The Burning Wire

by Jeffery Deaver

  And methane.

  Special Agent Timothy Conradt blinked as he looked at a group of people protesting bovine flatulence. Methane from livestock apparently burned holes in the ozone layer too.

  Cow farts.

  What a crazy world.

  Conradt was sporting an undercover mustache and wore jeans and a baggy shirt, concealing his radio and weapon. His wife had ironed the wrinkles into his garments that morning, vetoing his idea that he sleep in his clothes to get that "lived-in" look.

  He was no fan of knee-jerk liberals and people who'd sell the country out in the name of . . . well, who knew what? Complacency, Europe, globalism, socialism, cowardice.

  But one thing he had in common with these people was the environment. Conradt lived for the outdoors. Hunting, fishing, hiking. So he sympathized.

  He was scanning the crowds carefully because even though the perp known as the Watchmaker had been collared, ASAC Tucker McDaniel still was sure that that group Justice For the Earth was going to try something. The SIGINT hits were compelling, even nontech Conradt had to admit. Justice For the Earth. Or, as the agents were referring to it now, per McDaniel's instruction, JFTE, pronounced "Juf-tee."

  Teams of agents and NYPD cops were deployed throughout the city, covering the convention center near the Hudson River, a parade downtown in Battery Park and this gathering in Central Park.

  McDaniel's theory was that they'd misread the connection among Richard Logan, Algonquin Consolidated Power and JFTE, but it was likely that the group could have formed an alliance with, possibly, an Islamic fundamentalist cell.

  A symbiotic construct.

  A phrase that would give the agents plenty of ammunition for the next few months when they were out for drinks.

  Conradt's own feeling, from years on the street, was that JFTE may have existed but it was just a bunch of cranks, of no threat to anybody. He strolled around casually, but all the while he was looking for people who fit the profile. Watching where their arms were in relation to their bodies, watching for certain types of backpacks, watching for a gait that might reveal if they were carrying a weapon or an IED. Watching for pale jaws that suggested a newly shaved beard, or a woman's absent touch to her hair, possibly indicating her ill ease at being in public without a hijab for the first time since she'd reached adolescence.

  And always: watching the eyes.

  So far Conradt had seen some devout eyes and oblivious eyes and curious eyes.

  But none that suggested they were in the head of a man or woman who wanted to murder a large number of people in the name of a deity. Or in the name of whales or trees or spotted owls. He circulated for a while and finally eased up beside his partner, an unsmiling thirty-five-year-old, dressed in a long peasant skirt and a blouse as baggy and concealing as Conradt's shirt.

  "Anything?"

  A pointless question because she would have called him--and every other of the multitude of law enforcers here tonight--if she'd spotted "anything."

  A shake of the head.

  Pointless questions weren't worth answering aloud, in Barb's opinion.

  Bar-bar-a, he corrected himself. As she'd corrected him when they first started working together.

  "Are they here yet?" Conradt nodded at the stage set up at the south end of the Sheep Meadow, referring to the speakers scheduled to begin at six-thirty: the two senators who'd flown into the city from Washington. They'd been working with the President on environmental issues, sponsoring legislation that made the green libbers happy and half the corporations in America mad enough to wring their necks over.

  A concert would follow. He couldn't decide if most people were here for the music or the speeches. With this crowd, it was probably evenly divided.

  "Just got here," Barbara said.

  They both scanned for a while. Then Conradt said, "That acronym's weird. Juf-tee. They should just call it JFTE."

  "Juf-tee's not an acronym."

  "What do you mean?"

  Barbara explained, "By definition, to be an acronym, the letters themselves have to spell an actual word."

  "In English?"

  She gave what he thought was a condescending sigh. "Well, in an English-speaking country. Obviously."

  "So NFL isn't an acronym?"

  "No, that's initials. ARC--American Resource Council. That's an acronym."

  Conradt thought: Barbara is a . . .

  "How about BIC?" he asked.

  "I suppose. I don't know about brand names. What does it stand for?"

  "I forget."

  Their radios clattered simultaneously and they cocked their heads. "Be advised, the visitors are at the stage. Repeat, the visitors are at the stage."

