Jeffery Deaver - The burning wire

All three officers trained weapons on him.

But Logan's eyes were on Amelia Sachs, who seemed the most eager to shoot. He realized that Rhyme had asked the question about Sachs to alert them that he was ready to say the magic words and spring the trap.

I guess that's about it, then…

But the consequence was that she would have heard Logan's comment about her, her inferior skills.

Still, when she stepped forward to cuff him, it was with utmost professionalism, gently almost. Then she eased him to the floor with minimal discomfort.

The heavy officer stepped forward and reached for the wires coiled around Rhyme.

"Gloves, please," said the criminalist calmly.

The big cop hesitated. Then pulled on latex gloves and removed the cables. He said into his radio, "It's clear up here. You can put the power back on."

A moment later lights filled the room and, surrounded by the clicks of the equipment returning to life and the diodes flickering red, green and white, Richard Logan, the Watchmaker, was read his rights.

IT WAS TIME for the heroics.

Not generally the bailiwick of inventors.

Charlie Sommers decided he had removed enough insulation from the lightweight cable so that he was ready to try for the short circuit.

In theory this should work.

The risk was that, in its desperation to get to the ground, the instant he moved it closer to the return, the massive voltage in the feeder line would arc to the cable then consume his body in a plasma spark. He was only ten feet above the concrete; Sommers had seen videos of arc flashes that were fifty feet in length.

But he'd waited long enough.

First step. Connect the cable to the main line.

Thinking of his wife, thinking of his children-and his other children: the inventions he'd fathered over the years-he leaned toward the hot wire and with a deep breath touched the lightweight cable to it, using his hands.

Nothing happened. So far, so good. His body and the wires were now at the same potential. In effect, Charlie Sommers was simply a portion of a 138,000v line.

He worked the bare section of the cable around the far side of the energized line and caught the end underneath. He twisted it so there was tight contact.

Gripping the insulated part of the lightweight cable, he eased back, in his unsure fire-hose swing, and stared at the place he'd decided to close the connection: a girder that rose to the ceiling but, more important for his purposes, descended deep into the earth.

To which all juice had a primal instinct to return.

The girder was about six feet away.

Charlie Sommers gave a faint laugh.

This was fucking ridiculous. The minute the exposed end of the other wire neared the metal beam, the current would anticipate the contact and lunge outward in a huge explosion of arc flash. Plasma, flame, molten metal drops flying at three thousand feet per second…

But he saw no other choice.

Now!

Cut its head off…

He began to feed the cable to the metal bar.

Six feet, five, four…

"Hey there! Charlie? Charlie Sommers?"

He gasped. The end of the cable swung wildly but he reeled it in fast.

"Who's there?" Sommers blurted before realizing that it might be Andi Jessen's brother, who'd come to shoot him.

"It's Ron Pulaski. I'm that officer works with Detective Sachs."

"Yes, what?" Sommers gasped. "What're you doing here?"

"We've been trying to call you for a half hour."

"Get out of here, Officer. It's dangerous!"

"We couldn't get through. We called you right after you hung up speaking to Amelia and Lincoln."

Sommers steadied his voice. "I don't have my goddamn phone. Look, I'm shutting down the power here, in the whole area. It's the only way to stop him. There's going to be a huge-"

"He's already stopped."

"What?"

"Yessir, they sent me here to find you. To tell you that what they were saying on the phone was fake. They knew the killer was listening in and they couldn't tell you what they were really planning. We had to make him think we believed the attack was happening here. As soon as I left Lincoln's, I tried to call you. But we couldn't get through. Somebody said they saw you coming down here."

Jesus Lord in heaven.

Sommers stared at the cable dangling below him. The juice in the feeder cable could decide at any moment that it wanted to take a shortcut to get back home and Sommers would simply disappear.

Pulaski called, "Say, what exactly're you doing up there?"

Killing myself.

Sommers retracted the cable slowly and then he reached into the enclosure and began undoing the connection with the main line, expecting-no, positive-that at any moment he would hear, very, very briefly, the arc flash hum and bang as he died.

The process of unraveling the beast seemed to take forever.

"Anything I can do, sir?"

Yes, shut the hell up.

"Um, just stay back and give me a minute, Officer."

"Sure."

Finally, the cable came away from the feeder line and Sommers dropped it to the floor. Then he eased out of the fire hose sling, hung for a moment, and tumbled to the ground on top of the cable. He collapsed in pain from the fall but stood and tested for broken bones. He sensed there was none.

"What's that you were saying, sir?" Pulaski asked.

He'd been repeating a frantic mantra: stay put, stay put, stay put…

But he told the cop, "Nothing." Then he dusted off his slacks and looked around. He asked, "Hey, Officer?"

"Yessir?"

"By any chance you pass a restroom on your way down here?"

"CHARLIE SOMMERS'S OKAY," Sachs called, slipping away her cell phone. "Ron just called."

Rhyme frowned. "I didn't know he wasn't okay."

"Seems he tried to play hero. He was going to shut down the power at the convention center. Ron found him in the basement with a wire and some tools. He was hanging from the ceiling."

"Doing what?"

"I don't know."

"What part of 'stay put' did he have trouble with?"

Sachs shrugged.

"You couldn't've just called him?"

"Didn't have his phone on him. Something about a hundred thousand volts."

Andi Jessen's brother was fine too, though filthy and hungry and furious. He'd been recovered from the back of Logan's white van parked in the alley behind Rhyme's townhouse. Logan had shared nothing with him and had kept him in the dark-in both senses. Randall Jessen had assumed he'd been kidnapped in some scheme to extort money from his wealthy CEO sister. Randall'd heard nothing of the attacks, and Logan's plan was apparently to electrocute him in Rhyme's basement, as if he'd accidentally touched a hot wire dismantling the switch he'd installed to kill Rhyme. He'd been reunited with his sister, who'd been briefed by Gary Noble about the situation.

Rhyme wondered if she'd respond to the fact that the target of her attacks in the press-the alternative energy world-had been behind the scheme.

Rhyme asked, "And Bob Cavanaugh? The Operations man?"

"McDaniel's guys got him. He was in his office. No resistance. Tons of business records on start-up alternative energy companies the conspirators planned to do deals with after they'd taken over Algonquin. The Bureau'll get the other names from his computer and phone records-if he doesn't cooperate."

A green cartel…

Rhyme now realized that Richard Logan, sitting cuffed and shackled in a chair between two uniformed patrolmen, was speaking to him. In a cool, eerily analytical voice, the killer repeated, "A setup? All fake. You knew all along."

"I knew." Rhyme regarded him carefully. Though he'd confirmed the name Richard Logan, it was impossible to think of him as that. To Rhyme he would always be the Watchmaker. The face was different, yes, after the plastic surgery, but the eyes were those of the same man who'd proved every bit as smart as Rhyme himself. Smarter even, on occasion. And unbridled by the trivia of law and conscience.