“Are they accurate?”
“As accurate as the escarpment. The steam doesn’t turn the hands. It lifts weights that drive the wheels. There’s one in the Midwest. Instead of chiming the hour, it blows a whistle.”
“Why do you want Rhyme dead?”
“When a horologist builds a clock or watch, the rooms are as clean as scientists making a space telescope. Not a single bit of dust or a hair or grain of sand. The room I use, in Europe, has negative pressure.”
“Like a biohazard lab.”
“Lincoln is a grain of sand that keeps ending up in my wheelworks. We’ve been on a collision course for years. There was a job I wanted, last year. An oligarch. London. Highest security in the city. More than for the king.”
“Dmitry Olshevsky.”
“That’s him. Five million.” He felt the irritation once again. “I was passed over. Pierre LeClaire got the job. The buyer didn’t say, but I think it was what Lincoln had done to my reputation.”
“And you’re his grain of sand. Because he may have stopped some projects, but you’re still free.”
True. But little consolation.
Hale happened to glance at the security camera monitor. Someone — a man, he believed — stood at the mouth of the cul-de-sac just on the other side of the chain barring entry. Had the man gotten closer, the alarm would have sounded.
This was not unusual. People were curious about the demolition site.
Was this just a passerby who’d noted the crumbling buildings?
A potential buyer of the land?
A potential thief?
A precursor to a raid? If so, he had an escape plan prepared — Gilligan’s theft of underground passage maps in the city had been helpful. And anyone breaching the trailer would not live long enough to find any evidence of where he had gone.
He rose and pressed a button, which turned on a spotlight affixed to the building beside where the watcher stood.
The sudden bath of illumination seemed not to bother him at all. Even in the wash of light, his features were not distinguishable, and Hale could tell only his race, which was white, and a medium build. His head was covered with a baseball cap. The clothing was casual, not business attire. The visitor was behind a pile of construction rubble, so nothing below his chest was visible. He stayed in place for a moment, then turned and left.
She looked up at his still face.
“Nothing.”
She rose and began to dress.
Hale gauged his reaction to her impending departure. A definitive conclusion did not materialize.
Simone said, “He’s not well, Rhyme. I was reading.”
“He’s disabled. There are issues. But nothing to make me think he’ll die of natural causes anytime soon.”
Her eyes on the ticking clock as she buttoned her blouse with deft fingers. “He’s had a good run, you could say. Better, I think, for him to go out on a high note.”
This would be her poetic side speaking. Sentiment was not an aspect of Charles Vespasian Hale. He was, in this way too like Lincoln Rhyme.
The way he would describe the endgame fast approaching was simpler: time eventually runs out for everyone.
31
At 10:15 that evening, Amelia Sachs announced, “I want to get out to the sites. Still haven’t heard from Ron.”
She sent another text, as she’d done several times earlier. Pulaski had not responded. Not like him.
In jeans and a black T, she was gazing at the map of the city, on which the tower cranes in operation in the five boroughs were indicated with red X’s. She rocked back and forth on her low black boots. With her phone she took pictures of a half dozen, to record the addresses. She didn’t need to explain her selection. These were the tallest, the ones that would do the most damage when they tumbled to earth tomorrow morning, if the Watchmaker stayed true to his promise.
Rhyme could see she was restless, frustrated. The leads were not moving them forward, and this made her grow tense. She worked on curbing those habits she used to eliminate stress — the nails digging into her cuticles, digging into her scalp. She told herself to stop. The commands worked occasionally.
“I’ll go on without him.” She Velcro-strapped a plate of body armor over her torso. A check of her weapon and extra magazines. This was beyond redundant; he’d personally seen her check the equipment twice today. But this was his wife: both edgy and calmly, coldly professional. These are not mutually exclusive characteristics.
She caught him watching her clip two magazine holsters onto her left hip and place another in her left front pants pocket.
“I stumble across Hale, and it comes down to it? I’ll only wound him.”
Rhyme shrugged.
NYPD forbade shooting to wound. Weapons were made, and carried, to kill. They served no other purpose unless, on a breezy day, you needed a paperweight.
But this was the Watchmaker.
Rhyme wanted him alive.
Jacket back on, she pulled her car keys from the shelf. There were two, one for the ignition, one for the trunk, the Torino having been born in an era before the miracle — or curse — of digital electronics. The bits of metal jangled like tiny bells.
Rhyme could certainly see in her eyes the fire to find the killer. But tonight, that intensity was diminished by something else: her labored breathing, her unsteadiness.
The coughing.
“Sachs.”
She looked at him.
“It’s a good plan. But, no. Not you.”
Her lips tightened.
“No chest X-ray, all right. Your call. But get some rest.”
“It’s him, Rhyme. The Watchmaker.”
“Tonight, you’re talking guard duty. Anybody could handle that. Spencer.”
And helping make his argument: her breathing stuttered and she reluctantly took some more hits from the oxygen. He noted only now that it appeared to be a new tank. She hadn’t mentioned swapping the first one out for another.
“If we can’t find out where the next attack’s going to be, there’ll be a scene to search tomorrow. That’s where we’ll need you.”
Did she bristle at the hint? That he was a superior officer. If you took the relationship out of the equation, the marriage, that’s what he technically was, even if retired. He was a captain, she a mere gold shield.
The fraught moment might have become something harsher.
Except it did not; her eyes explained she knew he was right.
She didn’t move for a moment, then her shoulders sagged. “All right.”
And it seemed to Rhyme that relief washed over her. She dropped into a chair and placed a call to Lyle Spencer, telling him of her plan to hit several of the most likely target sites tomorrow and make sure guards were in place... and look for the Watchmaker himself, on the off chance that he was preparing one of the tower cranes for tomorrow’s attack.
After disconnecting, she nodded upstairs. “Early bedtime.”
He offered a half smile and was about to respond when there came the sound of the front door opening — the visitor would have the number pad code — and the brief rush of traffic before the door closed.
Ron Pulaski appeared in the arched doorway to the parlor.
Pale, eyes wide, he stopped and winced, then looked from one to the other.
“Ron, are you all right?” Sachs asked.
“There was an accident. Downtown. I hit somebody, another car.”
“But are you okay?”
“Just stunned. The other car, it caught fire, the driver — a kid, a student — he’s in the hospital. I went over there myself to see how he is. They couldn’t tell me. Or wouldn’t. Not family, you know.”