  The visitors--a euphemism for the senators.

  The command post agent ordered Conradt and Barbara to move into position on the west side of the stage. They made their way forward.

  "You know, this actually was a sheep meadow," Conradt told BIC. "The city fathers let them graze here until the thirties. Then they got moved to Prospect Park. Brooklyn. The sheep, I mean."

  Barbara looked at him blankly. Meaning: What does that have to do with anything?

  Conradt let her precede him up a narrow path.

  There was a burst of applause. And shouts.

  Then the two senators were up on the podium. The first one to speak leaned forward into the microphone and began talking in low, resonant tones, his voice echoing across the Sheep Meadow. The crowd was soon hoarse from shouting their mad approval every two minutes or so as the senator fed them platitudes.

  Preaching to the converted.

  It was then that Conradt saw something off to the side of the stage, moving steadily to the front, where the senators were standing. He stiffened then leapt forward.

  "What?" Barbara called, reaching for her weapon.

  "Juf-tee," he whispered. And grabbed his radio.

  Chapter 83

  AT 7 P.M. Fred Dellray returned to the Manhattan Federal Building from visiting William Brent, aka Stanley Palmer, aka a lot of other names, in the hospital. The man was badly injured but had regained consciousness. He'd be discharged in three or four days.

  Brent had already been contacted by the city lawyers about a settlement for the accident. Being hit by an NYPD police officer who fucks up with a squad car was pretty much a no-brainer. The figure being offered was about $50,000, plus medical bills.

  So William Brent was having a pretty good couple of days, financially at least, being the recipient of both the settlement, tax-free, as a personal injury award, and the 100 Gs Dellray had paid him--tax-free, too, though solely because the IRS and New York Department of Revenue would never hear a whisper about it.

  Dellray was in his office, savoring the news that Richard Logan, the Watchmaker, was in custody, when his assistant, a sharp African-American woman in her twenties, said, "You hear about that Earth Day thing?"

  "What's that?"

  "I don't know the details. But that group, Juftee--"

  "What?"

  "JFTE. Justice For the Earth. Whatever it is. The ecoterror group?"

  Dellray set down his coffee, his heart pounding. "It's real?"

  "Yep."

  "What happened?" he asked urgently.

  "All I heard is they got into Central Park, right near those two senators--the ones the President sent down to speak at the rally. The SAC wants you in his office. Now."

  "Anybody hurt, killed?" Dellray whispered in dismay.

  "I don't know."

  Grim-faced, the lanky agent stood. He started down the hallway quickly. His variation of the lope, the way he usually walked. The gait came, of course, from the street.

  Which he was now about to say good-bye to. He'd tracked down an important clue to help catch the Watchmaker. But he'd failed in the primary mission: to find the terror group.

  And that's what McDaniel would use to crucify him . . . in his bright-eyed yet somber, energetic yet subtle way. Apparently he already had if the SAC wante
d him.

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

  As he walked he glanced into offices, to find somebody to ask about the incident. But they were empty. It was after hours but more likely, he guessed, everybody'd sped to Central Park after Justice For the Earth was spotted. That was perhaps the best indicator that his career was over: Nobody had even called to request his presence in the operation.

  Of course, there was another possible reason for that too--and for the summons to the SAC's office: the stolen $100K.

  What the hell had he been thinking of? He'd done it for the city he loved, for the citizens he was sworn to protect. But did he actually believe he'd get away with it? Especially with an ASAC who wanted him out and who pored over his agents' paperwork like a crossword-puzzle addict.

  Could he negotiate his way out of jail time?

  He wasn't sure. With the fuckup over Justice For the Earth, his stock was real low.

  Down one corridor of the nondescript office building. Down another.

  Finally he came to the den of the special agent in charge. His assistant announced Dellray and the agent walked inside the large corner office.

  "Fred."

  "Jon."

  The SAC, Jonathan Phelps, mid-fifties, brushed at his gray swept-back hair, pushing it a little farther back, and motioned the agent into a chair across from his cluttered desk.

