The Burning Wire

tied them all together: Those who made a living with their hands were looked down on by “real people,” the ones who relied on their services, the rich, the comfortable, the ungrateful.
    Safe in this invisibility, he was in the process of installing a much more powerful version of the device he’d tested earlier at the health club. In the nomenclature of electrical service, “high voltage” didn’t begin until you hit 70,000v. For what he had planned, he needed to be sure all the systems could handle at least two or three times that much juice.
    He looked over the site of tomorrow’s attack one more time. As he did he couldn’t help but think about voltage and amperage . . . and death.
    There’d been a lot of misreporting about Ben Franklin and that insane key-in-the-thunderstorm thing. Actually Franklin had stayed completely off damp ground, in a barn, and was connected to the wet kite string with a dry silk ribbon. The kite itself was never actually struck by lightning; it simply picked up static discharge from a gathering storm. The result wasn’t a real bolt but rather elegant blue sparks that danced from the back of Franklin’s hand like fish feeding at the surface of a lake.
    One European scientist duplicated the experiment not long afterward. He didn’t survive.
    From the earliest days of power generation, workers were constantly being burned to death or having their hearts switched off. The early grid took down a number of horses, thanks to metal shoes on wet cobblestones.
    Thomas Alva Edison and his famous assistant Nikola Tesla battled constantly over the superiority of DC, direct current (Edison), versus AC, alternating current (Tesla), trying to sway the public by horror stories of danger. The conflict became known as the Battle of the Currents and it made front-page news regularly. Edison constantly played the electrocution card, warning that anyone using AC was in danger of dying and in a very unpleasant way. It was true that it took less AC current to cause injury, though any type of current powerful enough to be useful could also kill you.
    The first electric chair was built by an employee of Edison’s, rather tactically using Tesla’s alternating current. The first execution via the device was in 1890, under the direction not of an executioner but a “state electrician.” The prisoner did die, though the process took eight minutes. At least he was probably unconscious by the time he caught fire.
    And then there were always stun guns. Depending on who was getting shot and in what part of the body, they could be counted on for the occasional death. And the fear of everyone in the industry: arc flashes, of course, like the attack he’d engineered this morning.
    Juice and death . . .
    He wandered through the construction site, feigning end-of-day weariness. The site was now staffed by a skeleton crew of night-shift workers. He moved closer, and still no one noticed him. He was wearing thick-framed safety glasses, the yellow Algonquin hard hat. He was as invisible as electricity in a wire.
    The first attack had made the news in a big way, of course, though the stories were limited to an“incident” in a Midtown substation. The reporters were abuzz with talk of short circuits, sparks and temporary power outages. There was a lot of speculation about terrorists but no one had found any connection.
    Yet.
    At some point, somebody would have to consider the possibility of an Algonquin Power worker running around rigging traps that resulted in very, very unpleasant and painful deaths, but that hadn’t happened.
    He now left the construction site and made his way underground, still unchallenged. The uniform and the ID badge were like magic keys. He slipped into another grimy, hot access tunnel and, after donning personal protective gear, continued to rig the wiring.
    Juice and death.
    How elegant it was to take a life this way, compared, say, with shooting your victim at five hundred yards.
    It was so pure and so simple and so natural.
    You could stop electricity, you could direct it. But you couldn’t trick it. Once juice was created it would instinctively do whatever it could to return to the earth, and if the most direct way was to take a human life in the process, it would do so in, literally, a flash.
    Juice had no conscience, felt no guilt.
    This was one of the things he’d come to admire about his weapon. Unlike human beings, electricity was forever true to its nature.

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