The Burning Wire

by Jeffery Deaver

  William Brent said, "The world's changing, Fred."

  Oh, we're back to that? Dellray mused to himself.

  "And I've got some new prospects I need to pursue. But what's the problem? What's always the problem?"

  Money, of course.

  Dellray asked, "How much?"

  "One hundred thousand. Up front. And you have a guarantee. I will get you something."

  Dellray coughed a laugh. He'd never paid more than five large to a snitch in all his years running them. And that princely sum had bought them indictments in a major dockside corruption case.

  One hundred thousand dollars?

  "It's just not there, William," he said, not thinking about the name, which Brent probably hadn't used in years. "That's more than our entire snitch bag put together. That's more than everybody's snitch bag put together."

  "Hm." Brent said nothing. Which is exactly what Fred Dellray himself would have done, had he been on the other side of the negotiation.

  The agent sat forward, his bony hands clasped. "Give me a minute." Like Jeep in the stinky diner earlier, Dellray rose and walked past a skateboarder, two giggling Asian girls, and a man handing out fliers, looking surprisingly rational and cheerful, considering his cause was the 2012 end of days. Near the dharma tree he pulled out his phone and made a call.

  "Tucker McDaniel," was the clipped greeting.

  "It's Fred."

  "You got something?" The ASAC sounded surprised.

  "Maybe. A CI of mine, from the day. Nothing concrete. But he's been solid in the past. Only he wants some money."

  "How much?"

  "How much we got?"

  McDaniel paused. "Not a lot. What's he got that's gold?"

  "Nothing yet."

  "Names, places, acts, numbers? Scraps? . . . Anything?"

  Like a computer rattling off data in a list.

  "No, Tucker. Nothing yet. It's like an investment."

  Finally the ASAC said, "I could do six, eight thousand probably."

  "That's all?"

  "How the hell much does he want?"

  "We're negotiating."

  "Fact is, we've had to adjust bottom lines for this one, Fred. Took us by surprise. You know."

  McDaniel's reluctance to spend was suddenly clear. He'd moved all the money in the Bureau operating accounts to the SIGINT and T and C teams. Naturally one of the first places he'd raided was the snitch fund.

  "Start with six. See the merchandise. If it's meaty, maybe I could go nine or ten. Even that's pushing it."

  "I think he could be on to something, Tucker."

  "Well, let's see some proof. . . . Hold on. . . . Okay, Fred, it's T and C on the other line. I better go."

  Click.

  Dellray snapped the phone shut and stood for a moment, staring at the tree. He heard: "She was hot, you know, but there was this one thing didn't seem right . . . no, it's the Mayan calendar, I mean, maybe Nostradamus . . . that's totally fucked up . . . yo, where you been, dog? . . ."

  But what he was really hearing was his partner in the FBI some years ago saying, No problem, Fred. I'll take it. And going on a trip that Dellray had been scheduled to handle.

  And then hearing the voice of his special agent in charge of the New York office two days later, that voice choking, telling Dellray that the partner had been one of the people killed in a terrorist bombing in the Oklahoma City federal building. The man had been in the conference room that Dellray should have been occupying.

  At that moment, Fred Dellray, in a comfortable air-conditioned conference room of his own many miles from the smoking crater, had decided that a priority in his law enforcement career from then on would be to pursue terrorists and anyone else who killed the innocent in the name of ideas, whether political or religious or social.

  Yes, he was being marginalized by the ASAC. He wasn't even being taken seriously. But what Dellray was about to do had very little to do with vindicating himself, or striking a blow for the old ways.

  It was about stopping what he thought was the worst of evils: killing innocents.

  He returned to William Brent, sat down. He said, "Okay. One hundred thousand." They exchanged numbers--both cold phones, prepaid mobiles that would be discarded after a day or so. Dellray looked at his watch. He said, "Tonight. Washington Square. Near the law school, by the chessboards."

  "Nine?" Brent asked.

  "Make it nine-thirty." Dellray rose and, according to the tradecraft of the CI world, left the park alone, with William Brent remaining behind to pretend to read the paper or contemplate the Krishna elm.