  No, Dellray thought, cluttered wasn't the right word. It was ordered and organized; it was just layered in three inches of files. This was, after all, New York. There was a lot that could go wrong and needed mending by people like the SAC.

  Dellray tried to read the man but could find no clues. He too had worked undercover earlier in his career. But that wouldn't buy Dellray any sympathy, that wisp of common past. That was one thing about the Bureau; federal law and the regulations promulgated thereunder trumped everything. The SAC was the only person in the room, which didn't surprise Dellray. Tucker McDaniel would be reading rights to terrorists in Central Park.

  "So, Fred. I'll get right to it."

  "Sure."

  "About this Juf-tee thing."

  "Justice For the Earth."

  "Right." Another sweep through the opulent hair. It was as ordered after the fingers left as when they arrived.

  "I just want to understand. You didn't find anything about the group, right?"

  Dellray hadn't gotten this far by poking at the truth. "No, Jon. I blew it. I hit up all my usual sources and a half dozen new ones. Everybody I'm running now and a dozen I've retired. Two dozen. I didn't come up with squat. I'm sorry."

  "And yet Tucker McDaniel's surveillance team's had ten clear hits."

  The cloud zone . . .

  Dellray wasn't going to trash McDaniel either, not even wing him a bit. "That's what I understand. His teams came up with a bucketful of good details. The personnel--this Rahman, Johnston. And code words about weapons." He sighed. "I heard there was an incident, Jon. What happened?"

  "Oh, yeah. Juf-tee made a move."

  "Casualties?"

  "We've got a video. You want to see it?"

  Dellray thought, No, sir, you betcha I don't. The last thing I want to see is people hurt because I screwed up. Or Tucker McDaniel leading in a takedown team to save the day. But he said, "Sure. Roll it."

  The SAC leaned over his laptop and hit some keys, then spun the unit around for Dellray to look at. He expected to see one of the typical Bureau surveillance videos, shot with a wide-angle lens, low contrast to pick up all the details, information at the bottom: location and by-the-second time stamp.

  Instead, he was looking at a CNN newscast.

  CNN?

  A smiling, coiffed woman reporter, holding a sheaf of notes, was talking to a man in his thirties, wearing a mismatched suit jacket and slacks. He was dark-complexioned and his hair was cropped short. He was smiling uneasily, eyes shifting between the reporter and the camera. A young redheaded boy with freckles, about eight years old, stood next to him.

  The reporter was saying to the man, "Now, I understand your students have been preparing for Earth Day for the past several months."

  "That's right," the man answered, awkward but proud.

  "There are a lot of different groups here in Central Park tonight, supporting one issue or another. Do your students have a particular environmental cause?"

  "Not really. They have a lot of different interests: renewable energy, risks to the rain forest, global warming and carbon dioxide, protecting the ozone layer, recycling."

  "And who's your young assistant here?"

  "This is a student of mine, Tony Johnston."

  Johnston?

  "Hello, Tony. Can you tell our viewers at home the name of your environmental club at school?"

  "Uhm, yeah. It's Just Us Kids for the Earth."

  "And those are quite some posters. Did you and your classmates make them yourself?"

  "Uhm, yeah. But, you know, our teacher, Mr. Rahman"--he glanced up at the man beside him--"he helped us some."

  "Well, good for you, Tony. And thanks to you and all your fellow students in Peter Rahman's third-grade class at Ralph Waldo Emerson elementary school in Queens, who believe you're never too young to start making a difference when it comes to the environment. . . . This is Kathy Brigham reporting from--"

  Under the SAC's stabbing finger, the screen went blank. He sat back. Dellray couldn't tell if he was going to laugh or utter some obscenity. "Justice," he said, enunciating carefully. "Just Us . . . Kids." He sighed. "Want to guess how much shit this office is in, Fred?"

  Dellray cocked a bushy eyebrow.

  "We begged Washington for an extra five million dollars, on top of the expense of mobilizing four hundred agents. Two dozen warrants were ramrodded through magistrates' offices in New York, Westchester, Philly, Baltimore and Boston. We had absolutely rock solid SIGINT that an ecoterror group, worse than Timothy McVeigh, worse than Bin Laden, was going to bring America to its knees with the attack of all time.

