"No," Sachs said. "You wait here."
"Okay. You go down two flights and you'll see a red door. It'll say 'Algonquin Consolidated' on it. That'll lead to stairs going down to the service tunnel. Here's the key." He handed it to her.
"What's your partner's name?"
"Joey. Joey Barzan."
"And where was he supposed to be?"
"At the bottom of the access stairs, turn left. He was working about a hundred feet, hundred and fifty, away. It'd sort of be under where the hotel is."
"What's visibility down there?"
"Even with the juice off, there'll be some work lights on battery power."
Battery. Great.
"But it's really dark. We always use flashlights."
"Are there live lines there?"
"Yeah, it's a transmission tunnel. The feeders here are off now, but others're live."
"Are they exposed?"
He gave a surprised blink. "They've got a hundred and thirty thousand volts. No, they're not exposed."
Unless Galt had exposed them.
Sachs hesitated then swept the voltage detector over the door handle, drawing a glance of curiosity from the Algonquin worker. She didn't explain about the invention, but merely gestured everybody back and flung the door open, hand on her weapon's grip. Empty.
Sachs and the two officers started down the murky stairwell--her claustrophobia kicked in immediately but at least here the disgusting smell of burned rubber and skin and hair was less revolting.
Sachs was in the lead, the two patrolmen behind. She was gripping the key firmly but when they got to the red door, giving access to the tunnel, she found it was partially open. They all exchanged glances. She drew her weapon. They did the same and she gestured the patrolmen to move forward slowly behind her, then eased the door open silently with her shoulder.
In the doorway she paused, looked down.
Shit. The stairs leading to the tunnel--about two stories, it seemed--were metal. Unpainted.
Her heart tripping again.
If you can, avoid it.
If you can't do that, protect yourself against it.
If you can't do that, cut its head off.
But none of Charlie Sommers's magic rules applied here.
She was now sweating furiously. She remembered that wet skin was a far better conductor than dry. And hadn't Sommers said something about salty sweat making it even worse?
"You see something, Detective?" A whisper.
"You want me to go?" the second officer asked.
She didn't respond to the questions but whispered back, "Don't touch anything metal."
"Sure. Why not?"
"A hundred thousand volts. That's why."
"Oh. Sure."
She plunged down the stairs, half expecting to hear a horrific crack and see her vision fill with a blinding burst of spark. Down the first flight of stairs, then down the second one.
The estimate was wrong. The journey was down three very steep flights.
As they approached the bottom, they heard rumbling and hums. Loud. It was also twenty degrees hotter down here than outside and the temperature was rising with every step of the descent.
Another level of hell.
The tunnel was bigger than she expected, about six feet across and seven high, but much dimmer. Many of the emergency lighting bulbs were missing. To the right, she could just make out the end of the tunnel, about fifty feet away. There were no doors Galt could have escaped through, no places to hide. To the left, though, where Joey Barzan was supposed to be, the corridor disappeared in what seemed to be a series of bends.
Sachs motioned the other two to stay behind her as they moved to the first jog in the tunnel. There they stopped. She didn't believe Galt was still here--he would get as far away as he could--but she was worried about traps.
Still, it was a belief, not a certainty, that he'd fled. So when she looked around the bend she was crouching and had her Glock ready, though not preceding her, where Galt might knock it aside or grab it.
Nothing.
She looked down at the water covering the concrete floor. Water. Naturally. Plenty of conductive water.
She glanced at the wall of the tunnel, on which were mounted thick black cables.
DANGER !!! HIGH VOLTAGE
CALL ALGONQUIN CONSOLIDATED POWER
BEFORE WORKING
She remembered the Algonquin worker's comment a moment ago about the voltage.
"Clear," she whispered.
And motioned the officers along behind her, hurrying. She certainly was concerned about the Algonquin worker, Joey Barzan, but more important she hoped to find some clues as to where Galt might've gone.
