The Burning Wire

didn’t think he knew either. She glanced at the EMS medic who was bent over Barzan. They were still in the tunnel beneath the Battery Park Hotel.
    “Concussion, lost some blood.” He turned to his patient, who was sitting unsteadily against the wall. “You’ll be all right.”
    Bob Cavanaugh had managed to find the source of the juice and shut down the line that Galt had used for the trap. Sachs had confirmed that the electrical supply was dead, using Sommers’s current detector, and quickly—really quickly—undone the wire attached to the feeder line.
    “What happened?” she asked Barzan.
    “It was Ray Galt. I found him down here. He hit me with a hot stick, knocked me out. When I woke up he’d wired me to the line. Jesus. That was sixty-thousand volts, a subway feeder. If you’d touched me, if I’d rolled a few inches to the side . . . Jesus.” Then he blinked. “I heard the sirens on the street. The smell. What happened?”
    “Galt ran some wires into the hotel next door.”
    “God, no. Is anybody hurt?”
    “There are casualties. I don’t know the details yet. Where’d Galt go?”
    “I don’t know. I was out. If he didn’t leave throughthe college, he had to go that way, through the tunnel.” He cast his eyes to the side. “There’s plenty of access to the subway tunnels and platforms.”
    Sachs asked, “Did he say anything?”
    “Not really.”
    “Where was he when you saw him?”
    “Right there.” He pointed about ten feet away. “You can see where he rigged the line. There’s some kind of box on it. I’ve never seen that before. And he was watching the construction site and the hotel on his computer. Like it was hooked into a security camera.”
    Sachs rose and looked over the cable, the same Bennington brand as at the bus stop yesterday. No sign of the computer or hot stick, which she recalled Sommers telling her about—a fiberglass pole for live-wire work.
    Then Barzan said in a soft voice, “The only reason I’m alive now is that he wanted to use me to kill people, isn’t that right? He wanted to stop you from chasing him.”
    “That’s right.”
    “That son of a bitch. And he’s one of us. Linemen and troublemen stick together. It’s like a brotherhood, you know. We have to be. Juice is so dangerous.” He was furious at the betrayal.
    Sachs rolled the man’s hands, arms and legs for trace and then nodded to the medics. “He can go now.” She told Barzan if he thought of anything else to give her a call and handed him a card. A medic radioed his colleague and said that the scene was clear and that they could bring the stretcher down the tunnel to evacuate the worker. Barzan sat back against the tunnel wall and closed his eyes.
    Sachs then contacted Nancy Simpson and told herwhat had happened. “Get ESU into the Algonquin tunnels for a half mile around. And the subways too.”
    “Sure, Amelia. Hold on.” Simpson came back on a moment later. “They’re on their way.”
    “What about our witness from the hotel?”
    “I’m still checking.”
    Sachs’s eyes were growing more accustomed to the dark. She squinted. “I’ll get back to you, Nancy. I see something.” She moved through the tunnel in the direction that Barzan indicated Galt probably had fled.
    About thirty feet away, sandwiched behind a grating in a small recess, she found a set of Algonquin dark blue overalls, hard hat and gear bag. She’d seen a flash of yellow from the safety hat. Of course, Galt would now know that everybody was looking for him, so he’d stripped off the outfit and hidden it here with the tool bag.
    She called back Simpson and asked her to contact Bo Haumann and ESU and let them know that Galt would be in different clothes. Then she donned latex gloves and reached forward to pull the evidence out from behind the metal.
    But then she stopped fast.
    Now, you have to remember that even if you think you’re avoiding it, you could still be in danger .
    Sommers’s words resounded in her head. She took the current detector and swept it over the tools.
    The needle jumped: 603 volts.
    Gasping, Sachs closed her eyes and felt the strength drain from her legs. She looked more carefully and saw a wire. It ran from the grating underground to the conduit behind which the evidence was stashed. She’d have to touch the pipe to pull the items out. The power was technically off in the tunnelbut maybe this was a case of islanding or backfeed, if she remembered what Sommers had told