  "And they turned out to be a bunch of eight-and nine-year-olds. The code words for the weapons, 'paper and supplies'? They meant paper and supplies. The communication wasn't going on in the cloud zone; it went on face-to-face when they woke up from naptime at school. The woman working with Rahman? It was probably little Tony because his goddamn voice hasn't changed yet. . . . It's a good thing we didn't get SIGINT hits about somebody, quote, 'releasing doves' in Central Park because we might've called in a fucking surface-to-air missile strike."

  There was silence for a moment.

  "You're not gloating, Fred."

  A shrug of the lanky shoulders.

  "You want Tucker's job?"

  "And where will he--?"

  "Elsewhere. Washington. Does it matter? . . . So? The ASAC spot? You want it, you can move in tonight."

  Dellray didn't hesitate. "No, Jon. Thanks, but no."

  "You're one of the most respected agents in this office. People look up to you. I'll ask you to reconsider."

  "I want to be on the street. That's all I've ever wanted. It's important to me." Sounding as un-street as any human being possibly could.

  "You cowboys." The SAC chuckled. "Now you might wanta get back to your office. McDaniel's on his way here for a conversation. I'm assuming you don't want to meet him."

  "Probably not."

  As Dellray was at the door, the SAC said, "Oh, Fred, there's one other thing."

  The agent stopped in midlope.

  "You worked the Gonzalez case, didn't you?"

  Dellray had faced down some of the most dangerous assholes in the city without his pulse speeding up a single beat. He now was sure his neck was throbbing visibly as the blood pumped. "The drug collar, Staten Island. Right."

  "There was a little mix-up somewhere, it seems."

  "Mix-up?"

  "Yeah, with the evidence."

  "Really?"

  The SAC rubbed his eyes. "At the bust your teams scored thirty ki's of smack, a couple doz
en guns and some big bricks of money."

  "That's right."

  "The press release said the cash recovered was one point one million. But we were getting the case ready for the grand jury and it looks like there's only one million even in the evidence locker."

  "Mislogging a hundred K?"

  The SAC cocked his head. "Naw, it's something else. Not mislogging."

  "Uh-huh." Dellray breathed deeply. Oh, man . . . This is it.

  "I looked over the paperwork and, it was funny, the second zero on the chain-of-custody card, the zero after the one million, was real skinny. You look at it fast, you could think it was a one. Somebody glanced at it and wrote the press release wrong. They wrote, 'one point one.' "

  "I see."

  "Just wanted to tell you, if the question comes up: It was a typo. The exact amount the Bureau collected in the Gonzalez bust was one million even. That's official."

  "Sure. Thanks, Jon."

  A frown. "For what?"

  "Clarifying."

  A nod. It was a nod with a message and that message had been delivered. The SAC added, "By the way, you did a good job helping nail Richard Logan. He had that plan a few years ago to take out dozens of soldiers and Pentagon people. Some of our folks too. Glad he's going away forever."

  Dellray turned and left the office. As he returned to his own, he allowed himself a single nervous laugh.

  Third graders?

  Then pulled out his mobile to text Serena and to tell her that he'd be home soon.

  Chapter 84

  LINCOLN RHYME GLANCED up to see Pulaski in the doorway.

  "Rookie, what're you doing here? I thought you were logging in evidence in Queens."

  "I was. Just . . ." His voice slowed like a car hitting a patch of soupy fog.

  "Just?"

  It was close to 9 p.m., and they were alone in Rhyme's parlor. Comforting domestic sounds in the kitchen. Sachs and Thom were getting dinner ready. It was, Rhyme noticed, well past cocktail hour and he was a bit piqued that nobody had filled up his plastic tumbler of scotch again.

  A failing he now told Pulaski to remedy, which the young cop did.

  "That's not a double," Rhyme muttered. But Pulaski seemed not to hear. He'd walked to the window, eyes outside.

  Shaping up to be a dramatic scene from a slow-moving Brit drama, Rhyme deduced, and sipped the smoky liquor through the straw.