The Vanished Man (Lincoln Rhyme 5)

A gasp and she spun around, bringing the gun up--aiming at the center of the dust-coated cobweb that had caressed her skin.

Back into the corridor.

More locked doors. More dead ends.

Footsteps approached. A man walked past her now, bald, in his sixties, dressed in a guard's uniform and wearing an appropriate ID badge. He nodded as he walked past. He was taller than Weir so she let him pass with no more than a glance.

But then she thought there might be a way for a quick-change artist to change his height.

Turning back, fast.

The man was gone; she saw only an empty corridor. Or an apparently empty corridor. She recalled again the silk the Conjurer had hidden beneath to kill Svetlana Rasnikov, the mirror to kill Tony Calvert. Her body a knot of tension, she unholstered her weapon and started toward where the guard--the apparent guard--had disappeared.

*

Where? Where was Weir?

Trotting along Centre Street, Roland Bell surveyed the landscape in front of him. Cars, trucks, hot dog vendors in front of their steaming metal carts, young people who'd been working at their perpetual-motion law firms or investment banks, others woozy from pitchers of beer at the South Street Seaport, dog walkers, shoppers, dozens of the Manhattanites who roam the streets on days beautiful and days gray simply because the city's energy draws them outside.

Where?

Bell thought much of life was like driving a nail--shooting, in his local vernacular. He'd been raised in the Albemarle Sound area of North Carolina, where guns were a necessity, not a fetish, and he'd been taught to respect them. Part of this involved concentration. Even simple shots--at a paper target, a rattlesnake or copperhead, a deer--could go wide and dangerous if you didn't stay focused on the target.

Well, life was just like that. And Bell knew that whatever was going on inside the Tombs right now, he had to remain focused on his single job: protecting Charles Grady.

Amelia Sachs called in and reported that she was checking out every human being she could find in the Criminal Courts building, of whatever age, race or size (she'd just tracked down and ID'd a bald guard, who was far taller than Weir and looked nothing like the killer but who had only passed muster because it turned out that he'd known her late father). She'd finished one wing of the basement and was about to start on another.

Teams under Sellitto and Bo Haumann were still searching upper floors of the building, and the oddest addition of all to the hunt was none other than Andrew Constable himself, who was tracking down leads to Weir in upstate New York. Now that'd be a kick, Bell thought--if the man accused of the attempted murder in the first place turned out to be the one who found out where the real suspect was.

Looking into the cars he jogged past, looking at trucks on the street, looking down alleyways, guns ready but not drawn. Bell had decided that it made the most sense for them to hit Grady here on the street, before he entered the building, where there was a better chance of escaping alive. He doubted that these people were suicidal--that didn't fit the profile. In the moment between the time Grady parked his car and stepped out until he walked into the massive doors of the grimy Criminal Courts building the killer would go for his shot. And an easy one it would be--there was virtually no cover here.

Where was Weir?

And, just as important, where was Grady?

His wife had said he'd taken the family car, not the city one. Bell had put out an emergency vehicle locator for the prosecutor's Volvo but no one had spotted it.

Bell turned slowly, surveying the scene, revolving like a lighthouse. His eyes rose to the building across the street, a government office building, a new one, with dozens of windows facing Centre Street. Bell had been involved in a brief hostage-taking in the building and he knew that it was practically deserted now, on Sunday. A perfect place to hide and wait for Grady.

But then the street would be a good vantage point too--for a drive-by, say.

Where, where?

Roland Bell recalled a time he'd gone hunting with his daddy up in the Great Dismal Swamp in southern Virginia. They'd been charged by a wild boar and his father'd winged the animal. It had disappeared into the brush. The man had sighed and said, "We gotta go git him. Can't ever leave a wounded animal."

"But he tried to attack us," the boy had protested.

"Well now, son, we walked into his world. He didn't walk into ours. But that's neither here nor there. It's not a question of fairness. It's a question of we got to find him if it takes all day. Not humane to him and now he's twice as dangerous to anybody else comes along."

Looking around them at the impossible tangle of brush and reeds and swamp grass and loblolly, stretching for miles, young Roland said, "But he could be anywhere, Dad."

His father laughed grimly. "Oh, don't worry 'bout finding him. He'll find us. Keep your thumb on that safety, son. You may have to shoot fast. You comfortable with that?"

"Yessir, I am."

Bell now made another visual circuit of the vans, the alleyways nearby, the buildings next to and across the street from the courthouse.

Nothing.