The Burning Wire (19 page)

Chapter 31

AMELIA SACHS WAS
on the Columbia University campus, Morningside Heights, in northern Manhattan.

She had just left the Earth and Environmental Science Department office, where a helpful receptionist had said, "We don't have a volcano exhibit, as such, but we have hundreds of samples of volcanic ash, lava and other igneous rock. Whenever some undergrads come back from a field project, there's dust all over the place."

"I'm here, Rhyme," she said into the mike and told him what she'd learned about the volcanic ash.

He was saying, "I've been talking to Andi Jessen again. The transmission line goes underground basically all the way from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson. It roughly follows a Hundred and Sixteen Street. But the lava dust means the arc is rigged somewhere near the campus. What's around there, Sachs?"

"Just classrooms, mostly. Administration."

"The target could be any of them."

Sachs was looking from right to left. A clear, cool spring day, students meandering or jogging. Sitting on the grass, the library steps. "I don't see a lot of likely targets, though, Rhyme. The school's old, mostly stone and wood, it looks like. No steel or wires or anything like that. I don't know how he could rig a large trap here to hurt a significant number of people."

Then Rhyme asked, "Which way is the wind blowing?"

Sachs considered this. "To the east and northeast, it looks like."

"Logically, what would you think? Dust wouldn't blow that far. Maybe a few blocks."

"I'd think. That'd put him in Morningside Park."

Rhyme told her, "I'll call Andi Jessen or somebody at Algonquin and find out where the transmission lines are under the park. And, Sachs?"

"What?"

He hesitated. She guessed--no,
knew
--that he was going to tell her to be careful. But that was an unnecessary comment.

"Nothing," he said.

And disconnected abruptly.

Amelia Sachs walked out one of the main gates in the direction the wind was blowing. She crossed Amsterdam and headed down a street in Morningside Heights east of the campus, toward dun-shaded apartments and dark row houses, solidly built of granite and brick.

When her phone trilled she glanced at caller ID. "Rhyme. What do you have?"

"I just talked to Andi. She said the transmission line jogs north around a Hundred Seventeenth then runs west under the park."

"I'm just about there, Rhyme. I don't see . . . oh, no."

"What, Sachs?"

Ahead of her was Morningside Park, filled with people as the hour approached lunchtime. Children, nannies, businesspeople, Columbia students, musicians . . . hundreds of them, just hanging out, enjoying the beautiful day. People on the sidewalks too. But the number of targets was only part of what dismayed Sachs.

"Rhyme, the whole west side of the park, Morningside Drive?"

"What?"

"They're doing construction. Replacing water mains. They're big iron pipes. God, if he's rigged the line to them . . ."

Rhyme said, "Then the flash could hit anywhere on the street. Hell, it could even get inside any building, office, dorm, a store nearby . . . or maybe miles away."

"I've got to find where he connected it, Rhyme." She slipped her phone into its holster and jogged to the construction site.

Chapter 32

SAM VETTER HAD
mixed feelings about being in New York.

The sixty-eight-year-old had never been here before. He'd always wanted to make the trip from Scottsdale, where he'd lived for 100 percent of those years, and Ruth had always wanted to see the place, but their vacations found them in California or Hawaii or on cruises to Alaska.

Now, ironically, his first business trip after her death had brought him to New York, all expenses paid.

Happy to be here.

Sad Ruth couldn't be.

He was having lunch, sitting in the elegant, muted Battery Park Hotel dining room, chatting with a few of the other men who were here for the construction finance meeting, sipping a beer.

Businessman talk. Wall Street, team sports. Some individual sports talk too, but only golf. Nobody ever talked about tennis, which was Vetter's game. Sure, Federer, Nadal . . . but tennis wasn't a war story sport. The topic of women didn't much enter into the discussion; these men were all of an age.

Vetter looked around him, through the panoramic windows, and worked on his impression of New York because his secretary and associates back home would want to know what he thought. So far: really busy, really rich, really loud, really gray--even though the sky was cloudless. Like the sun knew that New Yorkers didn't have much use for light.

Mixed feelings . . .