But could they? These tunnels would go on for miles, she guessed. They would have been a perfect route by which to escape. The floors were dirt and concrete, but no footprints were obvious. The walls were sooty. She could collect trace evidence for days and not come up with a single thing that might yield a clue as to where he'd gone. Maybe--
A scraping sound.
She froze. Where had it come from? Were there side passages where he might be hiding?
One of the officers held up a hand. He pointed at his own eyes and then forward. She nodded, though she thought the military signal wasn't really necessary here.
But whatever makes you comfortable in situations like this. . . .
Though not much was making Sachs comfortable at the moment. Again, the bullets of molten metal zinged, hissing, through her mind's eye.
Still, she couldn't pull back.
Another deep breath.
Another look . . . Again, the stretch of tunnel ahead of them was empty. It was also dimmer than the other. And she saw why: most of the lightbulbs were missing here too, but these had been broken out.
A trap, she sensed.
They had to be directly beneath the hotel, she figured, when they came to a ninety-degree turn to the right.
Again she took a fast look, but this time it was hard to see anything at all because of the greater darkness here.
Then she heard noises again.
One patrolman eased close. "A voice?"
She nodded.
"Keep low," she whispered.
They eased around the corner and made their way up the tunnel, crouching.
Then she shivered. It wasn't a voice. It was a moan. A desperate moan. Human.
"Flashlight!" she whispered. As a detective, she wore no utility belt, just weapons and cuffs, and she felt the painful blow as the officer behind her shoved the light into her side.
"Sorry," he muttered.
"Get down," she told the patrolmen softly. "Prone. Be prepared to fire. But only on my command . . . unless he takes me out first."
They eased to the filthy floor, guns pointed down the tunnel.
She aimed in that direction too. Holding the flashlight out to her side at arm's length so she wouldn't present a vital-zone target, she clicked it on, the blinding beam filling the grim corridor.
No gunshots, no arc flashes.
But Galt had claimed another victim.
About thirty feet away an Algonquin worker lay on his side, duct tape over his mouth, hands tied behind him. He was bleeding from the temple and behind his ear.
"Let's go!"
The other officers rose and the three of them hurried down the tunnel to the man she supposed was Joey Barzan. In the beam she could see it wasn't Galt. The worker was badly injured and bleeding heavily. As one of the patrolmen hurried toward him to stop the hemorrhaging, Barzan began to shake his head frantically and wail beneath the tape.
At first Sachs assumed he was dying and that death tremors were shaking his body. But as she got closer to him she looked at his wide eyes and glanced down, following their path. He was lying not on the bare floor but on a thick piece of what looked like Teflon or plastic.
"Stop!" she shouted to the officer reaching forward to help the man. "It's a trap!"
The patrolman froze.
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She remembered what Sommers had told her about wounds and blood making the body much less resistant to electricity.
Then, without touching the worker, she walked around behind him.
His hands were bound, yes. But not with tape or rope--with bare copper wire. Which had been spliced into one of the lines on the wall. She grabbed Sommers's voltage detector and aimed it at the wire wrapped around Barzan's flesh.
The meter jumped off the scale at 10,000v. Had the patrolman touched him, the juice would have streaked through him, through the officer and into the ground, killing them instantly.
Sachs stepped back and turned up the volume on her radio to call Nancy Simpson and have her find Bob Cavanaugh and tell the operations director he needed to cut the head off another snake.
Chapter 39
RON PULASKI HAD managed to nurse Ray Galt's damaged computer printer back to life. And he was grabbing the hot sheets of paper as they eased into the output tray.
The young officer pored over them desperately, searching for clues as to the man's whereabouts, accomplices, the location of Justice For . . . anything that might move them closer to stopping the attacks.
Detective Cooper sent him a text, explaining that they hadn't successfully stopped Galt at a hotel downtown. They were still searching for the killer in the Wall Street area. Did Pulaski have anything that could help?