  Or figure out how to spend his money.

  But the CI was soon lost to thought, and Fred Dellray was considering how best to plan the set, what part the chameleon should now play, how to cast his eyes, how to convince and wheedle and call in favors. He was pretty sure he could pull it off; these were skills he'd honed for years.

  He'd just never thought he'd ever be using his talents to rob his employer--the American government and the American people--of $100,000.

  Chapter 19

  AS AMELIA SACHS followed Charlie Sommers to his office on the other side of the Burn in Algonquin Consolidated, she was aware that the heat was rising along the complicated route he was taking. And the rumble filling the halls was getting louder with every step.

  She was totally lost. Up stairways, down stairways. As she followed him she sent and received several text messages on her BlackBerry but as they moved lower and lower she had to concentrate on where she was walking; the hallways became increasingly visitor-hostile. Cell reception finally turned to dust and she put her phone away.

  The temperature rose higher.

  Sommers stopped at a thick door, beside which were a rack of hard hats.

  "You worried about your hair?" he asked, his voice rising, since the rumbling from the other side of the door was very loud now.

  "I don't want to lose it," she called back. "But otherwise, no."

  "Just getting mussed a bit. This is the shortest way to my office."

  "Shorter's better. I'm in a hurry." She grabbed a hat and squashed it onto her head.

  "Ready?"

  "I guess. What's through there exactly?"

  Sommers thought for a moment and said, "Hell." And nodded her forward.

  She recalled the seared polka-dot wounds that covered Luis Martin. Her breath was coming fast and she realized that her hand, moving toward the door handle, had slowed. She gripped and pulled the heavy steel portal open.

  Yep, hell. Fire, sulfur, the whole scene.

  The temperature in the room was overwhelming. Well over a hundred degrees and Sachs felt not only a painful prickle on her skin but a curious lessening of the pain in her joints as the heat deadened her arthritis.

  The hour was late--it was close to eight p.m.--but there was a full staff at work in the Burn. The hunger for electricity might ebb and flow throughout the day but never ceased completely.

  The dim space, easily two hundred feet high, was filled with scaffolding and hundreds of pieces of equipment. The centerpiece was a series of massive light green machines. The largest of them was long with a rounded top, like a huge Quonset hut, from which many pipes and ducts and wires sprouted.

  "That's MOM," Sommers called, pointing to it. "M-O-M. Midwest Operating Machinery, Gary, Indiana. They built her in the 1960s." This was all shouted with some reverence. Sommers added that she was the biggest of the five electrical generators here in the Queens complex. He continued, explaining that when first installed, MOM was the biggest electrical generator in the country. In addition to the other electrical generators--they were only numbered, without names--were four units that provided superheated steam to the New York City area.

  Amelia Sachs was indeed captivated by the massive machinery. She found her step slowing as she gazed at the huge components and tried to figure out the parts. Fascinating what the human mind could put together, what human hands could build.

  Sommers added with
some pride, it seemed to Sachs, that the output of the entire Queens facility--MOM plus several other turbines--was close to 2,500 megawatts. About 25 percent of the city's entire usage.

  He pointed to a series of other tanks. "That's where the steam is condensed to water and pumped back to the boilers. Starts all over again." Proudly he continued, shouting, "She's got three hundred and sixty miles of tubes and pipes, a million feet of cable."

  But then, despite her fascination and the massive scale, Sachs found herself gigged in the belly by her claustrophobia. The noise was relentless, the heat.

  Sommers seemed to understand. "Come on." He gestured her to follow and in five minutes they were out the other door and hanging up their hats. Sachs was breathing deeply. The corridor, while still warm, was blessedly cool after her minutes in hell.

  "It gets to you, doesn't it?"

  "Does."

  "You all right?"

  She diverted a tickling stream of sweat and nodded. He offered her a paper towel from a roll kept there for mopping faces and necks, it seemed, and she dried off.

  "Come on this way."

  He led her down more corridors and into another building. More stairs and finally they arrived at his office. She stifled a laugh at the clutter. The place was filled with computers and instruments she couldn't recognize, hundreds of bits of equipment and tools, wires, electronic components, keyboards, metal and plastic and wood items in every shape and color.

