The Burning Wire by Jeffery Deaver

Author:Jeffery Deaver
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781439156339
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-06-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 40

AMELIA SACHS WAS taking stock of Joey Barzan.

“How you doing?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

She wasn’t sure what that meant and didn’t think he knew either. She glanced at the EMS medic who was bent over Barzan. They were still in the tunnel beneath the Battery Park Hotel.

“Concussion, lost some blood.” He turned to his patient, who was sitting unsteadily against the wall. “You’ll be all right.”

Bob Cavanaugh had managed to find the source of the juice and shut down the line that Galt had used for the trap. Sachs had confirmed that the electrical supply was dead, using Sommers’s current detector, and quickly—really quickly—undone the wire attached to the feeder line.

“What happened?” she asked Barzan.

“It was Ray Galt. I found him down here. He hit me with a hot stick, knocked me out. When I woke up he’d wired me to the line. Jesus. That was sixty-thousand volts, a subway feeder. If you’d touched me, if I’d rolled a few inches to the side . . . Jesus.” Then he blinked. “I heard the sirens on the street. The smell. What happened?”

“Galt ran some wires into the hotel next door.”

“God, no. Is anybody hurt?”

“There are casualties. I don’t know the details yet. Where’d Galt go?”

“I don’t know. I was out. If he didn’t leave through the college, he had to go that way, through the tunnel.” He cast his eyes to the side. “There’s plenty of access to the subway tunnels and platforms.”

Sachs asked, “Did he say anything?”

“Not really.”

“Where was he when you saw him?”

“Right there.” He pointed about ten feet away. “You can see where he rigged the line. There’s some kind of box on it. I’ve never seen that before. And he was watching the construction site and the hotel on his computer. Like it was hooked into a security camera.”

Sachs rose and looked over the cable, the same Bennington brand as at the bus stop yesterday. No sign of the computer or hot stick, which she recalled Sommers telling her about—a fiberglass pole for live-wire work.

Then Barzan said in a soft voice, “The only reason I’m alive now is that he wanted to use me to kill people, isn’t that right? He wanted to stop you from chasing him.”

“That’s right.”

“That son of a bitch. And he’s one of us. Linemen and troublemen stick together. It’s like a brotherhood, you know. We have to be. Juice is so dangerous.” He was furious at the betrayal.

Sachs rolled the man’s hands, arms and legs for trace and then nodded to the medics. “He can go now.” She told Barzan if he thought of anything else to give her a call and handed him a card. A medic radioed his colleague and said that the scene was clear and that they could bring the stretcher down the tunnel to evacuate the worker. Barzan sat back against the tunnel wall and closed his eyes.

Sachs then contacted Nancy Simpson and told her what had happened. “Get ESU into the Algonquin tunnels for a half mile around.

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