The Broken Window (Lincoln Rhyme 8)

* 1907 hours. RFID scan, Associated Credit Union credit card, Avenue of the Americas and 34th Street. 4 seconds. No purchase.

"Okay, she's in Pam's car. Why's that? Where's hers?"

"What's the license?" Whitcomb asked. "Never mind, it's faster just to use her code. Let's see. . . ."

A window popped up and they could see a report that her Camaro had been impounded and towed from in front of her house. Nobody had any information on the pound it was destined for.

"Five Twenty-Two did that," Rhyme whispered. "He must have. Like your wife, Pulaski. And the electricity here. He's going after all of us, however he can."

Whitcomb typed and the automobile information was replaced with a map, showing the hits on the geographic-positioning profile. It revealed Sachs's movement from Brooklyn to Midtown. But then the trail stopped.

"The last one?" Rhyme asked. "The RFID scan. What was that?"

Whitcomb said, "A store read the chip in one of her credit cards. But it was brief. Probably she was in the car. She'd have to be walking pretty fast for that short a reading."

"Did she keep going north?" Rhyme mused.

"That's all the information we have. It'll update soon."

Mel Cooper said, "She might've taken Thirty-fourth Street to the West Side Highway. And gone north, out of the city."

"There's a toll bridge," Whitcomb said. "If she crosses it we'll get a hit on the license plate number. The girl whose car it is--Pam Willoughby--doesn't have an E-ZPass. innerCircle would tell us if she did."

At Rhyme's instruction, Mel Cooper--the senior police officer among them--had an emergency vehicle locator sent out on Pam's license number and car make.

Rhyme called the precinct house in Brooklyn, where he learned only that Sachs's Camaro had indeed been towed. Sachs and Pam had been there briefly but had left quickly and hadn't said where they were going. Rhyme called the girl on her mobile. She was in the city with a girlfriend. Pam confirmed that Sachs had discovered a lead after the break-in at her town house in Brooklyn but hadn't mentioned what it was or where she was going.

Rhyme disconnected.

Whitcomb said, "We'll feed the geopositioning hits and everything we've got about her and the case through FORT, the obscure relationship program, then Xpectation. That's the predictive software. If there's any way to find out where she's gone, this'll do it."

Whitcomb looked up at the ceiling again. Grimaced. He rose and walked to the door. Rhyme could see him lock it, then wedge a wooden chair under the knob. He gave a faint smile as he sat down at the computer. He began to type.

"Mark?" Pulaski asked.

"Yes?"

"Thanks. And this time, I mean it."

Chapter Forty-six

Life is a struggle, of course.

My idol--Andrew Sterling--and I share the same passion for data, and we both appreciate their mystery, their allure, their immense power. But until I stepped into his sphere I never appreciated the full extent of using data as a weapon to expand your vision to every corner of the world. Reducing all of life, all of existence to numbers, then watching them billow into something transcendent.

Immortal soul . . .

I was in love with SQL, the workhorse standard for database management, until I was seduced by Andrew and Watchtower. Who wouldn't have been? Its power and elegance are enthralling. And I've come to fully appreciate the world of data, thanks to him--though indirectly. He's never given me more than a pleasant nod in the hall and a query about the weekend, though he knew my name without a glance at the ID on my chest (what a breathtakingly brilliant mind he has). I think of all the late nights I spent in his office, 2:00 A.M. or so, SSD empty, sitting in his chair and feeling his presence as I read through his spine-up library. Not a single one of those pedantic and silly businessman's self-help books, but volumes and volumes revealing a much greater vision: books about the collection of power and geographic territory: the continental U.S. under the Manifest Destiny doctrine in the 1800s, Europe under the Third Reich, mare nostra under the Romans, the entire world under the Catholic Church and Islam. (And they all appreciated the incisive power of data, by the way.)

Ah, the things I've learned just from overhearing Andrew, savoring what he's written in drafts of memos and letters and the book he's working on.

"Mistakes are noise. Noise is contamination. Contamination must be eliminated."

"Only in victory can we afford to be generous."

"Only the weak compromise."

"Either find a solution to your problem, or stop considering it a problem."