Part of which was a little guilt about enjoying himself. He was going to see
Wicked,
to see if it stacked up to the Phoenix version, and probably
Billy Elliott,
to see if it stacked up to the trailers of the movie. He was going to have dinner in Chinatown with two of the bankers he'd met that morning, one based here and one from Santa Fe.

Maybe there was a hint of infidelity about the whole enjoyment thing.

Of course, Ruth wouldn't've minded.

But still.

Vetter also had to admit he was feeling a little out of his element here. His company did general construction, specializing in the basics: foundations, driveways, platforms, walkways, nothing sexy, but necessary and oh-so-profitable. His outfit was good, prompt and ethical . . . in a business where those qualities were not always fully unfurled. But it was small; the other companies that were part of the joint venture were bigger players. They were more savvy about business and regulatory and legislative matters than he was.

The conversation at the lunch table kept slipping from the Diamondbacks and the Mets to collateral, interest rates and high-tech systems that left Vetter confused. He found himself looking out the windows again at a large construction site next to the hotel, some big office building or apartment going up.

As he watched, one worker in particular caught his eye. The man was in a different outfit--dark blue overalls and yellow hard hat--and was carrying a roll of wire or cable over his shoulder. He emerged from a manhole near the back of the job site and stood, looking around, blinking. He pulled out a mobile phone and placed a call. Then he snapped it closed and wandered through the site and, instead of leaving, walked toward the building next door to the construction. He looked at ease, walking with a bounce in his step. Obviously he was enjoying whatever he was doing.

It was all so normal. That guy in the blue could have been Vetter thirty years ago. He could have been any one of Vetter's employees now.

The businessman began to relax. The scene made him feel a lot more at home--watching the guy in the blue uniform and the others in their Carhartt jackets and overalls, carrying tools and supplies, joking with one another. He thought of his own company and the people he worked with, who were like family. The older white guys, quiet and skinny and sunburned all of them, looking like they'd been born mixing concrete, and the newer workers, Latino, who chatted up a storm and worked with more precision and pride.

It told Vetter that maybe New York and the people he was doing this deal with
were
in many ways similar to his world and those who inhabited it.

Relax.

Then his eyes followed the man in the blue overalls and yellow hard hat as he disappeared into a building across from the construction site. It was a school. Sam Vetter noted some signs in the window.

POGO STICK MARATHON FUNDRAISER. MAY 1.
JUMP FOR THE CURE!
CROSS-GENDERED STUDENTS DINNER MAY 3. SIGN UP NOW!
THE EARTH SCIENCES DEPARTMENT PRESENTS
"VOLCANOES: UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL"
APRIL 20--MAY 15. IT'S FREE AND IT'S FIERY!
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Okay, he admitted, with a laugh, maybe New York
is
a little different from Scottsdale, after all.

Chapter 33

RHYME CONTINUED TO
look over the evidence, trying desperately to find, in the seemingly unrelated bits of metal and plastic and dust that had been collected at the scenes, some connection to spark his imagination and help Sachs figure out where exactly Galt had rigged the deadly cable to the water line running through Morningside Heights and Harlem.

If that's in fact what he'd done.

Spark his imagination . . .
Bad choice of word, he decided.

Sachs continued to search Morningside Park, looking for the spliced wire running from the transmission cable to the pipes. He knew she'd be uneasy--there was no way to find the wire except to get close to it, to find where it had been attached to the water pipes. He recalled the tone of her voice, her hollow eyes as she'd described the shrapnel from the arc flash yesterday, peppering Luis Martin's body.

There were dozens of uniformed officers from the closest precinct, clearing Morningside Park and the buildings in the vicinity of the water pipe project. But couldn't the electricity follow a cast-iron pipe anywhere? Couldn't it produce an arc flash in a kitchen a mile away?

In his own kitchen, where Thom was now standing at the sink?

Rhyme glanced at the clock on his computer screen. If they didn't find the line in sixty minutes they'd have their answer.

Sachs called back. "Nothing, Rhyme. Maybe I'm wrong. And I was thinking at some point the line has to cross the subway. What if he's rigged it to hit a car? I'll have to search there too."

"We're still on the horn with Algonquin, trying to narrow it down, Sachs. I'll call you back." He shouted to Mel Cooper, "Anything?"

