And hurt he was, devastated, though he didn't know it yet.
And me? Dance thought. How do I feel about this?
Then she promptly tucked that consideration away, refusing to examine it right now.
O'Neil stood like a schoolboy who'd asked a girl to the eighth-grade dance. She wouldn't have been surprised if he'd jammed his hands into his pockets and stared down at his shoe tips. "So I was just wondering, about next week. A few extra days?"
Where do we go from here? Dance thought. If she could hover over herself, looking down as a kinesic analyst, what was her body language saying? She was, on the one hand, deeply moved by the news. On the other, she was as cautious as a war-zone soldier approaching a roadside package.
The appeal of a trip with Michael O'Neil was almost overwhelming.
Yet the answer, of course, could not be yes. For one thing, O'Neil needed to be there for his children, completely there, one hundred percent there. They might not--should not--have been told about their parents' problems at this point. Yet they would know something. Children's intuition is a primary force of nature.
But there was another reason for Dance and O'Neil not to share personal time in Los Angeles.
And, coincidentally, it appeared just now.
"Hello?" called a man's voice from the side yard.
Dance held Michael O'Neil's eye, gave a tight smile and called, "Up here. In the back."
More footsteps on the stairs and Jonathan Boling joined them. He gave a smile to O'Neil and the two men shook hands. Like Dance, he was in jeans. His knit shirt was black, under a Lands' End windbreaker. He wore hiking boots.
"I'm a little early."
"Not a problem."
O'Neil was smart, and more, he was savvy. Dance could see that he understood instantly. His first reaction was dismay that he'd put her in a difficult position.
His eyes offered a sincere apology.
And hers insisted that none was necessary.
O'Neil was amused too and gave Dance a smile not unlike the one they'd shared when last year they'd heard on the car radio the Sondheim song "Send in the Clowns," about potential lovers who just can't seem to get together.
Timing, they both knew, was everything.
Dance said evenly, "Jonathan and I are going to Napa for the weekend."
"Just a little get-together at my parents' place. I always like to bring along somebody to run interference." Boling was downplaying the getaway. The professor was smart too--he'd seen Dance and O'Neil together--and understood that he'd walked into the middle of something now.
"It's beautiful up there," O'Neil said.
Dance remembered that he and Anne had spent their honeymoon at an inn near the Cakebread Vineyard up in wine country.
Could we just shoot these ironies dead, please? Dance thought. And she realized that her face was burning with a girlish blush.
O'Neil asked, "Wes is at your mom and dad's?"
"Yep."
"I'll call him. I want to cast off at eight tomorrow."
She loved him for keeping the fishing date with the boy, even though Dance would be out of town and O'Neil had plenty to cope with. "Thanks. He's really looking forward to it."
"I'm getting a copy of the decision from L.A. I'll email it to you."
She said, "I want to talk, Michael. Call me."
"Sure."
O'Neil would understand that she meant talking about him and Anne and the impending separation, not the J. Doe case.
And Dance understood that he wouldn't call, not while she was away with Boling. He was that kind of person.
Dance felt a fast urge--a hungry urge--to hug the deputy again, put her arms around him, and she was about to. But for a man who remained unskilled at kinesic analysis, O'Neil instantly picked up on her intention. He turned and walked to the stairs. "Got to collect the kids. Pizza night. Bye, Jon. And, hey, thanks for all your help. We couldn't've done it without you."
"You owe me a tin badge," Boling said with a grin and asked Dance if he could carry anything out to the car. She pointed out the shopping bag full of soda, water, snacks and CDs for the drive north.
Dance found herself clutching her wineglass to her chest as she watched O'Neil start down the deck stairs. She wondered if he'd turn back.
He did, briefly. They shared yet another smile, and then he was gone.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Katherine Buse, whose excellent research gave me the lowdown on blogs and life in the synth world and who taught me how to survive (at least for a while) in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Thanks too for the savvy editorial skills of Jane Davis, Jenna Dolan, Donna Marton, Hazel Orme and Phil Metcalf. My appreciation to James Chilton's webmaster, my sister, Julie Reece Deaver, and thanks, as always, to Madelyn and to the puppies--all of them.
