The Steel Kiss (Lincoln Rhyme 12)

Iggy ordered his second-or third-in-command to do so. The man hopped to the task, making calls on his walkie-talkie.

Sachs asked the foreman, "How could he have gotten out of the site?" The walls were eight-foot plywood, topped with razor wire.

Iggy rubbed his hard hat as if scratching his head. "Entrances on Forty-Seventh. Or here, but this one, the main one, probably he would've been spotted. And nobody did or they woulda told me."

She sent two officers in the direction of the 47th Street entrance. And said to Boss Iggy, "Oh, and tell your men not to use the elevators."

"They can't walk down--"

"He could have sabotaged them."

His eyes went wide. "Jesus. For real?"

Iggy's adjutant ended a transmission and said, "He mighta been up there, one of the lower floors. Tall guy. Nobody was sure he was working for a sub or whatever."

This seemed like the most likely target: the elevator cars mounted on the outside of a scaffolding track. It wouldn't take much, she guessed, for a DataWise controller to shut down the automatic brakes. Workers would slam to the ground at a hundred miles an hour.

Iggy called out, "Freeze the elevators. All of them. And tell the guys up there not to use them until they've been checked."

Good. That would... But then Sachs reflected: Wait. No. Hell, what am I thinking of? No, no, got it wrong. Of course! Remember his MO. He's not going to be sabotaging the jobsite; he's here so he can watch where he's going to attack. He needs the high-rise as a vantage point. Just like he wasn't in Benkoff's apartment; he was across the street. Just like he was in the Starbucks so he could watch the escalator when the access panel opened to swallow up Greg Frommer.

So. What could he see from the iron skeleton here?

Then Sachs was aware of silence.

The screaming table saw in the workshop of the theater across the street had stopped. Sachs turned and hurried to the opening in the fence surrounding the construction site. From there she could see that the carpenter in the set-building workshop was gripping the mean-looking blade with one hand and wielding a socket wrench with another. The saw looked new, state-of-the-art.

And it was surely embedded with a DataWise5000.

He was his target! Unsub 40 was waiting till the man had shut the saw off and was changing the blade and then--though the carpenter thought it was safe--the unit would come to life and sever his hand or send the unsecured blade spinning through his belly or groin, or maybe into the street to hit passersby.

Sachs sprinted across the street, halting traffic with her palm, yelling toward the open theater doors, "Get back from the saw! Get back! It's going to start up!"

But he couldn't hear through the protective earmuffs.

Sachs arrived at the doorway of the workshop. "Stop!" No response.

The saw and the unsub's victim were still forty feet away. She then noted that the power cord to the saw extended from a fixture in the wall right next to her, a few feet away. There was, however, no plug. The cable disappeared into the wall.

No time. The unsub, somewhere high on the construction site, would have seen her and would be hacking into the saw's controller right now, to turn on the blade and slice away the hand of the oblivious carpenter. To her right was a workbench filled with hand tools, including a large pair of bolt cutters. The handle was wood--a good insulator, right? She wasn't sure when it came to 220 volts, which was what the saw undoubtedly used.

But no choice.

She yanked the tool off the rack, fitted the sharp teeth on either side of the power cable and pressed the handles together, closing her eyes as the sparks fired into the air around her.

CHAPTER 33

Moving as fast as I can, through the crowded sidewalks, putting distance between me and the theater and those who wanted to stop me, put me in jail, take me away from Alicia. Away from my brother. From my miniatures.

Shoppers! Goddamn Shoppers.

And Red, of course.

The worst Shopper of all. I so regret giving her the benefit of the doubt. I hate her, hate her, hate her now.

I was, though, I must confess, not surprised, not totally surprised, to see her in the construction site as I stood on the third floor and scanned the kill zone--the workshop behind the theater.

Still: How? How did she guess about the attack at the theater?