The Burning Wire

course—Thom’s job wasn’t in any danger. Even if his arms and hands moved, even if his lungs were working betterthan ever and the business below the waist was approaching that of the nondisabled, he still had no sensation, was still subject to sepsis, would not walk—probably never would, or at least not for many years. But this didn’t bother Lincoln Rhyme. He’d learned from his work in forensics that you rarely got 100 percent of what you sought. But usually, with hard work and the alignment of circumstance—never, in Rhyme’s view, “luck,” of course—what you did achieve was enough . . . for the identification, the arrest, the conviction. Besides, Lincoln Rhyme was a man who needed goals. He lived to fill gaps, to—as Sachs knew well—scratch the itch. His life would be useless without having someplace to go, constantly someplace to go.
    Now, carefully, using faint movements of the muscles in his neck, he rotated his palm and lowered it to the bed, with all the coordination of a newborn foal finding its legs.
    Then exhaustion and the residue of the drugs were all over him. Rhyme was certainly prepared to sleep, but he chose instead to postpone oblivion for a few minutes, resting his eyes on Amelia Sachs’s face, pale and half visible through her hair, like the midpoint of a lunar eclipse.

Acknowledgments
    Warm thanks to Crimespree magazine, the Muskego, Wisconsin, library and all those who attended the Murder and Mayhem get-together there last November and won this product placement for their enthusiastic participation at the event, and for their love of reading!
    And to Julie, Madelyn, Will, Tina, Ralph, Kay, Adriano and Lisa.

EDGE
    JEFFERY DEAVER
    Available in hardcover from Simon & Schuster
    Turn the page for a preview of Edge . . . .

JUNE 2004

    The Rules of Play

THE MAN WHO wanted to kill the young woman sitting beside me was three-quarters of a mile behind us, as we drove through a pastoral setting of tobacco and cotton fields, this humid morning.
    A glance in the rearview mirror revealed a sliver of car, moving at a comfortable pace with the traffic, piloted by a man who by all appearances seemed hardly different from any one of a hundred drivers on this recently resurfaced divided highway.
    “Officer Fallow?” Alissa began. Then, as I’d been urging her for the past week: “Abe?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is he still there?” She’d seen my gaze.
    “Yes. And so’s our tail,” I added for reassurance. My protégé was behind the killer, two or three car lengths. He was not the only person from our organization on the job.
    “Okay,” Alissa whispered. The woman, in her mid-thirties, was a whistle-blower against a government contractor that did a lot of work for the army.The company was adamant that it had done nothing wrong and claimed it welcomed an investigation. But there’d been an attempt on Alissa’s life a week ago and—since I’d been in the army with one of the senior commanders at Bragg—Defense had called me in to guard her. As head of the organization I don’t do much fieldwork any longer but I was glad to get out, to tell the truth. My typical day was ten hours at my desk in our Alexandria office. And in the past month, it had been closer to twelve or fourteen, as we coordinated the protection of five high-level organized crime informants, before handing them over to Witness Protection for their face-lifts.
    It was good to be back in the saddle, if only for a week or so.
    I hit a speed dial button, calling my protégé.
    “It’s Abe,” I said into my hands-free. “Where is he now?”
    “Make it a half mile. Moving up slowly.”
    The hitter, whose identity we didn’t know, was in a nondescript Hyundai sedan, gray.
    I was behind an eighteen-foot truck, CAROLINA POULTRY PROCESSING COMPANY painted on the side. It was empty and being driven by one of our transport people. In front of that was a car identical to the one I was driving.
    “We’ve got two miles till the swap,” I said.
    Four voices acknowledged this over four very encrypted com devices.
    I disconnected.
    Without looking at her, I said to Alissa, “It’s going to be fine.”
    “I just . . .” she said in a whisper. “I don’t know.” She fell silent and stared into the side-view mirroras if the man who wanted to kill her were right behind us.
    “It’s all going just like we planned.”
    When innocent people find themselves in situations that require the presence and protection of