Gone were the good old days.
“Hm,” Rhyme offered. It was a variation of a grunt. When he spoke, it was, more or less, to himself. “No obvious reason for the heist. And yet the data were stolen. And it was risky.” He wheeled close to the board. “For. A. Purpose. And what might that be?”
Frustration sent his eyes to the bottle of Glenmorangie scotch sitting on a high shelf nearby. Rhyme’s right arm and hand were largely functional, yes, and could easily grip a bottle, and open and pour it.
He could not, however, stand and snag it from the perch where his mother hen had set it. Coincidentally, that very individual — his caregiver, Thom Reston — happened to enter the parlor just then and notice Rhyme’s gaze. He said, “It’s morning.”
“Aware of the time, thank you.”
When Rhyme didn’t look away from the colorful label, Thom said, “No.”
The man was dressed impeccably, as always, today in tan slacks, a baby-blue shirt and a floral tie. He was slim yet strong, his muscles largely developed not from hunks of iron or machines but from moving Rhyme himself. It was Thom who got the man into and out of the chair and bed and bath.
Another grunt and dark glance toward the liquor.
It was early, no disputing, but the concept of “cocktail hour” had always been a moving target for Lincoln Rhyme.
He looked back at the whiteboard devoted to the DSE theft, but his going-nowhere meditation on the theft was interrupted by the hum of the door buzzer.
Rhyme looked up. It was Lon Sellitto, his former partner from the days before the accident. He was senior in Major Cases, Amelia Sachs’s assignment, and was the detective who most often liaised with Rhyme when he was used by the NYPD as a consultant.
“He looks energized,” Rhyme said, ordering the latch to open.
Inside, the big man, balding in an unenthusiastic way, sloughed off his brown raincoat and hung it. Not that Rhyme cared, but Sellitto seemed to buy the ugliest garments on the rack. And one could find colors that were not muddy-camel-brown, could one not? Sellitto’s clothes were often wrinkled too, as today, a function of the man’s round physique, Rhyme guessed. Most manufacturers presumably created garments out of textiles whose waiting state was smooth.
Then again, what did Rhyme know? Thom and Sachs bought his outfits — like today’s taupe slacks, black polo shirt and forest-green cardigan. Someone once commented that what he was wearing looked comfortable. Thom had cut him a glance and Rhyme’s planned response — “Wouldn’t exactly know, now, would I?” — was replaced with an insincere smile.
Sellitto offered a brief nod to all in the room. Then a frown crossed his face as his eyes shot to an overlarge Sony TV screen mounted in the corner. “Why isn’t the news on?”
“Lon.”
“Is this the remote? No. Where’s the remote?”
Thom picked it up from a shelf and powered the unit up.
Rhyme said, “Why don’t you just tell us, instead of waiting for the anchor-bot?”
“A situation,” Sellitto said, but didn’t elaborate. He took the remote and clicked to one of the national stations. Depicted were a Breaking News bulletin, a crawl at the bottom that Rhyme was too far away to read, and video of damage at a construction site. Another message popped up. It reported E. 89th Street, New York City. This was replaced by: One dead, six injured in crane collapse.
Sellitto looked from Sachs to Rhyme. “It wasn’t an accident. Somebody did it on purpose. They’ve sent the city a list of demands. And if they don’t get what they want, they’re going to do it again in twenty-four hours.”
3
The mayor had received an email with a URL that took him to a private chat room on the anonymous message board 13Chan.
Rhyme read the words that Sellitto called up on the computer monitor in the center of the parlor.
Nearly 50 million Americans live in housing they can’t afford. 600,000 have no homes at all, and one third of those are families with children. Yet New York continues to encourage developers’ building luxury high-rises, which it has done since the early twentieth century.
The city is the largest landowner in the area. It holds 370 million square feet of property and its obsene how little of that is devouted to affordable housing. There are huge amounts of space in the city that are unused and not being planned for development, which we know because we have examined real estate records.
Our demand is this: The city will create a nonprofit corporation; to this corporation, the city will transfer the properties that are on the list below and convert them to affordable housing.
We will be monitoring progress via government records.
New York City will suffer one disaster every twenty-four hours until the corporation is created and the property is transferred.
The countdown has begun.
The next page featured a list of properties throughout the five boroughs. Some seemed to be vacant land, but most were built-out structures, presumably abandoned: schools, a public housing tower, a former dock and helipad in Brooklyn that had been bought from the Defense Department, a research lab that had been owned by the National Institutes of Health and transferred to the City University of New York, warehouses that had been under lease to the state for storing census records, a former National Guard armory.
“The group’s name?” Sachs asked.
No deep digging was necessary.
A brief search revealed that the word “Kommunalka” referred to a program used once upon a time in the Soviet Union — a frenzied building of communal apartments after World War II to address a housing shortage.
Sachs skimmed the articles. “Wonder if the perps did their homework. Most of the Soviet buildings’ve been torn down and replaced by — you guessed it — expensive bourgeois apartments.”
Rhyme was intrigued. Forensically, sabotage was no more interesting than his current stolen engineering document case. The deadline, however, and the risk of more death, now moved Unsub 212 to a lower priority.
Rhyme asked, “How did he do it? IED?”
Sellitto answered, “No explosives that anybody heard. Somehow, he got to the counterweights, tinkered with them. The foreman doesn’t know. It changed the balance and the thing went down. Oh, you’re going to be getting a—”
Rhyme’s mobile whirred and he commanded, “Answer phone.”
He then said into the unit, “Yes?”
A woman’s harried voice. “Captain Rhyme?”
“That’s right.”
“Please hold for Mayor Harrison.”
A moment later the man’s smooth voice came through the speaker. “Captain Rhyme.”
“Mayor.”
Knowing Rhyme wouldn’t bother with such protocols, Sachs said, “You’re on speaker with Detectives Sachs and Sellitto.”
“Lon. You’re there.”
“Just briefing Lincoln and Amelia now.”
“I wanted to let you know that we’re not agreeing. You know our policy.”
The city didn’t pay ransom and it didn’t give in to extortion demands.
The man continued, “We couldn’t do what they’re asking anyway. Whoever’s behind this has no idea of what’s involved. There’re a hundred documents we’d have to put together. A nonprofit needs a three-person board, president, VP, secretary, treasurer, registered agent, and, Christ, a million approvals: the state revenue, IRS, EPA. Hell, a budget. Needs to be funded. We can’t deed anything over until all that’s done, which would take weeks or months...”