The Burning Wire (29 page)

Chapter 54

HE AWOKE FAST,
from a dream.

He tried to recall it. He couldn't remember enough to know whether it had been bad or simply odd. It was certainly intense, though. The likelihood, however, was that it was bad, since he was sweating furiously, as if he were walking through the turbine room at Algonquin Consolidated.

The time was just before midnight, the faint light of the clock/alarm reported. He'd been asleep for a short time and he was groggy; it took a moment to orient himself.

He'd ditched the uniform and hard hat and gear bag after the attack at the hotel, but he'd kept one of his accoutrements, which was now dangling from a chair nearby: the ID badge. In the dim, reflected light he stared at it now: His sullen picture, the impersonal typeface of "R. Galt" and, above that, in somewhat more friendly lettering:

ALGONQUIN CONSOLIDATED POWER
ENERGIZING YOUR LIFE
^TM

Considering what he'd been up to for the past several days, he appreciated the irony of that slogan.

He lay back and stared at the shabby ceiling in the East Village weekly rental, which he'd taken a month ago under a pseudonym, knowing the police would find the apartment sooner or later.

Sooner, as it turned out.

He kicked the sheets off. His flesh was damp with sweat.

Thinking about the conductivity of the human body. The resistance of our slippery internal organs can be as low as 85 ohms, making them extremely susceptible to current. Wet skin, 1,000 or less. But dry skin has a resistance of 100,000 ohms or more. That's so high that significant amounts of voltage are needed to push that current through the body, usually 2,000 volts.

Sweat makes the job a lot easier.

His skin cooled as it dried, and his resistance climbed.

His mind leapt from thought to thought: the plans for tomorrow, what voltages to use, how to rig the lines. He thought about the people he was working with. And he thought about the people pursuing him. That woman detective, Sachs. The younger one, Pulaski. And, of course, Lincoln Rhyme.

Then he was meditating on something else entirely: two men in the 1950s, the chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago. They devised a very interesting experiment. In their lab they created their version of the primordial soup and atmosphere that had covered the earth billions of years ago. Into this mix of hydrogen, ammonia and methane, they fired sparks mimicking the lightning that blanketed the earth back then.

And what happened?

A few days later they found something thrilling: In the test tubes were traces of amino acids, the so-called building blocks of life.

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

III
JUICE

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

--T
HOMAS
A
LVA
E
DISON

Chapter 55

"
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.

Chapter 56

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.

This could be the end of his career.

And even if he didn't get indicted, even if the attorney general didn't go anywhere with the case, he could still be sued by the guy's family. What if the man ended up like Lincoln Rhyme, paralyzed? Did the police department have insurance for this sort of thing? His own coverage sure wouldn't pay for anything like lifelong care. Could the vic sue Pulaski and take away everything? He and Jenny'd be working for the rest of their lives just to pay off the judgment. The kids might never go to college; the tiny fund they'd already started would disappear like smoke.

"I'm here to see Stanley Palmer," he told the attendant sitting behind a desk. "Auto accident yesterday."

"Sure, Officer. He's in four oh two."

Being in uniform, he walked freely through several doors until he found the room. He paused outside to gather his courage. What if Palmer's entire family was there? Wife and children? He tried to think of something to say.

But all he heard was
thud.
Then
crack.

Ron Pulaski took a deep breath and stepped into the room. Palmer was alone. He lay unconscious, hooked to all sorts of intimidating wires and tubes, electronic equipment as complicated as the things in Lincoln Rhyme's lab.

Rhyme . . .

How he'd let down his boss! The man who'd inspired him to remain a cop because Rhyme had done the same after his own injury. And the man who kept giving him more and more responsibility. Lincoln Rhyme believed in him.

And look what I've done now.

Pulaski stared at Palmer, lying absolutely still--even stiller than Rhyme, because
nothing
on the patient's body was moving, except his lungs, though even the lines on the monitor weren't doing much. A nurse passed by and Pulaski called her in. "How is he?"

"I don't know," she replied in a thick accent he couldn't identify. "You have to talk to, you know, the doctor."

After staring at Palmer's still form for some time, Pulaski looked up to see a middle-aged man of indeterminate race in blue scrubs.
M.D.
was embroidered after his name. Again because of Pulaski's own uniform, it seemed, the medico gave him information he might not otherwise have doled out to a stranger. Palmer had undergone surgery for severe internal injuries. He was in a coma and they weren't able to give a prognosis at this point.

He didn't have any family in the area, it seemed. He was single. He had a brother and parents in Oregon and they'd been contacted.

"Brother," Pulaski whispered, thinking of his own twin.

"That's right." Then the doctor lowered the chart and cast a look at the cop. After a moment he said, with a knowing gaze, "You're not here to take his statement. This has nothing to do with the investigation. Come on."

"What?" Alarmed, Pulaski could only stare.

Then a kind smile blossomed in the doctor's face. "It happens. Don't worry about it."

"Happens?"

"I've been an ER doctor in the city for a long time. You never see veteran cops come in person to pay respects to victims, only the young ones."

"No, really. I was just checking to see if I could take a statement."

"Sure . . . but you could've called to see if he was conscious. Don't play all hardass, Officer. You got a good heart."

Which was pounding all the harder now.

The doctor's eyes went to Palmer's motionless form. "Was it a hit-and-run?"

"No. We know the driver."

"Good. You nailed the prick. I hope the jury throws the book at him." Then the man, in his stained outfit, was walking away.

Pulaski stopped at the nurses' station and, once more under the aura of his uniform, got Palmer's address and social security number. He'd find out what he could about him, his family, dependents. Even though he was single, Palmer was middle-aged so he might have kids. He'd call them, see if he could help in some way. Pulaski didn't have much money, but he'd give whatever moral support he could.

Mostly the young officer just wanted to unburden his soul for the pain he'd caused.

The nurse excused herself and turned away, answering an incoming call.

Pulaski turned too, even more quickly, and before he left the nurses' station, he pulled on sunglasses so nobody could see the tears.