The Burning Wire Read online

  "Today?" Rhyme had a fuzzy recollection of some phone calls. If it wasn't about a case, he rarely paid much attention to the noise around him.

  "You said today. You said you'd meet with him."

  "Oh, I really need an award. What am I going to do with it? Paperweight? Does anybody you know ever use paperweights? Have you ever used a paperweight?"

  "Lincoln, it's being given to you for inspiring young people with disabilities."

  "Nobody inspired me when I was young. And I turned out all right." Which wasn't completely true--the inspiration part--but Rhyme grew petty whenever distractions loomed, especially distractions involving visitors.

  "A half hour."

  "Is a half hour I don't have."

  "Too late. He's already in town."

  Sometimes it was impossible to win against the aide.

  "We'll see."

  "Kopeski's not going to come here and cool his heels like some courtier waiting for an audience with the king."

  Rhyme liked that metaphor.

  But then all thoughts of awards, and royalty, vanished as Rhyme's phone blared and Detective Lieutenant Lon Sellitto's number showed up on caller ID.

  Rhyme used a working finger on his right hand to answer. "Lon."

  "Linc, listen, here's the thing." He was harried and, to judge from the surround-sound acoustics piping through the speaker, apparently driving somewhere quickly. "We may have a terrorist situation going on."

  "Situation? That's not very specific."

  "Okay, how's this? Somebody fucked with the power company, shot a five-thousand-degree spark at a Metro bus and shut down the electric grid for six square blocks south of Lincoln Center. That specific enough for you?"

  Chapter 4

  THE ENTOURAGE ARRIVED from downtown.

  Homeland Security's representative was a typically young but senior officer, probably born and bred among the country clubs of Connecticut or Long Island, though that was, for Rhyme, merely a demographic observation and not, necessarily, a fault. The man's shine and sharp eyes belied the fact that he probably wouldn't quite know where he fit in the hierarchy of law enforcement, but that was true of nearly everybody who worked for HS. His name was Gary Noble.

  The Bureau was here too, of course, in the incarnation of a special agent whom Rhyme and Sellitto worked with frequently: Fred Dellray. FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover would have been dismayed at the African-American agent, only partly because his roots were clearly not in New England; rather, the consternation would come from the agent's lack of "Ninth Street Style," a reference to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. Dellray donned a white shirt and tie only when his undercover assignments called for such an outfit, and he treated the garb like any other costume in his player's wardrobe. Today, he was wearing authentic Dellray: a dark green plaid suit, the pink shirt of a devil-may-care Wall Street CEO and an orange tie that Rhyme couldn't have thrown out fast enough.

  Dellray was accompanied by his newly named boss--assistant special agent in charge of the New York office of the FBI, Tucker McDaniel, who'd begun his career in Washington, then taken assignments in the Middle East and South Asia. The ASAC was compactly built with thick dark hair and a swarthy complexion, though with bright blue eyes that focused on you as if you were lying when you said, "Hi."

  It was a helpful expression for a law enforcement agent and one that Rhyme affected himself as the occasion merited.

  The NYPD's chief presence was stout Lon Sellitto, in a gray suit and, unusual for him, powder blue shirt. The tie--splotchy by design, not spillage--was the only unwrinkled article of clothing swathing the man. Probably a birthday present from live-in girlfriend Rachel or his son. The Major Cases detective was backed up by Sachs and Ron Pulaski, a blond, eternally youthful officer from Patrol, who was officially attached to Sellitto, but who unofficially worked mostly with Rhyme and Sachs on the crime scene side of investigations. Pulaski was in a standard dark blue NYPD uniform, T-shirt visible in the V at his throat.

  Both of the feds, McDaniel and Noble, had heard about Rhyme, of course, but neither had met him and they exuded various degrees of surprise, sympathy and discomfort seeing the paralyzed forensic consultant, who tooled around the lab deftly in his wheelchair. The novelty and uneasiness soon wore off, though, as they usually did with all but the most ingratiating guests, and soon they were struck by the more bizarre presence here: a wainscoted, crown-molded parlor chockablock with equipment that a crime scene unit in a medium-size town might envy.

  After introductions, Noble took the point position, Homeland Security carting the bigger umbrella.

