The Burning Wire

he sought out the rawest and most intense practical application of philosophy he could think of.
    He joined the FBI.
    Change . .  .
    His father reconciled himself to his son’s apostasy and they enjoyed coffee and long walks in Prospect Park, during which they came to understand that, although their laboratories and techniques were different, their outlooks and insights were not.
    The human condition . . . observed and written about by the father and experienced firsthand by the son.
    In the unlikely form of undercover work. Fred’s intense curiosity about and insights into the nature of life made him a natural Everyman. Unlike most undercover cops, with their limited acting skills and repertoires, Dellray could truly become the people he played.
    Once, when Dellray was in disguise as a homeless man on the streets of New York, not far from the Federal Building, the then assistant special agent in charge of the Manhattan office of the FBI—Dellray’s boss, in effect—walked right past and dropped a quarter into his cup, never recognizing him.
    One of the best compliments Dellray ever received.
    A chameleon. One week, a scorched-brain tweaker desperate for meth. The next a South African envoy with nuclear secrets to sell. Then a Somalian imam’s lieutenant, lugging around a hatred of America and a hundred quotations from the Koran.
    He owned dozens of outfits, purchased or hacked together by himself, which now clogged the basement of the town house he and Serena had bought a few years ago in BK—Brooklyn. He’d advanced in his career, which was inevitable for someone with his drive, skill and absolute lack of desire to stab fellow workers in the back. Now Dellray primarily ran other undercover FBI agents and civilian confidentialinformants—AKA snitches—though he still got into the field occasionally. And loved it just as much as he ever had.
    But then came the change.
    Cloud zone . .  .
    Dellray didn’t deny that both the good guys and the bad guys were getting smarter and more tech-savvy. The shift was obvious: HUMINT—the fruits of intelligence gathering from human-to-human contact—was giving way to SIGINT.
    But it was a phenomenon that Dellray simply wasn’t comfortable with. In her youth Serena had tried to be a torch singer. She was a natural at all forms of dance, from ballet to jazz to modern, but she just didn’t have the skill to sing. Dellray was the same with the new law enforcement of data, numbers, technology.
    He kept running his snitches and he kept going undercover himself, and getting results. But with McDaniel and his T and A team—oh, ’scuse me, Tucker—his Tech and Com team, old-school Dellray was feeling, well, old. The ASAC was sharp, a hard worker—putting in sixty-hour work weeks—and an infighter; he’d stand up for his agents against the President if he needed to. And his techniques had worked; last month McDaniel’s people had picked up sufficient details from encrypted satellite phone calls to pinpoint a fundamentalist cell outside Milwaukee.
    The message to Dellray and the older agents was clear: Your time’s passing.
    He still stung from the dig, possibly inadvertent, delivered at the meeting in Rhyme’s lab:
    Well, keep at it, Fred. You’re doing a good job. . .  .
    Meaning, I didn’t even expect you to come up with any leads to Justice For and Rahman.
    Maybe McDaniel was right to criticize. After all, Dellray had as good a network of CIs in place as you could hope for to track terrorist activities. He met with them regularly. He worked them all hard, doling out protection to the fearful, Kleenex to the wet-eyed guilty, cash to the ones who informed as a livelihood and painful squeezes to the shoulders and psyches of those who’d gotten, as Dellray’s grandmother said, too big for their britches.
    But of all the information he’d gathered about terrorist plots, even embryonic ones, there’d been nothing about Rahman’s Justice For or about a big fucking spark.
    And here McDaniel’s people had made an ID and defined a real threat by sitting on their asses.
    Like the drones in the Middle East and Afghanistan? You know the pilots are next to a strip mall in Colorado Springs or Omaha. . .  .
    Dellray had another concern too, one that had arisen around the same time as youthful McDaniel appeared: Maybe he just wasn’t as good as he used to be.
    Rahman might’ve been right under his nose. Cell members in Justice For might’ve been studying