"Not yet. Soon, I hope." He sent the message, turned back to the printouts.
Of the eight remaining pages in the print queue, nothing was immediately relevant to finding and stopping the killer. But Pulaski did learn something that might become helpful: Raymond Galt's motive.
Some of the pages were printouts of postings that Galt had made on blogs and online newsletters. Others were downloads of medical research, some very detailed and written by doctors with good credentials. Some were written by quacks in the language and tone of conspiracy theorists.
One had been written by Galt himself and posted on a blog about environmental causes of serious disease.
My story is typical of many. I was a lineman and later a troubleman (like a supervisor) for many years working for several power companies in direct contact with lines carrying over one hundred thousand volts. It was the electromagnetic fields created by the transmission lines, that are uninsulated, that led to my leukemia, I am convinced. In addition it has been proven that power lines attract aerosol particles that lead to lung cancer among others, but this is something that the media doesn't talk about.
We need to make all the power companies but more important the public aware of these dangers. Because the companies won't do anything voluntarily, why should they? If the people stopped using electricity by even half we could save thousands of lives a year and make them (the companies) more responsible. In turn they would create safer ways to deliver electricity. And stop destroying the earth too.
People, you need to take matters into your own hands!
--Raymond Galt
So that was it. He was ill, he felt, because of companies like Algonquin. And he was fighting back in the time he had left. Pulaski knew the man was a killer, yet he couldn't help but feel a bit of sympathy for him. The officer had found liquor bottles, most of them at least half empty, in one of the cupboards. Sleeping pills too. And antidepressants. It was no excuse to kill anybody, but dying alone of a terminal disease and the people responsible for your death not caring? Well, Pulaski could understand where the anger came from.
He continued through the printouts, but found only more of the same: rants and medical research. Not even emails whose addresses they might trace to see if they could find Galt's friends and clues to his whereabouts.
He looked through them once more, thinking about Assistant Special Agent in Charge Tucker McDaniel's weird theory about cloud zone communications, looking for code words and secret messages that might be embedded in the text. Then he decided he'd wasted enough time on that and bundled up the printouts. He spent a few minutes bagging the rest of the evidence, collecting the trace and attaching chain-of-custody cards. Then he laid the numbers and photographed the entire site.
When he was finished, Pulaski looked up the dim hallway to the front door and felt the uneasiness return. He started toward the door, noting again that both the knob and the door itself were metal. What's the problem? he asked himself angrily. You opened it to get inside an hour ago. Leaving on the latex exam gloves, he tentatively reached out and pulled the door open, then, with relief, he stepped outside.
Two NYPD cops and an FBI agent were nearby. Pulaski nodded a greeting.
"You hear?" the agent asked.
Pulaski paused in the doorway of the apartment, then stepped farther away from the steel door. "About the attack? Yeah. I heard he got away. I don't know any details."
"He killed five people. Would've been more but your partner saved a lot of them."
"Partner?"
"That woman detective. Amelia Sachs. Bunch were injured. Third-degree burns."
Pulaski shook his head. "That's tough. That same way, the arc flash?"
"I don't know. He electrocuted them, though. That's all I heard."
"Jesus." Pulaski looked around the street. He'd never noticed how much metal there was on a typical residential block. A creepy feeling was flooding over him, the paranoia. There were metal posts and bars and rods everywhere, it seemed. Fire escapes, vents, pipes going into the ground, those metal sheets covering under-sidewalk elevators. Any one of them could be energized enough to send a charge right through you or to explode in a shower of metal shrapnel.
Killed five people . . .
Third-degree burns.
"You okay there, Officer?"
Pulaski gave a reflexive laugh. "Yeah." He wanted to explain his fear, but of course he didn't. "Any leads to Galt?"
"No. He's gone."
"Well, I gotta get this back to Lincoln Rhyme."
"Find anything?"
"Yeah. Galt's definitely the one. But I couldn't find anything about where he is now. Or what he's got planned next."