  "Mr. Rhyme--"

  "Lincoln," he corrected. Rhyme grew irritated when anyone deferred to him, and he considered the use of his surname a subtle way of patting him on the head and saying, Poor thing; sorry you're confined to a wheelchair for the rest of your life. So we'll be extra-special polite.

  Sachs caught the weight behind his correction and rolled her eyes in a gentle arc. Rhyme tried not to smile.

  "Sure, Lincoln, then." Noble cleared his throat. "Here's the scenario. What do you know about the grid--the electricity grid?"

  "Not much," Rhyme admitted. He'd studied science in college but never paid much attention to electricity, other than electromagnetics' appearance in physics as one of the four fundamental forces in nature, along with gravity and the weak and the strong nuclear forces. But that was academic. On a practical level Rhyme's main interest in electricity involved making sure enough of it got pumped into the town house to power the equipment in his lab here. It was extremely thirsty and he'd twice had to have the place rewired to bring in additional amperage to support the load.

  Rhyme was very aware too that he was alive and functioning now solely because of electricity: the ventilator that had kept oxygen pumping through his lungs right after the accident and now the batteries in his wheelchair and the current controlled by the touch pad and voice-activated ECU, his environmental control unit. The computer too, of course.

  He wouldn't have had much of a life without wires. Probably no life at all.

  Noble continued, "The basic scenario is our UNSUB got into one of the power company's substations and ran a wire outside the building."

  " 'Unknown subject' singular?" Rhyme asked.

  "We don't know yet."

  "Wire outside. Okay."

  "And then got into the computer that controls the grid. He manipulated it to send more voltage through the substation than it was meant to handle." Noble fiddled with cuff links in the shape of animals.

  "And the electricity jumped," the FBI's McDaniel put in. "It was basically trying to get into the ground. It's called an arc flash. An explosion. Like a lightning bolt."

  A 5,000 degree spark . . .

  The ASAC added, "It's so powerful it creates plasma. That's a state of matter--"

  "--that isn't gas, liquid or solid," Rhyme said impatiently.

  "Exactly. A fairly small arc flash has the explosive power of a pound of TNT and this one wasn't small."

  "And the bus was his target?" Rhyme asked.

  "Seems so."

  Sellitto said, "But they have rubber tires. Vehicles are the safest place to be in a lightning storm. I saw that someplace, some show."

  "True," McDaniel said. "But the UNSUB had it all figured out. It was a kneeling bus. Either he was counting that the lowered step would touch the sidewalk or hoping somebody'd have one foot on the ground and one on the bus. That'd be enough for the arc to hit it."

  Noble again twisted a tiny silver mammal on his cuff. "But the timing was off. Or his aim or something. The spark hit the sign pole next to the bus. Killed one passenger, deafened some people nearby, and dinged a few with glass, started a fire. If it'd hit the bus directly, the casualties would've been a lot worse. Half of them dead, I'd guess. Or with third-degree burns."

  "Lon mentioned a blackout," Rhyme said.

  McDaniel eased back into the conversation. "The UNSUB used the computer to shut down four
other substations in the area, so all the juice was flowing through the one on Fifty-seventh Street. As soon as the arc happened, that substation went offline, but Algonquin got the others up and running again. Right now about six blocks in Clinton are out. Didn't you see it on the news?"

  "I don't watch much news," Rhyme said.

  Sachs asked McDaniel, "The driver or anybody see anything?"

  "Nothing helpful. There were some workers there. They'd gotten orders from the CEO of Algonquin to go inside and try to reroute the lines or something. Thank God they didn't go in before the arc happened."

  "There was nobody inside?" Fred Dellray asked. The agent seemed a bit out of the loop and Rhyme guessed there hadn't been time for McDaniel to fully brief his team.

  "No. Substations're mostly just equipment, nobody inside except for routine maintenance or repairs."

  "How was the computer hacked?" Lon Sellitto asked, sitting noisily in a wicker chair.

  Gary Noble said, "We aren't sure. We're running the scenarios now. Our white hat hackers've tried to run a mock terrorist scenario, and they can't get inside. But you know how it works; the bad guys're always one step ahead of us--techwise."

