The Cold Moon

cop named Dennis Baker was looking for a hit man to kill an NYPD detective. The mob wouldn’t touch killing a cop, but was Hale interested? He wasn’t but he immediately realized that he could use Baker as a second complication to the plan: a citizen getting revenge against a crooked cop. Finally, he added the wonderful flourish of the Delphic Mechanism theft.
    Motive is the one sure way to get yourself caught. Eliminate the motive, you eliminate suspicion. . . .
    Hale now stepped to the front flower arrangement in the conference room and adjusted it the way any diligent soldier would do—a soldier proud to be part of this important occasion. When no one was looking he pushed one of the metal disks he’d just retrieved from downstairs—computerized detonators—into the explosive, pushed the button to arm it and fluffed up the moss, obscuring the device. He did the same to the arrangement in the back, which would detonate via a radio signal from the first detonator.
    These two lovely arrangements were now lethal bombs, containing enough explosive to obliterate the entire room.

    The tone in Rhyme’s lab was electric.
    Everyone, except Pulaski, on a mission at Rhyme’s request, was staring at the criminalist, who was in turn gazing at the evidence charts that surrounded him like battalions of soldiers awaiting his orders.
    “There’re still too many questions,” Sellitto said. “You know what’s going to happen if we push that button.”
    Rhyme glanced at Amelia Sachs. “What do you think?” he asked.
    Her ample lips tightened. “I don’t think we have any choice. I say yes.”
    “Oh, man,” Sellitto said.
    Rhyme said to the rumpled lieutenant, “Make the call.”
    Lon Sellitto dialed a little-known number that connected him immediately to the scrambled phone sitting on the desk of the mayor of New York City.

    Standing in the conference room in HUD, which was filling up with soldiers and their guests, Charles Hale felt his phone vibrate. He pulled it from his pocket and glanced down at the text message, another one from Charlotte Allerton. FAA grounding all flights. Trains stopped. Special team at NIST office checking U.S. clock. It’s a go. God bless.
    Perfect, Charles thought. The police believed the complication about the Delphic Mechanism and his apparent plan to hack into the computer controlling the nation’s cesium clock.
    Hale stepped back, looked over the room and plastered a satisfied look on his face. He left and took the elevator down to the main lobby. He walked outside, where limos were arriving, under heavy security. He eased into the crowd that was gathered on the other side of the concrete barriers, some waving flags, some applauding.
    He noted the protesters too, scruffy young people, aging hippies and activist professors and their spouses, he assessed. They carried placards and were chanting things that Hale couldn’t hear. The gist, though, was displeasure at U.S. foreign policy.
    Hang around, he told them silently.
    Sometimes you get what you ask for.

Chapter 38
    Entering the sixth-floor conference room with seventeen other soldiers from all branches of the armed services, United States Army Sergeant Lucy Richter gave a brief smile to her husband. A wink too to her family—her parents and her aunt—who were sitting across the room.
    The acknowledgment was perhaps a little abrupt, a little distant. But she was not here as Bob’s wife or as a daughter or niece. She was here as a decorated soldier, in the company of her superior officers and her fellow men and women at arms.
    The soldiers had assembled downstairs in the building, while their families and friends had come to the conference room. Waiting for their grand entrance, Lucy had chatted with a young man, an air force corpsman from Texas who’d come back to the States for medical treatment (one of those fucking rocket-propelled grenades had ricocheted off his chest pack before exploding several yards away). He was eager to get back home, he’d said.
    “Home?” she’d asked. “I thought we were reenlisting.”
    He’d blinked. “I am. I mean my unit. That is home.”
    Standing uneasily in front of her chair, she glanced at the reporters. The way they looked around them, searching hungrily for story opportunities like snipers seeking targets, made her nervous. Then she put them out of her mind and gazed at the pictures that had been mounted for the ceremony. Patriotic images. She was moved by the sight of the