The FBI agent asked, "Who's going to do surveillance?" He nodded at the apartment. "You want to leave some of your people here?"
The implication being that the feds were perfectly happy to come along for the bust but since Galt wasn't here and probably wouldn't return--he must've heard on the news that they'd identified him--they didn't want to bother leaving their people on guard detail.
"That's not my call," the young officer said. He radioed Lon Sellitto and told him what he'd found. The lieutenant would arrange for two NYPD officers to remain on site, though hidden, until an official undercover surveillance team could be put together, just in case Galt tried to sneak back.
Pulaski then walked around the corner and into the deserted alleyway behind the building. He popped the trunk and loaded the evidence inside.
He slammed it, and looked around uneasily.
At all the metal, surrounded by metal.
Goddamn it, stop thinking about that! He got into the driver's seat and started to insert the key into the steering column. Then he hesitated. The car had been parked here, up the alley, out of sight of the apartment in case Galt did come back. If the perp was still free, was there a chance he'd returned and rigged some kind of a trap on Pulaski's car?
No, too far-fetched.
Pulaski grimaced. He started the car and put it in reverse.
His phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen. It was his wife, Jenny. He debated. No, he'd call her later. He slipped the phone away.
Glancing out the window he saw an electrical service panel on the side of a building, three large wires running from it. Shivering at the sight, Pulaski gripped the key and turned it. The starter gave that huge grinding sound when the engine's already running. In panic, believing that he was being electrocuted, the young cop grabbed the door handle and yanked it open. His foot slipped off the brake and landed on the accelerator. The Crown Victoria screeched backward, tires skidding. He slam
med on the brake.
But not before there was a sickening thud and a scream and he caught a glimpse of a middle-aged man who'd been crossing the alley, carting a load of groceries. The pedestrian flew into the wall and collapsed on the cobblestones, blood streaming from his head.
Chapter 40
AMELIA SACHS WAS taking stock of Joey Barzan.
"How you doing?"
"Yeah. I guess."
She wasn't sure what that meant and didn't think he knew either. She glanced at the EMS medic who was bent over Barzan. They were still in the tunnel beneath the Battery Park Hotel.
"Concussion, lost some blood." He turned to his patient, who was sitting unsteadily against the wall. "You'll be all right."
Bob Cavanaugh had managed to find the source of the juice and shut down the line that Galt had used for the trap. Sachs had confirmed that the electrical supply was dead, using Sommers's current detector, and quickly--really quickly--undone the wire attached to the feeder line.
"What happened?" she asked Barzan.
"It was Ray Galt. I found him down here. He hit me with a hot stick, knocked me out. When I woke up he'd wired me to the line. Jesus. That was sixty-thousand volts, a subway feeder. If you'd touched me, if I'd rolled a few inches to the side . . . Jesus." Then he blinked. "I heard the sirens on the street. The smell. What happened?"
"Galt ran some wires into the hotel next door."
"God, no. Is anybody hurt?"
"There are casualties. I don't know the details yet. Where'd Galt go?"
"I don't know. I was out. If he didn't leave through the college, he had to go that way, through the tunnel." He cast his eyes to the side. "There's plenty of access to the subway tunnels and platforms."
Sachs asked, "Did he say anything?"
"Not really."
"Where was he when you saw him?"
"Right there." He pointed about ten feet away. "You can see where he rigged the line. There's some kind of box on it. I've never seen that before. And he was watching the construction site and the hotel on his computer. Like it was hooked into a security camera."
Sachs rose and looked over the cable, the same Bennington brand as at the bus stop yesterday. No sign of the computer or hot stick, which she recalled Sommers telling her about--a fiberglass pole for live-wire work.
Then Barzan said in a soft voice, "The only reason I'm alive now is that he wanted to use me to kill people, isn't that right? He wanted to stop you from chasing him."
"That's right."