Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

Another creak.

He spun the wheelchair around again, three-sixty, but saw nothing. Then he spotted, on one of the examination tables at the far end of the room, a cell phone. Although the power was off in the rest of the townhouse, of course, the mobile would be working.

Batteries…

Rhyme pushed the controller touchpad forward and the chair responded quickly. He sped to the table and stopped, his back to the doorway, and stared down at the phone. It was no more than eighteen inches from his face.

Its LCD indicator glowed green. Plenty of juice, ready to take or send a call.

"Thom?" he called again.

Nothing.

Rhyme felt the pounding of his heart through the telegraph of his temples and the throbbing veins in his neck.

Alone in the room, virtually immobile. Less than two feet away from the phone, staring. Rhyme turned the chair slightly sideways and then back, quickly, knocking into the table, rocking the phone. But it remained exactly where it was.

Then he was aware of a change in the acoustics of the room, and he knew the intruder had entered. He banged into the table once again. But before the phone skidded closer to him, he heard footsteps pound across the floor behind him. A gloved hand reached over his shoulder and seized the phone.

"Is that you?" Rhyme demanded of the person behind him. "Randall? Randall Jessen?"

No answer.

Only faint sounds behind him, clicks. Then jostling, which he felt in his shoulders. The wheelchair's battery indicator light on the touchpad went black. The intruder disengaged the brake manually and wheeled the chair to an area illuminated by a band of pale sunlight falling through the window.

The man then slowly turned the chair around.

Rhyme opened his mouth to speak but then his eyes narrowed as he studied the face before him carefully. He said nothing for a moment. Then, in a whisper: "It can't be."

The cosmetic surgery had been very good. Still, there were familiar landmarks in the man's face. Besides, how could Rhyme possibly fail to recognize Richard Logan, the Watchmaker, the man who was supposedly hiding out at that very moment in an unsavory part of Mexico City?

LOGAN SHUT OFF the cell phone that Lincoln Rhyme had apparently been trying in his desperation to knock into service.

"I don't understand," the criminalist said.

Logan sloughed a gear bag off his shoulder and set it on the floor, crouching and opening it. His quick fingers dug into the bag and he extracted a laptop computer and two wireless video cameras. One he took into the kitchen and pointed into the alley. The other he set in a front window. He booted up the computer and placed it on a nearby table. He typed in some commands. Immediately images of the alley and sidewalk approaches to Rhyme's townhouse came on the screen. It was the same system he'd used at the Battery Park Hotel to spy on Vetter and determine the exact moment to hit the switch: when flesh met metal.

Then Logan looked up and gave a faint laugh. He walked to the dark oak mantelpiece where a pocketwatch sat on a stand.

"You still have my present," he whispered. "You have it… have it out, on display." He was shocked. He'd assumed the ancient Breguet had been dismantled and every piece examined to determine where Logan lived.

Though they were enemies, and Logan would soon kill him, he admired Rhyme a great deal and was oddly pleased that the man had kept the timepiece intact.

When he thought about it, however, he decided that, of course, the criminalist had indeed ordered it taken apart, down to the last hairspring and jewel, for the forensics team but then had it reassembled perfectly.

Making Rhyme a bit of a watchmaker too.

Next to the pocketwatch was the note that had accompanied the timepiece. It was both an appreciation of Rhyme, and an ominous promise that they'd meet again.

A promise now fulfilled.

The criminalist was recovering from his shock. He said, "People'll be back here any minute."

"No, Lincoln. They won't." Logan recited the whereabouts of everyone who'd been in the room fifteen minutes ago.

Rhyme frowned, "How did you…? Oh, no. Of course, the generator. You have a bug in it." He closed his eyes in disgust.

"That's right. And I know how much time I have."

Richard Logan reflected that whatever else occurred in his life, he always knew exactly how much time he had.

The dismay on Rhyme's face then faded into confusion. "So it wasn't Randall Jessen masquerading as Ray Galt. It was you."

Logan fondly studied the Breguet. Compared the time to a watch on his own wrist. "You keep it wound." Then he replaced it. "That's right. I've been Raymond Galt, master electrician and troubleman, for the past week."

"But I saw you in the airport security video… You were hired to kill Rodolfo Luna in Mexico."

"Not exactly. His colleague Arturo Diaz was on the payroll of one of the big drug cartels out of Puerto Vallarta. Luna is one of the few honest cops left in Mexico. Diaz wanted to hire me to kill him. But I was too busy. For a fee, though, I did agree to pretend I was behind it, to keep suspicion off him. It served my purposes too. I needed everyone-especially you-to believe I was someplace other than New York City."

"But at the airport…" Rhyme's voice fell to a confused whisper. "You were on the plane. The security tape. We saw you get in that truck, hide under the tarp. And you were spotted in Mexico City and on the road there from the airport. You were seen in Gustavo Madero an hour ago. Your fingerprints and…" The words dissolved. The criminalist shook his head and gave a resigned smile. "My God. You never left the airport at all."

"No, I didn't."

"You picked up that package and got onto the truck in front of the camera, on purpose, but it just drove out of view. You handed the package off to somebody else and got a flight headed to the East Coast. Diaz's men kept reporting you in Mexico City-to make everybody think you were there. How many of Diaz's people were on the take?"

"About two dozen."

"There was no car fleeing to Gustavo Madero?"

"No." Pity was an emotion that to Logan was inefficient and therefore pointless. Still, he could recognize, without being moved personally, that there was something pitiable about Lincoln Rhyme at the moment. He also looked smaller than when last they met. Nearly frail. Perhaps he'd been sick. Which was good, Logan decided; the electricity coursing through his body would take its toll more quickly. He certainly didn't want Rhyme to suffer.

He added, as if in consolation, "You anticipated the attack on Luna. You stopped Diaz from killing him. I never thought you'd figure it out in time. But, on reflection, I shouldn't have been surprised."

"But I didn't stop you."

Logan had killed a number of people in his lengthy career as a professional. Most of them, if they were aware they were about to die, grew calm, as they understood the inevitability of what was about to happen. But Rhyme went even further. The criminalist now almost looked relieved. Perhaps that was what Logan saw in Rhyme's face: the symptoms of a terminal illness. Or maybe he'd just lost the will to live, given his condition. A fast death would be a blessing.

"Where's Galt's body?"

"The Burn-the boiler furnace at Algonquin Power. There's nothing left." Logan glanced at the laptop. Still all clear. He took out a length of Bennington medium-voltage cable and attached one end to the hot line in a nearby 220-volt outlet. He'd spent months learning all about juice. He felt as comfortable with it now as with the fine gears and springs of clocks and watches.

Logan felt in his pocket the weight of the remote control that would turn the power back on and send sufficient amperage into the criminalist to kill him instantly.