“Get to a doctor, Ron,” Sachs said.
“They checked me out at the scene, the EMTs. I’m good, just stiff.”
Rhyme said, “The word is Tarr doesn’t have any targets. It’s not that urgent, Ron. A day to rest won’t hurt.”
“Yeah,” he said, and his voice was bitter. “Looks like it’s going to be more than a day. They ran the standard post-accident blood panel. I tested positive for fentanyl.”
Rhyme and Sachs glanced each other’s way.
The criminalist asked, “Did you happen to—”
“Yeah, I sure did. Tried to save a banger in this crew we’d just taken down. Didn’t have gloves on.” He grimaced. “Stupid, with fent.”
Rhyme knew the dangers of the drug. Some first responders had passed out simply by touching an overdose victim. Several nearly died. Now the opioid antidote Narcan was carried by every responder — for themselves as well as for victims.
“I’m on administrative leave till the inquiry.”
“It’ll be a formality,” Sachs said. “This’s happened before.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure how good it’s going to go.” He sighed. “I screwed up. The whole thing was my fault. I ran a red light.”
Sachs said, “All right, Ron. Get yourself a lawyer. The union’ll set you up.”
He nodded, his eyes flat. “Yeah.”
Rhyme said, “Get on home. Get some rest.”
Sachs asked, “You have wheels?”
“Got a pool car. The director took pity. Have to return it tomorrow. I don’t know, I’ll... I’ll rent one, I guess.” He seemed dazed. “Just wanted to let you know...”
“Call us tomorrow.”
“Yeah, sure. ’Night.”
And, shoulders slumped, he walked slowly out of the town house.
Sachs said, “That’s going to be a tough one. Drugs and running a light and an injury? He’ll beat the narc, but the optics’re bad. Cops I know’ve been fired for less. And, Jesus, there’re reporters already looking over the blotter. They love stuff like this almost as much as an officer-involved shooting.”
“We’ll make some calls,” Rhyme said, though he was thinking that his political pull in the NYPD extended only so far, as his official connection with the department was about the same as that of a Rite Aid clerk or Uber driver.
Sachs said, “I’ll go upstairs.”
They kissed good night, and carting the oxygen tank, she trod up the stairs, not conceding her condition to the extent she’d take the elevator.
Rhyme nodded, and after she left, his eyes settled on the murder board. Where the top had once said Unsub 89, it now read merely Hale.
Lincoln Rhyme was thinking:
Bishops and rooks and pawns...
I can see the movement of the pieces in our chess game, Charles.
As always, they’re moving with your, yes, clockwork precision, economical and unhesitant.
Moving on squares black and squares white.
Bishops and rooks and pawns...
One space at a time, two, ten...
But, Charles, what eludes me is your strategy. How can I counter this move or that without having a clue as to how you’re going to conquer my king?
Unless and until Rhyme could figure that out, his failure — and he felt it keenly — would have mortal consequences to the citizens of New York.
And, of course, to Rhyme himself. He was very aware of a note Hale had sent to him, a prelude to his trip here, a note that left no doubt what his intentions were:
The next time we meet — and we will meet again, I promise you — will be the last. Farewell, for now, Lincoln. I’ll leave you with this sentiment, which I hope you will ponder on sleepless nights: Quidam hostibus potest neglecta; aliis hostibus mori debent.
The Latin translated into: “Some enemies can be ignored; other enemies must die.”
II
A Grain of Sand
32
From the early-morning shadows of an alley across from his next target, Charles Vespasian Hale was looking over the jobsite.
Specifically, his attention was upon a cluster of men near the entrance — there were two other ways into the place, but they had been sealed with four-by-eight plywood sheets.
The men were engaged in a lively conversation. Sports? Streaming TV shows? Women?
But, having been transformed from craftsmen to guards, they were observant, surely hoping for the chance to whip the hide of the man who’d pissed on their sacred profession.
Wearing jeans, a dark windbreaker, a black baseball cap, he studied them now, these stocky men in brown overalls, yellow and orange vests and yellow hard hats. Their hands were blunt, their brows broad, faces tanned. The job would pay well, and Hale supposed they, like the late Andy Gilligan, owned boats for weekend diversion. One smoked — furtively, breaking a rule — while another sipped coffee. The third occasionally lifted a brown paper bag to his lips. Hale had learned that a surprising number of skyscraper workers drank, especially those doing beam work. Their deaths from falling were underreported.
These three looked about occasionally, but being amateurs at the security business, they missed much.
Including Hale himself.
He gazed skyward to the Swenson-Thorburg AB tower crane soaring into the sky, the tubing like blood-coated bone, the company’s signature crimson hue.
The slewing unit — the massive turntable — was unlocked and, like the one he’d seen yesterday at the dead-drop site, the jib swiveled slightly in the wind.
The crane was, from this base view, a brute of a creature. But from his research for the project here in New York, Hale had come to see them as devices of great subtlety. Their development in fact paralleled the evolution of timepieces.
From shadoofs — pivoting levers that held buckets to scoop up well water — to derrick cranes (named after Thomas Derrick, the famed Elizabethan hangman) to the towers of the 1970s, cranes, like clocks, drove the engines of industry, and therefore society. At some point, cities could no longer grow geographically and remain cities. Horizontal expansion did not work. It was cranes that made cities seek the skies, drawing more and more population, and grow increasingly powerful.
To Hale, though, there was one immutable difference between cranes and clocks. While he could not conceive of destroying any watch or clock (other than IED timers, of course), he could without any twitch of concern bring one of these monsters crashing to its knees.
And this particular tumble, in a few hours, would be spectacular.
The crane itself was only slightly higher and heavier than the one he’d brought down yesterday. But the difference was this: there was no operator in the cab to heroically point the jib where it could do the least harm. When the Swenson-Thorburg AB died, so would many people. The building the jib towered over was 1960s construction: the superstructure, of course, was steel. But much of the rest was soft aluminum and glass — which would explode under the impact like a thousand hand grenades made of sharpened shards and collapse upon itself. Layer upon layer of building material, bone and blood.
He looked at his watch.
The time was 7:03 a.m.
There remained, of course, the question of getting the acid delivered to the device’s counterweight trolley. This would be a bit trickier than the first one, given the guards.
Whose eyes diligently scanned the street, the sidewalk, pedestrians, passing vehicles — especially those that slowed as drivers and passengers shot fast, nervous glances at the spidery red legs of the crane, which reached to a hazy sky.