She said to him, "I'm sorry, honey."

He looked out the window of the townhouse into the complex geometry of buildings and beyond, where he could just see a bit of stonework from the Brooklyn Bridge. A portion of Walt Whitman's poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" came to mind. The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious; My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

These words were true of him as well. The facade of Fred Dellray: hip, ornery, tough, man of the street. Occasionally thinking, more than occasionally thinking, What if I'm getting it wrong?

The beginning lines of the next stanza of Whitman's poem, though, were the kicker: It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil; I am he who knew what it was to be evil…

"What'm I going to do?" he mused.

Justice For the Earth…

He ruefully recalled turning down the chance to go to a high-level conference on satellite and data intelligence gathering and analysis. The memo had read, "The Shape of the Future."

Slipping into street, Dellray had said aloud, "Here's the shape of the few-ture." And rolled the memo into a ball, launching it into a trash bin for a three-pointer.

"So, you're just… home?" Serena asked, wiping Preston's mouth. The baby giggled and wanted more. She obliged and tickled him too.

"I had one angle on the case. And it vanished. Well, I lost it. I trusted somebody I shouldn't've. I'm outa the loop."

"A snitch? Walked out on you?"

An inch away from mentioning the one hundred thousand. But he didn't go there.

"Gone and vanished," Dellray muttered.

"Gone and vanished? Both?" Serena's face grew theatrically grave. "Don't tell me he absconded and disappeared too?"

The agent could resist the smile no longer. "I only use snitches with extra-ordinary talents." Then the smile faded. "In two years he never missed a debriefing or call."

Of course, in those two years I never paid him till after he'd delivered.

Serena asked, "So what're you going to do?"

He answered honestly, "I don't know."

"Then you can do me a favor."

"I suppose. What?"

"You know all that stuff in the basement, that you've been meaning to organize?"

Fred Dellray's first reaction was to say, You've got to be kidding. But then he considered the leads he had in the Galt case, which were none, and, hefting the baby on his hip, rose and followed her downstairs.

RON PULASKI COULD still hear the sound. The thud and then the crack.

Oh, the crack. He hated that.

Thinking back to his first time working for Lincoln and Amelia: how he'd gotten careless and had been smacked in the head with a bat or club. He knew about the incident though he couldn't remember a single thing about it. Careless. He'd turned the corner without checking on the whereabouts of the suspect and the man had clocked him good.

The injury had made him scared, made him confused, made him disoriented. He did the best he could-oh, he tried hard-though the trauma kept coming back. And even worse: It was one thing to get lazy and walk around a corner when he should've been careful, but it was something very different to make a mistake and hurt somebody else.

Pulaski now parked his squad car in front of the hospital-a different vehicle. The other one had been impounded for evidence. If he was asked, he was going to say he was here to take a statement from somebody who'd been in the neighborhood of the man committing the terrorist attacks on the grid.

I'm trying to ascertain the perpetrator's whereabouts…

That was the sort of thing he and his twin brother, also a cop, would say to each other and they'd laugh their asses off. Only it wasn't funny now. Because he knew the guy he'd run over, whose body had thudded and whose head had cracked, was just some poor passerby.

As he walked inside the chaotic hospital, a wave of panic hit him.

What if he had killed the guy?

Vehicular manslaughter, he supposed the charge could be. Or criminally negligent homicide.