The Burning Wire (Lincoln Rhyme 9)

Then it faded as Sachs crouched and said in a voice that Mel Cooper couldn't hear, "I don't want you any different than you are, Rhyme. But I want to make sure you're healthy. For me, that's all I care about. Whatever you choose is fine."

For a moment Rhyme recalled the title of the pamphlet left by Dr. Kopeski, with Die with Dignity.

Choices.

She leaned forward and kissed him. He felt her hand touching the side of his head with a bit more palm than made sense for a gesture of affection.

"I have a temperature?" he asked, smiling at catching her.

She laughed. "We all have temperatures, Rhyme. Whether you have a fever or not, I can't tell." She kissed him again. "Now get some sleep. Mel and I'll keep going here for a while. I'll be up to bed soon." She returned to the evidence she'd found.

Rhyme hesitated but then decided that he was tired, too tired to be much help at the moment. He wheeled toward the elevator, where Thom joined him and they began their journey upward in the tiny car. Sweat continued to dot his forehead and it seemed to him that his cheeks were flushed. These were symptoms of dysreflexia. But he didn't have a headache and he didn't feel the onset of the sensation that preceded an attack. Thom got him ready for bed and handled the evening detail. The blood pressure cuff and thermometer were handy. "Little high," he said of the former. As to the latter, Rhyme didn't, in fact, have a fever.

Thom executed a smooth transfer to get him into bed, and Rhyme heard in his memory Sachs's comment from a few minutes earlier.

We all have temperatures, Rhyme.

He couldn't help reflecting that clinically this was true. We all did. Even the dead.

Chapter 54

HE AWOKE FAST, from a dream.

He tried to recall it. He couldn't remember enough to know whether it had been bad or simply odd. It was certainly intense, though. The likelihood, however, was that it was bad, since he was sweating furiously, as if he were walking through the turbine room at Algonquin Consolidated.

The time was just before midnight, the faint light of the clock/alarm reported. He'd been asleep for a short time and he was groggy; it took a moment to orient himself.

He'd ditched the uniform and hard hat and gear bag after the attack at the hotel, but he'd kept one of his accoutrements, which was now dangling from a chair nearby: the ID badge. In the dim, reflected light he stared at it now: His sullen picture, the impersonal typeface of "R. Galt" and, above that, in somewhat more friendly lettering:

ALGONQUIN CONSOLIDATED POWER

ENERGIZING YOUR LIFETM

Considering what he'd been up to for the past several days, he appreciated the irony of that slogan.

He lay back and stared at the shabby ceiling in the East Village weekly rental, which he'd taken a month ago under a pseudonym, knowing the police would find the apartment sooner or later.

Sooner, as it turned out.

He kicked the sheets off. His flesh was damp with sweat.

Thinking about the conductivity of the human body. The resistance of our slippery internal organs can be as low as 85 ohms, making them extremely susceptible to current. Wet skin, 1,000 or less. But dry skin has a resistance of 100,000 ohms or more. That's so high that significant amounts of voltage are needed to push that current through the body, usually 2,000 volts.

Sweat makes the job a lot easier.

His skin cooled as it dried, and his resistance climbed.

His mind leapt from thought to thought: the plans for tomorrow, what voltages to use, how to rig the lines. He thought about the people he was working with. And he thought about the people pursuing him. That woman detective, Sachs. The younger one, Pulaski. And, of course, Lincoln Rhyme.

Then he was meditating on something else entirely: two men in the 1950s, the chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago. They devised a very interesting experiment. In their lab they created their version of the primordial soup and atmosphere that had covered the earth billions of years ago. Into this mix of hydrogen, ammonia and methane, they fired sparks mimicking the lightning that blanketed the earth back then.

And what happened?

A few days later they found something thrilling: In the test tubes were traces of amino acids, the so-called building blocks of life.

They had discovered evidence suggesting that life had begun on earth all because of a spark of electricity.

As the clock approached midnight, he composed his next demand letter to Algonquin and the City of New York. Then with sleep enfolding him he thought again about juice. And the irony that what had, in a millisecond burst of lightning, created life so many, many years ago would, tomorrow, take it away, just as fast.