Cold Fire

read it without strain.
    The opening line made Holly sit up straighter in her chair: A courageous bystander, who would say only that his name was Jim, saved the life of Nicholas O'Conner, 6, when a New England Power and Light Company vault exploded under a sidewalk in a Boston residential area Thursday evening.
    Softly, she said, “What the hell … ?”
    She tapped the keys, instructing the computer to shift the field of display rightward on the page to show her the multiply enhanced photo that accompanied the piece. She went to a bigger scale, then to a still bigger one, until the face filled the screen.
    Jim Ironheart.
    Briefly she sat in stunned disbelief, immobilized. Then she was stricken by a need to know more—not only an intellectual but a genuinely physical need that felt not unlike a sudden and intense pang of hunger.
    She returned to the text of the story and read it through, then read it again. The O'Conner boy had been sitting on the sidewalk in front of his home, directly on the two-by-three-foot concrete lid that covered the entrance to the power company's vault, which was spacious enough for four men to work together within its subterranean confines. The kid had been playing with toy trucks. His parents had been within sight of him on the front porch of their house, when a stranger had sprinted along the street. “He comes right at Nicky,” the boy's father was quoted, “snatches him, so I thought sure he was a nutcase child molester going to steal my son.” Carrying the screaming child, the stranger leaped over a low picket fence, onto the O'Conners' lawn, just as a 17,000-volt line in the vault exploded behind him. The blast flipped the concrete lid high into the air, as if it were a penny, and a bright ball of fire roared up in its wake. Embarrassed by the effusive praise heaped on him by Nicky's grateful parents and by the neighbors who had witnessed his heroism, the stranger claimed that he had smelled burning insulation, heard a hissing coming from the vault, and knew what was about to happen because he had “once worked for a power company.” Annoyed that a witness had taken his photograph, he insisted on leaving before the media arrived because, as he put it, “I place a high value on my privacy.”
    That hair's-breadth rescue had occurred at 7:40 Thursday evening in Boston—or 4:40 Portland time yesterday afternoon. Holly looked at the office wall clock. It was now 2:02 Friday morning. Nicky O'Conner had been plucked off that vault cover not quite nine and a half hours ago.
    The trail was still fresh.
    She had questions to ask the Globe reporter who had written the piece. But it was only a little after five in the morning in Boston. He wouldn't be at work yet.
    She closed out the Press's current-edition data file. On the computer screen, the standard menu replaced the enlarged newspaper text.
    Through a modem she accessed the vast network of data services to which the Press subscribed. She instructed the Newsweb service to scan all the stories that had been carried by the wire services and published in the major U.S. newspapers during the past three months, looking for instances in which the name “Jim” had been used within ten words of either “rescue” or the phrase “saved the life.” She asked for a printout of every article, if there should be any, but asked to be spared multiples of the same incident.
    While Newsweb was fulfilling her request, she snatched up the phone on her desk and called long-distance information for area code 818, then 213, then 714, and 619, seeking a listing for Jim Ironheart in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego counties. None of the operators was able to help her. If he actually lived in southern California, as he had told her he did, his phone was unlisted.
    The laser printer that she shared with three other workstations was humming softly. The first of Newsweb's finds was sliding into the receiving tray.
    She wanted to hurry to the cabinet on which the printer stood, grab the first printout, and read it at once; but she restrained herself, focusing her attention on the telephone instead, trying to think of another way to locate Jim Ironheart down there in the part of California that locals called “the Southland.”
    A few years ago, she simply could have accessed the California Department of Motor Vehicles computer and, for a small fee, received the street address of anyone holding a valid driver's license in the