  Ron Pulaski asked, "Anybody take credit?"

  "Not yet," Noble replied.

  Rhyme asked, "Then why terrorism? I'm thinking it's a good way to shut down alarms and security systems. Any murders or burglaries reported?"

  "Not so far," Sellitto pointed out.

  "A couple of reasons we think it's terrorists," McDaniel said. "Our obscure-pattern-and-relationship-profile software suggests so, for one thing. And right after it happened I had our people go through signals from Maryland." He paused, as if warning that nobody here should repeat what he was about to say. Rhyme deduced the FBI man was referring to the netherworld of intelligence--government snooping agencies that might not technically have jurisdiction in the country but who can maneuver through loopholes to keep on top of possible malfeasance within the borders. The National Security Agency--the world's best eavesdroppers--happened to be in Maryland. "A new SIGINT system came up with some interesting hits."

  SIGINT. Signal intelligence. Monitoring cell phones, satellite phones, email . . . Seemed an appropriate approach when confronted with somebody using electricity to stage an attack.

  "Picked up references to what we think is a new terror group operating in the area. Never cataloged before."

  "Who?" Sellitto asked.

  "The name starts with 'Justice' and has the word 'for' in it," McDaniel explained.

  Justice For . . .

  Sachs asked, "Nothing else?"

  "No. Maybe 'Justice For Allah.' 'Justice For the Oppressed.' Anything. We don't have a clue."

  "The words in English, though?" Rhyme asked. "Not Arabic. Or Somali or Indonesian."

  "Right," McDaniel said. "But I'm running multi-language and -dialect monitoring programs on all communications we can pick up."

  "Legally," Noble added quickly. "That we can pick up legally."

  "But most of their communications take place in the cloud zone," McDaniel said. He didn't explain this.

  "Uhm, what's that, sir?" Ron Pulaski asked, a variation of what Rhyme was about to, though in a much less deferential manner.

  "Cloud zone?" the ASAC responded. "The phrase comes from the latest approach to computing--where your data and programs are stored on servers elsewhere, not on your own computer. I wrote an analysis paper on it. I'm using the term to mean new communications protocols. There's very little standard cell phone and email use among the negative players. People of interest are exploiting new techniques, like blogs and Twitter and Facebook, to send messages. Also embedding codes in music and video uploads and downloads. And personally I think they've got some new systems altogether, different types of modified phones, radios with alternative frequencies."

  The cloud zone . . . Negative players.

  "Why do you think 'Justice For' is behind the attack?" Sachs asked.

  "We don't necessarily," Noble said.

  McDaniel filled in, "Just, there were some SIGINT hits about monetary dispersals over the past few days and about some movement of personnel and the sentence 'It's going to be big.' So when the attack happened today, we thought, maybe."

  "And Earth Day's coming up," Noble pointed out.

  Rhyme wasn't exactly sure what Earth Day was--and didn't have an opinion about it one way or the other, except recognizing with some petulance that it was like other holidays and events: crowds and protesters clogging the streets and depleting the resources of the NYPD, which he might otherwise need to run cases.

  Noble said, "Might be more than a coincidence. Attack on the grid the day before Earth Day? The President's taking an interest."

  "The President?" Sellitto asked.

  "Right. He's at some renewable energy summit outside of D.C."

  Sellitto mused, "Somebody making a point. Ecoterror."

  You didn't see much of that in New York City; logging and strip-mining weren't big industries here.

  " 'Justice For the Environment' maybe," Sachs suggested.

  "But," McDaniel said, "there's another wrinkle. One of the SIGINT hits correlated 'Justice For' with the name Rahman. No family name. We've got eight unaccounted-for Rahmans on our Islamist terror watch list. Could be one of them, we're thinking, but we don't know which one."

  Noble had abandoned the bears or manatees on his cuffs and was now playing with a nice pen. "We were thinking, at Homeland, that Rahman could be part of a sleeper cell that's been here for years, maybe from around the time of Nine-eleven. Staying clear of an Islamist lifestyle. Sticking with moderate mosques, avoiding Arabic."

  McDaniel added, "I've got one of my T and C teams up from Quantico."

  "T and C?" Rhyme asked, peeved.

