The Burning Wire

himself.
    He’d ditched the uniform and hard hat and gear bag after the attack at the hotel, but he’d kept one of his accoutrements, which was now dangling from a chair nearby: the ID badge. In the dim, reflected light he stared at it now: His sullen picture, the impersonal typeface of “R. Galt” and, above that, in somewhat more friendly lettering:
    ALGONQUIN CONSOLIDATED POWER
ENERGIZING YOUR LIFE TM
    Considering what he’d been up to for the past several days, he appreciated the irony of that slogan.
    He lay back and stared at the shabby ceiling in the East Village weekly rental, which he’d taken a month ago under a pseudonym, knowing the police would find the apartment sooner or later.
    Sooner, as it turned out.
    He kicked the sheets off. His flesh was damp with sweat.
    Thinking about the conductivity of the human body. The resistance of our slippery internal organs can be as low as 85 ohms, making them extremely susceptible to current. Wet skin, 1,000 or less. But dry skin has a resistance of 100,000 ohms or more. That’s so high that significant amounts of voltage are needed to push that current through the body, usually 2,000 volts.
    Sweat makes the job a lot easier.
    His skin cooled as it dried, and his resistance climbed.
    His mind leapt from thought to thought: the plans for tomorrow, what voltages to use, how to rig the lines. He thought about the people he was working with. And he thought about the people pursuing him. That woman detective, Sachs. The younger one, Pulaski. And, of course, Lincoln Rhyme.
    Then he was meditating on something else entirely: two men in the 1950s, the chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago. They devised a very interesting experiment. In their lab they created their version of the primordial soup and atmosphere that had covered the earth billions of years ago. Into this mix of hydrogen, ammonia and methane, they fired sparks mimicking the lightning that blanketed the earth back then.
    And what happened?
    A few days later they found something thrilling: In the test tubes were traces of amino acids, the so-called building blocks of life.
    They had discovered evidence suggesting that life had begun on earth all because of a spark of electricity.
    As the clock approached midnight, he composed his next demand letter to Algonquin and the City of New York. Then with sleep enfolding him he thought again about juice. And the irony that what had, in a millisecond burst of lightning, created life so many, many years ago would, tomorrow, take it away, just as fast.

Earth Day
    III
    JUICE

    “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”
    —T HOMAS A LVA E DISON

Chapter 55
    “ PLEASE LEAVE A message at the tone.”
    Sitting in his Brooklyn town house at 7:30 a.m., Fred Dellray stared at his phone, flipped it closed. He didn’t bother to leave another message, though, not after leaving twelve earlier ones on William Brent’s cold phone.
    I’m screwed, he thought.
    There was the chance the man was dead. Even though McDaniel’s phrasing was fucked-up ( symbiotic construct? ), his theory might not be. It made sense that Ray Galt was the inside man seduced into helping Rahman and Johnston and their Justice For the Earth group target Algonquin and the grid. If Brent had stumbled into their cell, they’d have killed him in an instant.
    Ah, Dellray thought angrily: blind, simpleminded politics—the empty calories of terrorism.
    But Dellray’d been in this business a long time and his gut told him that William Brent was very much alive. New York City is smaller than people think, particularly the underside of the Big Apple. Dellray had called up other contacts, a lot of them: other CIs and some of the undercover agents he ran.No word about Brent. Even Jimmy Jeep knew nothing—and he definitely had a motive to track down the man again, to make sure Dellray still backed the upcoming march through Georgia. Yet nobody’d heard about anybody ordering a clip or a cleaner. And no surprised garbagemen had wheeled a Dumpster to their truck and found nestled inside the pungent sarcophagus an unidentified body.
    No, Dellray concluded. There was only the obvious answer, and he could ignore it no more: Brent had fucked him over.
    He’d checked Homeland Security to see if the snitch, either as Brent or as one of his half dozen undercover identities, had booked a flight anywhere. He hadn’t, though any professional CI knows