  And junk food. Tons of junk food. Chips and pretzels and soda, Ding Dongs and Twinkies. And Hostess powdered sugar doughnuts, which explained the dandruff on his clothes.

  "Sorry. It's the way we work in Special Projects," he said, shoveling aside computer printouts from an office chair for her to sit in. "Well, the way I work, at least."

  "What exactly do you do?"

  He explained, somewhat abashedly, that he was an inventor. "I know, sounds either very nineteenth century or very infomercial. But that's what I do. And I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I do for a living exactly what I wanted to when I was a kid and building dynamos, motors, lightbulbs--"

  "You made your own lightbulbs?"

  "Only set fire to my bedroom twice. Well, three times, but we only had to call the fire department twice."

  She looked at a picture of Edison on the wall.

  "My hero," Sommers said. "Fascinating man."

  "Andi Jessen had something about him on her wall too. A photo of the grid."

  "It's Thomas Alva's original signature. . . . But Jessen's more Samuel Insull, I'd say."

  "Who?"

  "Edison was the scientist. Insull was a businessman. He headed Consolidated Edison and created the first big monopolistic power utility. Electrified the Chicago trolley system, practically gave away the first electrical appliances--like irons--to get people addicted to electricity. He was a genius. But he ended up disgraced. This sound familiar? He was way overleveraged and when the Depression came, the company went under and hundreds of thousands of shareholders lost everything. Little like Enron. You want to know some trivia: The accounting firm Arthur Andersen was involved with both Insull and Enron.

  "But me? I leave the business to other people. I just make things. Ninety-nine percent amounts to nothing. But . . . well, I've got twenty-eight patents in my name and I've created nearly ninety processes or products in Algonquin's. Some people sit in front of the TV or play video games for fun. I . . . well, invent things." He pointed to a large cardboard box, brimming with squares and rectangles of paper. "That's the Napkin File."

  "The what?"

  "I'm out at Starbucks or a deli and I get an idea. I jot it down on a napkin and come back here to draw it up properly. But I save the original, toss it in there."

  "So if there's ever a museum about you there'll be a Napkin Room."

  "It has occurred to me." Sommers was blushing, from forehead to ample chin.

  "What exactly do you invent?"

  "I guess my expertise is the opposite of what Edison did. He wanted people to use electricity. I want people not to."

  "Does your boss know that's your goal?"

  He laughed. "Maybe I should say I want people to use it more efficiently. I'm Algonquin's negawatt maven. That's 'nega' with an n."

  "Never heard about that."

  "A lot of people haven't, which is too bad. It came from a brilliant scientist and environmentalist, Amory Lovins. The theory is to create incentives to reduce demand and use electricity more efficiently, rather than trying to build new power plants to increase supply. Your typical power station wastes nearly half of the heat generated--right up the smokestack. Half! Think about that. But we've got a series of thermal collectors on the stacks and cooling towers here. At Algonquin we lose only twenty-seven percent.

  "Oh, and lately I've been spending half my time traveling around the country linking up small alternative and renewable companies, so they can get onto the major grids like the Northeastern Interconnection--that's ours--and sell juice to us, rather than us selling to small communities."

  "I thought Andi Jessen wasn't very supportive of renewables and alternative energy."

  "No, but she's not crazy either. It's the wave of the future. I think we just disagree about when that future's going to arrive. I think sooner." A whimsical smile. "Of course, you did notice that her office is the size of my entire department, and it's on the ninth floor with a view of Manhattan. . . . I'm in the basement." His face grew solemn. "Now, what can I do to help?"

  Sachs said, "I have a list of people at Algonquin who might've been behind the attack this morning."

  "Somebody here?" He appeared dismayed.

  "It's looking that way. Or at least they were working with the perp. Now, he's probably a man, though he could be working with a woman. He or she had access to the computer codes that let them get into grid control software. He kept shutting down substations so that the electricity was rerouted into the substation on Fifty-seventh Street. And he reset the circuit breakers higher than they should have been."

