The Burning Wire

electricity, other than electromagnetics’ appearance in physics as one of the four fundamental forces in nature, along with gravity and the weak and the strong nuclear forces. But that was academic. On a practical level Rhyme’s main interest in electricity involved making sure enough of it got pumped into the town house to power the equipment in his lab here. It was extremely thirsty and he’d twice had to have the place rewired to bring in additional amperage to support the load.
    Rhyme was very aware too that he was alive and functioning now solely because of electricity: the ventilator that had kept oxygen pumping through his lungs right after the accident and now the batteries in his wheelchair and the current controlled by the touch pad and voice-activated ECU, his environmental control unit. The computer too, of course.
    He wouldn’t have had much of a life without wires. Probably no life at all.
    Noble continued, “The basic scenario is our UNSUB got into one of the power company’s substations and ran a wire outside the building.”
    “ ‘Unknown subject’ singular?” Rhyme asked.
    “We don’t know yet.”
    “Wire outside. Okay.”
    “And then got into the computer that controls the grid. He manipulated it to send more voltage through the substation than it was meant to handle.” Noble fiddled with cuff links in the shape of animals.
    “And the electricity jumped,” the FBI’s McDaniel put in. “It was basically trying to get into the ground. It’s called an arc flash. An explosion. Like a lightning bolt.”
    A 5,000 degree spark . .  .
    The ASAC added, “It’s so powerful it creates plasma. That’s a state of matter—”
    “—that isn’t gas, liquid or solid,” Rhyme said impatiently.
    “Exactly. A fairly small arc flash has the explosive power of a pound of TNT and this one wasn’t small.”
    “And the bus was his target?” Rhyme asked.
    “Seems so.”
    Sellitto said, “But they have rubber tires. Vehicles are the safest place to be in a lightning storm. I saw that someplace, some show.”
    “True,” McDaniel said. “But the UNSUB had it all figured out. It was a kneeling bus. Either he was counting that the lowered step would touch the sidewalk or hoping somebody’d have one foot on the ground and one on the bus. That’d be enough for the arc to hit it.”
    Noble again twisted a tiny silver mammal on his cuff. “But the timing was off. Or his aim or something. The spark hit the sign pole next to the bus. Killed one passenger, deafened some people nearby, and dinged a few with glass, started a fire. If it’d hit the bus directly, the casualties would’ve been a lot worse. Half of them dead, I’d guess. Or with third-degree burns.”
    “Lon mentioned a blackout,” Rhyme said.
    McDaniel eased back into the conversation. “The UNSUB used the computer to shut down four other substations in the area, so all the juice was flowing through the one on Fifty-seventh Street. As soon as the arc happened, that substation went offline, but Algonquin got the others up and running again. Right now about six blocks in Clinton are out. Didn’t you see it on the news?”
    “I don’t watch much news,” Rhyme said.
    Sachs asked McDaniel, “The driver or anybody see anything?”
    “Nothing helpful. There were some workers there. They’d gotten orders from the CEO of Algonquin to go inside and try to reroute the lines or something. Thank God they didn’t go in before the arc happened.”
    “There was nobody inside?” Fred Dellray asked. The agent seemed a bit out of the loop and Rhyme guessed there hadn’t been time for McDaniel to fully brief his team.
    “No. Substations’re mostly just equipment, nobody inside except for routine maintenance or repairs.”
    “How was the computer hacked?” Lon Sellitto asked, sitting noisily in a wicker chair.
    Gary Noble said, “We aren’t sure. We’re running the scenarios now. Our white hat hackers’ve tried to run a mock terrorist scenario, and they can’t get inside. But you know how it works; the bad guys’re always one step ahead of us—techwise.”
    Ron Pulaski asked, “Anybody take credit?”
    “Not yet,” Noble replied.
    Rhyme asked, “Then why terrorism? I’m thinking it’s a good way to shut down alarms and security systems. Any murders or burglaries reported?”
    “Not so far,” Sellitto pointed out.
    “A couple of reasons we think it’s terrorists,” McDaniel said. “Our