Read an excerpt from
The Burning Wire
by Jeffery Deaver
Coming in June 2010 from Simon & Schuster
THE DRIVER EASED the M70 bus through traffic toward the stop on 57th Street near where Tenth Avenue blended into Amsterdam. He was in a pretty good mood. The new bus was a kneeling model, which lowered to the sidewalk to make stepping aboard easier, and featured a handicap ramp, great steering and, most important, a rump-friendly driver's seat.
Lord knew he needed that, spending eight hours a day in it.
Today was beautiful, clear and cool. April. One of his favorite months. It was about 11:30 a.m. and the bus was crowded as people were heading east for lunch dates or errands on their hour off. Traffic was moving slowly as he nosed the huge vehicle closer to the stop, where four or five people waited beside a lamppost covered with flyers.
He was approaching the bus stop and he happened to look past the people waiting to get on board, his eyes taking in the old, brown building behind the stop. An early-twentieth-century building, it had several gridded windows but was always dark inside; he'd never seen anybody going in or out. A spooky place, like a prison. On the front was a flaking sign in white paint on a blue background.
ALGONQUIN CONSOLIDATED POWER COMPANY
SUBSTATION MH-10
PRIVATE PROPERTY
DANGER. HIGH VOLTAGE. TRESPASS PROHIBITED.
He rarely paid attention to the place but today something had caught his eye, something, he believed, out of the ordinary. Dangling from the window, about ten feet off the ground, was a wire, about a half inch in diameter. It was covered with dark insulation up to the end. There, the plastic or rubber was stripped away, revealing silverish metal strands; it was bolted to a fitting of some kind, a flat piece of brass. Damn big hunk of wire, the driver thought.
And just hanging out the window. Was that safe?
He now braked the bus to a complete stop and hit the door release. The kneeling mechanism engaged and the big vehicle dipped. The metal lower step was now just inches from the sidewalk. The driver turned his broad, ruddy face toward the door, which eased open with a satisfying hydraulic hiss. The folks began to climb on board. "Morning," the driver said cheerfully.
A woman in her eighties, clutching an old shabby Henri Bendel shopping bag, nodded back and, using a cane, staggered to the rear, ignoring the empty seats in the front reserved for the elderly and disabled.
How could you not just love New Yorkers?
Then sudden motion in the rearview mirror. Flashing yellow lights. A truck was speeding up behind him. Algonquin Consolidated. Three workers stepped outside and stood in a close group, talking among themselves. They held boxes of tools and thick gloves and jackets. They didn't seem happy as they walked slowly toward the substation, staring at it, heads close together as they debated something. One of those heads was shaking ominously.
Then the driver turned to the last passenger about to board, a young Latino, clutching his Metrocard and pausing outside the bus. He too was gazing at the substation. Frowning. The driver noticed his head was raised, as if he was sniffing the air.
An acrid scent. Y
es, something was burning. The smell reminded him of the time that an electric motor in the wife's washing machine had shorted out and the insulation burned. Nauseating. A wisp of smoke was coming from the doorway of the substation.
So that's what the Algonquin people were doing here.
That'd be a mess. The driver wondered if it would mean a power outage and the stoplights would go out. That'd be it for him. The crosstown trip, normally twenty minutes, would be hours. Well, in any event, he'd better clear the area for the fire department. He gestured the passenger on board. "Hey, mister, I gotta go. Come on. Get on--"
As the passenger, still frowning at the smell, turned around and stepped onto the bus, the driver heard what sounded like pops coming from inside the substation. Sharp, almost like gunshots. Then a flash of light, light like a dozen suns, filled the entire sidewalk between the bus and the cable dangling from the window.
The Latino passenger disappeared into a cloud of flame.
The driver's vision collapsed to gray afterimages. The sound was like a ripping crackle and shotgun blast at the same time, stunning his ears. Though belted into his seat, his upper body was slammed against the side window.
Through numb ears, he heard the echoes of his passengers' screams.