  "Tech and Communications. To run the surveillance. And warrant specialists to get taps if we need them. Two DOJ lawyers. And we're getting two hundred extra agents."

  Rhyme and Sellitto glanced each other's way. This was a surprisingly substantial task force for a single incident that wasn't part of an ongoing investigation. And mobilized with incredible speed. The attack had happened less than two hours ago.

  The Bureau man noticed their reaction. "We're convinced there's a new profile to terrorism. So we've got a new approach to fighting it. Like the drones in the Middle East and Afghanistan? You know the pilots are next to a strip mall in Colorado Springs or Omaha."

  The cloud zone . . .

  "Now, T and C's in place, so we'll be able to hook more signals soon. But we'll still need traditional approaches." A look around the lab. Meaning forensics, Rhyme supposed. And then the ASAC looked toward Dellray. "And street-level work. Though Fred tells me he hasn't had much luck."

  Dellray's talent as an undercover op was exceeded only by his skills as a handler of confidential informants. Since 9/11 he'd curried favor with a large group of CIs in the Islamic community and taught himself Arabic, Indonesian and Farsi. He worked regularly with the NYPD's impressive anti-terror unit. But the agent confirmed his boss's comment. Grim-faced, he said, "Haven't heard anything about Justice For or Rahman. Ran it past my boys in Brooklyn, Jersey, Queens, Manhattan."

  "Just happened," Sellitto reminded.

  "Right," McDaniel said slowly. "Of course something like this would've been planned for, what would you guess? A month?"

  Noble said, "I'd imagine. At least."

  "See, that's this damn cloud zone."

  Rhyme could also hear McDaniel's criticism of Fred Dellray: The point of informants was to learn about things before they happened.

  "Well, keep at it, Fred," McDaniel said. "You're doing a good job."

  "Sure, Tucker."

  Noble had given up fidgeting with the pen. He was consulting his watch. "So Homeland'll coordinate with Washington and the State Department, embassies too, if we need to. But the police and the Bureau'll run the case like any other. Now, Lincoln, everybody knows your expertise with crime scene work, s
o we're hoping you'll work point on analysis of the trace. We're assembling a CS team now. They should be on location at the substation in twenty minutes. Thirty, tops."

  "Sure, we'll help," Rhyme said. "But we run the entire scene. Entrance to exit. And all secondary scenes. Not just trace. The whole ball of string." He glanced at Sellitto, who nodded firmly, meaning, I'm backing you up.

  In the ensuing awkward moment of silence, everybody was aware of the subtext: who would ultimately be in charge of the investigation. The nature of police work nowadays was such that whoever controlled the forensics basically ran the case. This was a practical consequence of the advancements in crime scene investigative techniques in the past ten years. Simply by searching the scenes and analyzing what was found, forensic investigators had the best insights into the nature of the crime and possible suspects and were the first to develop leads.

  The triumvirate--Noble and McDaniel on the federal side and Sellitto for the NYPD--would be making strategic decisions. But, if they accepted Rhyme as key in the crime scene operation, he would be in effect the lead investigator. This made sense. He'd solved crimes in the city longer than any of them had, and since there were no suspects or other significant leads at this point, other than evidence, a forensic specialist was the way to go.

  Most important, Rhyme wanted the case bad. The boredom factor . . .

  Okay, some ego too.

  So he offered the best argument he could: He said nothing. Just settled his eyes on the face of the Homeland Security man, Gary Noble.

  McDaniel fidgeted a bit--it was his crime scene people who would be demoted--and Noble lobbed a glance toward him, asking, "What do you think, Tucker?"

  "I know Mr. Rhyme's . . . I know Lincoln's work. I don't have a problem with him running the scene. Provided there's one hundred percent coordination with us."

  "Of course."

  "And we've got somebody present. And we get the findings as soon as possible." He looked into Rhyme's eyes, not at his body. "The most important thing is fast response time."

  Meaning, Rhyme suspected, can somebody in your condition deliver? Sellitto stirred, but this wasn't a crip put-down. It was a legitimate question. One that Rhyme himself would have asked.

  He answered, "Understood."

  "Good. I'll tell my Evidence Response people to help however you want," the ASAC assured him.