The tech was speaking with a supervisor in the Algonquin control center. Following Andi Jessen's orders, he and his staff were trying to find if there had been any voltage fluctuation in specific parts of the line. This might be possible to detect, since sensors were spaced every few hundred feet to alert them if there were problems with insulation or degradation in the electric transmission line itself. There was a chance they could pinpoint where Galt had tapped into the line to run his deadly cable to the surface.

But from Cooper: "Nothing. Sorry."

Rhyme closed his eyes briefly. The headache he'd denied earlier had grown in intensity. He wondered if pain was throbbing elsewhere. There was always that concern with quadriplegia. Without pain, you never know what the rebellious body's up to. A tree falls in the forest, of course it makes a sound, even if nobody's there. But does pain exist if you don't perceive it?

These thoughts left a morbid flavor, Rhyme realized. And he understood too that he'd been having similar ones lately. He wasn't sure why. But he couldn't shake them.

And, even stranger, unlike his jousting with Thom yesterday at this same time of day, he didn't want any scotch. Was nearly repulsed by the idea.

This bothered him more than the headache.

His eyes scanned the evidence charts but they skipped over the words as if they were in a foreign language he'd studied in school and hadn't used for years. Then they settled on the chart again, tracing the flow of juice from power generation to household. In decreasing voltages.

One hundred and thirty-eight thousand volts . . .

Rhyme asked Mel Cooper to call Sommers at Algonquin.

"Special Projects."

"Charlie Sommers?"

"That's right."

"This is Lincoln Rhyme. I work with Amelia Sachs."

"Oh, sure. She mentioned you." In a soft voice he said, "I heard it was Ray Galt, one of our people. Is that true?"

"Looks that way. Mr. Sommers--"

"Hey, call me Charlie. I feel like I'm an honorary cop."

"Okay, Charlie. Are you following what's happening right now?"

"I've got the grid on my laptop screen right here. Andi Jessen--our president--asked me to monitor what's going on."

"How close are they to fixing the, what's it called? Switchgear in the substation where they had that fire?"

"Two, three hours. That line's still a runaway. Nothing we can do to shut it down, except turn off the switch to most of New York City. . . . Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Yes. I need to know more about arc flashes. It looks like Galt's spliced into a major line, a transmission level line, and hooked his wire to the water main, then--"

"No, no. He wouldn't do that."

"Why not?"

"It's a ground. It'd short out the instant it touched."

Rhyme thought for a minute. Then another idea occurred to him. "What if he was just hinting at tapping into the transmission line? Maybe he actually rigged a smaller trap, someplace else. How much voltage would you need for an arc?"

"A hundred and thirty thousand is your arc flash of mass destruction but, sure, you can have one with a lot less juice. The key is that the voltage exceeds the capacity of the line or terminal that's carrying it. The arc jumps from that to another wire--that's phase to phase. Or to the ground. Phase to ground. With house current, you'll get a spark but not an arc flash. That's at most about two hundred volts. When you're closer to four hundred, yes, a small arc is possible. Over six hundred, it's a strong possibility. But you're not going to see any serious length until you get into medium to high voltages."

"So a thousand volts could do it?"

"If the conditions were right, sure."

Rhyme was staring at the map of Manhattan, focusing on where Sachs was at the moment. This news exponentially increased the number of places where Galt might have planned his attack.

"But why're you asking about arcs?" Sommers wondered.

"Because," Rhyme said absently, "Galt's going to kill somebody with one in less than an hour."

"Oh, did Galt's note say something about an arc?"

Rhyme realized that it didn't. "No."

"So you're just assuming that's what he'd do."

Rhyme hated the word "assumption" and all its derivatives. He was furious with himself, wondering if they'd missed something important. "Go on, Charlie."

"An arc is spectacular but it's also one of the least efficient ways to use electricity as a weapon. You can't control it very well, you're never sure where it's going to end up. Look at yesterday morning. I mean, Galt had a whole bus for a target and he missed. . . . You want to know how
I'd
kill somebody with electricity?"

Lincoln Rhyme said quickly, "Yes, I very much would," and tilted his head to the phone to listen with complete concentration.