Through half-blinded eyes, he saw fire.
As the driver began to pass out, he wondered if he himself might be the source of the raging flames.
"I HAVE TO tell you. He got out of the airport. He was spotted an hour ago in downtown Mexico City."
"No," Lincoln Rhyme said in a sigh, closing his eyes briefly. "No . . ."
Amelia Sachs, sitting beside Rhyme's candy-apple-red Storm Arrow wheelchair, leaned forward and spoke into the black box of the speakerphone. "What happened?" She tugged at her long red hair and twined the strands into a severe ponytail.
"By the time we got the flight information from London, the plane had landed." The woman's voice blossomed crisply from the speakerphone. "Seems he hid on a supply truck, snuck out through a service entrance. I'll show you the security tape we got from the Mexican police. I've got a link. Hold on a minute." Her voice faded as she spoke to her associate, giving him instructions about the video.
The time was just past noon and Rhyme and Sachs were in the ground-floor parlor turned forensic laboratory of his town house on Central Park West, what had been a gothic Victorian structure in which had possibly resided--Rhyme liked to think--some very unquaint Victorians. Tough businessmen, dodgy politicians, high-class crooks. Maybe an incorruptible police commissioner who liked to bang heads. Rhyme had written a classic book on old-time crime in New York and had used his sources to try to track the genealogy of his building. But he could find no pedigree.
The woman they were speaking with was in a more modern structure, Rhyme had to assume, 3,000 miles away: the Monterey office of the California Bureau of Investigation. CBI agent Kathryn Dance had worked with Rhyme and Sachs several years ago, on a case involving the very man they were now closing in on. Richard Logan was, they believed, his real name. Though Lincoln Rhyme thought of him mostly by his nickname: the Watchmaker.
He was a professional criminal, one who planned his crimes with the precision he devoted to his hobby and passion--constructing timepieces. Rhyme and the killer had clashed several times; Rhyme had foiled one of his plans but failed to stop another. Still, Lincoln Rhyme considered the overall score a loss for himself since the Watchmaker wasn't in custody.
Rhyme leaned his head back in his wheelchair, picturing Logan. He'd seen the man in person, up close. Body lean, hair a dark boyish mop, eyes gently amused at being questioned by the police, never revealing the mass murder he was planning. His serenity seemed to be innate, and it was what Rhyme found to be perhaps the most disturbing quality of the man. Emotion breeds mistake and carelessness, and no one could ever accuse Richard Logan of being emotional.
He could be hired for larceny or illegal arms or any other scheme that needed elaborate planning and ruthless execution, but was generally hired for murder--killing witnesses or whistle-blowers or political or corporate figures. Recent intelligence revealed he'd taken a murder assignment in Mexico somewhere. Rhyme had called Dance, who had many contacts south of the border--and who had herself nearly been killed by the Watchmaker's associate a few years earlier. Given that connection, Dance was representing the Americans in the operation to arrest and extradite him, working with a senior investigator with the Ministerial Federal Police, a young, hardworking officer named Arturo Diaz.
Early that morning they'd learned Logan would be landing in Mexico City. Dance had called Diaz, who scrambled to put extra officers in place to intercept him. But, from Dance's latest communication, they hadn't been in time.
"You ready for the video?" Dance asked.
"Go ahead." Rhyme shifted one of his few working fingers--the index finger of his right hand--and moved the electric wheelchair closer to the screen. He was a C4 quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down.
On one of the several flat-screen monitors in the lab came a grainy image of an airport. Trash and discarded cartons, cans and drums littered the ground on both sides of the fence in the foreground. A private cargo jet taxied into view and just as it stopped, a rear hatch opened and a man dropped out.
"That's him," Dance said softly.
"I can't see clearly," Rhyme said.
"It's definitely Logan," Dance reassured. "They got a partial print--you'll see in a minute."
The man stretched and then oriented himself. He slung a bag over his shoulder and, crouching, ran toward and hid behind a work shed. A few minutes later a worker came by, carrying a package the size of two shoeboxes. Logan greeted him, swapped the box for a letter-size envelope. The worker looked around and walked away quickly. A maintenance truck pulled up. Logan climbed into the back and hid under some tarps. The truck disappeared from view."
