The Burning Wire

checking for post-incident bombs or other booby traps, a popular terrorist technique.
    A solemn, lean-faced man in his fifties stood with his arms crossed, staring at the substation. He wore an Algonquin Consolidated badge on a chain around his neck. He was the senior company representative here: a field supervisor in charge of this portion of the grid. Sachs asked him to describe what Algonquin had learned about the event in detail, and he gave her an account, which she jotted into her notebook.
    “Security cameras?”
    The skinny man replied, “Sorry, no. We don’t bother. The doors are multiple locked. And there’s nothing inside to steal, really. Anyways, all that juice, it’s sort of like a guard dog. A big one.”
    Sachs asked, “How do you think he got in?”
    “The door was locked when we got here. They’re on number-pad locks.”
    “Who has the codes?”
    “All the employees. But he didn’t get in that way. The locks have a chip that keeps records of when they’re opened. These haven’t been accessed for two days. And that”—he pointed to the wire dangling from the window—“wasn’t there then. He had to break in some other way.”
    She turned to Pulaski. “When you’re finished out here, check around back, the windows and roof.” She asked the Algonquin worker, “Underground access?”
    The field supervisor said, “Not that I know of. The electric lines into and out of this station comethrough ducts nobody could fit in. But there could be other tunnels I don’t know about.”
    “Check it out anyway, Ron.” Sachs then interviewed the driver of the bus, who’d been treated for glass cuts and a concussion. His vision and hearing had been temporarily damaged but he’d insisted on staying to help the police however he could. Which wasn’t very much. The round man described being curious about the wire protruding from the window; he’d never seen it before. Smelling smoke, hearing pops from inside. Then the terrifying spark.
    “So fast,” he whispered. “Never seen anything that fast in my life.”
    He’d been slammed against the window and woke up ten minutes later. He fell silent, gazing at his destroyed bus, his expression reflecting betrayal and mourning.
    Sachs then turned to the agents and officers present and said she and Pulaski were going to run the scene. She wondered if word really had come down from the FBI’s Tucker McDaniel that this was kosher. It wasn’t unheard of for senior people in law enforcement to smilingly agree with you and then intentionally forget the conversation had ever taken place. But the federal agents had indeed been told. Some seemed irritated that the NYPD was taking this pivotal role, but others—the FBI’s Evidence Response Team mostly—didn’t seem to mind and indeed regarded Sachs with admiring curiosity; she was, after all, part of the team headed up by the legendary Lincoln Rhyme.
    Turning toward Pulaski she said, “Let’s get to work.” Sachs walked toward the RRV, binding her crimson hair into a bun, to suit up.
    Pulaski hesitated and glanced at the hundred dotsof cooling metal disks on the sidewalk and lodged against the front of the building, then at the stiff wire hanging from the window. “They did shut the power off in there, didn’t they?”
    Sachs just motioned him to follow her.

Chapter 6
    WEARING DRAB, DARK blue Algonquin Consolidated Power worker overalls, a baseball-style cap without logo and safety glasses, the man busied himself at the service panel in the back of the health club in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.
    As he did his work—mounting equipment and stripping, connecting and snipping wires, he thought about the attack that morning. The news was all over the incident.
    One man was killed and several injured this morning when an overload in a power company substation in Manhattan produced a huge spark that jumped from the station to a bus sign pole, narrowly missing an MTA bus .
    “It was like, you know, a lightning bolt,” one witness, a passenger on the bus, reported. “Just filled the whole sidewalk. It blinded me. And that sound. I can’t describe it. It was like this loud growl, then it exploded. I’m afraid to gonear anything that’s got electricity in it. I’m really freaked out. I mean, anybody who saw that thing is freaked out.”
    You’re not alone, the man thought. People had been conscious of—and awed and frightened by—electricity for more than five thousand years. The word