  "So that's how it happened." His face was troubled. "The computers. I wondered. I didn't know the details."

  "Some of them will have alibis--we'll take care of checking that out. But I need you to give me some idea of who'd have the ability to reroute the electricity and rig the arc flash."

  Sommers seemed amused. "I'm flattered. I didn't know Andi even knew much about what happens down here." Then the cherubic look was gone, replaced by a wry smile. "Am I a suspect?"

  She'd spotted his name when Jessen had first mentioned him. She held his eye. "You're on the list."

  "Hm. You're sure you want to trust me?"

  "You were on conference call from ten-thirty until nearly noon today, when the attack happened, and you were out of town during the window when the perp could have gotten the computer codes. The key data show you didn't log into the safe file room at any other time."

  Sommers was lifting an eyebrow.

  She tapped her BlackBerry. "That's what I was texting about on the way here. I had somebody in the NYPD check you out. So you're clean."

  She supposed she sounded apologetic for not trusting him. But Sommers said, his eyes sparkling, "Thomas Edison would have approved."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He said a genius is just a talented person who does his homework."

  Chapter 20

  AMELIA SACHS DIDN'T want to show Sommers the list itself; he might know some of the employees and be inclined to dismiss the possibility of their being suspects, or, on the other hand, he might call her attention to somebody simply because he thought they were otherwise suspicious.

  She didn't explain her reluctance but said simply she just wanted a profile of somebody who could have arranged the attack and used the computer.

  He opened a bag of Doritos, offered Sachs some. She declined and he chomped down a handful. Sommers didn't seem like an inventor. He seemed more like a middle-aged advertising copywriter, with his tousled hair and slightly untucked bl
ue-and-white-striped shirt. Bit of a belly. His glasses were stylish, though Sachs suspected that on the frames were the words "Made in" preceding some Asian Rim country. Only up close could you see the wrinkles near his eyes and mouth.

  He washed the food down with soda and said, "First, rerouting the juice to get it to the substation on Fifty-seventh Street? That'll narrow things down. Not everybody who works here could do it. Not many people could at all, in fact. They'd need to know SCADA. That's our Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition program. It runs on Unix computers. He'd also probably have to know EMP--energy management programs. Ours is Enertrol. It's Unix-based too. Unix is a pretty complicated operating system. It's used in the big Internet routers. It's not like Windows or Apple. You couldn't just look up online how to do it. You'd need somebody who'd studied SCADA and EMP, taken courses in it or, at the very least, apprenticed in a control room for six months, a year."

  Sachs jotted notes, then asked, "And about the arc flash. Who'd know about rigging that?"

  "Tell me how he did it exactly."

  Sachs explained about the cable and the bus bar.

  He asked, "It was aimed out the window? Like a gun?"

  She nodded.

  Sommers went silent for a moment. He focused elsewhere. "That could've killed dozens of people. . . . And the burns. Terrible."

  "Who could do it?" Sachs persisted.

  Sommers was looking off again, which he did a lot, she'd noticed. After a moment: "I know you're asking about Algonquin employees. But you ought to know that arc flashes are the first thing that all electricians learn about. Whether they're working as licensed tradesmen, in construction, for manufacturing companies, the army or navy . . . any field at all, as long as they're around electrical service lines with enough juice for arcs to be a problem, they'll learn the rules."

  "So you mean that anybody who knows how to avoid arcs or prevent them knows how to create them."

  "Exactly."

  Another note in her quick handwriting. Then she looked up. "But let's just talk for the moment about employees."

  "Okay, who here could rig something like that? There'd be live wire work involved, so it'd have to be somebody who is or has been a licensed master electrician in private contracting or been a lineman or a troubleman for a utility."

  "A what? Troubleman?"

  Sommers laughed. "Great job title, hm? Those're supervisors who arrange for the repairs when a line goes down or there's a short circuit or other problem. And remember that a lot of the senior people here have risen through the ranks. Just because they do energy brokerage now and sit behind a desk doesn't mean they can't rewire a three-phase service panel in their sleep."