"The plane?" he asked.
"Continued on to South America on a corporate charter. The pilot and copilot claim they don't know anything about a stowaway. Of course they're lying. But we don't have jurisdiction to question them."
"And the worker?" Sachs asked.
"Federal police picked him up. He was just a minimum wage airport employee. He claims somebody he didn't know told him he'd be paid a couple of hundred U.S. to deliver the box. The money was in the envelope. That's what they lifted the print from."
"What was in the package?" Rhyme asked.
"He says he doesn't know but he's lying--I saw the interview video. Our DEA people're interrogating him. I wanted to try to tease some information out of him myself but it'll take too long for me to get the okay."
Rhyme and Sachs shared a look. The "teasing" reference was a bit of modesty on Dance's part. She was a kinesics--body language--expert and one of the top interrogators in the country. But the testy relationship between the sovereign states in question was such that a California cop would have plenty of paperwork to negotiate before she could slip into Mexico for a formal interrogation, whereas the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency already had a sanctioned presence there.
Rhyme asked, "Where was Logan spotted in the capital?"
"A business district. He was trailed to a hotel, but he wasn't staying there. It was for a meeting, Diaz's men think. But by the time they'd set up surveillance he was gone. But all the law enforcement agencies and hotels have his picture now." Dance added that Diaz's boss, a very senior police official, would be taking over the investigation. "It's encouraging that they're taking it all pretty seriously."
Yes, encouraging, Rhyme thought. But frustrating too. To be on the verge of finding the prey and yet have so little control over the case. . . . He found himself breathing more quickly. He was considering the last time he and the Watchmaker had been up against each other; Logan had outthought everybody. And easily killed the man he'd been hired to murder. Rhyme had had all the facts at hand to figure out what Logan was up to. Yet he'd misread the strategy completely.
"By the way,"
he heard Sachs ask Kathryn Dance, "how was that romantic weekend away?" This had to do, it seemed, with Dance's new love interest. The single mother of two had been a widow for several years.
"We had a great time," the agent reported.
"Where did you go?"
Rhyme wondered why on earth Sachs was asking about Dance's social life? She ignored his impatient glance.
"Santa Barbara. Stopped at Hearst Castle on the way. . . . Listen, I'm still waiting for you two to come out here. The children really want to meet you. Wes wrote a paper about forensics for school and mentioned you, Lincoln. His teacher used to live in New York and had read all about you."
"Yes, that'd be nice," Rhyme said, thinking exclusively about Mexico City.
Sachs smiled at the impatience in his voice and told Dance they had to go.
After disconnecting, she wiped some sweat from Rhyme's forehead--he hadn't been aware of the moisture--and they sat silent for a moment, looking out the window at the blur of a peregrine falcon sweeping into view. It veered up to its nest on Rhyme's second floor. Though not uncommon in major cities--plenty of fat, tasty pigeons for meals--these birds of prey usually nested higher. But for some reason several generations of the birds had called Rhyme's town house home. He liked their presence. They were smart, fascinating to watch and were the perfect visitors, not demanding anything from him.
A male voice intruded. "Well, did you get him?"
"Who?" Rhyme snapped. "And how artful a verb is 'get'?"
Thom Reston, Lincoln Rhyme's caregiver, said, "The Watchmaker."
"No," grumbled Rhyme.
"But you're close, aren't you?" asked the trim man, wearing dark slacks, a businessman's starched yellow shirt and a floral tie.
"Oh, close," Rhyme muttered. "Close. That's very helpful. Next time you're being attacked by a mountain lion, Thom, how would you feel if the park ranger shot really close to it? As opposed to, oh, say, actually hitting it?"
"Aren't mountain lions endangered?" Thom asked, not even bothering with an ironic inflection. He was impervious to Rhyme's edge. He'd worked for the forensic detective for years, longer than many married couples had been together. And the aide was as seasoned as the toughest spouse.